Month: March 2016

A few years ago, if a student arrived at an Ascend elementary school wearing the wrong color socks, she was sent to the dean’s office to stay until a family member brought a new pair.

Now, the school office is stocked with extra socks. Students without them can pick up a spare pair before heading to class.

It’s a simple shift, but part of a revolution in the culture at Ascend, which oversees five charter elementary schools, three middle schools, and a high school in Brooklyn. Making sure students and parents were sweating the small stuff, once integral to the network’s philosophy, was simply producing “too many unhappy children,” Ascend’s CEO Steve Wilson explained recently.

“We’ve moved sharply away from a zero-tolerance discipline approach,” Wilson said. “We believe a warm and supportive environment produces the greatest long-term social effects.”

Parallel shifts are happening across New York City, as some charter-school leaders take a second look at discipline policies they put in place when they opened. Those policies, connected to a broader set of ideas referred to as “no excuses,” combine teachers’ high academic expectations for students with strict behavior rules meant to ensure an orderly learning environment.

Some schools have tweaked those policies after seeing the effects on students, particularly as they exit their charter schools for more lenient environments. Others aim to distance themselves from the harsh practices that have grabbed headlines and generated fears that they could erode crucial political and parental support for charter schools. And some have changed simply because the charter sector’s swift growth has made faithful implementation of original practices impossible.

Still, “no-excuses” ideas still form the backbone of the culture at many charter schools that belong to networks like Achievement First, KIPP, and Ascend, which generally have firm guidelines for everything—from how students walk down hallways to what they wear. Teachers say they’re key to allowing students to focus in class and net high scores on state tests. But as the sector grows—and issues of school discipline make national headlines—many schools are pulling back slightly as they search for the right balance.

“There is a broad movement away from no-excuses discipline policies,” said Mary Wells, the co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit that advises charter schools. “Most are having conversations about how and how much should we adjust our culture.”

* * *

At the start of a ninth-grade physics class at Achievement First Brooklyn High School last month, students sat in silence as they worked on a problem. They had less than a minute to scribble an answer on their whiteboards.

“Twenty-four seconds,” Alexis Riley warned the class. When her timer went off, students held up their answers and the teacher scanned the room. “85 percent mastery,” she said.

The leaders at Achievement First, a network of schools in Brooklyn, see a rigorous, rule-based school culture as key to allowing students to be as focused as they were at the beginning of physics that day. They also see it as part of a strategy for ensuring that students in poverty do not fall behind more affluent peers.

After all, if students are not required to pay attention, how will they learn the concepts they need to succeed in college-level science classes? If they are not ready to learn within 60 seconds of entering class, when will they catch up?

op-ed last year. “The answer is that Success Academy’s 34 principals and I deeply believe that if we lessened our standards for student comportment, the education of the 11,000 children in our schools would profoundly suffer.”

The former leader of Brooklyn Ascend Lower School, Brandon Sorlie, remembers a moment when he realized the school’s focus on rigor and discipline had gone too far.

“It was horrible for me to walk out to dismissal and the first conversation I would hear parents having with their children is, ‘What color are you on?’” said Sorlie, now the chief academic officer at Ascend, referring to a tool used to track students’ behavior. The conversations were always about behavior as opposed to learning, he said.

A fourth-grade student does test-prep in his English class at Brownsville Ascend Lower Charter School in Brooklyn. (Stephanie Snyder)

Achievement First now has 17 schools in the city; Uncommon has 21. Success Academy, the largest network in New York City, has 34 different schools. The growth of the networks has made it difficult to strike the delicate balance between rigor and warmth in every charter classroom.

“Look at D.C.,” the New York City Charter Center CEO James Merriman said, referring to the roughly 45 percent of students in the nation’s capital who attend charter schools. “Size has made these conversations about how the sector deals with discipline impossible to avoid.”

Harsh discipline practices at some schools have also made headlines, providing fodder for critics and concerned parents. A Chalkbeat analysis found that charter schools suspended students in 2011-12 at a rate almost three times that of traditional public schools. Critics have long held that strict discipline prevents these charter schools from educating the highest-needs students, since they implicitly encourage unruly students to leave the school.

That shift comes as charter schools face more pressure than ever to serve high-needs students. A “Got to Go” list of student names at a Success Academy school sparked widespread outrage last year, and the teachers union has made it a legislative priority to pressure charter schools to do more. Even the governor, a longtime supporter of charter schools, has made reference to “troubling practices.” Plus, both Achievement First and Success Academy face lawsuits for their treatment of students with disabilities.

An Achievement First school in Hartford made students wear a white shirt over their uniform signaling they were in “re-orientation” as a discipline tool, according to a 2013 Hartford Courant article. The shirt forbade students from interacting with their peers or participating in music and special physical classes. (A spokeswoman from Achievement First said the practice has changed.)

At KIPP Star Washington Elementary School, students were placed in a “calm-down” room, a padded room about the size of a walk-in closet, according to a 2013 New York Daily News story. A spokesman for KIPP said that as of January 2014, KIPP stopped referring students to the calm-down room.

a video of a Success Academy teacher harshly criticizing a student who answered a math question incorrectly.

Network leaders have said that cases like these do not represent their overall school culture. But behind the scenes, some leaders also began to question whether, in their quest to balance joy and academic rigor, the scale was too often weighted towards rigor.

“You’ve got to get them all right like it’s a symphony,” said Doug McCurry, the co-CEO and superintendent of Achievement First, about the principles at the core of Achievement First. “I think, over the last few years, we’ve been playing the focus and rigor notes maybe more loudly than the investment and thinking notes.”

Others have raised questions about whether the tight control of student behavior actually sets all students up for success, especially before heading off to college, where few people will be making sure students do their work. If students are confined to a tight structure in elementary and high school, it is no wonder they might find college “unfamiliar and overwhelming,” Wilson said.

Some of the changes at schools are easy to see. The color boards that used to hang in Ascend elementary schools to designate students by behavior are no longer there. At its high school, Ascend has begun experimenting with restorative justice, an approach to discipline meant to focus on problem-solving instead of punishment. (A number of district schools are experimenting with those ideas, too.)

Tatiana Piskula teaches math to fourth-grade students at Brownsville Ascend Lower Charter School in Brooklyn. (Stephanie Snyder)

On a recent afternoon, one student addressed his peers for putting an inappropriate image on the desktop of student computers. His peers were then given the opportunity to ask why he would do that.

“In another school that had a different philosophy, he could have been suspended,” said Shannon Ortiz-Wong, an English teacher at Brooklyn Ascend High School. Instead, his family members were brought in for a meeting, he apologized to his peers, and wrote a reflection.

When Dakarai Venson, a ninth-grader at Brooklyn Ascend High School was in middle school, he said he would be sent to the dean’s office for reading in class. Now, the teachers would not respond in the same way.

“I’ve gotten older, so I know it’s not the time to be reading. But also, teachers—they wouldn’t just overreact now,” Venson said.

Years ago, KIPP schools used to have students eat lunch in silence, but that practice is gone. The paycheck system used to track student behavior and progress toward character goals has “dramatically increased” the number of ways students can earn dollars for positive dollars, through showing character traits like curiosity and zest, said Allison Willis Holley, the principal at KIPP Infinity in Harlem.

Explore, a network of four charter schools, still has “soar sticks” in some elementary schools, which have student names on clothespins that move up and down based on a student’s behavior. But the practice is only used sporadically and schools are trying to find ways to eliminate extrinsic reward and consequence systems, the chief academic officer Sam Fragomeni said in an email.

Still, across most networks, schools look and feel about the same as they did a few years ago. Students still learn in rigorous classroom environments, adhere to strict uniform codes, and are held accountable for their behavior using rigid merit and demerit systems. An untucked shirt can still earn a demerit at Achievement First. Success Academy gives students infractions for slouching. Chewing gum means the loss of paycheck dollars at KIPP.

What has changed, many say, is how these rules are emphasized and applied. Schools have taken steps to give more positive feedback, de-emphasize the tiniest behavior infractions, differentiate how they treat student misbehavior, and ensure students are learning from their consequences.

In short, it’s about working within the network’s original framework to improve the balance between a “warm and demanding” learning environment, KIPP’s Dave Levin said.

In terms of discipline, that means students are now taught to learn from their mistakes instead of simply receiving a consequence, the KIPP principal Holley said. While student at KIPP might still get a zero for failing to complete an assignment, now teachers are more deliberate about following up with students and helping them learn from their mistakes, she explained.

KIPP schools also run their own advisory groups now called KIPP circles. Students are tasked with setting character and behavior goals—and also with having a little fun.

“There’s time for kids to be kids and to wiggle and to have time to talk and have social interactions and do all those things which contributes to a happier place,” Holley said.

It’s unclear whether rethinking these policies will lead to a total reboot of school culture, but some worry the high-pressure environment created both externally and internally at charter schools schools leaves little wiggle room for a seismic shift. Charter-school renewal is based on academic results.

Success Academy, for its part, has not changed its discipline philosophy and does not plan to, according to a spokesman. Far from reforming the discipline code, Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy said it should serve as a model.

“The city could learn from Success’s code of conduct and provide the same safe, engaging learning environments that children need—and parents want,” she said.

This post appears courtesy of ChalkBeat New York. Stephanie Snyder and Fabiola Cineas contributed reporting.

Black and white Americans have dramatically different views on whether all children have equal access to the same opportunities.

While 77 percent of whites surveyed in an Atlantic Media/Pearson Opportunity Poll released this week think children of color in their neighborhood have access to the same opportunities as white children, just 41 percent of African Americans agree. More than 70 percent of Latinos and Asians polled agree with the statement, making the figure from black respondents the outlier, albeit not necessarily a surprising one.

Across a range of markers, from educational attainment to salary to health, black Americans lag behind white Americans. Black children are more likely to attend high-poverty schools with fewer resources and less-qualified teachers. Just 41 percent of blacks surveyed think the schooling children in their neighborhood receive is adequately preparing them for college work, compared with about half of whites, 61 percent of Latinos, and 63 percent of Asians. So it’s not necessarily surprising that African American respondents do not think children of color have the same opportunities as white children.

“I really don’t know where we can pick up and make it better,” said Venita Smith, an African American mother of three who was polled and lives in Oklahoma City. “I just wish we could all live in peace and harmony. It’s not going to happen, but I do wish that.”

But not everyone sees the gaps in access to opportunities or agrees that they exist. Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to think children of color have access to the same opportunities, 87 percent versus 60 percent. A full third of urban respondents do not agree with that statement, while those in suburban and rural areas tend to think access to opportunity is more equitable. That may reflect the fact that many of America’s urban centers remain deeply segregated.

Nicole Smith, the chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, said, “I think it’s not surprising at all that people would have different perspectives. I think because we live in America and everything seems to be available … access to the same TV shows, the same stores for shopping, to roads, to freedom of movement, there’s a tendency for us by extension to believe that freedom extends to everything else.” Yet she agrees that access to things like quality schools and higher education varies significantly by race and income, which leads to vastly different opportunities for different communities.

The variation in responses may be partially due to a lack of awareness on the part of white respondents, but it might also reflect a reluctance to confront inequality. The “subtext,” true or not, Smith pointed out, is that if one group, in this case black Americans, says it doesn’t have equal access to opportunity, is that another group, in this case white Americans, has an unfair amount of access, which can spark defensiveness instead of empathy. “You have a lot of white people denying white privilege,” she said.

The lack of awareness may be tied in part to the fact that whites mostly live among other whites. While 53 percent of white respondents say their neighborhood is mostly white, just 14 percent of blacks say the same. Blacks and Latinos report living in mixed neighborhoods. And although most respondents who said their neighborhood is home to families from different backgrounds agree that the diversity makes the community a better place, 5 percent of white respondents and 15 percent of black respondents said it contributed to problems in the neighborhood.

One area where problems have emerged in recent years is in the policing of American neighborhoods. Black and white Americans are also deeply divided when it comes to trust in police. Just 13 percent of black poll respondents said they can trust their neighborhood police to do what is right almost all of the time, while 45 percent of whites, 48 percent of Asians, and 31 percent of Latinos surveyed think this is the case.

What Do Americans Think About Access to Education?

Venita Smith said her trust in the police has waned over the years. Between the 1960s and the ‘80s, she said, people in uniform “were very trustworthy.” Now, though, she thinks people are looking for fast money and the importance of community has declined. “Everybody is out to get what they can get,” she said. “Therefore, that’s telling me the police department is hiring people just to hire them and not screening them like they used to.”

Although police departments around the country would beg to differ, Smith’s views may be shaped by local experience. Several months ago, the former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of rape after targeting African American women over the course of half a year. Several days ago, victims filed a suit against the city for allegedly failing, in part, to investigate an earlier complaint they argue might have prevented their abuse. “Come on! What is going on? I mean, what is going on?” Smith said, incredulously. More broadly, over the last several years, a series of officer-involved shootings of black men have sparked questions about entrenched problems within the criminal-justice system that disadvantage people of color.

Nicole Smith isn’t overly optimistic that things will improve in the near future, particularly given Donald Trump’s rise in popularity. “We have a lot of rhetoric about taking America back,” she said, “a lot of rhetoric about not focusing on equity and not paying any attention to differences, and perhaps being afraid or tired of the political correctness that a multicultural society requires for success.”

The Atlantic Media/Pearson Opportunity poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International surveyed 1,276 adults living in the United States by landline and cell phone from February 10 through 25. The survey included oversamples of African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Hispanics. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The margin of sampling error for the complete sample is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points; the margins of error are larger for subgroups.

How did my son perform on his high-school physics test this morning? Seconds after the teacher posts his score online, I can find out. With just a few more clicks, I can also tell you how the grade affected his overall performance for the quarter, his GPA for the year, how many times he was late for school, and what he ate for lunch this week.

All of this information is readily available to parents at any time through our school district’s virtual gradebook—an increasingly popular tool that is reshaping parental involvement in schools nationwide and opening up the black box of student assessment. Experts predict that these programs will evolve using the latest technology to measure increasingly varied facets of students’ educational lives. While many parents seem to appreciate the increased connections with their schools, others—myself included—are not interested in the constant surveillance and assessment of their children.

Nearly all of America’s public schools now post grades online through student-management software such as PowerSchool, Engrade, LearnBoost, and ThinkWave, according to Jim Flanagan, the chief learning services officer for the nonprofit International Society for Technology in Education. And online gradebooks are only one component of these programs, which also typically aggregate students’ demographic information, arrange schedules, and track and manage payments for food services—ideally, Flanagan said, providing comprehensive collection of data for every student.

Student-management software was first developed by locally operated companies about 15 years ago, before being slowly acquired by larger education technology firms, and now accounts for a big chunk of the $8.38 billion ed-tech market. Those within the industry are very optimistic about its expansion. These systems have the potential to rethink the ways that schools assess students, Flanagan said, beyond the traditional quizzes and tests—for example, through data dashboards that measure students’ emotional state, level of engagement, and mood or motivation. One San Francisco start-up has created a program that utilizes motion-tracking and facial- and speech-recognition software to collect this type of data, which they say will increase hands-on, project-based learning.

Some parents have reported that this new software is an effective method for increasing communication between school and home. Many of my friends are very happy with this technology. One said that she learned that her daughter was struggling with reading by reviewing her marks on the online gradebook; the teacher never informed my friend of these issues. With this knowledge, she was able to get help for her daughter early in the year. Others have said that they’ve been able to correct teachers’ grading errors with these programs.

To respond the proliferation of these online gradebooks, the Harvard Family Research Project has a list of useful tips for administrators, teachers, and parents on how to effectively use these new tools. It recommends that parents strike a balance between monitoring data and allowing the child to progress at his or her own pace, noting that parents should avoid constantly checking online portals, also known as “e-hovering.”

Letter Grades Deserve an ‘F’

Others are less impressed with the impact of this technology on family life. Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Price of Privilege, described online gradebooks as “a miserable idea.” Teachers these days grade “everything,” even works in progress, she said, and the online gradebooks make these scores subject to constant inspection by parents—potentially discouraging kids from experimenting or making mistakes that are integral to learning.

This heightened adult surveillance of kids, Levine added, is precisely what they don’t need during this stage of development; it can create “robo-students” and exacerbate the already-distressing levels of stress, anxiety, and depression among teenagers. “As an adult, what would it be like to have your every move evaluated?” Levine asked.

At the same time, parents can get overly attached to the constant information rewards the software provides. “Your kid gets an A one day, then a C the next, and then an A the following day,” Levine said. “Parents end up logging in too many times. It’s seductive and addictive. One loses the ability to manage it.” When her children were in school, she found that she was logging in every day, so, she requested that school not send her any information. “There wasn’t anything there that I couldn’t learn from talking to my kids.”

Although I can easily find out how my 16-year-old son fared on this morning’s physics test by logging into our online gradebook, I won’t. Like Levine, I stopped looking at his grades about a year ago, because daily monitoring of his performance made everyone miserable. Dinner time had become the place for all-caps conversations about grades that did nothing to help an already-stressed high-school junior. Between school, track practice, and homework, he routinely works 18-hour days, his weekends packed with SATs, track competitions, and term papers. We decided that home had to be a refuge from those pressures; he couldn’t handle angry parents on top of everything else.

By stepping away from the Big Brother of online gradebooks, my husband and I chose to prioritize learning and sanity—both his and ours—over grades. We were not interested in producing another “excellent sheep” or fracturing our family. So, I ask my son about once a week if he’s checked his grades and whether he’s doing okay, but that’s about it. I can see that he’s working hard and learning, and that’s good enough for me. Schools have to balance the demands of parents who want more data with parents who want less—and maybe a simple “opt out” button on these gradebooks could create a happy middle ground.

Now that we’re not arguing about grades during family meals, we’re talking about other things. We talk about the primary results and the policy differences between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. He and his dad talk about European soccer teams. We’re helping his little brother learn the names of all the countries in Europe. Because learning doesn’t just happen at school; it also happens at the dinner table.

SAN ANTONIO—A meaningful pre-kindergarten experience is increasingly seen as a critical part of a child’s education, and parents are expected to play a much more significant role. In this city, like many around the country, poorer families must first overcome powerful hurdles to be more present in their children’s education. That’s why Pre-K for San Antonio was designed to support and engage parents and extended families in ways that bolster their pre-schoolers’ chances to excel.

Raising the most diverse generation of Americans ever
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While students are taught by master teachers with advanced degrees in classrooms filled with the latest educational tools and technology, parents also receive specialized attention from trained professionals. Parent Specialists plan activities, provide support and guidance in parenting, encourage parents’ professional development, and generally foster in them the idea of active citizenship. A central part of their role is to identify areas in which Pre-K 4 SA can help families cross over from poverty and physical isolation in San Antonio, where urban sprawl and multiplying highways effectively section off the haves from the have-nots.

“We service a community that has historically been marginalized. We try to make this a welcome table of education,” Luti Vela-Gude said. “This creates a place of belonging for people. It used to be that people were connected with their families or churches, but the school is now playing that role. The parents feel like they belong here.” A licensed-professional counselor and former teacher, Vela-Gude is one of two family specialists at Pre-K 4 SA’s South Center.

One person who sees the families’ needs up close is Yvette Tercero, the school nurse at the center. It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday, and speaking to her makes it clear that her days are unpredictable and full. “I’m here at 7:15 a.m. because I have parents who want to drop off medication, tell me that their child had a fever but she’s good to go, and I have to tell them the child can’t stay in school,” she said. Somewhere between administering 22 daily medications every 30 minutes to children with ongoing conditions, seeing students for “small boo boos and scratches,” providing documentation for teachers, and occasionally calling EMS for more severe injuries, she has become the de facto community doctor for families at the center. “I juggle to keep everything balanced, and no two days are alike. There are days when it’s a total blur,” she said.

But there is method to the madness that sometimes engulfs this dedicated and caring nurse’s routine: Pre-K 4 SA has built and billed itself as a child-centered but family-focused early-childhood development and education effort, with an outsized emphasis on parents, the extended family and other caretakers. Now in its third year, Pre-K 4 SA is a pilot program started by former mayor and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro to provide full-time pre-k instruction for thousands of children in underserved neighborhoods. Considered a bold move by supporters and an overreach by detractors, the program was built on the recognition that less-advantaged families in the city would benefit from having their children attend full-day pre-k while also having access to services that could help them create a path out of poverty.

Ingraining a sense of belonging in children and parents, especially among this largely-Hispanic city, will likely have profound effects on San Antonio and Texas as both become increasingly diverse. By 2020, Latinos will be the majority among 25- to 44-year-old in Texas, the majority of 45- to 64-year-olds by 2030, and the majority of adults age 65 and older by 2050, according to joint report from the San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Intercultural Development Research Association at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Today, Latino children make up the majority of Texas children ages 0-17, and in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, of 350,000 students, 64 percent are “economically disadvantaged,” 73 percent are “Hispanic/Latino,” and 70 percent of those do not meet the third-grade state reading standards.

The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media has written that “Programs with a strong focus on literacy, full-day preschool, and summer programs are showing promise among Hispanic students.” Overall, and notwithstanding their tremendous population growth, Hispanic children are not faring well in education. Hechinger described them as “the least likely of all children to be enrolled in a preschool program,” concluding that “Hispanic children enrolled in state-funded pre-k programs still lag behind every other ethnic group.”

Each of the four Pre-K 4 SA centers has a parent café staffed with two specialists who plan hundreds of activities for parents each year, such as workshops, volunteer opportunities, outings in the city, creative parent-child events, and activities that welcome other family members. “We include the younger siblings. In turn, that buys them into the program. When those little siblings turn four, they’ll want their child to come here,” Lisa Harper, a parent specialist, said. This strategy seems to be working.

Stephanie Rivera said her son Jude, 4, has benefitted greatly from attending. “We love it here. He loves his teacher, and there are so many activities for them to do, and outside of school there’s a lot of stuff to do. It’s great,” Rivera said. She’s also already applying what Jude learns in school to her youngest child. “His brother’s only a year old. So we try to implement that at home: ‘Okay, what’s the problem and what’s the resolution?’” Rivera, who is a stay-at-home mom, also volunteers at the center, “which is good for me because I know what’s going on in the school, I feel like I’m helping, and I get to know the staff and the teachers a lot better.” Harper said that parent volunteers “own this place”—helping make flyers, decorating rooms for activities, setting up for book fairs and big events, doing whatever is asked.

Harper, a licensed social worker with 16 years of experience, enjoys her primary role of sparking parent-child engagement but said that she sometimes struggles to convince parents to prioritize their children’s education. “One of the barriers is family conflict, putting the child first, making them see how important it is to let their child attend school, letting them know that their child is attending an elite school,” she said. She recalled conversations over the phone and in person in which she simply asked a parent, “Did anyone ever call your house to find out why you missed school?” Most of the time the answer is no, so she uses that personal experience to draw a line of difference between the parents’ lives and their child’s. “Has anyone before come out to your house and asked why your child isn’t coming to school? Nine out of 10 times the answer is no,” she said. The conversation usually takes a positive turn, with Harper emphasizing how committed she and everyone at the center are, and the parent committing to not withdrawing the child or bringing him back after a prolonged absence. “Just knowing that we care, that their children come first” is enough for parents who themselves came of age lacking basic support structures, she said. To that end, all four Parent Cafes are equipped with computers, a color printer, comfortable furnishings and other materials that parents can use for job searches, college applications, and securing other services through the city and non-profits.

Tercero, now in her second year on the job, recognizes that a lot of the families are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. She recognizes that they often don’t have medical insurance, cannot take the time off for fear of losing their jobs, or simply lack knowledge about the severity of some ailments. In some instances, she intervenes more assertively, coordinating with one of the parent specialists to arrange for a home visit so the specialist can assess the situation at home and make recommendations or arrangements as needed. “Sometimes we may find ourselves in a situation in which we need clothing now, we need food now,” Vela-Gude said.

“A lot of times I’m the only health care provider they see that they have easy access to,” Tercero said. Parents will often bring a child in to see her for an assessment of mild to intermediate conditions; she may end up suggesting visiting a doctor or simply resting. Parents ask her about other children and family members while they’re there, too, even though she does not provide official referrals except for hearing follow-ups if students can’t pass the state-mandated annual screening done at the center. (During the school year, the Greater San Antonio Hispanic Dental Association offers a free dental screening for children.)

The families that participate in Pre-K 4 SA fall under the low-income category, with 90 percent of children eligible because they meet state qualifications based on income, their parents’ military status, being wards of state, their language proficiency, or other qualifiers. About 20 percent of children receive a scholarship, which means they are eligible but live in a district that does not participate in the program, and they pay on a sliding scale, with the lowest end paying about $3 per month and the higher end paying about $1,000, according to CEO Kathleen Bruck. The fee includes transportation from a community center or library, staying for the extended day, and lunch and a snack. To remain eligible for tuition assistance, administrators twice a year check that parents are still working full-time or are enrolled in school at least three days a week.

“You belong here” is the heartfelt message teachers, administrators, and support staff echo in their daily interactions with children and families who attend Pre-K for San Antonio. Teachers also organize two class outings per year and parents are encouraged to participate. Most of them feature cultural offerings in San Antonio outside of their neighborhoods, which is often the first time some families have encountered the richness of this historic city. In its second year, 93 percent of children had at least one family member participate in an activity, according to the 2015 annual report. “These outings make the parents and the teachers much closer,” Bruck said.

“We go on little field trips. We get to know each other, we get to know other parents.  We actually create a bond. All the events they have are awesome,” said Melissa Wash, whose daughter Gabrielle attends the center. “It’s family oriented, definitely. The kids need that growing up, especially in this community.”

The SAT has been called out of touch, instructionally irrelevant, and a contributor to the diversity gaps on college campuses because the test arguably benefits wealthier students who can afford heaps of test preparation.

But now the SAT is fighting back. The College Board, the test’s owner, is hoping that a major makeover of the assessment that’s set to debut this weekend will persuade critics that students, teachers, and colleges still need an exam that has been a centerpiece of the admissions landscape for 90 years.

“The SAT had gotten disconnected from the work of the American high school,” said David Coleman, president of the College Board, at recent seminar for education journalists, while citing a 2008 report. “And frankly we agree, so in our attempt to redesign the exam, we’ve tried to make it so that it looks a lot more like the work kids do in high school. It’s quite a simple idea.”

Many of the defining features of the SAT have been revamped. Obscure vocabulary, colloquially known as “SAT words,” has been cut from the new test. The guessing penalty of yore that took off a fraction of a point for producing the wrong answer also has been banished. The test has fewer questions, asks students to at times explain their answers, reduces the number of multiple-choice options from five to four, and will provide more time for fewer sections. And the essay, which became mandatory in 2005, is optional now, though many colleges still will require it.

“It’s not okay to tell someone to study something because it’s on a test. It’s only okay if they’ll use it again and again,” said Coleman. “Nothing you should do, we say to students today, should be to prepare just for the SAT.”

As the SAT strives to appeal to a wider student audience, the College Board has been more active in presenting it as an affordable and more relevant exam. Students who receive fee waivers to take the test are now automatically eligible for fee waivers to apply to four participating colleges of their choice—an average perk worth more than $150. A texting program run by the College Board nudges students to fill out important financial-aid forms. The College Board also mails students colorful guides to take advantage of public assistance for higher education.

And the College Board is arguing that the new SAT more accurately reflects what students learn in school, rebuffing criticism that acing the SAT requires mastering a separate curriculum through expensive test-prep services. Elite preparation centers can charge $1,000 an hour to coach students to score high on the exam. Entry-level prices for SAT practice through popular test-prep centers can start at $750—nearly a week’s pay for the median household income.

“If you’re wondering who should be worried about this new exam, I’ll be rather frank,” Coleman said. “Certainly not students. The changes we’ve made to this exam are welcoming to them. But it may be test-prep executives that are beginning to see a changing game.”

The College Board recently partnered with the online education nonprofit Khan Academy to train students on testing fundamentals and provide practice questions with detailed answers. Students can also download a free new SAT app to their smartphones and snap photos of their answers on paper-and-pencil practice tests that are then scored within a minute. Coleman says the answers can be sent to Khan Academy, which will provide feedback to help the student improve. The partnership has also generated a free training portal specifically for the redesigned SAT.

Some testing experts have pointed out that the new SAT is modeled around the Common Core standards adopted by more than 40 states. Before joining College Board, Coleman was seen as one of the architects of the common standards. But the link between the SAT and high-school learning standards extends beyond his connection to both.

The SAT in recent years has also become the main assessment used in some states to measure how much high-school students have learned. SAT’s chief competitor, the ACT, is also in the high-stakes test market. The ACT recently overtook the SAT as the most popular college-entrance test in the country, which some analysts believe animated the College Board to secure more state-testing contracts.

Where the College Board or ACT may see a natural alignment of testing and school curriculum, others see a grab for dollars. “Follow the money,” said Bob Schaeffer, the public-education director of FairTest, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. “This is a marketing war between two companies who have figured out correctly that it’s a lot more cost-efficient to sell tests to state education officials and use taxpayer money to pay for testing every kid in this state rather than signing up parents and kids one-on-one and having to process 1.8 million credit cards each year.”

Kenton Pauls, the director of higher-education partnerships at ACT, pushed back on the notion that his organization’s test doesn’t reflect what students learn in high school. He cited the ACT’s National Curriculum Survey that takes the pulse of where students are academically. Pauls said that the survey prompted the testing giant to change the structure of its essay on the ACT in 2015. “There are many ways in which there is alignment between the curriculum survey and the Common Core. There are some ways in which they are not” aligned, he said.

Schaeffer is also critical of the role testing plays in education and champions the push to remove college-entrance exams like the SAT and ACT from the college-application process. Backers of this effort argue that college-entrance tests favor the affluent and that to improve the economic and racial diversity at colleges, the tests should go. FairTest has calculated that more than 800 postsecondary institutions and 200 schools well-regarded by the rankings of U.S. News & World Report no longer require test scores as part of their application process, including top-50 colleges and universities like Brandeis University, Bowdoin College, Wake Forest, and Wesleyan.

While the test-optional movement is growing, there is some evidence that admissions officers still see value in the SAT and ACT exams. According to a 2011 survey of college admissions officers, scores on the SAT or ACT are almost as important a factor in determining whether students gain acceptance to a college as their grades.

But Schaeffer pointed to a 2008 report also by the National Association for College Admission Counseling that argued the SAT and ACT poorly reflect the concepts high-school students are being taught. He then touted a large study published in 2014 that reviewed college transcripts of 123,000 students from 33 colleges and concluded high-school GPAs were as strong a predictor of college success as SAT or ACT scores. The study warned that the SAT and ACT may prompt colleges to weed out low-scoring students with high grades while rewarding applicants with higher test scores.

The College Board’s chief data scientist on testing said at the seminar that neither grades nor test scores fully predict a student’s potential, but using both indicators gives colleges a much clearer snapshot of a student’s potential. “The message here is that using two is better than one,” said Kevin Sweeney, the vice president for psychometrics research at the College Board. “If you don’t, you’re throwing information away.”

Supporters of the use of standardized tests say that their value also lies in accounting for varying grading policies across the country’s thousands of school districts. “Where is the vigilance on grading?” asked Coleman. “Do you know that grades for all classes of students have surged in the last few years while test scores remain flat?”

There’s also dispute over whether test-optional admissions policies yield more low-income, black, Latino, and Native American students. Coleman says there’s no data to suggest test-optional schools are admitting a more diverse student body. Schaeffer countered that he spoke to admissions officials at Wake Forest University, Pitzer College, and Trinity College who said their student bodies are more diverse since going test-optional.

Whether tests will continue to influence the college-entrance shuffle is high on the minds of the nation’s leading colleges. Early in 2016, a coalition of more than 80 institutions of higher learning embraced a Harvard University report that called for a sea change in how students are admitted. Chief among the proposals? Make the SAT and ACT tests optional, or at least make the scores count a lot less.

This article appears courtesy of the Education Writers Association.

A faculty working group at the University of Houston recently offered these recommendations to professors preparing for Texas’s new campus-carry law, set to take effect August 1. The situation to which these recommendations are alluding—gun violence in response to controversial or otherwise difficult classroom discussions—is at this point only a hypothetical worst-case scenario. But critics of the legislation are still appalled: To abide by the law, and keep everyone safe in classrooms with armed students, faculty may ultimately have to resort to self-censorship.

Proponents of the legislation, which allows individuals with concealed-carry permits to possess firearms on public-university campuses, argue that fears surrounding campus carry are overblown. In the eight states that have already enacted such a law, none of the predicted nightmares have taken place—students drawing their weapons on professors who fail them, for example, or students firing on one another in heated classroom arguments. In fact, campus-carry supporters maintain that the law will keep the peace, enabling students and faculty to defend themselves effectively, and deter would-be shooters. So long as universities are gun-free zones, gun-rights advocates argue, they are well-advertised targets for prospective attackers.

But the potential benefits of the law are slight, and dubious at best. It turns out, for example, there were armed students at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on the day of its shooting last fall. Their presence did not deter the attack, nor did they halt it; the students wisely decided not to jump into the fray for fear it would compound the mayhem.

By contrast, campus carry’s potential for harm is quite real. Its principal threat is less than obvious, however; its impact may not be physically manifest at all. I’m counting its cost in terms of what is lost in the classroom—and it is a loss that may be deeply damaging to the country’s democracy.

This can be gleaned from the faculty concerns at the University of Houston. In short, they argued that guns in the classroom pose an intolerable threat to free speech. It’s unclear whether campus carry does and will in fact undermine the freedom of expression, but if there’s one place in society where the citizenry must not tolerate such threats, it’s the college classroom. The college classroom is meant to be a special space where all manner of ideas are aired, considered, and debated, and differences negotiated—through speech and argument—with no fear of violent recrimination, no fear of inciting angry students to draw their guns.

In my philosophy and politics classes, for example, I—like peers in my field—routinely broach contentious issues: topics such as structural racism, abortion, and gun rights (the most contentious of them all). Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views. It’s important to ensure that students feel free to explore their thoughts and express them—frankly—so they can experiment and develop. They must feel free to push their intellectual limits, and entertain lines of argument that are controversial, probably offensive to some.

It is a goal, an often elusive ideal, that the college classroom be that space where the circulation and contest of ideas are freewheeling and dynamic, as ideas are subjected to the close inspection of logic, and measured in the light of history and personal experience. This can—and many will say should—be a raucous affair on occasion.

invoked Stand Your Ground after he shot and killed an unarmed German exchange student trespassing in his garage. That same year, Cyle Quadlin killed an unarmed man with whom he argued in an Arizona Walmart; he drew his weapon when he felt he was losing the fight, and police accepted his plea of self-defense. These are just two of many similar controversies stemming from the law.

What does Stand Your Ground tell students soon to enter armed classrooms? It may tell them to be wary around those who are armed, or possibly armed, for fear of seeming threatening. Of course, no one knows precisely what is threatening to whom, which could mean the message is more open-ended, and potentially devastating: Curtail your behavior in general—rein it in; watch what you say, to whom, and how. In fact, it may even send the message that it’s best to approach and engage others as little as possible.

One University of Houston professor, Maria Gonzalez, expressed her concerns over campus carry in the context of her own classes, which cover Marxist and Queer Theory. In so doing, she invoked the added mission universities have to provide safe harbor for ideas that may be unpopular in society at large, ideas that are radical to some. This is a key reason why universities offer tenure to faculty: to protect academic freedom and defend against censorship. Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians. Universities play a key role in early discussions about expanding these rights: Radical ideas must be given a hearing, and require a space to be vetted and honed before emerging into the culture at large, and ultimately the political stage.

I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires. As Gonzalez suggests, classes devoted to highly controversial topics could be the most vulnerable in this respect. How many students are going to risk uncomfortable and potentially intrusive lines of inquiry about gender identity, for example, in conservative Texas—when some of their conservative peers may well be armed? Why even go there, if you are an instructor, and can’t hope to have a productive or illuminating conversation?

It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.

Alison Hanks-Sloan wanted to know how to keep her students from dropping out. A former English teacher for non-native speakers, she was working in the international students’ office at Prince George’s County Public Schools, a large suburban system in Maryland, right next to Washington, D.C. Just two-thirds of the county’s English language learners were graduating high school at all, let alone on time.

Immigrants make up one-third of the system’s 128,000 students. New students are arriving all the time, including, recently, about 500 who crossed unaccompanied into the U.S. from Mexico. They’re not only adjusting to a new country, but to family members they may never have met before and to being a student again.

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“You’ve been an adult on your own for a time, and suddenly you have all these rules,” notes Hanks-Sloan. Suburban school systems like Prince George’s were designed for a homogeneous, mainly middle-class population, but “many of our students come with trauma,” she says. “We knew we had to do something different.”

With a $3 million grant from the Carnegie Foundation, the district opened two high schools for recent immigrants last fall. Hanks-Sloan is now the principal of one of them, the International High School at Largo.

The schools belong to the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which started in the 1980s and now consists of 22 schools for recent immigrants in New York City, the Bay Area, and the Washington, D.C., region. Unlike traditional high schools that “track” students by skill level, the Internationals mix students who are totally new to English with students who are more proficient. There’s a focus on learning by experience instead of through lectures and memorization. The Internationals Network says its students outperform other English language learners at traditional high schools and are more likely to graduate.

Hanks-Sloan and Carlos Beato, the principal of the International High School at Langley Park, organized focus groups with immigrant families and students to understand what a school for them should look like. Both International High Schools have full-time social workers on staff. School starts and ends two hours later, reflecting research that teenagers perform better later in the day. One period each day is set aside for homework help or extracurricular activities that would otherwise happen after school, ranging from debate team to yoga.

The schools are only open to students currently taking ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes. But when they opened last fall, 270 students (out of 700 who were eligible) applied for 200 freshman seats. The result is “school[s] of choice,” says Hanks-Sloan. “Students realize that they’re valued and they have an opportunity to be successful. They get to be a part of a small school.”

caused some tension with Largo High and members of the area’s black community, who felt they were taking resources from other students. The county’s chapter of the NAACP publicly opposed the schools, arguing that they violated Brown v. Board of Education by creating separate schools for immigrants. There’s also a substantial body of research saying that students from disadvantaged backgrounds perform better in racially and socioeconomically mixed schools.

Students at Largo High were more open. Their lunch overlaps with International High’s, and when the International students walked into the shared cafeteria on the first day, “there was some heckling,” says Hanks-Sloan. “But by the second day, they walked in and there was applause.” Largo High students mentor their peers at International, and the two schools’ soccer teams scrimmage together.

While the International High Schools are getting immigrant students more engaged, it’s too soon to call it a success. They’re three years away from graduating any students, and Maryland’s gauntlet of standardized tests doesn’t begin until the spring. Natifia Mullings, a spokesperson for Prince George’s County Public Schools, notes that attendance is higher than for the countywide population of English language learners.

The biggest impact may be on students’ confidence. I met with four International High students, including Jessica, and asked them what they liked most about the school. They were confident, well-spoken, and optimistic about their futures.

“It’s a safe space,” said Jessica. “You feel comfortable here because they’re like you.”

“They’re not gonna judge you for your color,” adds Deyssi, who emigrated here from Honduras at 11 and hopes to be a lawyer.

“Or your race,” says Alex, who moved here from Nigeria when he was young and wants to be a pediatrician.

“Or your accent,” says Khadoum, who was born in Senegal.

This article appears courtesy of CityLab.

Last July, Eithan Osborne braved the waters of Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, considered a world-class surf spot, to compete in a high-profile amateur surf contest. The 15-year-old won, besting a local favorite. For the budding professional surfer—who is sponsored by major brands like Billabong and Monster Energy—it was a career highlight, inching him closer to his dream of one day joining the top 34 male surfers in the world on the World Surf League’s Men’s Championship Tour.

Osborne’s latest battle, though, isn’t in the ocean but in the classroom. Recently, he was forced to leave the public high school he has been attending in his hometown of Ventura, California, a coastal suburb north of Los Angeles. His often-grueling travel schedule requires him to miss class, sometimes for two or three weeks at a time, to fulfill sponsor obligations (like filming surf movies and participating in photo shoots), attend training camps, and compete in contests. It’s a romantic existence, traveling the world, living the itinerant, Endless Summer-inspired lifestyle. But while Osborne said he has been diligent with completing homework packets and communicating with teachers from the far-flung locales he travels to, over the course of the school year thus far, he has accumulated enough absences to be in violation of California law. The law mandates that students who are absent three times or more, for more than 30 minutes, without a valid excuse are considered truant. Students are considered “chronic truants” if they miss 10 percent or more of school days in one school year.

About a month shy of his 16th birthday, Osborne is soft-spoken and thoughtful, earning mostly As and Bs in his classes, according to him and his mother. He’s fluent in French. “I’m gone so much and that takes away from school. That’s probably the hardest part—trying to be at both places at once. But I want to graduate and just get a good education,” he said.

Michelle Yap / The Atlantic

The challenge of balancing school and sport, while not uncommon among talented athletes who jumpstart their careers at early ages, is particularly tricky for young surfers. To advance at the most elite level requires criss-crossing the globe to participate in contests and train throughout the year, not unlike in other sports, although some allow their athletes more options. (Skiers and snowboarders, for example, can attend accredited academies while pursuing their sports competitively.)

While amateur surfers are not required to attend every World Surf League (WSL) sanctioned event, they can sometimes be found jet-setting from surf spots in Australia to Tahiti to Hawaii, within a span of a few days. Securing—and keeping—sponsorship deals is crucial for competitive surfers of any level to help fund travel and contest fees. Athletes are also offered financial incentives for achieving various objectives, like increasing their social-media followings, and, not surprisingly, competing in and winning contests.

For young surfers, the pressure is multi-pronged: to rise in the ranks of a sport that has outgrown its counter-culture roots to be as competitive as other professional sports, yet is still not integrated in most school sports agendas like, say, football or volleyball are. For athletes like Osborne who want to continue traditional schooling, the pressure is also on them (and their parents) to find programs that wouldn’t restrict their ability to travel and compete while they are in or nearing their physical primes. It’s caused some to question whether surf should win out over school if it means limiting even talented young surfers’ abilities to have holistic school experiences—and potential back-up plans in case those pro pipe dreams don’t work out.

“Only a few really make it to the top level. I think it’s really important for kids to finish high school at least because you might not make it,” said Carissa Moore, a three-time WSL women’s world champion who counts Red Bull and Target among her sponsors. The women’s tour is half the size of the men’s with only 17 competitors.

Successfully completing a high-school education, then, is sometimes an exercise in trial-and-error. Take Osborne’s Billabong teammate Ryland Rubens, 16, who does a combination of participating in online courses and attending classes in-person at a San Diego charter school when he’s in town. Rubens and his family opted for this arrangement after trying homeschooling, an increasingly popular option among action-sports athletes; he only lasted a few days.

Osborne in his room (Michelle Yap / The Atlantic)

“I was just not into it. I really like working with a teacher. I definitely want to have a back-up plan. I definitely want to get a college degree,” said Rubens. The teen surfer has faced some peculiar challenges completing part of his schooling online, like when he traveled to Biarritz, a seaside town in the southwest of France, for a sponsored trip, only to battle hiccuping wi-fi for two weeks.

Which all may sound like a caseful of champagne problems. But it’s this decidedly anti-Spicoli attitude that motivated Moore to earn her high-school diploma from Punahou School in Honolulu, a private college-prep institution where President Obama and the golfer Michelle Wie also graduated. After qualifying for the Women’s Championship Tour at age 18 during the second semester of her senior year, Moore missed one of the tour’s stops to attend her graduation ceremony—a bold choice considering her then-fledgling rookie status. She would go on to win her first world championship a year later.

Now 23, and the current defending world champion, she looks back at her academic experience fondly. While she understands the motivation, Moore laments that the competitive nature of the sport has urged younger athletes to abandon more traditional schooling.

“Sometimes, home-schooling is better for a family. [It] does work for some people, but I do get sad seeing more and more of the younger generation not going to school because they think they need to give 100 percent of their time to surfing,” she said. “You don’t have to be in the water 24/7.”

Her fellow pro surfer Conner Coffin, 22, has a similar stance on academics, having managed to complete two years toward a college degree. After testing out of high school early, Coffin enrolled in his local community college, taking courses in philosophy, Spanish and biology, among others. He would ask his professors for classwork he could complete while away on a fabled “Indo boat trip,” or sojourn to surf remote island chains off the coast of Indonesia—an experience considered a zenith of wave wanderlust by recreational and pro surfers alike.

Unlike Moore, though, Coffin started homeschooling in the 7th grade, an experience he credits with allowing him to pursue his career.

“Everyone has the opportunity to be passionate about something and be really good at that, but the traditional school system doesn’t really feed that and allow [kids] to cultivate their passions and their interests and go for what they love to do,” said Coffin.

But he also sees the increasing pressure to start careers earlier. “It definitely seems like kids now are getting pushed younger and younger to start seriously pursuing a surf career, when they’re like 13.”

Careers that might never take off. “I see parents pulling their kids out [of traditional school] with the false hopes that their kid has this bright career in the sport when, really, they might not. They’re pulled out under false pretenses, and they’re missing out on that education and that whole school experience,” said Micah Byrne, a Billabong team manager and former pro surfer.

Coffin himself started being sponsored by Hurley, a Nike-owned brand, at age 11. For now, completing his degree is on the backburner; the Santa Barbara native makes his debut on the men’s pro tour this season.

The motivation to firm up an educational back-up plan is perhaps more pronounced among young female surfers. While the global surf industry is expected to grow to over $13 billion by 2017, women garner fewer endorsements and other career opportunities compared to their male counterparts, although, in a significant push by the WSL, the Women’s Championship Tour reached pay parity with the men’s in 2014.

“The guys have different ways of pursuing a surfing career, whether it’s charging big waves or free surfing. I think that’s part of the reason why the girls are a little more mindful of that kind of stuff,” said Mahina Maeda, 18, referring to the chatter she often hears among her fellow female surfers about completing their degrees. Maeda herself missed her high-school graduation ceremony last year when she earned a wildcard spot in a women’s pro contest in Fiji.

As for Osborne, he now plans to attend an alternative high school in the same district where he can pursue independent study, take a combination of high school and college courses, and be less obligated to be physically present on-campus. More importantly, he will still be able to graduate with peers from his old school, if he wants to.

“I hate that they have to choose,” said Osborne’s mother, Karine. “What if going pro doesn’t happen? I want him to have a way out, and I want him to understand that it’s not the only thing he can do.”

It’s not an unreasonable concern. Even at the professional level, surfing garners a small fraction of mainstream media coverage compared to other sports. The most high-profile surf story in recent memory arguably happened last year, when a great white shark attacked the former world champion Mick Fanning in the middle of a live broadcast, just days after and not far from where Osborne clinched his own junior title. Of course, this status could all change if surfing makes it into the Olympics, a hope for some surfers if only to further legitimize their sport and careers.

Osborne studying in his room (Michelle Yap / The Atlantic)

But until surf academies—or something like them—pop up, students like Osborne who want to attend traditional schools while juggling demanding careers are limited in their options.

“I’m super bummed about leaving school. Honestly, I’m surprised I’ve lasted this long. I knew I would have to choose between school and traveling, and I don’t want to give up traveling,” Osborne said. He likens his choice to surfing in a competition, where making the most out of less-than-favorable ocean conditions means changing up his strategy and adapting.

On his last full day on-campus, Osborne said goodbye to his teachers and friends; he leaves soon for a month-long training camp in Hawaii. His mom then drove him to the beach to surf and film with one of his sponsors.

“People think surfing, it’s just like we get to travel the world and screw around and surf waves. It’s not really like that. You’re putting your life into it,” he said.

“People will say, ‘You have the easiest job ever,’” said Coffin, who surfs with Osborne occasionally. “I will say it’s a really fun job, but there’s no easy part about it.” And for young surfers especially, it rings true both in and out of the water.