Dual enrollment is exploding. During the 2022-23 school year, nearly 2.5 million high school students took college classes, simultaneously earning high school and college credits. That’s up from 1.5 million students in the fall of 2021 and roughly 300,000 students in the early 2000s. Figures released last week show that dual enrollment grew another 7 percent in the fall of 2024 from a year earlier, even as the number of traditional college freshmen fell. 

Exactly how much all of this is costing the nation isn’t known. But the state of Texas, which accounts for 10 percent of high schoolers who are taking these college classes, was investing $120 million annually as recently as 2017, according to one estimate. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to extrapolate that over $1 billion a year in public funds is being spent on dual enrollment across the nation. 

Alongside this meteoric rise of students and resources, researchers are trying to understand who is taking advantage of these early college classes, whether they’re expanding the pool of college-educated Americans, and if these extra credits help students earn college degrees faster and save money.

A new analysis released in October 2024 by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracked what happened to every high school student who started taking dual enrollment classes in 2015. Of these 400,000 high schoolers, more than 80 percent enrolled in college straight after high school. That compares favorably with the general population, of whom only 70 percent of high school graduates went straight to college. Almost 30 percent of the 400,000 dual enrollees, roughly 117,000 students, earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. But a majority (58 percent) had not earned any college degree, either a four-year bachelor’s or a two-year associate, or any post-secondary credential, such as a short-term certificate, within this four-year period. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

This is the most detailed and extensive analysis of dual enrollment that I’ve seen, covering all students in the nation, and tracking them for years after high school. But the analysis does not answer the fundamental question of whether dual enrollment  is a worthwhile public policy. 

It’s not clear that  an early taste of higher education encourages  more students to go to college who wouldn’t have otherwise. And it’s hard to tell from this report if the credits are helping students get through college any faster. 

The fact that students with dual enrollment credits are faring better than students without dual enrollment credits isn’t terribly persuasive. In order to qualify for the classes, students usually need to have done well on a test, earned high grades or be on an advanced or honors track in school. These high-achieving students would likely have graduated from college in much higher numbers without any dual enrollment courses.

“Are we subsidizing students who were always going to go to college anyway?” asked Kristen Hengtgen, a policy analyst at EdTrust, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization that lobbies for racial and economic equity in education. “Could we have spent the time and energy and effort differently on higher quality teachers or something else? I think that’s a really important question.”

Related: High schoolers account for nearly 1 out of every 5 community college students

Hengtgen was not involved in this latest analysis, but she is concerned about the severe underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students that the report highlights. A data dashboard accompanying the new report documents that only 9 percent of the high schoolers in dual enrollment classes were Black, while Black students made up 16 percent of high school students. Only 17 percent of dual enrollment students were Hispanic at a time when Hispanic students made up almost a quarter of the high school population. White students, by contrast, took 65 percent of the dual enrollment seats but represented only half of the high school population. Asian students were the only group whose participation in dual enrollment matched their share of the student population: 5 percent of each. 

Advocates of dual enrollment have made the argument that an early taste of college can motivate students to go to college, and the fact that so few Black and Hispanic students are enrolling is perhaps is the most troubling sign that the giant public-and-private investment in education isn’t fulfilling one of its main objectives: to expand the college-educated workforce.

Hengtgen of EdTrust argues that Black, Hispanic and low-income students of all races need better high school advising to help them sign up for the classes. Sometimes, she said, students don’t know they have to take a prerequisite class in 10th grade in order to be eligible for a dual enrollment class in 11th grade, and by the time they find out, it’s too late. Cost is another barrier. Depending upon the state and county, a family may have to pay fees to take the classes. Though these fees are generally much cheaper than what college students pay per course, low-income families may still not be able to afford them. 

Tatiana Velasco, an economist at CCRC and lead author of the October 2024 dual enrollment report, makes the argument that dual enrollment may be most beneficial to Black and Hispanic students and low-income students of all races and ethnicities. In her data analysis, she noted that dual enrollment credits were only providing a modest boost to students overall, but very large boosts to some demographic groups. 

Among all high school students who enrolled in college straight after high school, 36 percent of those with dual enrollment credits earned a bachelor’s degree within four years compared with 34 percent without any dual enrollment credits. Arguably, dual enrollment credits are not making a huge difference in time to completion, on average.

However, Velasco found much larger benefits from dual enrollment when she sliced the data by race and income. Among only Black students who enrolled in college straight away, 29 percent of those who had earned dual enrollment credits completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, compared to only 18 percent of those without dual enrollment credits. That’s more than a 50 percent increase in college attainment. “The difference is massive,” said Velasco.

Among Hispanic students who went straight to college, 25 percent of those with dual enrollment credits earned a bachelor’s degree within four years. Only 19 percent of Hispanic college students without dual enrollment credits did. Dual enrollment also seemed particularly helpful for college students from low-income neighborhoods; 28 percent of them earned a bachelor’s degree within four years compared with only 20 percent without dual enrollment. 

Again, it’s still unclear if dual enrollment is driving these differences. It could be that Black students who opt to take dual enrollment classes were already more motivated and higher achieving and still would have graduated from college in much higher numbers. (Notably, Black students with dual enrollment credits were more likely to attend selective four-year institutions.) 

There is a wide variation across the nation in how dual enrollment operates in high schools. In most cases, high schoolers never step foot on a college campus. Often the class is taught in a high school classroom by a high school teacher. Sometimes community colleges supply the instructors. English composition and college algebra are popular offerings. The courses are generally designed and the credits awarded by a local community college, though 30 percent of dual enrollment credits are awarded by four-year institutions. 

A few other takeaways from the CCRC and National Student Clearinghouse report:

• States with very high rates of college completion from their dual enrollment programs, such as Delaware, Georgia, Mississippi and New Jersey, tend to serve fewer Black, Hispanic and low-income students. Florida stood out as an exception. CCRC’s Velasco noted it had both strong college completion rates while serving a somewhat higher proportion of Hispanic students.
• In Iowa, Texas and Washington, half of all dual enrollment students ended up going to the college that awarded their dual enrollment credits. 
• In Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Wisconsin, dual enrollment students have become a huge source of future students for community colleges. (A separate cost study shows that some community colleges are providing dual enrollment courses to a nearby high school at a loss, but if these students subsequently matriculate, their future tuition dollars can offset those losses.)

And that perhaps is the most worrisome unintended consequence of the explosion of dual enrollment credits. Many bright high school students are racking up credits from three, four or even five college classes and they’re feeling pressure to take advantage of these credits by enrolling in the community college that partners with their high school. That might seem like a sensible decision. It’s iffy whether these dual enrollment credits can be transferred to another school, or, more importantly, count toward a student’s requirements in a major, which is what really matters and holds students back from graduating on time. 

But a lot of these students could get into their state flagship or even a highly selective private college on scholarship. And they’d be better off. Dual enrollment students who started at a community college, the report found, were much less likely than those who enrolled at a four-year institution to complete a bachelor’s degree four years after high school.

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

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

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Data is now everywhere in our lives, informing our decisions about which new show to watch, what path to take or whether to grab an umbrella. But it’s practically absent from the way our kids learn.

Our approach to teaching data science and data literacy has hardly evolved since I started my teaching career in 1995. Yet now more than ever, K-12 students need basic modern data science skills.

Nearly 1 in 4 job postings in the United States require data science skills. These aren’t just tech jobs — they span industries from manufacturing to agriculture to transportation. The ability to capture, sort and analyze data is as important for small business owners as it is for computer scientists.

Now is the time to reprioritize curricular emphases to reflect the importance of data science and data literacy. With data talent in high demand globally, other countries are investing billions in data education.

But American K-12 education still underemphasizes data science and data literacy skills — including the ability to understand qualitative and quantitative data, assess claims based on data and make data-driven predictions.

How do we know? Look at the data.

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According to the most recent NAEP results, between 2019 and 2022, student performance in data analysis, statistics and probability fell by a full 10 points for eighth grade students, representing what some experts consider a full grade level in lack of progress.

Data science education is typically reserved for higher education, but only slightly more than a third of Americans have a college degree. The opportunity to learn basic data skills should not be reserved for a select group of students.

Every student needs a chance to practice these vital skills from kindergarten through high school. That’s why I am excited for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to be a part of Data Science 4 Everyone’s national Chart the Course initiative, exploring the integration of data literacy and science across our most important school subjects. It will build upon NCTM’s work to reimagine, revitalize and increase math’s relevance for high schoolers.

As president of NCTM, I’ve had the honor of helping to lead the mathematics education community through a time of profound technological change, which has included developing a position statement on AI.

Additionally, in partnership with the National Science Teaching Association, the Computer Science Teachers Association, the National Council for the Social Studies and the American Statistical Association, we made an unprecedented joint call to build data science as an interdisciplinary subject across K-12 education.

Early in my teaching career, we focused on teaching students how to use a dataset to create a bar graph or scatter plot. Now, students need to know how to formulate the question that will generate the data, how to collect the data and how to interpret the data.

Students are eager to make sense of the world around them, but many don’t see how classroom instruction is related to the problems they will face as adults.

Data — in the form of numbers, graphics and videos — can provide the hook that pulls students into lessons with real-world examples and applications.

While a math teacher might look at a graph and observe that a certain variable decreased, a social studies teacher might say, “Of course there was a decrease, look at what was happening at that moment in history.”

If we want students to think with and use data analysis skills in their everyday lives during and after high school, we need to create relevant data-learning experiences that engage students in using statistics to make sense of the world around them. This will also result in better test scores because students will understand the material and be able to apply what they know.

Related: Do we need a ‘Common Core’ for data science education? 

We are now joining with Data Science 4 Everyone in an even broader effort to create the first-ever national K-12 data learning progression that stretches across school subjects. It will shape how generations of students study data.

Educator voices are vital to this process. We need input from the people who are closest to students and who will be rolling out data science lessons in their classrooms, so we’re asking them to weigh in. We need to engage our educators in order to effect change.

Data Science 4 Everyone’s Chart the Course voting platform is open through October 31, and we are encouraging teachers to vote for the learning outcomes they believe are the most important for K-12 students to learn by the time they graduate from high school.

The selection of the learning outcome options in Chart the Course was informed by 11 focus groups made up of students, educators, higher education leaders, policymakers, researchers, curriculum designers and industry professionals.

The collaborative approach was designed to create a framework that meets the needs of students and reflects the cross-disciplinary potential of data science. We hope to equip students with the skills they need to understand data and think critically and carefully as they interact with AI tools and draw their own conclusions about the world around them.

Engaging with data is a way to make education relevant for all our students and bring our many subjects together in unique ways. It’s time to chart a course that connects classroom learning to the lives of students. That should be our goal for all teachers.

Kevin Dykema is president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), an international mathematics education organization with more than 30,000 members. He has taught eighth grade mathematics for over 25 years in southwest Michigan.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: OPINION: A better democracy starts in our schools

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

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

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

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

Related: Teaching action civics engages kids and ignites controversy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The free community college movement effectively began in 2014 when Republican Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee signed the Tennessee Promise Scholarship Act, which offered the state’s high school graduates free tuition to attend any two-year public community college or technical college in Tennessee.

Communities around the country had been experimenting with free college programs since 2005, usually with private funding, but Tennessee was the first to make it a statewide policy, and it inspired 36 states to follow suit. This year, Massachusetts was the most recent to make community college free. (Here is a search tool for all the free college programs, including more than 400 local ones.) 

But as free-tuition programs have multiplied, so have questions and doubts. Are low-income students benefiting? Is free tuition leading to more college graduates? 

Unfortunately we have to wait years to allow students time to get through college, but answers to these important questions are starting to emerge from Tennessee. College Promise, a nonprofit that advocates for making college free, along with tnAchieves, the nonprofit that helps administer the Tennessee program, released a 10-year anniversary report on Oct. 14. The report offers encouraging signs that the Tennessee Promise scholarship program, which now costs about $29 million a year in tuition subsidies and other services, has helped more students go to college and earn two-year associate degrees. In addition, Tennessee shared some of the lessons learned. 

First the numbers. The report highlights that more than 90 percent of all Tennessee high school seniors apply for the free college program. All students regardless of family income are eligible, and roughly 15,000 students a year ultimately use the program to enroll in college right after high school.  About half come from low-income families who qualify for the Federal Pell Grant. 

Thirty-seven percent of students who initially enrolled in college with the Promise scholarship program earned a two-year associate degree within three years, compared with only 11 percent of students who applied for the scholarship but never met its requirements, such as financial aid paperwork and service hours.* Tennessee projects that since its inception, the scholarship program will have produced a total of 50,000 college graduates by 2025, administrators told me in an interview.

Before the free tuition program went statewide, only 16 percent of Tennessee students who started community college in 2011 had earned an associate degree three years later. Graduation rates then rose to 22 percent for students who started community college in 2014. At this time, 27 Tennessee counties had launched their own free tuition programs, but the statewide policy had not yet gone into effect. 

By 2020, when free tuition statewide had been in effect for five years, 28 percent of Tennessee’s community college students had earned a degree in three years. Not all of these students participated in the free tuition program, but many did. 

It’s unclear if the free tuition program is the driving force behind the rising graduation rates. It could be that motivated students sign up for it and abide by the rules of the scholarship program and might have still graduated in higher numbers without it. It could also be that unrelated nationwide reforms, from increases in federal financial aid to academic advising, have helped more students make it to the finish line.

I talked with Celeste Carruthers, an economist at University of Tennessee Knoxville, who has been studying the free tuition program in her state. She is currently crunching the numbers to figure out whether the program is causing graduation rates to climb, but the signs she sees right now are giving her “cause for optimism.” Using U.S. Census data, she compared Tennessee’s college attainment rates with the rest of the United States. In the years immediately following the statewide scholarship program, beginning with the high school class of 2015, there is a striking jump in the share of young adults with associate degrees a few years later, while associate degree attainment elsewhere in the nation improved only mildly. Tennessee quickly went from being a laggard in young adult college attainment to a leader – at least until the pandemic hit. (See graph.)

While evaluation of the Tennessee program continues, researchers and program officers point to three lessons learned so far: 

• The scholarship program hasn’t helped many low-income students financially. The Federal Pell Grant of $7,395 far exceeds annual tuition and fees at Tennessee’s community colleges, which hover around $4,500 for a full-time student. Community college was already free for low-income students, who represent roughly half of the students in Tennessee’s free college program. Like other free college programs around the country, Tennessee’s is structured as a “last dollar” program, which means that it only pays out after other forms of financial aid are exhausted. 

That means that tuition subsidies have primarily gone to students from higher income families that don’t qualify for the Pell Grant. In Tennessee, the funding source is the state lottery. Roughly $22 million of lottery proceeds were used to pay for community college tuition in the most recent year.

• Free tuition alone isn’t enough help. In 2018, Tennessee added coaching for low-income students to give them extra support. (Low-income students hadn’t been receiving any tuition subsidies because other financial aid sources already covered their tuition.) Then, in 2022, Tennessee added emergency grants for books and other living expenses for needy students – up to $1,000 per student per semester.* The extra assistance for low-income students is financed through state budget allocations and private fundraising. For students who are the first generation in their families to attend college, current graduation rates have jumped to 34 percent with this extra support compared with 11 percent without it, the 10-year report said. 

“Pairing the financial support with the non-financial support – that mentoring support, the coaching support – is really the sweet spot,” said Graham Thomas, chief community and government relations officer at tnAchieves. “It’s the game changer, and that is often overlooked for the money part.” 

Coaching is best conducted in person on campus. During COVID, Tennessee launched an online mentoring platform, but students didn’t engage with it. “We learned our lesson that in-person is the most valuable way to go when building relationships,” said Ben Sterling, chief content officer at tnAchieves.

• The worst case scenario didn’t happen. When free community college was first announced, critics fretted that the zero price tag would lure students away from four-year colleges, which aren’t free. That’s bad because the transfer process from community college back to a four-year school can be rocky with students losing credits and the time invested. Studies have shown that most students are more likely to complete a four-year degree if they start at a four-year institution. But the number of bachelor’s degrees did not fall. It seems possible that the free tuition policy lured students who wouldn’t have gone to college at all in the past, without cannibalizing four-year colleges. However, bachelor’s degree acquisition in Tennessee, though rising, remains far below the rest of the nation. (See graph.)

As an aside, students are also able to use their Tennessee Promise scholarship funds at a limited number of public four-year colleges that offer associate degrees. About 10 percent of the program’s students take advantage of this option.

Despite all the positive signs for educational attainment in Tennessee, recent years have not been kind. “Everything that’s happened to enrollment since COVID  kind of erased all of the gains from Tennessee Promise,” said the University of Tennessee’s Carruthers. The combination of pandemic disruptions, a strong job market and changing public sentiment about higher education hammered enrollment at community colleges nationwide. Students have started returning again in Tennessee, but community college enrollment is still below what it was in 2019.  

* Correction and clarifications: Because of incorrect information supplied to The Hechinger Report, an earlier version of this story mischaracterized the two groups of students that succeeded in earning a college degree within three years. This story was also modified to clarify that only coaching was introduced in 2018. A separate mentoring service already existed. In addition, the $1,000 emergency grants, which began in 2022, are not one-time grants but can be issued multiple times.

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

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

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If your last name starts with an A, that could mean that you’re also more likely to score an A on a test. But if you’re a Wilson or a Ziegler, you may be suffering from a new slight of the modern age: lower college grades.

Grading processes have profoundly changed at colleges and universities in the past decade. Instead of placing assignments on a table in the front of the classroom, students today upload their work to a website, called a Learning Management System or LMS, where course documents, assignments and communications are all housed. Students can even take their exams directly within the LMS. 

Course instructors mark assignments, papers and exams within the LMS, which also functions as a computerized grade book. The default setting is to sort student submissions in alphabetical order by surname. The computer system automatically guides the instructor to grade Adams before Baker all the way down to Zimmerman.

A trio of researchers at the University of Michigan, including one whose surname begins with W, documented an unintended consequence of grading in alphabetical order. “There is such a tendency of graders to give lower grades as they grade more,” said Helen Wang, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Michigan’s business school.

Wang and her two co-authors analyzed over 30 million grades at a large university that uses the most popular LMS, which is called Canvas. They calculated that surnames starting with U to Z were docked a little more than half a point (0.6 points) on a 100-point scale compared with A-to-E surnames. That’s a rather small penalty. But cumulatively, these small dings can add up and eventually translate into the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus on a final grade. 

The study is described in a 2024 draft paper posted on the website of SSRN, formerly known as the Social Science Research Network. It is currently undergoing revisions with the academic journal Management Science.

The researchers detected grading bias against the end of the alphabet in a wide range of subjects. However, the grading penalty was more pronounced in the social sciences and the humanities compared to engineering, science and medicine. 

In addition to lower grades, the researchers also found that students at the bottom of the alphabet received more negative and impolite comments. For example, “why no answers to Q 2 and 3? You are setting yourself up for a failing grade,” and “NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.” Top-of-the-alphabet students were more likely to receive, “Much better work on this draft, [Student First Name]! Thank you!” 

The researchers cannot prove precisely why extra points are deducted for the Wilsons of the world, but they suspect it’s because instructors – mostly graduate students at the unnamed university in this study – have heavy grading loads and they get tired and cranky, especially after grading the 50th student in a row. Even before the era of electronic grading, it’s quite likely the instructors were not as fair to students at the bottom of the paper pile. But in the paper world, a student’s position in the stack was always changing, depending on when the papers were turned in and how the instructors picked them up. No student was likely to be in the bottom of the pile every time. In the LMS world, the U’s, V’s, W’s, X’s, Y’s and Z’s almost always are.

Another theory mentioned by the authors in the paper is that instructors may feel the need to be stricter if they’ve already given out a string of A’s, so as not to be too generous with high marks. Students at the bottom of the alphabet may be the victims of a well-intentioned effort to restrain grade inflation. It’s also possible that instructors are too generous with students at the top of the alphabet, but grade more accurately as they proceed. Either way, students at the bottom are being graded differently. 

Some college instructors seem to be aware of their human frailty. In 2018, one posted on a message board at Canvas, asking the company to randomize the grade book. “For me, bias starts to creep in with fatigue,” the instructor wrote. “I grade a few, go away from it, grade a few more, take a break. Or that’s the goal when I’m not up against a deadline.” 

If you’ve read this far, perhaps you are wondering how the researchers know that the grades for the U-to-Z students were unfair. Maybe they’re comparatively worse students? But the researchers matched the grades in Canvas with the student records in the registrar’s office and they were able to control for a host of student characteristics, from high school grades and college GPA to race, ethnicity, gender, family background and income. End-of-the alphabet surnames consistently received lower marks even among similar students who were graded by the same instructor.

The researchers also found that a tiny fraction of instructors tinkered with the default settings and graded in reverse alphabetical order, from Z to A. That led to the exact opposite results; students with end-of-the alphabet names earned higher grades, while the grades for A, B and C surnames were lower.

The bias against end-of-alphabet surnames is probably not unique to students who use the Canvas LMS. All four major LMS companies, which collectively control 90 percent of the U.S. and Canadian market with more than 48 million students, order submissions alphabetically for grading, according to the researchers. Even Coursera, a separate online learning platform, does it this way.   

Wang’s solution is to shake things up and have the LMS present student work for grading in random order. Indeed, Canvas added a randomize option for instructors in May 2024, after the company saw a draft of this University of Michigan study.  “It was something that we had on our radar and that we’d heard from some users, but had not completed it yet,” a company spokesman said. “The report from the University of Michigan definitely pushed that work to top priority.” 

However, the default remains alphabetical order and instructors need to navigate to the settings to change it. (Changing this default setting, according to the study authors, has “low visibility” within system settings on the site.) I hope this story helps to get the word out. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are our top four takeaways from these three states:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about low-income student success was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fifteen years ago, the Obama administration and philanthropic foundations encouraged more Americans to get a college degree. Remedial classes were a big barrier. Two-thirds of community college students and 40 percent of four-year college students weren’t academically prepared for college-level work and were forced to take prerequisite “developmental” courses that didn’t earn them college credits. Many of these college students never progressed to college-level courses. They racked up student loan debts and dropped out. Press reports, including my own, called it a “remedial ed trap.”

One controversial but popular solution was to eliminate these prerequisite classes and let weaker students proceed straight to college-level courses, called “corequisite courses,” because they include some remedial support at the same time. In recent years, more than 20 states, from California to Florida, have either replaced remedial classes at their public colleges with corequisites or given students a choice between the two. 

In 2015, Tennessee’s public colleges were some of the first higher education institutions to eliminate stand-alone remedial courses. A 10-year analysis of how almost 100,000 students fared before and after the new policy was conducted by researchers at the University of Delaware, and their draft paper was made public earlier this year. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and may still be revised, but it is the first longer term study to look at college degree completion for tens of thousands of students who have taken corequisites, and it found that the new supports haven’t worked as well as many hoped, especially for lower achieving students .

First the good news. Like earlier research, this study of Tennessee’s two-year community colleges found that after the elimination of remedial classes, students passed more college courses, both introductory courses in English and math, and also more advanced courses in those subjects.

However, the extra credit accumulation effect quickly faded. Researchers tracked each student for three years, and by the end of their third year, students had racked up about the same number of total credits as earlier students had under the old remedial education regime. The proportion of students earning either two-year associate degrees or four-year bachelor’s degrees did not increase after the corequisite reform. Lower achieving college students, defined as those with very low ACT exam scores in high school, were more likely to drop out of college and less likely to earn a short-term certificate degree after the switch to corequisites.

“The evidence is showing that these reforms are not increasing graduation rates,” said Alex Goudas, a higher education researcher and a community college professor at Delta College in Michigan, who was not involved in this study. “Some students are benefiting a little bit – only temporarily – and other students are harmed permanently.”

It seems like a paradox. Students are initially passing more courses, but are also more likely to drop out and less likely to earn credentials. Florence Xiaotao Ran, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware and the lead researcher on the Tennessee study, explained to me that the dropouts appear to be different types of students than the ones earning more credits. Students with somewhat higher ACT test scores in high school, who were close to the old remedial ed cutoff of 19 points (out of 36) and scoring near the 50th percentile nationally, were more likely to succeed in passing the new corequisite courses straight away. Some students who were far below this threshold also passed the corequisite courses, but many more failed. Students below the 10th percentile (13 and below on the ACT) dropped out in greater numbers and were less likely to earn a short-term certificate. 

Data from other states shows a similar pattern. In California, which largely eliminated remedial education in 2019, failure rates in introductory college-level math courses soared, even as more students also succeeded in passing these courses, according to a study of an Hispanic-serving two-year college in southern California. 

Ran’s Tennessee analysis has two important implications. The new corequisite courses – as they currently operate – aren’t working well for the lowest achieving students. And the change isn’t even helping students who are now able to earn more college credits during the first year or two of college. They’re still struggling to graduate and are not earning a college degree any faster.

Some critics of corequisite reforms, such as Delta College’s Goudas, argue that some form of remedial education needs to be reintroduced for students who lack basic math, reading and writing skills. 

Meanwhile, supporters of the reforms believe that corequisite courses need to be improved. Thomas Brock, director of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University, described the higher dropout rates and falling number of credentials in the Tennessee study as “troubling.” But he says that the old remedial ed system failed too many students. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

“The answer is not to go back,” said Brock, “but to double down on corequisites and offer students more support,” acknowledging that some students need more time to build the skills they lack. Brock believes this skill-building can happen simultaneously as students earn college credits and not as a preliminary stepping stone. “No student comes to college to take remedial courses,” he added.

One confounding issue is that corequisite classes come in so many different forms. In some cases, students get a double dose of math or English with three credit hours of a remedial class taken concurrently with three credit hours of a college-level course. A more common approach is to tack on an extra hour or so to the college class. In her analysis, Ran discovered that instructional time was cut in half for the weakest students, who received many more hours of math or writing instruction under the old remedial system.

“In the new scenario, everyone gets the same amount of instruction or developmental material, regardless if you are just one point below the cutoff or 10 points below the cutoff,” said Ran.

There are also big differences in what takes place during the extra support time that’s built into a corequisite course. Some colleges offer tutoring centers to help students fill in their knowledge gaps. Others schedule computer lab time where students practice math problems on educational software. Another option is extended class time, where the main professor teaches the same material that’s in the college level course only more slowly, spread across four hours a week instead of the usual three.  

Overcoming weak foundational skills is not the only obstacle that community college students face. The researchers I interviewed emphasized that these students are struggling to juggle work and family responsibilities along with their classes, and they need more support – academic advising, career counseling and sometimes therapy and financial help.  Without additional support, students get derailed.  This may explain why the benefits of early credit accumulation fade out and are not yet translating into higher graduation rates. 

Even before the pandemic, the vast majority of community college students arrived on campus without a strong enough foundation for regular college-credit bearing classes and were steered to either remedial or new corequisite classes. High school achievement levels have deteriorated further since 2020, when the data in Ran’s study ended. “It’s not their fault,” said Ran. “It’s the K-12 system that failed them.”

That’s why it’s more important now than ever to figure out how to help under-prepared college students if we want to improve post-secondary education. 

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

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

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We are still in the early days of understanding the promise and peril of using generative AI in education. Very few researchers have evaluated whether students are benefiting, and one well-designed study showed that using ChatGPT for math actually harmed student achievement. 

The first scientific proof I’ve seen that ChatGPT can actually help students learn more was posted online earlier this year. It’s a small experiment, involving fewer than 200 undergraduates.  All were Harvard students taking an introductory physics class in the fall of 2023, so the findings may not be widely applicable. But students learned more than twice as much in less time when they used an AI tutor in their dorm compared with attending their usual physics class in person. Students also reported that they felt more engaged and motivated. They learned more and they liked it. 

A paper about the experiment has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but other physicists at Harvard University praised it as a well-designed experiment. Students were randomly assigned to learn a topic as usual in class, or stay “home” in their dorm and learn it through an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT. Students took brief tests at the beginning and the end of class, or their AI sessions, to measure how much they learned. The following week, the in-class students learned the next topic through the AI tutor in their dorms, and the AI-tutored students went back to class. Each student learned both ways, and for both lessons – one on surface tension and one on fluid flow –  the AI-tutored students learned a lot more. 

To avoid AI “hallucinations,” the tendency of chatbots to make up stuff that isn’t true, the AI tutor was given all the correct solutions. But other developers of AI tutors have also supplied their bots with answer keys. Gregory Kestin, a physics lecturer at Harvard and developer of the AI tutor used in this study, argues that his effort succeeded while others have failed because he and his colleagues fine-tuned it with pedagogical best practices. For example, the Harvard scientists instructed this AI tutor to be brief, using no more than a few sentences, to avoid cognitive overload. Otherwise, he explained, ChatGPT has a tendency to be “long-winded.”

The tutor, which Kestin calls “PS2 Pal,” after the Physical Sciences 2 class he teaches, was told to only give away one step at a time and not to divulge the full solution in a single message. PS2 Pal was also instructed to encourage students to think and give it a try themselves before revealing the answer. 

Unguided use of ChatGPT, the Harvard scientists argue, lets students complete assignments without engaging in critical thinking. 

Kestin doesn’t deliver traditional lectures. Like many physicists at Harvard, he teaches through a method called “active learning,” where students first work with peers on in-class problem sets as the lecturer gives feedback. Direct explanations or mini-lectures come after a bit of trial, error and struggle. Kestin sought to reproduce aspects of this teaching style with the AI tutor. Students toiled on the same set of activities and Kestin fed the AI tutor the same feedback notes that he planned to deliver in class.

Kestin provocatively titled his paper about the experiment, “AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning,” but in an interview he told me that he doesn’t mean to suggest that AI should replace professors or traditional in-person classes. 

“I don’t think that this is an argument for replacing any human interaction,” said Kestin. “This allows for the human interaction to be much richer.”

Kestin says he intends to continue teaching through in-person classes, and he remains convinced that students learn a lot from each other by discussing how to solve problems in groups. He believes the best use of this AI tutor would be to introduce a new topic ahead of class – much like professors assign reading in advance. That way students with less background knowledge won’t be as behind and can participate more fully in class activities. Kestin hopes his AI tutor will allow him to spend less time on vocabulary and basics and devote more time to creative activities and advanced problems during class.

Of course, the benefits of an AI tutor depend on students actually using it. In other efforts, students often didn’t want to use earlier versions of education technology and computerized tutors. In this experiment, the “at-home” sessions with PS2 Pal were scheduled and proctored over Zoom. It’s not clear that even highly motivated Harvard students will find it engaging enough to use regularly on their own initiative. Cute emojis – another element that the Harvard scientists prompted their AI tutor to use – may not be enough to sustain long-term interest. 

Kestin’s next step is to test the tutor bot for an entire semester. He’s also been testing PS2 Pal as a study assistant with homework. Kestin said he’s seeing promising signs that it’s helpful for basic but not advanced problems. 

The irony is that AI tutors may not be that effective at what we generally think of as tutoring. Kestin doesn’t think that current AI technology is good at anything that requires knowing a lot about a person, such as what the student already learned in class or what kind of explanatory metaphor might work.

“Humans have a lot of context that you can use along with your judgment in order to guide a student better than an AI can,” he said. In contrast, AI is good at introducing students to new material because you only need “limited context” about someone and “minimal judgment” for how best to teach it. 

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

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

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In the United States today, 9 out of 10 school superintendents are white and two-thirds are white men. When you think of a typical superintendent, the person you imagine probably doesn’t look like me. 

As a Latina, my leadership isn’t often expected, nor is it always welcome. 

Institutional biases block career advancement for educators of color, who constitute only 1 in 5 U.S. teachers and principals. We are promoted less often and experience higher turnover than our white colleagues. 

This is a serious problem: The caliber and stability of our educator workforce affects our education system’s quality and capacity for improvement. We must address these barriers: Educators of color enhance student learning and are key to closing educational gaps. 

Much has been written about why we need to break down barriers in order to diversify the educator workforce. Much less covered has been the formidable task of how to launch and sustain transformative solutions. I urge fellow superintendents from all racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds to act now.

That’s what we are doing inWaukegan public schools in Illinois, which serve a diverse population of about 14,000 students from preschool through high school, near Lake Michigan, about 10 miles south of the Wisconsin border. I am using my leadership position to take strong, unapologetic action so that every student can graduate from high school prepared and supported to pursue their dreams. 

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Since taking on the superintendent role, I’ve found that when it comes to the young men in our district, we’ve got serious work to do. 

After analyzing a wide range of data and engaging in deep reflection last year, we realized that our Black male students often lack the necessary resources and support to reach their full potential. This aligns with national trends through which these students typically face low expectations, inequitable discipline that fuels the school-to-prison pipeline and a shortage of effective, culturally responsive teaching.

We launched an ambitious, systemwide, data-driven initiative aimed at creating equitable opportunities to help our Black male students and educators. I believe our efforts can provide an example for any school system dedicated to closing opportunity and achievement gaps for all students. 

Research confirms the intertwined success of Black students and educators. Studies show that low-income Black male students are 39 percent less likely to drop out of high school if they had at least one Black male teacher in elementary school. Our goal is to convince more Black male educators to build a career in our district because we know that hiring and retaining Black teachers and leaders can measurably improve math scores for Black students.

Related: White men have the edge in the school principal pipeline, researchers say

Some key insights from our work stand out as essential tools for continued success. First is the indispensable role of broad support from executive leadership. My commitment to addressing education inequities is deeply personal. I relate to many of the challenges our Black male educators face and, as a mother to a Black teenage boy, the urgency of this effort pulses through my veins.

Our board of education’s steadfast support has been equally key to launching our initiative, with board members helping drive us toward significant, measurable achievements.

Community engagement and leadership are our foundational principles. I know that the solutions we need won’t come from me alone. This acknowledgment led us to launch a task force that includes Black male students, teachers, principals, students’ fathers and other family members and community partners. 

We’ve also hosted planning sessions involving diverse stakeholders to try to foster buy-in and accountability as we move forward. And we’ve engaged national partners with unparalleled expertise to help us guide professional learning for district officials using an inclusive, equity-focused lens. 

We are also dedicating staff to oversee the work. We created a new position to catalyze our multiyear initiative and are investing in our teachers and leaders while we pursue systemic transformation. In particular, we launched a local leadership chapter for Men of Color in Educational Leadership, where our educators can share experiences, seek guidance and grow professionally within a community of practice.

We rely on a framework that highlights skills vital for the success of education leaders of color and contributes to the broader goal of systemic change in education. I often turn to these resources myself when reflecting on my own leadership as a woman of color. 

Acknowledging the extent of the challenge is just the start to fostering inclusive, equitable education. We have begun the critical process of setting goals so we can transparently track and communicate our progress. We are also trying to see how this focused initiative advances broader efforts to strengthen and diversify our entire educator workforce, including paraprofessionals, teachers and school leaders. 

Other superintendents can do this too. Find your champions, allies, community leaders and partners. The time for brave, visionary leadership is now.

Theresa Plascencia is superintendent of Waukegan Public Schools in Waukegan, Illinois. She sits on the Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents Advisory Policy Committee and on the Men of Color in Educational Leadership National Advisory Council. 

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

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