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One Reason Rural Students Don’t Go To College: Colleges Don’t Go To Them

The sunrise in rural central Michigan reveals a landscape of neatly divided cornfields crossed by ditches and wooded creeks. But few of the sleepy teenagers on the school bus from Maple Valley Junior-Senior High School likely noticed this scene on their hour drive to Grand Rapids.

They set out from their tiny school district of about 1,000 students, heading to the closest big city for a college recruiting fair. About 151 colleges and universities were waiting.

The students, from Nashville and Vermontville, Mich., were going to the recruiters because few recruiters come to see them.

For urban and suburban students, it’s common to have college recruiters visit their schools — maybe they set up a booth in the lunchroom, or talk with students during an English class. But recruiters rarely go to small, rural schools like Maple Valley, which serves fewer than 450 seventh- through 12th-graders.

“When we think about an urban high school, a college recruiter can hit 1,500 students at a time,” says Andrew Koricich, a professor of education at Appalachian State University. “To do that in a rural area, you may have to go to 10 high schools.”

Rural households also have lower incomes than urban and suburban ones, the Census Bureau reports, meaning that rural students are less profitable for colleges, which often have to offer them financial aid.

“People tend to overlook the rural areas. I think it’s kind of disappointing because some able students could get looked over,” says David Hochstetler, one of the Maple Valley students riding the bus to Grand Rapids. He’s interested in pursuing engineering or computer science in college.

One recent study by researchers at UCLA and the University of Arizona found public high schools in affluent areas receive more college recruiter visits than schools in less affluent areas. Those researchers also found recruiters from private colleges concentrate disproportionately on private schools. Rural areas usually have neither wealthy families nor private schools.

Rural households also have lower incomes than urban and suburban ones, the Census Bureau reports, meaning that rural students are less profitable for colleges, which often have to offer them financial aid.

“People tend to overlook the rural areas. I think it’s kind of disappointing because some able students could get looked over,” says David Hochstetler, one of the Maple Valley students riding the bus to Grand Rapids. He’s interested in pursuing engineering or computer science in college.

One recent study by researchers at UCLA and the University of Arizona found public high schools in affluent areas receive more college recruiter visits than schools in less affluent areas. Those researchers also found recruiters from private colleges concentrate disproportionately on private schools. Rural areas usually have neither wealthy families nor private schools.

Rural parents can also be skeptical of higher education in general, says Julia DeGroot, Maple Valley’s college counselor. DeGroot is the daughter of Grand Rapids white-collar professionals and went to a private high school. For her, she says, “college was never, ‘Are you going?’ It was, ‘Where are you going?’ ” But at Maple Valley, she says, “That’s not the case for these kids.”

“One of the biggest struggles is getting the parents to see that big picture where, ‘It’s OK if my kid goes away to college for four years. It doesn’t mean that they’re never coming back.’ “

Overcoming such perceptions means not only reaching rural students where they live, but getting them to visit campuses, says Andy Borst, director of undergraduate admissions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

“Students come to campus with reluctance, feeling that it may be too big. Once they get there and talk one-on-one to a current student, faculty person or admissions staff, they tend to be less frightened,” Borst says.

But it’s not always easy for rural students to visit a campus. “You have to drive a long distance to actually get somewhere that’s an actual place,” explains Maple Valley senior Sarah Lowndes.

‘A community of nerds like me’

David Hochstetler, the Maple Valley student interested in engineering, met with representatives from Michigan Technological University at the college recruiting fair in Grand Rapids. That meeting helped him decide to attend. The school also sent him an invitation to apply as a “select nominee.” He applied and was accepted early and given a yearly academic scholarship.

He was also able to visit the campus in Houghton, more than eight
hours away by car, because his family vacations on the Upper Peninsula. There, he took a college tour and connected with current students over his passion for engineering.

“Around here [home], there aren’t that many people on the engineering or computer side of things, ” he says. “I thought it would be cool to go into a community of nerds like me.”

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

[Read more at National Public Radio] Read More

Memphis school leaders consider proposal to hold back second-graders who can’t read

In an effort to boost literacy among its youngest students, Shelby County Schools has proposed a policy that would require second-graders to repeat the school year if they don’t read on grade level.

The district and state have struggled to get students ready to read by third grade and have heavily invested in literacy instruction. That has led to significant growth in reading scores in Memphis, but literacy rates remain stubbornly low.

Interim superintendent Joris Ray said the policy would ensure what he calls “the third-grade guarantee.”

“We want our students to be positioned to be competitive for the upcoming years because reading is definitely fundamental and it sets our students up for success,” Ray told reporters before a committee meeting of board members began.

The proposed policy would require the district’s 8,700 second-graders to meet eight of 12 points the district already tracks in order to be promoted to third grade. Four of those could come from passing report card grades in English each quarter, three from passing assessments to measure growth in reading skills, three from the state’s program for students struggling with reading, and two from the end-of-year test the district uses from the state.

The district would require students who do not meet the necessary number of benchmarks to attend summer school, where they could catch up in time to be promoted in the fall. The following school year, students would have 45 days to catch up before being required to repeat all of second grade.

About 26 percent of third-graders in Shelby County Schools can read on grade level as measured by the state’s TNReady test. The district wants to get that number up to 60 percent by next year and 90 percent by 2025 because third-grade reading levels are an important indicator of future academic performance.

The district already has a third-grade retention policy that’s not as specific as Burt’s proposed policy.

“The reason we’re addressing second grade in Memphis is when you looking at first grade, fifth month around December, the gap starts to widen,” said Antonio Burt, the district’s chief academic officer. “Nationally, it’s normally first grade, 11th month, which would be June going into the second grade year. Something happens in Memphis where that gap grows faster.”

The policy is modeled after a Florida law that was in place when Burt oversaw school turnaround there. Before going to Florida, Burt led a Memphis school in the district’s heralded Innovation Zone for low-performing schools.

If the policy is approved by the Shelby County Schools board, district officials will track students next year and recommend those who qualify to attend summer school in 2020, but not make it a requirement. The next year, qualifying second-graders would be required to go to summer school or be held back. Parents would be notified by Feb. 1 each year if their child is at risk of repeating second grade. Students who would be fully affected by the policy are this year’s kindergartners.

Burt declined to share his estimate on how many second-graders could be held back based on current data, saying it wouldn’t be valid to judge current students on a policy that’s not in place yet. He did not have an estimate on costs the policy might incur, such as additional second-grade teachers and a communications campaign to explain the initiative to parents and employees.

School board member Stephanie Love said the policy wouldn’t help older students who have already been passed along to the next grade without reading on grade level.

“Kudos to what we’re doing for second grade, but I think we’re still doing a disservice to certain students if we’re not looking at the entire district,” she said during the meeting Tuesday.

Requiring students to repeat a grade in middle school can cause dropout rates to spike, but doesn’t have the same consequence for younger students. Paired with summer school, retaining elementary school students can help in the long run, research shows.

A Michigan law that would hold back third grade students who aren’t reading at grade level goes into effect in the fall. With similarly low literacy rates, parents and district officials are worried a majority of Detroit youth will be held back. So far, the exact meaning of what reading on grade level looks like has not been determined.

Indiana schools use a separate reading test from its regular state assessment to determine if third-graders can read well enough to be promoted. State policymakers have allowed more flexibility for schools to move students to fourth grade as long as they re-teach reading skills if they don’t pass the test.

The proposed policy would require three readings from the school board and would likely come up for an initial vote later this month.

[Read more at Chalkbeat]

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Diverse: Issues in Higher Education: Report Envisions Path Forward for Educational Equity in Tennessee

Tennessee’s work to increase its residents’ postsecondary attainment levels through initiatives such as the “Drive to 55” campaign, Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect has positioned the state as a national model, but leaders must not get complacent with the progress made thus far.

That was the sentiment of a new Complete Tennessee report released Tuesday titled “No Time to Wait: The State of Higher Education in Tennessee.” The report reveals that although more than 40 percent of Tennesseans now hold a postsecondary credential, state leaders, educators and community and industry partners can do more to address and close equity gaps in enrollment, retention and graduation outcomes for minority, low-income, rural, undocumented, incarcerated and other underserved groups.

“What was great [about the report] was the understanding that we are now comfortable with saying the word equity. And that is really new, I think, for Tennessee. We’ve always talked about access,” said Dr. Shanna L. Jackson, president of Nashville State Community College and a panelist at the report’s unveiling event. “This work is helping us to look at who’s actually benefiting from those programs and who’s actually completing those programs. It’s causing institutions to think differently.”

Complete Tennessee notes that data, research and researchers’ and practitioners’ expertise should be the basis for the state’s education equity agenda.

“No Time to Wait” offers several key data points for leaders to begin laying the groundwork for strategies to better identify and support subpopulations of students:

• Community college graduation rates have increased from 13 percent to 22 percent since 2013. However, fewer than one out of every four community college students graduate within three years;

• Only one in ten Black students will complete a community college degree, and only a third of Black students graduate within six years of enrollment at Tennessee’s locally-governed four-year institutions;
• Despite Tennessee’s commitment to increasing college affordability, nearly 30 percent of the state’s low-income students enroll at a college or university, which is four percentage points lower than the national average;
• Retention in the University of Tennessee system has increased from 76 percent to 78 percent between 2014 and 2017. Community college retention rates dipped between 2015 and 2016, but increased to over 54 percent in 2017;
• Disparities in postsecondary attainment still persist for Black and Latino students, who hold postsecondary credentials at lower rates than Asian and White Tennesseans.

It will take collaborative efforts from elected officials, higher education stakeholders and institutional leaders to set “ambitious but attainable” annual goals to increase on-time graduation rates and shrink achievement gaps for students across race, income and geographic location, the report emphasized.

Part of the effort to ensure that all Tennesseans have the education and experiences needed to thrive in the workforce will revolve around a need for investment in institutions – particularly in rural and other areas affected by the effects of poverty.

Dr. Jared Bigham, a panelist and executive director of Chattanooga 2.0, an organization committed to increasing postsecondary degree or credential attainment, said this investment is important because geographical location can influence the availability or access to opportunities such as Advanced Placement (AP) or dual-enrollment courses.

Increasing students’ sense of belonging, extending financial support to undocumented students, supporting and implementing programs such as Nashville Getting Results by Advancing Degrees (GRAD) and increasing faculty diversity to reflect the changing demographic of learners are several other opportunities for the state to work towards closing equity gaps, Complete Tennessee leaders said.

Dr. Kenyatta Lovett, executive director of Complete Tennessee, said elevating student and citizen voices can help leaders come up with solutions to the barriers that affect their success. Some of the feedback he has received from students reveals many first-generation students’ experiences with impostor syndrome, some low-income students’ challenge with financial aid verification or potential returning students’ concerns about where to start their process to enter college.

On another front, the early stages of Nashville GRAD would mirror the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model, providing intensive advising support and helping nearly 400 students cover their non-tuition fees such as books, transportation or supplies.

At Nashville State, for instance, Nashville GRAD operates as a system of support for students regardless of their background or how prepared they come to the institution, Jackson said. And even further, the institution has demonstrated a commitment to access and support for incarcerated learners, most recently graduating 23 new alumni from the Turney Industrial Complex.

“We know that education changes lives,” Jackson said. “Finding the resources when [incarcerated individuals] don’t have access to Promise and Reconnect is very challenging, so that is something that we need to wrap our arms around those students as well and give them the supports that they need.”

Industry partners, community organizations and college career counselors can also do their part to engage students about their education and career aspirations starting before students even enter a postsecondary program, the report said.

“Tell students they’re not only getting a degree,” but give them real-time workforce data and experiences to make informed choices about their career plans and potential earnings, said Dr. Douglas Scarboro, senior vice president and regional executive of the Memphis Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Jose Lazo, senior political science major at Tennessee State University, offered closing remarks at Complete Tennessee’s report unveiling, highlighting education as not only the future, but also as the present.

Education, Lazo said, “is a transformative power like none other that can within one generation, transform society itself.”

[Read more at Complete Tennessee] Read More

STUDENT VOICE: ‘College was just another foreign word. Then it became a dream for every student in my school’

For first-generation students, the dream of going to college is fraught. It’s hard just to get there.

The average school-counselor-to-student ratio in the country is 484 to 1, and this lack of support hinders students as they attempt to continue their studies beyond high school. My Brooklyn high school was no different. It did not have enough counselors to help students with the college search and application process.

Most students in my school were recent arrivals from the Dominican Republic who did not speak much English. College was just another foreign word. Then it became a dream for  every student in our school. Here’s what happened:

During my junior year, a nonprofit called Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation came in and offered to run a peer college counseling program. When asked if I wanted to work with the organization in my school as a peer counselor, I said “yes.” (My experience is documented in the film Personal Statement.) I knew peer counselors were needed, but I didn’t have much of an idea of what that implied.

I had moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic when I was 12 years old with my father and my two younger siblings. Adapting to a new culture while also learning English was incredibly difficult. Being the oldest of three meant that I had a lot on my plate. After school I had to go home and serve as a mom: cooking, cleaning, checking up on my sister who, for nearly four years, was emotionally unstable, and facing my father’s biggest enemy —  his alcohol addiction.

If  I didn’t laugh, I would cry.

Having to deal with so much at home, though, prepared me for everything that came next. I knew that whatever happened, I’d be OK. But I also knew that other students in my school needed more help. What I didn’t realize in helping others was how much I was also helping myself.

In the summer after my junior year, I began training to be a peer counselor. I was learning everything that students needed to know to apply to college and for financial aid. I also got extra one-on-one support from my supervisor, who helped me constantly, both academically and mentally. I now had something that most public school students throughout the country don’t have: a strong support network to guide me through the complex process of applying to college.

I also know that more students from my school went to college because of the support I provided. For me, it wasn’t just a job, it was a mission — because I have known way too many students who never went to college.

One of my students, Luz, was too shy to go visit a college campus. She was nervous and embarrassed by her accent. I took a Saturday off from my other responsibilities and accompanied her on a tour of a community college. The opportunity to envision a future for herself in college, and the support she needed to get there, made a difference for Luz. She became more engaged in class and even started to speak in English every time she saw me.

I continue to do everything I can to create more college awareness. For too long, nothing has been done about it. As a community, we are failing young people.

If we want to make America great again, let’s begin by making college accessible to everyone.

We need more college counselors in public schools to close the college guidance gap.

[Read more at The Hechinger Report]

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Is Tennessee moving its weakest teachers to early, non-tested grades? New research says yes.

Tennessee’s education insiders have whispered for years that some elementary school principals were moving their least effective teachers to critical early grades, which are free of high-stakes tests. That’s despite clear evidence that those years are the most important for preparing students for a lifetime of learning.

Now a new study has confirmed that the shift is real.

Researchers examining 10 years worth of state data through 2016 found that low-performing teachers in grades 3 through 5 were more likely to be reassigned to non-tested early grades than their more effective peers.

The findings, released Friday by the Tennessee Education Research Alliance and Vanderbilt University, may be an important piece of the puzzle in figuring out why almost two-thirds of the state’s students are behind on reading by the end of the third grade.

“These trends matter because having effective teachers in the early grades helps establish a foundation for success as students progress into later grades,” the research brief states.

The authors used Tennessee’s teacher evaluation system, including classroom observation scores and student achievement data, to track the reassignment of elementary school teachers by their principals. They found that only a hundred of the lowest-rated teachers were shifted to the lower grades in any given year, making for a relatively small impact across Tennessee. However, the pattern was consistent for all reassigned teachers who scored in the bottom three evaluation ratings on a scale of 1 to 5.

It’s not conclusive, though, whether those teachers remain ineffective when moved to kindergarten, first, or second grades.

“This could be counter-productive, but it could actually be productive if school leaders are finding better fits for their elementary school teachers,” said Sy Doan, who authored the research brief along with Laura K. Rogers.

Another study is in the works to examine whether students’ academic growth is stunted by re-assigning less effective teachers to lower grades.

Like other states, Tennessee doesn’t require testing until the third grade, when student scores are used to begin gauging the performance of students, teachers, schools, and districts.

But research elsewhere has shown that the pressures of such accountability systems for higher elementary grades can unintentionally give administrators incentives to “staff to the test” and move their weakest teachers to the early years.

“The patterns we found in Tennessee are consistent with similar studies conducted in other states,” Doan said.

Advocates of early education say the latest findings — while not surprising — should be a powerful reminder to school administrators that kindergarten through second grade are high-stakes for students’ learning and development, even if those years are free of high-stakes testing.

“I think it’s going to raise some important conversations,” said Lisa Wiltshire, policy director for Tennesseans for Quality Early Education. “If we want to improve third-grade outcomes, Tennessee has got to start prioritizing investments in the early grades, particularly in the quality of teachers.”

Sharon Griffin, a longtime Memphis school administrator who now leads Tennessee’s school turnaround district, made that point last week during a presentation to state legislators on the House Education Committee.

“When I was a principal …. there was this unprecedented norm where you would put your most effective teachers in grades that are tested,” she said. “Now we know from lessons learned that it’s really pre-K, kindergarten, first and second grades where you need the strongest teachers, so that our kids can be on grade level by third grade and we are not trying to close the gap continuously from third grade on.”

Tennessee has done some serious soul-searching about why most of its third-graders can’t pass the proficiency bar in reading, which is considered the foundation for learning and success in all subject areas.

The frustrations deepened in 2015 when a landmark Vanderbilt study showed that academic gains achieved by students in Tennessee’s public pre-K classrooms were fading out by first grade and vanishing altogether by third grade.

Since then, the focus has been on why. Is it the quality of pre-K? Or could it be missteps and misalignment in instruction and curriculum from kindergarten through the third grade?

Upcoming research will dig into those questions as other Vanderbilt researchers visit Tennessee classrooms next school year to observe instructional quality and teaching practice in the early grades.

“We know surprisingly little about the connections among the experiences children have across the early grades of school,” said Caroline Christopher, who will co-lead the work with Dale Farran, director of the Peabody Research Institute.  

Their study will be funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted through the Tennessee Education Research Alliance, a partnership between Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development and the Tennessee Department of Education.

[Read More at Chalkbeat] Read More

The U.S. Teaching Population Is Getting Bigger, and More Female

Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession’s gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country’s public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority—63 percent—of all the country’s teachers (though men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s). Within a few decades, the choice to teach young children was solidified as an inherently “feminine” pursuit; in fact, girls who couldn’t or didn’t want to be homemakers had few other job options.

In the mid-20th century, however, cultural and political shifts prompted a surge in the number of women seeking employment in traditionally “masculine” sectors. These changes also prompted the reverse—albeit to a lesser extent: The number of men seeking classroom careers rose and has grown by 31 percent since the early 1980s.

Yet despite this, the gender distribution in the profession has strangely grown more imbalanced, according to recently released data, largely because women are still pursuing teaching at far greater rates than men. According to the study, led by the University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll, the nation has witnessed a “slow but steady” increase in the share of K–12 educators who are women. During the 1980–81 school year, roughly two in three—67 percent—public-school teachers were women; by the 2015–16 school year, the share of women teachers had grown to more than three in four, at 76 percent. (From 1987 to 2015, the size of the teaching force increased by more than 60 percent, from about 2.5 million to about 4.5 million, according to the recent report, which helps explain why the field tipped further female despite the rising number of men in the profession.)

The trend is “odd,” Ingersoll and his co-authors—all education scholars, and most of them former classroom teachers—write in the report. Generally speaking, starting in the 1970s the country’s occupations witnessed a significant decline in gender segregation, as the number of women in the workforce soared. An index that measures how many women or men would need to change jobs to achieve equal gender distribution across occupations fell 26 percent from 1972 to 2002, when it was at its lowest point, according to a 2010 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Ingersoll and his research team highlight the rising proportion of women who are, for example, physicians (from 10 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data and federal surveys), lawyers (from 4 percent to 37 percent over the same time period), and pharmacists (13 percent to 63 percent). Other research shows that fewer female college students are seeking teaching degrees: In the late 1970s, roughly a third of the women enrolled in U.S. colleges were majoring in education; today the share has dropped to 11 percent.

What explains these contradictory trends? Much of it comes down to misunderstandings of what teaching entails and how those assumptions intersect with gender norms. Unlike in many other countries, in the United States, teaching has long been seen as a relatively low-status profession. In 2018, a survey of people in roughly three dozen countries asked respondents to rank 14 different professions—including teaching, medicine, law, social work, and website engineering—by each career’s perceived social status. On the one hand, survey participants in the United States gave teachers a middling ranking, and tended to liken them to librarians; respondents in countries such as China and Malaysia, on the other hand, put teachers in first place, analogizing them to doctors.

This cultural disregard for teaching has a gendered consequence: The status of a given career tends to correlate with the share of men in that profession—higher status equals more men, generally speaking. And that has its own consequence: Research has found that employers place less value on work done by women than on that done by men. These trends reinforce each other in perpetuity.

Within a given field, the more prestigious positions attract more men. Notably, close to half of all principals today, including two-thirds of those serving high schools, are men, as are more than three-quarters of school-district superintendents. Additionally, nine in 10 elementary-school educators are women, according to Ingersoll’s study, compared with six in 10 of their high-school counterparts. Prekindergarten in particular is heavily dominated by women, perhaps because younger kids might be dismissed as requiring little more than “Wheels on the Bus” sing-alongs.

Julio González, a 23-year-old pre-K educator at a public bilingual school on Chicago’s Lower West Side, admitted that he bought into such stereotypes when Teach for America first offered him the job a little more than a year ago, straight out of the University of Texas at Austin. “I made sure to ask people, like, ‘Is this an actual job, or am I just a glorified babysitter?’ ” he recalls. A first-generation Mexican American who dreamed of becoming a lawyer so he could advocate for low-income communities like his own, González eventually realized that teaching might be a more effective way to serve those communities. After all, an individual’s racial and gender biases tend to develop at a very young age.

Prestige is not a merely notional idea, as it tends to correlate tightly with compensation. The fact that prekindergarten classrooms have difficulty “attracting men as early-childhood teachers is hardly surprising,” Marcy Whitebook, who co-directs UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, said in an email, given that work as a pre-K teacher “is seen as a pathway to poverty.”

Teachers overall tend to have pretty meager salaries. The ACT, which every year surveys a pool of test-takers on their career aspirations, found that among respondents who said they were “potentially” interested in a job as a K–12 teacher, as opposed to definitely interested or definitely not interested, low pay was the sticking point that made them unsure. Average teachers’ salaries have remained essentially flat since the 1990s after controlling for inflation, according to a report published last year by the nonprofit Education Resource Strategies (ERS), and grew just 7 percent in the two decades before that. Using a metric developed by MIT researchers, the ERS report found that in most states, K–12 educators’ salaries fall below the living wage. And usually, the younger the students, the lower their teacher’s pay, as a 2018 report on early-childhood educators shows.

Women might be more willing to accept teaching’s low wages because the profession is, in theory, more amenable than other careers to the needs of women. Mothers, for instance, are more likely now than ever before to desire employment, yet still tend to bear most of the child-rearing responsibilities. The school day tends to end two or so hours before that of typical American workers. A 9-to-5 workday, as Kara Voght has reported for The Atlantic, creates a challenge for parents who have to coordinate and pay for child care (or leave their kids unsupervised) during that time gap. The notion that teachers enjoy shortened work days and summers exempt from work-related duties is little more than a myth, but teachers who are parents are often at least on a schedule a little more conducive to their children’s needs.

One effect of the gender imbalance could be that younger students have fewer opportunities to interact with positive male role models. “As a black male teacher, sometimes I feel like a unicorn,” said Charles Jean-Pierre, a D.C. Public Schools art and French teacher. He said the black male teachers he had as a child of immigrants in Chicago motivated him to embrace his passion for art and become a teacher himself. “I think it’s important for students to experience joy, nurturing, and compassion from men … Male teachers embody hope and love for many students who do not see that on a daily basis [from men] in their homes.”

But men who do this work might confront wariness about their abilities, or suspicions about their intentions for working with young children. Ingersoll cited research published in one 1993 book about men in traditionally “feminine” occupations finding that among elementary-school teachers, men who were perceived as too “male” were dismissed as incapable of working with young children, while men who weren’t “male enough” were suspected of being child molesters. “You have to sort of work it out so you’re the right amount of maleness,” Ingersoll told me. “It’s tiresome, and so a lot of the male elementary teachers say after a while, ‘This is just too draining.’ ” Both González and Jean-Pierre said that they’re always aware of the latter concern, ensuring that another adult is always in the classroom and forging strong relationships with parents.

But the fact that male teachers have to consider this at all traces back to the entrenched stereotypes that underpin teaching’s gender imbalance. Given that low pay—and accompanying low social standing—is both a result of and driving force behind men’s underrepresentation in the profession, it stands to reason that salary hikes could help stem the imbalance. A pay bump could in theory spur a virtuous cycle in which greater representation of men in the profession could slowly shift perception, which Ingersoll in 2016 suggested to The New York Times could then beget even greater representation.

That said, some research suggests that pay hikes will only go so far in boosting the share of male teachers—attitudes about caregiving will need to change, too. “Two years ago, if someone had told me that the most important role you can play as a teacher is to be a caregiver, I probably would’ve said, ‘Well, that’s not what I’m signing up for,’ ” González acknowledged.

Today he—echoing Jean-Pierre—embraces the fact that caregiving is, indeed, integral to his responsibility as a teacher, and that it’s just as valuable as all the other parts of his job.

[Read more at the Atlantic] Read More

Higher Pay Leads to Smarter Teachers, Global Study Says

When teachers have higher cognitive skills, their students perform better academically, according to a new study that compared data from 31 countries.

And teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely across the world, with teachers in the United States performing worse than the average teacher in numeracy and slightly better than the average in literacy. Similarly, U.S. students perform below the average score in math and about average in reading. 

Notably, teachers have stronger cognitive skills—and their students perform better in math and reading—in countries that pay teachers more, like in Ireland, Canada, and Finland. Teachers’ cognitive skills were measured by an international survey of adults’ information-processing skills, like literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving. 

“This is the first time I’ve got conventional wisdom on my side,” joked Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and one of the study’s authors. “We all think that having smarter teachers will in fact lead to better performance. … What we show, I think, is that countries that have smarter teachers … make an active choice to hire teachers from higher up in the distribution of college graduates.” 

The study, published in the journal Education Next, examines data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The researchers looked at OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey data to gauge the reading and math skills of about 6,400 test-takers who work as teachers, as well as student-achievement data from the Program for International Student Assessment.

The researchers compared teachers’ math and reading skills in each of the 31 countries to the skills of other adult workers in their country and to the skills of teachers in other countries. They also examined whether students score higher on PISA, on average, in countries where the median teacher has stronger math and reading skills.

They found that increasing teachers’ math skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. The effect of increasing teachers’ literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, but still positive. 

(Researchers conducted a series of controls to determine that the relationship between teacher cognitive skills and student performance is not driven by overall skill levels in the country, but specifically what teachers know.)

The researchers also found the impact of teachers’ cognitive skills is somewhat larger for low-income students than their more-affluent peers, particularly in reading.

“Schools are just inherently more important for low-income kids,” Hanushek said. “[In wealthy households], you have the ability to make up for less-good instruction, whereas lower-income families, on average, are not as prepared or ready to make up for what goes on in schools.”

How Can We Create a Smarter Teacher Workforce?

Teachers perform better than the median college graduate in countries like Finland, Singapore, Ireland, and Chile, the study found. Finland and Singapore in particular have been praised by education scholars for their work on building a high-quality teaching force. For example, Finnish teacher-preparation programs only select about 10 percent of applicants—which the Finnish minister of education told Education Week is because “teachers are so respected in our society.” 

To match the cognitive skills of Finnish teachers, the United States would need to recruit its median math teacher from the 74th percentile of the college distribution instead of the current 47th percentile, and its median reading teacher from the 71st percentile instead of the 51st, the study found.

Making teacher-prep programs more selective has been a controversial policy goal in this country. The Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation, for instance, originally set a standard that would require colleges to admit a group of candidates with an average 3.0 GPA and who held scores averaging in the top half on nationally normed achievement assessments. But that standard received enormous pushback from universities. Many in the field said that GPA doesn’t necessarily determine who will be a good teacher. And there was a diversity concern, too: Black and Latino candidates tend to have lower scores than their white and Asian counterparts on traditional selectivity metrics, such as GPAs and SAT scores. (CAEP eventually softened the requirement to say programs could meet the average 3.0 GPA requirementat admissions or by the time candidates graduate.)

Instead of focusing on pipeline policies like those, the researchers write that increasing teacher salaries would be a way to expand the pool of potential teachers. Research shows that few high-achieving students want to become teachers. 

“I think the U.S. has chosen a really bad equilibrium in that we really do underpay our teachers,” Hanushek said, adding that U.S. teachers are paid 22 percent less than comparably experienced and skilled college graduates doing other jobs. “Then we get people who are not very high up in the distribution of college graduates.” 

The study found clear evidence that higher teacher pay is associated with an increase in teachers’ cognitive skills—which, in turn, is associated with better student performance.

Teachers across the country recently have walked out of their classrooms in protest of low wages. The national average teacher salary is $55,100, according to 2015-16 federal data, and that varies widely between states. 

Still, Hanushek said raising teacher salaries across the board might not achieve the desired results. “Bad teachers like more money as much as good teachers,” he said.

Instead, he recommends that policymakers work to ensure that higher salaries go to the most effective teachers.

Performance-based compensation is a reform that has fallen out of favor in the wave of teacher activism—teachers have gone on strike for across-the-board raises, and paying good teachers more has rarelyentered in the conversation. (The one exception is in Denver, where the teacher strike that ended last week was centered on performance-based compensation.) 

An Education Week analysis of State of the State addresses found that 17 governors so far this year have recommended that their state boost teachers’ pay—but only Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has suggested a merit-based model.

“I don’t think we can keep saying we’ve got the best teachers in the world,” Hanushek said. “We can’t keep underpaying teachers and ignoring teacher effectiveness in the classroom—it’s got to be competitive.” 

[Read More at Education Week] Read More

College readiness: How Cheatham, Robertson and Sumner Schools stack up

Large numbers of students in Tennessee are not ready for college, according to newly released state data.

The data shows how prepared public high school students are for college in math and reading and how many need remedial coursework once they enter a community college or public university in Tennessee.

Overall, it paints a grim picture of the state’s continued challenges in improving K-12 education and is especially telling in some areas, where there are vast disparities between district-level performance and individual high schools within the district.

In Middle Tennessee, some districts reported lower remediation rates than the state average while others, sometimes in neighboring counties, were much higher.

Take Robertson, Cheatham and Sumner Schools for example.

Three neighbors, three outcomes

Statewide data shows that 46 percent of the roughly 33,000 high school graduates at Tennessee’s public colleges in 2016-17 needed remedial efforts in math.

And 33 percent needed remedial efforts in reading.

Robertson County Schools was below the state average with 41.4 percent of its 407 graduates needing remedial efforts in math. The number was even lower for reading, with 27.9 percent in need of remediation.

Sumner Schools was also below the state average in both areas, and there were also more graduates going on to higher education in Sumner County than there were in Robertson County. In math, Sumner County sent 44 percent of its 1,212 graduates to college needing remedial coursework. In reading, 25.4 percent needed remedial coursework.

It was a different story for Cheatham County Schools.

Of the district’s 243 graduates, 58.3 percent, or 134, needed remediation in math, and 36.1 percent, or 83, needed remediation in reading.

In a statement issued Thursday, Cheatham County Schools said its focus is to ensure that all students are college or career ready and preparing students for success begins in the earlier grades. 

“We have concentrated our efforts on early literacy and math instruction, which ultimately prepares students for academic success in middle and high school,” the statement reads. “We are committed to implementing programs that help our students be successful. For example, at some of our high schools, we offer an after-school tutoring program in which teachers work one-on-one with students who need extra instruction. 

“We have seen significant academic progress with this program.”

Other efforts are also taking place, locally.

There are regular scheduled meetings in Cheatham County between district-level curriculum coordinators and building-level academics and principals. Together, they review and analyze data, “to determine how teachers can be better effective in the classroom and how students can be more prepared for academic achievement,” the statement said.

Improvement takes time

The data, released to the state Senate Education Committee Wednesday and obtained by the USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee, shows that while some public high schools prepare their students extraordinarily well for college, others are facing profound challenges.

This is especially true in economically distressed areas as well as suburban and rural areas of the state, the data shows.

Students are deemed to need remedial efforts on either math or reading when they score 18 or below on the ACT subtest, and they have a lower chance of graduating from college if they need remediation, according to the state.

State Sen. Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, who requested the data from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said the numbers are just too high.

“And that is only the folks that are college bound,” Lundberg said. “If you included every student, that number would be higher.”

The data does not include students who attend a private or out-of-state college or choose not to attend college. 

The state’s improvements in K-12 education have masked some schools’ struggles, Lundberg said.

The information is a bombshell, he said, that makes him rethink the state’s K-12 improvements compared with the rest of the nation. Overall, Tennessee has been one of the fastest-improving states in national education rankings.

The data comes as the state is sending more students than ever to college free of tuition and fees through the Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect programs. The state also has a goal of equipping 55 percent of Tennesseans with a degree or certificate by 2025.

Lundberg said if the state wants to hit its Drive to 55 goals, there needs to be a hard look at what is going on in education and the state’s teacher training programs.

“Everyone has to own up to this that we have an issue,” Lundberg said. “Every district and every school. This is the type of data that every principal wants to see — how do we stack up.”

The high school level

Looking at the data by district and school level shows even more disparities across the state.

And smaller schools had higher swings in the percentage of students needing remediation, according to Emily House, the chief policy and strategy officer for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

In mostly rural Cheatham County, this seems partly true.

Sycamore High School sent 102 students to college followed by Cheatham County Central High School with 74 and Harpeth High School with 67.

Harpeth recorded the lowest numbers in both categories: 49.2 percent in math and 28.8 percent in reading. Sycamore and Cheatham County Central both finished higher, with Sycamore posting 59 percent in math and 40 percent in reading and Cheatham County Central posting 64.8 percent in math and 36.6 percent in reading.

In Robertson County, also mostly rural, the high school data was a mixed bag.

Springfield High School sent the highest number of graduates to college and posted the highest percentage of students in need of remediation in reading.

Of the school’s 111 graduates, 37.7 percent, 40 students, needed remedial coursework in reading while 47.2, 50 students, needed remedial coursework in math.

Meanwhile, Jo Byrns High School, one of the smallest schools in Robertson County, posted the best percentages in both reading and math. Of its 31 graduates, 33.3 percent, or 10 students, needed remedial math coursework while 13.3 percent, or 4 students, needed remedial reading coursework at the college level.

Robertson County Director of Schools Chris Causey highlighted the district’s intervention programs for reading and math, which has resulted in an increase in college readiness for students as compared with just a few years ago, he said.

The director also noted that the numbers of students hitting ACT benchmarks has also risen steadily, according to the district’s data.

“We still have a way to go, but the trends are definitely going in the right direction,” Causey said. “In the future, as our students journey to post-secondary opportunities, this should only get better.”

Robertson County is home to five traditional high schools and one alternative program.

Data was not available for the alternative school.

Results varied at the other three schools, according to the state’s data.

Greenbrier High School sent 108 graduates to college, White House Heritage High sent 102 graduates to college and East Robertson High sent 51 graduates to college, the data shows.

East Robertson posted the highest percentage of students needing remedial math coursework, while Greenbrier was almost dead even with Jo Byrns in performance and White House Heritage was in the middle.

At East, 52.1 percent of the graduates, 25 students, needed remediation in math and 22.9 percent, 11 students, needed remediation in reading.

At Greenbrier, 33.7 percent, 34 students, needed remediation in math and 18.8 percent, 19 students, needed remediation in reading.

And, at White House Heritage, 39.2 percent, 40 students, needed remediation in math and 32.4 percent, 33 students, needed remediation in reading.The Tennessean’s Duane Gang, Jason Gonzales and Joel Ebert contributed to this report. Reach Nicole Young at 615-306-3570 or nyoung@tennessean.com.

[Read more at the Tennessean]

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Report: Tennessee’s teacher prep programs are doing a better job, but graduating fewer educators

Tennessee’s teacher training programs improved or maintained their scores on a report card released Friday, even as the number of would-be educators they graduated dipped for a third straight year.

Eight of the state’s 40 programs received the top overall score in 2018, while seven others moved up one notch to earn the second-highest scores. None of the programs saw their overall ratings decrease on the four-point scale, with 4 being the best.

Nontraditional training programs continued to excel, with Memphis Teacher Residency, Teach for America in Memphis and Nashville, and the New Teacher Project in Nashville all achieving a top ranking.

Among traditional programs, Lipscomb University in Nashville, Union University in Jackson, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville maintained their top scores, while Christian Brothers University in Memphis broke into the top tier as well.

“We’re now seeing a greater distribution of top scores” among traditional and nontraditional programs, said Sara Morrison, executive director of the State Board of Education.

That’s important because university-based programs produce about 90 percent of the state’s new teachers.

The State Board issues its annual report card to gauge how well programs are preparing candidates for the classroom and whether they’re meeting the needs of school districts and the goals of the state. Criteria includes a profile of graduates over the past three years, their placement and retention in Tennessee public schools, and their observation and growth scores on their evaluations on the job.

The latest report card is the third under a redesigned grading system that launched after a 2016 report said most of the state’s training programs weren’t equipping teachers to be highly effective in their classrooms. It was a big red flag because the quality of teachers matter more to student achievement than any other aspect of schooling.

“We have seen an improvement in overall scores year after year,” said Morrison, noting that more first-year teachers are being retained and are helping their students show gains on state standardized tests.

Also encouraging: More recent graduates were prepared for teaching positions that districts struggle to fill every year, including English as a Second Language, Spanish, special education, high school math, and high school science.

On the flipside, the report card showed a gradual decline in the number of teacher candidates completing their training programs.

That troubling trend comes as the state braces for half of its 65,000 teachers to leave or retire in the next decade.

“Every program is looking to improve their recruitment strategies,” said Amy Owen, the board’s policy director, who spoke with reporters on the eve of the report’s release.

Another continued concern is lagging diversity among teacher candidates. Only 15 percent are people of color, compared with 35 percent of the state’s student population — a challenge since research shows that students of color are more likely to succeed academically when taught by teachers of color.

Among the report card’s other highlights, Tennessee Tech University, one of the state’s largest teacher training programs, improved its overall score to reach the second-highest rating. So did Belmont University, King University, Maryville College, Milligan College, Trevecca Nazarene University, and Western Governors University.

The University of Memphis maintained its score in the second-highest tier, as did Austin Peay, East Tennessee State, and Middle Tennessee State. All three are among the state’s largest training programs.

Morrison applauded programs for increasingly aligning their training to the state’s newest academic standards, especially in the area of literacy, and for collaborating more with nearby school districts to meet their needs.

“Some programs have even begun implementing dual-certification models so that their candidates are prepared to teach both an area like elementary education and either special education or English as a Second Language,” she said. “The result is a win-win situation, with teachers being more prepared and in-demand, districts having ready access to the educators they need, and education preparation providers improving on the state report card.”

[Read more at Chalkbeat] Read More

Large numbers of Tennessee students not ready for college, new state data show

Newly released data detailing how ready Tennessee students are for college paint a grim picture of the state’s continued challenges in improving K-12 education.

The data, released to the state Senate Education Committee at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday and obtained by the USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee, tally college readiness across the state in math and reading down to the high school level.

“Connecting it with local high schools clearly makes it more tangible,” said Mike Krause, Tennessee Higher Education Commission executive director.

It shows that while some public high schools prepare their students extraordinarily well for college, others have profound challenges and send many of their students on needing remedial education.

For instance, in Shelby County, Hillcrest High School, part of the Achievement School District, sent all of its 18 students who went to public colleges in Tennessee needing math remediation, the data show of the 2016-17 first-year college class.

Nashville’s Whites Creek High School sent out 78 percent, or 28 students, into the state’s colleges needing reading remediation. In Knoxville, Austin-East sent 80 percent of students, or 36, who enrolled in the state’s colleges needing math remediation.

The numbers also show contrasts in other parts of the state — in economically distressed, suburban and rural areas.

Students who need remedial education have a lower chance of graduating from college, according to state data. Students are deemed to need remedial efforts on either math or reading when they score 18 or below on the ACT subtest, according to the state.

A high number of students needing remediation

The data show that 46 percent of the roughly 33,000 high school graduates at Tennessee’s public colleges in 2016-17 needed remedial efforts in math.

And 33 percent needed remedial efforts in reading.

State Sen. Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, who requested the data from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said that is too high.

“And that is only the folks that are college bound,” Lundberg said. “If you included every student, that number would be higher.”

The data do not include students who attend a private or out-of-state college or choose not to attend college. 

A bombshell of information

The state’s improvements in K-12 education have masked some schools’ struggles, Lundberg said.

The information is a bombshell, he said, that makes him rethink the state’s K-12 improvements compared with the rest of the nation. Overall, Tennessee has been one of the fastest-improving states in national education rankings.

Lundberg believes every Tennessean should take notice of the new data. 

“Taxpayers across the state and localities are putting money into the school system. They have paid to educate those children,” Lundberg said. “So when you get to graduate 12th grade you should have a low number (of kids needing remediation) or else someone has to pay again for something you should have done before.

“And if you really need remediation in math or reading in college, you are probably not going to finish,” he said.

Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Memphis, expressed concern when the information was presented to the Senate Education Committee that three high schools in Shelby County sent all of its students needing remediation in math.

“We do really need some help in Shelby County,” he said. “We have some major, major challenges, and we need to address that.”

The data come as the state is sending more students than ever to college free of tuition and fees through the Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect programs. The state also has a goal of equipping 55 percent of Tennesseans with a degree or certificate by 2025.

Lundberg said if the state wants to hit its Drive to 55 goals, there needs to be a hard look at what is going on in education and the state’s teacher training programs.

“Everyone has to own up to this that we have an issue,” Lundberg said. “Every district and every school. This is the type of data that every principal wants to see — how do we stack up.”

Krause also said the data is a shared issue.

“We’re the ones that produce (many) of the teachers that are in high schools,” Krause said.

And Tennessee Department of Education spokeswoman Chandler Hopper said the data affirms its commitment to align pathways from an early age to a career.

“We are in a position as a state to use this information to think about the expectations and supports we have for students across districts and schools and continue to push for a high-quality education for all students from day one,” she said.

Disparities at school, district level

Looking at the data by district and school level shows even more disparities across the state.

And smaller schools had higher swings in the percentage of students needing remediation, according to Emily House, the chief policy and strategy officer for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

In Metro Nashville Public Schools, the city has seen ACT scores rise.

“However, we know many students still struggle,” Nashville schools spokeswoman Dawn Rutledge said.

“That’s why the district has placed dedicated focus on early literacy and math instruction and regularly tracks that progress,” she said. “Preparing students for college and career starts in the earlier grades, and it is also critical in ensuring students are successful in high school.”

Blount County Schools sent 37 percent of its 654 students to public college needing math remediation. But in Alcoa High School, 38 students — about 50 percent of the students it sent to college in 2016-17 — needed math remediation.

In Sullivan County, there is an almost 20-point difference in college readiness in math between higher-performing Dobyns-Bennett High School and lower-performing Central High School.

Over 70 percent and 45 percent of La Vergne High School’s students in Rutherford County need remediation in math and reading, or 154 and 99 students, respectively. That is compared with 42.9 percent in math and 27.8 percent in reading for the entire 1,937 students the district sent to the state’s colleges.

Rutherford County Schools spokesman James Evans said the district’s focus is to ensure students are ready for college or career. He said the district advises students early and often about the importance of rigorous classes to prepare them for life.

“We work constantly to increase the number of programs and options available to students in high school and other grade levels,” he said.

In economically distressed counties such as Hardeman or Perry, the number of students needing remedial efforts is well above the state’s average.

Williamson County, which is the state’s most affluent county, has the lowest percentage of students who need remediation for math and the second lowest for reading. A total of 279 students at the district’s nine public high schools needed math remediation.

No Williamson County school had a higher remediation rate than 35 percent. 

By contrast, in Hardeman County — which is one of 15 counties currently deemed distressed — 64 percent of graduates needed remediation in math, with 47 percent similarly needing help with reading. At Middleton High School, one of the county’s two high schools, 78 percent, or 25 students, needed math remediation. 

College remediation efforts have improved

But as bad as the data is, Krause said, remediation has improved in recent years. Overall, he said colleges have increased their remediation rates by over 400 percent in recent years. 

“It has significantly declined from over 70 percent to low 50 percent” during a five-year period, he said.

Tennessee Promise students also show a higher rate of graduation despite many coming in with higher remedial needs, he said. 

After the hearing, Krause said the next step for higher education is to “have a conversation” with the state’s teacher colleges, to prepare future educators. For those already teaching, he said more training could help.

“I don’t believe that we have to wait until next year’s data,” Krause said. “I think we know there’s a cohort of juniors that are going to be taking an assessment in the next months — is there a way to get out there and really think through those competencies?” Krause said.

[Read more at the Tennessean] Read More