As we made our way down one of the city streets that bisect the Yale campus, cars zooming by, my daughter Mari swept her wide-eyed gaze across the grand Gothic cathedrals that are Yale’s residential colleges.

“I didn’t expect it to be so … fancy,” she said, her voice filled with wonder. She was six, and I knew “fancy” was her word for impressive, extravagant.

She’d heard about this place where I had spent four years of my life precisely 20 years earlier; she had been eagerly looking forward to attending the “reunion,” which was a new word for her. She knew we were going to school — but in her mind, schools didn’t look like this. Fascination began to seep in.

Vivid memories of that day came flooding back to me in the fall of 2017, when we dropped Mari off for her freshman year at Yale — 11 years after her first encounter. Her fascination had bloomed into excitement, into anxiety, into elation mixed surely with some fear.

I had my own surprises in store at the drop-off and in the four years that followed. What I discovered, what nobody had warned me about, was that having your child attend your alma mater can produce a powerful cocktail of emotions.

It blindsided me. Wait, are these tears in my eyes? It was more than the customary sadness of the college drop-off.

As our children get older and transition to lives outside our homes, we fight a constant state of anxiety — What are they doing right now? Are they happy? Are they safe? That’s especially true for Black parents like me. But I knew that over the next four years, I would have solid, reliable answers to those questions, almost as if she were walking around with a body cam. I knew this place, its hidden alleyways, its social centers, its sublime pockets of solitude tucked away in unlikely places.

As I drove away from campus that September, I felt my usual parenting anxiety subside just a bit. Instead of worry, my primary emotion was excitement for her. While she would be challenged, I also knew she would be surrounded by a vast array of resources that could help her discover new things about herself. Yale is good at that — opening eager young eyes, offering exhilarating new adventures.

But there are forces who want to deny parents like me the excitement derived from a profound shared experience with their children. Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon and the University of California system have dropped legacy admissions preferences. Colorado has banned them for its public universities; similar legislation has been introduced in Congress and in Virginia, New York and Connecticut. The federal Department of Education is investigating whether legacy preferences at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania constitute civil rights violations, and Yale president Peter Salovey said during a panel discussion last October that officials are deliberating the future of legacy admissions there.

After the Supreme Court’s decision last June dismantling affirmative action, this movement to end legacy admissions can be viewed as another blow to ambitious Black children — the ones whose parents were part of the first generation of nonwhites to matriculate at elite institutions in significant numbers. We finally made it in the door, and now they are seeking new ways to slam the door behind us.

Related: COLUMN: Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity

Yale’s legacy numbers have decreased slightly in recent years. Eleven percent of the class of 2027 are legacies; the numbers were 12 percent for the class of 2026 and 14 percent for the class of 2025. The overall acceptance rate for the class of 2027 was 4.35 percent, the lowest in recent history. Yale had 602 Black undergraduates on campus last fall, making up 8.8 percent of the 6,818 total undergraduates. By comparison, its proportion of white students was 32.3 percent; Asian students, 22.8 percent; and Hispanic students, 15.7 percent.

At the October discussion, President Salovey said that if legacy applicants were denied, they likely would be replaced by students whose parents simply went to different elite colleges. He added that the population of alumni children now applying to Yale is “far more diverse” than the populations of alumni children applying in the past.

As an alum who has been interviewing Yale applicants for more than three decades, as an interested observer, as a Yale parent, I’ve been watching this admissions system up close for decades. I know who will continue to benefit from it: the children of the wealthy and powerful — with or without legacy admissions.

I understand the desire to create a system that feels fair and inclusive. It’s a worthy goal. However, high-achieving children from low-income families rarely apply to selective schools like Yale. There’s even a term to describe their reluctance: undermatching. Studies show that low-income students are half as likely to pick a selective college as high-income students with similar grades and test scores. One major factor is the sticker shock of elite colleges’ tuition prices — though the overall cost to attend may be lower thanks to more generous financial aid packages.

And Black applicants are similarly rare at the most selective schools. In 36 years of interviewing applicants for Yale, seeing about four applicants per year, I can count the number of Black applicants I’ve interviewed on two hands — with a couple of fingers left over.

So, banning legacies will not transform the demographics of the applicant pool.

This feels like another case in which polite society wakes up and decides fairness should now be a priority and the system should be changed — just when my people have started benefiting from the system. In sheer numbers, if legacy admissions are banned along with affirmative action, I believe that Black people will suffer the most.

The onus will fall heavily on Black applicants to play a game of cat and mouse with the admissions officers — give them just enough info so they know your race; offer up just enough detail so they know a parent attended the school. And then hope for the best.

Related: College advisers vow to ‘kick the door open’ for Black and Hispanic students despite affirmative action ruling

What deeply concerns me is the way elite schools will prove they are now complying with the new law of the land: They will need to show that their number of Black students has decreased. Ugh. In future years, an applicant like my daughter — a Black legacy — will represent a flashing red warning light to the admissions office, like the “check engine” light on a car dashboard:

Tread carefully; danger ahead.

Trying to root out preferences for the wealthy in a society specifically designed for the advancement of the wealthy is disingenuous and unrealistic. We pay lip service to the goal of equity and fairness, but we know that the college admissions process will continue to send the wealthy and powerful to schools created to educate the wealthy and powerful so that they will continue to be wealthy and powerful. Ending legacies might make some folks feel better, but it’s unlikely to change this equation.

Nick Chiles, a New York Times bestselling author, is a writer in residence and professor at the University of Georgia. He is a member of the journalism advisory board of The Hechinger Report, which produced this essay.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article, a photo caption mistakenly stated that Yale had decided to cease preferences for legacy applicants. Captions on photos of Mari Chiles also incorrectly stated the year the photos were taken; it was 2017.

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

The post OPINION: Banning legacy admissions will deliver another blow to the children of Black alumni appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. — Standing in front of Ridgeview Charter Middle School in this Atlanta suburb, you can’t help but notice the opulence of the homes that surround it. Soaring turrets. Columned entrances. Lush lawns. These are folks who clearly have bitten off a sizable chunk of the American dream.

Inside the doors of the middle school, there’s a different American story playing out. With a student body that is nearly 70 percent Hispanic and black, and with slightly over half of its 1,100 students categorized as low-income, this is an institution that is not serving the homes around it. Most of the students at Ridgeview live in modest apartment complexes a few miles away. If they have school-age children, the residents of the ornate homes tend to send them to private schools outside the neighborhood.

In Sandy Springs, the public schools have had to confront a phenomenon that more and more suburbs around the country are facing, one long familiar to American cities: dwindling percentages of white students. At Ridgeview, as its share of white students decreased, its Hispanic population grew. Now Hispanic students make up nearly half the school; white students are about 30 percent; and black students, close to 20 percent.

The performance of minority students on standardized tests at Ridgeview historically has lagged behind that of white students, according to staff, who note that black and Hispanic students are much more likely to come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. On the latest statewide standardized test in reading, on a scale of 1 to 100 indicating level of proficiency, Hispanic students received a score of 42 and black students received a score of 60, while white students received the highest score of 100, for example. The same yawning gaps can be seen across the Fulton County School District, where Ridgeview is located, and on a national level.

Over the past decade, school officials in Fulton County, Georgia’s fourth-largest school district, have experimented with so-called personalized learning, tried integrating English language learners into mainstream classes, and introduced high school-level courses in middle school. But like many other districts around the country, officials here are now turning to a massive nonprofit college-readiness program to narrow the gaps. It’s called AVID, and its administrators say it’s reaching nearly 2 million students at more than 6,400 schools in 47 states.

AVID (which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination) is animated by a simple belief: Once children begin to see some success in school, their self-perceptions will shift so dramatically that they’ll commit to becoming stellar students — and this commitment will propel them through college. It is designed to expose students to organizational skills, peer support and leadership activities. AVID now has a $75 million annual budget and many years’ worth of independent studies and thousands of individual examples suggesting that it works.

A 2017 study by the Houston Independent School District, for example, found that students participating in AVID in 2015-16 enrolled in higher-level courses and received higher scores on AP exams and on standardized tests than those who did not. An independent study conducted in Washington state showed similar results. In Fulton County, where AVID is now in its fifth year, school leaders say it’s too early to see an impact in college-going rates but that AVID students are receiving better grades and are deciding to tackle challenging classes in high school.

“AVID has helped to transform the way the staff thinks about kids,” said Oliver Blackwell, who has been the principal at Ridgeview for three years. “For our teachers to sit around and passionately say that we have to believe that our kids can go to college is big, because that may not have always been the case. I know that sounds terrible when thinking of educators, but it’s true. Sometimes we can allow ourselves to be limited by stereotypes. I think that kind of change in thinking has happened at the school in recent years.”

Related: Nearly 750 charter schools are whiter than the nearby district schools

Such subconscious stereotyping is hardly unique to Ridgeview. Many middle-class white students arrive at school with “insider knowledge”— of how to pick classes, take tests and complete homework — that some of their less-advantaged peers lack, says Lea Hubbard, chair of the Department of Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego. Teachers pick up on that insider knowledge and reward it, she says, exacerbating the achievement gap.

AVID was designed to systematically help disadvantaged students compensate for their lack of insider knowledge. The program enrolls a subset of students in each of its schools — 200 at Ridgeview — in a special elective. The course uses positive reinforcements from teachers, peer support and a focus on “executive” skills (such as outlining, note-taking, and organizing) to give students a newborn confidence that they can be high achievers.

An essential tenet of AVID’s approach is that a successful student is an organized student. That’s especially true for students in the academic middle, the B and C kids, for whom AVID is most transformative, say teachers and administrators. “AVID gets those kids and really pushes them to where they can achieve at their full potential,” said Jessica Burgess, a seventh-grade English teacher at Ridgeview.

But AVID does have its critics. David Spring, a college professor in Washington state who helped to found an organization called Coalition to Protect Our Public Schools, questions AVID’s data. He said the program is just another in a long line of “charlatan, snake-oil” programs that have emerged over the last half century as “magic bullets” to close the performance gap between middle-class white students and low-income minority students.

“In those 50 years there has been only one program that has shown any validity at all in helping low-income and minority students: lowering class size,” said Spring, who wrote a book attacking programs like AVID called “Weapons of Mass Deception.” “[E]very dollar you put into AVID is a dollar you take away from lowering class sizes.”

Dennis Johnston, AVID’s chief research officer, said the program has many scientifically rigorous studies showing its positive impact and that it is not being adopted at the expense of lower class sizes.

Related: Most colleges enroll many students who aren’t prepared for higher education

Students who sign up for AVID quickly learn that the most important utensil in the AVID kitchen is the big white binder.

Vanessa Everhart, an eighth-grader at Ridgeview, snapped hers open on a recent afternoon to reveal a pile of papers — tutorial request forms, highlighted history readings, a daily calendar. Everhart proudly pointed out how neatly the voluminous stack was placed inside, organized with a three-hole punch.

The binder’s appearance was not just a sign of an eighth-grader’s fastidiousness. The papers — and the orderliness — are essential tools in AVID.

Teachers at AVID schools believe so much in the binder that they regularly take up precious minutes of class time for “binder checks.” Everhart said when she was in sixth grade, she had no sense of organization or the need to create a schedule for studying and tests. Because she would typically just stuff notes and assignments into random folders, “I would lose papers left and right.” Not anymore.

“The teachers do a shake test,” added eighth-grader Tai Freeman, peering over Vanessa’s shoulder. “Your binder is really organized if, when you shake it, nothing falls out. That’s a perfect binder.”

Related: Harvard law grad helps low-income students aim high

AVID was founded nearly four decades ago by an English teacher in San Diego, Mary Catherine Swanson. When the city was placed under court order to integrate its school system in 1977, Swanson realized that the number of black and Hispanic students at her institution, Clairemont High School, would rise overnight from 8 to about 500. After visiting the high school many of these students were coming from, and observing that most of their instruction was remedial, Swanson knew they would struggle at Clairemont. She decided to take pre-emptive measures.

“I asked kids if they would be willing to go into hard classes if I helped them do well there,” Swanson said. “And if they said ‘Yes,’ I took them. It was as easy as that.”

Swanson had been inspired by research out of the University of California, Berkeley on the role of peer group support in getting students of color to push and pull each other to academic success. She crafted the AVID program based loosely on that model, with the cohort of kids in the elective giving each other helpful nudges. Soon the standardized test scores of the school’s minority students began to soar, and Swanson’s program began to get attention outside of Clairemont.

Los Angeles Unified School District (64 AVID schools), Hillsborough, Florida (94) and Northside, Texas (77) are some of the largest adopters, according to AVID officials; it is also being used as far away as Australia and in U.S. Department of Defense schools around the world.

Once a district signs on, it pays for a team of educators — typically teachers and school administrators — to attend a three-day training. When the educators return to their buildings, they recruit a core group of students they think will benefit most. Those students sign a contract, pledging to pass all their classes and maintain satisfactory “citizenship” and attendance. They also commit to participating in extracurriculars and to presenting themselves as leaders “by demonstrating responsibility and respect.”

Each participating district assigns an employee to oversee the program’s implementation. The idea is that once schools have sent a critical mass of their teachers to the AVID trainings, the program’s philosophy will permeate the school and reach students who aren’t in the elective.

Leaders in suburban districts with fast-changing demographics like Sandy Springs say the program has helped elevate the leadership of minority students in their schools, altering perceptions of these students among teachers and classmates.

“AVID students have a level of citizenship they have to demonstrate in a way that helps other kids who may have bias and stereotype around kids of color. That actually helps shift the entire school culture in a positive way,” said Libby Miller, a district official overseeing the implementation of AVID in North Clackamas, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, that has a black and Hispanic population of about 20 percent (roughly 30 percent higher than it was 12 years ago and six times what it was 20 years ago). “They are seen as leaders and college-going, where maybe the stereotype wasn’t that way before.”

Related: Out of poverty, into the middle class

In the AVID elective at Ridgeview on a recent afternoon, teacher Jessica Burgess was using worksheets to hammer home proper comma usage with her seventh-graders. The students, divided into four groups, exchanged papers and corrected each other’s work while Burgess and an assistant teacher roamed the room to answer questions.

“Teaching coordinating conjunctions to seventh-graders is a nightmare,” she said, pausing in a corner as she observed the groups. An oversized copy of the AVID student contract hung on the wall behind her.

Using a method she learned from AVID, Burgess has taught the students how to revise and correct their own work. “That puts it on them, not on me,” she said.

At Ridgeview, where nearly 60 of the school’s 88 teachers have been trained by AVID, the concepts are being used throughout the school, according to Principal Blackwell. Ridgeview’s students feed into nearby Riverwood International Charter high school, which also runs the AVID program. A total of 27 schools (out of 106 in Fulton County) are using AVID.

Ridgeview students are old enough to notice the big fancy houses around the school — and the fact that kids in those houses rarely attend their school.

“I don’t understand why people think this isn’t a good school,” said Vanessa Everhart.

“We have good classes, good courses, good teachers …”

Her voice trailed off.

Anita Jackson, an eighth-grade math teacher, has seen the school’s radical transformation in the 26 years she’s been at Ridgeview — from overwhelmingly white to, in the last decade, majority students of color.

“I’ve seen people leave because of fear of the unknown,” she said. “And [neighborhood residents] keep building the mega mansions around here, while our children who live in the apartment complexes are struggling to pay the rent.”

Added Principal Blackwell, “But AVID absolutely changes the way they look at themselves.”

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

The post This program is helping fast-diversifying suburban schools promote success for all students appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

REVERE, Mass. — Most days in Nancy Barile’s English course at Revere High School, a visitor might begin to wonder when the real class is going to start. Discussions focus on plot points, character development, and persuasive writing, yes, but the text at their center isn’t Hamlet or Catcher in the Rye. It’s the television series The Walking Dead.

Three years ago a student who wasn’t completing his work dared Barile to watch the zombie show, saying he’d study if she did. Another teacher might have balked, but Barile had helped organize a punk rock scene growing up in Philadelphia and brings that “why not try it?” ethos to her teaching. She watched the series and then built an entire curriculum around it (content rated TV-MA means the course is only open to juniors and seniors). “The show has everything — sociology, psychology, interpersonal relations, ethics,” says Barile, who is in her 24th year of teaching. “We watch the show and dissect it.”

In class, students study all the familiar concepts of high school English, but they’re applying these concepts to a work they care about passionately. Through the lessons, they also have greater control over the pace and content of their curriculum. Barile says students who take the class are more engaged and show more improvement in their writing. The juniors are more likely to sign up for AP English as seniors than students who take other classes.

Barile’s class is a prime example of how Revere High School uses “student-centered learning” to reach a highly diverse student body. Under this approach, lessons are structured around the interests and needs of students, not box-checking convenience for teachers and administrators.

Students learn at different paces and via different teaching styles, the thinking goes. Give them more control over the manner in which they’re taught and how their work is assessed and you’ll produce more involved, successful students. In history, students might pick historical characters and analyze major events of their era from the character’s perspective. Math students might flip the class, watching videos explaining the concept beforehand, then use the teacher as a coach during class time — if they need help.

Related: Putting students in charge to close the achievement gap

Revere’s school district is one of the leaders in Massachusetts in advancing student-centered learning, which is surprising on multiple levels. It’s an approach associated with affluent private schools — free from state curricula and testing mandates. But Revere is a working-class city just north of Boston Logan International Airport, best known for having the oldest public beach in the country. About 80 percent of the high school’s 1,900 students come from low-income households, district officials say. Many are recent immigrants — 32 different languages were represented in the student body last year — whose English skills may be limited at best (about 19 percent are categorized as English language learners).

Also, Massachusetts public schools have been relatively slow to adopt student-centered learning, perhaps in part because traditional teaching approaches seem to work so well here—last year the state’s averages topped the National As sessment of Educational Progress test scores in reading and math. Other states, such as Virginia, which has tried to limit standardized testing and replace it with locally designed ways of measure ing student achievement, are much further along in adopting student-centered learning principles in the public schools, says Rebecca E. Wolfe, associate vice president of Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based nonprofit that helps educators and school districts adopt student-centered learning.

Revere High’s move to student-centered learning started when Lourenco Garcia became its principal in 2010. Garcia, who held the role until this summer, was concerned that so many students seemed unable to connect with their teachers or the material. This was reflected in the school’s standardized test scores, particularly those of minority students. Only 50 percent of its black students and 63 percent of its Hispanic students had achieved proficient or advanced scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System statewide English test in 2009.

Garcia, who had taught for 16 years in Brockton before becoming a high school principal in Rhode Island, researched student-centered learning and felt the techniques could provide an antidote to a form of torture found too frequently in schools: boredom.

He thinks the approach is especially potent for immigrant students, who often feel disempowered as they adapt to a new country. Garcia himself came to the United States 22 years ago from the island nation of Cape Verde.

Finally, the approach breaks from traditional classrooms where students are expected to sit and listen. “That’s the old factory model, where you were a passive learner,” he says. “This approach is dynamic. It motivates kids and brings a lot of enthusiasm into the classroom.”

After Garcia implemented student-centered learning at Revere High, proficient or advancescores on the MCAS for English jumped; in 2017, 82 percent of black students and 77 percent of Hispanic students achieved them. Gains were just as dramatic in math and science. The school’s four-year adjusted graduation rate rose from 71.5 percent in 2009 to 87.9 percent in 2017.

For a district with Revere’s demographics, this sort of performance drew national attention. In 2014, the high school was chosen as the top urban high school in America by the National Center for Urban School Transformation. Educators from as far away as Ohio, Texas, and California — and as nearby as Harvard University — flocked to the oceanside town to see the method in action. Candice Hazelwood, an educational consultant who was part of a group of Ohio educators that visited Revere in 2017, says “they have taken giving the students a voice to another level.”

Related: Is the new education reform hiding in plain sight?

It’s hard to hear above the two dozen students in Charles Willis’s class The History of Revere, which looks at how the community, first settled in the 1630s, has changed over time. The students have separated into groups to discuss oral history interviews they had conducted at a local senior center, an assignment they largely designed themselves as a way to get real-life examples of the city’s evolution.

Students have a say in how the classroom experience is structured, as well. They sit alongside teachers on some of Revere High’s 12 school improvement teams that focus on different aspects of student-centered learning, such as how students demonstrate proficiency, or how to extend learning beyond classroom walls. The teams sign off on all major changes at the school, meaning little goes forward without teacher buy-in.

The flip side of Garcia’s allowing teachers and students more creativity was requiring more accountability. In a school setting, that translated to more scrutiny. Garcia set a rule that he and his senior staff observe at least two teachers every single day. They fan out across the school, slipping into classrooms and watching what the teachers do, and how students respond, then write up an observation report within three days.

Garcia, 55, has an inclusive leadership style, and is known for working hard to connect with students. He plays a little game he calls “Where in the world is this student from?” On a spring day last school year, he spots a young man in the school cafeteria wearing a green sweatshirt and preparing to inhale a sandwich. Garcia walks over and asks, in perfect Portuguese, “Voce e do Brasil?” (“Are you from Brazil?”)

A smile creases the teen’s smooth face as he nods. Garcia smiles back. When he immigrated at the urging of family members who were already here, Garcia knew only a few words of English.

But he’s good with languages—he speaks seven (Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, and Cape Verdean Creole). He also knows how hard it is to make it as an immigrant.

He did odd jobs — bagging groceries, working in a laundromat — to support his family while he attended college, on his way to a job as a social studies teacher in Brockton.

Related: A Spanish-English high school proves learning in two languages can boost graduation rates

Garcia believes principals and teachers don’t have to have his experience as an immigrant and a minority to make student-centered learning work in schools with significant percentages of both. He was the only minority in a leadership role at Revere High, for instance.

Revere, along with a handful of other Massachusetts school districts, is trying to spread this style of learning. Three years ago, Revere was among six school districts — the others were Attleboro, Boston, Lowell, Somerville, and Winchester — to start the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment to advance personalized learning and student assessment.

So far, the consortium has trained teachers in 40 schools to swap multiple-choice tests for more creative ways of evaluating students, such as podcast production, narrative writing assignments, and architectural design projects. (The Revere school district received a grant for its work from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, also one of The Hechinger Report’s donors.)

Somerville aims to make student-centered learning apply not just to the academic but also to the physical, social, and emotional well-being of students, says Mary Skipper, superintendent of Somerville’s schools. The district is now renovating Somerville High School to introduce flexible classrooms conducive to collaborative work, one way to reduce the time students spend listening to a teacher lecture. “The ultimate goal is to have projects that incorporate things that motivate students, that they like, and from that be able to teach a variety of standards,” Skipper says.

While student-centered learning has shown promise for schools with high numbers of low-income students, including four Northern California high schools studied by Stanford, the approach has yet to be tried on a large scale.

Related: Extending school far beyond the classroom walls

But Revere has found that progress isn’t always steady, and it doesn’t work with every student. Recently, an influx of immigrant students with little formal education affected Revere High’s performance on some state measures, hitting pause on the school’s climb on state rankings during Garcia’s tenure. The high school dropped from a Level 1 school in 2015 to a Level 3 school in 2017 on the state report card, which looks at standardized test scores. The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced last December that it would no longer use the 1-5 levels to rate schools, moving away from relying so heavily on standardized tests to label schools. That decision, too, is part of the accelerating shift away from top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches to education.

“Assessment drives what gets taught and how it’s taught,” says Dan French, executive director of the Center for Collaborative Education, a Boston group that’s working with the student-centered learning consortium. “If students are focused on rote memorization to pass a state test, they will not be prepared for the higher-level thinking required in college and increasingly in careers.”

French says employers increasingly complain that graduates come to them unable to perform tasks needed to help their businesses thrive, such as analyzing and synthesizing data and collaborating with teammates. In effect, the focus on standardized tests winds up harming business productivity and the national and local economies. French says the desired skills are much more likely to be developed in a student-centered learning environment.

Samantha Karl, who graduated from Revere High School in 2017, says she and her classmates appreciated the school’s approach because it allowed them to move at their own pace. “For someone like me who likes to move a little faster, if I understood something I wouldn’t have to spend class listening to the teacher going over something I already understand,” says Karl. She says even the class clowns “started showing up to class prepared.”

Karl, now a sophomore at Boston College, thinks learning to work on her own prepared her for college in a way that she might not have experienced in a more traditional system. Revere is moving to spread student-centered learning across its 11 schools. This past summer, Garcia was promoted to executive director of data and accountability for the entire Revere district. Part of his job will be evangelizing for student-centered learning.

Revere’s superintendent, Dianne Kelly, says she created the position for Garcia because of his ability to identify struggling students and develop creative strategies to help them. John Perella, a Revere native and an assistant principal at the high school (before Garcia’s arrival) who spent the past seven years as principal of Medford High School, was named to replace Garcia. Perella says student-centered learning will continue to be a big part of the high school experience. “The future of education is based on these types of ideas where we engage students differently, we look at them less as a recipient of knowledge than as an integral part of the learning process,” he says.

That’s welcome news at Revere High, where teachers warmly embraced Garcia’s laser focus on student and teacher needs. According to June Krinsky-Rudder, who has taught art at Revere for 17 years, Garcia would approve art projects that she admits sounded a little “crazy.” After a tornado hit the area in the summer of 2014, she assigned her students to create installations based on their impressions of the tornado. Some of the nine works were big and bold, such as a sculpture of a person breaking through glass and one of junk hanging from a tree.

Not only did Garcia let her put on an art show, he personally called parents to ask them to attend—using whatever language he needed to communicate with them.

Garcia says he’s thrilled to have the opportunity to bring this kind of attention to detail to administrators across the district — with the hope that it will trickle down to students, ultimately keeping them at the center of everything he does.

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

The post Teaching to the student, not the test appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

QUEENS, N.Y. — When Ismelda Mejia, 16, a junior at a large public high school in the Bronx, was invited to the principal’s office earlier this fall along with nine of her classmates, she was thrilled to discover the reason why. Her GPA placed her among the top 10 students in her class. In fact, Mejia was number three. 

But after the principal and college counselor praised the students for their academic achievements, the rest of the message fell flat.

The administrators presented the students with what Mejia considered a surprisingly narrow set of options: They could attend one of the city or state’s public colleges, known as the CUNYs (City University of New York) and SUNYs (State University of New York), or they could find a job. 

“‘You guys have really high grades, so we expect you to be able to at least go to a SUNY,’” Mejia recalls staff telling the group. ‘“But if not, here’s a list of things you can do without having to go to college.’”  

Mejia, a student with Ivy League aspirations — she has her sights focused on Brown — was appalled. Although her Dominican-born mother did not attend college, Mejia plans to become a lawyer and specialize in representing children who’ve been abused. Three years ago, at the start of high school, she took a big step toward realizing that ambition by enrolling in a Queens-based afterschool program, Legal Outreach, that encourages low-income students to attend the nation’s top schools — and prepares them to thrive once they get there. 

Conventional wisdom among guidance counselors holds that students from high-poverty high schools may struggle at the nation’s elite colleges, so placing them in less competitive environments will give them a chance. A 2012 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that most high-achieving low-income students don’t apply to any competitive colleges. A separate study of 30 million college students from 1999 to 2013 revealed that while the number of children from low-income families attending four-year institutions rose rapidly during the 2000s, the share of low-income students at selective colleges barely budged. This was despite efforts by schools such as those in the Ivy League to modify their tuition policies specifically to draw more low-income students to their campuses.   

James O’Neal, founder of Legal Outreach, has dedicated the last 35 years of his career to challenging the kind of thinking that he believes holds low-income students back.  

Related: Rural schools join forces to make college the rule rather than the exception 

Started with the goal of getting students motivated to perform in school by sparking an interest in a legal career, the organization has evolved into a broader college prep program that offers writing courses, mentoring constitutional law debates, summer internships with blue-chip New York law firms, SAT prep, sessions to help students apply to college, a philosophy course taught by a college professor and workshops to help students and their parents prepare for college life. Students are recommended for the program by their teachers and must come from families that earn below a certain income threshold to qualify. Legal Outreach offers an opportunity to build the critical thinking skills and self-confidence its students’ wealthier peers often accrue naturally. Through its College Bound program, summer legal institute and parent workshops, the organization serves about 400 students and 70 families each year. 

Once they get to college, Legal Outreach graduates tend to do very well. Nationally, only 18 percent of high school graduates from high-poverty schools achieve a four-year college degree, compared to 52 percent of graduates from more affluent schools, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. By contrast, roughly 79 percent of recent Legal Outreach alumni graduated college within four years, and 93 percent finished in six. Approximately 78 percent of the program’s graduates last year attended colleges considered “highly” or “very” selective. Those schools included Yale, Cornell, Columbia, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Syracuse, Georgetown, Swarthmore and Morehouse. 

“The opportunities at that level are very different than what you are going to get at a local community college,” said Bethsheba Cooper, co-director of Legal Outreach, who has worked alongside O’Neal for 34 years. “You’re talking about learning from people who are the best in the game. There’s an education happening outside the classroom with people our kids otherwise wouldn’t come into contact with.” 

Just weeks after finishing Harvard Law School, in 1982, O’Neal found his way to New York. Instead of grabbing the cash that was being proffered by the nation’s top law firms, he decided his future lay in making change, not money. He had no training as a teacher, but he persuaded a high school principal to allow him to teach a law elective. O’Neal was convinced that if he could just get students excited about the law, they would find the motivation to propel themselves all the way to law school, a path he felt could transform the economic fortunes of entire families. 

Standing in front of a classroom of 11th- and 12th-graders at the high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, O’Neal had a startling revelation. Some of the students who sat before him were just as skilled as his Harvard classmates at dissecting an argument.  

Related: The community college ‘segregation machine’ 

“They came up with fascinating arguments to support whatever side they were on,” he recalled. “For a second I thought, had some of these kids gone to law school and just not told me?” 

But with his revelation in that Bed-Stuy classroom came a bracing splash of cold reality: The students might possess nimble minds, but they lacked the basic skills to surmount the educational challenges that awaited them on the way to a law degree. 

“Even though so many were good thinkers, they hadn’t acquired the ability to express themselves in standard English, orally or in writing,” he said. “The public education system had failed these kids.” 

O’Neal knew he had to find a way to reach students before it was too late. So he decided to go back to middle school. “As long as you’re able to get serious starting the ninth grade year, good things can happen for you,” he said. 

O’Neal started a program to introduce eighth graders to legal issues common in their communities — police use of force, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect. He also started a mock trial competition — and began to hire staff for the expanding program. With the mock trials, O’Neal saw students surprise even themselves when they realized they could stand in front of a room full of people and present a cogent argument.  

But he and his staff soon realized they still weren’t doing enough. He would come across students who’d impressed him as eighth graders and discover they were floundering in high school. They felt lost in schools with thousands of kids, where they received little attention and support from staff.  

Related: An urban charter school achieves a fivefold increase in the percentage of its black and Latino graduates who major in STEM 

“I was operating under the assumption that what they needed was motivation at an early enough stage to discipline themselves and apply themselves toward their dreams,” he said. “But that was naïve.” 

So with no real funding to support it, in 1989 O’Neal opened an afterschool study center for high schoolers in Harlem, starting with just eight students. These kids were taught study skills and received help with their homework.  

Each year, O’Neal — now joined by Cooper — began systematically adding new elements to the program, and bringing the program to more students. Early on, Saturday writing classes were born. (Nick Chiles, the author of this piece, served as a writing instructor in the program from 1994 to 2004.) But a year-long, once-a-week class wasn’t enough. Students needed writing instruction all four years of high school, with the first year devoted exclusively to grammar, so those elements were added, too. Next came the summer law internships at top law firms, then the mentoring program, and the constitutional law debates.  

Carol Van Atten, vice president of the Charles Hayden Foundation, which focuses on at-risk children in the Northeast, said she’s impressed by O’Neal’s willingness to experiment. “Some things have worked, some things haven’t. He doesn’t worry about what the funder thinks,” said Van Atten, whose fund has given Legal Outreach $1.7 million over the past two decades. “He’ll just say, ‘We thought it was going to work, but it didn’t.’ Then he comes to me again and again and says, ‘I want to try this over the summer.’ I’ll say, ‘Go ahead’.” 

Today, Legal Outreach operates with an annual budget of $2.3 million, about $5,764 per participant. There are 17 full-time staff members and 60 part-time. While many groups offer one or two programs similar to those on Legal Outreach’s docket — such as mentoring or SAT prep or summer internships — few take such a holistic approach. 

“They’re providing the kind of support that’s just not out there, that’s only provided by a handful of programs,” says Danielle Pulliam, a program officer with the Pinkerton Foundation, which has supported the group since 1996. “James O’Neal has found the secret sauce in terms of what’s needed: consistent caring adults in a young person’s life, but also letting them see what’s possible by having high standards.” 

Sixty-eight percent of Legal Outreach graduates finished college with GPAs of 3.0 or higher, according to a recent report, with 21 percent at or above 3.5. And many do pursue legal careers — 10 percent of participants who graduated college are pursuing or have obtained a J.D. 

“A lot of organizations out there are helping kids get to college, but when you look at the percentages of those who get through college, it’s abysmal,” said O’Neal, now 60. “You have to ask yourself ‘Why?’ Part of that has to do with finances; I certainly understand that. But it also has to do with people not being prepared for it.”  

O’Neal has been pressured by funders and other educators to expand, but he’s been wary of sacrificing quality for size — especially given how unreliable funding can be. The program gets about 60 percent of its money from foundations and the rest from individuals.  

But O’Neal did help a group in New Jersey start the NJ Legal Education Empowerment Program, a nonprofit affiliated with Seton Hall Law School that uses Legal Outreach’s model. It celebrated its 10th anniversary this year and has graduated more than 140 students to date. 

In 2008, after decades bouncing around to whatever Harlem school would give the group space, Legal Outreach raised enough money to complete a $3 million renovation of a former leather factory in Long Island City. Inside the refurbished building, a modern, spacious three-story space, earnest students are scattered about, their expressions purposeful — but they are quick to laugh and smile as well. They look comfortable, at home, like they know they are in a space where people care about them. Of course, they are not free of adolescent angst — but at Legal Outreach that angst is more about grades and SATs than Instagram and BFFs. 

Some students return to work for the program after college and graduate school. Darrius Moore, a 25-year-old Legal Outreach alum, took a job as an academic advisor with the program after graduating from Franklin and Marshall College, in Pennsylvania. Though his degree is in social work, Moore said his summer internship at a prominent Manhattan law firm paid dividends in college. 

“It gives you the opportunity to see what corporate America is like, how a law firm operates, which is a profession that is foreign to most of us,” he said. “It encourages you to think, ‘I can exist in this world.’ So when you get to college, you say to yourself, ‘Okay, I have interacted with this demographic of people before. I can compete.’” 

Cooper said that her students’ strong writing and oral communication skills help boost their self-confidence and dispel misconceptions about their abilities. As an example of this, Cooper tells a story about an alumna who went before the college dean after getting into a physical altercation with her roommate and surprised him with her use of logic and reasoning. “Her mother called us back and said, ‘Those constitutional law debates really helped. The dean pulled me over and said, I don’t know how she learned how to do that.’ She presented such a strong, cogent argument that she stayed in school and the other girl was kicked out.” 

Of all Legal Outreach’s programs, Cooper said she believes the transition-to-college workshop deserves the most credit for helping students finish college. It covers academic as well as social issues — the meaning of consent, how to respond to racial micro-aggressions, proper ways of interacting with professors, handling roommate conflicts and what to do if financial aid falls through. Cooper peruses The Chronicle of Higher Education for real-life case studies to present to students. 

“For our kids, going to college is as different as going to another country,” Cooper said. “Knowing what’s coming and having tools to deal with it allows them to navigate in this new world.” 

Mejia said she’s grateful that Legal Outreach has pushed her to excel. “The kids I go to school with don’t necessarily try, aren’t the most motivated kids,” she said. Three years at Legal Outreach has changed her outlook, she added.  

She expects to soon earn a place as the second-ranked student in her class, overtaking the girl who currently holds that spot. “If not for Legal Outreach, I wouldn’t have had any idea of what my options are,” she said. “I would have taken that list my school gave us and told my mom, ‘Hey, I don’t have to go to college. I can just work.’” 

This story about poor students 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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That question may be even more acute for black and Latino students, whose track record of success is decidedly mixed at many institutions — particularly in areas like math and science. In addition, blacks and Latinos have been getting further behind whites and Asian-Americans when it comes to earning bachelor’s degrees, a recent report found.

But perhaps students should be asking the inverse question: Is the University of X good enough for me?

With declining enrollments and the nation’s desperate need for more skilled workers, colleges should be making sure they are as welcoming and supportive as possible to all students, including blacks and Latinos, according to nearly a dozen experts interviewed by The Hechinger Report.

Schools that aren’t making such efforts are going to be less successful and will lag behind their peers in the performance of black and Latino students, many academics say.

The scholars do, however, suggest potential solutions to make higher education far more inclusive.

Here are five steps every college in the country should be taking to help every student succeed:

1. View student failure as a problem with the institution, not the student.

Charles Fisher, professor of biology and associate dean for graduate education at Penn State University, says professors in STEM classes traditionally view themselves as gatekeepers, choosing the elite students who deserve to be scientists, engineers or doctors — and discarding everybody else.

Related: Even when graduation rates rise, black students at many colleges get left behind

“But Penn State and other schools are diligently changing that,” says Fisher, who also directs the Millennium Scholars Program, aimed at bringing more black and Latino students into the sciences. “Now we tell faculty, ‘When you look out at your classroom of students, you should see 100 students carefully selected to succeed at this university. If those 100 students don’t succeed, you’re failing them. What are you doing wrong that those students can’t learn the material you’re here to teach?’ There is a national effort at any university worth its salt to change that paradigm, to get rid of those dinosaurs from those introductory classes — or reeducate them.”

2. Encourage students to study together and to support each other.

More than 40 years ago, almost by accident, Uri Treisman became a pioneer in leading black and Latino students to academic success in math and science with a program he started at the University of California-Berkeley. While a graduate student working on his dissertation in mathematics in 1974, Treisman investigated why so many black undergraduates were failing calculus while Chinese students were thriving — even though the black students were working just as hard or harder.

After months of research, Treisman and his team found the answer: The Chinese students were working together in groups, in which they could help and bolster each other, while the black students were all working in isolation. Treisman got permission from Berkeley to create what would eventually become the Emerging Scholars program, structuring it so that black and Latino students would learn to work together in groups.

The results were dramatic: The black and Latino students began to outperform the white and Asian students in their classes. Many of the black and Latino students went on to earn Ph.D.s and become distinguished scientists, engineers and physicians.

Related: College graduation rates rise, but racial gaps persist

Over the next four decades, Treisman’s group model became one of the fundamentals for leading black and Latino students to higher education success in STEM. In 1992, Treisman received one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants, recognizing his transformational work; in 1999, Black Issues in Higher Education magazine named him one of the 20th century’s outstanding leaders in higher education.

Treisman had his students not only study together but sit together in the front of their classrooms and ask plenty of questions so that their performance would be noticed by startled professors not used to such behavior from black and Latino students. The students became transformed when they realized they could perform just as well as the Asian students — a finding Treisman says is consistent with research done by social psychologist Claude Steele.

In numerous studies detailed in his book “Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do,” Steele showed that when individuals are confronted with a test or situation in which they are in danger of confirming a stereotype about their group, their performance plummets. He called this phenomenon the “stereotype threat.”

Steele’s research has enormous implications for black students at predominantly white schools, where on an almost daily basis they are in situations in which they must confront the historical stereotype of blacks as less intelligent. Among the ways that this stereotype threat can be reduced, according to Steele, is for black students to socialize and have personal discussions with students from other racial groups so they begin to see that these students are dealing with many of the same challenges on campus.

3. Make the success of black and Latino students a campus-wide priority, instead of relegating the issue to a small, isolated office.

Treisman is now a professor of mathematics and of public affairs at The University of Texas at Austin and founder and executive director of the University’s Charles A. Dana Center, which works with institutions across the country to create successful environments for students of color. He says universities can no longer get away with isolated programs to deal with the issue of racial achievement gaps; reforms must be campus-wide and embraced by all faculty members in order for black and Latino students to truly thrive. Schools must also move away from forcing students of color into remedial programs.

“Those students need to learn how to navigate the boundaries of the different social worlds that make up higher education,” says Treisman, who used his experiences at Berkeley to create the Dana Center. “They have to learn how to try on the identities of the professions, to feel that they own them and have the right to play with them. This is in opposition to remedial programs, which lead people to think of themselves as outsiders. With remedial programs, they learn math as a compliance activity.”

Based largely on the success he has had with students on his campus, Freeman Hrabowski, the president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) and one of the nation’s foremost experts on the education of black and Latino students, says that achieving such change takes total campus involvement, not just an isolated diversity office.

“You’re not going to show tremendous difference in performance if you don’t have the most powerful people on the campus involved in the work,” Hrabowski says. “Diversity offices are very nice and can be supportive, but the power of the academy is in the hands of faculty, the professoriate. It’s only when there is a cultural difference, focusing on everybody from faculty, staff to administration, saying the success of these students from different backgrounds is a top priority on campus, only then can you make a difference.”

4. Change the mindset of faculty so that they have high expectations of success for black and Latino students.

Twenty-nine years ago, Hrabowski — an African-American mathematician — established the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UMBC with the financial assistance of philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff. The program relies heavily on the group approach, keeping several dozen high-achieving students — mostly black and Latino — together throughout their undergraduate years so that they can become a strong social and academic support network for each other.

Related: Should an urban school serving black and Latino students look like schools for affluent white kids?

And though there are only about 50 undergraduates selected for the Meyerhoff program each year, it has managed to transform the UMBC campus. Michael Summers, a professor of biochemistry at UMBC who is connected to the Meyerhoff program, says he is astounded that a program with only 200 students has been able to change the culture of a campus of 11,000 undergraduates.

“What happened at UMBC is that faculty expectations changed — and not only faculty but the expectations of white students and even minority students who aren’t in our program,” Summers said. “Freeman has students show up to big lecture halls 15 minutes ahead of time, sit together as a group in the front row, and boldly ask questions. They go to the tutorial center not to pass a class but to make A’s — and they end up being tutors. … If you’re a white faculty member delivering a lecture to a class of 300 chemistry students and you have 30 minority students sitting together in the front row every day, arriving before you get there, asking tough questions in class, showing up to office hours and typically one of them will earn the top grade on the exam, it changes what that faculty member expects from all students of color.”

Professors have had to adjust as a result, Summers said. “And then what happens — and I’ve heard this from colleagues in senior-level classes — whereas the professor used to be accustomed to seeing a black student sitting in the back of the upper-level courses and earning a C, now if a black student earns a C they will be called into the professor’s office because the professor will want to know what the issue is. When you start seeing this, which is what happened to me, and it’s right in your face, it forces you to look in the mirror and ask, ‘What have I been thinking all these years?’ ”

Of UMBC’s 11,000 undergraduates, about 17 percent are black and 7 percent Latino. Whites make up 43 percent of the student population while 21 percent are Asian.

Between 2005 and 2014, only five universities in the country had more black undergraduates go on to earn doctorates in science and engineering than UMBC, which had 93, according to statistics from the National Science Foundation. Of the top 10 schools on that list, UMBC was the only school that wasn’t an HBCU (historically black college or university).

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, UMBC also had more black undergraduates go on to complete M.D./Ph.D. programs than any other school in the country between 2011 and 2015 — UMBC had 15, while Yale, which was second, had seven.

5. Form a robust, aggressive corps of counselors for students, particularly students of color.

Marlisa Shaw, a black freshman at Penn State, credits the counselors in her school’s Millennium Scholars program with making it much easier for her to excel in the classroom.

“The support system is unbelievable,” says Shaw, 18. “I can come in and talk to my counselor about anything. I honestly believe in order to do well in academics you have to be supported in your personal life as well. A lot of times that can affect how you’re doing in school.”

Georgia State University has used its counseling services, called “GPS Advising,” to transform the performance of black students on its midtown Atlanta campus. GSU closely monitors student performance and, using computer algorithms, sends an alert to counselors when a student’s performance veers off course just a bit. Counselors then reach out to students to see what’s wrong.

Using the advising system and numerous other student supports, Georgia State now graduates more black students with bachelor’s degrees every year than any other nonprofit school in the United States (1,777 in 2015).

If more schools move toward implementing these measures on campuses across the country, experts say the performance of black and Latino students will make a dramatic leap forward.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher ed.

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“Anybody who succeeds in science tends to work in some group,” says Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. “I’m a mathematician and I’ve been doing it 40-plus years. But students who excel in high school are accustomed to being by themselves, working alone in their room. High schools teach kids that if you work with other people you’re cheating or you’re not smart.”

In programs like Meyerhoff Scholars at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and Millennium Scholars at Penn State, students live together, eat together, socialize together — all to make it easier for them to study together. When students study together, they learn from each other and figure out what they might be doing wrong — which doesn’t happen when they study in isolation.

As a doctoral student, Uri Treisman, now a math professor at the University of Texas at Austin, “saw Chinese students who were good at forming temporary but functional social groups. They didn’t necessarily like or want to socialize with the people in their study group, but they knew how to form a group to get something done. This is a very important skill for future leadership, where you have to form working groups to get stuff done all the time.”

2. Whenever the opportunity arises, sign up to be a tutor.

Treisman says that being a tutor has an enormous psychological benefit for black and Latino students. It also helps them learn the material more thoroughly. “When you’re a tutor for other students, you begin to understand at a deep level that you belong there and you can be successful. To see yourself as the helper rather than the help is really psychologically important for kids.”

3. Try not to be too disturbed if people are surprised by your academic success.

Treisman says he’s seen this racist phenomenon undermine students of color. “They don’t quite know how to make sense of this and it keeps eating away at them and undermines their confidence. We have to immunize them against that. Once people on campus see them as the tutor, as the campus leader, that stuff will start to fade away.” If students expect that it might happen, they will be less disturbed it if it does.

4. For those pursuing STEM degrees, start with the introductory science courses, even if the college is telling you to skip those courses based on your AP performance in high school.

“Starting in advanced chemistry or organic chemistry or second-year biology is a bad, bad idea,” says Hrabowski. “The reason I had 12 students — half black, half white and Asian — interview at Harvard Medical School recently, not just for the M.D. but many for the M.D./Ph.D., is we would never allow students to start with advanced organic chemistry. Even if they had 5’s on the AP exam. The point is to get them a stronger foundation. But it’s part of the culture at many schools, where everybody will think you’re slow if you start with freshman-level work. Everybody wants to show how smart they are. So all these kids start with advanced-level work — and they get C’s and D’s. And they don’t tell anybody about it. And then they change their majors.”

5. Go to the tutorial center and to professors’ office hours often — before you need help.

If you get in the habit of doing that at the beginning of each course, you will gain such a strong understanding of the material that you’ll never need to go there out of desperation.

6. Get to class before the professor, sit in the front row with other students in your study group and ask plenty of questions.

This will slowly begin to change the professors’ perceptions of the abilities of students of color, which tend to be negative on many campuses.

7. Look for opportunities to work as teaching assistants in the classroom.

“We had almost 400 LAs [learning assistants] volunteering in our classrooms this semester,” said Mary Beth Williams, professor of chemistry at Penn State University and associate dean for undergraduate education. “That’s a culture change in our own students — a change in the expectations of faculty and how we can engage students in classrooms, and also students changing their mindset as they learn how to learn. Students engaged in an active process in their learning is wholly different from sitting in the library cubicle or in their dorm rooms. The science shows us that is not how students learn the best.”

8. Just because you don’t get an A doesn’t mean you’re doomed.

Williams said she is bothered by the way many students, particularly women, react when they get a grade lower than what they were used to in high school. “If they get something less than an A on a single exam or in a course at the end of the semester, they sometimes interpret that as not being good enough,” Williams said. “That is the wrong interpretation. We need parents to understand that is something that can happen, it’s OK and we need to help students understand that you don’t have to get an A in everything to go to med school. You don’t have to get an A in everything to be successful. They should learn from what just happened. What can they improve with the ways they study or the ways they learn? But don’t give up. Building up that resilience and grit is incredibly important. We see less of it in incoming college students than we have in the past.”

This story was written by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher ed.

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Thousands of Mississippi’s third graders will sit in front of computers later this month to take the statewide reading test, but the eyes of teachers and administrators at Finch Elementary School will be intensely focused on a dozen students at this Wilkinson County school.

These 12 students are among about 2,300 across the state who were held back in third grade this school year — out of 39,000 third graders who took the test — because they were unable to pass the statewide standardized reading test last year. Efforts to push students like these 2,300 into literacy represent the central thrust of Mississippi’s controversial Literacy-Based Promotion Act, the Third Grade Gate.

Legislation signed by Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant four years ago mandated both that schools hold back students who can’t pass the reading proficiency test and that schools take measures to make sure students get additional services when they are held back. At Finch, those measures took the form of one-on-one instruction, tutoring, daily monitoring, a new third-grade teacher and smaller third-grade classes.

But kids who repeated third grade still have a hurdle to overcome before they move on to fourth grade. The law says that when third graders sit to take the test again — scheduled throughout the state April 17 to 25 — those youngsters who were held back last year can be held back a second time if they can’t pass the test this go-round. That shouldn’t happen if there is any value to Bryant’s idea that holding students back for a year and giving them extra help will improve their literacy — Bryant has said he benefitted greatly when he had to repeat third grade. If many of those students fail a second time, however, the state’s new initiative could be a huge waste of money.

Related: As Mississippi delivers bad news to 5,600 third graders, stressed-out parents say there must be a better way

Last year was the first year that retained students were forced to take the third-grade test again. But state officials didn’t track how many of those students passed the test or how many were forced to go through third grade a third time, according to Kymyona Burk, literacy director for the Mississippi Department of Education. Overall, the number of students who were held back in third grade dropped from 3,064 at the end of the 2014-15 school year to 2,307 at the end of 2015-16.

“We’re happy fewer kids are being held back, but they should track that data to see how well kids are doing [after they are held back],” said Monty Neill, executive director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (also known as FairTest), the advocacy group that has long fought against the widespread use of standardized tests. “In Florida, they found higher test scores in the beginning for the kids who were held back, but the gains dissipated over a few years.”

Neill says the fact that fewer kids were held back last year may be a result of improved reading skills, but could also be “because teachers are prepping them better for the test.”

Mississippi is one of only five states that allow students to be held back a second time when they are unable to pass the test, according to a 2014 analysis by the Education Commission for the States. The others are Florida, North Carolina, Indiana and Oklahoma.

The third-grade promotion plan has placed immense pressure on everyone in the system, but it is the strain on the little ones that caused many parents and educators across Mississippi to oppose the third-grade gate test in the first place. Sharon Robinson, principal of Finch Elementary, said the high stakes can bring a great deal of stress to students, teachers, administrators and parents, but said they have no choice but to deal with it.

“That’s what the state has put in place,” she said. “We all just have to rise to the occasion to meet the needs of the children.”

Related: Can literacy coaches help solve Mississippi’s education woes?

When the results of the third-grade test were released last May, Finch had one of the highest failure rates in the state with 44.4 percent of the school’s 54 third-graders failing the test the first time they took it. Of the 54 who failed, 42 students avoided repeating third grade by passing the test upon taking it a second or third time over the summer or by receiving a “good cause exemption” because they were in special education.

Robinson said too many of her young students are missing valuable phonemic skills — being able to identify the sound each letter makes — when they first come to Finch in kindergarten. She said the school staff is now concentrating on building a stronger reading foundation before students reach third grade.

Poverty poses a challenge at Finch, where 100 percent of the students qualify for free lunch, according to Robinson. In 2015, 52.4 percent of the children under 18 in the county were below the federal poverty level, a rate far higher than the statewide average of 31.8 percent.

This year, the state increased the support it offered to districts like Wilkinson, according to Burk, the state literacy director. The number of on-site literacy coaches rose to 86 coaches in 171 schools in 78 school districts, from 74 coaches in 127 schools in 65 school districts.* Coaches model lessons for teachers, co-teach with them and provide teachers feedback on their literacy instruction.

Teachers can also attend professional development seminars, provided by the state, to improve their literacy instructional strategies. The free sessions consist of two days of training in both the fall and spring. Burk said approximately 1,400 teachers attended the fall 2016 session — and 12,000 teachers have received the training since Gov. Bryant enacted the Third Grade Gate legislation.

This year, for the first time, teachers have access to videos that model effective literacy instruction strategies. They can also sign up for training sessions to help them develop classroom management strategies to deal with students’ behavioral challenges.

Although funding for the Literacy-Based Promotion Act remained static at $15 million, the same amount it received in 2015-16, the state benefitted from a half million dollar grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, according to Jean Cook, spokeswoman for the Mississippi Department of Education. (Kellogg is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

In Holmes County in central Mississippi, the district has been paying particular attention to the third graders at William Dean Jr. Elementary, the largest of the county’s four elementary schools and the school with the poorest performance on last year’s third-grade test. Of the 128 students who took the third-grade test at Dean last year, 42 percent (54 students) failed the initial test and 24 students eventually were held back.

Angel Meeks, superintendent of Holmes County schools, said one of her primary goals this school year is to make sure the students repeating third grade are placed in the classrooms of the best third-grade teachers in the district.

“We revamped the schedules to put the best teachers in front of those students,” Meeks said.

In addition, the district pulled students out of class for tutorials from certified reading teachers, provided after-school tutorials and offered a Saturday academy for students in grades 3 through 8. These additional services not only help the students repeating third grade but also help the struggling readers among the new third graders. Meeks said the district, which is in the poorest county in Mississippi, according to a study by USA TODAY, was able to pay for the additional services out of its federal Title 1 dollars.

Meeks said some of the 24 Dean students who were held back have made “tremendous progress” during the course of this school year, but she said others are still struggling.

The superintendent said she had clear evidence last year of the difference a skilled professional can make. In 2015-16, the principal at Williams-Sullivan Elementary School, a national board-certified reading specialist, worked with the school’s only third-grade class on a regular basis and tutored the students who needed extra help. This intervention showed up in the test results, Meeks said: Only 13 percent of the third graders failed last year’s reading test, compared to a combined failure average of 34 percent at the three other elementary schools in the district.

Special education students, many of whom are grappling with reading disabilities, must take the statewide reading test and are included in the pass/fail statistics for each school — although they are exempt from being forced to repeat third grade. For a school like Warren Central Intermediate, which sits just a few miles from the Mississippi River in the Vicksburg-Warren school district, an unusually large special education population can skew the results. Out of the 480 students at Warren Central in grades 3 through 6, about 20 percent are classified as special education — compared to about 12 percent of the students in the state.

Related: At a school in Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhood, literacy is up and disciplinary problems are down

Of the 130 third graders at Warren Central Intermediate who took the state test last year, 30.8 percent failed. But Principal Tonya Magee said only five students wound up being held back, primarily because so many of the students who failed qualified for the special education exemption. This school year, the students repeating third grade are pulled out of class for 45 minutes every day to work with a reading tutor. Magee said four of the five have been progressing well enough to likely pass the April test—but one student has been struggling. She added that student may be showing signs of a reading disability.

“We’re going to refer that student to the district evaluation team to see what’s going on,” Magee said. “But I feel good about the other ones.”

What worries Magee is the difficulty too many of her current third graders have taking a test on the computer. Few students have computers at home, so they aren’t used to manipulating the mouse.

“When we give them paper and pencil tests, they do better. When we give them computerized tests, they seem to not do so well,” Magee said. “What we’re seeing is they’ll read the passage one time and read the question and then choose an answer instead of going back and rereading, which requires scrolling up and down. The kids are not taking out time to do that.”

Magee said she now has enough laptops to allow every child in the school to be able to practice on one. Eventually, she expects that to result in improved test scores.

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

*Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the number of literacy coaches in Mississippi schools.

The post Is repeating third grade — again and again — good for kids? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

One by one, smartly dressed young African-American men emerged from dark curtains, each wearing a big smile and holding aloft a small sign displaying one of the most heartening sentences in the English language: “I got the job!”

By the end of this mid-November day, more than 300 young men had left interviews at Detroit’s Cobo Center with offers from a wide variety of Detroit-area companies, large and small. There were retail jobs, Pepsi delivery jobs, energy company apprenticeships, food industry jobs, bank clerk and teller jobs, all a result of the so-called opportunity summit organized by My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, along with several partners.

The scene in many ways perfectly illustrated both the power and promise of former President Barack Obama’s provocative White House initiative, My Brother’s Keeper. Propelled by the president’s forceful exhortation, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance — the nonprofit agency created to carry out the president’s agenda — had used its influence to draw hundreds of Detroit-area employers to the large convention hall, where they offered jobs to a group that unemployment statistics indicate is not coveted by corporate America: young black and Latino males.

Compared to other groups in the U.S., young black males have higher unemployment, lower graduation rates, less access to health care and higher incarceration rates. According to the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress, by eighth grade, just 12 percent of black boys and 17 percent of Latino boys were reading at or above proficiency, compared to 38 percent of white boys.

Audio: Listen to author Nick Chiles talk about this story on American Public Media’s Educate podcast

Horace Morgan, 20, quickly surmised when he walked into Detroit’s Cobo Center that this wasn’t like other job fairs he’d attended, and he was right: He got five job offers. Morgan now works for Michigan Works! Association, which aims to connect employers with job seekers.

“As soon as I saw the faces of the guys there, I knew something was different,” said Morgan, who had to drop out of college last year because he couldn’t scrape money together for tuition. “Everyone had a smile and looked like they were having a pleasurable experience. So I went in and gave it a chance. It was really uplifting. I saw a couple of guys crying because they never thought they’d have an opportunity to get a job.”

Related: At Georgia State, more black students graduate each year than at any U.S. College

Will President Trump stall momentum?

Since Obama announced My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) in February 2014, his engagement has led to an unprecedented surge in corporate, nonprofit and philanthropic support for this troubled population. In December, the White House described commitments of more than $1 billion from the private sector, calling the progress “remarkable.”

MBK initiatives have been started in nearly 250 communities in all 50 states, along with nearly two dozen federal agencies and departments. Cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Compton and Detroit have started or expanded pre-existing programs. A range of foundations have committed millions of dollars for MBK’s six areas of focus: preschool education; reading proficiency by third grade; high school graduation; college attendance or career training; jobs; and reducing violence and helping ex-felons re-enter society.

But as President Donald Trump takes over, leaders in the movement worry about his administration’s impact on the momentum they’ve created — and they hope Obama will remain involved.

“There is no person maybe in the world who has a higher ethical and moral standing in this arena — the arena of open society, democracy, fairness and equity — than President Obama,” said Geoffrey Canada, a highly regarded expert on improving the lives of black boys and the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, one of the most successful and closely watched urban programs in the country.

Canada said Obama can’t allow MBK to become a program that galvanized a great deal of attention and money — then fizzled away. “We better start seeing results,” he said.

Other leaders are impressed by the fundraising, but wonder if Obama’s movement can reverse the dismal statistics attached to young black males.

“It’s a fair question and the right question — one I ask myself every day,” said Blair Taylor, who became CEO of My Brother’s Keeper Alliance in April. “My short answer is, ‘Yes.’ My extended answer is, ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do.’ ”

Taylor believes Obama’s initiative has prompted communities around the country to mobilize around the task of improving outcomes for boys and men of color, and notes that some young men have seen their lives changed at events like the job summit in Detroit in November, along with a similar summit held last July in Oakland.

Jason Board, a 19-year-old student at Macomb Community College outside of Detroit, is one of them. He needed a job after walking away from one in concessions at Comerica Park during the Detroit Tigers baseball season. He quit after a white manager told him to tuck in his shirt, saying this wasn’t his “hood” or “a music video.”

“I didn’t want to suck it up because I felt like he would have won, he would have got what he wanted,” said Board, who was pleasantly surprised by encouragement from employers he met at the Detroit job summit. “It was like they had an understanding of your background, so they weren’t judging you on what you’ve done in the past. It was more about your work ethic, what you could do in the future.”

Related: Two years after Obama’s college graduation initiative, major obstacles remain

‘Jury is still out’

It’s still early for My Brother’s Keeper, and so far there is no independent analysis of what specifically has been accomplished. Taylor said he is encouraged by the impact it is having, but daunted by the size of the challenge.

“Put that impact in the context of how big the issue is and how systemic the issue is and how much work there is to do ahead — a couple years into it the My Brother’s Keeper effort looks like we’re making progress,” said Taylor, previously chief community officer for Starbucks and president of the Starbucks Foundation. “But I don’t think anybody out there two years in would be waving a flag of victory. We’re nowhere near that.”

For an initiative with such ambitious goals, leaders know the next five years are crucial. If MBK is going to be a major and relevant force for change, they say change needs to start happening now.

“And we better be clear enough about what we’re trying to do that we can measure whether it’s working,” Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone added.

Shawn Dove, executive director of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, has been working with various organizations on the problems facing black boys for more than two decades — most of his adult life. He said, “I think the challenge for all of us is having a place we can point to and say in the next five years, ‘This is what winning looks like.’ He [Obama] has widened the tent to include entities like the private sector that never focused on this issue. My Brother’s Keeper has given a level of hope and sustainability in this area that in my lifetime hasn’t been there.”

Related: Stop punishing black children just because they’re black

Yet Dove also sounded a cautionary note. “There’s been a lot of activity, as you know, but right now we’re not winning. There’re some pockets of promise, but on a major scale the jury is still out around this work.”

Black males remain on the bottom

For example, a 2015 analysis by the Schott Foundation for Public Education found that in 35 of the 48 states where data was collected, and in the District of Columbia, “black males remain at the bottom of four-year high school graduation rates. (Latino males were at the bottom in 13 states.)”

Phillip Jackson, executive director of the Black Star Project, a Chicago nonprofit that has been working in the black community for the past 20 years, is skeptical about MBK’s prospects. He’s seen elaborate White House reports on My Brother’s Keeper and heard Obama’s speeches, but not enough evidence that the program has changed the lives of black boys.

“I don’t buy the glitz; I don’t buy changing the world by press release,” said Jackson, former CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority and chief of staff for Chicago Public Schools. “The young men in Chicago who need My Brother’s Keeper the most have never heard of it. So when you say My Brother’s Keeper started these programs, that’s great. But the young men shooting and killing each other at alarming levels here have never heard of it.”

Chicago saw a 54 percent increase in homicides in 2016 over the previous year (from 496 to 762) and a 47 percent increase in shooting victims (from 2,939 to 4,331). That means that Chicago last year had more murders than the two largest American cities, New York and Los Angeles, combined.

Jackson said he was disturbed that, in Chicago, nonprofits that previously had shown no interest in the plight of black boys stepped into the arena to get their hands on My Brother’s Keeper money — crowding out smaller groups that had been doing the work for years.

“Here in Chicago, there are numerous nonprofits that serviced black men and boys who now no longer exist,” Jackson said, noting that many simply ran out of money. “They’re gone. Black men and boys are in just as bad and possibly worse condition as they were in before My Brother’s Keeper … It’s wonderful to have program brochures and reports, but until I see an infrastructure in place that’s reaching the people who need it most, then it’s a failed program.”

Who will lead?

Moving forward, the leaders of the MBK movement worry that President Trump’s priorities are unlikely to include uplifting black boys. Trump has never publicly spoken about MBK and his administration has not responded to requests to get his views about the program.

Related: Was the DeVos confirmation hearing a dream or a nightmare?

After Trump’s election, MBK leaders said, the tenor of their internal meetings suddenly changed — they went from plotting out optimistic blueprints for the future to nervous discussions about how to protect gains and survive the next four years.

“Last year we were discussing whether we were doing too much at the national level and not enough at the local. It was a conversation we were having in the land of plenty,” said Tonya Allen, CEO of the Skillman Foundation, a 56-year-old Detroit-based nonprofit, and board chair of the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. “None of us expected we would soon be living in the land of famine. Now the conversation has shifted to, ‘How do we shore up these national organizations so we can sustain the ground we’ve gotten in the last few years?’ ”

Taylor said even if Trump scraps everything Obama started, he hopes the new president will replace it with something else to help the population of young black males.

Broderick Johnson, who ran the MBK initiative inside the White House for Obama, recently said he has confidence MBK will continue, noting that it has “really been embraced by Republican mayors and business leaders and others.”

Will Obama stay involved?

Another unknown: Will the former president continue to be engaged in MBK?

Obama gave some clues last month when he spoke at the final White House gathering of MBK leaders, pledging that he’ll be invested “for the rest of my life.”

“My Brother’s Keeper was not about me; it was not about my presidency,” Obama told the audience. “It’s about all of us working together. Because ensuring that our young people can go as far as their dreams and hard work will take them is the single most important task that we have as a nation. It is the single most important thing we can do for our country’s future.”

He also made it clear that he is aware of the challenges ahead. “We’ve got to make sure that we’re out there showing what works,” Obama said. “We can’t hang onto programs just because they’ve been around a long time. We can’t be protective of programs that have not produced results for young people, even if they’ve produced some jobs for some folks running them. And we have to make sure that we’re casting a wide net so that we’re not just cherry-picking some kids who probably have so much drive they’d make it anyway. We’ve also got to go deep, including in the places like juvenile facilities and our prisons to make sure that some very still-young people are reachable.”

While MBK has not garnered consistent coverage in the mainstream media, it has remained big news in the African-American community — largely because the country’s first black president formulated an official White House policy in response to a specifically black problem.

After the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin prompted an explosion of outrage in the black community, Obama listened when leaders like Shawn Dove came to the White House and presented a compelling case for action. Months later, in February 2014, the president announced the creation of MBK.

Canada, of the Harlem Children’s Zone, said he would like Obama to spend significant time highlighting “best practices” over the next few years. “There are programs out there actually doing solid work in employment, in education, in breaking the cradle-to-prison pipeline,” Canada said. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The president can go into cities and rural areas across the country with a tool kit that says, here are things you should be thinking about and focusing on. Then he can ensure the right tools are there with the right resources. Because it’s going to cost money.”

‘We feel seen’

At the My Brother’s Keeper Detroit job summit, older men acted as mentors: they gave the younger generation haircuts, showed them how to tie a necktie and prepped them for interviews. The ride-share app Lyft offered a week of free rides for those who got jobs to sustain them until their first paycheck.

Allen, whose Skillman Foundation helped plan the summit, said she underestimated how much the event would inspire the young men who attended. “If you had asked me earlier whether this was an important thing to do, I would have said it was a good idea but it wasn’t especially important,” said Allen. “But in hindsight I think it was extraordinarily important. What the young men told me was, ‘We feel seen.’ They felt the event was a declarative statement that they were important, they mattered, there were people looking out for them — not on the micro individual level but on the macro community level.”

Obama and other MBK leaders want American corporations to realize how much talent is being missed. Taylor, of My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, calls the 5.4 million young people age 16 to 24 who currently aren’t in school or don’t have a job “missed human potential.”

“That’s the story here,” Taylor said in a phone interview. “When I sat on the other end of the table as the chief community officer for Starbucks, my approach has consistently been that this isn’t about altruism, this is about young people representing an enormous opportunity for America … the way to convince America to engage on this issue in a sustained way in the long term is to show America the missed potential.”

Taylor said employers at the job fair in Detroit were high-fiving young men after their interviews. Recruiters told him it was the best recruiting event they’d ever attended.

“These are recruiters who have recruited for 15 years — can you imagine?” Taylor said. “They were going into a low-income community with young people who are ‘disenfranchised and disconnected’ and walking away saying this is the best event they’ve ever been to. But that’s because in most instances they haven’t seen the human potential and haven’t recruited from that population. That’s what this is all about.”

Jason Board, who now works on the assembly line at Detroit Manufacturing Systems, said the event was a refreshing break for him from employers who gave him the message that he shouldn’t even be applying for a job.

“They’d have this attitude, like, ‘You know you can’t be successful at this; you know this isn’t for you,’ ” he said. “But this time they were telling us, ‘Hey, why don’t you give this a try?’ When it comes to young black males, people shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. I feel like we’re full of talent. People would be surprised by what we can do.”

In his final remarks on MBK, Obama warned that change for young black and brown males may not happen as quickly as many had hoped. “It is as a consequence of neglect over generations that so many of these challenges exist. We shouldn’t expect that we’re going to solve these problems overnight, but we’ve got proof about what happens when you just give folks a little love and you act on that love.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more from Nick Chiles.

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ATHENS, Ga. — Ascend to the third floor of Memorial Hall at the University of Georgia, walk along the winding hallway, and you will come face to face with the emblems of UGA’s efforts to embrace diversity.

The walls are covered with plaques and signs for the many groups serving students who are not white. There’s the Black Affairs Council, the Asian American Student Association, the Hispanic Student Association, the UGA chapter of the NAACP, the Multiracial Student Organization, the Black Male Leadership Society.

These groups are part of the 231-year-old university’s attempt to make its vast campus of 28,000 undergraduates feel less intimidating to nonwhite students. The message: No matter who you are, you can find a family at UGA.

But for black students, Athens can still be an unnerving place. Every year, when they step onto the campus for the first time, many black students find themselves surrounded by more white people than they have ever seen in one place in their lives. They heard the talk in high school that UGA was a “white school,” and now they are finding out what that means.

The University of Georgia is seen as the star of the state’s public higher education system — an ambitious research university, flush with cash (endowment: $1 billion) and top professors and boasting an extensive network of diehard alumni who sweat UGA red, particularly during football season.

Black students represent just 7 percent of its student population (or about 2,000 undergrads), in a state where black students are 34 percent of all high school graduates. Among the nation’s flagship state universities, only the University of Mississippi and Louisiana State show a wider disparity between black students on campus and the number of black high school graduates in the state, according to a Hechinger Report analysis.

“Most of our kids are used to going to schools where they are in the majority,” said Virgil Murray, executive director of the Maynard Jackson Youth Foundation, an Atlanta-based program that helps high-achieving African-American students reach top-notch colleges and professional careers. “They go to Georgia and they are not.”

Interviews with black students on the Georgia campus revealed that while they have not often encountered racial strife in classrooms, they sometimes experience unpleasantness because of their race in the dorms and in social situations. UGA junior Morgan Ukaonu, 20, and her friend Jalen Gregory, 21, a senior, said that they have received subtle digs or snide comments from white students many times.

Related: Black students are drastically underrepresented at top public colleges, data show

“I don’t know why, but it’s usually where we all live,” said Ukaonu, an entertainment and media studies major who graduated from the highly regarded Henry W. Grady High School in midtown Atlanta. “It can be subtle things, but being in the South, one thing you notice is that people are very well-mannered. So when I see or experience certain things that don’t resemble that, it stands out. And it’s happened multiple times.”

Often, the instances are “people being rude nonverbally,” she said, “such as the time when I held the door for a guy and he went through the door right next to it, and didn’t acknowledge the fact that I was holding the door for him.”

Sterling Crossley, a 19-year-old sophomore, said a group of his friends, all black, went to a white fraternity party last year and were told they had to leave because “the cops were coming.”

“But then they continued partying,” Crossley said. “My friends knew the cops weren’t coming. I’ve heard stories like that a couple of times.”

Murray, whose program counsels about two dozen high school seniors every year, said he’s had four students from his program transfer from UGA in the last several years because they didn’t feel comfortable or supported on campus.

“I try to tell them when you go to University of Georgia, it is going to be a cultural change,” said Murray, adding that many white students come to UGA from rural areas, where they aren’t used to being around black students. “In the living areas is where people are more themselves, and you see who they really are. That’s where some sensitivity training could be provided for all students on the campus.”

And then there are the football games.

“You feel unity at the games — until they get drunk and we start losing,” said Gregory, a journalism major. “Then they can get really rude.”

Reports of this kind of discomfort often get back to the high schools from which these students came, leading many high-achieving black high school seniors to avoid even applying to UGA, many students said. Many turn instead to Georgia State, where more than one-third of the undergraduate population is black.

“I can understand where people are coming from when they say UGA is a white school,” said sophomore Morgan Guthrie, 19. “Even when you tour here, you don’t really see many of us walking around. If they don’t see people that look like them, they are less inclined to come.”

Related: What happens when a college recruits black students others consider too risky?

Patrick M. Winter, associate vice president in the university’s admissions office, said the school “works diligently” to recruit and retain a diverse student body.

“As admission to UGA has become more competitive, it continues to be a priority to identify and encourage qualified African American students to apply,” Winter wrote in an email, citing the office’s many outreach campaigns, as well as programs such as the African American Male Experience and Georgia Daze, which bring prospective students to the campus while they are high school seniors, with the hope that they will see diversity in action in Athens.

And Winter said the numbers are improving; the black student enrollment among freshmen who entered UGA this fall was 8.4 percent, or about 500 students, compared to 7.4 percent of the class that entered in 2006, or about 375 students.

Murray of the Maynard Jackson program said the university has an obligation to keep increasing that number.

“We are taxpayers, too. We help pay for those salaries and administration at UGA,” said Murray. “They can’t say ‘we’re doing a good job’ based on these numbers.”

When black students at UGA need to feel a rejuvenating caress from kindred spirits, they know where to go. They call it “Tate Time.”

Every weekday beginning at about 11 a.m., the plush chairs and couches outside the food court in the Tate Student Center start to fill up with black students chatting, flirting, studying, eating — enjoying the comfort of a space they have carved out as their own.

“You can study in Tate Time around people who look like you, in a comfortable space, and you can be how you want to be, talk how you want to talk, without being judged or feeling awkward,” said Mansur Buffins, 20, a junior who is president of the UGA chapter of the NAACP.

To those who would ask why black students, or Asian students or Hispanic students, choose to engage in this type of self-segregation, these students respond that no one questions the sight of a large group of white students socializing together.

The existence of Tate Time speaks to the vexing question that black parents and students have confronted for decades: How to find that elusive campus offering an education that will kick open doors in the professional world along with an environment where black students will feel respected and even championed.

“If you’re a university and you have black students, underrepresented students, students in oppressed groups, then you should be making every effort to make them feel comfortable, safe, secure,” Buffins said. “Especially if you are a PWI [predominantly white institution] in the South, with those historical legacies that are pretty terrible.”

Related: Colleges’ promises to diversify face one challenge: finding black faculty

Stan Jackson, the university’s director of student affairs communications and marketing initiatives, said when he hears black high school students talk about fears that the UGA campus is intimidating, he believes it’s because they’re unaware of the efforts the university is making.

“There are a lot of resources we offer here on campus, and there’s no way that type of detail is going to get down to a high school student,” he said. “One of the things I commonly hear from students is, ‘Oh, I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know this was here. If I’d only known this it would have made my decision a lot more informed.’

“It’s a little bit on the University of Georgia to do better,” he added. “To get out there and say, ‘Of course there’s a spot for you. We want to be welcoming and here for you.’ ”

Buffins, of the campus NAACP chapter, said that he can see the considerable efforts UGA is making to create a campus that is comfortable for nonwhite students. “I’d give them between a B-plus and an A-minus in that area,” he said.

But Guthrie said there is only so much UGA officials can do.

“The higher-ups can try their best, but we’re not going to class with them, we don’t see them everyday, we’re not interacting with them everyday,” she said. “That’s where the disconnect is.”

Related: Why more black students are enrolling in historically black colleges

Just 70 miles away, in downtown Atlanta, is UGA’s less prestigious cousin, Georgia State University. More than a third of its 25,000 undergraduates are black, and it has been heralded nationally for its commitment to the success of black students. In fact, Georgia State now graduates more black students every year than any college in the United States.

This glaring contrast presents black students in the Peach State with a choice: at the risk of oversimplifying, it’s prestige versus comfort.

“Students here feel that UGA has more prestige,” said Morgan Palmer, 19, a UGA sophomore. “That’s the first thing they talk about when someone says they want to transfer because they feel out of place—that you won’t get as good an education.”

That prestige is weighed against the comfort of Georgia State, which some students say feels almost like a historically black college.

Michelle Garfield Cook, associate provost and chief diversity officer at UGA, said her office’s mission is to keep pushing to create a campus “that fosters diversity and inclusion.”

As evidence of success, Cook pointed out that UGA for the past three years has received a Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award, presented by the magazine Insight Into Diversity to schools that demonstrate a commitment to diversity and inclusion in their programs, hiring practices and student recruitment, retention and completion. UGA was one of 83 schools to receive the award this year; so was Georgia State.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher education.

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ATLANTA — Stress is as familiar to college students as fast food and sleep deprivation. It’s always there, perched on their shoulders like a gargoyle. There are times it can become overwhelming.

For Georgia State University senior Aly Shields, extra stress swept into her life last year with a harsh suddenness. It was brought on by a family crisis; she just couldn’t shake it. Normally a solid student, Shields got back a few tests and papers with surprisingly low grades. She soon received an email from her college advisor: “Hey, is everything okay?”

To Shields, the meaning behind that message was clear: “I care about you.”

“When I went to meet with him, he helped me with studying, with finding more resources and with stress management,” said Shields, 23, a psychology major. “Students here understand that your advisor isn’t just there to plug in your classes. They are there for so much more than that.”

An email to Shields from her counselor may sound mundane. But it represents the core of a remarkable transformation at Georgia State University.

Over the last five years, Georgia State has turned itself into a leader among U.S. colleges for generating high academic achievement by populations that have often struggled at large, predominantly white institutions: African-American students, lower-income students and first-generation college students.

With its jumble of slate-gray concrete buildings mixed in with the skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta, Georgia State now graduates more black students with bachelor’s degrees every year than any other nonprofit school in the United States (1,777 in 2015). That stat includes the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Spelman, Howard and Florida A&M.

From 2003 to 2015, according to GSU, its graduation rate (finishing a bachelor’s degree within six years of starting) for African-American students rose from 29 to 57 percent. For Hispanic students, it went from 22 to 54 percent. By 2014, for lower-income students (those eligible for a federal Pell grant), it reached 51 percent — nearly the same as for non-Pell students. Its graduation rate for first-generation students went up 32 percent between 2010 and 2014.

And GSU increased those percentages while also increasing its number of black, Hispanic and low-income students by 10 percent.

Related: Black students are drastically underrepresented at top public colleges, data show

The centerpiece of GSU’s turnaround is the system it created and calls “GPS Advising.” Using computer algorithms, it closely tracks student performance, and GSU’s army of advisors monitors every student’s academic output on a daily basis. If a student’s performance veers off course just a bit, counselors receive an alert. They reach out to the student to find the source of the problem. According to GSU calculations, in 2014-15 the system generated more than 43,000 individual meetings between advisors and students.

In addition, knowing how frequently students drop out because they find themselves unable to cover tuition, GSU instituted a program that provides modest “retention grants” to students who are short of money. Last year it offered nearly 2,000.

Another program, called “Keep HOPE Alive,” helps students who have lost Georgia’s HOPE scholarship — which covers tuition costs at state institutions — re-qualify for the money by working to lift their GPAs back to the required 3.0. And for incoming freshman it considers “at risk,” GSU offers an intensive seven-week summer prep program.

Darryl B. Holloman, dean of students and associate vice president for student affairs at Georgia State, said many black students often feel isolated and alone — and afraid to seek help because of their desire to prove they can do the work. So the aggressive outreach from Georgia State’s advisors can be a revelation, evidence that someone at the school cares about them.

“All these programs reinforce for students at Georgia State that ‘You belong here. It’s okay for you to be here. We have a culture that supports you,’ ” said Holloman. “That’s huge. At many of the prestigious schools, there’s some element of, ‘You have to adapt to us.’ In its newness and brashness, Georgia State — which is just 100 years old, and that’s kind of a baby compared to some other institutions — is just brash enough to say, ‘No, we can adapt to you.’ ”

This work has made GSU a campus where black students feel supported and valued.

“The advisors here are really invested in their students,” said Jasmine Odum, 19, a sophomore. “They’re really into making sure you’re okay. It motivates you to really try harder, because you know somebody is backing you up.”

Odum pointed out that her advisor is an African-American woman, which she said makes a difference to her. In fact, to serve one of the largest populations of black college students (more than 8,000) in America, GSU officials have built an infrastructure that includes high numbers of black administrators, advisors and faculty members.

Related: Colleges’ promises to diversify face one challenge: finding black faculty

About 10 percent of GSU instructors are black, Holloman said. The national average, excluding HBCUs, is about 4 percent.

“When you see people who look like you and they have succeeded, it helps you academically,” said Zuwena Green, 21, a senior biology major who plans to go to medical school. “Science is a rough major, but in my classes I see a lot of black females. In fact, some of my teachers are black, too, and it’s great. I’m talking about black female instructors who are scientists and researchers. It’s actually very exciting.”

Austin Lewis, 21, said he’s had more black instructors in his last two semesters at Georgia State than he had in all his previous school years combined.

“It means I have a level of comfort here,” said Lewis, a junior sociology major. Speaking of the state’s flagship campus, the University of Georgia, he added, “When I go to visit a school like UGA, which has way more white students, it doesn’t feel the same. I think that does something to your psyche.”

Only about 7 percent of UGA students are African-American in a state where 34 percent of high school graduates are black.

In interviews at Georgia State, many black students said they feel they have the best of both worlds: the black peers, support staff and cultural environment they might find at an HBCU, but the resources and the diversity of a large state school.

On the weekends, GSU students said the campus feels even more like an HBCU. That’s because the number of black students who live on the downtown Atlanta campus is more than double the number of white students — 2,794 black students this fall compared to 1,209 white students. Most of its 25,000 students commute from nearby homes or apartments.

“I didn’t realize how large the African-American population is until I got here,” said Odum. “When you sit down in the classroom, it’s more people like you than anything else. It’s comforting, refreshing. And the black community here is more involved in the campus than you would think. They’re the ones in the Greek organizations and the campus clubs and athletic clubs. They’re the ones pushing the alumni associations. Black students are a big part of the spirit of the school.”

Alexus Walker, 20, said when she first walked into classrooms at GSU, she sensed something missing that she had long associated with school.

“In high school, I was one of the few black students and I always felt like I was being judged by the teachers and students,” said Walker, a GSU junior who went to high school in Gwinnett County. “In the classrooms here, I don’t feel uncomfortable at all. It feels normal.”

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Jalissa Clay, an 18-year-old freshman, said she went to a predominantly black high school in Gwinnett County, so when applying to college she was intimidated by the idea of going to an overwhelmingly white campus like the University of Georgia.

“I think it’s important to black students, as people from the African diaspora, to be around people who share a similar background,” Clay said. “We may not have had the kind of racially charged experiences as our ancestors, but we all know there are problems, and we understand each other. So it’s nice to be around other people who understand where you’re coming from, instead of being around people who don’t really know you or know the history.”

Bernard McCrary, director of Georgia State’s Black Student Achievement office, said it helps that many of GSU’s black staff members were the first in their families to attend college, just as he was.

“I think when you have a lot of first-generation folk, these are people who understand what that struggle is like for students because they’ve gone through it or had family members go through it,” McCrary said. “They get it, they understand and will do everything in their power to make sure the students they service are successful.”

Georgia State’s success has received national attention and numerous accolades. Last year, the American Council on Education, the largest national advocacy group representing the nation’s colleges and universities, gave Georgia State its Award for Institutional Transformation, praising the way the university had increased graduation rates and closed its achievement gap “in innovative and creative ways and achieved dramatic changes in a relatively briefly period.”

For black professionals like McCrary who have spent years in education circles hearing about the academic achievement gap between black students and white students, Georgia State’s success with black students has been enormously gratifying.

“We’ve been able to pull up kids that may be first-generation or from financially distressed backgrounds, kids the system has traditionally said are not going to make it,” McCrary said. “We’re pulling them to get college degrees in large numbers. What that says is there’s hope. Now we just need for others to follow suit.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher education.

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