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

Elementary school teachers often face a significant challenge when it comes to teaching math: their own discomfort with numbers. 

The Hechinger Report recently hosted a live event for people to learn more about efforts to solve this problem. The conversation included commentary from Lisa Ginet, director of program design and operations at the Erikson Institute; Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality; and Ivory McCormick, a first grade teacher at The Galloway School in Atlanta.

As our early childhood reporter Ariel Gilreath recently reported, elementary school teachers often struggle with teaching this subject. In her story, Gilreath writes: “Decades of research shows that math anxiety is a common problem for adults, and surveys show it particularly affects women, who make up nearly 90 percent of elementary teachers in the United States. Put simply, a lot of elementary school educators hate the prospect of teaching math, even when the math concepts are beginner level.”

The story about math anxiety is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series about math instruction. The series is a collaboration with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The post Experts share the latest research on how teachers can overcome math anxiety   appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Like many states with a large number of rural schools, Wyoming desperately needs more teachers.

Take the case of the Teton County School District, in Jackson, Wyoming. Located near Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, the area is well known as a vacation spot. Despite the alluring landscape, for full-time residents the extremely high housing costs are daunting.

That makes it difficult to retain staff. The average tenure of a teacher is just four years.

“Primarily, people come out here and they are going to be a ski bum for a while,” said superintendent Gillian Chapman.

Setting aside the sky-high cost of housing, which they can hardly control, district leaders are thinking creatively about perks they can use to entice staff to stay. They decided to take part in a new University of Wyoming project, the Master Educator Competency Program, to help give teachers meaningful support and professional development.

“It’s not always about paying people more,” Chapman said. “It’s about respecting the profession.”

“This is super cutting-edge work and radical for higher ed now,”

Adam Rubin, a founder of 2Revolutions, education consulting firm partnering with the University of Wyoming

Many states are grappling with this problem. Keeping teachers in classrooms is a complicated issue that involves a balance of competitive pay, meaningful work and helping teachers become masters at their craft so they feel like they can make a difference. The university’s new Master Educator program is one part of a statewide effort designed to address that last point, as a way to help districts retain their teachers.  

If Wyoming could cut in half the number of teachers who quit, the state wouldn’t be struggling to find enough educators, Scott Thomas, dean of the University of Wyoming College of Education, pointed out. They’d have a surplus. And increasing the number of experienced teachers, rather than simply trying to increase the ranks of novices, is good for students, too.

Related: To fight teacher shortages, some states are looking to community colleges to train a new generation of educators

Thomas’s college of education offers the state’s only teacher preparation program. The first part of the plan will give teachers the meaningful professional development they need, to prevent them from leaving the profession. A one-size-fits-all approach wouldn’t work, he said. Although many of Wyoming’s schools have a lot in common, the challenges in each locality differ.

To figure out what teachers needed on a local level, the university faculty and leadership left campus and went to the schools.  

“Let’s bring the University of Wyoming to the state of Wyoming,” Thomas said. “We are going to come out and listen.”

Thomas came here in 2021 by way of Vermont, and, although he thought he understood rural education, he quickly discovered he had a lot to learn about schools in the vast open spaces of the West. The university partnered with 2Revolutions, an education consulting company that has worked with other states to redesign teacher education, and together with faculty members and college leaders, they went on a road trip to do interviews and hear directly from educators about what they need. They determined that teachers needed courses that helped them solve real-life problems they encountered in the classroom. And the professional development should be practically minded so that people could immediately put it to use and get feedback on how it’s going in real time.

 “It’s not always about paying people more. It’s about respecting the profession.”

Gillian Chapman, superintendent, Teton County School District in Jackson, Wyoming

Nationally, the $18 billion professional development industry for K-12 teachers is not widely known for its quality, said Adam Rubin, a founder of 2Revolutions. The partnership with the University of Wyoming is notable because the education will be job-embedded, with small modules that can be adapted to the needs of the teachers.

“This is super cutting-edge work and radical for higher ed now,” Rubin said.

And, importantly, teachers need flexibility to take those classes with online instructors, because in a wide-open space like the Cowboy State, it’s not realistic to expect teachers to commute to campus.

Related: Waiting for the traveling teacher: Remote rural schools need more hands-on help

For the Teton County School District, for instance, it’s a seven-hour drive to most institutions where district staff could work on a master’s degree or get high-quality professional development. And the planning process with 2Revolutions and the University of Wyoming, which included in-depth interviews with teachers to map out coursework relevant to issues they see in the district, helped the superintendent gain deeper insight into the needs of her staff.

“Feedback that our team shared with the university was really powerful for me, what was on people’s minds and what they were thinking about,” Chapman said. “Frankly, I don’t have the time to ask these important questions. Success for me, well, we have already reached one piece, because [teachers] have provided me with information that will make me a better superintendent and provide better professional development.”

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

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Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Higher Education newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning. Subscribe today!

Emily Thompson was working in a convenience store in rural Maine two years ago when she met someone who changed her life.

Thompson, then 47, had recently reentered the workforce as a cashier after raising her child. A woman came into the store, worried about getting gas into her car because she had forgotten her wallet. As she helped the woman with the electronic payment app on her smartphone, she noticed her name tag: Pilar Burmeister, director of the nursing program at Eastern Maine Community College.

“Can you really get an R.N. from a community college?” Thompson recalls asking her.

Yes, she could. Not only that, she wouldn’t need to travel into the city to do it.

The nursing program at the Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor, Maine, partners with rural hospitals to provide nursing education close to home for students who would rather not come into the city. Now in its sixth year, the program is helping the community college increase enrollment in a job that’s in great demand. And it is reaching students who might otherwise struggle with transportation costs (especially during a period of epically high gas prices), family responsibilities or just a preference for staying close to home.

“It is a need in this community, and I want to work in the community where I live.”

Katie Eastman, nursing student at Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital, Ellsworth, Maine

“It’s a win-win for everybody,” Burmeister said. “We get to increase our rolls. Hospitals win because they get nurses. Students win on saving time and money.”

Nationwide, hospitals are grappling with major staffing shortages. To get enough nurses to care for patients, hospitals have been shelling out extraordinary sums to travel nurses. The situation is dire in rural hospitals, which have a smaller local population to draw from and have historically struggled to recruit people to work in the more remote regions.

Eastern Maine Community College currently enrolls students who do their clinical rotations, lab work and remote coursework in three rural hospitals, and work is underway to bring the program to additional communities. The Eastern Maine staff is also helping Washington County Community College. That college, in a remote region near the Canada border, does not have a nursing program, but the model Eastern Maine developed to partner with rural hospitals will help Washington County bring nursing education to the most northern reaches of the state.

This rural focus helps community colleges train more people who are likely to stick around in the rural hospital after they graduate.

Related: She has the heart of a nurse, but can she overcome obstacles to her degree?

So far, most of the nurses being trained by Eastern Maine are staying in the rural hospitals that they are paired with for clinicals. It’s already saving money for hospitals. For instance, Northern Light Mayo Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, graduated six students in the class in 2020 and five are now working there, Burmeister said. In the first nine months after their graduation, she said, that saved the hospital $360,000 in travel nursing costs.

The locally recruited nurses also get a benefit. The hot job market means they likely will have a job offer in hand as soon as they graduate, for a job that pays a good wage and benefits. And it’s a chance for local people to serve their family and friends.

“It is a need in this community,” said Katie Eastman, a student who is paired with the Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital in Ellsworth, Maine, “and I want to work in the community where I live.”

“It’s a win-win for everybody. We get to increase our rolls. Hospitals win because they get nurses. Students win on saving time and money.”

Pilar Burmeister, director, nursing program, Eastern Maine Community College

The students do their clinical work and labs in the local hospital they are paired with for the duration of the two-year program. A nurse in the local hospital works for the community college to oversee the clinical work. Students take their classes online, meeting together as a local cohort in their community and Zooming in, so to speak, to watch a live class together that is happening in Bangor. The local nurse paired with the cohort is also at the Zoom class, so she can help answer questions and better connect the classwork to the hands-on training.

Dyana Gallant, an adjunct nursing instructor for Eastern Maine and a staff nurse at Millinocket Hospital, said that of the four graduates of the program’s first year, three started working at the hospital. The local training also gives the students what amounts to a two-year job interview, allowing both employer and employee to get to know each other well. And when nurses go on to the job after graduation, the transition is smooth. They already know their co-workers and where to find supplies.

“It is a huge confidence booster,” Gallant said.

Related: When nurses are needed most, nursing programs aren’t keeping up with demand

The rural students must occasionally travel to Bangor for a few experiences that the community collage can’t facilitate locally, such as clinicals in in-patient psychiatric wards and obstetrics. But making that trip only a handful of times, as opposed to several times a week, makes a big difference for people who live in rural communities.

Transportation to nursing programs, which require affiliation with a hospital, can be a challenge for these students, who don’t get financial aid to pay for the kind of beating a car would take doing a long commute. Nearly 44 percent of Maine’s community colleges are located in places without access to public transportation, according to a study by the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation.

Finding a community college close to home was a game-changer for Thompson, who went to the city for a bachelor’s degree in English right after high school. She didn’t do much with that degree when she moved home to rural Maine. Now, she’s looking forward to May when she plans to graduate as an R.N. and leave her cashier days behind.

“It is going to be a bit of a new lease on life for me,” Thompson said. “I wasn’t making a bunch of money at the store. I liked working there. But this is a real career for me.”

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

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CAMPO, Colo. — On the long drive south, as the land on the horizon turned from mottled green to dusty brown, the college professor’s Subaru carried four cartons of doughnuts, two bags of fresh produce and a bin of children’s books.

All of it was destined for rural schools. It would be a drive of nearly four hours from the outskirts of Denver to a sparsely populated corner of Colorado where the flat skyline bleeds into Oklahoma, New Mexico and Kansas. It’s a trip that Robert Mitchell has been making once a week for five years, arriving on a Monday, sleeping over in the locally owned, $55-a-night Starlite Motel in Springfield, then turning the car north to return home two days later to his wife and son.

Unless you’ve been to Campo, and met the people in this town of 103 residents, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would endure that drive.

“The thing is,” Mitchell said, as his black sedan cruised down a long stretch of U.S. Route 287, “we are not just in the education business, we are in the relationship business, especially with rural education. You have to make the effort.”

Mitchell is an assistant professor who studies the issues that rural schools struggle with and trains aspiring teachers. He decided the best way to understand the needs of rural schools wasn’t by sitting in his office on a college campus, beaming in as a floating head on a video screen. He had a better idea: Show up with a box of doughnuts and try to make some friends. He kept coming back. Eventually the school superintendent, who doubles as a special education teacher and a substitute, asked if he’d be interested in doing more; the schools have been short-staffed for years. And that’s how the students at Campo got a college professor as one of their teachers.

More than 9.3 million students go to public schools in rural areas, more than the combined total of the nation’s 85 largest school districts. Rural students tend to do well in elementary school, but something changes as they get older.  Although rural schools have made tremendous gains in high school graduation rates, these students are still less likely than their suburban and urban peers to successfully continue their education after high school. And while schools serving rural children have many strengths, such as intense community support and a nurturing atmosphere, they need to prepare their students to thrive in an economy that demands more than a high school education.

Rural schools are anything but homogeneous, ranging from the Black Belt in the South to tiny Alaska Native Villages. One thing they have in common is a dire shortage of teachers, a problem that becomes more consequential as students get older and need more advanced classes to prepare them for life after high school.

On the drive to Campo, Mitchell makes stops at several schools along the way. He pulls into a school parking lot, pops open his trunk and retrieves a slim, white box of fresh Krispy Kreme doughnuts and a slip of paper with his college’s logo, his contact information and an invitation to call and chat about any problem the school might be facing.

At 6-foot-3, Mitchell towers above the school secretaries, but with his sensible polo shirts and khaki pants, his disarming smile and a repertoire of goofy things to say, he sets people at ease.

“These are healthy ones — totally health food,” he says as he arrives without warning in a teachers’ lounge with the gift of sticky-sweet carbs.

Related: Rural schools have a teacher shortage. Why don’t people who live there, teach there?

Mitchell started working as an assistant professor of education at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, after a few other careers, including as a news reporter (“it wasn’t for me”), an insurance industry lobbyist (“the worst”), a public school teacher in the massive Los Angeles Unified School District (“difficult politics”) and an employee in the Colorado Department of Higher Education, where he first started interacting with rural schools like Campo’s. He’s still closely involved in public policy matters with the state, and often calls legislators to help them understand why their proposals might have unintended consequences. (“They wanted to require that all teachers be able to diagnose autism. This would have meant teachers would need medical degrees. That would not help the teacher shortage!”)

The extent of the teacher shortage in rural schools is difficult to overstate — a fact of life in these schools that predates the Covid-19 pandemic. In Colorado, for instance, there were about 380 open positions for educators in rural schools at the start of the 2021-2022 school year; by the end of the year more than half remained open, according to statistics from the state’s education department. And of the positions that were filled, many were staffed by people who do not have traditional training or are not considered qualified to work in the subject area they are teaching.  

It’s hard to convince outsiders to come teach in places like Campo. The pay is low. And few people realize just how remote it is here. Nikki Johnson, the Campo superintendent,  puts it this way in emails she sends to applicants from out of the area: “Please look at a map. We are in the Plains, not the mountains.” One applicant from Boston dropped out of consideration for a job after the superintendent explained that a car, not a bike, would be needed to survive, as the closest Walmart is about an hour away.

For the current school year, there were zero applications for Campo’s open math teacher job, so the district is doing a swap with the neighboring town of Vilas, which had zero applications for its open science-teacher job. By sharing math and science teachers, the districts can fill two gaps.

And sometimes, even when teachers are available who are technically qualified to teach, they may not have the expertise to offer the specialized courses that middle and high school students need to be competitive for college. In Campo School District No. Re-6, its official name, where there were 46 students in grades K-12 last year, there hasn’t been a math teacher who is “comfortable” teaching beyond algebra I for nearly six years, Johnson said.  

Last year in Campo, a math teacher who was remote much of the time beamed in on a massive screen, her face as tall as a chalkboard. One day in spring, three middle-school boys followed along diligently as she loomed above them like a friendly Wizard of Oz. No adult was in the room to prod them to listen. Their independence and self-discipline, unusual in children this age, was admirable, but couldn’t answer questions or help them work out a problem the way a teacher in the room could.

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

As students get older, the problem of the missing higher-level math courses becomes acute.

Malcom Lovejoy, a high school senior who applied to elite colleges, taught himself precalculus with the help of some books and the free, online Khan Academy. Despite this impressive feat, to most far-off college admissions officers, he was just another transcript without a calculus credit. Usually calculus is an expectation, not exceptional, for selective colleges and universities. And while students at large high schools get in-person visits from college recruiters, kids in rural schools are lucky to get a handful of glossy postcards in the mail after they take national college aptitude exams. 

In rural communities, most high school seniors who go on to college or trade school tend to choose places they’ve heard of, either because they are close by or because the students know someone who has gone there.  There are a handful of schools in southeastern Colorado and neighboring Oklahoma at which Campo students matriculate year after year.

But Lovejoy, a soft-spoken student with sandy-brown hair, is attending Rice University in Houston this fall on a scholarship. It’s not something he would have considered before he started studying with Mitchell. He first signed up for a college-credit world history class with Mitchell, who is also employed by a nearby community college to teach the course. Mitchell saw promise in Lovejoy, and helped him apply to a program that links students of modest means with colleges and universities.

“He would have just never even known to apply for that scholarship,” said Johnson, who in addition to serving as Campo’s superintendent, working with special education students and substitute teaching, has also been scrambling to find qualified staff for the preschool.

In Campo, where it seems like everyone in the school takes on multiple jobs, Mitchell fit right in, helping with college applications and talking to students about their futures.

“Robert is someone I can count on to walk in the door and say, ‘How can I help?’”Johnson said.

On a hot day near the end of May, Lovejoy and three classmates stood for their graduation ceremony inside the cinnamon-scented, one-floor building that houses all grades, preschool to high school. Mitchell drove down for the day, as he tries to do for special events, even serving once as the keynote speaker at graduation.

Although the senior class was tiny, nearly every seat in the auditorium, which holds a full-sized basketball court, was occupied that day. The outsize crowd — former teachers, far-flung family members, alumni and people with no connection to the current class — was a testament to the community’s fierce commitment to its humble school. People drove for hours from the surrounding land, a vast place that seemed to contain nothing, to fill up a gym so they could watch children turn their tassels and say goodbye to high school. 

On his last visit to southeastern Colorado before schools took leave for the summer, Mitchell stopped by the Vilas School District Re-5, which neighbors the Campo district and is also small. Unlike some other states, Colorado has many small rural districts (111 had fewer than 1,000 students in fall 2020) because state lawmakers haven’t forced consolidations that could save money. Like most people, rural Coloradans tend to like the community connection of their hometown schools.

Related: Proof Points – Rural American students shift away from math and science during high school, study finds

“You can almost consider us like modern one-room schoolhouses,” said Corey Doss, the Vilas superintendent. “We still have our own identities.”

In Vilas, a town of 109 people, the school is in the midst of a renovation project, funded in large part by taxes collected on the state’s marijuana industry. The 93-year-old building has been gutted, wires strewn about, front doors yawning open for crews to work. It’s a good time to renovate, with the state footing a large chunk of the bill. It’s also the worst time to renovate, because the nation’s supply chain issues have made construction materials expensive and hard to come by. As a result, the Vilas project is behind schedule, and no one is certain when it will be done.

In the meantime, the 75 students going to school on the Vilas campus study inside the gym, which is housed in a Quonset hut, and an adjacent whitewashed cinder block building with blue trim. It’s not uncommon for students to be displaced during renovations like this. But in places with more money, school leaders rent specially outfitted classroom trailers.

“You can almost consider us like modern one-room schoolhouses. We still have our own identities.” Corey Doss, superintendent in Vilas, Colorado

In Vilas, there’s no budget for the $400,000 it would take to get those mobile classrooms. The district has erected some framed drywall to break up the space in the gym building. Teachers in the elementary-grades area have strung cozy drapes that can be pulled open like a shower curtain to enter classrooms. Inside one room, a teacher works at a U-shaped table with students around her on tablet computers. Three fans surround the table, pushing around the hot air.

As Mitchell walks out of the elementary-school area, two teachers ask him to go into the gym, where older students are giving presentations on the businesses they dreamed up for an end-of-year project; more adults are needed to ask them questions about their work. Each student stands before a large poster-board presentation, in a setup reminiscent of a science fair. Mitchell walks through the area, only to be stopped again.

A staff member is holding a stack of carefully folded  letters, which Mitchell had dropped off earlier. They describe Mitchell’s new college-credit class in Vilas. He’s expanding his work for 2022-23, so that he’ll teach a class at Campo one day and another at Vilas the next day. He asked teachers to give the letters to students to invite them to join. The gesture is meant to suggest something special — an invitation.

“I’ve had some questions about this,” the staffer asks. “Will the students have to write papers this class?” Writing college-level papers is something that Mitchell has noticed students don’t seem to particularly enjoy.

 “Yes,” Mitchell responds, before quickly adding the point he hoped would keep them interested. “But I care the most about the process, not the final product. Tell them I will help.”

And that’s just what he did. In mid-August, Mitchell sat in a classroom created with some temporary walls in Vilas and greeted three students who had decided to try something new: a world history class with a college professor they’d never met in a place where everyone knows their names.

This story about rural education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. The reporting was supported by the Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

The post Waiting for the traveling teacher: Remote rural schools need more hands-on help appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!

When Audrey Green, a middle school teacher in Broward County, Florida, began the year working remotely with her students, she had a lot to think about.

She had to establish a personal connection with students she’s never seen face to face and help children develop tools to cope during a pandemic. And she had to handle emotionally heavy issues, like the student who hung around after class online because she said she didn’t want to be alone. All of that while also ensuring they were being challenged academically.

But before she could do any of the hard work of teaching students through a screen, she had to solve another problem. How would she set up those screens in the first place?

Teachers have long spent their own money to outfit their classrooms — on average, teachers spend $459 out of pocket on school supplies annually, according to an analysis of 2011-12 data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics. Some teachers get some of that money back: Several states provide at least partial reimbursement for these expenses and the federal government allows a $250 tax deduction, according to Alyssa Evans, a policy researcher at the Education Commission of the States.

But the national economic crisis means that teachers might be out of pocket this year as they attempt remote teaching. States that normally compensate teachers for their expenditures might not have the money to fund those programs. In Nevada, for instance, the state created a $4.5 million program in 2015 that allows local schools to set their own rules or reimburse teachers who buy their own supplies. The budget for that item this year? Nothing. The state legislators zeroed out that budget item due to the pandemic-fueled budget crisis.

Florida, where Green teaches, is one of the states that provides teachers with a pot of money to be reimbursed for supplies. But technology isn’t an allowable expense because the law excludes equipment.

Green is also a technology liaison at Silver Trail Middle School, so she was able to think of solutions to remote teaching issues that may trip up a less tech-savvy educator. “I’m a MacGyver,” she said. “I can cook you an entire meal with an old whisk.”

And yet even for Green, the start of the school year brought seemingly endless obstacles.

Consider, for instance, the seemingly mundane task of ensuring the 35 to 40 students in the virtual room could hear and speak during class. Most cell phones these days don’t come with headphone jacks, so many students only had wireless ear buds at their disposal, but needed plug-in headphones for their laptop school computers. Some students were unable to procure those. Green got a tablet to use on the side so she can chat with those students via text.

The tablet is one of several screens she uses to pull off remote teaching. She has a work-issued laptop and a large monitor she uses to see and acknowledge raised hands among a sea of three dozen faces. She uses another screen to project presentations and examples for the children to look at while also being able to see their teacher.

It’s “like mission impossible,” Green said.

Green had access to extra technology around her house to hack together her remote workstation. But she also had to buy things, like an extra $40 for battery packs to ensure she can stay connected. Green said she is fortunate that she had a lot of things on hand. She knows other teachers who weren’t as lucky.

“It’s money, money, money going out, going out to make it work and they won’t cover it,” she said.

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

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WILMINGTON, Del. — Taheem Fennell, 12, loves to ride his bike. He taught himself when he was 4 years old while visiting older cousins in Pennsylvania. He remembers running and jumping on, feeling his feet going around and testing the brakes.

“I never rode a bike with training wheels,” he says.

Taheem wants to ride his bike to the park more, but his mother worries about him venturing too far from the one-bedroom apartment in the Quaker Hill neighborhood that they share with his stepfather and four siblings, and sometimes other relatives. Earlier this year, Taheem witnessed a shooting as he was walking to school. And in the summer of 2017, Taheem’s 16-year-old sister, Naveha Gibbs, was shot and killed in a city a 20-minute drive to the north. She was with a 26-year-old man thought to be in a gang.

So Taheem spends much of his free time inside, reading. His favorite books are in the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, about a kid who’s starting middle school. Novels help him focus his mind on something positive, his mother, Charmaine Jones, says.

He started fifth grade about a month after his sister was killed. He clutched the program from her funeral in class. He had angry outbursts. The staff at Bancroft Elementary School suggested counseling, and his mother eagerly accepted the help. Taheem learned coping strategies from a family crisis therapist at the school, whom he came to trust and rely on. She taught him how to help himself when he’s feeling overwhelmed with sadness or rage.

Despite all his struggles emotionally, he remained on track academically. He marched in an elementary school graduation ceremony in June 2018, sporting a blue polyester robe while his mom and stepdad clapped and took pictures. He flashed a big smile, with round cheeks. After it was over everyone herded into the gym, where he helped his mom with his 1-year-old brother’s stroller. School staff passed out cake with fluffy white icing.

But after Taheem began sixth grade at Bayard Middle School this year, everything began to fall apart.

In a neighborhood dotted with tidy brick row homes, Bayard Middle School rises like a drab brick fortress, virtually windowless. A chain-link fence frames an American flag on the roof above the concrete entrance. The nearly 50-year-old school spans three city blocks on South DuPont Street, a thoroughfare named for one of the most celebrated and wealthy families of this tiny state.

The children at the school are almost entirely black and poor. Many of them, like Taheem, are scarred by violence and loss.

While he was in elementary school, Taheem’s classrooms were clearly under-resourced, with a constant shortage of pencils and classroom floors so damaged that wood slabs were gouged out. But they had a librarian, and Taheem eagerly awaited his weekly visits to check out books. Bayard Middle School, when he arrived there, had a library, but no librarian, so most of the day it’s a dark, unused room. Chapter books slouch on unattended shelves. Faded posters peel off the walls. Occasionally, a glow illuminates a corner of the room where children’s faces are softly lit by a row of desktop computers. They practice for standardized tests that reveal Bayard to be the lowest-performing school in the state.

Various attempts to help the school — including with federal money — have, so far, been unsuccessful.

Educators here say they don’t have the support to do their jobs correctly. And staffing the school is a chronic problem. “The children who need the most should get the most,” said Krystal Greenfield, a longtime Wilmington educator.

Children who attend schools in unsafe communities — even if they themselves have not been a victim of a crime — score lower on academic achievement tests than children who live in safer places. Children in Wilmington are more likely to be shot than children anywhere else in the country, and the city has the distinction of being one of the most dangerous in the nation, according to a 2017 analysis by the Associated Press and The News Journal. Newsweek magazine dubbed the city “Murder Town USA” in 2014. At the time, the mayor told Newsweek that the local schools were to blame for the cycle of violence.

When Taheem started the sixth grade, Bayard had one behavioral health consultant for about 325 students, the vast majority of whom have experienced trauma, and she was only able to take on a dozen or so cases at a time. So teachers and administrators served as ad hoc mental health or social service providers for children in crisis. A boy arrived at school the morning after his 5-year-old sister was shot. A girl stopped coming to school later appeared on a “missing child” flyer that her principal discovered in the mail one morning. And on and on.

A new federal regulation was supposed to force change at schools like Bayard. Part of the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015, it requires states – many for the first time this year – to reveal publicly how much money each school gets per student. The push for transparency is part of a slow-burning movement to overhaul school funding formulas and make them more fair. Court cases are also challenging states to increase spending for schools that serve low-income students. And presidential candidates are also pitching solutions. Former Vice President Joe Biden made increasing school funding central to his new education platform. Bernie Sanders has proposed tripling Title I funding for low-income schools. Elizabeth Warren’s plan would limit charter schools in favor of funding for traditional public schools.

Broadly, it’s known that school districts serving more poor students and more students of color receive less funding than those serving more white and affluent students. But the specifics of how those dollars are meted out have been hidden, making it difficult to know how money is spent in each school building.

“It’s been a bit of a black box for folks,” said Ary Amerikaner, vice president for P-12 policy, research and practice at the Education Trust, an educational nonprofit that focuses on the needs of at-risk students.

The Every Student Succeeds Act would require states to break down local, state and federal funding sources per student. Historically, public schools have organized spending by category on the district-wide level — teachers, benefits, materials, for instance — but there were no structures in place to calculate how much money is spent in each school building.

Nationally, schools primarily serving black and brown children receive $23 billion less than schools primarily serving white students, according to EdBuild, a nonprofit advocacy group, and now a dozen states, including Delaware, are facing state-level court challenges to their methods for allocating money to local schools.

Related: While the rest of the world invests more in education, the U.S. spends less

Still, advocates hope these numbers will have some effect as they trickle out this year and next. Advocates are working in some states to pressure legislatures to spend more money on poor children, including in notoriously stingy Mississippi.

The new funding transparency is also giving ammunition to the teacher protests that have swept the country, bringing additional pressure for change from within the classroom. Teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, West Virginia and Oakland have walked off the job this year over teacher compensation, class size and classroom funding.

The Trump administration rolled back some of the ESSA regulations set by the Obama administration in favor of local control that allows states to set their own rules for how to deal with schools that have chronically-low test scores and other matters. Rules that require school-level spending reports remain in effect. This fall, an official from DeVos’ department of education complained that states were burying required spending reports for fear that the public will not be able to understand the information. But already, states have begun publishing new data on how much is spent in each local school, and it is sure to fuel more debate, says Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. It will be shocking, even to school principals, how much money is spent on individual schools, she said.

“It’s often jaw-dropping for them,” Roza said.

The escalating fight over money will play out in a quickly shifting education landscape, as the will to continue to invest in chronically failing schools like Bayard has dwindled on the federal level and school choice advocates like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos push alternatives to the public system. In Wilmington, enrollment across the lowest-performing traditional public schools has plummeted, with students opting for charter schools and private schools.

The year before Taheem headed to Bayard, he sometimes begged his mother to leave the lights on in the house at night. “They tell us it’s firecrackers but I know it’s not,” Taheem said. “They just don’t want us to get worried.”

It had been several months since he’d seen two men shooting at each other on his walk to elementary school. That morning, Jones was in her apartment. Taheem and two of his brothers, one 14 and the other 7, had just left for the school bus stop when she heard the shots outside. Her heart started racing, then she heard someone pounding on the door. Her husband was there with the children, telling her to get inside the house.

Jones doesn’t want her children to go for snacks at the corner store a few blocks away anymore, or to the park to play without her. After that gunfight, she called the school district repeatedly, she said, until they agreed to let the neighborhood children catch the bus on a safer block.

Months later, she continued to worry. In the summer, when children were restless and out of school, it was increasingly difficult to contain them.

“I don’t want to lose another child to gun violence,” she said one summer afternoon while sitting on her stoop, watching the children play on the sidewalk nearby. “I try to give them the outside but out here it’s just too much violence. You can’t let your kids do anything. It’s just ridiculous, but Taheem just … he wants to be with his friends, and I understand that, but I’m scared.”

She turned to look at Taheem, who was holding his youngest brother’s chubby baby hands, helping him walk. “I don’t want you out of my eyesight because I don’t know what’s going to happen out here.”

Related: In 6 states, school districts with the neediest students get less money than the wealthiest

Jones was pregnant with her first child at 15 years old, and did not finish high school. Her daughter Naveha spent most of her childhood in Philadelphia, where Jones grew up, running around with people Jones now recognizes were trouble. Naveha ran away from home as a teenager, and spent time in a group home. Jones moved her family to Wilmington, 30 miles south of Philadelphia, nearly five years ago to escape an abusive relationship.

Naveha desperately wanted her brother to have a different kind of life, Jones said. She recalled her daughter saying to him: “I don’t want you ending up where I’m at. You need to do what mommy tell you to do. You need to listen in school. School is nothing to play with.”

Jones also wants something better for her youngest kids. At home, she encourages her children to read by assigning them to write book reports for her.

As Taheem’s stepfather walked him to his first day at Bayard, he gave him a similar lecture, about growing up and behaving in school. Taheem was upbeat. He loved school, except for the homework. He had a new camouflage backpack, a fresh haircut and cherry-red high-top sneakers. “I am looking forward to meeting new friends and math,” he said. But he was a little nervous, too.

“I really don’t know what it’s going to be like,” he said.

The year before, Bayard’s sixth grade hadn’t had a math teacher all year. Many of the school’s teachers were involuntary transfers after a budget crisis in the district — people forced to teach there because there wasn’t room for them in other district buildings. Some came from the suburbs, where teachers with more seniority can “bump” less experienced teachers out of jobs when there’s a budget crisis. Most left Bayard as soon as they could find another posting.

Bayard is, without a doubt, a stressful and difficult school to work in. Teachers have been injured by students. It’s not uncommon for teachers to call from the parking lot midday and quit. Some don’t even bother to notify; one just stopped showing up after the winter holiday break, never to be heard from again. Staff absences are such a problem that the school leaders decided they had to find several full-time substitutes to report to school every day to fill in.

Not everyone agrees that the nation’s lowest-performing schools would perform better if they were better funded. Critics of funding lawsuits have argued that the problem isn’t money, it’s that traditional public schools in poor neighborhoods tend to be dysfunctional and the money isn’t properly spent. Along with high staff turnover, they often lack a coherent approach to address the emotional and academic needs of students.

Hardly anyone would argue that school funding does not make a difference, but academic research on the effects of school funding on kids’ classroom performance and long-term success has been mixed. More money does not always equal better results for students—at least not as can be measured by math and reading assessments. An influx of money at Bayard wouldn’t immediately solve troubles like how to attract the best teachers to this tough neighborhood. Nor would it remove union rules that can block school leaders from picking which teachers get assigned there.

Bayard, for example, was given occasional infusions of cash and marched through state-monitored turnaround efforts with few signs of improvement as a result—most recently, about five years ago, when it was given money and technical assistance supported by Obama’s Race to the Top grants. This year, roughly only 4 percent of its students were proficient in math and 13 percent were proficient in reading.

“It turns out when you give schools extra funds they rarely feel like they can actually rethink what they can actually do with them,” said Frederick Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “You end up putting more dollars into schools, and everything they have been doing for 40 years remains intact.”

And, critically, figuring out how what is spent is just the start. To get a better understanding of what a school lacks, policymakers need to know what the money is being spent on. A new report from the ACLU, for instance, reports that 1.7 million children nationwide attend schools where there are police officers but no counselors.

Related: Governments are spending billions more on education, and it’s making inequality worse

As dysfunctional as Bayard has been for years, for some students it has been an important lifeline in the community. Last school year, students came to the assistant principal, Krystal Greenfield, like a mother. One day, she got a text message from the parent of a child who had moved on to high school. He had been a shy child — someone who was bullied in middle school that Greenfield took under her wing. Now, he was taking up with a gang, and his mother knew he wouldn’t listen to anyone but Greenfield. She went to see him, pleaded with him to change his ways.

“He had an internal battle,” she said. “He didn’t know whether he wanted to be a good guy who got bullied and picked on — or a bad guy who got respect for money and drugs and being that dude.”

As she walked through the halls, walkie-talkie and jangle of keys at her hip, Greenfield came to the sixth-grade floor of the school. The walls are painted an alarming scarlet red, and children are supposed to wear matching red shirts to allow staff to immediately identify their grade level. She encountered a group of students, two boys and two girls, standing in the hallway. They were bickering with a hall monitor. The monitor grew more animated and loud as the children continued to defy him. Greenfield sidled up to a short, stocky boy with his bright red polo shirt tucked into a pair of carpenter-style chinos. She put her arm around him, hugged him tight and walked him silently to the other end of the hall. She spun him to face her and smiled warmly. Then, she was firm.

“What’s going on? Why aren’t you in class?”

The boy launched into a dramatic reenactment of how he was making a “hmm” noise, and his teacher didn’t like it. He didn’t want to stop because he liked the sound. The sound is not that loud, he protested, and other students make noise, too. Greenfield listened to every word and then looked him in the eyes.

“Please, just stop,” she said.

He agreed and shuffled back to the classroom. Quietly.

Later, Greenfield explained that this child’s home had burned to the ground a few months earlier. The fire had been intentionally set by a relative. Two of the firefighters who responded to the blaze were killed.

Greenfield said that when she runs into a child who’s having problems in school, sometimes she’ll bring the child into her office to look at their academic history together on the computer. They’ll look at that timeline as Greenfield scrolls through various data points — math and reading achievement tests, primarily — that schools track.

“I show them, I say, ‘All right, these are your test scores,’ ” she said. “ ‘This is your life, this is what’s on paper, this is what I see when I look you up.’ ”

The district’s system color codes the numbers like a stoplight. She’ll trace a finger on the screen. A student may have started out in elementary school as a green before moving to yellow, then red. “What happened that year you sank?” she’ll ask. She’s never met a child who didn’t know what happened.

“Kids know their story,” she said. “They know what happened, they know when it went wrong and they don’t have an answer for it. They don’t know how to fix it because they have no power, they have no control.”

Greenfield said that if she had her wish she would staff the school fully with teachers who were trained and eager to work with this population. She’d pay them well, she said. But her more realistic plan, for the 2018-19 school year, supported by the school principal, was to create more spaces in the school for children to learn to cope with their feelings.

Instead, Krystal Greenfield left Bayard a week before classes started. The school district unexpectedly moved her to another school that had a sudden principal vacancy. Her assistant principal job at Bayard went unfilled for a few months, but the staff started the year with a teachers union-organized training to help them understand the needs of childhood trauma and the school did manage to fill every vacant staff position in the sixth grade before Taheem started classes. At other schools, having a teacher in place in every classroom by the start of the school year might be a given, but at Bayard, administrators hailed it as a major success.

Radical changes this year were meant to further improve the school’s position. Bayard became a first-to-eighth grade building this school year, as part of a plan to find additional money to support the most challenged schools in Wilmington, including Bayard, by combining several schools, lengthening the school year and paying staff a little extra if they promise not to quit.

Gov. John Carney, who took office in 2017, oversaw budget cuts, including cuts to education, early in his tenure. To deal with the state’s budget crisis, he created a “shared sacrifice” system in which programs enjoyed both by the wealthy and the poor were trimmed. Those budget cuts, combined with the inability to raise local taxes due to a failed budget referendum, propelled Bayard Middle School deeper into crisis.

Then Carney, a life-long Delawarean and the son of an educator, visited Bayard last year. He was appalled. He went into a math class, where there was a substitute doing not much of anything, papers on the floor, kids unengaged. He said the teacher didn’t even acknowledge his presence. “We had single-digit math proficiency standards in these schools. Are you kidding me? If we doubled the proficiency standards, you’d be at 10 percent,” Carney said in an interview. “You’d have to quadruple the achievement standards just to get to 20 percent. It’s immoral. I mean … you’ve got to do something about it.”

“The physical conditions of the building, the instruction, everything happening in Bayard at that time was completely unacceptable,” he said. “We ought to treat these children like they’re our own.”

In Delaware, the school funding formula is more than 70 years old, and no one, not even the Democrats who control much of the state government, are eager to change it. When the legislation was written, schools were still segregated by law. The state also had the dubious distinction of being the only one in the country requiring black schools to be funded only by taxes levied from black property owners. Few people of color owned property, so a wealthy member of the du Pont family personally funded $6 million for the construction of new schools for black children in 1920. It was a step forward, but it was hardly enough. The entire state only had one high school for black children until the 1950s. (Schools in Delaware were one of the five cases that comprised Brown v. Board of Education. It was the single case for which a state court had ruled that separate is not equal.)

National budget experts describe Delaware’s funding formula as antiquated and regressive. The recently retired chief justice of the state Supreme Court, Leo Strine, said in an extraordinary statement last year that leaders have ignored their “moral duty,” arguing that “kids who have less, need more.” It is one of the few states that provides no additional money for the education of students who are learning English, for example. Money for helping poor students, in general, is not cemented into the formula. As a result, the pot of money set aside especially for schools that serve low-income students is subject to the whims of legislators and governors who can (and do) cut it or shuffle priorities.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to equal funding in education, but plaintiffs in several states have successfully argued in the courts that state constitutions require at least an adequate, if not an excellent, education be provided each student. The cases, including one in New York, have resulted in funding formulas that funnel more money to students with higher needs. But court cases can take years to be resolved.

“As a practical matter, work with the legislators is a quicker way to right the ship,” said Rebecca Sibilia, the CEO of EdBuild.

In Delaware, Democrats have controlled the governorship, the majority in the legislature and nearly every state row office for years. But they haven’t had the political will to update the way the state funds its public schools.

A report from EdBuild revealed that, nationally, schools primarily serving black and brown children receive $23 billion less than schools primarily serving white students. And the number of children has nothing to do with it: The schools with children who are not white serve almost the same number of students.

When the ACLU and Community Legal Aid Society Inc. sued Delaware last year, the state argued that the court shouldn’t insert itself into the debate because school funding was the purview of the general assembly and the governor. In late November, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster refused the state’s request to dismiss the case and issued a searing rebuke of the idea that the state’s courts had no jurisdiction over the matter, writing, “At the extreme, the State could corral Disadvantaged Students into warehouses, hand out one book for every fifty students, assign some adults to maintain discipline, and tell the students to take turns reading to themselves. Because the State does not think the Education Clause says anything about the quality of education, even this dystopian hypothetical would satisfy their version of the constitutional standard.”

Carney proposed increased funding for the state’s neediest students, including English language learners, and he found enough support in the Legislature. But he stopped short of proposing a complete overhaul of the school funding formula. Instead, the additional money would be set outside that system. Critics pointed out that this would continue to make the funding susceptible to budget cuts and the whims of politicians.

In an interview at a Newark, Delaware, bagel shop, Carney said an increase in spending tied to a new funding formula would make it difficult to manage the budget. “When you have mandatory spending and you don’t have revenue that keeps up with it, you just keep digging a hole that’s harder to get out of,” he said.

But the new plan, which includes the effort to combine schools in Wilmington, has proven to be a Herculean task. In addition to transforming Bayard into a 1-8 school, the district is restructuring and renovating several elementary schools. Another building will be repurposed as an early education center.

Carney dedicated $15 million to fund these changes, with the local district kicking in another $2.5 million. The money is one-time infusion, not a systematic change to how the lowest-performing schools are funded.

The plans have been difficult to execute, even with the extra money, proving just how hard it is to make big changes in high-needs schools. A major renovation planned for Bayard was downgraded. To start the year, the school got fresh paint, a playground and a key fob swipe system on doors to the upper floors. Some of the best staff have left because they can’t work for a longer school year with their own family obligations. A new librarian and art teacher started this fall.

Paul Herdman, CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware, a nonprofit organization that advocates for education reform, said that without the lawsuit forcing the state’s hand, and the additional transparency, it seems unlikely that there will be lasting change to how the state allocates money for schools.

“There’s the notion of taking a big political risk on changing the balance of where dollars go in a way that might adversely affect more affluent students — or at least the perception,” Herdman said. “I think there’s the perception that it’s a ‘Peter to pay Paul’ kind of situation that some people are going to lose and some people are going to win. And I that’s a really difficult political gamble for someone in office. And so I think once this lawsuit gets in place, I think it’s actually an opportunity for legislators who want to do the right thing to come up with a good solution.”

For Taheem, the reforms may come too late. In his first year at Bayard, trouble found him almost immediately.

He got into a fight in math, his favorite class. His mom rode the bus to school and arrived pushing a stroller bearing her youngest son and holding the hand of a young granddaughter to meet with a dean of students. He escorted them into a room in the main office with only one chair and a hodgepodge of old furniture. The dean leaned on a desk. Taheem stood near the wall. His mom took the chair.

Jones said that she’d told Taheem there are no excuses for his behavior. The dean asked Taheem if everything was “cool” now, or if he thought it would be a good idea for the dean to mediate a talk between the boys. Taheem wanted to talk.

At that point, Jones explained Taheem’s struggles after the loss of his sister. She said October would be a difficult month, because it’s his sister’s birthday month, and Taheem would need help. She suggested assigning him some extra books to read to “keep his mind occupied.”

“Are you in counseling here?” the dean asked Taheem.

Taheem nodded yes. But he named a teacher who runs a club, not a mental health professional.

Hearing about the counselor, his mom requested that the dean sign up Taheem immediately, and explained how well Taheem had done with that extra help in elementary school.

The dean promised to send parental consent forms home with Taheem to get him signed up.

Weeks passed before the school sent home the paperwork.

By then, Taheem’s problems had reached a frightening crescendo.

Three months in to his first year at Bayard, eighth-grade boys jumped Taheem in the hallway, his mother said, leaving him with a bump on his head and a busted lip. Taheem didn’t want to go to school at all. Then he started running around with a group of boys who were drawing the attention of the police. And he continued to have problems in school, landing himself on a disciplinary plan last year.

His mother had to quit one of her two jobs as a home health aide because she was being called to the school so often for meetings about his behavior. Jones plans to move her family to a safer neighborhood as soon she can afford it.

“Y’all pile them all up in one school, and all these kids have all these problems,” Jones said. “It’s ridiculous.”

This story about school funding 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 “Kids who have less, need more”: The fight over school funding appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story about school bonds is part of the series Districts in Debt, which examines the hidden financial pressures challenging American schools.

The state audit of the Fox C-6 School District in the small town of Arnold, Missouri, was brutal.

It revealed a slew of financial missteps: The superintendent and administrators had been giving themselves raises and using school district credit cards to purchase personal items such as shampoo, engraved watches, gift cards and wedding favors. But most costly of all, it argued, were mistakes the school district had made with bonds.

From 2007 to 2013 the district’s taxpayers had approved several bonds, totaling more than $46.6 million, to help the district afford new technology, renovations to school buildings and new school buses. The audit alleged that the school district got a bad deal — one that may ultimately cost it $5.6 million in unnecessary interest payments.

“What happened in our district should not have happened, but it did,” said John Brazeal, who joined the district as its chief financial officer in 2014. “It’s not going to happen again on my watch.”

In order to finance large projects, such as the construction of new school buildings or major renovations, school districts generally issue bonds and pay them back, with interest, over several years or decades. To help structure these deals, district administrators and school boards typically turn to outside financial advisers, lawyers and bond underwriters. But that can put school districts in a vulnerable position: They can easily be taken advantage of — urged to issue needless or poorly structured bonds, pushed to accept high interest rates or duped into paying hundreds of thousands in unreasonable fees. State officials and financial experts across the country warn that taxpayers ultimately end up paying millions more each year than necessary, which can lead to new tax hikes or result in less money for classrooms.

Because most bonds are so large, districts face big financial consequences if they don’t get the best deal possible, said Mark Robbins, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut who has studied municipal bonds. “When you’re talking about borrowing tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars, even a one-hundredth of an interest rate point can be the equivalent of a teacher’s salary.”

Conflicts of interest?

Most school districts don’t have a municipal bond expert on staff or on their board, leaving them at the mercy of financial companies to guide them through the bond issuance process. Federal regulations require that these companies treat municipalities fairly, but the incentives built into the bond issuance process can sometimes pit school districts’ interests against those of their financial team.

The advisers are typically paid a fee for their services related to the size of the bond or contingent on it being issued — and that can incentivize them to counsel districts to issue larger or more frequent bonds. Districts also work with underwriters, who purchase the bonds from the district and sell them to investors. The higher the interest rate on a bond, the easier it is for underwriters to sell.

Lori Raineri, president of the Sacramento-based independent public consulting company Government Financial Strategies, says she frequently hears from school district leaders who relied on relationships, referrals or marketing to choose their financial team but lack the quantitative expertise to evaluate the advice they get. (To avoid potential conflict of interests, her firm charges districts a fee based on the work it performs, regardless of whether bonds are sold.)

Raineri says it breaks her heart to see school districts in fiscal distress. She said it begs the question: “Who’s benefiting here?”

Related: When school districts fall in debt and can’t get out

When they get a bad deal, school districts can find themselves on the hook for unnecessarily high payments in a variety of ways. Some districts, like Missouri’s Fox C-6, are stuck paying interest rates that are well above market rate. In one extreme case, a California district agreed to pay 12 percent interest on a $16.7 million bond issued in 2005. By the time all the debt is paid off, the district will have spent $34.3 million — almost a million more on interest than on the principal.

The fees that districts pay to financial firms also sometimes reach eyebrow-raising amounts. A study by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (University of California, Berkeley), identified six California districts that paid more than 8.5 percent of their bond principal in fees, significantly greater than the 1 percent average costs the study found. In a separate case, Kansas City-based George K. Baum & Company, the same financial firm that underwrote the Fox C-6 bonds, was sanctioned by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for overcharging a school district in 2011. The company charged $43 per $1,000 bonds issued — far above the typical $7 to $9 for such an offering — for a total fee of $416,173, according to the regulatory authority.

In a memo to the district superintendent, George K. Baum said the fee it charged was appropriate because it had originally anticipated underwriting a larger bond, which failed at the ballot box. The regulator disagreed, noting that the firm “failed to deal fairly with the school district.”

George K. Baum accepted the findings without admitting or denying them, and consented to a censure and fine of $100,000. Jon Baum, the company’s CEO, did not respond to a request for comment.

Lack of competition

Researchers and financial experts, meanwhile, say that school districts also bear some of the responsibility for bad bond deals. Too often, districts don’t shop around for the most favorable deal even though opening the process to competitive bidding can help drive down costs. When schools buy supplies like paper, for instance, they typically request bids and take the best offer they receive. But when it comes to bonds, noncompetitive sales — in which an issuer such as a school district unilaterally chooses an underwriter without comparing multiple options — are common.  These negotiated sales make up the bulk of money in municipal bond sales, according to data from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group for broker-dealers and investment bankers.

There are some circumstances in which a noncompetitive sale is the better option: when a district has a low credit rating and is unlikely to attract any bidders, for example, or when the bond deal is complex. Yet experts say those cases are exceptions.

Mike Parnell, an associate executive director at the Missouri School Board Association, said that noncompetitive sales often make sense because they allow school districts to retain local control of the bond-issuing process rather than leaving it up to the market. “If you’re able to negotiate a more favorable rate for the district, that’s going to be a good thing,” he said. “If you just have to take whatever is out there that day, that may not be in the district’s best interest.”

But Robbins, the University of Connecticut professor, takes a different view: It’s a matter of convenience for school districts that don’t want to put in the time and effort to seek out comparisons. Among researchers who study competitive bidding, there’s widespread agreement that a bidding process yields the best deal, he said: “It is not controversial.”

Some states require that school districts go through a competitive bidding process under at least some circumstances when issuing a bond. But at least 25 states do not.

Related: School districts are going into debt to keep up with technology

School districts that forgo competitive bids often make their decisions based on relationships — which financial firms will go to great lengths to forge. The firms will sponsor school board or leadership conferences and take school leaders out to dinner.

Some firms have gotten in trouble for going even further. In 2013, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined a Missouri-based underwriting firm $200,000 for “improperly gifting” more than 2,000 tickets to sporting events. About half the tickets went to school superintendents and one-third to school board members who stopped by its booth at the annual Missouri School Boards’ Association conference  and filled out a piece of paper with their contact information.

The association said it was unaware of that incident. “The only giveaways we sanction at our conference are random drawings,” the association said in an email. “We expect vendors in our exhibit hall to comply with all laws and industry standards.”

Community outrage

In the Fox C-6 School district, which serves over 11,000 students in a tight-knit community near the Mississippi River, the state audit led to an outcry against school leaders. In the 109-page report, the school board was singled out for special scorn for allegations that it failed in its duty to vet the district’s spending. After the audit and the resulting public backlash, top administrators left the district. The superintendent took a buyout but admitted no wrongdoing.

In the report, the state also faulted the school district for failing to solicit competitive bids for its bonds, as recommended by state auditors. Brazeal, the Fox C-6 chief financial officer, said he doesn’t agree completely with the auditors’ recommendations on competitive bidding. He sees some downsides to a competitive bid process, and he believes the district owed most of its financial troubles to a different culprit: the terms of the debt.

The bond deal had an interest rate of 4 to 5 percent, at a time when the market rate was closer to 3 percent, according to the audit. Also, the debt was structured so that the district was making interest-only payments until 2026, increasing the overall cost of the loan.

Why the district made these decisions is unclear — curiously, no documentation of the advice that led to these actions could be located by state auditors. The auditors noted that the district failed to seek advice from someone who didn’t stand to make money from the transaction.

“The lack of independent financial advice could result in the Board not being adequately informed of debt issuance options or being unable to adequately evaluate debt proposals,” the state auditors wrote. “The underwriter does not have a fiduciary responsibility to the district.” (The state auditor did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

Related: How rising tension pension costs hurt school districts

A 2013 report from the Missouri state auditor found that the vast majority of the state’s districts and municipalities did not use an independent financial adviser and, therefore received all their financial advice from their underwriting firm. The report estimated that school districts and local governments could have saved up to $43 million between 2008 and 2011 had they gotten more favorable interest rates.

A bill introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives in 2017 and backed by the state auditing agency would have required school districts and other municipal agencies to use an independent financial adviser or go through a competitive bid process when issuing bonds. But the bill died in committee after push back from financial firms and from groups that represent municipal agencies.

The groups said that a competitive bidding process would add bureaucracy and time and wouldn’t end up saving taxpayers money. “We didn’t see any upside to that at all,” said Dirk Burke, executive director of the Missouri Association of Counties, an advocacy group that represents county governments.

But a narrower bill introduced in the state Senate did pass later that year. Under the legislation, Missouri school districts with good credit ratings must hire an independent adviser or sell their bonds competitively when issuing bonds worth more than $12 million.

Parnell, of the state school board association, says that most Missouri school districts still prefer to use negotiated sales for their bonds.

Bad financial decisions can breed distrust in communities, forcing district leaders to spend time and money repairing their reputations and making it more difficult for them to raise money for new projects. This year, for example, the Fox C-6 School District asked voters to approve a $70 million bond to upgrade aging school buildings.

Ahead of the vote, the district’s top administrators — none of whom worked in the district during the previous bond deal — distributed a question-and-answer sheet to residents designed to head off concerns. It addressed comments such as: “How do we know they are going to do what they say with the $70 million?” and “I am not supporting the district because they did not prosecute the former superintendent.”

Brazeal said he felt that the school district had done everything it could to repair the community’s trust.

“It’s sad when money is not benefiting students” he said. “For those of us that are here to carry on, we do what we can to keep it from happening again.”

But the efforts at rebuilding trust seem to have fallen flat. On April 2, voters rejected the district’s plan to issue $70 million in new bonds for building renovation and upkeep. Meanwhile, district staff continue to grapple with buildings in disrepair: Pipes leak sewage, basement classrooms have broken floor tiles and schools are not fully accessible to people with disabilities.

This story about school bonds is part of the series Districts in Debt and was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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And once teachers arrive, schools have to contend with another problem. Educators must meet annual requirements that dictate how much time they spend improving their craft – even though teachers’ colleges aren’t often nestled in such remote locations.

One collective of 22 school districts in southeast Kentucky is working on a solution. The group is taking the idea of online delivery of teacher training and amplifying it, turning it into something that can be custom-fit for individual teachers and leaders. The goal is to create not just a replacement for, but an improvement on, the typical courses teachers take to improve their work.

“The courses are really focused on [teaching] real kids with real challenges,” said Jeff Hawkins, executive director of the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, which is working with the 22 school districts and national partners to create the new training.

It’s part of a movement called “micro-credentials,” and while this particular example explains how it can be used to train teachers, the method is also being used elsewhere for other professions and students. The idea behind it is simpler than the buzzy name suggests. These custom-fit courses are meant to show proficiency on a specific skill set, and those who earn a micro-credential can then take additional classes that build upon what they’ve learned. Advocates call this “stacking,” and in some instances it’s seen as a possible alternative to a traditional degree.

In the case of the schools in the Kentucky Valley Educational Cooperative, it’s a solution for a threefold problem: attracting, retaining and training teachers.

“We don’t have a public university in our footprint,” Hawkins said. “It could be a couple hour drive to get to a university.”

The teacher shortage in this area is so acute, Hawkins said, that even elementary school teachers are in short supply in some schools. The cooperative is working with national partners, such as the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Digital Promise, to create the structure for a successful micro-credential program. So far, they have developed three micro-credential courses, with more on the way. And once enough courses are created, these locally developed courses could be used to help certain teachers meet state requirements that they earn a master’s degree, or the equivalent, within five years after they begin teaching. A recent change in state law paved the way for micro-credentials to count toward this.

For educators in schools within the cooperative’s boundaries, the micro-credential courses are free. They are available online, so they can be taken at the hours that are convenient for the teacher. And, unlike some other online courses, the materials have been specially created for this community. So instead of coming up with a hypothetical plan for measuring student progress, for example, teachers can create something in the course that is immediately useful to their work.

“That’s much better for our teachers than a construct that’s created in some other professional development that is not real,” Hawkins said.

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Almost five years ago, Summit Public Schools decided that scoring high on standardized tests wasn’t enough to ensure success after high school.

Leaders at the California-born charter school network decided that students needed to have the skills necessary to understand how to survive in life after a teacher stopped holding their hand. A report they released Monday reveals the research behind the school model.

“We get a lot of questions about how do you know that personalized learning works or how do you know Summit learning works,” said Adam Carter, chief academic officer at Summit Public Schools. “It’s a compilation of the ‘greatest hits’ of research put into a school model.”

The report comes a few years after the celebrated schools began work to reinvent themselves. Summit students had scored high on standardized tests of math and English, earning the school a national reputation for success with students who typically didn’t fare well. And almost all Summit graduates enrolled in college. But then the school’s leaders discovered that about half of those students were dropping out of college. They decided to do something about it.

Their new report, The Science of Summit, explains all the research that educators there consulted when designing a new method for teaching and learning.

“It’s not even about ‘if it works.’ It’s more about ‘everything we are doing is based on evidence,’ ” Carter said. “We take the best theory and apply it in practice. We are not claiming it’s the only way. We want to put forth [that] it is our way.”

Related: Despite its high-tech profile, Summit charter network makes teachers, not computers, the heart of personalized learning

The paper dives deeply into the methods and evidence for teaching cognitive skills, content knowledge, habits of success and a sense of purpose. And the leaders at Summit have also articulated ways to train teachers, measure student progress and engage the school community in a conversation about topics such as the “habits of success” or “sense of purpose,” which are notoriously difficult to define and gauge.

The information shared in Summit’s publication is the latest example of how the West Coast charter school network is moving to expand its reach beyond its own schools. The Summit Learning Program includes 330 schools; 2,450 teachers, and 54,230 students in 40 states for the 2017-2018 school year. That’s up from just 19 school partners in 2015.

The Science of Summit paper is the first in a series of reports that will share what teachers and leaders at the school network are learning with even more educators. They don’t expect everyone will have the interest (or spare time) to sit down and read the 60-page Science of Learning report, so follow-up reports will include reports on what teachers and students are actually doing in classrooms, explaining the Summit methods from that vantage point.

“It’s just the beginning of what we hope is a conversation to explain pieces of our model,” Carter said.

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A California-born charter school network is starting a new program to home-grow teachers rooted in their approach to education.

Summit Public Schools – widely known for its partnership with Facebook to develop a flexible academic program that allows teachers and students to work on custom-fit lessons at their own pace – will soon begin certifying teachers. It’s being branded as the nation’s first teacher residency focused on personalized learning.

“Implicit in this is we can improve student outcomes if teachers are already trained before they start full-time teaching,” said Pamela Lamcke, director of the Summit teacher learning residency.

The first group of 24 teaching residents will begin work this month on eight campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area. The one-year program, which has been approved to certify teachers in the state of California only, has several goals, including increasing the number of teachers who are able to work in a personalized learning environment and improving teacher retention. One of the challenges Summit has faced is teacher turnover.

The residents will spend four days a week in classrooms with cooperating teachers, doing just about everything a working teacher does during the school day. This will immerse them in more than just core classes and instruction. They will participate in faculty meetings, family communication and intervention activities. The residency will ensure that what the teaching residents learn in theory courses will be connected to what they are seeing in the classroom. And the teaching residents will be doing their coursework for the teaching certificate using personalized learning, as well, so they can experience this style of instruction as students themselves.

More than half of the 24 aspiring teachers are people of color. The first year is tuition-free for the teaching residents (thanks to a grant from a philanthropy), who will take courses at Summit and participate in all parts of the school day. The price for future years has not yet been determined.

Among the first teaching residents is Janine Peñafort, herself a graduate of Summit Public Schools. She has a bachelor’s degree in Spanish, and worked as a tutor last year in Summit schools. A Filipina, she said she never had a Filipino teacher when she was in school. Last year, when she worked as a tutor, she received a note from a student saying how nice it was to have another Filipino on campus.

“I think it’s important for students to see someone who can identify with them and holds the same cultural values,” she said.

Peñafort, a first-generation college graduate, said she believes that personalized learning will help students become more independent. One of the biggest challenges she faced in college, she said, was figuring out what to do and where to go when a teacher or professor wasn’t directly instructing.

“I want to help students learn to search for information and to be more critical thinkers,” she said.

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