LOCKHART, Texas — Sometime last year, Alfonso Sifuentes was on a bus tour as part of a chamber of commerce’s efforts to map out the future of the bustling Central Texas region south of Austin where he lives and works.

There was chatter about why San Marcos, a suburb along one stretch of the Interstate 35 corridor, had little interest in a proposed expansion of Austin Community College into that area. Voters previously rejected the idea because of the property tax increase it would have required. As he swayed in his seat on the moving bus, Sifuentes, a businessman in the waste management industry who has long been involved in community development, thought about his hometown of Lockhart — like San Marcos just 30-some miles from Austin — and about the opportunities the college’s growing network of campuses could bring. Somewhere along the bus route, he made a declaration for all to hear. 

“Well, if San Marcos doesn’t want it,” Sifuentes said, “Lockhart will take it.”

This November, the college is coming to voters in the Lockhart Independent School District with a proposition to begin paying into the Austin Community College taxing district. In exchange, residents would qualify for in-district tuition and trigger a long-term plan to build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas, which is positioning itself to tap into the economic boom flowing into the smaller communities nestled between Austin and San Antonio.

Community colleges have long played a crucial role in recovering economies. But in Lockhart, ACC’s potential expansion could serve as a case study of the role colleges can play in emerging economies as local leaders and community members eye the economic growth on the horizon.

That is, if they can convince enough of their neighbors to help pay for it.

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

At the edge of two massive metropolitan areas — Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south — Caldwell County is dotted by quaint communities offering small-town living. While the streets in other small rural communities are lined by shuttered storefronts or sit in the shadow of industry long gone, local leaders pitch this as a place “where undeniable opportunity meets authentic Texas community.”

Lockhart, the county seat, is revered as the barbecue capital of Texas with an established status as a day trip destination. About 30 miles southeast of Austin, its picturesque town square hosts a regular rotation of community events, including a summer concert series on the courthouse lawn and a series of pop-ups on the first Friday of the month featuring some mix of live music, receptions at a local art gallery, and sip and strolls and cheesecake specials at the antique store.

The county’s population of roughly 50,000 residents is dwarfed by the big cities and the nearby suburban communities that often rank among the fastest growing in the country. But what the county lacks in population it makes up for with a relatively low cost of living, space to make room for industry, housing and, potentially, Austin Community College.

The potential annexation is an example of how colleges are becoming more nimble and more responsive to both emerging economies and the needs of students, said Maria Cormier, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But Cormier argues such expansions must be intentionally designed with equity in mind to envision multiple pathways for students so that, for example, students from marginalized backgrounds aren’t limited only to certificate-level programming. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

“These sorts of questions become important when colleges are proposing these kinds of expansions: To what extent are they thinking about longer-term pathways for students?” Cormier said.

ACC already partners with Lockhart ISD on an early college high school that allows students to complete transferable college credit hours while earning a high school diploma, and proponents of annexation highlight the affordable higher education opportunities it would generally provide students in the Lockhart area. But their sales pitch emphasizes what it would mean to leverage ACC for the whole community. While the share of adults with a high school degree within Lockhart ISD’s territory is roughly aligned with the state, the share who have a bachelor’s degree — just 16.8 percent — falls to about half of the state rate.

“An effort like this can never be wrong if it always is for the right reasons,” said Nick Metzler, an information technology manager and consultant who serves as the president of the Greater Lockhart for ACC political action committee, which formed to pursue the college’s expansion.

Related: Five community colleges tweak their offerings to match the local job market

First established in 1973, ACC has steadily grown its footprint in Central Texas through annexation. Though not commonly used, a provision of Texas education law grants a community college the ability to expand its taxing district by adding territory within its designated service area. Working within a service district roughly the size of Connecticut, ACC first expanded its reach in 1985 when voters in the territory covered by the Leander Independent School District, a northern suburb of Austin, agreed to be annexed.

In the years since, neighboring communities in the Manor, Del Valle and Round Rock school districts followed with large majority votes in favor of annexation. ACC’s expansion into Austin’s southern suburbs didn’t begin until 2010, when annexation passed in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District.

The collective initiative to bring ACC to Lockhart has been the topic of discussion for many years, but the current effort was formally triggered by a community-led petition that required locals to gather signatures from at least 5 percent of registered voters. Fanning out at youth sporting events, school functions and other community gatherings, PAC members met with neighbors who indicated their children would be the first in their families to go to college, if they could afford it. Others were adults excited by the prospect of trade programs and certifications they could pursue and the transformative change it could bring to their families as new industries move into Caldwell County.

“Those things would catch a lot of the individuals who couldn’t make it to four-year universities or couldn’t afford to go to four-year universities,” Metzler said. “That’s always been kind of where we as a community have kind of been lacking.”

Lockhart also has an incentive for partnering with ACC: A recent assessment commissioned by the city identified the need to partner with a postsecondary institution for job training if it wanted to meet its economic goals and compete in its target business sectors, namely large-scale auto and electronic manufacturing, food processing and tourism. It also identified the lack of skilled administrative workers along with computer and math specialists as a challenge to reaching those goals.

In the end, PAC members easily surpassed the threshold of the 744 signatures they were required to submit — they turned in 1,013.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

On the ballot now is a proposal for homeowners to trade $232.54 a year on average — a rate of $.1013 per $100 in property value — for in-district services. That includes a steep discount for in-district tuition that comes out to $85 per credit hour compared with $286 for out-of-district residents, though high school graduates from Lockhart ISD would also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program going into effect this fall.

“We are very interested in providing access to high-quality, affordable education in our region because we think it’s a game changer for families,” Chris Cervini, ACC’s vice chancellor for community and public affairs, said in an interview. “We think it promotes affordability by providing folks a lifeline to a family-sustaining wage, so we are very bullish on our value proposition.”

The vote would also allow ACC to grow its tax base as it works to keep pace with its growing enrollment. When classes kicked off this fall, ACC was serving about 70,000 students across 11 campuses in the Central Texas region — an enrollment increase of 15 percent compared with a year earlier. The potential expansion comes as community colleges are adapting to a new state financing model based on student outcomes, including financial incentives for schools if students obtain workforce credentials in certain fields.

The college proposed a three-phase service plan that would begin with expanded offerings in the area, such as evening classes, and eventually work up to a permanent facility tailored to match workforce needs, including demand for certificate programs to “reskill and upskill” for various high-demand careers. Cervini, who has been a main liaison with the Lockhart community, previously said the college was considering whether it could quickly deploy its resources into the community through mobile training rigs for HVAC and welding.

Its timeline could be sped up now that the college has identified a historic building in the heart of downtown — the old Ford Lockhart Motor Company building — as its potential home. During a recent presentation to the Lockhart City Council, ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart told city leaders he appreciated that the site would represent the community’s history juxtaposed to “what we think the future looks like.”

But ACC leaders said the issue ultimately has to play out in the community. There’s been no apparent organized opposition to the vote in Lockhart, and ACC officials say they’ve been engaged with local leaders who have been supportive in helping inform voters about the annexation process. The proposal recently picked up the endorsement of Lockhart’s mayor, Lew White, who commended ACC leaders for their outreach to the community about their offerings.

“I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for, and I think you’re really shaping your proposal for this fall election very nicely,” White said. “And I think it’s something that our community needs to get together and get behind and support.”

Related: States and localities pump more money into community colleges than four-year campuses

Even Lockhart ISD leaders frame the college’s pitch as an initiative with potential benefits extending well beyond the increased access it would offer students in the region.

Overseeing a record 6,850 students in a district covering about 300 square miles, Superintendent Mark Estrada said education is essential to cultivating communities where residents can not only actively participate in the sort of growth Caldwell County is experiencing but benefit from it as well.

“I think the real conversation and consideration is how would this benefit the educational attainment of the entire community, which currently is one of the lowest in Central Texas,” Estrada said. “The mid-career switches, people’s opportunity to have access to education to pursue a passion or career they’ve always been interested in — that’s a major consideration for the community. It’s a narrow look if we’re only looking at high school graduates.”

Still, Caldwell County remains a conservative area in a conservative state where fighting property tax increases has become a favorite political calling card. Much of that debate has centered on funding for public schools, with the fight over school finance often falling to the question of whether older Texans, who are mostly white and less likely to have children enrolled in public schools, are willing to pay for the future of younger Texans, who are mostly Latino. Roughly 4 out of every 5 students enrolled in Lockhart ISD are Latinos.

Voters in the area have shown at least some unwillingness to foot the bill for education-related expansions. In 2019, they rejected a $92.4 million bond proposed to address the significant growth in student enrollment Lockhart ISD had seen in the prior decade. The bond package would have gone toward making more room for more students through the addition of a two-story wing to the local high school, two new school buildings and renovations throughout the district. It also would have backed improvements to the district’s workforce preparation efforts, including a new agricultural science facility and additions to the district’s career technology center to allow more students to participate in auto repair classes and hospitality training. Opponents of the measure, 1,632 voters, won with 55 percent of the vote compared with 1,340 who voted in favor.

This time around, proponents of annexation are hoping the eagerness they’ve felt in the community from those who signed onto the original petition — and those who come to see the broader benefits it could bring to the community — will translate to votes.

In recounting the interest they fielded in the early days of their efforts collecting signatures, PAC members described one canvas of a local gym in a portion of the county that’s seeing some of the biggest growth but trails in terms of income. Some of the gym-goers were enthusiastic about the possibility of pursuing technical certifications but realized they weren’t registered to vote, a requirement of the signature collection process.

They went out and got on the voter rolls. Then, they came back to put their names on the petition.

Contact the editor of this story, Nirvi Shah, at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.

This story about Austin Community College 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 A community college could transform a region — and help itself grow. Will voters buy it? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A quarter of the children in the U.S. are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census, yet 60 percent of Hispanic families live in child care deserts, areas with an undersupply of child care.

Culturally appropriate and accessible Spanish-language child care is tailored to the needs of Hispanic and Latino families, where Spanish is often the primary language. The Hechinger Report has covered the growing demand for Spanish-language care around the country, and has heard from readers and sources about the barriers many communities face in developing it, including challenges with licensing would-be providers.

Here is a guide for understanding the federal policies that contribute financing and training to providers of Spanish-language child care around the country.

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

Federal funding for child care

Child Care and Development Block Grants (CCDBG)

With an appropriation of $8.7 billion in fiscal 2024, CCDBG is the primary federal program that supports child care access. Every three years, each state submits a Child Care and Development Fund Plan detailing current care programs, including services available to providers and families with limited English proficiency.

State child care agencies must include families and providers with limited English proficiency in their support plans, but the process isn’t always monitored, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Agency outreach is often recorded only through yearly reports and complaints filed against the agencies.

Head Start

More than 800,000 children and families are enrolled in Head Start, a federal program that provides child care to low-income families. Nearly one-third of enrolled students are dual language learners.

Over a quarter of the program’s teachers speak Spanish, and Head Start offers apprenticeship programs to recruit the parents of English learners and their community members. These apprentices teach classes in their home languages, outside of standard working hours. Head Start works with community colleges and other educational institutions to help apprentices complete the requirements to become licensed child care providers.

Preschool Development Grant Birth through 5

Preschool development grants for children up to age 5 are competitive federal grants that states can apply for with proposals to expand upon existing federal, state and local investments in child care. These grants support early child care, and the majority (40 of the 42 proposals from 2023) mention English learners.

The BUILD Initiative analyzed the approved proposals from 2023 and identified seven distinct strategies to support English learners at the state level: culturally appropriate translation of resources, training to support language development, workforce degree or credential programs, worker recruitment and retention initiatives, standardizing a process to identify English learners and, in tribal communities, immersion and engagement.

Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV)

The MIECHV program provides federal funding to pair pregnant people and parents of young children with trained home visitors, including nurses, educators and social workers. Home visitors are required to communicate in their partner family’s home language or provide an interpreter. They are also required to use research-based strategies and activities that support bilingual children.

However, MIECHV regulations for supporting English learners and their families are not as specific as other federal programs. Funding has also stagnated since 2013, and experts estimate that only 140,000 families, about 3 to 5 percent of those eligible, are actually receiving services.

How states are using federal funds

Colorado

Providers Advancing School Outcomes (PASO) is a 120-hour intensive course that trains informal caregivers to become early childhood educators. The program is targeted at Hispanic families, and offers courses in Spanish.

Developed by the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition in 2006, PASO has advocated for a handful of bills within Colorado state legislature, including property tax exemptions for child care centers, a stipend for early childhood educators in training and work-based learning programs.

California

Creciendo Juntos, launched by the Mexican American Opportunity Foundation, supports the “holistic development of Latino families in California” and helps aspiring providers in Los Angeles County by reimbursing them for medical training and certification fees. The organization, whose name means “growing together,” also provides centers with bedding, toys and other early child care fundamentals.

State-level plans for preschool development grants

Five states plan to spend preschool development grant funding on recruiting and retaining multilingual child care providers and educators, according to the BUILD Initiative.

• Idaho plans to recruit and support Spanish-speaking providers to start, expand and maintain home-based child care programs in rural areas with a high population of Latino families. The state also plans to pair this initiative with the local Child Care Resource and Referral agencies, increasing support of current home-based providers through training and networking opportunities.

• Illinois will implement a standardized process to identify English learners via a home language survey and screening. It also proposed increasing compensation for bilingual early childhood educators.

• Mississippi will grant bonuses for programs that employ educators who are fluent in languages other than English and pay for monthly bonuses to providers serving families with limited English proficiency.

• Ohio plans to support informal and unlicensed home-based child care programs through the ESCALERAS program, which, as of October 2022, was helping 36 providers receive their license. Ohio projects the program will expand to serve 63 providers by June 2025.

• Virginia will expand its Fast Track program, which recruits and trains emerging early childhood educators, to offer training materials in Spanish.

Contact editor Nichole Dobo at 212-870-8954 or dobo@hechingerreport.org.

This story about daycare in Spanish 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.

The post These federal policies support Spanish-language child care appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story about how to catch up at school was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post The habits of 7 highly effective schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Reporter Kavitha Cardoza shares an inside look at her recent story on a superintendent who was shown the door after winning national attention for serving English learners. This is an edition of our Future of Learning newsletter. Sign up today to get it delivered straight to your inbox.

Heath Grimes, the superintendent of Russellville City Schools in Alabama, had already received several accolades for his work with English learners when I spoke to him in June 2023 for a story on teacher apprenticeships. So I was surprised at the end of the call when he told me his contract had not been renewed. This happened while he was the elected president of the School Superintendents of Alabama. It was obvious he’d been surprised as well. 

I’ve reported on English learners for years and knew their educational outcomes often lagged behind their non-English learner peers because districts don’t always offer the training or have the resources to support them. Yet this conservative Alabama community of 11,000 people, where the district’s English learner population is at 33 percent, was seeing a lot of success. What went wrong?

I began digging, and after months of reporting and research, I finally got to see Russellville for myself in March 2024. Being there reminded me of my eight years reporting in rural Illinois — families had roots that ran generations deep, people valued tradition and “the way things have always been done,” and everyone turned out to support the high school football team. When Grimes had the football field re-turfed so the newly created soccer team could play there as well, it seemed like an apt metaphor for the changes happening in the wider community.

When a former board member told me, “People bleed black and gold” (the school colors), he was only mildly exaggerating. I learned how essential the Russellville school system is to the fabric of the community. The school board provided leadership and a steadying hand as the community struggled through demographic shifts, and educators figured out new methods of instruction and created award-winning classes to support English learners. I learned how, when given a chance, the parents of English learners, often immigrants who were very poor, worked long shifts and didn’t speak English, proudly gave of their time and resources to the district. And I learned how what happens inside a school building is only a part of the story that cannot be separated from the politics of education that happens outside it.

I spoke with dozens of educators, board members and parents, but also a woman who worked at the hotel where I stayed whose niece attended the middle school, a Taco Bell cashier where I ate every night who was an alum, and a couple in a Walmart parking lot who were shopping for school supplies. 

Getting to the bottom of why a dedicated superintendent was shown the door was both exhausting and exhilarating. Gradually I built trust with community and school system insiders, and some 18 people, many of whom had knowledge of the events, told me that small-town politics and anti-immigrant sentiment contributed to the superintendent’s departure. (The Russellville mayor and the school board attorney wrote in response to my questions that English learners had thrived in the district long before Grimes and that anti-immigrant sentiment did not play a role in the decision to not renew his contract.)  

Read my story, which was part of a collaboration between Hechinger and palabra, an initiative of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, along with AL.com. You can also find it in Spanish. I’d love to hear your reactions and ideas for other stories you think we should cover on English learners, school leaders and other topics. – Kavitha Cardoza

Here’s what stood out from a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education: the idea of “redesigning schools for the generative AI era.” According to the report’s authors, this means that teachers and schools should emphasize “skills only the human mind possesses,” such as critical and creative thinking, to help students learn how to work with AI. Some districts, like Houston Independent School District and Gwinnett County Public Schools, have already begun working on initiatives like this. It reminded me of calls during the pandemic years about redesigning schools to better meet the needs of students – yet ultimately school systems saw little change. The report highlights some of the more positive thinking on how AI can potentially solve challenges that school systems have faced for years, including teacher shortages and academic recovery. 

In other news: The Department of Education announced this month it was once again changing how the 2025-26 FAFSA form will be launched and processed in an effort to minimize some of the problems with the messy rollout of its 2024-25 form. The application will open to a limited number of students and colleges during a testing period starting Oct. 1 and will be available for all students by Dec. 1, the department says. 

More on the Future of Learning

“Many kids can’t read, even in high school. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?,” The Hechinger Report

“What education could look like under Harris and Walz,” The Hechinger Report

“What education could look like under Trump and Vance,” The Hechinger Report

“California’s two biggest school districts botched AI deals. Here are lessons from their mistakes.” CalMatters

“New St. Paul Public Schools program will center Black culture and history,” Sahan Journal

“What does Universal Service Fund ruling mean for E-rate?” K-12 DiveThis story about the Russellville superintendent was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Javeria Salman contributed reporting.

This story about the Russellville superintendent was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. 

The post Investigating why a high-performing superintendent left his job  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca Griesbach of AL.com contributed reporting.

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

The post A superintendent made big gains with English learners. His success may have been his downfall appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, educators have pondered its implications for education. Some have leaned toward apocalyptic projections about the end of learning, while others remain cautiously optimistic.

My students took longer than I expected to discover generative AI. When I asked them about ChatGPT in February 2023, many had never heard of it.

But some caught up, and now our college’s academic integrity office is busier than ever dealing with AI-related cheating. The need for guidelines is discussed in every college meeting, but I’ve noticed a worrying reaction among students that educators are not considering: fear.

Students are bombarded with negative ideas about AI. Punitive policies heighten that fear while failing to recognize the potential educational benefits of these technologies — and that students will need to use them in their careers. Our role as educators is to cultivate critical thinking and equip students for a job market that will use AI, not to intimidate them.

Yet course descriptions include bans on the use of AI. Professors tell students they cannot use it. And students regularly read stories about their peers going on academic probation for using Grammarly. If students feel constantly under suspicion, it can create a hostile learning environment.

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

Many of my students haven’t even played around with ChatGPT because they are scared of being accused of plagiarism. This avoidance creates a paradox in which students are expected to be adept with these modern tools post-graduation, yet are discouraged from engaging with them during their education.

I suspect the profile of my students makes them more prone to fear AI. Most are Hispanic and female, taking courses in translation and interpreting. They see that the overwhelmingly male and white “tech bros” in Silicon Valley shaping AI look nothing like them, and they internalize the idea that AI is not for them and not something they need to know about. I wasn’t surprised that the only male student I had in class this past semester was the only student excited about ChatGPT from the very beginning.

Failing to develop AI literacy among Hispanic students can diminish their confidence and interest in engaging with these technologies. Their fearful reactions will widen the already concerning inequities between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students; the degree completion gap between Latino and white students increased between 2018 and 2021.

The stakes are high. Similar to the internet boom, AI will revolutionize daily activities and, certainly, knowledge jobs. To prepare our students for these changes, we need to help them understand what AI is and encourage them to explore the functionalities of large language models like ChatGPT.

I decided to address the issue head-on. I asked my students to write speeches on a current affairs topic. But first, I asked for their thoughts on AI. I was shocked by the extent of their misunderstanding: Many believed that AI was an omniscient knowledge-producing machine connected to the internet.

After I gave a brief presentation on AI, they expressed surprise that large language models are based on prediction rather than direct knowledge. Their curiosity was piqued, and they wanted to learn how to use AI effectively.

After they drafted their speeches without AI, I asked them to use ChatGPT to proofread their drafts and then report back to me. Again, they were surprised — this time about how much ChatGPT could improve their writing. I was happy (even proud) to see they were also critical of the output, with comments such as “It didn’t sound like me” or “It made up parts of the story.”

Was the activity perfect? Of course not. Prompting was challenging. I noticed a clear correlation between literacy levels and the quality of their prompts.

Students who struggled with college-level writing couldn’t go beyond prompts such as “Make it sound smoother.” Nonetheless, this basic activity was enough to spark curiosity and critical thinking about AI.

Individual activities like these are great, but without institutional support and guidance, efforts toward fostering AI literacy will fall short.

The provost of my college established an AI committee to develop college guidelines. It included professors from a wide range of disciplines (myself included), other staff members and, importantly, students.

Through multiple meetings, we brainstormed the main issues that needed to be included and researched specific topics like AI literacy, data privacy and safety, AI detectors and bias.

We created a document divided into key points that everyone could understand. The draft document was then circulated among faculty and other committees for feedback.

Initially, we were concerned that circulating the guidelines among too many stakeholders might complicate the process, but this step proved crucial. Feedback from professors in areas such as history and philosophy strengthened the guidelines, adding valuable perspectives. This collaborative approach also helped increase institutional buy-in, as everyone’s contribution was valued.

Related: A new partnership paves the way for greater use of AI in higher ed

Underfunded public institutions like mine face significant challenges integrating AI into education. While AI offers incredible opportunities for educators, realizing these opportunities requires substantial institutional investment.

Asking adjuncts in my department, who are grossly underpaid, to find time to learn how to use AI and incorporate it into their classes seems unethical. Yet, incorporating AI into our knowledge production activities can significantly boost student outcomes.

If this happens only at wealthy institutions, we will widen academic performance gaps.

Furthermore, if only students at wealthy institutions and companies get to use AI, the bias inherent in these large language models will continue to grow.

If we want our classes to ensure equitable educational opportunities for all students, minority-serving institutions cannot fall behind in AI adoption.

Cristina Lozano Argüelles is an assistant professor of interpreting and bilingualism at John Jay College, part of the City University of New York, where she researches the cognitive and social dimensions of language learning.

This story about AI literacy 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 TEACHER VOICE: My students are afraid of AI appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LEXINGTON, Neb. — Naidid Aguilera was feeling stuck.

Stuck at her job at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Stuck in a central Nebraska town after emigrating from Mexico roughly 15 years earlier with her husband. Instead of working in her dream role as an elementary school teacher, she spent her days hauling cow organs for inspection. 

Then she learned about one group’s effort to expand access to high-quality child care here, specifically for families who speak little English, through free training and help navigating state licensing laws. The classes would be entirely in Spanish, eliminating one of the single-biggest hurdles for expanding care in this town of 11,000, where 2 out of 3 residents are Hispanic. For years, it had just one Spanish-speaking child care provider.

As Aguilera dialed the phone to sign up for classes, she recalled feeling overcome with emotion because she had believed her goal of working with children was left back in Mexico.

“The only question they really asked me was why I would want to pursue a child care license,” Aguilera said through a Spanish interpreter. “My response was, ‘I want to do more than where I’m at right now at Tyson and move further in life. I’m looking for another opportunity.’”

Through the local advocacy of several organizations, the community will have nine Spanish-speaking providers by this summer — including Aguilera. Although Lexington still has a waiting list of 550 children in need of care, the town’s child care gap has been cut by nearly 100 children with the addition of new providers, according to local data. 

A nonprofit group called Communities for Kids, partnering with other organizations, began training providers after community surveys revealed the town’s need for Spanish-language child care. The group, founded in 2017, helps develop quality early care and education programs in Nebraska communities that don’t have enough of them.

“If you can’t communicate, or your culture is different, trusting a white English-speaking woman with your child — that’s a lot of trust,” said Shonna Werth, Communities for Kids’ assistant vice president of early childhood programs.

At the time, with only one bilingual provider, most Hispanic families were shuffling their children among neighbors or family members for care. It was the only way for Spanish-speaking parents to communicate with a provider directly.

Some parents employed by the local meatpacking plants worked split shifts to ensure their children were with someone they could communicate with.

“You wonder, ‘Where are those kids? What experiences are they having?’” Werth said. 

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

There’s a lack of Spanish-speaking or bilingual early childhood education providers across the nation, said Tania Villarroel, early childhood senior policy analyst for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. One of the barriers to growing the child care workforce is the process of getting certified.

“It’s a resource to speak Spanish, but if you don’t have good English skills, it can also be really hard to get those degrees,” Villarroel said. “It benefits Latino children to have a Latino provider because they have the same lived experience, same heritage — it’s easier for them to connect to families, to get more family engagement.”

Recent research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families found that Latino families across the United States consider multiple factors when trying to find child care, like schedule flexibility and whether the provider offers culturally responsive care for their children.

“Some [places] serve only Hispanic children, and they have Hispanic providers. But then other sites have no Hispanic children, and probably no Hispanic representation. So we see this sort of segregation going on,” said Julia Mendez, a researcher for the center. “There’s the families who are seeking the care and the families can’t find what they need, because it’s not available.”

Mendez said it’s common for home-based care to be of lower quality for Hispanic families, becauseif their providers don’t speak English, they have fewer opportunities for professional development or credentialing.

Boosting the quality of Lexington’s child care — not just its accessibility — was crucial, Werth said. She joined two local child care advocates, sisters Stephanie and Maricela Novoa, to implement the free training. Maricela Novoa is an early learning bilingual specialist providing assistance to early childhood educators through the Nebraska Department of Education. Stephanie Novoa, a realtor, also works with Communities for Kids and volunteers as a special advocate with the courts.

The training in Lexington began in 2021 with a program called the “Professional Learning Series,” which included 55 hours of classes on the licensing process or required skills for high-quality early childhood education. The series was taught exclusively in English – and did not attract Spanish-speakers.

Another series followed in 2022, and this time, there was a professional interpreter and headsets available for translation. The class was held every Tuesday night from August through November at the local YMCA, with free child care and food available.

“We were kind of building that foundation of [making] sure there are things that if they want to get licensed, this will be useful for them if and when they ever get there,” Werth said. “Like, let’s not just do training for the sake of training, but training that has a dual purpose. They’re building their education and their skills so that they can have better interactions with the kids they are caring for or as parents, because not all of them are on that trajectory of being a child care provider.”

Related: Our child care system gives many moms a draconian choice: Quality child care or a career

Werth said when the classes first opened, the goal was to reach five or six participants. Twenty showed up.

“Midway through the classes, participants would bring a neighbor or a friend. And so we had to close the class because it was a small room,” said Maricela Novoa. “It was just that word of mouth, that trust piece — this is safe, this is good. This is something that you’ll value.”

Next was a 10-week business class in 2023, followed by courses on parenting and safety that were provided in English with a Spanish interpreter.

Aguilera said she remembers many long days last spring working at the meatpacking plant, then attending classes in the evening.

“The classes were one after another, but at the same time that was nice because it was just all over at once,” Aguilera said. “I was tired, but it was very worth it.”

Werth said it was slow-going to license the nine women, especially when they ran into language barriers.

“Stephanie and I met with six or eight participants one night. They all brought their licensing packets, and we sat down with them to help them just try to work through that. And [it] took hours to do, which should not be the case,” Werth said.

It took several hours more to help participants navigate an online class. Most of them had little experience working with technology other than their phones. Werth recalled the library closing around them one evening as they helped participants use computers for the first time.

Maricela Novoa said the lack of Spanish materials or Spanish-speaking representatives is a constant hurdle for future providers. Even now, a Lexington resident could call a state agency for help but not get anyone on the phone who can speak Spanish.

“It does get tiring, because you’re the only person in the room saying, ‘Hey, is this available in Spanish?’ when there’s a new resource available,” Maricela Novoa said. 

Mendez, of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, said her organization calls these obstacles “administrative burden.”

“It’s true across the board that any barrier, like a language barrier, can keep people out,” Mendez said. “With administrative burden, you have to learn what the resources are, but first, you have to know about them. And then you have to navigate the systems to try to figure out how to get the credential or the support that you’re looking for.”

Related: In-home child care could be solution for rural working parents

Just a few years ago, Miriam Guedes was the only Spanish-speaking child care provider in Lexington. She started a daycare on her own after being a paraprofessional at the public school district’s preschool for 19 years.

She obtained her license by herself — an uphill battle, she said, with all the paperwork in English — but soon wanted to do more, although she didn’t know how. 

Guedes, whose business is attached to her house, said people started knocking on her door asking if she had room for more kids, but she could take only eight at a time. 

“People were coming in, asking for more and more and more,” she said.

She learned about the free training being offered through Communities for Kids and signed up. The training gave her business experience and the skills to expand her certification, allowing her to care for 12 children at once at her center, “Blooming Daycare.” Now she’s a mentor to Aguilera and the other women who are getting licenses.

Aguilera opened her own child care business, “El Niño Del Tambor Daycare” early this spring. The name means “little drummer boy.” It’s in her basement, recently renovated to include cribs, small chairs and a table, organizers filled with colorful books and crafts, an alphabet rug and more. Her new license is taped to a marker board at the entrance.

She enrolled her first child mid-March and now has four children in her care, in addition to two of her own children. Aguilera said she could easily see herself hiring an assistant and taking on more children in the near future.

It’s something that changed her life for the better, she said.

“When I first started taking in kids, I kind of broke down a little bit because it came full circle,” Aguilera said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to stay home with my kids. And now I get to do this. I’m so happy.”

This story about child care solutions 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 A small rural town needed more Spanish-language child care. Here’s what it took appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Attending school in America has been a “positive culture shock” to Marzia Mohammadi, a 17-year-old senior at Mt. Lebanon High School. 

Mohammadi’s life changed overnight when she was forced to flee Afghanistan, her home country, following the Taliban’s ascension and the withdrawal of American troops from the region in August 2021. Her mother had worked with the U.S. embassy. Living in Kabul was no longer safe for them. 

When their refugee case was processed, Mohammadi and her family were sent to Pittsburgh. Nearly three years later, Mohammadi is preparing to enroll in an American university, something she had never planned. 

At Mt. Lebanon High School, apart from her regular classes, she chose electives like global studies, business and political science — three of her favorite subjects. The educational structure was a stark contrast to what she experienced back in Kabul. 

“We have more classes, we have more opportunities,” she said. “In Afghanistan, we have subjects that everyone must learn but in here, you can choose your classes, take whatever you want.”

Mohammadi is one of the 76,000 people who were evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021. Pittsburgh was one of the cities recommended by the State Department for their resettlement. 

The sudden influx of refugee families created an urgency to figure out a system that could cater to the needs of school-going children and youth. This task fell upon various resettlement agencies and organizations that worked with refugee populations. 

Meg Booth, Afghan youth support program manager at after-school provider ARYSE, said the influx of young refugees presented unique challenges for many organizations.

“The nature of the situation and the fastness in which it all happened is a bit of an unprecedented thing or a context in which our organization hadn’t worked with a lot in the past,” Booth said. 

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

As Afghan refugee students navigate the complexities of new school systems, many face challenges in communication, discrimination and helping their families resettle in a new country.

In Mohammadi’s first year at Mt. Lebanon High School, she struggled to keep good grades. As an English as a Second Language [ESL] student, she received additional support to help her with English skills, but language barriers created challenges in other subjects. 

Outside of her ESL classes, the school attempted to bridge those gaps using various translation tools, but the technology — including popular tools like Google Translate — provided inaccurate translations in Iranian Farsi that she couldn’t understand well. 

“So [teachers] used to simplify the words and give us our test to take it in our ESL classes,” she said.

Such problems are prevalent in other school districts as well. Mohammadi’s friend N.W., whose full name has been withheld for privacy reasons, attends Carlynton High School, which serves the communities of Carnegie, Crafton and Rosslyn Farms. When she was six years old, N.W.’s family moved to Indonesia, where she did not receive any formal education in English. At Carlynton, N.W.’s teachers translated documents in Dari before administering tests, but she could not read them since she did not attend school in Afghanistan. 

Sara Hoffman, director of pupil services and special education at Carlynton, acknowledged the limitations of many popular translation tools and said the district is now using the ILA translation service, deemed more reliable than Google Translate. 

Booth of ARYSE said she believes the gap in translation services is a result of a broader systemic issue: A lack of policies around communication with parents and policies for integrating ESL students. State law requires that schools communicate with ESL families in their preferred language and ensure parent participation by providing translation and interpretation services.

When Muzhda Ayubi arrived in Pittsburgh as a refugee in October 2022, she was the only person in her family who spoke English. 

At 15, Ayubi was thrust into a challenging role in which she had to navigate studying at West Mifflin High School and support her family with everyday tasks. Her responsibilities ranged from assisting her brother with schoolwork to helping her parents with emails, medical support and buying groceries. The weight of these responsibilities overwhelmed Ayubi, who wished her parents received more support. 

“I used to go everywhere and I used to do everything. And it was feeling like too much. It was too much pressure on me,” said Ayubi, now 17. 

Upon arrival, Afghan families are connected to a resettlement agency that will aid them in the initial resettlement process. Voluntary agencies such as the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants are contracted by the federal government to coordinate and determine the number of refugees that a resettlement agency will receive. 

Once a resettlement agency is notified of a family’s arrival, they acquire furniture and food and start searching for affordable housing options. The assistance continues for 90 days post-arrival, with help to find jobs, enroll kids in schools and enroll in eligible benefits. 

Simone Vecchio, family services director at Hello Neighbor, said as a resettlement agency, they are focusing on empowering students in postsecondary pathways to become self-sufficient.

“The reality is that a lot of students are responsible for so many things at home,” she said, that it “…probably even feels like a burden to them to even think about pursuing something for themselves.”

Related: After enrollment slump, Denver-area schools struggle to absorb a surge of refugee and migrant children

School districts around the area are trying to adapt to the growing influx of immigrant students in different ways. 

Stacee Rutherford, an ESL teacher at West Mifflin Area High School, said while the district does not have interpreters at events, all calls and messages are translated for students whose first language isn’t English. The district also uses a family engagement service called TalkingPoints.

The service is a multilingual platform to cater to the needs of immigrant families. 

Challenges remain, though, with translating for parents and carers, and students sometimes carry the burden.

The Global Switchboard and its All for All Education Subcommittee, which includes organizations such as Jewish Family and Community Services [JFCS], developed the Know Your Education Rights Training to empower immigrant and refugee families to understand and navigate Pittsburgh’s education systems.

Families can receive training in six areas: parent engagement, language access, ESL support, discipline and behavior support, special education and gifted education.

“Those are the areas, probably except for language access, where American families struggle in and that’s on top of immigrant and refugee parents trying to understand the labyrinth of that whole system,” said Funmi Haastrup, an education equity consultant, who worked on developing the training. 

Despite finding a supportive environment in high school, Mohammadi said she feels that many schools could better support Afghan students by helping them plan for college after graduation. 

Because she is an ESL student, Mohammadi said she felt some teachers offered her less encouragement to take advanced classes or apply to four-year universities.

Vecchio of Hello Neighbor called it a “deficit mentality.” 

And that attitude toward refugees and immigrants, she said, “really puts them at a disadvantage because it doesn’t allow them to fully use their skills, their experience, their education, their knowledge, and really feel like they can be successful.”

Outside of school, many of these students found community through programs, like Empowered Afghan Youth run by ARYSE and JFCS’ Bridge Builders, that help high school students with mentorship, social-emotional support and postsecondary pathways. 

N.W. said the Empowered Afghan Youth program has helped her with college applications, getting a driver’s permit, English practice and career guidance. 

Related: Lost in translation: Parents of special ed students who don’t speak English often left in the dark

Erin Barr, director of youth services at JFCS, said other disparities exist in assessing a refugee student’s need for ESL services or determining a learning disability. Furthermore, when a refugee or immigrant student is not literate in their first language, it can complicate finding appropriate special education supports. 

“It’s very hard to know if the student is not reading at grade level because they can’t read English or because they have some type of deficit in their ability to learn,” she said.

Haastrup said many immigrant families think it is taboo for a child to have a disability and schools should consider those cultural nuances before communicating with them. 

“Schools shouldn’t be waiting for the parents to come to them because it’s much harder for immigrant and refugee families for a host of different reasons,” she said. “And so I think schools need to be proactive, they have to take the initiative in reaching out to families.”

As Afghan refugees, S. Ahmadzai’s family was sent to Houston, Texas, when they first came to the United States in August 2021. Two years later, Ahmadzai, whose full name has been withheld for privacy reasons, moved to Pittsburgh and enrolled in the suburban Keystone Oaks School District. 

Ahmadzai, then 15, struggled to fit in at first. “They saw a new student being from a different culture and having a hijab. It was new for them. Some of them are talking to you, some of them are not,” she said. 

Her first few days in school were completely different from what she experienced in Texas, where her school was more diverse and her teachers spoke in Persian and Spanish. Many of her fellow students there were Afghans. 

At Keystone Oaks, where 78 percent of high school students are white, Ahmadzai felt out of place. 

Districts like Carlynton and Mt. Lebanon celebrate days on which students learn about different cultures and regions. Students get a prayer room during the holy month of Ramadan and separate spaces during lunchtime. 

“Everyone is really respectful. … No one’s coming to our room. The students are not eating in front of us as we celebrate anything important from our culture,” Mohammadi said. 

And yet, other students like N.W. and Ahmadzai maintain that school staff could have a better cultural understanding of ESL and refugee students. 

“You can feel the difference,” N.W. said. “You can see, like, how they’re treating American students versus refugee kids.”

Hoffman said the Carlynton School District regularly sends teachers and staff for professional training as the district is recognizing a cultural shift. The district is incorporating multicultural books at elementary grade levels to give students more exposure to different cultures. 

“We’re trying to work on getting the staff to be more culturally responsive to the students and that is an area that we definitely need to improve upon,” Hoffman added. 

Advocates and community organizations believe cultural understanding is essential for schools to create a positive experience for refugee students. Zubair Babakarkhail, a refugee and cultural navigator at JFCS, said teachers should learn and teach about different religions and cultures in a way that includes all students. 

“When we say America is a country of immigrants,” he said, “I think it’s a bigger need for all the teachers in schools that they should understand at least some about different cultures and religions.”

Lajja Mistry is the K-12 education reporter at PublicSource. She can be reached at lajja@publicsource.org

This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.

The post ‘Positive culture shock’ spells challenges and triumphs for Afghan teen students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PASADENA, Calif. — After starting elementary school in the late 1960s, Naomi Hirahara and three other girls formed a clique called the C.L.A.N., an acronym that represented each of the girl’s first initials. Hirahara said she and her friends didn’t consider the racial implications of their group’s name until one of their fathers objected: “The Klan is very bad!”

The group consisted of Hirahara, who is Japanese-American, two Black girls and a White Jewish girl. They attended Loma Alta Elementary, a racially diverse school in Altadena, Calif., that stood out from many others in the Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), especially its high schools, which were more racially homogenous.

“I really treasured the fact that we could form these interracial and intercultural relationships,” Hirahara said of her school, where, she recalled, students acknowledged racial differences, but weren’t fixated on them.

By 1970, the racial makeup of PUSD schools would command the attention of the entire country. A U.S. district court judge determined the school system had “knowingly assigned” students to schools by race and ordered it to desegregate based on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional. To racially integrate, PUSD launched what CBS News and The New York Times described then as the most substantial busing program outside the South.

Seventy years after the Brown decision on May 17, 1954, PUSD is still rebounding from the white flight that followed its desegregation order. More than 27,700 school-age youth live in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre, the communities served by the district, but only about half of them attend public school.

With 133,560 residents, Pasadena has one of the densest concentrations of private schools in the country, according to school officials. But the moms in the community who support public schools have organized to create a more equitable and diverse educational landscape.

They have teamed up with local educational organizations to advocate for the school district, and by extension, for racially and economically diverse schools. They have reached out to families with preschoolers, joined public school tours and gone door-to-door to reframe the narrative around PUSD. District officials, for their part, have expanded magnet and dual language immersion offerings, among other competitive programs, at schools to attract families from a wide range of backgrounds.

Families and officials have also worked together to educate realtors. It turns out that some of them dissuaded homeowners from enrolling children in PUSD, contributing to the exodus to private schools and, more recently, charter schools.

Changing negative perceptions that date back to school desegregation during the 1970s hasn’t been easy, they said. Back then, the backlash to the busing program occurred almost as soon as it started, with a recall campaign against school board members and a near 12-percentage-point drop in white student enrollment. Ronald Reagan, who was California’s governor at the time, stoked the fire when he signed legislation that prohibited busing without parental consent.

Today, advocating for Pasadena’s public schools is all the more challenging when considering that more than 40 private schools have been established in PUSD’s boundaries; the district has 23 public schools. In interviews, community members told The 19th that the proliferation of private schools has enabled white, middle- and upper-class families to evade public schools in the five decades since court-ordered desegregation.

“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,” said Brian McDonald, who served as PUSD’s superintendent for nine years before stepping down in 2023.

California is not usually a place associated with segregation, though segregation has historically been a problem in the state. A 1973 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that school segregation there and elsewhere in the West is frequently “as severe as in the South.” A report released last month by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA — “The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America – from Brown to Now” —  ranked California as the top state in the country where Black and Latino students attend schools with the lowest percentages of white students.

“California has gone through a major racial transition,” said Gary Orfield, one of the authors of the report and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “It was an overwhelmingly White state in terms of school enrollment at the time of the Brown decision, but it’s now, of course, a state that is overwhelmingly non-White in terms of student enrollment. That’s basically caused by tanking birth rates and immigration.”

Fueling segregation, Orfield said, is the fact that California has largely lacked state policies designed to racially balance schools since the 1960s and 1970s, when court orders brought about change.

In Pasadena, some residents say that the school district’s reputation is improving and more people want to invest and enroll their children in public schools. Although white and Asian-American students remain underrepresented in PUSD, the White student population has slightly increased over the past 20 years despite the drop in the city’s White population during that period.

After failed attempts, Pasadena voters have approved ballot measures to increase funding for local schools in recent years, enabling the district to make millions of dollars in upgrades. The district has also received national recognition for its academic programs, school tours are packed and young parents now tend to view diversity as an asset, its supporters say.

“Most school districts across the country have given up on integration. It’s not on the radar screen,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who has authored studies on PUSD and is director of housing policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. “Pasadena, along with a number of other forward-looking communities, is trying to do something about that. They haven’t reached all their goals, but I’m inspired that there is a critical mass of parents who recognize the benefits of diversity for all students.”

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

During a recent information session for prospective public school parents, Nancy Dufford, executive director of the Pasadena Education Network (PEN), which works to get families involved in district schools, told the audience: “Probably, a lot of you were told when you moved here that you couldn’t send your kids to public school.”

She was stunned to find out that none of the families had actually heard such comments. It was the first time she had spoken to a group of parents who hadn’t been warned away. In Pasadena, Dufford said, it has been tradition for established families not to send their children to public schools. “So many people live here for long periods of time,” she said. “So you have generations of families here who have that message.”

The message ends up making its way to newer Pasadenans. Dufford said she heard it herself after becoming a mother in the 1990s, shortly after relocating to the city. In fact, PEN, the group she runs today, was started in 2006 by a group of preschool parents who had heard the same thing yet refused to listen.

They were among the parents who asked questions like, “Why do people say the schools aren’t good?”

Kimberly Kenne, president of the PUSD Board of Education and one of the founding members of PEN, said that she also wondered about this “pervasive narrative” when she moved to town in the early 1990s. She wasn’t aware of the bias against public schools in Pasadena, though her husband, who was raised in the city, attended private school when the desegregation order came down.

After their first child was born in 1997, Kenne considered enrolling him in the neighborhood public school — only to be admonished by fellow parents. “Are you sure you’re going to share the values of the other parents at public school?” she recalled them asking.

She enrolled her son in a private school, but changed her mind. One reason is that the school wasn’t equipped to meet his needs as a neurodivergent child. Another is that the private school lacked racial diversity in the student body, something that mattered to her.

Jennifer Hall Lee, vice president of PUSD’s Board of Education, also enrolled her daughter, who is now 20, in private school — regretting the decision when she realized her daughter didn’t seem comfortable interacting with people from a wide range of backgrounds.

Lee herself had gone to a public high school in Atlanta in the 1970s that had equal percentages of Black and White students. After switching her daughter to public school, Lee noticed that the child’s worldview changed.

“She would talk to me about the kids in the schools, from first-generation immigrant kids to foster youth,” Lee said. “She began to really understand the differences in socioeconomic status and understand that people lived in apartments and not everybody owned a home. She started understanding the full breadth of her community.”

In a city where the median home sale price is $1.1 million and the median household income is almost six figures, it’s confusing for newcomers to understand why the school system has a poor reputation since affluence in a community typically translates into quality in its public schools.

Pasadena, however, has become known as “a tale of two cities,” a place where the gap between the rich and the poor has only widened and the two groups don’t mingle socially or academically. At $97,818, the median household income is just above the state’s and $23,000 above the nation’s. At the same time, the city’s poverty rate of 13.4 percent is slightly higher than the state and national rate.

When the school district’s critics mention that its test scores are lower than those in surrounding school systems, supporters respond that the city has a wealth gap that’s largely absent from the more homogeneous neighboring suburbs. Many of the detractors, Dufford said, are also unaware that PUSD’s “bad” reputation coincided with the 1970 desegregation order that accelerated the departure of white, middle- and upper-income families from the district.

White flight out of Pasadena has been traced back as far as the 1940s. The reasons include lower birth rates among white families, an economic downturn in the aerospace industry that limited employment opportunities and the restructuring of neighborhoods to make way for freeways. By 1960, the racial demographics of the city were also changing, with communities of color expanding rapidly. The next year, PUSD lost about 400 students when the mostly white community of La Cañada broke away from the district to form its own separate school system, which to this day is ranked as one of the state’s best. In 1976, La Cañada Flintridge became its own city.

“The fact that people are willing to create whole new municipalities, so they don’t have to integrate — that should really wow people,” said Shannon Malone, PUSD’s senior director of principals, who added that her views were not the school district’s but her own. “You would rather create a whole new city than to let your child sit next to a person of color. I don’t think people have a full understanding of that at all.”

Having lived through the desegregation order, Hirahara, who is now an award-winning mystery writer, wishes more people knew about the history of the city’s schools. In 2016, she received a grant from the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division to present “Loma Alta: Tales of Desegregation,” a talk at a public library that featured her and two other district alumni sharing their experiences.

“So many people don’t even know that it was the first West Coast school district to get the order to desegregate, so it’s a very unique and telling experience of why we’re still dealing with issues of race today,” Hirahara said.

When Hirahara was enrolled in Loma Alta, about half of its students were Black. It was one of Pasadena’s top-performing elementary schools, which the 1973 report from the Civil Rights commission attributed to the fact that many of the students came from middle-class households. Other high-achieving schools in the district with large Black populations included Audubon Primary School and John Muir High School. Six students at John Muir were accepted into the elite California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1972, a rare feat that prompted Caltech’s then-president to write about the accomplishment in the local newspapers.

The Brown v. Board decision had the unintended consequence of costing tens of thousands of Black educators their jobs as many white schools did not want to employ these teachers and principals after integration. The consequences have endured for decades. In 2021, about 15 percent of public school students nationwide were Black, but only 6 percent of public school teachers nationwide were, according to a forthcoming report by the Southern Education Foundation, a nonprofit that works to advance equitable education policies.

“We really, truly haven’t recovered from the very pervasive belief in the area that PUSD schools are not up to snuff,”

Brian McDonald, the Pasadena Unified School District, former superintendent

Malone, who is Black and was bused to schools in Los Angeles, underscored the results of studies that show that students of color excel when they have Black teachers, demonstrating better academic and behavioral outcomes. But when Black children attend integrated schools, their support systems don’t usually accompany them, she said.

The achievements of students at racially diverse schools in the district didn’t stop the parents bent on leaving PUSD from doing so, administrators complained to federal officials in 1973. The biggest obstacle preventing the district from truly becoming integrated, the administrators said, was “white flight.” The Civil Rights commission’s report quoted one administrator making a remark that could have come from a PUSD supporter today: “White parents don’t take time to see whether the system is bad or not. They simply listen to people who criticize the district without foundation.”

What’s different is that now the district has an army of moms actively challenging these attitudes. Victoria Knapp is one of them, but it took time and trust in herself before she became a public school crusader.

Related: Revisiting Brown, 70 years later.

When Knapp entered grade school in Pasadena in the 1970s, she heard that children her age were being bused from one neighborhood to another, but she didn’t understand why it was being done or what it was like. Knapp did not attend the city’s public schools.

“My schools were predominantly white, predominantly Catholic and predominantly middle class or above,” she said.

She had some familiarity with public schools because her mother taught for the Los Angeles Unified School District, but she didn’t know that a contentious debate about integrating them had unfolded in her own community. Years later, after the birth of her older son, she felt pressure from fellow moms to send her children to private school. The aversion to public school in her moms’ group made her reflect on her city’s past. She thought to herself: “You mean to tell me that whatever was going on here 40 years ago is still going on?”

Still, her Catholic school upbringing and the nudging from the private school enthusiasts led Knapp, chair of the Altadena Town Council’s executive committee, to rule out PUSD. First, she and her husband enrolled their eldest son in a parochial school. Then they tried a nonsectarian private school. The couple felt that both schools exposed their children to experiences and behaviors they did not appreciate, like the sense of entitlement expressed by some of their classmates. Knapp, for the first time, began to consider an alternative.

“It did seem counterintuitive to me that I was going to have this relatively homogenous group of moms dictate what we were going to decide for our own kid,” she said.

After touring PUSD schools, Knapp questioned the idea that they were inferior to the city’s private schools. She wondered, “What’s not good? Is it that our public schools are predominantly Black and Brown children?”

When some parents raised safety concerns, she responded that elementary schools aren’t typically dangerous and that fights, gun violence and truancy occur at private and public schools alike. “They could never really articulate what safety meant,” Knapp said. “What safety meant was they didn’t want their child in an integrated, diverse school. They just didn’t. And that’s exactly where I wanted my privileged white sons to be.”

Both of her sons, a sixth grader and an 11th grader, have now attended public school for years. Her younger son attended Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson’s alma mater, Cleveland Elementary School.

Knapp became an active PUSD parent, serving as a PTA president at Altadena Arts Magnet, the school her younger son attended next, and an ambassador for the Pasadena Education Network, a role that has her regularly participate in school tours. Going on tours allows her to field questions from prospective parents. What the families see often surprises them, Knapp said.

“They think they’re going to see chaos and mayhem, then they come in,” she said. “Altadena Arts is an inclusion school, so kids of all neurodiversities are included in the same classroom. It’s socioeconomically diverse, it’s racially diverse, it’s gender diverse, it’s very integrated. You walk up there and it’s like, ‘This is what a school should look like.’”

Karina Montilla Edmonds, who moved to Pasadena in 1992 to attend Caltech, never doubted the city’s public school district. When her now 22-year-old daughter was entering kindergarten, Edmonds and her former husband turned down the chance to send her to the neighboring San Marino Unified School District (SMUSD), which ranks as one of the state’s top 10 school systems. Her then-husband taught for SMUSD, qualifying their eldest daughter for an interdistrict transfer to the suburb where the median household income is $174,253 and more than 85 percent of students are proficient in reading and math.

Edmonds wasn’t interested. “At the time, I was like, ‘That’s not my school. That’s not my community. I have a school two blocks away. Why wouldn’t I go there?’”

The decision appalled many of her fellow parents. “People thought I was nuts,” she said. “Luckily, I have a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech, so they knew I wasn’t stupid, but they definitely thought I was crazy.”

The mom of three from Rhode Island didn’t fear that her children wouldn’t get a good education in Pasadena’s public schools because she excelled in the public education system in her state while growing up in a household of few resources, raised by parents with limited formal education. “I thought I was rich because everybody around me was on public aid,” she said. When she attended a competitive public high school, she learned just how economically disadvantaged her family was. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I’m poor.’”

She now serves on the board of the Pasadena Educational Foundation, a nonprofit focused on developing community partnerships to help the city’s public schools excel. The organization also works with the Pasadena-Foothills Association of Realtors to educate real estate agents about the public schools since some realtors had a history of discouraging homebuyers from enrolling their children in PUSD. McDonald, the former superintendent, said that it happened to him when he was buying a home several years ago.

“She advised me to put my kids in every other school and district except for PUSD,” he said. “But I’m happy to say that through the efforts of the district and the Pasadena Educational Foundation, primarily utilizing the realtor initiative, we were able to change a few minds.”

Edmonds agrees that educating realtors is an important step. Her perspective on public schools and the surrounding communities, she added, also comes from the fact that her ex-husband taught in Pasadena before San Marino. Was he suddenly a better teacher because he moved from a less affluent school district to a more affluent one? She didn’t think so. She also didn’t compare the two district’s test scores because their populations are different. Pasadena Unified has significantly more low-income students, foster youth, English language learners and Black and Brown students than San Marino Unified, which is predominantly White and Asian American.

“To me, that’s part of the enrichment of getting to be with and learn from a broader part of our community,” she said, adding that children don’t suffer because they attend school in diverse environments.

The idea of seeking out or avoiding schools based on demographics concerns her.

“I feel like our democracy depends on an educated population,” she said. “I think every child should have access to excellent education and have an opportunity for success because I know the opportunities that I had given to me through the public school system.”

Related: Proof Points: 5 takeaways about segregation 70 years after the Brown decision.

The year after McDonald became the PUSD superintendent in 2014, he wrote a column in the local paper describing the difficulties the district was experiencing because of the high percentage of parents sending their children to private school. He estimated that the district was losing out on about $14 million because of declining enrollment, money that could help PUSD prevent school closures, teacher layoffs and cuts to student services.

But he also touted the district’s variety of programs for students such as dual language immersion schools and International Baccalaureate, as well as the piloting of a dual enrollment program with the local community college. Since then, the district has expanded its initiatives and created new ones. In addition to Spanish and Mandarin, the district’s dual language immersion tracks now include French and Armenian. From 2013 to 2022, PUSD also received three federal magnet assistance program grants that allow it to bring more academic rigor to its schools.

“We lose enrollment because people have a negative perception of our schools, so I think the idea of a magnet theme, whether it’s arts or early college, or a dual-language program, can really get people excited about something that their students are really interested in or maybe a value that their family has, let’s say, around the arts,” said Shannon Mumolo, PUSD’s director of

magnet schools, enrollment, and community engagement. Schools with themed magnet programs, she added, can sway families who weren’t interested in PUSD to consider at least going on a school tour.

Enrollment at PUSD’s John Muir High School has increased since it became an Early College Magnet in 2019, Mumolo said. Across the board, enrollment of students from underrepresented groups — white and Asian American — have gone up since the school district expanded its academic programs over the past decade.

“But I also want to make sure to emphasize that the schools have maintained their enrollment of their Black and Latino students,” Mumolo said. “We want to make sure that we’re keeping our neighborhood students and maintaining enrollment for those groups.”

The former superintendent also touts PUSD’s Math Academy, which The Washington Post in 2021 lauded as “the nation’s most accelerated math program.” The course allows gifted middle school students to take classes, such as Advanced Placement Calculus BC, that are so rigorous that only a small percentage of high school seniors take them.

Kenne, the school board president, said that her children, now both in their 20s, were gifted math students. The Math Academy was not available when they were in grade school. She and her husband switched them out of PUSD in high school, in part, because at the time they had more opportunities to excel in math in private school, she said, acknowledging that it was a controversial choice for a parent who advocates for public education. 

“People do have reasons,” Kenne said of some parents who choose private school. But she also said that private school overall wasn’t especially rigorous for her children. “My son calculated that he didn’t need to do homework for some classes to get a decent grade,” she said.

By introducing a wide variety of academic programs, including in math, PUSD has challenged the gap between what outsiders perceive it to be and what the district actually is, according to McDonald. “I think if we had not implemented those programs, the declining enrollment would have been much more acute,” he said.

Kahlenberg, the researcher, agrees. He said data suggests that when middle-class families get the right incentives to go to a public school, even one that’s outside their neighborhood, they do.

Since the busing integration program did not succeed in the district, Kahlenberg, in his studies of the school district, recommended that PUSD take creative approaches to lure in middle-income families. That includes introducing unique academic programs as well as developing or deepening partnerships with institutions in or around Pasadena — Caltech, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pasadena Playhouse, Art College Center of Design, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library.   

But the focus on winning parents back has led to some tension, Kenne said.

“Sometimes a message that we’ve heard in the last 10, 20 years is, do we care more about marketing to the people who don’t come to our district, or working hard for the people who are already here?” Kenne said. “Because sometimes the public-facing message seems to be all about getting kids back, and it makes the people in the system go, ‘Am I not important to you? I’m already here.’”

Nationwide, Black students who attended school in the late 1960s were more likely to be in integrated classrooms than Black youth today. Supreme Court decisions, such as 1991’sBoard of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowelland 2007’s Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, have contributed to the resegregation of the nation’s schools by phasing out court-ordered busing and making it harder to racially balance schools, according to experts.

Kahlenberg said schools nonetheless have a duty to continue trying to integrate — if not by race, then by class.

“The children of engineers and doctors bring resources to a school, but so do the children of recent immigrants or children whose parents have struggled,” Kahlenberg said. “The more affluent kids benefit as well from an integrated environment. When people have different life experiences they can bring to the discussion novel ideas and new ways of thinking, and that nicely integrated environment is possible in a place like Pasadena.”

Hirahara, for one, still cherishes her childhood in the school district, back when she befriended the girls in the C.L.A.N. As schools across the nation have largely re-segregated, she fears that too few young people get to experience what she did.

“I’m so glad that I had that kind of upbringing,” she said, “and I think it prepared me better for life.”

The post 70 years later, schools — and moms — are still fighting segregation appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Students gather once a month at my high school for what we call “equity lunch chats” with teachers and administrators. The students ask about many topics, including tardy policies, access to athletics and clubs, and even treatment by deans and security. Their questions give the adults like me in the room a glimpse into their world. But no matter how the conversation starts, the students — nearly half of whom are Black, Asian, Hispanic or multiracial — often come back to complaints about the lack of diversity in our school’s textbooks and educational materials.

They want to see themselves and their cultures reflected in the books we read, and they don’t want token representation. They want more diverse classroom experiences.

“I appreciate that my teachers try to offer different narratives,” a student said at one of our sessions discussing teaching materials featuring history and stories from all continents, “but they always seem to be about hardship or having to overcome an obstacle. We are never just the average main character.” Another student pointed out that he already knows about the “famous people of color, but never hears about the everyday lives of them.”

As a Colorado secondary school history teacher and former English teacher, I believe, and research shows, that student achievement improves when learners are personally engaged. Higher engagement correlates with higher productivity, work quality and satisfaction — and even improved attendance rates.

Students tell us this every day in ways big and small. I see them clamor for Zheng He, Simon Bolivar, Cesar Chavez, Mary Wollstonecraft and Haile Selassie when they choose research topics. In her research paper this year, a student named Briana who picked Cesar Chavez wrote that she had never been given so many choices before, and that “the choices have never included topics that make me feel like I am learning about my own heritage at the same time. I am so proud to be Hispanic and loved researching a personal hero of mine.”

I also see my students’ hands go up when we study world religions, and they can share a story from home. They nod along as we cover topics that connect to stories their grandparents shared with them, like tales of migration and cultural celebrations.

Related: Teaching social studies in a polarized world

It’s time we listened to our students and strengthened our curriculums to teach a balanced history that honors all cultures and narratives. Here are a few ways we can do this:

Improve instructional materials. Our long-standing curricula highlight a Eurocentric global history and white-centric American history, with only small cameos by the people who were enslaved, harmed and marginalized. Gathering a team of students and educators to advise on an inclusive curriculum would give students a voice in the process and create a starting place for teachers like me as we build our own classroom lesson plans.

Provide all students opportunities to advocate for inclusive sources. When students have voice and choice in their learning, they are more inclined to participate and succeed. Teachers can learn from those choices and adapt long-term lesson-planning to respond to the various needs and interests of all their students. High schools can build student-led spaces like those in our equity lunch chats, where students suggest texts and topics, and history classes like mine can support the mission of making our curriculum more inclusive.

Provide educators with the time and training to be culturally responsive teachers. As schools across the country welcome more diverse student populations (including 2,800 migrant children newly enrolled in Denver schools in January), the need for teachers to be culturally responsive is ever more pressing. States should offer teachers stipends and extra time to diversify their historical knowledge and then build lessons and materials to reflect it. Districts should also consider bringing in students and experts in equity studies as sounding boards and editors for these new curriculums.

Related: STUDENT VOICE: There’s something missing from my Advanced Placement classes, and that needs to change

In the meantime, I look forward to our lunch chats and to learning from our students about how we can listen better and make real gains toward their goal of a more equitable education. We must continue to be advocates for an inclusive learning experience that allows for honesty, connection and relevance for all our learners.

Emily Muellenberg is a social studies teacher at Grandview High School in Aurora, Colorado. She is a 2023-24 Teach Plus Colorado Policy Fellow.

This story about creating more diverse classroom experiences 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 TEACHER VOICE: Students deserve classroom experiences that reflect their history appeared first on The Hechinger Report.