Wednesday, June 30, 2021
C-SPAN's 2021 Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership Results Announcement
C-SPAN announced the results of the 2021 Presidential Historians Survey. 142 historians rated former U.S. presidents using 10 different leadership characteristics. Survey Project Coordinator Rachel Katz made the announcement. Find complete results he […]
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How to Decide How to Spend Elementary and Secondary School Relief Funds
States and districts have almost $122 billion coming their way from the American Recovery Program’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ARP ESSER) fund. Decisions on how to spend the money will have to be made quickly, because the ESSER funding timeline is fast, and student needs are substantial. In theory, the best way to determine how to spend the funds is relatively straightforward. In practice, though, it may feel more challenging. ESSER funds are new, so administrators may have questions about what is allowed, especially given that a broader range of possibilities is permitted under ESSER when compared to other federal education programs.
The Basics of Spending ESSER Funding
The $122 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARP ESSER) is the third round of ESSER funding, which totals $189.5 billion in all. The first round (ESSER 1) was about $13 billion from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, and the second (ESSER 2) was roughly $54 billion from the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act. In all three rounds, 90 percent of the money must go to school districts, which have broad discretion over how to spend the funds. Districts must spend at least 20 percent of ARP ESSER funds to address learning loss through evidence-based interventions.
ESSER funds not allocated to districts are kept by states as “state-reserve” funds. States can spend ESSER 1 and 2 state-reserve funds on emergency needs to address issues related to coronavirus (and a small amount on administrative expenses). ARP ESSER state-reserve funds are subject to specific spending requirements. From the ARP ESSER state-reserve, states must spend 7 percent of the state’s total ARP ESSER allocation for evidence-based activities: 5 percent to address learning loss, 1 percent for summer enrichment, and 1 percent for comprehensive after-school programs. States may spend the remaining ARP ESSER state-reserve funds on emergency needs to address issues related to coronavirus (and a small amount on administrative expenses).
Before states and districts can understand what is possible under ESSER, they first have to understand the program’s rules, including timing and permissible spending options. ESSER can support many activities traditional U.S. Department of Education grant programs cannot, and, most important, misunderstandings about existing programs could shape ESSER implementation in ways that limit its potential.
Timing
States and districts have a limited time to spend ESSER funds, and understanding these timelines is vital for making decisions about which kinds of activities to support and when.
Each round of ESSER money has its own “period of availability.” This means, briefly, that ESSER funds can only pay for work performed during that period, contracts entered into during that period, or certain activities carried out during that period. These are known as “obligations,” which is a technical term under federal law.
Administrators have an extra year to spend all three rounds of ESSER money beyond what is written in Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, and ARP because of a law outside of ESSER called the General Education Provisions Act. That means ESSER 1 is available for obligation until September 30, 2022, ESSER 2 until September 30, 2023, and ARP ESSER until September 30, 2024. ESSER funds must be liquidated within 120 calendar days after the end of each applicable obligation deadline.
States have a narrower window to make some important spending decisions, however. States have one year from the date they received each ESSER grant to choose whether to award state-reserve funds to other entities through grants and contracts or to spend funds directly.
What ESSER can support
ESSER is different from traditional U.S. Department of Education programs in two important ways. First, unlike many U.S. Department of Education programs that are limited to certain students (like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act for students with disabilities) or schools (like Title I for schools with certain poverty levels), ESSER can benefit any or all students, staff, and schools. This means states and districts can invest in systemwide initiatives to equitably improve outcomes for all students, target funds to students with specific needs, or do both. Second, ESSER can support activities that some traditional programs cannot, like core instruction, facilities upgrades, and construction.
Taken together, this means states and districts need to think differently about ESSER spending. For example, in general, federal education funds cannot be used for districtwide high-quality core curricula. This limitation does not apply to ESSER, however, and some states are already taking advantage of this flexibility. The Tennessee Department of Education is using ESSER and other U.S. Department of Education funds for its statewide Read 360 initiative, which includes tutoring and online supports to help develop systematic foundational literacy skills, high-quality phonics-based instructional materials, and other resources to support strong reading instruction. The Nebraska Department of Education is using ESSER funds to provide statewide access to high-quality math instructional materials.
States and districts can also use ESSER funds for school facility and infrastructure improvements to reduce health risks, mental health supports for students and staff, extending learning time or reorganizing the school day to accelerate learning, extending broadband and device access, and much more.
For as many spending options as ESSER offers, though, there are other considerations that will affect state and local spending choices. Chief among these is the many federal administrative regulations that apply to ESSER, such as federal procurement rules districts must follow when buying goods or services with ESSER money, federal rules for construction, federally funded employee compensation, and more. These rules are manageable, but states and districts might be sensitive to the ways they complicate certain spending choices.
How perceptions of existing federal education programs could impact ESSER spending
Even though ESSER is not subject to the same kinds of constraints as other U.S. Department of Education programs, misunderstandings about those programs could end up as barriers to ESSER innovation.
Even though ESSER funds are distributed to states and districts based on Title I allocations, for example, ESSER funds are not subject to Title I’s spending rules—a point that is confusing to many.
Long-held misunderstandings about traditional U.S. Department of Education programs—particularly the two largest, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—could also limit ESSER spending in unexpected ways, which may be more significant. Some state and district leaders mistakenly believe that an IDEA-funded service for students with disabilities cannot be provided to other students through another funding source. Some also believe that any service delivered to both students with and without disabilities cannot be considered a special-education service, regardless of how it is funded. Neither of these beliefs is correct, but they might make some districts reluctant to use ESSER funds in innovative ways.
One district considered using ESSER funds to expand the use of occupational therapists in its elementary schools to support students’ social and emotional needs after the return to in-person learning. Leaders in this district, however, were concerned that, because some students with disabilities receive occupational therapy as a special-education service, they could not offer services to non-disabled students without running afoul of federal special-education laws. This is not correct, but the district’s equivocation shows how misunderstandings about existing programs could inadvertently incentivize the status quo and limit ESSER’s potential for innovation.
A Framework for ESSER Planning
How, then, can ESSER funds be spent in a way that makes sense for each district and allows for innovation? First, states and districts should determine local needs and identify a set of potential approaches to meeting those needs. States and districts then need to do their research. Those approaches that are infeasible or that policy does not permit should be ruled out; the requirements of ESSER do constrain these decisions but rule out surprisingly few options. Finally, spending should be prioritized in cost-effective ways.
1. Determine state and local needs and potential approaches to meeting them
ESSER is designed to permit many types of spending, and there’s no single “right” choice that applies everywhere. To move beyond simply identifying needs and towards determining the best way to address them, states and districts should consider multiple strategies to address each plausible issue, rather than starting with one favored candidate. The point here isn’t to seek out one permissible silver bullet, but to generate a robust set of alternatives to consider. It is therefore critical to solicit and consider a diverse range of perspectives about needs.
Many analyses focus on how student outcomes vary across demographic groups. For more actionable results, districts might consider how student outcomes differ with access to school-based resources, like experienced teachers, enriched instructional offerings, or counseling staff.
2. Do the research
With a list at the ready, leaders should start to gather information on each option. Now is the time to answer two big questions. First, what would it take to implement this strategy well? Many strategies are evaluated at a smaller scale than leaders may envision, so they should consider whether they can implement at their desired scale. Space, transportation, staffing, scheduling, and technology are all required and should be included in cost calculations, as well as the resources that are available but would be diverted from other uses, like staff time.
Timing of spending as well as total costs should be considered. This is straightforward for one-time costs, like a single year of summer school or extended learning time. But for changes that would reverberate into future budgeting, what will happen, instructionally and contractually, when the ESSER funds run out—especially for districts with particularly large ESSER allocations? This is a great reason to reflect not just on which new things districts would like to acquire, but also on how existing spending patterns are working out. Are there less effective practices taking up resources that, over time, could be freed up for new uses?
If the strategy seems feasible, leaders can move on to the second big research question: what would happen if the strategy was implemented well? This means considering evidence based on what’s happened elsewhere, with an eye to how convincing and relevant it is. Thinking through how likely the outcomes are due to the strategy requires thinking through a counterfactual scenario.
Many studies compare test scores at the start of the school year with scores at the end and implicitly or explicitly attribute all of that growth over the year to the use of a particular curriculum or intervention, but a better approach would be to compare test score changes over the course of the year in settings using different interventions. This gets closer to approximating a counterfactual outcome: how did test scores change fall to spring with, say, one math curriculum in place versus another? Ideally, research takes care of the “selection problem,” or why different schools choose to use different interventions, by introducing variation that is random, or close to it, where interventions are used.
3. Rule out the non-starters
Some options simply can’t work, either because their implementation requirements are infeasible in a given context, or because federal law (and sometimes state law or policy) preclude them. In most cases for ESSER, though, getting more information on what is permissible is likely to rule options in rather than out.
What makes a strategy permissible in terms of ESSER’s evidence requirements, which apply to the required set-aside spending categories described above for states and districts? These all draw on the Every Student Succeeds Act’s definition of evidence. ESSA has four “tiers” of evidence but, for the purpose of understanding ESSER, all you need to understand is its most flexible option. Carrie Conaway has described this fourth tier as ESSA’s “hidden gem.” In her words, it applies to “programs and practices that are informed by research and seem reasonably likely to succeed.” Being informed by research is different than being the subject of research. A district might choose to adopt a new core reading curriculum that includes elements research has identified as important for helping students learn to read to replace a current curriculum that is lacking them. This is okay under ESSER, even if that particular new curriculum is not in the What Works Clearinghouse.
ESSA’s numbered tiers imply a hierarchy, but the technical aspects of research that define the tiers determine just a fraction of the practical significance of research findings. For example, many districts are especially interested in resources to help students with disabilities and English learners, for whom the past year has been particularly bleak instructionally. Yet the research base at the highest tiers of evidence on what works for these groups is especially weak. This doesn’t mean districts should walk away from their needs and values. Instead, they should understand and embrace the broad view of evidence permitted under the law.
4. Prioritize based on cost-effectiveness
With any luck, at least one good option has survived to this point. Leaders can use the research they’ve assembled to think about how effective each option is likely to be alongside its cost. This step may seem obvious when it comes in this sequence, but all too often, the sources consulted won’t even mention costs.
It’s true that this process will take longer than running the top contender or two through the What Works Clearinghouse or EdReports.org—which is just doing a fraction of the “do your research” step and nothing else. Still, perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of the good here: even a light, quick version of this framework will help states and districts make better ESSER funding decisions.
Nora Gordon is associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University and the co-author of Common-Sense Evidence: The Education Leader’s Guide to Using Data and Research. Melissa Junge and Sheara Krvaric co-founded the Federal Education Group, where they are attorneys.
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The post How to Decide How to Spend Elementary and Secondary School Relief Funds appeared first on Education Next.
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Horrific story of the week:
Critical report on BBC Newsround story is misleading
An online article by science pressure group the Health Advisory and Recovery Team (HART) has claimed a video by children’s TV show Newsround made a number of misleading claims about the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for children.
Since the video was released, Newsround made one correction in an accompanying article on its website stating “the claim that the vaccine is 100% safe has been removed from an online transcript of this article.”
It also included a statement from UK drug regulator the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
It said: “We have carefully reviewed clinical trial data in children aged 12 to 15 years and have concluded that the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective in this age group and that the benefits of this vaccine outweigh any risk.”
However, a number of other claims HART made are themselves misleading.
Claim: The Pfizer vaccine trials were too small to detect adverse effects and prove efficacy
HART said this Pfizer trial was “grossly underpowered” to detect relatively rare serious events as only 1,131 children received the vaccine in the trial and claimed that seven of the children in the trial had severe adverse events associated with the vaccine, one of which was life-threatening.
It also raised questions over the ability of the trial to demonstrate efficacy, claiming that because the risk of symptomatic Covid-19 in children is so low, you would need to vaccinate more than two million people to detect one death.
It is true that the trial, which had over 6,000 participants, was too small to detect very rare adverse events. Dr Jason Oke, senior statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, told Full Fact “Trials are rarely, if ever, of sufficient size (or powered) to detect differences in rare adverse events and this trial…is no exception.
“So, I would say that [HART’s] statement is not incorrect but I would suggest that this issue is not unique to this study.”
While seven serious adverse events were detected among the vaccine trial group, none of the events were recorded as being related to the vaccine.
HART’s assessment of Pfizer’s efficacy data (which found 18 cases of Covid-19 in the unvaccinated group, and none in the vaccinated group) appears to only consider vaccination worthwhile if it prevents death.
While the trial was too small to detect a difference in Covid-19 deaths, that was not its purpose. It set out to measure the impact of efficacy of vaccines in reducing the risk of Covid-19, and found the vaccine worked. As Full Fact and others have reported, the vaccine is not only to reduce the risk of dying from Covid-19 (which we have previously reported is close to one in 100,000 in children who catch the disease) but to reduce non-lethal but harmful symptomatic Covid-19, transmission of the disease, and long Covid.
Claim: An independent review has advised that all Covid-19 vaccination should be halted because of the number of deaths and adverse events it has caused.
HART also cited an open letter to CEO of the MHRA Dr June Raine as evidence of the vaccines’ harmfulness, claiming it was an “independent preliminary Yellow Card reporting review (which) advises that all COVID-19 vaccination should be halted, pending a full independent safety enquiry.” The “review” argues that 1,253 deaths and 888,196 adverse reactions (ADR) reported via the Yellow Card Scheme were “covid-19 vaccine attributed”.
We’ve said on a number of occasions that reporting of deaths and adverse events following a vaccine does not mean they are connected.
Some adverse events have been investigated and are possibly linked to vaccination. The MHRA has received reports of 389 cases of blood clotting following the AstraZeneca vaccine, of which 68 were fatal. Its advice remains “that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks in the majority of people.” Under 40s however are being offered an alternative to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
According to the latest statistics, there have been 395 instances of anaphylaxis/anaphylactoid reactions in response to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, 16 instances after the Moderna vaccine and 760 after the AstraZeneca vaccine. Anyone with a history of allergic reactions to the Pfizer vaccine or hypersensitivity to the Moderna vaccine have been told to not receive those vaccines.
Reports of Bell’s Palsy (a type of facial paralysis) have been analysed but “so far is similar to the expected natural rate and does not currently suggest an increased risk following the vaccines.”
There have been eight reports of Capillary Leak Syndrome (where fluid leaks from the small blood vessels into the body, which can lead to organ failure and death). While it is an extremely rare condition, whose triggers are not well understood, the MHRA has advised the AstraZeneca vaccine should not be used by anyone with a history of such episodes.
The MHRA also monitored reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammatory heart conditions) following vaccination. It says the reports are “very rare”, “typically mild” and people should attend for vaccination when invited “unless advised otherwise.”
A range of menstrual disorders have been reported after the Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines but the number of reports are said to be low in relation to the number of women who have had their vaccine and how common such disorders are generally.
Of other adverse events with a fatal outcome following vaccination “review of individual reports and patterns of reporting does not suggest the vaccine played a role in the death.”
Claim: Because children have more active immune systems, they will generate more spike proteins which are now linked to “harms”.
HART also claimed that children produce more spike proteins generated by the Covid-19 vaccine.
It claimed recent evidence shows these proteins are harmful. We believe this refers to statements made by viral immunologist Byram Bridle who claimed, just as spike proteins from the Covid-19 virus can enter the bloodstream and cause cellular damage, so can spike proteins generated by the Covid-19 vaccine.
While we don’t know whether children produce more spike proteins following vaccination we recently fact checked Mr Bridle’s comments. Spike proteins generated by the vaccines work differently to those generated by the Covid-19 virus, and so the assumption that spike proteins generated by the vaccine could also harm cells in the bloodstream is unevidenced..
His theory has also been addressed by a number of other scientists and fact checkers.
Claim: There is a distinct likelihood Covid-19 vaccinations causes myocarditis in children
HART also noted Newsround hadn’t mentioned some of the Pfizer vaccine’s side effects, citing a recent FDA report and an upcoming U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) emergency meeting on associated myocarditis (an inflammation of the heart, which can lead to heart failure).
The CDC reported earlier this month that more than half of the myocarditis cases reported to the U.S Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System after the second dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines were in people aged between 12 and 24.
This has led to the FDA adding a warning to the Pfizer and Modera vaccines.
As noted earlier, the MHRA has received reports of myocarditis following vaccination but say instances are very rare, events were typically mild and individuals should still come forward for their vaccine unless advised not to.
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Horrific story of the week:
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Horrific story of the week:
Pandemic school attendance: fact checked
An article published by The Sun on 27 June claims that 100,000 pupils have failed to return to school full-time despite classrooms reopening.
This claim is based on a report produced by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which states that during September to December 2020, 93,514 pupils in England were severely absent, which means they missed school more often than they attended. This does not include pupils who missed lessons directly due to Covid-19, for example, school bubble closures.
The Sun fails to point out in the headline and the first five paragraphs of the article that this figure applies to attendance in September to December 2020, and is not reflective of current school attendance rates.
In fact, the second paragraph of the article misleadingly states the absences are “despite classrooms reopening in March” which is irrelevant as the figures used in the report relate to the 2020 autumn term.
It’s also important to note that even before Covid-19, in the autumn term of 2019, 60,244 pupils were classed as severely absent.
This indicates that the factors contributing to the absence of a large number of these children may not be related to, or at least dependent on, Covid-19.
The recent picture
The Department for Education (DfE) has published more recent data, indicating what’s happening in schools, but has not estimated the proportion of pupils who are “severely absent”, which is a measure the CSJ calculated itself.
As a baseline, the overall absence rate in state-funded primary, secondary and special schools in England in the 2018/19 academic year was 4.7% (meaning a 95.3% attendance rate) though the DfE does warn about making direct comparisons between this figure and more recent attendance figures.
Towards the end of April attendance attendance was at its highest level at any point of the pandemic (94%), with the DfE saying that the attendance rate in state-funded primary schools (96%) was broadly in line with attendance in a typical academic year.
At the time of writing, this rate has dropped to 87.4% for all state-funded schools, largely due to the rapid spread of the Delta variant.
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Horrific story of the week:
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- 3D Comfort mask design
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- Comfortable stretch fabric for tight fit
- Easy to put on & remove
Specs
- Color: white
- Materials: 3-layer melt-blown non-woven PPE
- Product dimensions: 1"H x 8"L x 5"W
- 3D Comfort design
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Horrific story of the week:
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Charter Schools Go to College
Lourdes Rea wanted to transfer from community college to a four-year university but worried about the $70,000 she’d have to borrow to cover the costs. Plus, she would need a strong essay to get in, but as the first in her family to pursue a college education, she didn’t know how to write one.
The problem wasn’t that she lacked an appetite for hard work or vision for the future. At 20, Rea was already financially independent from her parents and worked 30 hours a week at a Trader Joe’s grocery store, along with other odd jobs, to pay her bills. But, like many students, she found it hard to balance those demands with her full-time course load. Meanwhile, she was trying to find an internship in marketing, her intended career.
She sought out advice on her community-college campus, but it wasn’t easy to get the information she needed. “I would literally sometimes ask five, six, seven different people before I got to the place where they could help me,” she said. Even then, she often felt uncomfortable and unsure of what to say. “I was very shy to ask. I just felt so lost.”
So she turned to an unlikely source of support: an advisor from the charter high school she’d attended.
An “alumni college success” coach from Bright Star Schools, which runs three charter high schools in Los Angeles, helped Rea put together an admissions essay to transfer to the University of Southern California, get financial aid to avoid the debt she feared, and win a coveted digital-media internship at a major entertainment company—all while cheering her on along the way.
That high-school coach “has been the most important person in my educational journey,” said Rea, now 22 and a junior at USC majoring in business administration with an internship at the Walt Disney Company on her resume. “She would always check in with me, and we would go back and forth with different situations that I had. Her support is not just school; it’s being there for me when things get really hard.”
Bridging a “Vast Divide”
Charter high schools largely serving low-income, first-generation, Black and Hispanic students have long boasted of the comparatively high proportions of their students who graduate and go to college. But as these schools and their alumni grow older, charters also are looking at their rates of degree attainment, which remain lower than they’d like. In response, several leading charter networks, including Achievement First, Bright Star Schools, Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Summit Public Schools, and Uncommon Schools, have been expanding two key aspects of their high-school programs to promote alumni success on campus: detailed data tracking and analysis, and hands-on counseling and support.
First, a relatively new source of data is showing high schools how well their graduates do after they leave. The National Student Clearinghouse’s Student Tracker reports whether and where graduates enroll, attend, and complete college. This information is helping charters find and address shortcomings in the way they prepare high-school students for postsecondary success. Many public high schools have started using data in this way, too.
The charters also have begun to leverage the insights from that data, and the rising numbers of entering college students they collectively produce, to demand better outcomes from the universities and colleges where those students end up. Already, some are steering their graduates away from institutions where the data show they don’t do well—advice that is bound to get the attention of institutions already struggling to fill seats and meet diversity goals.
Second, charter schools have expanded their alumni-support services to address low rates of completion, including by following their graduates to college campuses and providing advisors, mentors, and ongoing advocacy to raise the odds that students will make it to the finish line. College-access counseling is growing to become college-completion counseling, too.
These initiatives are too new for long-term impacts to be measured decisively, especially considering that postsecondary success rates are computed over six or eight years. But they apply tools that have been separately shown to increase completion among students who are low-income, first-generation, and ethnic and racial minorities, such as encouraging them to attend more selective institutions with greater resources and supports. Funding for this work is covered largely by private philanthropy, though there are ongoing discussions with partner universities to share the costs, since they also share the benefits of improved success rates.
These kinds of interactions between high schools and colleges largely haven’t existed before. K–12 and higher-education institutions generally exist separated from one another across a vast divide, seldom talking to each other, never mind collaborating in the interests of students. This has created a confounding non-system of college preparation and postsecondary education, with large numbers of students falling off track in the transition.
“Everyone just passes the buck from one to another, and I can say that as someone who was at the intersection of those two sectors,” said Liane Hypolite, assistant professor of educational leadership at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and a former charter-high-school college counselor.
“We continue to have these arbitrary divides between K–12 and higher education,” she said. “If we saw them as connected, maybe we could really strengthen the learning that our students experience.”
Higher Education’s Failings
The proportion of high-school graduates going on to college has been rising overall, and has reached 70 percent. But colleges and universities have generally failed to improve retention or fully close gaps in degree attainment between first-generation, low-income, Black and Hispanic students and higher-income whites.
Sixty-four percent of white students enrolling in a four-year institution earn a bachelor’s degree within six years compared to 54 percent of Hispanic students and 40 percent of Black students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In addition, students from higher-income homes are substantially more likely to earn a degree. By age 24, an estimated 62 percent of students whose household income is in the top 25 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree. That number falls sharply for students from poorer households, to 44 percent, 21 percent, and 16 percent for the second, third, and bottom quartiles of household income, according to an analysis by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.
Narrowing these divides is especially important to the nation’s leading charter networks, which enroll large numbers of low-income Black and Hispanic students. KIPP, the biggest, serves about 113,000 students in 21 states. Nearly all are low income, measured by whether they qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Fifty-five percent are Black and 40 percent are Hispanic.
KIPP students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend college, often arrive on campus with more challenges than are faced by many of their classmates, said Ajuah Helton, the national director of KIPP Through College, the network’s college-advising arm. “There is potentially a financial gap, a sense of belonging on campuses, and a third piece around what it looks like to be able to compete academically in situations where there are not enough resources.”
Higher education is not doing enough to address this “triple threat” to student success, said Helton. “It’s frustrating that high schools have to really carry the burden of strong transitions to help students get to and through” college, she said.
As much as institutions say they’re student facing, “sometimes they really aren’t,” said Onjheney Warren, a college transition specialist at KIPP Generations Collegiate High School in Houston. “That just goes back to how higher education is not accessible unless … unless you’re white, honestly. We are filling that void, because our students deserve college counselors. They deserve choice.”
These efforts by charter operators come at a moment of change and vulnerability in higher education. The potential pool of applicants coming out of charter schools is especially attractive to colleges and universities amid enrollment declines and new calls for diversity and inclusion.
Enrollment in higher education in the United States has been falling steadily for a decade and took a sharp dive during the Covid-19 pandemic. While the number of applicants to college in the fall of 2020 in every other category rose, the number of first-generation applicants declined, according to the Common App. And about half of college students already enrolled said Covid-19 disruptions will make it harder for them to finish their degrees, according to a poll by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That included 56 percent of Black and Hispanic students, compared to 44 percent of whites.
Even if enrollment rebounds, declines in the country’s birthrates that began during the economic crisis of 2008 point to even steeper dropoffs in the numbers of incoming freshmen starting after 2025, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education estimates. After the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and widespread calls for racial justice, many schools have also made a broad commitment to attracting a more racially and economically diverse student body to their campuses.
Charter schools already use the intelligence they’ve been collecting to steer their students away from institutions where they don’t do well. For example, Bright Star recommends its families not send graduates to certain community colleges in southern California with very low completion rates.
“You could imagine a situation in which K–12 would start to use those data to advise their students differently, as in, ‘These institutions are doing a terrible job with Black students, with Latinx students, with low-income students—don’t go there,’” said Mandy Savitz-Romer, director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s master’s program in prevention science and practice and a former urban high school counselor.
Now several charters are banding together to remind enrollment managers of the diversity and growing number of their graduates, forcing colleges and universities to do a better job if they want these students on their campuses.
There’s self-interest involved on the part of charter schools as well. KIPP, for example, has publicly committed to “preparing students for economically self-sufficient, choice-filled lives,” which typically involves more education than a high-school diploma. Charters including KIPP are judged by families and donors not only on how many of their students graduate high school and go to college, but on how many earn a degree.
“These are charter schools that rely on private philanthropy,” said Savitz-Romer, “and they would like to say that they’re successful.”
Power in Numbers
Bringing their emerging clout to bear on improving campus support for students is “the next frontier” for charter high schools, said Amy Christie, senior director of college access and success at the Achievement First network of charter schools in New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
“We’ve been trying to do that in isolation, leveraging our own political capital,” she said. Now, charter schools seeking to change colleges’ and universities’ behavior are teaming up to share information and broadcast a common message to admissions officers across the country: do better by our students.
“We’re saying, ‘Listen, we’re sending you 100 kids every year,’” she said. And they are keeping track of how those students do once on campus.
“I know my equivalents at every charter system in the country, and we’re swapping information about what’s going on with XYZ College,” Christie said. “Inevitably that school will come up on some kid’s list, and we’re going to say to families, ‘Here’s the track record. This ultimately is your decision, but I wouldn’t recommend it.’”
Not all colleges and universities have welcomed questions from their students’ high schools. Many resist sharing the kind of detailed records high schools need to keep track of their alumni, such as the academic progress of individual students or groups of students—with or without their names attached. “Colleges are very, like, ‘We don’t want to give you our data,’” KIPP’s Warren said. Some are unwelcoming of the charter-school coaches who materialize on campus with their students looking for help. “I’ve had people in offices say, ‘What is your job? Why are you here with them?’” she said. “As if we’re going to be judging them or telling them they’re doing their job wrong.”
But charters already have access to detailed information about student trends on campus through other sources. StudentTracker provides information that high schools generally haven’t ever had, at least in the surprising amount of detail they can now get. In the past, high schools had known only whether or not their students, as they were handed their diplomas, said they planned to go to college. StudentTracker can report back about which graduates enrolled at which institutions, in close to real time, and where they end up each semester after that. It can break this down by students’ gender, race, ethnic background, and other characteristics. And schools can compare how their graduates in each of these categories perform against national averages. The price: $595 per year, per high school.
With this expanded transparency, a growing number of institutions are beginning to cooperate and form explicit partnerships with charter schools and networks. KIPP has agreements with 97 institutions to recruit, support, and share data about its students. The network sends one quarter of its graduates to these schools, which include Brown, Duke, and Vanderbilt universities, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At least one partner institution, Colorado State University in Fort Collins, has agreed to split the cost of a full-time advisor for KIPP students on its campus.
Other charter schools have similar deals with higher-education institutions. Achievement First has partnered with Lafayette College and to date, 30 of its graduates have enrolled at the school.
“We feel like they’re an extension of our admissions office,” said Gregory MacDonald, vice president for enrollment
management at Lafayette in Easton, Pennsylvania. “Their success is our success, and our success is their success. It’s completely intertwined.”
Although the small liberal-arts college has a low student-faculty ratio of fewer than 11 to 1 and provides its own mentors, tutors, and advisors, first-generation students like the ones who come from Achievement First schools “might not know that there are services available, and they might not even know what help they need and what to ask for,” MacDonald said. “There’s a lot of pressure on these kids, and, culturally, asking for help might be seen as a weakness, and that’s what we have to overcome.”
Having advisors from Achievement First working with them even after they’ve shown up on campus, he said, is “another safety net.”
Still, these sorts of active partnerships are the exception, not the rule.
“I would not say that higher-education institutions are typically reaching out to us,” said Helton of KIPP. “They do want to reach out and recruit. But in terms of deep partnerships, I would like to see more. It could and should be so much more.”
Filling a Need
Much of what college-success advisors do for charter-school alumni is provide the help they need to clear the many obstacles that can derail them: finding housing, registering for classes, picking majors, budgeting money, keeping financial aid flowing, and managing time. They also connect students with “campus champions” known to be accessible and in touch with a range of student needs.
“Sometimes as we get to know these campuses, our alumni will say, ‘Everyone needs to go see Joe,’” said Christie. “‘Once you know Joe, you’re made.’ Our success team is aggressively finding out who those people are.”
A significant amount of the advising consists of helping students cut through red tape, said Patrick Rametti, director of college completion at Uncommon Schools, a charter school network that operates in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
“College can be a very bureaucratic, difficult place to navigate,” Rametti said. “That’s often what our support ends up being: answering questions that the student doesn’t know who to turn to [for assistance] on the college campus.”
The early days of college can be particularly challenging for any young person learning to manage unstructured time, meet increased academic expectations, and adjust to campus life. Then there are the financial stresses, homesickness, imposter syndrome, family responsibilities, and other hurdles many low-income, first-generation, Black, and Hispanic students in particular often must surmount. These students also tend to lack the networking savvy of classmates whose parents went to college.
A survey of KIPP alumni in college found that one in four was financially supporting family members, more than 40 percent had missed meals, and more than half worked at least one job. Fewer than one third had internships connected with their career plans.
The support these students need is often straightforward, such as reminders to register for classes on time or visit professors during office hours. Advisors also remain on call to step in when something unexpected happens.
“I don’t have to be their therapist. I don’t have to be their mom. I don’t have to be their best friend. But I want them to be able to text us when they need some help,” said Warren.
Familiar Faces
These relationships begin in high school. The Bright Star Schools network has a coordinator of its alumni support and college success program (ASCS, pronounced “ask-us”) at each of its three high schools. These counselors help seniors with financial-aid applications and teach skills including time management. Students are required to get to know their ASCS counselors before they can receive their diplomas.
“If our students don’t know us and trust us, they’re not going to willingly let us track and support their progress,” said Genoveva Cortes, the program’s director.
At Achievement First, students work with college and career counselors throughout high school, with the goal of getting into the “best-fit four-year college or university.” Once that’s happened, they’re paired with alumni-success counselors who will support them during and after graduation, in what Christie called “a warm handoff.”
“We’re trying to get our students to meet the success team in trust-building ways,” she said.
At Uncommon Schools, alumni-success coaches interview students before they finish high school to learn their goals, where they plan to go to college, and what they want to study, said Rametti. And at KIPP, college-transition specialists start their work during the final semester of high school, teaching seniors about such subjects as financial aid and credit hours. Students aren’t allowed to have their high school transcripts until they meet with a college coach and complete a 35-point college checklist covering everything from financial aid to health insurance.
After graduation, the focus moves to avoiding “summer melt”—that is, when students who initially enroll and intend to go to college fail to show up on campus in the fall. Summer melt sidetracks between 10 and 40 percent of high-school graduates, according to the most comprehensive study of the problem, by the Harvard Strategic Data Project. Low- and moderate-income students, those with low academic confidence, and students headed for community colleges are all at the high end of that range.
KIPP has started using a chatbot called Kipper to stay connected to its college-going graduates in the summers and help reduce summer melt. Kipper regularly sends students text messages like “Did you know that you have to register for orientation? Check your school’s calendar” and “I think you’re amazing. Just popping in to tell you that you’ve got this.” The chatbot also uses artificial intelligence to answer commonly texted questions.
The charters’ most intensive efforts happen once these students finally arrive on campus and have to navigate the often-baffling complexity of college. KIPP counselors check in to make sure they have, in fact, shown up, see how they’re doing, and find out whether they have housing, went to orientation, are attending classes, and bought the textbooks and supplies they’ll need. KIPP keeps track of its growing caseload in college with check-ins each semester and a color-coded system based on how well students seem to be doing on their own. “I can just pull out every color from the benchmarks and that’s my 20 students who need more help this semester—let me call them,” Warren said.
Advisors also help their students pick classes strategically—not just electives that sound fun, but core requirements for majors that connect with their career aspirations. They comfort them through homesickness and connect them with resources on campus that they might not otherwise easily find or are reluctant to use.
High-school college-success advisors “are constantly encouraging students through our support to be better self-advocates,” Rametti said. “We’re not going to just call the financial aid office and yell at them. We’re going to talk to the student to make sure they understand what the problem is and only intervene as needed.”
“We think of ourselves as successful once we can say our students are plugged in, whether it’s an office or a program
or a mentor who can help them navigate that campus,” echoed Christie.
Helping or Handholding?
Charter networks often boast that their graduates finish high school “college ready.” But some charters provide so much personalized attention in the lower grades that graduates who are prepared academically still can find the largely self-directed world of college singularly challenging. The intensive supports that help many charter-school students persist through high school, which some critics disparage as handholding, may leave students unprepared for the realities of college life.
“The charter schools do a great deal of regulating students—and then students transition to college where they have to become self-regulated,” Savitz-Romer said.
For example, at Codman Academy Charter School in Boston, students were allowed to resubmit assignments to earn higher grades. The practice was intended to provide more opportunities to learn the subjects. But a study of alumni found it worked against them when they got to college, where no such second chances were allowed. In response, the school changed its revision process.
The Summit Public Schools charter network in California and Washington State, which is underwritten by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, made a similar discovery. While an impressive 98 percent of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges and universities, just 49.9 percent earn a degree within six years of high-school graduation. That’s still considerably higher than national averages for low-income students of color, but not high enough.
Summit determined that its alumni had become accustomed to intensive support, such as one-to-one mentors, which suddenly fell away after high-school graduation. So the network introduced self-directed learning cycles, which require high-school students to set goals, reflect on their progress, and learn time-management skills. The goal is to empower students to become self-directed learners with “habits of success” and a greater sense of purpose. A Summit spokeswoman said that, because college completion rates are calculated over six years, it won’t know the results of this until mid-2022.
Advisors from charter schools say their support is far from coddling; rather, they are simply providing what first-generation and low-income students need to persevere. Students who lack middle-class resources or family knowledge about how universities work can easily be knocked off course by a minor financial mishap or missed administrative deadline. And it’s hard to catch up.
Depending on their financial-aid packages, for example, students might not have access to money for textbooks until several weeks into the semester, noted Christie of Achievement First. Many charter-school graduates, unlike higher-income college classmates, don’t have the cash to spare while waiting for grants and loans to come through, Christie said.
“That’s a very micro example, but the macro of college is that you need a lot of money during the transition that people assume everybody has,” she said. In addition, costs for transportation and supplies also tend to not be factored in to financial-aid awards. When the pandemic forced universities to close, many lower-income students were stranded on campus. In response, KIPP created an emergency fund to help its students travel home.
“The seemingly small barrier of those sorts of small purchases also impacts other things, like your connection to campus,” said Christie. Instead of enjoying “what the movies tell us college is supposed to be,” she said, many of her students spend the start of freshman year waiting for help at the bursar’s office.
Rametti told the story of an Uncommon Schools alumna who landed at a top liberal-arts college but couldn’t decide on a major. Instead of starting her studies with general coursework and deciding on a major later, she decided to take a semester off—which research shows is often a first step to dropping out. “She had no one advising her” until her high-school coach stepped in, he said. “You can only imagine how our students are making it at larger public institutions, where they’re really just a grain of sand on the beach.”
Warren recalled one of her KIPP Through College advisees at just that sort of institution. After one semester, the student was intimidated, overwhelmed, and ready to drop out. “She was just, ‘I can’t do this. There are 200 people in this class, the professors don’t even know my name. I’m just so used to smaller classes. I’m going to leave.’”
Warren convinced the student to persist and helped her find and register for smaller classes.
“I really have to emphasize to students that the college offices are frightening and the people there may not be the nicest, but you need to go and talk to them,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really hard to go to an office on your own. In the past, we’ve walked students to mental-health services. We’ve walked students to financial aid.”
These supports are most broadly provided for freshmen but can last throughout a student’s college years. Uncommon Schools provides at least a year of intensive support to its graduates and extended counseling to its most vulnerable alumni. KIPP, Bright Star, and Achievement First offer counseling supports for as many as six years after graduation.
The Results
Because many of these efforts are new or evolving, their impact is not yet clear.
One of the earliest wins for charter schools that keep supporting students after high school appears to be in slowing summer melt. At KIPP, the combination of text nudging, artificial intelligence, and human interaction has cut summer melt among New York students to 2 percent from 35 percent.
Measuring summer melt, however, only takes a summer. Tracking completion rates takes six years or more, and some of the charter networks haven’t been providing intensive support to their alumni on campuses long enough for it to show up significantly yet in the statistics.
Eight in 10 KIPP students now enroll in college after graduating high school. The proportion who earn bachelor’s degrees within six years has been rising steadily to reach 43 percent, according Helton, head of KIPP Through College. Another 6 percent earn associate degrees. At Uncommon Schools, 58 percent of high-school graduates earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. The figure at Achievement First is 53 percent and at Bright Star, 37 percent. Another 8 percent of former Bright Star students complete associate degrees.
Research into what boosts graduation rates more broadly suggests the charters are aiming at the right targets.
Charters typically push students to apply to and enroll at more academically demanding colleges than they might ordinarily consider. Low-income students in particular tend to “undermatch” with less-selective institutions that have poor graduation rates. Pushing them toward more elite institutions, as the charter-school programs relentlessly do in the first step of their alumni-success work, improves their outcomes, according to research by the UChicago Consortium on School Research, which is based at the University of Chicago.
Charters are also helping students find resources they might not have known existed. One of particular importance to low-income students is work-study, which the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment finds is often better connected to students’ career plans than off-campus employment and reduces commuting time. While research has found that work-study participation slightly decreases first-year grades, it also slightly increases the number of credits students earn in their first year of college.
Other programs comparable to what the charter schools are doing have also had positive outcomes. The Carolina Covenant, for instance, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, gives low-income students not only significant financial aid, but also work-study jobs, mentoring by faculty, staff, or older Covenant scholars, and workshops about such things as time management and study techniques. Started in 2003, it’s increased graduation rates for this category of students by 8 percentage points.
Those types of supports have helped Allison Gonzalez-Castro stay the course in higher education. The first in her family to go to college, she got cold feet at the threshold of her freshman year, until her KIPP Through College counselor talked her out of putting off her education. People who postpone college, regardless of their intentions, are much less likely ever to go, according to research by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Once on campus, homesick and struggling to manage her own schedule, Gonzalez-Castro ended up on academic probation and fell back on her KIPP Through College coach to help her through.
“I probably texted her hundreds of times,” she said. “She was my person to go to when I needed help. If I was crying because I was stressed, she was the person I would text. They already know what I’ve been through. They know my story, my background. So I feel more comfortable talking about personal problems and stuff that would eventually affect my education.”
Now a junior at Colorado State University majoring in human development and family studies, Gonzalez-Castro, 20, is on track to graduate on time.
“I really, really, really appreciate them,” she said of her KIPP college success advisors. “If they hadn’t opened my eyes and gotten me on the right path, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”
Jon Marcus is higher education editor at the Hechinger Report. He writes about higher education for the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, and others.
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Telegraph suggests 9% of England dies each year
“Just 748.6 people per 100,000 died last month, after mortality rates fell even lower than April, when 851.2 people per 100,000 died – the lowest it had been since records began in 2001.”
This is not right. These statistics are annualised average figures, not monthly figures. This means that if May’s death rate applied across the whole year, there would be 748.6 deaths per 100,000 people over the course of the year. But it is wrong to say that this proportion of people who did die during that month.
If 748.6 people per 100,000 died each month, on average, then around 9% of the country would die every year.
In reality, about 1% of the population of England dies each year.
The Office for National Statistics, which publishes these statistics, is not particularly clear on the fact that this is the annual death rate in May, not the actual number of deaths in May.
Its monthly mortality analysis says deaths fell “to a low of 748.6 deaths per 100,000 people in May 2021”. Although it does say later: “monthly rates in this bulletin are adjusted to allow for comparisons with annual rates”.
The provisional figures show 35,401 deaths were registered in England in May, while the latest population figures show 56.5 million people live in England, so about 63 per 100,000.
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Horrific story of the week:
Social Media Posts Mislead on Harris Border Trip
Quick Take
Some popular online posts suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris’ trip to El Paso is “over 1000 miles away” from the “border crisis.” It’s true that other areas — including the Rio Grande Valley — are experiencing higher levels of border activity, as critics have noted, but El Paso is a hotspot for illegal immigration.
Full Story
Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to the U.S. southern border in El Paso on June 25 — a move that comes amid an influx of immigrants illegally crossing the border. It followed criticism by Harris’ political opponents that she had not yet gone to see the issues firsthand.
In the days leading up to the trip, the choice of location became a point of criticism, too.
Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, called the destination of El Paso “politically safer.” And Politico cited two unnamed sources in reporting that the location for Harris’ trip was chosen in part “because El Paso is in less of a crisis than other areas.”
But some popular online posts took the critique further, leaving the misleading impression that El Paso, in the western corner of Texas, was not truly a visit to the “border” (quotation marks theirs) or that the “border crisis” didn’t apply to El Paso.
“Kamala finally has an upcoming border trip. Problem is, she’s going to El Paso,” reads a Facebook post shared more than 1,200 times. The post features a map pointing to the area of the Rio Grande Valley sector and labeling it the “border crisis” and noting the distance to El Paso.
“What do you think about Kamala’s first trip to the ‘border’ over 1000 miles away?” the post, which has also been shared on Instagram, continues. The post offers no other context.
The El Paso area has in fact seen a significant uptick in Border Patrol activity this fiscal year compared to the same time period last year, Customs and Border Protection statistics show. In May, Border Patrol’s El Paso sector recorded 22,219 encounters — the third highest of the nine sectors that month.
It’s true, though, that other areas along the border (especially the Rio Grande Valley sector) have experienced higher amounts and increases in terms of overall Border Patrol activity this year — as some critics of the trip have noted.
The map being used in the Facebook and Instagram posts came from a June 23 tweet by Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who criticized the location, writing, “After all that, @VP isn’t even going to the right place. Here’s a map.”
Cornyn later tweeted a thread, on June 25, in which he said that “El Paso has definitely been negatively effected by the Biden-Harris” administration’s policies, but said the Rio Grande Valley was the “epicenter” of the problem.
Looking at the raw numbers of total Border Patrol encounters by each sector, the Rio Grande Valley sector has indeed seen the highest number of encounters — 271,927 — so far in fiscal year 2021.
Other sectors have seen higher rates of increases in overall Border Patrol activity than Rio Grande Valley or El Paso, when compared to the same time period in fiscal year 2020.
The Yuma sector in Arizona has seen a 738.6% increase in Border Patrol encounters this fiscal year from last, Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the Migration Policy Institute, pointed out in an email to us, noting that there are different ways to gauge the changing activity.
The Rio Grande Valley sector has reported a 406.7% increase in overall Border Patrol activity. And the El Paso sector has experienced a 267.5% increase — the fifth-highest rate — and ranked fourth for the raw number of encounters.
Other data also show that the El Paso area remains a hotspot — contrary to the impression of the Facebook and Instagram posts — even if it doesn’t experience the same volume as some other sectors.
Mittelstadt noted that Border Patrol statistics show “the El Paso sector has experienced among the most rapid increases in encounters of unaccompanied children (ranking third in year-over-year percent change after Yuma and Big Bend); and ranks fourth among sectors in terms of the increase in encounters of single adults.”
On the first point, the El Paso sector saw a 232% increase in encounters with unaccompanied migrant children from October through March (8,636), compared with the same period in fiscal year 2020 (2,598).
While the rate was slightly higher than Rio Grande Valley’s rate of 230%, the raw numbers show Rio Grande Valley experienced the most encounters with unaccompanied children (20,964) of all the sectors, as of March.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.
Sources
Daniels, Eugene. “Harris looks to shift the narrative at the southern border.” Politico. 25 Jun 2021.
Jaffe, Alexandra. “On border tour, Harris cites ‘progress’ in ‘tough’ situation.” Associated Press. 25 Jun 2021.
Lippman, Daniel. “Kamala Harris is set to visit the border.” Politico. 23 Jun 2021.
Mittelstadt, Michelle. Director of communications, Migration Policy Institute. Email to FactCheck.org. 24 Jun 2021.
“Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki.” White House. 23 Jun 2021.
Rogers, Katie and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “After Criticism Over Her Border Absence, Harris Will Visit El Paso.” New York Times. 23 Jun 2021.
“Southwest Land Border Encounters (By Component).” U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Updated 9 Jun 2021.
“U.S. Border Patrol Southwest Border Apprehensions by Sector.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Accessed 24 Jun 2021.
“Vice President Harris Holds Briefing at Southern Border.” C-SPAN. 25 Jun 2021.
The post Social Media Posts Mislead on Harris Border Trip appeared first on FactCheck.org.
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