Last April, an email went out to families in the Troy School District outside Detroit. Signed by unnamed “concerned Troy parents,” it said that a district proposal to end “basic” and “honors” math classes for sixth and seventh graders was part of a longer-term district plan to completely abolish honors classes in all of its schools.

Superintendent Richard Machesky and his team were stunned. The district was indeed proposing to merge separate sixth- and seventh-grade math tracks into what it said would be a single, rigorous pathway emphasizing pre-algebra skills. In eighth grade, students could opt for Eighth Grade Math or Algebra I. But the district had no plans for changes to other grades, much less to do away with high school honors classes.

Earlier that month, Machesky and a district team of curriculum specialists and math teachers had unveiled the plan during a series of meetings with parents of current and incoming middle schoolers. Parents had largely expressed support, said Machesky: “We thought we were hitting the mark.”

No matter. The email blast spurred opponents to show up at a board workshop and a town hall, and a petition demanding that the middle-school plan be scrapped got more than 3,000 signatures. At a packed board meeting that May, more than 40 people spoke, nearly all opposed to the plan, and the comments got personal. “Are you all on drugs?” parent Andrew Sosnoski asked the members.

It’s part of the skirmish over “detracking,” or eliminating the sorting of kids by perceived ability into separate math classes. Since the mid-1980s, some education experts have supported such moves, citing research showing that tracking primarily serves as a marker of race or class, as Black and Hispanic students, and those from lower-income families, are steered into lower-track classes at disproportionate rates. In the last 15 years, a handful of school districts around the country have eliminated some tracked math classes.

While there’s been ample research on tracking’s negative effects, studies of positive effects resulting from detracking are scant. In perhaps the only attempt to summarize the detracking literature, a 2009 summary of 15 studies from 1972 to 2006 concluded that detracking improved academic outcomes for lower-ability students, but had no effect on average and high-ability students.

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

Proposals to curtail tracking often draw fiery opposition, sometimes scuttling the efforts. The Portland school district in Oregon planned to compress two levels of middle school math into one starting in 2023, but after criticism, said the issue needed more study. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, won office in 2021 on an education platform that included protecting tracking, after an outcry over a state department of education plan that included language about “improving math equity,” which some interpreted as limiting tracking. The San Francisco Unified School District, which in 2014 detracked math through ninthgrade, recently announced that it’s testing the reintroduction of a tracked system, following a lawsuit from a group of parents who alleged that detracking hurt student achievement.

The pushback, often from parents of high-track students with the time and resources to attend school board meetings, is part of why tracking, especially in math, remains common. In a 2023 survey of middle-school principals by the Rand Corporation, 39 percent said their schools group students into separate classes based on achievement.

But some places have changed their math classes with minimal backlash, and also ensured course rigor and improved academic outcomes. That’s often because they moved slowly.

Evanston Township High School, in Illinois, started detracking in 2010, collapsing several levels in two freshman-year subjects — humanities and biology — into one.

Then, for six years, the school made no other changes. That allowed leaders to work out the kinks and look at the data to make sure there were no negative effects on achievement, said Pete Bavis, the district’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

Teachers liked the mixed-ability classes and asked to expand them to other subjects, so in 2017 the school began detracking sophomore and junior English, Geometry and Algebra II.

At South Side Middle School and High School on Long Island, detracking went even slower, taking 17 years to fully roll out. The district started in 1989 with middle-school English and social studies, and progressed to high school math and chemistry by 2006.

The pace let parents see it wasn’t hurting their children’s achievement, said former South Side High Principal Carol Burris. During that period, the proportion of students earning New York’s higher-level Regents diploma climbed from 58 percent in 1989 to 97 percent by 2005. “I always told parents, when we started moving this through the high school, ‘Look, if this isn’t working, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to hurt your kid,’” she said.

Related: How one district diversified its math classes – without the controversy

Those slow rollouts contrast with what happened in the Shaker Heights City School District in Ohio in 2020. That summer, school leaders needed to simplify schedules to accommodate a mix of online and onsite students because of the pandemic. They saw an opening to do something that had long been in the district’s strategic plan: end tracking in most fifth- through ninth-grade subjects.

But teachers complained last spring that it had gone too quickly, saying that they didn’t get enough training on teaching mixed classrooms, and that course rigor has suffered. Even supporters of detracking suggested it had happened so fast that the district couldn’t lay the groundwork with parents.

Shaker Heights Superintendent David Glasner said he understands those concerns. But he said he also heard from parents, students and instructional leaders in the district who say they’re glad the district “ripped the Band-Aid off.”

In Troy, despite the pushback from parents, the school board ultimately voted 6-1 for the change, noting that the district had spent four years studying options and that teachers and outside experts largely supported the plan.

Machesky said if he had it to do over, he’d communicate with parents earlier. The anonymous email took advantage of an information void: The district had communicated the proposal only to parents of current and upcoming middle schoolers. Most who turned out to oppose it had younger kids and hadn’t been told, he said.

Leaders in Evanston and South Side both say they also framed detracking as a way to create more opportunities for all students. As part of getting rid of tracks, Evanston created an “earned honors” system. All students enroll in the same classes, but they can opt into honors credit — which boosts their class grade by a half-point, akin to extra credit — if they take and do well on additional assessments or complete additional projects.

School leaders in South Side also ensured that detracked classes remained as challenging as the higher-level classes had been previously, Burris said. To make sure students succeeded, the school arranged for teachers to tutor struggling students in a support class held two or three times a week and in a half-hour period before school, changing the bus schedules to make that work. Teachers also created optional activities for each lesson that would push higher-achieving students if they mastered the material being covered.

“You have to make sure you’re not taking something away from anyone,” said Burris.

To prepare for pushback, Evanston also formed a “rapid-response team” that answered parent questions about the new system within 24 hours and developed dozens of pages of frequently updated FAQs. That took the pressure off teachers, letting them focus on the classroom, said math department chair Dale Leibforth. By the end of the first year of detracking, the school had gotten just three complaints, all requests for fixes to narrow technical problems rather than wholesale critiques, said Bavis.

“We imagined a catastrophe,” he said. “We asked, ‘what could go wrong?’” and mapped how to handle each scenario.

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

In response to continued critiques of its detracking effort, last fall Shaker Heights pioneered another idea: an evening immersion experience that lets parents sit through detracked classes. The four mock sessions — two in literature and two in math — were followed by questions and answers.

Parents were respectful but probing: How do teachers work together to make the new system work? Do kids know when they’re grouped with others who are struggling in a skill? Are the books we worked with really at sixth-grade level? While there’s no data on the session’s effects, Glasner says they “absolutely did move the needle” on community opinion.

Research from the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, suggests that districts should focus on how detracking helps all students, rather than emphasizing that the efforts are aimed to advance equity and benefit students in lower tracks, said senior fellow Halley Potter. That approach gives parents of higher-track kids the idea that their own child’s academics are being sacrificed to help others.

That fits with what Machesky thinks happened last spring in Troy. “We kind of got caught up with the equity arguments that were raging in districts nationally at the time,” he said.

After last May’s board vote, opponents launched a recall petition against three board members who’d voted in favor of the change. To get on the ballot, it needed 8,000 signatures but got fewer than half that.

Since then, the opposition there has gone silent.

Last fall the district held “math nights” to talk about the new system and let parents ask questions. The students have settled in. “I have received zero negative communication from parents — no emails, no phone calls — zero,” said Machesky. 

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

Whether detracking spreads may depend on the experience of parents and students. Back on Long Island, parent Mindy Roman’s three children graduated from South Side High in 2009, 2012 and 2018, and she said she’s glad they were in classes with diverse groups of students. Her children didn’t have classes with a Black student until middle school because of the way elementary school lines were drawn, she said. And all three did well in the district’s detracked courses.

But Roman said she’s heard from current parents with the opposite experience. “It’s not ‘oh my God, my child is getting access to these unbelievable opportunities,’ but more like, ‘my kid is gonna get a 70 in a class when they could get a 90. I don’t want them to be put under that much pressure.’”

John Murphy, who was principal at South Side High from 2015 to 2023, said he started hearing around 2018 from people worried about the effects of the workload on their children’s mental health, and the school responded by giving less homework. Even so, “students are working way harder than they did 20 years ago,” said Murphy, now an assistant for human resources to Superintendent Matthew Gaven.

Still, academic outcomes at South Side have improved since the district eliminated tracking. In 2021-22, 89 percent of South Side graduates earned the highest-level diploma the state offers — the advanced Regents diploma — compared with 42 percent in New York state as a whole. Another 9 percent earned the Regents diploma.

That said, the district recently made an accommodation. Post-Covid, a small group of parents of middle schoolers told the district they didn’t think their children were ready for Algebra I because of the pandemic-era learning interruptions. So South Side Middle School retracked eighth-grade math starting in the 2023-24 school year, offering parents the choice of Algebra I or a grade-level math course. Gaven said that only around 7 percent of parents of eighth graders asked for that option, and that demand for it might taper as schools return to normal.

It’s an opt-in model far different from those that direct students into lower-level courses because of test scores or teacher recommendations, said Gaven. “We know our kids can handle algebra, but we respect our parents as partners and wanted to give them a voice and an option.”

This story about detracking 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 Eliminating advanced math ‘tracks’ often prompts outrage. Some districts buck the trend  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Editor’s note: Substituting for Jill Barshay is Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report’s investigations editor. Jill will return next week.

Every school day, thousands of students are suspended for vague, subjective reasons, such as defiance and disorderly conduct. Our investigative team recently took a deep dive into these punishments, based on 20 states for which we were able to obtain data. Our analysis revealed more than 2.8 million suspensions and expulsions from 2017-18 to 2021-22 under these ambiguous categories. 

Here’s a closer look at some of what we found:

1. Suspensions for these categories of behavior are incredibly common. 

Our analysis found that nearly a third of suspensions and expulsions reported by states was meted out under these types of categories, which also included insubordination, disruptive behavior, and disobedience. 

In Alabama, educators have 56 categories to choose from as justification for student punishment; a full third in our sample were assigned for one of four vague violations. This is what the state calls them: “defiance of authority,” “disorderly conduct — other,” “disruptive demonstrations,” and “disobedience — persistent, willful.” 

In North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon, about half or more of all suspensions were classified in similar categories. 

There are a few reasons why these categories are so widely used. For one, they often capture the low-level infractions that are most common in schools, such as ignoring a teacher’s direction, yelling in class or swearing. By comparison, more clearcut and serious violations, such as those involving weapons or illegal substances, are rarer. They made up only 2 percent and 9 percent of the discipline records, respectively. 

But experts also say that terms such as disorder or defiance are so broad and subject to interpretation that they can quickly become a catchall. For instance, in Oregon, the umbrella category of disruptive behavior includes insubordination and disorderly conduct, as well as harassment, obscene behavior, minor physical altercations, and “other” rule violations.

2. Educators classify a huge range of behavior as insubordination or disruption. 

As part of our reporting, we obtained more than 7,000 discipline records from a dozen school districts across eight states to see what specific behavior was leading to suspensions labeled this way. It was a wide range, sometimes even within a single school district. Sometimes students were suspended for behavior as minor as being late to class; others, because they punched someone. And it was all called the same thing, which experts say prevents school discipline decisions from being transparent to students and the greater public. 

There were some common themes though, behaviors like yelling at peers, throwing things in a classroom or refusing to do work. We developed a list of 15 commonly repeated behaviors and coded about 3,000 incidents by hand, marking whether they described that type of conduct. We used machine learning to analyze the rest. 

Related: Young children misbehave. Some are suspended for acting their age

In fewer than 15 percent of cases, students got in trouble for using profanity, or for talking back, or for yelling at school staff. In at least 20 percent of cases, students refused a direct order and in 6 percent, they were punished for misusing technology, including being on their cell phones during class or using school computers inappropriately.

3. Inequities can be even more pronounced in these ambiguous categories. 

We know from decades of research and federal data collection that Black students are more likely to be suspended from school than their white peers. In many places, that is especially true when it comes to categories like insubordination. 

In Indiana, for example, Black students were suspended or expelled for defiance at four times the rate of white students on average. In 2021-22, eight Black students received this punishment per 100 students, compared with just two white students. In all other categories, the difference was three times the rate. 

Research suggests that teachers sometimes react to the same behavior differently depending on a child’s race. A 2015 study found that when teachers were presented with school records describing two instances of misbehavior by a student, teachers felt more troubled when they believed a Black student repeatedly misbehaved rather than a white student.

They “are more likely to be seen as ‘troublemakers’ when they misbehave in some way than their white peers,” said Jason Okonofua, assistant professor at University of California-Berkeley and a co-author of the study. Teachers are usually making quick decisions in situations where they are removing a child from the classroom, he said, and biases tend to “rear their heads” under those circumstances.

Related: What happens when suspensions get suspended?

Similar disparities exist for students with disabilities. In all states for which we had demographic data, these students were more likely to be suspended for insubordination or disorderly conduct violations than their peers. In many states, those differences were larger than for other suspensions. 

4. Suspension rates vary widely within states. 

Further underscoring how much educator discretion exists in determining when or whether to suspend a student, individual districts report hugely different suspension rates. 

Take Georgia, for instance, which allows for students to be punished for disorderly conduct and “student incivility.” In 2021-22, the 3,300-student McDuffie County School System cited these two reasons for suspensions more than 1,250 times, according to state data. That’s nearly 40 times per 100 students. Similarly sized Appling County issued so few suspensions for disorderly conduct and student incivility that the numbers were redacted to protect student privacy. 

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

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

The post PROOF POINTS: Four things a mountain of school discipline records taught us appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Teaching social studies in a polarized world

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story about creating more diverse classroom experiences was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post TEACHER VOICE: Students deserve classroom experiences that reflect their history appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TULSA, Okla. — Amoni y Zoe esparcieron el contenido de una bolsa de sándwich llena de caramelos de frutas sobre sus escritorios como parte de una lección de matemáticas sobre proporciones.

“¿Qué significa tener el 50 por ciento?” preguntó su maestra, Kelly Woodfin, a los alumnos de sexto grado en su clase de matemáticas avanzadas. “¿Qué significa tener la mitad?”

Amoni y Zoe, ambas de 11 años, comieron solo un caramelo cada una, mientras convertían la proporción de manzanas verdes o fresas rosadas de su bolsa en fracciones, decimales y porcentajes. Cuando se quedaron perplejas con una estrategia para convertir un decimal en un porcentaje, inmediatamente levantaron las manos.

“Creo que hay que dar dos pasos hacia la izquierda”, dijo Amoni, su oración terminando en una pregunta.

“Has estado haciendo esto durante dos semanas, hermana”, la reprendió Woodfin en broma. “No sé por qué dudas de ti misma”.

Hace años, cuando Woodfin asistió de kinder hasta octavo grado en Union Public Schools, ella estudió en aulas bastante homogéneas. Woodfin recuerda que sus compañeros eran predominantemente blancos, un legado de que las familias blancas se mudaron a los suburbios cuando las escuelas de Tulsa empezaron a desegregarse durante los años cincuenta. Pero cuando ella regresó para enseñar en el distrito de Union en 2012, la población estudiantil blanca matriculado se había reducido a poco más de la mitad.

Sin embargo, hasta hace poco, los estudiantes en las clases avanzadas de matemáticas de Union seguían siendo en su mayoría blancos. Los estudiantes del itinerario acelerado en la escuela intermedia y secundaria procedían principalmente de escuelas primarias en vecindarios prósperos, donde los estudiantes tendían a sacar mejores resultados en la prueba de nivel de pre-álgebra para la cual tenían una sola oportunidad de tomarla en quinto grado. Pero en un día de invierno reciente, solo dos de los estudiantes de Woodfin se identificaban como blancos y más de un tercio todavía estaban aprendiendo el inglés.

La transformación en las clases de Woodfin representa más que un cambio general sobre quién asiste a las escuelas de Unión, donde hoy solo uno de cada cuatro estudiantes es blanco. También es el resultado de una campaña de años de duración para identificar y promover a más estudiantes de orígenes subrepresentados en los cursos de matemáticas más desafiantes del distrito.

En otros lugares, preocupaciones sobre quién puede acceder a clases de matemáticas avanzadas han llevado a los distritos a eliminar los sistemas de itinerarios (desagrupamiento) que separan a los estudiantes en diferentes clases de matemáticas según su capacidad percibida, o a eliminar las clases aceleradas por completo en nombre de la equidad.

Unión Public Schools, en cambio, ha intentado encontrar un término medio. El distrito, que se encuentra en partes de Tulsa y sus suburbios del sureste, continúa el sistema de grupos de clases de matemáticas separadas a partir del sexto grado. Pero también ha agregado nuevas formas para que los estudiantes califiquen para cursos de matemáticas de nivel superior, más allá de la prueba de nivel y ha aumentado el apoyo (incluyendo tutoría en las escuelas y períodos de clase más largos) para los estudiantes que han demostrado promesa en la materia.

Los datos de inscripción sugieren que el esfuerzo de hacer que las matemáticas de nivel superior sean accesibles para más estudiantes, habían comenzado a dar resultados antes de la pandemia. Pero han habido desafíos: en los últimos años, menos estudiantes se han matriculado en clases de matemáticas avanzadas en general, aunque el decrecimiento en número de estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos ha sido menos pronunciado que para otros grupos. Sentimientos anti-profesores, además de los bajos salarios docentes en Oklahoma, han dificultado la contratación de educadores de matemáticas, según administradores del estado. En Union High School, un puesto para enseñar Álgebra II permaneció vacante durante más de un año.

Pero el distrito sigue comprometido con sus cambios. Últimamente, directores de escuela y educadores de matemáticas veteranos han convencido a algunos exalumnos a que se unan a las filas docentes de Union. Shannan Bittle, especialista en matemáticas de secundaria en Union, dijo que los nuevos programas académicos del distrito, como aviación y construcción, podrían ofrecer a los estudiantes más formas de aplicar matemáticas avanzadas en empleos lucrativos.

“Nos esforzamos muchísimo para no dejar a la gente fuera” de las matemáticas aceleradas, dijo ella. “Pero hacemos todo lo posible para darles las herramientas para tener éxito”.

Tomar álgebra o matemáticas de un nivel superior en la escuela intermedia coloca al estudiante en el camino de tomar cálculo en la escuela secundaria, lo cual abre puertas a universidades selectivas y se considera un curso de entrada para muchas carreras STEM, las cuales son bien remuneradas. Datos federales sobre educación muestran que los estudiantes blancos en la escuela secundaria se matriculan en cálculo a una tasa casi ocho veces mayor que la de sus pares afroamericanos y aproximadamente el triple del promedio de los estudiantes latinos.

“Hay muchos estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos, y estudiantes procedentes de familias de bajos ingresos, que han demostrado aptitudes y anhelan más, pero sistemáticamente se les niega el acceso a cursos avanzados de matemáticas”, escribieron los autores “Esta práctica, y esta mentalidad, debe cambiar un informe de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro Education Trust y Just Equations”, publicado en diciembre del 2023.

Aun así, los enfoques que algunos distritos escolares han adoptado para aumentar la diversidad estudiantil en las clases de matemáticas han generado controversia.

En San Francisco, el distrito escolar eliminó clases de matemáticas aceleradas en las escuelas intermedias y secundarias en 2014 para poner fin a la segregación por capacidad, lo cual provocó protestas de padres. Tres años después, Cambridge Public Schools en Massachusetts comenzó a desmantelar su política de itinerarios de matemáticas aceleradas o de nivel de curso. Cerca de Detroit, el consejo escolar de Troy eligió eliminar las clases de matemáticas avanzadas para las escuelas intermedias empezando más tarde este año.

Asimismo, el año pasado la junta de educación del estado de California adoptó nuevas pautas curriculares que, entre otras ideas, alientan a las escuelas a posponer álgebra hasta el noveno grado. La junta insistió que el esquema “afirma el compromiso de California de garantizar la equidad y la excelencia en el aprendizaje de matemáticas para todos los estudiantes”. Pero los críticos, entre ellos profesores de matemáticas y ciencias, han opinado que hace lo contrario, al negar a los estudiantes la preparación académica que les hace falta para tener éxito.

“Veo el valor, en teoría”, dijo Rebecka Peterson, profesora de matemáticas de Union High y la Maestra Nacional del Año 2023, acerca de esfuerzos como el de California. Pero añadió: “Cada niño es distintivo, y como madre, una talla única no es lo que quiero para mi hijo”.

Peterson comenzó a trabajar en las escuelas de Union hace unos 12 años, impartiendo clases de matemáticas desde álgebra de nivel intermedio hasta cálculo de Advanced Placement. Desde el principio, Peterson notó la división demográfica en sus clases: “Somos un distrito con una riqueza cultural, y, sin embargo, mis clases de cálculo eran en su mayoría blancas”, dijo.

Decidió hablar con su directora de escuela en ese entonces, Lisa Witcher. Las dos descubrieron que, aunque Union High recibía a estudiantes de todos los 13 campus de primaria del distrito, los estudiantes de cálculo de Peterson venían principalmente de solo tres: los más blancos y ricos de las escuelas primarias de Union.

Poco después, oficiales administrativos del distrito recurrieron a Witcher para encabezar un nuevo programa de universidad temprana. Ella comenzó a reclutar estudiantes que habían tomado geometría en su primer año, pero descubrió que solo un décimo de los estudiantes afroamericanos de primer año en Union eran elegibles para inscribirse en esa clase. No habían tomado la clase requerida para entrar, Álgebra I, en octavo grado.

“Eso provocó algunas conversaciones incómodas”, dijo Witcher, quien se jubiló del distrito en 2021.

Al final, los administradores encontraron que la causa de la falta de diversidad estudiantil en las clases de matemáticas avanzadas de la escuela intermedia y secundaria se encontraba en el quinto grado. Ese era el año en el cual las escuelas administraban un examen mayormente basado en palabras, en el que los estudiantes tenían una sola oportunidad de aprobar. Los funcionarios del distrito dijeron que ese examen de gran peso perjudicaba a dos poblaciones en aumento en las escuelas de Union: los niños que todavía estaban aprendiendo el inglés y los niños de familias de bajos ingresos, cuyos padres no podían pagar tutores privados.

Este descubrimiento provocó una serie de cambios que comenzaron hace aproximadamente una década. El distrito escolar no eliminó el examen de quinto grado que servía como entrada a las matemáticas avanzadas, pero hoy los estudiantes pueden tomar el examen múltiples veces. Las escuelas primarias ofrecen tutores de matemáticas a partir del tercer grado, con programas extraescolares para estudiantes rezagados en la materia. Los maestros pueden recomendar a estudiantes prometedores a tomar matemáticas avanzadas de sexto grado, independientemente de su desempeño en el examen de nivel. Un administrador central también revisa las calificaciones de los estudiantes y el progreso en los exámenes de competencia para automáticamente inscribir estudiantes en clases aceleradas. (Se les envía una carta a los padres notificándoles sobre la inscripción automática y en ese momento pueden optar por que sus hijos no participen).

“Los perseguimos a todos los rincones del distrito escolar”, dijo Todd Nelson, ex profesor de matemáticas que ahora supervisa datos, investigaciones y pruebas del distrito.

Desde 2016, ha aumentado la diversidad de los estudiantes matriculados en los cursos avanzados de matemáticas del distrito. Ahora los estudiantes latinos representan el 29 por ciento de la matrícula total, antes representaban el 18 por ciento. Los estudiantes afroamericanos y multirraciales representan cada uno el 10 por ciento de la matrícula, en el 2016 representaban cerca del 8%.

Sin embargo, más recientemente la participación en matemáticas de nivel superior ha disminuido en todos los subgrupos de estudiantes en las escuelas de Unión. Las cifras del distrito muestran que esta tendencia comenzó antes de la pandemia, especialmente en las escuelas secundarias. Pero los administradores dicen que la interrupción debido a los cierres de las escuelas contribuyó a una persistente aversión a inscribirse en cursos desafiantes. Aun así, las proporciones de estudiantes afroamericanos, latinos y multirraciales que se matriculan en las clases avanzadas de matemáticas de Union han caído en tasas mucho más bajas que las de los estudiantes asiáticos y blancos.

“Consideramos que el trabajo que estamos haciendo es un proceso a largo plazo, a diferencia de solucionar el problema en un año”, añadió Nelson.

En la clase de sexto grado de Woodfin, Vianca, de 11 años, no estaba segura de cómo había terminado en la clase de matemáticas avanzadas. Recordó haber tomado un examen “súper difícil” cuando estaba en quinto grado y se registró para matemáticas estándar en la escuela intermedia.

“Parece que me colocaron aquí”, dijo.

Vianca dijo que la materia le ha sido un desafío este año. Pero un cambio reciente en los horarios de sexto grado que agrega más tiempo para las matemáticas significa que tiene 90 minutos con Woodfin cada día, en lugar de solo 45.

“Ella siempre va más despacio” cuando le parece demasiado, dijo Vianca sobre su maestra. “Puedo pedir ayuda”.

Duplicar la cantidad de tiempo para las matemáticas para los estudiantes de sexto grado en Union ha tenido un costo. Algunos padres se enojaron ante la reducción de actividades extracurriculares, como arte o música. El cambio requirió duplicar el número de profesores de matemáticas de secundaria, y los directores de escuela ya habían tenido dificultades para reclutar profesores para esas materias. (El año pasado, la tasa de rotación de docentes de Oklahoma alcanzó el 24 por ciento, la tasa más alta en una década, según datos estatales.)

La falta de diversidad docente también complica la misión general del distrito de incrementar la diversidad estudiantil en las matemáticas avanzadas, reconoció Bittle. Solo dos de aproximadamente 90 profesores de matemáticas de escuelas intermedias y secundarias se identifican como afroamericanos; y los esfuerzos para reclutar en Langston University, la única universidad históricamente afroamericana del estado, aún no han sido exitosos. Bittle añadió que los bajos salarios docentes en Oklahoma no ayudan. Las escuelas de los estados vecinos tienden a ofrecer mucho más que el salario inicial para profesores en Oklahoma de aproximadamente $40,000 anuales.

Las investigaciones acerca del debate sobre la eliminación de los sistemas de seguimientos demográficos presentan un panorama complicado. Casi al mismo tiempo que el distrito hizo sus cambios, un estudio internacional encontró que separar a los estudiantes dotados en clases aceleradas podría exacerbar la división entre ricos y pobres en las escuelas. Otro artículo, publicado por la Brookings Institution en 2016, encontró que los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos en estados que utilizaron más sistemas de itinerarios para separar a estudiantes de octavo grado en diferentes niveles de habilidad en matemáticas obtuvieron mejores calificaciones en los exámenes de Advanced Placement.

“Esto seguirá siendo turbio”, dijo Kristen Hengtgen, analista senior de Education Trust. “El proceso de eliminar los sistemas de itinerarios parece tener buenas intenciones, pero todavía no hemos visto de manera concluyente que funcione”.

Sin embargo, Unión sigue comprometido con sus esfuerzos. Y en una clase de cálculo totalmente silenciosa, donde sólo el zumbido del sistema de climatización interrumpía el frotar de los lápices, los estudiantes permanecían comprometidos con sus propios trabajos.

Lizeth Rosas estaba sentada en la última fila. Vestida con bata azul brillante del programa de enfermería que tendría más tarde ese día, la joven de 18 años garabateó notas sobre cómo encontrar el valor promedio de fricción en un intervalo determinado.

“¿Alguna pregunta?”, dijo su maestra. “Hablen ahora o callen para siempre.”

Sólo ocho de los 22 estudiantes de la clase se identificaban como blancos. Rosas comenzó a estudiar matemáticas avanzadas cuando estaba en séptimo grado, dijo. El año pasado, para su sorpresa, un maestro le recomendó tomar el curso de Advanced Placement.

“Al principio me cuestioné, y, mucho”, dijo. “No sabía si estaba lista. Es mucho que procesar y nos movemos muy rápido”.

Rosas planea trabajar como enfermera práctica con licencia después de graduarse y supone que las conversiones de medicamentos y líquidos intravenosos requerirán matemáticas. Su padre, quien dirige su propia empresa de remodelación, no puede ayudarla con sus tareas de cálculo, dijo ella. Pero su programa de enfermería, parte de un programa de extensión de la escuela secundaria en el cercano Tulsa Technology Center, ofrece tutoría académica.

“No me hace tanta falta”, dijo Rosas. “Los profesores aquí son realmente atentos. Simplemente me ayudan. Me recuerdan que puedo hacerlo”.

Este artículo sobre equidad en las matemáticas fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Regístrese para el Hechinger newsletter.

The post Cómo un distrito ha diversificado sus clases de matemáticas avanzadas — sin controversia appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LOS ANGELES — When Abram van der Fluit began teaching science more than two decades ago, he tried to ward off classroom disruption with the threat of suspension: “I had my consequences, and the third consequence was you get referred to the dean,” he recalled.

Suspending kids didn’t make them less defiant, he said, but getting them out of the school for a bit made his job easier. Now, suspensions for “willful defiance” are off the table at Maywood Academy High School, taking the bite out of van der Fluit’s threat. 

Mikey Valladares, a 12th grader there, said when he last got into an argument with a teacher, a campus aide brought him to the school’s restorative justice coordinator, who offered Valladares a bottle of water and then asked what had happened. “He doesn’t come in … like a persecuting way,” Valladares said. “He’d just console you about it.”

Being listened to and treated with empathy, Valladares said, “makes me feel better.” Better enough to put himself in his teacher’s shoes, consider what he could have done differently — and offer an apology.

This new way of responding to disrespectful behavior doesn’t always work, according to van der Fluit. But “overall,” he said, “it’s a good thing.”

In 2013, the Los Angeles Unified School District banned suspensions for willfully defiant behavior, as part of a multi-year effort to move away from punitive discipline. The California legislature took note. Lawmakers argued that suspensions for relatively minor infractions, like talking back to a teacher, harmed kids, including by feeding the school-to-prison pipeline. Others noted that this ground for suspension was a subjective catch-all disproportionately applied to Black and Hispanic students.

A state law prohibiting willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3 went into effect in 2015; five years later, the ban was extended through eighth grade. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law adding high schoolers to the prohibition. It takes effect this July.

A Hechinger Report investigation reveals that the national picture is quite different. Across the 20 states that collect data on the reasons why students are suspended or expelled, school districts cited willful defiance, insubordination, disorderly conduct and similar categories as a justification for suspending or expelling students more than 2.8 million times from 2017-18 to 2021-22. That amounted to nearly a third of all punishments reported by those states.

As school districts search for ways to cope with the increase in student misbehavior that followed the pandemic, LAUSD’s experience offers insight into whether banning such suspensions is effective and under what conditions. In general, the district’s results have been positive: Data suggests that schools didn’t become less safe, more chaotic or less effective, as critics had warned.

From 2011-12 to 2021-22, as suspensions for willful defiance fell from 4,500 to near zero, suspensions across all categories fell too, to 1,633, a more than 90 percent drop, according to state data. Those numbers, plus in-depth research on the ban, show that educators in LAUSD didn’t simply find different justifications for suspending kids once willful defiance was off limits. Racial disparities in discipline remain, but they have been reduced.

Meanwhile, according to state survey data, students were less likely to report feeling unsafe in school. During the 2021-22 school year for example, 5 percent of LAUSD freshmen said they felt unsafe in school, compared with more than three times that nine years earlier. As for academics, state and federal data suggest that the district’s performance didn’t fall after the disciplinary shift, although the state switched tests over that decade, making precise comparison difficult.

“It really points out that we can do this differently, and do it better,” said Dan Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law. 

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first

A pile of research demonstrates that losing class time negatively affects students. Suspensions are tied to lower grades, lower odds of graduating high school and a higher risk of being arrested or unemployed as an adult. Losen said this is in part because students who are suspended not only miss out on educational opportunities, but also lose access to the web of services many schools offer, including mental health treatment and meals.

That harm is less justifiable for minor transgressions, he added. And “what makes it even less justifiable is that there are alternative responses that work better and involve more adult interface for the student, not less.”

In part because of this research, Los Angeles, and then California, increasingly focused on disciplinary alternatives as they eliminated or narrowed the use of suspensions for willful defiance. 

LAUSD gradually scaled up its investment, rolling out training in 2015 for teachers and administrators in “restorative” practices like the ones Valladares described. Educators were also encouraged to implement an approach called positive behavioral interventions and supports. Together, these strategies seek to address the root causes of challenging behavior. That means both preventing it and, when some still inevitably occurs, responding in a way that strengthens the relationship between student and school rather than undermining it.

The district also created new positions, hiring school climate advocates to give campuses a warm, constructive tone, and “system of support advisors,” or SOSAs, to train current employees in the new way of doing discipline. From August to October 2023, SOSAs offered 380 such sessions; since July 2021 alone, more than 23,000 district staff members and 2,400 parents have participated in restorative practices training, according to LAUSD.

All that work has been expensive: The district budgeted more than $31 million for school climate advocates, $16 million for restorative justice teachers and nearly $9 million for the SOSAs for this school year. Combined with spending on psychiatric social workers, mental health coordinators and campus aides, the district’s allocation for “school climate personnel” totaled more than $300 million this year.

That’s money other districts don’t have. And it’s part of what prompted the California School Boards Association to support the recent legislation only if it were amended to include more cash for alternative approaches to behavior management.

Troy Flint, the organization’s chief communications officer, said administrators in many remote, rural districts in particular do not have the bandwidth, or the ability to hire consultants, to train staff on new methods. Their schools also often lack a space for disruptive students who have had to leave class but can’t be sent home, and lack the adults needed to supervise them, he said. “You often have situations in these districts where you have a superintendent or principal who’s also a teacher, and maybe they drive a bus – they don’t have the capacity to implement all these programs,” said Flint.

The state’s 2023 budget allocated just $7 million, parceled out in grants of up to $100,000, for districts to implement restorative justice practices. If each got the full amount, only approximately 70 districts would receive funding — when there are more than a thousand districts in the state. Even then, the grants would give each district only a small fraction of what LAUSD has needed to make the shift.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Even in LAUSD, the money only goes so far. The district of more than 1,000 schools employs nearly 120 restorative justice teachers, meaning only about a tenth of schools have one. Roughly a third of schools have a school climate advocate. SOSAs are stretched thin too, in some cases supporting as many as 25 schools each, and some budgeted SOSA positions haven’t been filled. There’s also the continual threat of lost funding: In recent years, the district has been using federal pandemic funding, which ends soon, to pay for some of the work. “School sites are having to make hard choices,” said Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an LAUSD school board member.

And money hasn’t been the district’s only challenge. Success requires buy-in, and buy-in requires a change in educators’ mindsets. Back in 2013, van der Fluit recalls, his colleagues’ perspective on the ban on willful defiance suspensions was often: “What is this hippie-dippie baloney?” Teachers also questioned the motives of district leaders, wondering if they wanted to avoid suspending kids because school funding is tied to average daily attendance. 

Now, most days, van der Fluit sees things differently — but not always.

Last year, for example, when he asked a student who was late to get a tardy slip, she refused. She also refused when a campus aide, and then the restorative justice coordinator and then the principal, asked her to go to the school’s office. The situation was eventually resolved after her basketball coach arrived, but van der Fluit said it had been “a 20-minute thing, and I’m trying to teach in between all of this stuff.”

That sort of scene is rare at Maywood, van der Fluit said, but it happens. There are students “who just want to disrupt, and they know how to manipulate and control and are gaslighting and deflecting.” He described seeing a student with his phone out. When van der Fluit said, “You had your phone out,” the student denied it. Van der Fluit said there are days he feels “the district doesn’t have my back” under this new system. Researchers, legislators and school board members, he said, wear “rose-colored glasses.”

His concerns are not uncommon. But according to Losen, in LAUSD, “The main issue for teachers was that the teacher training was phased in while the policy change was not.”

In recent years there has been some parental pushback too: At a November 2023 meeting of the school district safety and climate committee, for example, a handful of parents described their kids’ schools as “out of control” and decried a “rampant lack of discipline.”

Ortiz Franklin acknowledged an uptick in behavioral incidents over the last three years, but attributed it to the pandemic and students’ isolation and loss, not the shift in disciplinary approach. Groups like Students Deserve, a youth-led, grassroots nonprofit, have urged LAUSD to hold the line on its positive, restorative approach.

“Our schools are not an uncontrollable, violent, off-the-wall place. They’re a place with kids who are dealing with an unprecedented level of trauma and need an unprecedented level of support,” said W. Joseph Williams, the group’s director.

District survey data presented at the same November meeting, meanwhile, suggests most teachers remain relatively committed to the policies: On a 1 to 4 scale, teachers rated their support for restorative practices at around a 3, on average, and principals rated it close to a 4.

Even van der Fluit, who maintains that the new way takes more work, said: “But is it the better thing for the student? For sure.”

At Maywood, Marcus Van, the restorative justice coordinator who met with Valladares after the teen argued with a teacher, said students have a chance to talk out their problems and grievances and resolve them. In contrast, Van said, “When you just suspend someone, you do not go through the process of reconciliation.”

Often, so-called defiant behavior is spurred by some larger issue, he said: “Maybe somebody has parents who are on drugs [or] abusive, maybe they have housing insecurity, maybe they have food insecurity, maybe they’re being bullied.” He added: “I think people want an easy fix for a complicated problem.”

Valladares, for his part, knows some people think suspensions breed school safety. But he said he feels safer — and behaves in a way that’s safer for others — when “I’m able to voice how I feel.”

Twelfth grader Yaretzy Ferreira said: “I feel like they actually hear us out, instead of just cutting us out.”

Her first year and a half at Maywood, she was “really hyper sassy,” according to Van. But, Ferreira recalled, that changed after Van invited her mom and a translator to a meeting: “He was like, ‘Your daughter did this, this, this, but we’re not here to get her in trouble. We’re here to help.’” Now, the only reason she ends up in Van’s office is for a water or a snack.

Van der Fluit said the new approach is better for all kids, not just those with a history of defiance. For example, the class that watched the tardy slip interaction unfold saw adults model how to successfully manage frustration and de-escalate a situation. “That’s incredibly valuable,” he said, “more valuable than learning photosynthesis.”

The Maywood campus is calmer than it used to be, educators at the school say. Students, for the most part, no longer roam the halls during class time. There’s less profanity, said history teacher Michael Melendez. Things are going “just fine” without willful defiance suspensions, he said.

Nationally, researchers have come to a similar conclusion: A 2023 report from the Learning Policy Institute, based on data for about 2 million California students, concluded that exposure to restorative practices improved academic achievement, behavior and school safety. A 2023 study on restorative programs in Chicago Public Schools, conducted by the University of Chicago Education Lab, found positive changes in how students viewed their schools, their in-school safety and their sense of belonging.

In Los Angeles, many students say the hard work of transitioning to a new disciplinary approach is worth it.

“We’re still kids in a way. We are growing, but there’s still corrections to be made,” said Valladares. “And what’s the point in a school if there’s no corrections, just instant punishment?”

This story about PBIS 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 What happens when suspensions get suspended? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TOLEDO, Ohio – The sound of his teacher smacking his desk jolted Marquan into consciousness, and his head jerked up. “Wake up,” his teacher said.

Marquan hadn’t slept much the night before, and the words came out before he was fully coherent. “Watch out before you make me mad,” he said. 

His teacher turned and asked if that was a threat. The 16-year-old said no, he was just startled, but it was too late – he was sent out of the classroom and given a two-day suspension. 

What the teacher heard as a threat was, for Marquan, an instinctive reaction, and he had failed to code-switch in that groggy moment.

“I wasn’t threatening him; it was just loud and all of a sudden,” said Marquan, now 17 and a sophomore at Jesup W. Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “That was the most unfair thing.” 

In Ohio, Black students like Marquan are suspended for incidents like this far more frequently than their white peers. In the past six years, Ohio has issued close to 885,000  suspensions and expulsions for comments and misbehaviors tagged as disobedience or disruption. Nearly half of those dismissals have been for Black students, even though they make up only 17 percent of the public school population. Black students in Ohio are, on average, kicked out of classes for these offenses at four and half times the rate of white students.

A Hechinger Report analysis across 20 states found that these types of categories are cited as justification in nearly a third of all suspension and expulsion records. In many states, including Indiana, Maryland and Rhode Island, Black students are suspended more often for these kinds of incidents, which can include dress code violations, talking back to teachers and being too noisy in class.

States use different terms to describe the offenses – disrespect, insubordination, defiance – depending on their discipline code. But what they all have in common is the subjective nature of an educator’s decision; experts say that’s what leads to racial disparities. What seems disrespectful and threatening in one classroom can be entirely acceptable in another, depending on who’s listening and who’s speaking. That’s when racial and cultural differences between educators and students can come into play. Bias also plays a role.

“Disobedience is identified, by and large, by lived experiences,” said Jennifer Myree, who was a principal and assistant principal in Cincinnati for seven years and now works for the Ohio Department of Education. “If you have a child who comes from a home where they’re allowed to speak out about injustices, for example, saying ‘That’s not fair,’ and the classroom teacher, or the administrators, don’t believe that the child should speak out on things, they can consider that disobedience.”

Researchers say that racial disparities inside schools tend to reflect what’s happening in society as a whole and that income level does not explain the discrepancies.

“Teachers are no more biased than other people, but also no less biased,” said Russell Skiba, a professor in the school psychology program at Indiana University and director of its Equity Project. “Race is the much more important predictor of whether a kid gets suspended rather than poverty.”

Related: When typical middle school antics mean suspensions, handcuffs or jail

A spokesperson from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Lacey Snoke, didn’t respond directly to questions about the state’s racial disparities. Snoke, the chief communications officer, said the department “supports schools and districts as they address non-academic barriers to learning.” The Indiana Department of Education said that school discipline policies were set at the local level. Rhode Island said that it helps school districts in setting discipline policies that “are conducive to a safe and nurturing environment that promotes academic success.” Maryland’s state education agency said only that it makes annual data available for school districts to analyze.

Snoke also noted that the state requires schools to use a student support system known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS. “When implementing PBIS with fidelity, schools and districts see a reduction in out-of-school suspension and exclusionary discipline,” she said.

Like many of America’s school districts, Toledo’s public schools have struggled with keeping discipline racially equitable for years. In 2020, following a federal civil rights investigation, the district agreed to a settlement with the federal Department of Justice “to address and prevent discriminatory discipline of students based on race or disability.” Last spring, the government extended its monitoring for an additional year after finding that the district was not in full compliance with the settlement terms. 

Part of the problem in Toledo, the fifth-largest school district in Ohio with more than 21,000 students, is that teachers and administrators haven’t figured out what’s at the root of the disparity, according to a federal monitoring report sent to the district last May and obtained by The Hechinger Report as part of its investigation into the widespread use of suspension for things like defiance and disruption around the country.

“Speculative answers about the reasons for why disciplinary referrals would be greater for Black students when compared to white students ranged from blaming the students’ underperformance in math and English language arts to blaming ‘parents who don’t take pride’ or are otherwise uninvolved in their children’s lives,” according to the report. “Educators at one school opined that they are not using strategies that engage kids of color; those at another school said they needed to develop activities for students to feel more of a sense of belonging.”        

Last year, there were more than 12,000 suspensions in Toledo public schools for defiance or disruption and more than 7,700 were given to Black students, up from 7,000 the year before. Black students received 65 percent of defiance and disruption suspensions last year, even though they make up about 46 percent of the student population in Toledo.

Related: Preventing suspensions: Tackle discipline problems with empathy first    

The reason for the high numbers is multi-faceted, and the solutions need to be as well, said Amerah Archer, acting executive director for the Department of Equity Diversity and Inclusion in the Toledo Public Schools.

“We understand there’s sometimes a cultural mismatch between teachers and students and their backgrounds,” Archer said. “So we offer culturally responsive training, to help our teachers understand how to build relationships and students across cultures.”

The district has also brought in outside mental health providers and — in all 57 of its schools — it has set up social-emotional wellness teams to examine discipline data and look for trends, including racial disparities within schools and classrooms. Educators receive training on how to respond to students who have endured trauma and may be acting out as a result, with responses that can lead to alternatives to suspensions.

Sheena Barnes, president of the school board until January this year, points to a culture that views some children as more dangerous than others. She’s also concerned about educators who have trouble appropriately interpreting a child’s behavior.

Barnes, who is Black, got a call last year to come to her child’s school immediately. Her son, who is on the autism spectrum and was in third grade at the time, had been trying to mix paints to make a specific color. The teacher accidentally took one of the colors away, frustrating the boy, who threw his paintbrush and splattered some paint. After Barnes arrived and helped de-escalate the situation, she said the teacher asked her if they could talk. 

“’He just scares me,” she said the teacher confessed to her. 

“So I asked her, ‘What did he do? Did he bite you, kick you, did he throw something at you, cuss at you? I’m going through all the list of things that could make you scared of a 9-year old, my baby.’ And she says, ‘It’s the way he looks at me.’

“And I just crumble,” Barnes recalled. “If you’re scared of him in third grade, what the hell are you gonna do to him in ninth grade?”

Moments like these – when adults see children as threatening – can influence decisions made in a heated classroom situation. The Department of Justice report on Toledo schools last spring concluded that “subjective infractions that are prone to bias, such as ‘Disruptive Behavior’ and ‘Failure to Follow Directions’” play a role in racial discrepancies when it comes to discipline.

Related: Hidden expulsions? Schools kick students out but call it a ‘transfer’

Toledo school officials noted that the report said that the district had “made significant progress” in some areas and that the Covid-19 pandemic had “hampered and delayed the District’s ability to execute certain provisions in a timely manner.”

Barnes, who remains on the school board, said she welcomed the continued monitoring by the government, because, she said, “we still have work to do.”

“There’s not a bad child – there’s a child reacting to a bad situation,” she said, sitting in a cafe in downtown Toledo, and noting the many serious issues faced by young people, such as gun violence and food insecurity.

“Maybe I can’t read. So, I’m gonna disrupt the class, because I don’t want to get embarrassed,” said Barnes. “Or if you ask me where my homework is, I’m gonna make some silly jokes and get kicked out, because I don’t want people to know that I didn’t have a home to sleep in last night, or I couldn’t do my homework, because we didn’t have power.”

Sometimes disruptive behavior starts with a small incident – like a student calling out in class. If a teacher has trouble redirecting the child, it can escalate, and the classroom can become chaotic. Teachers sometimes conclude that removing the child who is being loud is in the best interest of the whole class.

Experience and training can provide teachers with tools to address student conduct without suspensions.

One study in California published last year found that it was often the least-experienced teachers who relied on removing disruptive students from the classroom, and that even three years of teaching experience led to a substantial drop in the number of students referred for discipline.

The same study found that, among teachers who removed students from class and sent them to the principal’s office for disciplinary action, the top 5 percent did this so often that they accounted for most of the racial gaps in these referrals – effectively doubling those gaps.

Those gaps are largely driven by incidents that require a more subjective call, such as for “defiance,” rather than more objective categories like drug use or skipping class, according to Jing Liu, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and one of the study’s authors. 

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class

Other researchers argue that stressful environments can bolster racial inequities.

“When people are stressed out, when they are under pressure, when they don’t have the time to think through a response, they are more likely to rely on racial biases,” said Juan Del Toro, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who has studied the impact of discipline policies on Black students. 

Del Toro argues that more support for teachers could bring down the number of suspensions for low-level offenses, which in turn could help more students perform well academically. His research showed that when students committed minor misbehavior infractions, those who were suspended experienced significant negative academic consequences, compared with students who were just written up for the same kind of offense. 

In Toledo, Jamarion, a 10th grader at E. L. Bowsher High School, was serving an in-school suspension last December for getting in an argument with another student when he was assigned an additional three days for talking in the suspension room.

“We were just talking about the way we were feeling, bored and all that. You’re just sitting there all day staring at the wall or doing your homework,” said Jamarion, who is 15. (His last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) “You should at least get a warning or something.”

“It’s not fair,” he said. “I was mad, upset.” And he said he was concerned about missing more math classes and falling behind.

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions     

Educators and administrators emphasize that simply banning suspensions for low-level offenses would not change school culture or help educators find alternatives. “It could fix the data,” said Myree, the former Cincinnati principal, “but it might not fix what’s going on in the building.”

Some districts in Ohio, such as Cleveland Municipal, reduced the number of disobedience suspensions of Black children over the past year, but the number in Ohio overall climbed to more than 78,400 in 2022-23, up 16 percent from the previous year.

Izetta Thomas spent 18 years as an educator in Columbus public schools in Ohio and is now the education justice organizer for the Columbus Education Association, the union that represents Columbus educators. 

She believes individual teachers have a responsibility for their actions, but that teacher-prep programs and the school system itself could do more to curb the overuse of suspensions. 

“It’s hard for educators because a lot of us might feel like this [discipline decisions] is not what I signed up to do, this is not what I learned in my college classroom,” said Thomas. “But why isn’t it a part of teacher training in colleges? Why isn’t understanding of our own biases and lenses and those that are different from ours, why aren’t we taught early on what that is?”

“Everybody needs Band-Aids, she added, “but Band-Aids only last so long.”

Editors’ note: The Hechinger Report’s Fazil Khan had nearly completed the data analysis and reporting for this project when he died in a fire in his apartment building. Read about the internship fund created to honor his legacy as a data reporter. USA TODAY Senior Data Editor Doug Caruso completed data visualizations for this project based on Khan’s work.

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

The post ‘It was the most unfair thing’: Disobedience, discipline and racial disparity appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Even before her son started kindergarten, Ashley Meier Barlow realized that she might have to fight for his education. Her son has Down Syndrome; when he was in prekindergarten, school officials in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, told Barlow that he wouldn’t be going to the neighborhood school, with some special education accommodations, as she had assumed.

Instead, the educators told Barlow that they wanted her son to attend a classroom across town meant for children who are profoundly impacted by their disabilities. Barlow immediately resisted, because she knew the curriculum would likely focus on life skills, and her son might never be taught much reading beyond learning the shape of common, functional words like stop and exit. “I think about it 10 years later and it still makes me want to cry,” said Barlow. “They had no confidence that they would be able to teach him.”

Driving the recommendation, Barlow knew, was her son’s low cognitive scores. “If [schools] have an IQ that suggests a child’s cognitive ability is significantly less than average, they will rely on it every time,” said Barlow, who now handles special education cases in her work as an attorney. To get her son even modified access to the regular kindergarten curriculum, Barlow would need to show that his potential to learn exceeded his test scores.

For generations, intelligence tests have played an outsize role in America, helping at times to control who can join the military and at what rank; who can enroll in the nation’s most elite private schools, and even who can be executed under federal law. They have also played a large role in America’s public schools, helping to determine from the earliest grades who can access extra help and accelerated learning and who can reap the benefits of high expectations.

After the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, schools suddenly found themselves required to label and serve children with a variety of special needs — including learning disabilities and what was then called mental retardation — without enough tools beyond testing to guide them. 

IQ tests’ centrality in many schools is now slowly starting to ebb after decades of research showing their potential for racial and class bias, among other issues. IQ scores can also change significantly over time and have proven particularly unreliable for young children. As a result, more states and school districts have adopted policies and practices that downplay the role of intelligence testing in special education evaluations.

Yet the change isn’t happening fast enough for many parents and researchers who say the tests remain deeply ingrained in the work of school psychologists, in particular, and that they are still regularly misused to gauge young children’s potential and assess whether they are “worthy” of extra help or investment.

“Cognitive testing is kind of the bread and butter of [school] psychologists,” says Tiffany Hogan, a professor and director of the Speech & Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston. “Casting doubts on the use of it is casting doubts on the entire field.”

Related: How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

About a year ago, my daughter, then 5, took an intelligence test as part of a standard education evaluation process. When I looked at the subtest results, a lot of it seemed predictable. My daughter performed especially well in the parts of the verbal section that measure general knowledge (a 5-year-old might be asked the opposite direction from north, for instance). That made sense because we talk constantly about the world around us. Her scores were lower in the portions of the test focused on visual and spatial patterning. That, too, tracked in a family that hates puzzles. 

My (fortunately) low-stakes experience speaks to the long-standing criticism that intelligence tests measure a child’s exposure and early education opportunities, especially for white, middle- and upper-class language and experiences, rather than “innate” intelligence. When the tests became common in public schools in the 1970s and 80s, the goal was they would assess children’s potential, while achievement tests would show how much progress they had made learning grade-level skills. This distinction was codified through a method of evaluating for learning disabilities called the “discrepancy model,” included in 1977 federal guidelines. This model, which I reported on in an article last year for The Hechinger Report and Scientific American, requires a significant “discrepancy” between a child’s IQ and achievement to establish a learning disability, making it hard for children with lower IQs to qualify.

“(School psychologists) had very few tools in the beginning,” said Mary Zortman Cohen, who retired last June after working 34 years as a school psychologist in Boston, “so cognitive testing took on an outsize role in special education.”

At the same time, intelligence tests faced some legal challenges. In the late 1960s, San Francisco school educators labeled a young African American boy named Darryl Lester mentally retarded (what we now call intellectually disabled) after an IQ test. Without fully informing his mother, the school district pulled him out of the regular education program and assigned him to classes focused on life skills. Years later, he recounted in a story published by KQED, San Francisco’s public radio station, that his school days were dominated by recess and field trips.

In the early 1970s, Lester, known in court documents as Larry P., became the lead plaintiff in a California lawsuit alleging that IQ tests discriminated against Black students and were too often used to label them “educable mentally retarded” and remove them from traditional classes. In Lester’s case, he struggled to learn to read but never got appropriate help. 

Lester and the other plaintiffs won their case. In the late 1970s, a judge ruled that IQ tests could not be used to determine special education eligibility for Black students. Despite the victory, Lester was never taught to read, according to the KQED update.

The California case had a big impact on the state with the largest public school enrollment but was an anomaly nationally. Even as California enacted the ban, IQ tests became central across the country to the relatively young and rapidly expanding field of school psychology. To this day, some schools, like Lester’s, withhold access to sufficient academic instruction for many children with low IQs, said Kentucky parent and lawyer Barlow. “It even happens in preschool, this withholding of academic supports.”

In many places, IQ scores have historically been embedded into the definitions of two disability types: intellectual disability (where an IQ score below the low 70s often plays a large role in qualifying a child for the designation) and specific learning disability, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia (where until the early aughts the federal government told states to use the IQ discrepancy model for diagnosis).

Yet cognitive testing is not limited to learning and intellectual disabilities, it is often part of the process for determining a wide range of disabilities, sometimes needlessly so. Children suspected of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, and emotional and behavioral issues frequently get these tests, and the tests are a standard part of the protocol in many districts whenever a family or school outsider requests a special education evaluation for any reason. “I think what it boils down to is needing something to disqualify kids from services, and this pervasive view that it represents a child’s potential,” said Hogan, the Boston speech and literacy professor. She believes that cognitive testing can provide useful context on a child’s strengths and weaknesses but should never be relied on too heavily to diagnose, or fail to diagnose, a student.

Related: Almost all students with disabilities are capable of graduating on time. Here’s why they’re not

In his 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously assailed the validity and influence of IQ testing, bringing news of this developing critique to a broader audience. Contrary to the beliefs of some of the original creators and backers of IQ tests, Gould disagreed with the idea that the tests could be used to rank or assign value to people. And he pointed out the structural racism and subjectivity embedded in both the tests and how they were being used to perpetuate societal power structures. His book coincided with other research showing that IQ tests can be biased against Black or low-income students, as well as many others, because they contain language and content that is more familiar to white middle- and upper-income students. 

In the years after “The Mismeasure of Man,” a growing number of education researchers and scientists also began to question the validity and importance of IQ tests in diagnosing learning disabilities. The critiques prompted the federal government to change course in 2004, as part of reauthorizing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, strongly recommending that states consider alternatives to looking at the gap between intelligence and achievement scores when determining if a child has a learning disability.

So why does intelligence testing remain so pervasive?

“There’s a science-to-practice lag that can take many years,” said Zortman Cohen, the retired school psychologist. “It takes a long time to infiltrate large, bureaucratic school systems.”

School psychologists say procedures are changing, albeit slowly and inconsistently. Change has been possible in part because of the spread of an evaluation method, known as “response to intervention,” that looks at how children respond to different teaching strategies before making a call as to whether they have a disability.

School psychologist Regina Boland said that in her first job in Nebraska she was forced to rely on the IQ discrepancy model to determine if a child had a learning disability (that district now uses a different approach). “There’s general agreement that it is the least valid method,” she said. “There are some kids who don’t get services under that model who definitely deserve and need support.”

Since moving to Illinois, a state that uses response to intervention as its main method, Boland has a lot more latitude in when to use cognitive tests in the process of determining whether a child has a disability and what help they need.

Under response to intervention, “a lot more is in the control of the school psychologist,” she said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than what we’ve done in the past.”

While Boland believes that “the usefulness of IQ tests is overrated by some teachers,” she wouldn’t want to see them disappear entirely; she uses some form of cognitive testing in about 60 to 70 percent of her initial evaluations.

“I find it useful when kids who are lower functioning and may have intellectual disabilities come across as defiant and disrespectful, when really it’s a matter of them not understanding the information,” she said. “An IQ test can look beyond assumptions and capture abilities that are not assessed in the classroom.”

Related: What research tells us about gifted education

Not every intelligence test is created equal. Recent decades have seen a growth in cognitive tests with the goal of minimizing some of the race and class bias that plagued their predecessors.

Boland said she’s selective about which cognitive tests she uses. She avoids the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), a commonly used test. She finds it loaded with language that’s more familiar to middle-class white children and an overall bias “against cultural and linguistic minorities.” Research studies have critiqued the test in the past for including questions such as: “Who was Charles Darwin?” and “What is the capital of Greece?”

“I might use the Weschler if it’s a middle-class white kid,” she said. Fortunately, Boland added, there are more options than ever for cognitive tests that are “less language loaded.”

Jack Naglieri, an emeritus professor at George Mason University and a creator of some of those alternative tests, including the Cognitive Assessment System, said he noticed decades ago how blurry the distinction was between achievement tests and intelligence tests. Both, he said, test a child’s accrued knowledge, not innate capacity.

His tests try to measure “thinking rather than knowledge,” as he puts it.

As an example, his tests would attempt to assess a child’s ability to see patterns in a series of visual shapes (see diagram) while a traditional IQ test might require a child to show vocabulary and numeracy knowledge to answer a comparable question. “The field is mired in the past in 100-year-old technology that people think is good because it’s been used for so long,” he said, “not because it really works.”

Educators and school psychologists need to rely less on intelligence tests, use them more wisely in some instances, and ensure that they are choosing the least biased tests. But they cannot bear this responsibility alone. States and school districts play an enormous role in setting the parameters under which school psychologists must operate. Some district and state officials have denied children access to special education services by setting limits on how many children qualify — with cognitive testing at times playing a problematic role as gatekeeper. Boland, the school psychologist, for example, had more freedom to exercise her professional judgment when she moved to a state that didn’t mandate a heavy reliance on intelligence testing in diagnosing certain disabilities.

Training programs for school psychologists also must change, at least those that still include outdated materials or simplistic guidance on cognitive testing. “Strict cognitive testing is a poor way of addressing the pieces of the puzzle for any one kid,” said Zortman Cohen. “It takes a lot of good training to understand how to do this well.”

In addition to systemic and policy changes, we also need a shift in mindset. Embedded in too many schools’ practice and policy, to this day, is the idea that an intelligence test score can somehow measure human potential. It does not. At their best, these tests provide a snapshot in time of a child’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses. But it is fundamentally unjust to deploy them in ways that conflate a score with a capacity for learning, and exclude children from full participation in that learning process by denying them access to an academic curriculum, or extra help learning to read. To continue to do so implicitly upholds the wild, ill-informed dreams of IQ exams’ 19th and early 20th century creators, many of them eugenicists who believed civilization would advance only upon social and educational exclusion and segregation determined by untested tests.

For nine months, Kentucky parent Barlow despaired that her son might fall victim to this kind of exclusion. She considered filing a legal complaint against the district, attended meeting after meeting, and reached out to national and local parent advocates alike — all to no avail. Then, a friend of hers was appointed principal of the neighborhood school — shortly before her son was scheduled to start kindergarten. The district relented, agreeing to let him attend the school.

Today he’s in seventh grade and receives regular instruction with his peers in math, English, science and social studies, with modifications. Barlow said he has made tremendous gains in areas including health, math, and reading. His learning enriches his life on a daily basis. It would not have been possible without exposure to a mainstream curriculum and peers, Barlow said.

“To see the bright lights go off when he is able to read the title of a TV show or the name of a song or the food he wants to eat on a menu — it’s like the angels are singing,” she said. “He can access the world because he can read.”

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

The post How flawed IQ tests prevent kids from getting help in school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

OXNARD, Calif. — On a Wednesday morning this December, Dale Perizzolo’s math class at Adolfo Camarillo High School is anything but quiet. Students chat about the data analysis they’ve performed on their cellphone usage over a week, while Perizzolo walks around the room fielding their questions.

The students came up with the project themselves and designed a Google form to track their phone time, including which apps they used most. They also determined the research questions they’d ask of the data — such as whether social media use during class reduces comprehension and retention.

“It’s more real-world math,” said Nicolas Garcia, a senior in Perizzolo’s class. “We have the chance and freedom to choose what we’re doing our datasets on, and he teaches us how we’re going to work and complement it [in] our daily lives.”

Across town, students in Ruben Jacquez’s class at Rio Mesa High School use coding software to compile and clean data they’ve collected on student stress levels. A few miles away at Channel Islands High School, Miguel Hernandez’s students use pie and bar charts to analyze a dataset about how social media influences people’s shopping habits.

Perizzolo, Jacquez and Hernandez are among the eight math teachers of an increasingly popular data science course offered at most schools in the Oxnard Union High School district, an economically diverse school system northwest of Los Angeles, where 80 percent of students identify as Hispanic. The district rolled out the class in fall 2020, in an attempt to offer an alternative math course to students who might struggle in traditional junior and senior math courses such as Algebra II, Pre-Calculus and Calculus.

California has been at the center of a heated debate over what math knowledge students really need to succeed in college and careers. With math scores falling nationwide, some educators have argued that the standard algebra-intensive math pathway is outdated and needs a revamp, both to engage more students and to help them develop relevant skills in a world increasingly reliant on data. At least 17 states now offer data science (an interdisciplinary field that combines computer programming, math and statistics) as a high school math option, according to the group Data Science for Everyone. Two states — Oregon and Ohio — offer it as an alternative to Algebra II.

But other math educators have decried a move away from Algebra II, which they argue remains core to math instruction and necessary for students to succeed in STEM careers and beyond. In California, that disagreement erupted in October 2020, after the group that sets admission requirements for the state’s public university system (known as A-G) announced it would allow students to substitute data science for Algebra II to help more students qualify for college. Math professors, advocates and even some high school educators argued that the state was watering down standards and setting students up for failure in college.

Then, in July last year, the group reversed its earlier decision, and in February released new recommendations reiterating that data science courses (and, to the surprise of some experts, even long-approved statistics classes) cannot be used as an alternative to Algebra II. It remains unclear how the decision will reshape college admissions; additional guidance is expected in May.

In Oxnard, educators say they have been left in the dark about how these decisions affect course offerings for their students. They argue that, more than ever, students need real-world math to help them succeed in the subject, and that the expansion of data science — some 500 Oxnard district students have taken it to date — has reoriented teachers’ and students’ approach to math. 

“Data science is changing their view of math,” said Jay Sorensen, Oxnard’s educational technology coordinator, who helped design the class. “It changed their perspective, or their view of what math is, because they maybe didn’t enjoy math or were frustrated with math or hated math before.”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Many kids in Oxnard stop taking any math after junior year of high school and the district has been trying to fix this for almost a decade. In 2015, Tom McCoy, then the assistant superintendent of education services, jokingly asked Sonny Sajor, the district’s math instructional specialist, “Can I get some math for poets?”

That started a conversation on what math classes might benefit and engage high schoolers who struggled in the subject and who didn’t plan to pursue science or math fields or attend a four-year college, said McCoy, who became Oxnard’s superintendent in 2020.

“Too many kids that dislike math would stop taking math the minute they could,” said Sajor, who co-designed the course at Oxnard. In the year before the district launched Data Science, only about 45 percent of students who took Math I in ninth grade made it to Math III by their junior year.

Inspired by a University of California, Los Angeles, seminar they attended on data science for high schoolers, Sajor and Sorensen designed the new course and partnered on it with the ed tech vendor Bootstrap.* Oxnard’s first data science classes generated enough student interest that the district expanded the course to more schools, and its popularity has continued to grow. Perizzolo’s class, for example, was meant to have 30 students but enrolls 39; he says he won’t turn away a student who signs up for a math class.

But not all educators in Oxnard were on board. Some math teachers, for example, questioned whether the Data Science course — which had been approved as an advanced statistics course equivalent to general statistics courses — was really equivalent to an advanced math course.* They noted that the statistics content in the course was at a ninth-grade level, Sajor said.

Oxnard Union’s data science teachers, though, say they’ve seen benefits.

“It’s giving kids exposure to really practical math, and it’s also creative,” said Allison Ottie Halstead, who teaches Data Science along with Honors Pre-Calculus and A.P. Statistics at Rancho Campana High School.

Alicia Bettencourt, who teaches Data Science at Hueneme High School, said the course has helped her to “incorporate more real-world problems, more authentic assessments, when I’m teaching” other math classes including Algebra II.

Most of Oxnard’s Data Science classes enroll a mix of students who are using the course to fulfill their required third year of math and those who’ve already taken Algebra II. According to district data, students who took Data Science as juniors in the 2022-2023 year were more likely to sign up for a math class their senior year. (Only about 10 percent of those students enrolled in Math III, an integrated math class that’s equivalent to Algebra II; larger shares enrolled in Statistics, Math for Finance Literacy and other classes). Meanwhile, the share of students receiving a D or F in Math III has dropped slightly since the Data Science course was introduced in 2020, the district said.

Nizcialey Dimapilis, a senior in Hernandez’s class at Channel Islands High School, said she is taking Data Science and A.P. Calculus simultaneously to prepare for computer engineering courses in college. “I thought this class would be more useful because it involves coding, which is completely kind of new to me,” Dimapilis said. The course has helped her understand graphs and create and read data in her other classes as well, she said. 

Some students said it helped them grasp math concepts they’d been introduced to in past classes and made them more interested in pursuing math in the future. Jaya Richardson, a senior taking Data Science at Oxnard High School, said she doesn’t consider herself “a math person.” As a junior, she took Math III and barely passed with a D.

Richardson considered repeating the class for a higher grade, but her counselor suggested Data Science instead. She said she’s happy with the decision, and even plans to pursue a degree in biology at a UC or CSU.

“This is way better,” she said of the Data Science course. “It’s still stressful, it’s still hard, but it’s more beneficial. We still do math in here, but it breaks it down in a way where I’m able to understand it without being overwhelmed.”

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

But many STEM professors are worried about the consequences of experiments like Oxnard’s.

Jelani Nelson, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that most data science courses offered in high schools are low level and don’t comply with UC and CSU college admission criteria that alternatives to Algebra II build on students’ earlier math coursework.

Without an understanding of what he calls “foundational math” — Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II — he says students won’t succeed in college courses in computer science, math, technology and economics. Even art can draw on foundational math, he noted (perspective drawing, for example, uses geometry).* Introductory college classes in data science also build on those math concepts, he said, so students who’ve taken data science in high school but not Algebra II are unlikely to succeed in the subject.

Many four-year colleges don’t teach Algebra II, Nelson said, so there’s little opportunity to make up that work later. “If you want to get back on track,” he said, “how are you going to do it?”

Adrian Mims, founder of the Calculus Project, a nonprofit that works to increase the number of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and low-income students in advanced mathematics, said swapping out data science for Algebra II has unintended consequences.

Standardized tests including the SAT and college math placement exams cover Algebra II, he said. He said he worries that students who opt for data science instead will be stuck in remedial math courses “not because they can’t learn the math, but because they made decisions in high school that deprive them of the opportunity to learn the content for them to do well.”

Rather than replacing Algebra II, data science concepts could be infused into Algebra II courses, and data science courses that include some Algebra II and geometry could be offered as electives to students who’ve already completed Algebra II, Nelson and others argue.

Others, though, don’t share those concerns. Pamela Burdman, founder of Just Equations, a nonprofit rethinking the role of traditional math pathways in high school, points to data showing that many students who take Algebra II in high school learn little.* She said emerging research suggests that courses like data science could have “more potential for bringing students into STEM” than the traditional preparatory math courses.

Despite the recent focus on the UC admissions requirements, only about 400 applicants out of roughly 206,000 in the last admissions cycle listed that they’d taken data science or statistics in lieu of Algebra II, she noted.

“I do worry that the debate over data science versus Algebra II is sort of a distraction,” she said.

Zarek Drozda, director of Data Science for Everyone, the national initiative based at the University of Chicago, agreed. “In the 21st century, if we can’t find opportunities to teach students about data, data science and AI basics, that is a huge problem,” he said.

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress?

Teachers and school guidance counselors in Oxnard are wary of wading into the math debate with their higher ed peers. But they aren’t afraid to voice their discontent with what they view as a disconnect between students’ needs and higher education.

“They’ve always moved the goal posts and I don’t know if they ever think about the students,” Hugo Tapia, a guidance counselor at Adolfo Camarillo High School, said about the state’s A-G university system.

Daniel Cook, a learning, instruction and technology coach at Camarillo, said that students come into high school behind in math and that the pandemic only made the problem worse. Yet colleges still expect students to have mastered Algebra II concepts and shut the door on those who haven’t.

“If one A-G math is the only reason why a kid doesn’t get into college, we’re robbing those kids,” he said.

Cook said that at Camarillo High School, some 44 percent of sophomores are not on track to be A-G eligible because of math, so they’re getting a message early on that they’re not college material. By senior year, the figure is about 25 percent.

Traditional math curriculum “is essentially focused on preparing students for STEM pathways in college,” Cook said. The July vote and subsequent policy recommendations to nix data science as an option for college applicants, he said, are a “slap in the face to students who have interests that are not STEM related.”

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

Educators in Oxnard are trying to cope with the uncertainty created by the state’s higher education system. With data science no longer counting toward college admission, Oxnard will eventually limit the course to students who’ve already taken, or are taking, Algebra II, according to Sajor. The district is also considering a pilot course that would integrate Algebra II and Data Science.

Such a course might ultimately be better for the district, Sajor said, because it would help more students engage with Algebra II concepts while also introducing them to coding and data science. “It’s maybe a step back, but it also might be two steps forward,” he said.

Still, current data science students, like Emma-Dai Valenzuela, say the class in its current form has been invaluable. A senior in teacher Stefanie Davison’s class at Pacifica High School, Valenzuela said it has allowed her to fulfill her graduation requirements while actually succeeding in a math class.

She transferred into the class after struggling in Math III, the integrated Algebra II course, she said. Valenzuela plans to join the Navy before attending college, and said her recruiters told her this course would offer a basic understanding of coding and math she can build on later.

“This is more hands-on,” she said. “We’re constantly doing new things.”

* Corrections: This story has been updated to say that data science courses were equivalent to general statistics classes under University of California system admissions rules, and to clarify Pamela Burdman’s comment about student performance in Algebra II.

It has also been updated to clarify Jelani Nelson’s comment about the importance of foundational math for college coursework.

The name of the ed tech vendor Bootstrap has also been updated.

This story about data science 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 Data science under fire: What math do high schoolers really need? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TULSA, Okla. — Amoni and Zoe scattered the contents of a sandwich bag full of fruit-flavored candy across their desks as part of a math lesson on ratios.

“What does it mean to have 50 percent?” their teacher, Kelly Woodfin, asked the sixth graders in her advanced math class. “What does it mean to have half?”

Amoni and Zoe, both 11, ate just one piece of candy each, as they converted the share of green apples or pink strawberries from their bag into fractions, decimals and percents. When they got stumped on a strategy for turning a decimal into a percentage, the pair’s arms shot in the air.

“I think, you go two steps over, and to the left,” Amoni said, her voice trailing into a question.

“You’ve been doing this for two weeks, sister,” Woodfin playfully chided her. “I don’t know why you’re doubting yourself.”

Years ago, when Woodfin attended Union Public Schools from kindergarten through eighth grade, she sat in fairly homogenous classrooms. Woodfin recalled her peers as predominantly white, a legacy of families moving to the suburbs as Tulsa schools desegregated during the 1950s. But when she returned to teach at Union in 2012, the white student population had shrunk to a little more than half of total enrollment.

Until recently, however, students in Union’s advanced math classes remained mostly white. The accelerated track in middle and high school drew mostly from elementary schools in affluent neighborhoods, where students tended to perform better on a pre-algebra placement test that they had one chance to take as fifth graders. But on a recent winter day, only two of Woodfin’s students identified as white and more than a third were still learning English.

The transformation of Woodfin’s class rosters represent more than a general shift in who attends Union schools, where today only one in four students is white. It’s also the result of a years-long campaign to identify and promote more students from underrepresented backgrounds into the district’s most challenging math courses.

Elsewhere, concerns about who gets access to advanced math have led districts to end the tracking of students into different math classes by perceived ability or to remove accelerated classes altogether in the name of equity. Union, by contrast, has attempted to find a middle ground. The district, which overlaps part of Tulsa and its southeast suburbs, continues to track students into separate math classes beginning in sixth grade. But it has also added new ways beyond the one-time placement test for students to qualify for higher level math courses, and increased support — including in-school tutoring and longer class periods — for students who’ve shown promise in the subject.

Enrollment data suggest the effort to make higher-level math accessible to more students had started to yield results before the pandemic. But there have been challenges: In the last few years, fewer students overall have enrolled in advanced math classes, although the declines for Black and Hispanic students have been less steep than for other groups. Anti-teacher sentiment, on top of Oklahoma’s low teacher salaries, have made it difficult to hire math educators, administrators here say. At Union High School, an Algebra II position remained vacant for more than a year.

But the district remains committed to its changes. Recently, principals and veteran math educators have persuaded some former students to join Union’s teaching ranks. Shannan Bittle, a secondary math specialist for Union, said new academic programs — like aviation and construction — could offer students more ways to apply higher levels of math in lucrative jobs.

“We try really, really hard not to keep people out” of accelerated math, she said. “But we do our best to give them the tools to succeed.”

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation of lost math progress?

Taking algebra or higher in middle school places a student on the path to calculus in high school, which opens the door to selective colleges and is considered a gateway course for many high-paying STEM careers. Federal education data shows white students enroll in high school calculus at nearly eight times the rate of their Black peers and about triple the average for Hispanic students.

“There are many Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds who have demonstrated an aptitude and are yearning for more — yet they are systemically denied access to advanced math courses,” wrote the authors of a December 2023 report from nonprofits Education Trust and Just Equations. “This practice — and mindset — must change.”

Still, approaches school districts have taken to increase diversity in math have inspired controversy.

In San Francisco, the school district eliminated accelerated math at middle and high schools in 2014 to end the segregating of classrooms by ability, prompting parental outcry. Three years later, Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts began dismantling its policy of tracking students into either accelerated or grade-level math. Near Detroit, the Troy school board voted to remove advanced math for middle schools beginning later this year.

Similarly, the California state board of education last year adopted new curriculum guidelines that, among other ideas, encourage schools to delay algebra until ninth grade. The board insisted the framework “affirms California’s commitment to ensuring equity and excellence in math learning for all students.” But critics — including math and science professors — have suggested it does the opposite, by denying students the academic preparation they need to succeed.

“I see the value, in theory,” Rebecka Peterson, a Union High math teacher and 2023 National Teacher of the Year, said of efforts like California’s. But, she added, “Kids are so unique, and one size fits all — as a mom, it’s not what I want for my son.”

Peterson started working for Union schools about 12 years ago, teaching math classes ranging from Intermediate Algebra to Advanced Placement Calculus. Early on, Peterson noticed the demographic split in her classes: “We’re a very culturally rich district, and yet, my calculus classes were mostly white,” she said.

She decided to talk with her principal at the time, Lisa Witcher. The pair discovered that, although Union High enrolled students from all 13 elementary campuses, Peterson’s calculus students primarily started at just three — the whitest and wealthiest of Union’s elementaries.

Shortly after, district administration tapped Witcher to spearhead a new early college program. She began recruiting students who had completed geometry as freshmen, but found only a tenth of Black freshmen in Union were eligible to enroll in that class. They hadn’t taken the prerequisite, Algebra I, in eighth grade.

“That sparked some uncomfortable conversations,” said Witcher, who retired from the district in 2021.

Ultimately, administrators traced the cause of the narrow pipeline into advanced middle and high school math to the fifth grade. That’s when schools administered a heavily word-based exam, which students had one chance to pass. District officials said the high-stakes exam disadvantaged two growing populations in Union schools: kids who were still learning English, and children from low-income families, whose parents couldn’t afford private tutors.

This discovery prompted a series of changes, beginning about a decade ago. The school district did not eliminate the fifth-grade exam as an entryway into advanced math, but students can now attempt the test multiple times. Elementary schools offer math tutors starting in the third grade, with after-school programs for students struggling in the subject. Teachers can refer promising students for sixth grade advanced math, regardless of how they did on the placement exam. A central administrator also reviews student grades and growth on proficiency exams to automatically enroll students into an accelerated class. (Parents are sent a letter notifying them of the automatic enrollment, at which point they can choose to opt out.)

“We hunt them down from every corner of the school district,” said Todd Nelson, a former math teacher who now oversees data, research and testing for the district.

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

Since 2016, the diversity of students enrolled in the district’s advanced math courses has increased. Hispanic students now make up 29 percent of enrollment, up from 18 percent; Black and multiracial students each represent 10 percent of enrollment, up from about 8 percent in 2016.

More recently, however, participation in higher-level math has dipped in Union schools, across all student subgroups. District data show the trend, especially in high school, started before the pandemic. But administrators say the disruption of school lockdowns contributed to a lingering aversion to signing up for challenging courses. Still, the share of Black, Hispanic and multiracial students enrolling in Union’s advanced math classes has fallen at much lower rates than those of Asian and white students.

“We see this as the long-term process of the work that we’re doing, as opposed to fixing the problem in one year,” Nelson added.

In Woodfin’s sixth grade class, 11-year-old Vianca wasn’t sure how she got into advanced math. She remembered taking a “super hard” test as a fifth grader and registered for regular math in middle school.

“I guess I was just placed in here,” she said.

Vianca said the subject has been a struggle this year. But a recent shift in sixth grade schedules to add more time for math means she has 90 minutes — instead of just 45 — with Woodfin each day.

“She always slows down” when it feels like too much, Vianca said of her teacher. “I can ask for help.”

Doubling the amount of math that both sixth graders take in Union has come with a cost. Some parents bristled at the reduction of extracurriculars, like art or music. The change required doubling the number of secondary math teachers, and principals already had a hard time recruiting teachers for those subjects. (Last school year, the turnover rate for Oklahoma teachers reached 24 percent, the highest rate in a decade, according to state data.)

The lack of teacher diversity also complicates the district’s overall mission of increasing diversity in advanced math, Bittle acknowledged. Only two out of about 90 middle and high school math teachers identify as Black, and efforts to recruit at Langston University, the state’s only historically Black university, have yet to prove successful. Bittle added that Oklahoma’s low pay for teachers doesn’t help: Schools in neighboring states tend to offer much more than the roughly $40,000 starting salary for teachers in the Sooner State.

Research on the detracking debate presents a complicated picture. About the same time that the district made its changes, one international study suggested steering bright students into accelerated classes could exacerbate the rich-poor divide in schools. Another paper, published by the Brookings Institution in 2016, found that Black and Hispanic students scored better on Advanced Placement exams in states that tracked more eighth graders into different ability levels in math.

“This will remain murky,” said Kristen Hengtgen, a senior analyst with the Education Trust. “Detracking seems to have good intentions, but we just haven’t seen it work conclusively yet.”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Union remains committed to its efforts, though. And in a pin-drop quiet Calculus class, where only the hum of the HVAC system disrupted the scratching of pencils, students remained committed to their own hard work.

Lizeth Rosas sat in the back row. Wearing bright blue smocks for a nursing program she had later in the day, the 18-year-old scribbled notes on how to find the average value of friction with a given interval.

“Any questions?” her teacher invited. “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

Only eight of the 22 students in the class identified as white. Rosas first got into an advanced math as a seventh grader, she said. Last year, to her surprise, a teacher recommended she take the Advanced Placement course.

“In the beginning, I questioned myself — a lot,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was ready. It’s kind of a lot to process, and we move so fast.”

Rosas plans to work as a licensed practical nurse after graduation, and expects conversions of medications and IV fluids will require math. Her father, who runs his own remodeling company, can’t help with her calculus work, she said. But, her nursing program, part of a high school extension program at the nearby Tulsa Technology Center, offers academic tutoring.

“I don’t really need it,” Rosas said. “The teachers here are really helpful. They just kind of help me. They remind me I can do it.”

This story about math equity 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 How one district has diversified its advanced math classes — without the controversy appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Mireya Barrera no quería pelear.

Durante años, se sentó en las reuniones con los docentes de educación especial de su hijo, luchando por mantener una sonrisa mientras entendía poco de lo que decían. En las ocasiones poco comunes en que se pedía ayuda a otros docentes que hablaban el idioma de Barrera, el español, las conversaciones seguían siendo vacilantes porque no eran intérpretes calificados.

Pero cuando su hijo Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, Barrera decidió invitar a un voluntario bilingüe de una organización local sin ánimo de lucro para que se sentara con ella y recordara sus derechos al equipo escolar.

“Quería a alguien de mi lado”, dijo Barrera, cuyo hijo tiene autismo, a través de un intérprete. “Durante todo este tiempo, no nos estaban facilitando las cosas. Eso provocó muchas lágrimas”. 

Independientemente del idioma que hablen los padres en casa, tienen el derecho civil de recibir información importante de los educadores de sus hijos en un idioma que entiendan. En el caso de los estudiantes con discapacidad, la ley federal es aún más clara: las escuelas “deben tomar todas las medidas necesarias”, incluidos los servicios de interpretación y traducción, para que los padres puedan participar de forma significativa en la educación de sus hijos.

Pero, a veces, las escuelas de todo el país no prestan esos servicios.

Las familias que no hablan inglés se ven obligadas a asistir a las reuniones sobre el progreso de sus hijos sin poder opinar ni preguntar a los educadores cómo pueden ayudar. Las diferencias culturales y lingüísticas pueden convencer a algunos padres de no cuestionar lo que ocurre en la escuela, un desequilibrio de poder que, según los defensores, hace que algunos niños se queden sin un apoyo fundamental. En caso de ser necesario, no es infrecuente que las escuelas encarguen a los estudiantes bilingües la interpretación para sus familias, poniéndolos en la posición de describir sus propios defectos a sus padres y tutores.

“Eso es totalmente inapropiado, en todos los sentidos posibles, y poco realista”, dice Diane Smith Howard, abogada principal de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Si al niño no le va especialmente bien en una asignatura académica, ¿por qué confiaría en que su hijo adolescente se lo contara?”.

Los distritos escolares culpan a la falta de recursos. Dicen que no tienen dinero para contratar a más intérpretes o a agencias de servicios lingüísticos y que, aunque lo tuvieran, no hay suficientes intérpretes calificados para hacer el trabajo.

En Washington y en algunos otros estados, la cuestión ha empezado a recibir más atención. Los legisladores estatales de Olympia presentaron este año una ley bipartidista para reforzar los derechos civiles federales en el código estatal. Los sindicatos de docentes de Seattle y Chicago negociaron recientemente, y consiguieron, servicios de interpretación durante las reuniones de educación especial. Y los distritos escolares se enfrentan a una creciente amenaza de demandas de los padres, o incluso a una investigación federal, si no se toman en serio el acceso lingüístico.

Aun así, los esfuerzos por ampliar el acceso lingüístico en la educación especial se enfrentan a una ardua batalla, debido al escaso número de intérpretes capacitados, la falta de cumplimiento a nivel estatal y el escaso financiamiento del Congreso (a pesar de que en 1974 prometió cubrir casi la mitad del costo adicional que supone para las escuelas proporcionar servicios de educación especial, el gobierno federal nunca lo ha hecho). El proyecto de ley bipartidista de Washington para ofrecer más protecciones a las familias fracasó repentinamente, después de que los legisladores estatales lo despojaran de disposiciones clave y los defensores retiraran su apoyo.

El sistema de educación especial puede ser “increíblemente difícil para todos”, dijo Ramona Hattendorf, directora de defensa de The Arc of King County, que promueve los derechos de las personas con discapacidad. “Luego todo se agrava cuando se introduce el idioma en la mezcla”. En todo el país, aproximadamente 1 de cada 10 estudiantes que califican para recibir servicios de educación especial también se identifican como estudiantes de inglés, según datos federales de educación, y esa proporción está creciendo. Cerca de 791,000 estudiantes de inglés participaron en educación especial en 2020, un aumento de casi el 30 % desde 2012. En más de una docena de estados, incluido Washington, el aumento fue aún mayor.

A medida que crece su número, también aumenta la frustración de sus padres con los servicios lingüísticos.

Durante el año escolar 2021-22, la defensora del pueblo en materia educación del estado de Washington recibió casi 1,200 quejas de los padres sobre las escuelas. Su principal preocupación, en todos los grupos raciales y demográficos, fue el acceso y la inclusión en la educación especial. La defensora del pueblo principal en materia de educación, Jinju Park, calcula que entre el 50 % y el 70 % de las llamadas que recibe la agencia son sobre educación especial, y que el 80 % de ellas son de clientes que necesitan servicios de interpretación.

Mientras que la mayoría de los estados conceden a las escuelas un máximo de 60 días desde que se remite a un estudiante a los servicios de educación especial para determinar si califica, las escuelas de Washington pueden tardar hasta medio año escolar. Y si un padre necesita servicios de interpretación o traducción, la espera puede durar aún más.

“Las leyes actuales no apoyan la participación plena de los padres”, escribió Park a los legisladores estatales en apoyo a la primera versión del proyecto de ley 1305 de la Cámara de Representantes, propuesta que finalmente fracasó. “Los padres para los que el inglés puede que no sea su lengua materna”, añadió, “a menudo, se ven abrumados por la información e incapaces de participar de forma significativa en el proceso”.

Barrera, cuyo hijo asistió al distrito escolar de Auburn, al sur de Seattle, dijo que, a menudo, se sentía excluida de su aprendizaje.

En el kínder, tras el diagnóstico de autismo de Ian, su equipo de educación especial llegó a la conclusión de que necesitaba un paraeducador asignado a tiempo completo, dijo Barrera. Recurrió a Google Translate y a otros padres para que la ayudaran a redactar correos electrónicos preguntando por qué no recibió ese apoyo hasta tercer grado. Sus solicitudes de copias traducidas de documentos legales quedaron en gran parte sin respuesta, mencionó, hasta que un director le dijo que la traducción era demasiado costosa.

Cuando Ian entró en la escuela secundaria, el acoso escolar y su seguridad se convirtieron en la principal preocupación de Barrera. Una vez llegó a casa sin un mechón de pelo, cuenta. A pesar de las repetidas llamadas y correos electrónicos a sus docentes, Barrera dijo que nunca recibió una explicación.

Además, cuando pidió ir a la escuela para observar, un docente le dijo: “Ni siquiera habla inglés. ¿Qué sentido tiene?”. Vicki Alonzo, portavoz del distrito de Auburn, afirma que el auge de la población inmigrante en la región en los últimos años ha llevado al distrito a destinar más recursos a ayudar a las familias cuya lengua materna no es el inglés. Casi un tercio de sus estudiantes son multilingües, dijo, y hablan alrededor de 85 idiomas diferentes en casa.

En el año 2019-20, el distrito gastó alrededor de $175,000 en servicios de interpretación y traducción, dijo; el año escolar pasado, esa cifra fue de más de $450,000.

Alonzo señaló que el distrito no recibió financiamiento adicional para esos servicios, que incluyeron alrededor de 1,500 reuniones con intérpretes y la traducción de más de 3,000 páginas de documentos.

El problema del acceso lingüístico es “un fenómeno nacional”, dijo Smith Howard, de la Red Nacional de Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad. “Es un problema de recursos y también una cuestión de respeto, dignidad y comprensión, que todos los padres deberían recibir”.

Los docentes también están frustrados.

El sindicato de docentes de Seattle protestó y retrasó el inicio de las clases el año pasado por unas demandas que incluían servicios de interpretación y traducción en educación especial. El contrato final, que dura hasta 2025, exige que los miembros del personal tengan acceso a diversos servicios que proporcionen traducción telefónica (un intérprete en directo) o de texto (en el caso de documentos escritos). El objetivo de esta disposición es garantizar que no se pida al personal bilingüe que traduzca si no forma parte de su trabajo.

Los docentes dicen que estas herramientas han sido útiles, pero solo en cierta medida: en ocasiones poco comunes hay intérpretes telefónicos disponibles para los idiomas menos comunes, como el amárico, y son frecuentes los problemas técnicos, como la interrupción de las llamadas.

La disponibilidad de intérpretes “no es tan constante como nos gustaría”, afirma Ibi Holiday, docente de educación especial de la escuela primaria Rising Star de Seattle.

También hay una cuestión de contexto. Es posible que los traductores no tengan experiencia en educación especial, por lo que las familias pueden salir de una reunión sin entender todas las opciones, lo cual puede ralentizar el proceso significativamente.

“Para muchas familias, la escuela de su país funciona de forma completamente diferente”, explica Mari Rico, directora del Centro de Desarrollo Infantil Jose Marti de El Centro de la Raza, un programa bilingüe de educación temprana. “Traducir no bastaba; tenía que enseñarles el sistema”.

Muchas escuelas del distrito de Seattle cuentan con personal multilingüe, pero el número y la diversidad de idiomas hablados no es constante, afirma Rico. Y existe un mayor riesgo de que el caso de un estudiante se pase por alto o se estanque debido a las barreras lingüísticas. Dijo que ha tenido que intervenir cuando las familias han pasado meses sin una reunión del programa de educación individualizada, incluso cuando su hijo estaba recibiendo servicios.

Hattendorf, de The Arc del condado de King, dijo que las soluciones tecnológicas más económicas, como las que utiliza Seattle, ofrecen cierta ayuda, pero su calidad varía mucho. Y los servicios pueden no ofrecer a los padres tiempo suficiente para procesar información complicada y hacer preguntas de seguimiento, explicó.

Al sur de Seattle, los Barrera decidieron cambiar a Ian de escuela secundaria.

Se graduó este año, pero la ley federal garantiza sus servicios de educación especial tres años más. Ian asiste ahora a un programa de transición para estudiantes con discapacidad, donde aprenderá habilidades para la vida, como conseguir un trabajo.

“Sabemos que, con ayuda, puede hacer lo que quiera”, dijo Barrera.

Ya, añadió, “todo es diferente. Los docentes intentan encontrar la mejor manera de comunicarse conmigo”.

Este artículo sobre los servicios de interpretación fue elaborado por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente y sin ánimo de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación, en colaboración con The Seattle Times.

The post Los padres de estudiantes de educación especial que no hablan inglés se enfrentan a otro obstáculo appeared first on The Hechinger Report.