In my career as an arts educator and school administrator, I have met countless families whose children are excited to embark on a college education focused on filmmaking or acting.

The parents are often less excited than their children, however: They seem both apprehensive and determined to steer their children to more “practical” pursuits. Given the financial realities regularly confronted by the arts and the high cost of postsecondary education, a bit of hesitation may be natural.

Just as there are a number of ways to build a career in filmmaking or acting, there are various ways to pursue learning these crafts. Whether through formal, postsecondary degree attainment or informal, out-of-school time opportunities via summer camps and workshops, the foundational skills students build by studying a creative craft are portable and durable and can set them up for success in whatever field they ultimately pursue.

A performing arts education, in particular, not only enhances one’s ability to learn — building listening skills, developing empathy and perseverance, enhancing focus and creating opportunities to express emotions — it also equips students with practical skills that translate seamlessly to life as we now live it.

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In my view, the performing arts have enormous value in ways we don’t often think of or even expect. Storytelling — the foundation of all these crafts — helps students to organize their thoughts, to understand the elements necessary to keep people engaged in a journey.

How many of us have had to stand up in a classroom or a conference room to hold or persuade an audience? It’s all storytelling. Understanding what makes a story work, how to perform it, how to capture your audience and get them to care about what you are saying are skills that can be taught and learned. These skills matter whether you’re hoping to score an A on a research presentation, perform a soliloquy or secure funding from a venture capitalist.

Mastering these skills gives students the practical abilities necessary to write well and create contemporary media; for the latter, they must develop skills with associated technologies, which include constantly changing gear and software. It puts them in the driver’s seat in an entrepreneurial, creator-driven economy.

Mastering their art also includes developing essential “soft skills,” such as organization, time management, collaboration, empathy, public speaking and persuasion, as well as planning and budgeting, multitasking, self-regulation and the development of cultural awareness, to name a few.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The lesson the arts teach

I’ve witnessed the positive impact of working in these crafts not only for the thousands of students I’ve worked with over my 30 years at the New York Film Academy (NYFA), but also through my own children, who were encouraged at an early age to participate in theater, music and media arts: Auditioning, performing and writing stories were common activities in our home.

Their exposure to these experiences and the resulting skills and self-assurance they gained spilled over to their studies and social acumen. I can say, without hesitation, that they succeeded in traditional academics in part due to the skills learned in their education and pursuits in the arts. Beyond that, my wife and I regularly received feedback about how much more poised and confident our children were than many of their peers.

Students with access to these experiences develop habits and practices that inform their ability to be present and prepared in a wide range of situations.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to find a career that doesn’t, on some level, rely on our ability to leverage a combination of technology, media and performance skills. We hear endless statistics about the need for strong technical skills, the need for a workforce that is literate in STEM — science, technology engineering, and math. Yet as a society, we have historically proven fickle when it comes to prioritizing the arts and supporting arts education.

Adding the arts to STEM, “STEAM” as some refer to it, marries the technical and the creative. There is a clear need and dependency on both. Together they not only engage both sides of the brain, they bring us a fuller experience of the world — to say nothing of the economic opportunities.

I worry that because we have so neglected and undervalued the arts, we have created a generation of anxious, socially disaffected young people struggling to find their place, to connect and make sense of an increasingly complex world. This neglect has set them up with a false belief that the human experience is binary: creative or linear; purposeful or financially lucrative.

The arts compel students to take control, whether directing a crew on set, creating a character or performing a part. Acting, in particular, offers students a safe space to be vulnerable and explore feelings that can overwhelm us in our “real” lives.

Mastering artistic skills can make the difference between success and failure in so many contexts, both personal and professional.

By prioritizing arts education, we empower students to pursue their passions and fulfill their potential. We equip them not only with the tools they need to succeed in any occupation but to make their unique and meaningful mark on the world.

By encouraging our kids to pursue the arts, we may actually achieve those things that so often feel nearly impossible: their happiness and success.

David Klein is the senior executive vice president at the New York Film Academy. He oversees the operations, development and delivery of programs including Acting for Film, Filmmaking, Musical Theatre, Broadcast Journalism and Cinematography.

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Dialogue between a teacher and an administrator as school opens in 2024:

The above dialogue is based on an actual situation, and it is emblematic of the reality that administrators far too often do not listen to the voices of teachers. The result is that many teachers feel alienated and disrespected. More than half say they are thinking about leaving the profession, and 86 percent of public schools reported difficulties hiring new teachers last year.

Yet, most teachers care about their students and want to enable them to succeed. That leaves the teachers who remain conflicted. They say to themselves: Do I leave for my own wellness, or do I stay for my students?

During the height of the pandemic, teachers were forced to rebuild the education plane as it was flying, often without supervision and adequate training or feedback opportunities. But here’s a key insight: Teachers developed creative and sometimes novel solutions to problems they encountered daily. They found ways for education to continue despite vast challenges. That’s the good news.

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

Now the bad news. When schools reopened, far too few administrators inquired about these new approaches, and were often unaware of them. School leaders failed to create opportunities to hear from and listen to their teachers both while they were off-site and when they were back on-site. This meant that positive changes developed during the pandemic were not carried forward, and the conversation centered on educational failures during the pandemic. This isn’t a problem of the past; it persists.

My co-author and I heard these observations as part of research we conducted for our new book, “Mending Education: Finding Hope, Creativity, and Mental Wellness in Times of Trauma.” During the pandemic and through 2023, we spoke with dozens of educators across the nation. During a weeklong period in June 2023, we also surveyed more than 150 pre-K to 12th grade teachers across the U.S. to capture their pandemic experiences and understand their situations.

What we learned is that teachers summoned remarkable creativity and ingenuity to navigate the continual crises with their students. Importantly, they wanted the best of the changes they created to be retained in the non-online school setting.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Some of the $190 billion in pandemic money for schools actually paid off

No one denies that there were many educational setbacks in the pandemic years; counterintuitively though, there were many positives. Sadly, these positives have not been adopted, replicated and scaled; they have been ignored as remnants of the pandemic. The result: Our schools have not improved in ways that would have been possible post-pandemic.

Take these two examples.

First, the pandemic paused standardized testing at the state and federal levels. Yet teachers, many of whom had been frustrated by the stress and limitations of testing, found new and improved ways to assess student learning. They turned to approaches such as allowing students to make oral or visual presentations (with video or illustrations) of their learning or to present portfolios with examples of their work like essays and quizzes and projects. Instead of relying on a single point in time score, educators were able to assess, and then share with families, students’ individual progress. Many of our survey respondents and other teachers with whom we worked were delighted with the changed approaches. Students were less anxious (teachers too). Teachers told us that when learning was not measured by a single score but rather in ways that captured student progress, learning outcomes improved.

Second, because learning was largely remote, traditional forms of discipline (expulsion, suspension, removal from class, timeouts) could not be used. Survey respondents and other teachers shared that they found ways to engage disengaged or disruptive students. They used breakout rooms and chatrooms to work with subgroups of students. They created group projects to enable students to learn about teamwork and peer support. They did exercises that enabled students to regulate and reregulate themselves by identifying their feelings, a strategy that benefited all students, not just those who were struggling overtly. They visited the homes of students and taught from driveways and through windows. They reached out via text or email to families to share problems and strategize about solutions.

Those changes could have continued after the pandemic. But for them to stick would have required decision-makers to listen in real time to the experiences of those working in the trenches with our students. So far, that hasn’t happened. Instead, we reopened schools as if we could return to what existed pre-pandemic; we tried to force a return to a prior “normal” that no longer exists. In short: Opportunity knocked, teachers responded and then changes were abandoned.

We are paying a high price for these failures to recognize teachers’ voices. We cannot educate from the top down or sideways in. Educational improvement comes at the micro, meso and macro levels — if we are sufficiently respectful of and open to the voices of those to whom we entrust our children. We must listen and learn from our teachers. If we do, we all stand to benefit.

Karen Gross, an author, educator and artist, is a former college president and senior policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Education; she currently serves as a continuing education instructor at Rutgers School of Social Work. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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Almost every day at the public elementary school she attended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Stephanie heard comments about her weight. Kids in her fifth grade class called her “fatty” instead of her name, she recalled; others whispered, “Do you want a cupcake?” as she walked by. One classmate spread a rumor that she had diabetes. Stephanie was so incensed by his teasing that she hit him and got suspended, she said.

But nothing the kids did upset her as much as the conduct of her teachers.

For years teachers ignored her in class, even when she was the only one raising her hand, said Stephanie, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. “I was like, ‘Do you not like me or something?” she recalled.

She felt invisible. “They would sit me in the back. I couldn’t see the board,” she said. When Stephanie spoke up once in middle school, a teacher told her, “I can’t put you anywhere else because you’re going to block other students.” She burned with embarrassment when her classmates laughed.

Nearly 20 percent of children in the U.S. — almost 15 million kids — were considered obese as of the 2020 school year, a number that has likely increased since the pandemic (new data is expected next year). The medical conditions associated with obesity, such as asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea, are well known. Children with obesity are also more likely to have depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.

Far less discussed are the educational outcomes for these children. Research has found that students with obesity are more likely to get lower grades in reading and math and to repeat a grade, and twice as likely to be placed in special education or remedial classes. They are also significantly more likely to miss school and be suspended or receive detention, and less likely than their peers to attend and graduate from college.

Researchers have suggested different reasons for this “obesity achievement gap,” including biological causes (such as reduced cortical thickness in the brain in children with obesity, which is linked to compromised executive functioning, and higher levels of the hormone cortisol, linked to poorer academic performance). They have also examined indirect causes of poor performance, such as that kids with obesity might miss school more often because of medical appointments or bullying. 

But a relatively new area of research has shifted attention to educator bias. Studies have found that teachers often perceive children with obesity as emotional, unmotivated, less competent and non-compliant. That can lead to teachers giving these students fewer opportunities to participate in class, less positive feedback and lower grades.

Weight bias is part of American culture, said Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, who has studied childhood obesity and bias. “Teachers are not immune to those attitudes,” she said. While many school districts have tried in the last 20 years to reduce childhood obesity through more nutritious meals and increased exercise, Puhl and other experts say schools also need to train teachers and students to recognize and confront the weight bias they say is hampering the education of an increasing number of children.

Some advocates argue that childhood obesity, which has steadily risen over the last 40 years, should be seen as an “academic risk factor” because of its lasting effects on educational and economic mobility. “There’s certainly been a big push for racial and ethnic diversity, for gender identity diversity, that’s so important,” said Puhl. “But weight is often left off the radar, it’s often not getting addressed.”

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Stephanie, now 18, has struggled with obesity her whole life. Within her family, being overweight never felt like a problem. But school was different.

Beginning in kindergarten, her classmates told her she looked like a Teletubby, she said. Even teachers made comments related to her weight. “If someone brought pastries for a birthday, they would ask, ‘Are you sure you want to eat that? Why don’t you try carrots and hummus?’” Stephanie recalled. Once Stephanie listened as an educator told her mother to put her on a diet. She stopped eating lunch at school after that. “When I was home, I ran to food because it was like the only place I would feel comfortable eating,” she said.

There were a handful of occasions teachers noticed her for something besides her weight. Stephanie smiled as she recalled a time when an English teacher praised an essay she wrote; when she won second place prize in a coding camp; when she was named ‘cadet of the year’ in JROTC during remote school during the pandemic. In elementary school, she received the President’s Award for Educational Achievement, designed to reward students who work hard, often in the face of obstacles to learning.

It wasn’t enough to make her feel like she had educators on her side. “In school, they want you to confide in teachers, they made us believe that we can go to teachers for anything,” she said. “If you have no friends or if there’s no one to trust — you can always find a teacher who you can feel safe with, you can always trust them. So, I would try, but they always pushed me away.”

One interaction in particular shattered her confidence. Toward the end of seventh grade, Stephanie stayed to ask a question after class. Her teacher asked if she was a new student. “‘How did you not notice I was in your class and the entire year I turned in work?” Stephanie wondered. “That’s when I started to feel like I’m a shadow.” From that point on she stopped caring about getting good grades. 

Liliana López, a spokesperson for Montgomery County Public Schools, said that teachers are not “expressly trained on weight bias,” but they “elevate all the identities individuals hold as valuable and we work with staff to identify ways they can create spaces full of affirmation, validation and significance for those identities.” Celeste Fernandez, spokesperson for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, said her organization does not offer specific training or information on weight bias.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

Researchers are increasingly identifying links between poor outcomes for students with obesity and teacher’s attitudes toward kids. In 2015, Erica Kenney, an associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard University, helped lead a team that analyzed data from a representative sample of children from across the nation. The researchers examined, among other things, whether the kids’ weight gain influenced teachers’ perceptions of their abilities and their standardized test scores.

Gaining weight didn’t change a child’s test scores, the researchers found, but, based on surveys, it was significantly linked to teachers having lower perceptions of students’ ability, for both girls and boys. In other words, kids who gained weight faced a small but significant“academic penalty” from their teachers, Kenney said.

A separate study, involving 130 teachers, found that educators were more likely to give lower grades to essays if they believed a child who was obese had written them. For the study, Kristin Finn, a professor in the school of education at Canisius University, in Buffalo, New York, took four essays written at a sixth grade level and paired them with stock photographs of students who looked similar but some had been digitally altered to appear overweight. The overweight students received moderately lower scores.

Finn found that the teachers were more likely to view the students with obesity as academically inferior, “messy” and more likely to need tutoring. In surveys, teachers also predicted that students with obesity weren’t good in other subjects such as math and social studies.

“To be able to make a judgment about somebody’s mathematical abilities based on a short essay seemed pretty remarkable,” said Finn. Yet, teachers maintained that they were personally unbiased in their evaluations. “They all think that they’re treating these children fairly,” she said.

Teachers’ perceptions of children’s academic potential matters: Their recommendations can affect not only students’ grades, but also their access to higher level courses, competitive programs, specialized camps and post-secondary opportunities including college.

Girls are at particular risk of being stigmatized for being obese, research has found. In one study, nearly a third of women who were overweight said they had had a teacher who was biased against them because of their weight. Students who face other barriers including poverty are also more likely to be penalized for being overweight, what is called a “double disadvantage.”

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost every subject – even PE

Covid, which hit during the spring of Stephanie’s eighth grade year, was a welcome interruption. She loved learning in the privacy of her home and not being “judged for my body,” she said.

When schools reopened in the fall of 10th grade, Stephanie couldn’t bear the thought of returning. She had gained weight during remote learning, some 100 pounds. Citing her asthma and her father’s diabetes, she applied for a waiver that would permit her to attend classes virtually. But “the real reason was because I was ashamed of what I look like,” she said.

She received the waiver and continued her high school studies at home.

After a 2022 diagnosis of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which had made her body resistant to insulin, Stephanie decided to undergo bariatric surgery. Following the operation, Stephanie lost more than half her body weight. When she returned to her high school to take exams, people were suddenly nice to her, she said. It frustrated her, she said: “I’m the same person.”

Negative perceptions of people with obesity start early. In one study, children as young as 3 who were shown drawings of people of varying weights perceived the obese people as “mean” more often than “nice.” In another study, when 5- and 6-year-olds were shown images of children of different body sizes, most said they did not want to invite the heavier children to their birthday party.

Experts argue that administrators and teachers must become more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the challenges facing children with obesity. Yolandra Hancock, a pediatrician who specializes in patients with obesity and a former teacher, said she frequently intervenes with educators on behalf of her patients with obesity. One 7-year-old boy was often late to class because he found it difficult to climb the three flights of stairs to get there.

“The assistant principal actually told him if he wasn’t so fat, he would be able to get up the stairs faster,” Hancock said. She explained that the student wasn’t walking slowly because of “laziness” but because obesity can cause a bowing of the leg bones, making it hard to navigate steps. Giving the student more time between classes or arranging for his classes to be on the same floor would have been simple fixes, she said.

In another case, an elementary school student with obesity was getting into trouble for requesting frequent bathroom breaks, a result of his large abdomen putting pressure on his bladder, similar to what happens during pregnancy. “He came close to having an accident,” Hancock said. “His teachers wouldn’t allow him to go to the restroom and would call his mother to complain that he wasn’t focusing.” She wrote to the school requesting that he be allowed to go to the restroom whenever he needed. “If you don’t allow them to do what it is that their body needs,” Hancock said, “you’re creating more barriers to them being able to learn.”

Research has found that teachers can play an important “buffering role” in reducing bullying for children with obesity. In one study, children who believed educators would step in to prevent future bullying did better in school than those who didn’t share this conviction.

But often teachers don’t intervene, said Puhl, the University of Connecticut researcher, because they believe that if students “want the teasing to stop, they need to lose weight.” Yet “body weight is not a simple issue of eating less and exercising more,” she added, but is instead a highly complex condition influenced by genetics, hormones, culture, environment and economics.Bullying and mistreatment don’t motivate people to lose weight, Puhl said, but often contribute to binge eating, reduced physical activity and weight gain.

One way to help, would be for schools to include body weight in their anti-bullying policies, Puhl said. At present, most schools’ anti-bullying policies protect children on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability and religious beliefs, “but very few mention body weight.” That lack is really shocking, she added, “because body weight is one of the most prevalent reasons that kids are bullied today.”

This spring, Stephanie went back to school to attend her graduation ceremony and receive her diploma. She still struggles with body image but is determined to put her negative experiences behind her and start fresh in college this fall, she says.

She plans to study psychology. “I want to understand people better, because I didn’t feel heard and there were a lot of things I didn’t speak about,” she said. “I just want to help people.”

Contact the editor of this story, Caroline Preston, at 212-870-8965 or preston@hechingerreport.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.

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BROOKLINE, Mass. — It was a humid, gray morning in July, and most of their peers were spending the summer sleeping late and hanging out with friends. But the 20 rising 10th graders in Lisa Rodriguez’s class at Brookline High School were finishing a lesson on exponents and radicals.

As Rodriguez worked with two students on a difficult problem, Noelia Ames was called over by a soft-spoken student sitting nearby. Ames, a rising senior who took Algebra II Honors with Rodriguez as a sophomore, was serving as a peer leader for the summer class.

“Are you stuck on a problem?” Ames asked, leaning over to take a closer look.

The students in Rodriguez’s class were participating in a summer program created by the Calculus Project, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. Founded at Brookline High near Boston in 2009, the group now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 nearby districts beginning in the summer after seventh grade to help them complete advanced math classes like calculus before they finish high school.

It focuses on helping students who are historically underrepresented in high-level math classes — namely those who are Black, Hispanic and low-income — succeed in that coursework, which serves as a gateway to selective colleges and well-paying careers. While some states and districts are nixing advanced-math requirements, sometimes in the name of equity, the Calculus Project has a different theory: Students who have traditionally been excluded from high-level math can succeed in those courses if they’re given a chance to preview advanced math content over the summer and take classes with a cohort of their peers.

In recent years the Calculus Project’s work has taken on fresh urgency, as the pandemic hit Black, Hispanic and low-income students particularly hard. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action left even some college officials concerned that inequities in high school math would make it harder for them to fill their classes with students from diverse backgrounds. The Calculus Project’s national profile has grown — its staff advises the College Board on AP math exams and classes and have advised groups in a few other states — even as the organization has attracted some scrutiny from parents, due to its emphasis on students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“One out of 10 Black students in the eighth grade math scores were scoring basic or above,” saidKristen Hengtgen, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit advocacy group EdTrust, referring to last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. “When you see that, you need to throw certain student groups the life jacket,” she added. “We cannot combat a math crisis if we’re not helping the students who need it the most.”

Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.

The racial and socioeconomic gaps in math are stark: Only 28 percent of Black students and 31 percent Hispanic students nationwide took advanced math in high school compared with 46 percent of white students, according to a 2023 report from EdTrust. Just 22 percent of low-income students took advanced math. Experts say that’s because these students are less likely to attend high schools that offer higher-level math or to be recommended by their teachers for honors or AP classes, regardless of mastery.

They are also less likely to report feeling confident in math class or to enroll in calculus even when they are on a path to take the class early in high school, according to a report from EdTrust and nonprofit Just Equations. When it comes to Black and Hispanic students, Hengtgen blames what she calls “the belonging barrier.” “Their friends weren’t in the class,” she said. “They rarely had a teacher of color.”

As a math teacher at Brookline High in the early 2000s, Calculus Project founder Adrian Mims got firsthand experience in what the research was beginning to establish. Black and Hispanic students were largely absent from the high school’s honors and advanced math courses, he said, and the few Black and Hispanic students who did enroll often dropped out early in the year.

As a PhD candidate at Boston College, Mims was writing his dissertation on how to improve African American achievement in geometry honors classes. His findings — suggesting that Black students dropped out of the course because they lacked knowledge of certain foundational math content, spent less time studying and preparing for tests, and lacked confidence in their math ability — became the catalyst for the first iteration of The Calculus Project.

Mims’ idea was to introduce Black students over the summer to math concepts they’d learn in eighth grade algebra in the fall. Students would be able to take the time to really understand those concepts and to build their confidence and skills, learning both from district teachers and peer teachers who could provide individual support.

In the summer of 2009, Mims piloted his idea with a group of rising eighth graders. In addition to learning concepts they’d see in algebra that fall, they were exposed to the stories of famous Black and Latino figures who excelled in STEM, such as Black NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and Mexican-American astronaut Jose M. Hernandez. When the school year arrived, they participated in after-school tutoring at Brookline High.

The next fall, 2010, the district opened the program to all interested students, regardless of race. Summer participants were placed into cohorts so they could advance through math classes in high school with peers they knew.

Teachers and administrators at Brookline say the project had an immediate — and lasting — impact. “It’s so much more than learning math,” said Alexia Thomas, a guidance counselor and associate dean of students at Brookline High.

In 2012, Brookline High saw more Black students score as advanced on the state Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System Math test than ever before; 88 percent of those students had participated in the Calculus Project. The highest-scoring student in the district was Black – and a program alum. Two years later, when the first cohort of students who participated in both the summer and year-long programs graduated from high school, 75 percent had successfully completed calculus.

Today, eight districts participate in the year-round program and another six send their students to the group’s summer programs, two three-week sessions that take place at Boston University, Emmanuel College and University of Massachusetts-Lowell. As of May 2024, 31 percent of students in the program identified as Black, 39 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 11 percent as Asian and 7 percent as white, according to program data. Mims has helped develop similar models in Florida and Texas.

In 2023, research consultancy group Mathematica, in partnership with the Gates Foundation, published findings from a two-year study on the effectiveness of the Calculus Project and two other math-oriented summer programs. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) According to the report, students in the Calculus Project outperformed students who hadn’t participated by nearly half a grade point in their fall math classes, on average.

Related: Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need?

The project runs counter to a recent push to engage high schoolers in math by making the content more relevant to the real world and substituting classes like data science for algebra II and calculus. Justin Desai, the Calculus Project’s director of school and district support and a former Boston Public Schools math teacher and curriculum designer, said he sees risks in that approach. Students need subjects like calculus, he said, because “it’s the foundation of modern technology.” To replace advanced math classes in favor of less rigorous math courses keeps students from accessing and excelling even in some non-STEM fields like law, he said.

The project finds ways to show students how math skills apply in the professional world.  Every semester students take field trips to Harvard Medical School, Google and to university research centers and engineering companies, where they are introduced to careers and see how the math they are learning is used in society.

In late July, a group of rising eighth graders from Newton Public Schools’ summer program took a field trip to the sprawling campus of global software company MathWorks. In one room, an engineer showed students how a car simulation model is built and used, while a second engineer helped students test a robotic arm. Another group of students learned how to use a programming software to turn an image into music.

As the Calculus Project has grown, there has at times been friction. In July, simmering tension between teachers and students at Concord-Carlisle High School came to a head when some project participants learned they’d been placed in financial literacy or statistics courses instead of calculus.

Some students being placed into lower-level classes has been a pattern since the program started at Concord-Carlisle in 2020, Mims said. He threatened to pull the program from the high school, and the students were reassigned to calculus (and one to statistics).

Mims said “this is a clear example” of how teacher recommendations can lock students out of advanced math classes. School administrators and teachers often point to students and parents as the reason for a lack of diversity in high-level math. “When we destroy that myth and we show that students can achieve at that level,” said Mims, “they can no longer point the finger at the students and the parents anymore, because we’ve created a precedent that these students can thrive.”

Laurie Hunter, the Concord-Carlisle superintendent, wrote in an email that her district is committed to partnering with the Calculus Project and that it “works closely with individual students and families to ensure their success and path align with the outcomes of the project.” She did not respond to specific questions. 

Milton Public Schools, another district that works with the Calculus Project, was the subject of a 2023 federal civil rights complaint from national conservative group Parents Defending Education. The group accused the district of discrimination by partnering with the Calculus Project, which it said segregates students by intentionally grouping students of certain backgrounds together as part of cohorts.

Mims rejects the group’s claims, noting that the Calculus Project is open to students of all backgrounds including white and Asian students. He says he has not heard from the federal government or the group about the complaint since early 2023. Parents Defending Education did not respond to several interview requests. A spokesperson for the federal Department of Education said the Office for Civil Rights does not confirm complaints but pointed to its list of open investigations. At the time of publication, there were no open investigations against Milton Public Schools.

Art Coleman, a founding partner at legal group EducationCounsel LLC, said that he doesn’t expect such challenges to be successful. School districts have a legal obligation to address inequities in student performance, he said, and “there is nothing in federal law that precludes that targeted support, as long as in broad terms, all students, regardless of their racial or ethnic status, have the ability to tap into those resources and that support.”

Related: How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy

This summer, the Calculus Project expanded its programming, including by adding a college advising class for rising seniors. It’s part of the group’s mission to help its students succeed not just in high school but in college and beyond, Mims said.

The group plans to help its graduates secure internships while they’re in college and network once they’re out, he said, and will soon begin tracking students to see how they do in college and the workforce. “It’s really about giving them every advantage that rich kids have,” Mims said.

Ames, the Brookline High senior and peer teacher, said she has found the program “totally life-changing,” in part because of the relationships she’s built with other students and teachers.

“You can be in the hardest class or the easiest class and every teacher will be there to support you,” said Ames, who is taking AP Calculus this fall and is considering studying finance after high school. “Whatever questions you have, they’ll answer.”

Quentin Robinson, a college junior who joined the Calculus Project as a rising seventh grader, said it taught him that he enjoyed math and also how to advocate for himself.

“My freshman year, they tried to put me in a lower-level math class because they didn’t think I was capable,” Robinson said. But his summer experience empowered him, and he persuaded the school to place him in Geometry Honors instead. He graduated from high school having completed both calculus and a college-level statistics course.

Now, Robinson is an accounting and data analytics major at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts. The Calculus Project, he said, helped him realize the voices of naysayers can be used as “a fuel” to achieve what you want.

Contact staff writer Javeria Salman at 212-678-3455 or salman@hechingerreport.org.

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

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As a political scientist with a background in policy analysis, I used to approach questions about policy plans in terms of which had data behind them and which didn’t — along with what such evidence might mean for decision-makers.

However, no question about what a new Donald Trump administration would mean for U.S. education can be answered strictly with a debate about facts and figures.

With the former president and his allies still denying that he lost the 2020 election, with Trump and his running mate embracing unfounded stories about Haitian immigrants eating household pets and with Trump’s obsession with the size of his cheering crowds, any analytical projection about his future agenda is all but impossible. With such an absence of facts or evidence-based policy designs, we must turn to past actions, current rhetoric and the priorities of Trump’s political alliances for a hint of what could come.

On that basis, we could expect more debates about bathrooms and women’s sports, more inexplicable musings about whether slavery had benefits for enslaved Americans, more spending of scarce resources to put Bibles in public schools and more singling out of kids because of their immigration status.

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

Many Republican proposals have been well-covered, starting with Project 2025 — the policy agenda assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a new Trump term. Although Trump denies that controversial document speaks for his candidacy, more than 140 former members of the first Trump team had a hand in its crafting.

The key education points in the platform Trump does claim as his own — the so-called Agenda47 and the GOP party platform — strike the same notes of emphasis as those in Project 2025. Indeed, the one-page education “chapter” in the 16-page party platform is all but a summary of its much larger Project 2025 counterpart.

What do they emphasize? Culture wars, school vouchers and a peculiar fixation on ending the federal Department of Education.

Two of the first three paragraphs of Project 2025’s education plan call for universal school vouchers. In Trump’s official GOP party platform, universal vouchers are the second education agenda item, behind a call to end teacher tenure. Both items follow a general statement about making great schools.

And yet, private school vouchers are not only eating up increasing shares of state budgets, some states are now directly funding new construction for private schools to receive those vouchers. These schools are free to discriminate on admissions and expulsion decisions across a variety of child characteristics.

The education bullet point in the 20-point summary of the Trump platform — the highlights of the highlights — excludes any specific policy statements, simply reading in its entirety:

Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.

Such a call echoes that of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, in his Foreword to Project 2025. In that section, after setting a new litmus test for all conservative presidential candidates to support universal vouchers, Roberts insists:

The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children.

Then there are the statements Trump and his allies make every day, including calls to end the U.S. Department of Education. A similar demand is in the very first paragraph of Project 2025’s education chapter, just ahead of its demands for vouchers.

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, who hosted a “fireside chat” with Trump in August, has said on X (formerly Twitter) that Trump is “not kidding” about ending the department, and that she “hope[s] to get to help him accomplish this goal,” perhaps as one last secretary for that agency.

She could have competition. Two weeks before Trump’s appearance for Moms for Liberty, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told reporters that she would consider joining a second Trump administration if it were for the specific task of eliminating the department she led in the first Trump term.

Let’s be clear: The U.S. Department of Education does many things, but what really riles up the Trumpian right is its role as the chief anti-discrimination authority for American schools. And that’s why it’s been singled out by the right for special criticism.

So what does all of this actually mean for kids and families?

What is the common theme of attacks on gender ideology, diversity and racial justice in schools; demands for universal vouchers; and calls to end the federal education agency?

Related: OPINION: I’d love to predict what a Kamala Harris presidency might mean for education, but we don’t have enough information

If policy proposals, like budgets, are moral documents, what unifies the possibilities of a new Trump term — whether laid out in Project 2025, the GOP platform, Agenda 47 or campaign speeches on the trail — into some statement of purpose?

I say it’s this: A new Trump presidency would usher in an era of isolation and separatism and a casting out of children who differ from their peers or from what Christian Nationalists believe America should look like beyond what we all share as human beings. As just one example: Voucher schemes, like those prioritized by Trump and his allies, have been used by the right to marginalize LGBTQ+ children and families by denying them access to what the right calls the “education freedom” and “opportunity” represented by such “scholarships.”

What, if not a Trump-inspired politics of humiliation, explains the Trumpian right’s current obsession with the names children use to call themselves or how they describe the racial legacy they carry and experience?

Yet presidents only have partial control over which specific plans they’re able to pass during their time in office. For that reason, considering a new Trump term is as much about the broader political coalition he leads as what Trump and his team could personally do in the education policy arena.

So, from all of this, and regardless of what policies actually pass, we can be sure that a Trump victory would extend the era of culture warring in American education.

For nearly a decade in political life, Donald Trump has told us who he is. When it comes to any education ideas he and his allies might have, my humble suggestion is that we finally listen to what he has said, and consider what he has already done.

Josh Cowen is a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and a senior fellow at the Education Law Center. He’s the author of “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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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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As a special education teacher, I often encountered students who struggled with solving math problems. Many would simply add all the numbers they saw without grasping what the problems were actually asking.

To help, I introduced keywords like “all together” for addition and “difference” for subtraction.

However, this approach fell short when students focused solely on the keywords, missing the problem’s context. Today, elementary school teachers share similar struggles with their students.

The issue isn’t just about teaching math; it also involves addressing gaps in literacy. Reading skills are closely related to children’s ability to solve math problems. And, as much as early literacy development plays a critical role in developing problem-solving abilities, early numeracy strongly predicts overall academic success, including literacy development: Research has found that literacy and math development are intertwined.

Yet, pre-K teachers spend an average of only 2.5 percent of their day on numeracy skills — a gap that underscores the need for teaching approaches that bridge math and literacy.

Teachers must do more to help students build foundational cognitive skills, such as logic and reasoning.

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

Integrated teaching can help students view math and English language arts as complementary disciplines that help them solve real-world problems. It could lead to better academic outcomes and a richer understanding of the world. Unfortunately, most elementary schools teach math and English language arts separately.

One way that teachers can address these comprehension gaps is to initially remove numbers from word problems and encourage students to read through the entire problems before they add or subtract. By solving “numberless word problems,” students can visualize and grasp the context before computing.

We can also use the power of storytelling. In my classroom, I incorporated engaging literature into math instruction to help my students better understand word problems. We used “Amanda Bean’s Amazing Dream,” a Marilyn Burns Brainy Day Book by Cindy Neuschwander, to explore multiplication concepts; the book’s illustrations helped students identify repeated addition and multiplication and allowed them to recognize similar scenarios in math problems. Incorporating math through storytelling helps children better understand and remember math concepts and also improves their confidence and reduces math anxiety. By building on the critical skills students need to excel in math and ELA, we can better equip them to apply math to real-world problems.

Here is what this approach encourages:

• Improved comprehension: Stories and real-world scenarios promote a better understanding of math concepts, making abstract ideas more accessible.
• Math visualization: Using descriptive writing and storytelling to explain math concepts, such as measurement and fractions, gives students a tangible reference for math principles as they exist in the world.
• Vocabulary development: Just as students learn new words in ELA, with math storytelling they learn math vocabulary to enhance their understanding of the math concepts needed to solve problems.
• Critical thinking skills: When students analyze problems from various perspectives and use language to describe them, they’re better equipped to apply problem-solving skills across disciplines.
• Contextualized problem-solving: By establishing context through literature, students are able to construct meaning to solve other problems.

Administrators should encourage training for teachers and provide resources that effectively blend math and ELA. Supporting a curriculum that encourages the teacher to be a facilitator — rather than a sage on a stage — will encourage more students to talk about math, draw upon their language skills and solve problems together.

Here are some approaches educators can use to blend instruction to challenge students and enhance math and ELA skills:

• Project-based learning: Assign hands-on projects that require mathematical analysis and language arts skills, such as reviewing datasets, creating infographics and writing interpretations.
• Collaborative learning environments: Ask groups of students to work together to solve complex problems that require mathematical reasoning and effective communication. Their work could include debates or reviews of written mathematical explanations.
• Literature-based mathematical discussions: Read books that incorporate mathematical themes or concepts and include a character who uses math to solve problems; such books can spark lively debate and serve as a springboard to discuss how math applies to real life.

These strategies strengthen the connection between math and ELA and promote deeper learning and engagement for all students.

Related: You probably don’t have your preschooler thinking about math enough

Using an integrated approach with literature also provides a level of comfort for teachers. Not surprisingly, most elementary school teachers didn’t choose their profession due to a deep love of mathematics — and some may suffer from math anxiety themselves. Teachers can model problem-solving beyond the classroom by expanding what it means to teach math through children’s books and hands-on activities.

Math instruction will only improve if administrators, educators, parents and policymakers push for integrated curricula. Doing so will not only help students’ math, but promote a more effective education system overall.

Thera Pearce is the learning services manager at ORIGO Education. She has experience in instructional design, curriculum consulting and professional development coordination. She has also worked as a special education teacher and coach for 15 years in North Carolina.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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This week, I wanted to highlight our continuing early ed math coverage by talking to Joe Hong, who wrote a story about a Milwaukee school district trying to revive methods it used for math instruction a decade ago. Our conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

A small group of teachers in Milwaukee are trying to return to math strategies the district used from 2004-2014. Teachers in the district call this “the golden years of math instruction.” Could you explain what made math during those years different?

It came down to a two-pronged accountability structure. First, there was a hierarchy of university professors, district administrators, teacher leaders and classroom teachers that bridged the needs of educators in the field and the latest research surrounding math pedagogy. Second, it was the university professors who oversaw the funding — a substantial amount of $20 million — and made sure it was spent just on improving math instruction and not redirected toward competing priorities in the school district.

Part of the glue that seemed to hold this instruction model together was the school district’s partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. When that partnership ended a decade ago, the district went back to using its own in-house math curriculum. My understanding is that partnership is still gone. How are educators in the district trying to keep the “golden years of math instruction” alive?

DeAnn Huinker, the University of Wisconsin professor who oversaw the partnership, is still running teacher trainings. Some of the teachers who were in the classroom in the early 2000s are now holding leadership positions in the district. Having these folks around makes it easier to continue the work, although at a smaller scale.

There’s a moment in your story where a first grade teacher is surprised she’s enjoying math. Do you get the sense proponents of this instruction model see the Milwaukee teachers benefiting as much as the students?

Yes, in fact I think so many teachers struggle with teaching math because they themselves aren’t comfortable with it. Milwaukee’s approach has always been centered around making sure teachers know the math. More than one person involved in Milwaukee’s math instruction told me, “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”

Was there any pushback to teaching math in this way?

There was some resistance. Part of it isn’t unique to math. Principals and teachers are wary of change because it can often mean more work for them, which often means allocating funds and time that they don’t have. And then there are also the ongoing debates in math education. Milwaukee’s approach really emphasizes the concepts behind math over the procedures, and while I don’t know whether the more procedurally-minded educators pushed back against the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnerships in the early 2000s, I’ve already gotten emails since the story published from educators criticizing the conceptual approach.

You touch on a trend in this story that I’ve noticed in my own reporting — early childhood teachers gravitating to younger grades to avoid having to teach difficult math. Do you get the sense the training intentionally targets the district’s early elementary educators to re-teach them how to think about math?

Milwaukee Public Schools has definitely focused on early childhood educators in recent years. Many of these teachers admit that they got into elementary teaching because they weren’t “math people.” But they’re starting to rethink their identities with these trainings and learning how to leverage their own expertises in child development and classroom management to engage with the youngest learners.

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

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