This Teacher Appreciation Week Comes With a Bittersweet Gift for Educators

I teach and I write. These are my passions.  

So you can imagine my bewilderment when I experienced paralyzing writer’s block, all while penning a piece for Teacher Appreciation Week.

After all, I’m never at a loss for words when asked to boast about my profession, and certainly not when provided an opportunity to celebrate my colleagues. I can sing their praises louder than the obnoxious whistling of my tea kettle, which is currently sounding the alarm that my morning brew is ready for consumption. 

Teachers are incredible superhumans. This is a fact, quantified by science. Okay, I’m not actually certain that the aforementioned quantitative research exists. But it has to, right? I mean, there has to be an existing study that analyzes the unconventional genetic, cognitive, or personality traits which somehow compel us to sign up to do what we do. 

So, I asked myself: Why am I feeling so uninspired? Why on day one of Teacher Appreciation Week, while sitting in the quiet solitude of the morning and drinking my perfect cup of Earl Grey, do I feel completely incapable of expressing my love for our profession? 

And just then an epiphany washed over me, one more violent than the frequent handwashing I’ve engaged in over the past six weeks. Perhaps this unprecedented writer’s block is fueled by unprecedented times. Perhaps I can’t write because I am currently lacking daily contact with the very thing that inspires me most—my students.

Teachers Are Inspired By Their Students

When I write a bitter diatribe about inequitable school funding or the inequities of AP course requirements, my inspiration stems from conversations with my students. When I write about the relationships we build in teaching, I am inspired by my encounters with my students. When I write about controversial topics such as politics in the classroom or guns in schools, I draw motivation from the debates I witness between my students. And when I write about educator apprehension or teacher self-efficacy, I do so because I fear I’m not enough for my students. 

I see the world through the lens of other people’s children, and this impacts everything that I believe in and everything that I write about. Unfortunately, this pandemic has robbed me of the very thing that inspires me more than any other—working daily with kids. And my story is one of many.

Yet, ever the optimist, I only allowed myself to engage in self-pity momentarily because I quickly realized that never have I been more confident and secure in my decision to become a teacher.

Never Forget What It Feels Like to Be Separated From Our Students

This unprecedented moment has taught me that I am destined to work with kids. I am designed to be a teacher. This moment, however heartbreaking and tragic it might seem at the time, is a gift that will sustain me during the undeniable upcoming challenges which lay ahead. Mostly, I will never forget how much I miss my students in this moment.

And that is my “gift” to my colleagues during this bizarre, unconventional, atypical, extraordinary Teacher Appreciation Week—a reminder that we should never forget this moment. In the indubitably trying times which are on the horizon, never forget what it felt like to be separated from your students. It is something I will carry with me for the duration of my career, a memory that will both haunt and inspire me to keep going, keep fighting. It will embolden and energize me to continue to raise my voice fiercely and unapologetically for kids, and I hope it does the same for you.

Thank you for all that you do to empower children. And on the tough days when you question whether you’re doing enough, never forget how much you missed your students in the midst of this pandemic. Most importantly, however, never forget how much your students miss you in this moment. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

Photo by Energetic.com, Canva-licensed.

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Harvard Law Professor’s Attack on Homeschooling Is a Flawed Failure. And Terribly Timed, Too. – by Patrick J. Wolf

The May-June issue of  Harvard Magazine carries an article, “The Risks of Homeschooling,” promoting the argument of Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Bartholet that the U.S. should enact “a presumptive ban” on homeschooling. Homeschooling is essentially unregulated, Bartholet argues, and many parents adopt this method of educating their children for nefarious reasons including indoctrinating the parents’ values into their children, isolating the children from society, and abusing them. Parents should be assumed to be incompetent and dangerous educators of their children. Therefore, specific parents may homeschool their children only if government officials determine that allowing them to educate their children at home is worth the risk.

The article prompted a tsunami of critical responses, in Education Next (see “Harvard Professor’s ‘Absurd’ Claim that Homeschooling is Child Abuse”) as well as here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. We seek here to move the discussion beyond the 1,000-word Harvard Magazine article that sparked such opprobrium by carefully considering Bartholet’s 80-page Arizona Law Review article that inspired the story. We expected it to be rigorous and fact-based but were sadly disappointed.

We are empirical social scientists who have studied and written about homeschooling along with other education policy topics. One of us, Wolf, homeschooled one of his now-adult children years before the Covid-19 pandemic turned tens of millions of Americans into some version of home-schoolers. Another, Watson, is homeschooling by necessity now. Upon reviewing Professor Bartholet’s article, we conclude that it suffers from contradictions, factual errors, statements of stereotyping, and a failure seriously to consider that the alternative to homeschooling–public schooling–shares the problems that she attributes to home education. One need not have personal experience with homeschooling to identify the article’s many flaws.

Elizabeth Bartholet

Professor Bartholet often seems to be arguing with herself. Early in the article, she states: “We have no way of identifying, based on existing information, the total group of homeschoolers.” For the remainder of the article, however, she confidently describes what is true of “many” (used 90 times), “most” (53 times), and “a majority of” (6 times) homeschoolers. If no one knows the denominator, how can anyone say what is true for many, most, or, especially, a majority of the homeschool population? Similarly, in the section where Bartholet argues that “many” homeschooling parents are incapable of educating their children, she asserts that homeschoolers are disadvantaged relative to non-homeschoolers. In the later section where she dismisses the empirical research on homeschooling outcomes, she argues that the superior results for homeschooled students are simply because their families are advantaged relative to non-homeschoolers. Throughout the article, homeschoolers are characterized as almost monolithically (“up to 90%”) conservative Christians seeking to indoctrinate their children. On page 10, however, they are described more accurately as highly diverse in their religious affiliations and motivations. On page 5, Bartholet states, accusingly, “Most all miss out on extracurricular activities.” Five pages later she admits that many parents who homeschool “make efforts to enable their children to participate in certain school programs such as sports.” If families homeschool primarily to indoctrinate their children, shield them from any outside influence, and abuse them, as she argues throughout the essay, why do most families homeschool a child for only part of their K-12 education, as is implied by statistics on page 9 of the law review article?

One contradiction stands out. Professor Bartholet says “homeschooling in its current unregulated form poses serious risks of abuse and neglect.” That is the central claim of her paper. Later in the article, she lists a dizzying array of government regulations of homeschooling judged by courts to be “legal.” These include her preferred regulations that parents be preapproved by the state before they can educate their children, be certified instructors, use a specified curriculum, provide annual reports, administer the state test to their child, and allow government officials to inspect their home. So homeschooling is unregulated but her prescribed regulations of homeschooling are reasonable because they operate legally today?

The article contains a number of assertions about homeschooling that are clearly undermined by the facts and unsupported by her sources. Bartholet’s central claim is: “Many families choose homeschooling precisely because it enables them to escape the attention” of Child Protective Services. Her source that supposedly proves this explosive charge merely states that there “is anecdotal evidence” of such ill intent. Similarly, Bartholet asserts that the “majority” of families that homeschool are “descendants of the original conservative Christian wing.”  She writes that estimates range “from a majority up to 90%.” The sources for this claim include a federal government survey that indicates only 16% of parents homeschool primarily to provide “religious instruction,” an article from The Atlantic on homeschoolers suggesting that “[R]oughly two-thirds are Christian,” and speculation by an author that 90% of families that homeschool “are religious.” If only 67% of homeschoolers are even Christian, how could “up to 90%” be specifically conservative Christians? The numbers don’t add up.

Bartholet states that many families that homeschool “are at the low end of the socioeconomic ladder, with 19% below the poverty line and 36% between poverty and 200% of poverty, significantly more than that of those in public and private schools.” She is claiming that 55% is a comparatively high proportion of low-income students in a population. It is not. Poverty and near-poverty rates are either missing or unreliable for most private school students, but over 52% of the public school student population has incomes at or below 185% of poverty, meaning that the proportions of students at or below 200% of poverty are similar for homeschool and public school students, in spite of the fact that only 28% of homeschool families contain two adult working outside the home. She asserts, without evidence, that children who are homeschooled lose “out on opportunities to learn things that are essential for employment and for exercising meaningful choices in their future lives.” A recent study by the research center CARDUS, which Bartholet cites at other points in her article, reports, to the contrary, that employment rates and earnings are similar for homeschooled and non-homeschooled adults, and the two groups are “not much different in their pursuit of new experiences in life.” Bartholet claims, “Homeschooling presents…democratic concerns.” The only empirical study of that question that we know of concludes, to the contrary, that students who were homeschooled display significantly higher levels of political tolerance than otherwise similar students who attended public schools.

Speaking of tolerance, some of the statements in the Bartholet article concern us. She states: “Members of a variety of religious groups are included today in this conservative Christian wing, including many Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists. These homeschooling groups hold similar ideas about the importance of keeping their children isolated from conflicting cultural values.” Professor Bartholet presumes to define which religious groups are and are not “conservative Christians,” then engages in stereotyping by ascribing the same “isolationist” values to individuals in those groups. She criticizes parents who homeschool for having values that run counter to those of the larger society, thus undermining the values of pluralism and toleration of people with views of the good life that differ from one’s own. She demonstrates prejudice against immigrants by asserting that non-English-speaking parents are incapable of homeschooling their children. She argues that some parents who homeschool “are mentally ill or disabled, or caught up in substance abuse,” as if having a disability necessarily disqualifies a parent from educating their child. These are some of the statements that leapt out as offensive to us.

Child abuse is a serious problem. It concerns us greatly. It occurs in the homes of some parents who homeschool their children but also in public schools around the country. Bartholet’s article pays scant attention to the usual alternative to homeschooling–public schools–and the problems of child abuse and disturbingly low levels of civic knowledge reported there. A rich debate could be had about when unconventional approaches to parenting cross the line into abuse and neglect. We did not find such a balanced or nuanced discussion in the 80 pages of this article.

Professor Elizabeth Bartholet’s claims that homeschooling contributes significantly to the scourge of child abuse fail to survive scrutiny. Ironically, Bartholet pleads with us to trust government officials to decide which select parents have the capability and correct values to be safely granted the privilege of educating their children at home. We now know what that looks like. Last month, government officials ordered almost all K-12 children to be educated at home in order to promote the safety and wellness of themselves and our society. We are all homeschoolers now, by government decree. That development appears to have left Professor Bartholet, well, schooled.

Patrick J. Wolf is a distinguished professor of education in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and co-editor of Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on School Choice and Civic Values.

Matthew H. Lee is a distinguished doctoral fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Angela R. Watson is a senior research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

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Better School Counselors, Better Outcomes – by Christine Mulhern

Teenagers are not known for their coolheaded decision-making, yet they face hundreds of choices with significant long-term consequences. In school, they must decide which courses to take, how much effort to invest, and whether and where to enroll in college. Many understandably lack the information and capacity needed to navigate such complex options.

Enter the school counselor. High-school counselors can communicate the benefits of doing well in school, help with college applications, and recommend courses of study to prepare students for the careers of their choice. Belief in a counselor’s potential to boost college success has drawn national attention and inspired policy changes, such as former First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Reach Higher” initiative and the expansion of counselor hiring in Colorado and New York City.

Yet there has been no quantitative evidence to date showing how high-school counselors affect student outcomes—or even confirming that they matter at all. In this study, I aim to close that research gap. I focus on Massachusetts, where a quasi-random assignment process is used to assign many high-school students to counselors based on the student’s last name. I look at the outcomes of each counselor’s students to determine individual effectiveness, as well as at counselors’ experience, educational background, and other characteristics to identify the attributes of those who are most effective.

As with teachers, counselors vary significantly in their effects on student outcomes. For example, improving counselor effectiveness by one standard deviation, which is equivalent to having a counselor at the 84th percentile of effectiveness rather than at the 50th percentile, makes students 2.0 percentage points more likely to graduate high school and 1.7 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year college. Unlike teachers, however, counselors’ impacts are most strongly connected to their providing information and assistance to students, rather than building students’ cognitive skills. Their effects are most pronounced among low-achieving and low-income students; low achievers, for example, are 3.4 percentage points more likely to graduate if assigned to an effective counselor. I also find that students benefit from being matched to a counselor of the same race and having a counselor who attended a local college.

High-school counselors’ large caseloads of nearly 250 students, on average, are often a cause for concern. However, my analysis indicates that students would gain more from being assigned to a more effective counselor than to a counselor with a moderately smaller caseload. I estimate that hiring a new counselor in every Massachusetts high school would lead to smaller gains in educational attainment than increasing the average counselor’s effectiveness by one standard deviation.

In short, boosting counselor effectiveness can be an important school-improvement strategy. It may also be a more cost-effective means of improvement than boosting teacher effectiveness, because counselors serve more students, there are far fewer counselors than teachers, and many high-school counselors receive little, or no, training on college advising. Counselors are an often-overlooked engine of educational improvement, and policymakers would do well to devote more time and attention to improving access to effective counselors.

Michelle Obama: Her “Reach Higher” initiative aimed to encourage more students to pursue post-secondary education.

What Do High-School Counselors Do?

Counselors are a common feature at most U.S. high schools, though the nature of the job can vary considerably across schools. In general, high-school counselors spend most of their time on course scheduling, college and career advising, and general student support, according to a 2018 survey of college-admissions counselors nationwide. The responsibilities reported in the survey suggest that there are four main ways in which counselors are likely to influence student outcomes: helping students build cognitive and non-cognitive skills and providing students with information and direct assistance.

Counselors may influence students’ cognitive skills by placing them in, or removing them from, particular classes. Most counselors are responsible for course scheduling, so they may direct students toward or away from effective teachers and advanced classes, as well as help students gain access to specialized services for English-language learners or students with disabilities. They may also work on improving students’ non-cognitive skills, such as behavior and engagement with school, through mental-health counseling, disciplinary actions, and general support.

In addition, counselors may provide information that many students lack about postsecondary education and labor-market options. This could include the costs and benefits of different options, as well as the steps to apply and enroll in college. Counselors can also influence what students do after high school by assisting them directly, such as by obtaining SAT fee waivers, writing letters of recommendation, and helping students complete forms and sign up for services. They also may help students with college or job applications.

In Massachusetts, the focus of my study, there are no regulations dictating counselor caseloads or professional duties, though the state requires counselors to be licensed and hold a master’s degree. It also requires that all schools have a “school adjustment” counselor who primarily supports the mental health, social, and emotional needs of students, which may free up time for guidance counselors to focus more on academic support. Massachusetts provides a recommended counseling model, which consists of suggested guidelines on how to provide services, and has a formal evaluation process for counselors.

A Range of Influence

I use student-level data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, including student demographics, courses, grades, attendance, discipline, and standardized-test scores, as well as human-resources data on counselor employment, education, and demographics. I link these data to National Student Clearinghouse records on postsecondary enrollment and persistence for students projected to graduate high school between 2008 and 2017.

About one-third of public high schools in the state match students to counselors based on the beginning letters of the student’s last name. This process approximates random assignment. I identify 143 schools that post information about their last-name assignment policies on their websites, which yields a sample of 723 counselors serving about 155,000 students. To estimate individual counselor effects, I focus on the 131 schools for which I can link counselors to students in at least two different cohorts with at least 20 students in each cohort, for a sample of 510 counselors serving 142,000 students.

This sample and assignment process enable me to identify the causal impact of individual counselors on student outcomes. In particular, I compare the outcomes of students who attend the same school but who are assigned to different counselors because of the student’s last name. In making these comparisons, I control for students’ 8th-grade test scores, demographic characteristics, and indicators of services received in 8th grade. Consistent with the assignment process being quasi-random, however, I find no evidence that students are sorted to counselors based on these characteristics.

I use this approach to estimate counselors’ effects on a range of student outcomes, which I organize into five domains (see Figure 1). Cognitive and non-cognitive skills correspond to two of the four channels by which counselors may influence student outcomes. College readiness and selectivity, in turn, may capture the other two channels—the provision of information and direct assistance in the college application process. The fifth domain captures counselors’ longer-term effects on educational attainment.

I estimate counselors’ effectiveness within each of these domains, as well as their overall effectiveness across all five. The latter estimate serves as my summary measure of a counselor’s effectiveness in supporting student success.

Counselor Effectiveness and Student Success

Having an effective counselor matters for a wide range of student outcomes. Let’s start with educational attainment, which many see as an important long-term measure of student success. Students assigned to counselors who are one standard deviation more effective than the median are 2 percentage points more likely to graduate high school, 1.7 percentage points more likely to attend a four-year college, and 1.4 percentage points more likely to persist in college into a second year (see Figure 2). The graduation rates of the colleges students choose to attend are also 1.3 percentage points higher, suggesting that they also may be more likely to earn a degree.

These impacts are generally larger for students who are not white, scored below average on the state test in 8th grade, or are from low-income families. For example, a minority student assigned to an effective counselor is 3.2 percentage points more likely to graduate high school and 2.2 percentage points more likely to attend college. Low-achieving students assigned to an effective counselor are 3.4 percentage points more likely to graduate and 2.5 percentage points more likely to attend college. These results indicate that counselors may be an important resource for closing racial and economic gaps in college completion.

How do effective counselors boost educational attainment? It does not appear to be a result of building students’ cognitive skills, as I find little evidence that counselors vary in their effects on 10th-grade test scores and course grades. Counselors do vary in their impact on student suspensions, but I find no significant variation in effects on attendance or unexcused absences—and counselors’ effectiveness in improving these proxies for non-cognitive skills is unrelated to their effectiveness in increasing attainment.

In contrast, counselors have large effects on my measures of college readiness and selectivity. They cause students to be more (or less) likely to take the SAT, to earn a higher SAT score, and take AP tests and also play a major role in whether students enroll in a college that is selective or has a high graduation rate. Moreover, their effectiveness within these two domains is strongly related to their impact on educational attainment.

These results imply that counselors influence educational attainment by doing more than just influencing students’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Their effects on educational attainment must run through other channels, such as by providing information or direct assistance to their students. For instance, counselors may have large effects on SAT taking because they provide information about when to take the test or obtain fee waivers for students. More broadly, these results indicate that educators of all kinds can have important impacts on students’ long-term outcomes by providing them information or helping them access opportunities.

Specialization

To better understand counselor effectiveness, I consider the complexity of their responsibilities. They are assigned a diverse set of students and are charged with achieving many results, ranging from setting course schedules to boosting high-school graduation and supporting college enrollment. They are also expected to influence many intermediate outcomes, and it may be difficult for them to attain all desired outcomes given their large caseloads and limited training. Do counselors opt to specialize and focus their energies on certain domains? Or are especially effective counselors better in all aspects of their work? To answer these questions, I estimate counselor effects on specific outcomes and look for commonalities.

In general, the counselors who are effective at improving high-school graduation are also effective at increasing college attendance. This may not be surprising since students must graduate high school in order to attend college. If, however, we expect that the marginal student induced by a counselor to graduate high school is unlikely to be a college attendee, it suggests that counselors who are particularly effective in boosting educational attainment are able to do so for different kinds of students.

In contrast, I find that counselors who improve indicators of non-cognitive skills, such as students’ attendance and behavior while in high school, tend to differ from those who improve educational attainment and, in particular, from those who boost attendance at highly selective colleges. The pattern confirms that even good counselors are typically not good at everything. Some counselors appear to specialize in increasing educational attainment, others at improving non-cognitive skills, and still others at increasing the selectivity of the college a student attends.

Attributes of Effective Counselors

What distinguishes those counselors who are most effective in supporting student success? Advocates seeking to expand access to high-school counseling tend to focus on caseloads, assuming that counselors are more effective when they work with fewer students. I find only a modest relationship, however, between caseload size and students’ educational attainment. Similarly, counselor experience is not related to student outcomes. Instead, students appear to benefit from being matched with a counselor of the same racial group and with a counselor who attended a local college or university.

Students assigned to a same-race counselor—defined here as a white counselor for white students and a non-white counselor for students who are not white—are about two percentage points more likely to graduate high school, attend college, and persist in college compared to their peers who are assigned to a counselor of a different race (see Figure 3). These effects are largest for non-white students, who are 3.8 percentage points more likely to graduate high school and to attend college if matched to a non-white counselor. There is no detectable benefit from matching students to counselors based on their gender.

Minority students may benefit from being matched to a minority counselor if these counselors have a better understanding of students’ experiences and needs. Or a race-matched counselor could have different expectations for students based on their race, a pattern documented among teachers (see “The Power of Teacher Expectations,” research, Winter 2018). Unlike most research on teachers, however, I find that white students also benefit from same-race matches, and white students typically have many potential role models in schools.

These patterns could also be explained by how much students trust their counselor. There is often considerable discretion on both the student and counselor side in how they interact with one another. Students may be more willing to reach out to counselors if they share a salient characteristic such as race.

Counselors’ knowledge of the local higher-education context may also matter for students’ success. Students assigned to counselors who received their bachelor’s degree in Massachusetts are 2.5 percentage points more likely to graduate high school than those assigned to a counselor who earned a degree outside of the state. They are also more likely to attend college and enroll in colleges with higher graduation rates. It may be that these counselors better understand the local college options, the needs of local students, or state graduation requirements than counselors educated elsewhere. However, having a counselor who completed his or her master’s degree in Massachusetts is not associated with higher student educational attainment.

I find no evidence that counselors who attended more selective undergraduate or master’s institutions are more effective than their peers, but there is some evidence that counselors guide students to attend colleges that are similar to those they attended. For example, students with a counselor who attended an elite college are about 2 percentage points more likely to attend an elite college. Counselors who attended a public college also shift attendance to public colleges, and those who attended large undergraduate institutions increase student attendance at large institutions. Thus, counselors may use their own college experiences to guide the recommendations they provide to students.

Most measures of counselor experience, including the number of years they have spent in the role, are not positively related to student outcomes. In addition, counselors who hold teaching licenses are less effective in terms of rates of high-school graduation than their peers without a license. It may be that the skills required to be an effective teacher and an effective counselor differ, or counseling may be a path selected by ineffective teachers when they leave the profession. Either way, school administrators should not consider teaching experience a plus when hiring counselors.

Quantity vs. Quality: The Role of Caseloads

Given the time-intensive nature of advising, one might expect caseload sizes to influence how well counselors serve students. If, however, counselors have found ways to serve many students efficiently, such as with group sessions or by using technology to provide individualized guidance at scale, caseloads may not have large impacts on student success.

Counselor caseloads are difficult to study because they present a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. Schools in high-income areas with high-achieving students and ample resources typically have the smallest caseloads—indeed, I find that four-year college enrollment rates are highest at schools with smaller caseloads. But is that a function of those counselors’ effectiveness? In fact, when I adjust that figure to take baseline student achievement and demographics into account, the relationship becomes statistically insignificant.

To learn more, I perform several analyses to nail down the causal relationship between caseloads and educational attainment. For example, I study what happens to high-school graduation and college attendance rates within a school when caseloads increase or decrease due to changes in enrollment. I also examine how these outcomes change when a school hires an additional counselor or loses an existing one.

Taken as a whole, these approaches tell a consistent story: larger counselor caseloads are probably bad for educational attainment, but this relationship is quite small. The largest estimate I obtain indicates that increasing caseloads by 100 students per counselor is associated with a decrease of 1.1 percentage points in high-school graduation and a decrease of 1 percentage point in four-year college attendance. This is roughly half as much as increasing counselor effectiveness by one standard deviation. On average, hiring a new counselor in a Massachusetts high school would reduce full caseloads by 74 students.

In short, my results suggest that we should not expect large returns to hiring one additional counselor in each Massachusetts high school. It remains possible that very large swings in caseloads—larger than those I am able to study in Massachusetts—would lead to larger changes in student outcomes. Caseloads may also matter for other outcomes, such as mental health, that I cannot measure with my data. However, to improve educational attainment, increasing counselor quality is probably a more promising approach.

An Overlooked Opportunity

High-school counselors matter—but some matter more than others. The information and assistance an effective counselor provides can have considerable and long-lasting benefits for his or her students, boosting college outcomes years after they graduate high school. Schools and districts can help students do better not just by improving teacher performance, but by supporting more effective counseling, as well.

Moreover, improving access to effective counselors may be a simpler and more cost-effective way to increase educational attainment than improving access to effective teachers. There are far fewer counselors than teachers, so it is probably cheaper, and possibly easier, to deliver training to them. Counselors’ limited (and often nonexistent) training on college advising means that even basic training may have large effects on postsecondary outcomes. And because counselors already work in nearly every U.S. high school, improving their effectiveness may be a more attainable goal than increasing student access to highly personalized (and often expensive) interventions aimed at improving college access.

While advocacy groups often focus on reducing counselor caseloads as a means of boosting their impact, my study suggests that making counselors more effective may be a better goal. That assumes there is a straightforward way to improve effectiveness, which is admittedly a matter for future research. There is one simple and inexpensive way to put these findings to work right away, however: increase the diversity of the counselor workforce, especially in schools serving large numbers of minority students.

In sum, high-school counselors have significant potential to sway the choices and outcomes of the students they serve. Future efforts to improve student behavior, high-school completion, and college enrollment may benefit from leveraging the positions of school counselors and increasing their effectiveness. Efforts to improve school counseling or expand access to the type of guidance provided by the most effective counselors may also have important social and economic benefits. Counselors are and should be considered an important resource for addressing educational inequities and increasing educational attainment.

Christine Mulhern is a doctoral candidate in public policy at Harvard University. This research was supported, in part, by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

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The Education Exchange: “Some School Districts Are Talking about not Reopening until Next January” – by Education Next

The director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Robin Lake, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss a new report published by CRPE which details school district response plans to Covid-19.

Listen to the podcast now.

The full report, “School Systems Make a Slow Transition From the Classroom to the Cloud,” co-written by Lake and Bree Dusseault, is available now.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

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“Preparing for a second wave of shutdowns in the fall” – by Frederick Hess

Dan Ayoub

Dan Ayoub, general manager of education at Microsoft, works on mixed reality, artificial intelligence, higher ed, and STEM education for the software giant. Prior to this, Dan spent 20 years in the gaming industry, most notably as studio head for the iconic title Halo. I reached out to Dan to ask about Microsoft Education’s response to coronavirus and to get his take on how to make virtual learning engaging. Here’s what he had to say.

Rick: What has Microsoft done in response to the coronavirus to help schools and districts?

Dan: I have been immensely proud of how Microsoft has responded to take care of its customers, community, and employees in this time. We have been helping schools, districts, and countries around the world get online and teaching. Not to promote products here, but Teams in education has exploded. For those unsure, Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool for an organization or school that combines video chat, file and app sharing, etc. There are also specialized education features like tools to manage your class and distribute assignments.

In addition to funding initiatives and donations, we’ve opened up access to our software and added new tools and features to our products based on educator feedback. We’ve provided free cloud resources, workshops, and training to educators; helped institutions migrate online; donated hardware; and created online curriculum and virtual camps for educators and parents, to name a few.

Rick: What are you hearing from teachers, principals, districts, and parents about what’s going on?

Dan: At an educator and district level, it feels like we’ve transitioned from, “We just need to get online right away and use what we have,” to more deliberate thinking around what to use and how to approach things when schools open up again. Many educators are preparing for a second wave of shutdowns in the fall and are designing “blended learning” strategies around what it looks like to have students come back to school, then potentially be back at home. With the benefit of being able to plan more deliberately, I think many educators will take what they’ve learned from this rapid transition to distance learning and adapt to be as effective as possible going forward.

Rick: What have you seen come out of the ed-tech space that’s got you excited?

Dan: As a general rule, I think you’re seeing ed tech step up to the plate here, and that’s exciting. Folks working in ed tech genuinely believe that technology is transformative for education, but in many cases, I think it was easy for people to procrastinate over the implementation of new methods. Now people who were hesitant to adopt ed tech are doing so in droves and seeing the benefits. Millions of users are now engaged and giving feedback on what they need.

Rick: What are the most helpful things that ed-tech companies could be doing?

Dan: I think we should look at three key areas:

Reducing friction:  You have got kids and parents at home trying to cope with this “normal,” and making the technology easy to use and adopt is key.

Accessibility: Think about students with learning differences or who speak multiple languages. Remote learning exacerbates the need to think about accessibility in everything you do, and I’m proud that this has been a focus at Microsoft.

Listen to teachers: These are our warriors out there, and they know what they need. Hear them when they ask for features or call out things that don’t work, and give them access to training.

Rick: Is there anything that you’ve seen going on that is unhelpful? What would you caution against?

Dan: If I had a word of caution for ed-tech companies, it would be to not be ambulance chasers and to remember that people are overwhelmed and trying to cope. I believe that the role of ed tech is to service teachers, students, and parents, and while there is opportunity right now, we shouldn’t be opportunistic. Priority one needs to be finding ways to help.

To educators, I would just say make sure you do your homework before adopting technology. Privacy and security are critical now, and it’s important to understand how these things are handled.

Rick: You spent years designing Halo and have probably thought more than anyone else in the ed-tech space about how to make online learning engaging for kids. What advice would you offer to teachers doing virtual learning for the first time? Any insights they should keep in mind?

Dan: There are a lot of concrete best practices being shared out there right now. I think the first piece of advice would be to remember that we’re all learning here. It’s OK to try things out, and not everything is going to work.

Beyond that, as you say, it’s about engaging your students while they are at home. While limiting in some ways, this is freeing in others. One of the best things I heard from an educator is that it’s great that you don’t have to pack everything on a specific subject into a set time frame since you don’t have another period coming—you can spread things out. There are also opportunities for self-directed learning and allowing students to pursue topics that they are interested in.

Finally, remember that your students are probably immensely comfortable with technology; maybe experiment with things outside of your own comfort zone. Video games are an amazing tool for education, and a number of educational game companies have made their resources free. Minecraft for Education has released a number of modules, and I am also a fan of Prodigy.

Rick: It often seems like game designers have figured out some things about engaging youths that have yet to show up in educational software. Have you seen any progress being made on this front since the entire nation has transitioned to distance learning?

Dan: I think most of the progress has been about making distance learning feasible and realistic at scale, and there’s still a lot to do there at a practical level.

The best examples I’ve seen so far are those experiences that are built around what students are already enjoying doing today. There are great educational tools that take advantage of kids’ comfort with short-form videos, like FlipGrid; and educational games are amazing at taking a child’s love of games and play and using those mechanics to help them to learn.

At the end of the day, I think educational software developers can learn an immense amount about student engagement from game design. Games do very basic things exceptionally well: teaching skills, reinforcing those skills over time, building tolerance to risk and failure, and building social skills.

Rick: OK, last question. I know you’re home with kids of your own. What are you doing with them right now to keep them learning and engaged?

Dan: It’s a challenge to say the least, and my genuine hope at the end of all this is that more folks see the ridiculously important role that educators play, and how difficult it is!

Our district recently started remote learning, but prior to that, I was effectively pulling standards-aligned content and creating a daily schedule for them, while starting to expose them to the next grade level as it was pretty clear that school was not coming back into session this year.

This meant I would pull some basic classes and worksheets for core subjects, then I would get them to go outside and play, and then come back and write about what they’d seen and what was interesting to them. We also did week-long projects on subjects they got to choose, so the engagement was there as they were digging deeper into topics that were of interest to them. It was hard to limit screen time, but I tried to keep it limited to some learning games, and Bill Nye the Science Guy! I also took the opportunity to do some dedicated French classes for them. My favorite memory of all that has to be their first gym class, where I took them outside and they realized I’d bought a whistle and they were doing shuttle runs!

Lastly, I wanted to make sure socialization wasn’t missed. My kids are five and eight, so that was something they’d really miss out on with school closed. We booked lots of video calls with friends, and I found some co-operative play games like Roblox and Minecraft that my 8 year old could play with his friends.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at AEI and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

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I Found out How to combat for My Child When He Couldn't Read. Now I Help Various Other Moms and dads Do the Very same.

Advocating for your own kid, or teaching other people—doctors, dentists, teachers, etc.—about your kid, is something you learn as you go along. Even if you don’t work with any single barrier for long, your overall advocacy skills build with experience.

I learned this the hard way. I successfully advocated for my illiterate, suicidal fourth-grader to get a free and appropriate education at a school specializing in proper instruction for dyslexic kids and struggling readers. I also advocated for my mother, suffering from frontotemporal dementia, to get appropriate care at an assisted living facility.

In both cases, I was quick to understand that the powers-that-be thought they knew more and had more power than me. I gained confidence and balanced the scales by learning more, so I could approach conversations from a place of knowledge. I didn’t have to get a teaching degree or a psychology degree, but I had to learn what my son and mother needed, and understand why they weren’t getting it.

I came to this work with certain advantages. I have a college degree; I have had to research and learn new things for a living using physical libraries and resources and, of course, I have access to the internet, which can be a fantastic resource or a complete rabbit hole. To check my facts, I’ve had to interview people for information. Our family also had the financial resources and know-how to pay for private supports, from tutors to camp to lawyers.

Talking with my social network helped, too. By relying on thoughtful friends, I was introduced to another mother who had successfully gotten her kid into a school for dyslexic kids. She shared her process with me, and that gave me somewhere to start. Thanks to her, I knew specialized schools for kids with dyslexia existed. Could there be specialized summer programs, too? Specialized tutors? By talking with my sister in-law, a physician, who then consulted a friend, I got a list of neuropsychologists who could tell us more about our son. 

I found Camp Dunnabeck online. I spoke on the phone with them about my son. We decided to visit and learn more. Not only did my son learn to read there, the camp helped me learn more about dyslexia and how to advocate for my son. I learned what he needed to continue his education.

One key to successful advocacy is having the confidence that you know your kid and being able to back up what you are saying with research. Increasing my own knowledge helped me level the playing field and fight for the education my child, and every child, is due.

Advocating for Other People’s Kids Requires an Intentional, Long-Term Campaign

Yet, after gaining all that knowledge, it took a whole new learning curve to take my advocacy to the next level: Not only advocating for my son, but for all children with dyslexia. I discovered that advocating for other people’s kids is much more intentional—a long term campaign. 

I knew I had to start by learning even more. I attended sessions designed for parents of dyslexic kids about the best strategies to teach reading and writing. And I started researching on my own—reading books and meeting with experts to learn more about reading, language and dyslexia. 

I began to ask bigger-picture questions. For example, one in every 60 kids are on the autism spectrum, which over the last decade has seen a significant uptick in public awareness and school attention. So how is it possible that at the same time, 1 of every 6 kids are dyslexic and yet so little is known about how to teach them?

I found a lot of literature on poverty and illiteracy, but none correlating the illiteracy to ineffective instruction. I found a lot of information on school disconnectedness, illiteracy and school dropout rates, but again, nothing connecting this to instruction.

Because I was involved in ending mass incarceration, I researched the correlations between dyslexia, illiteracy and prison. It was clear—if you were not taught to read, you didn’t have many options. In the United States, about half of all prisoners are functionally illiterate due to dyslexia and poor instruction. I decided I wanted to look at this as an equity issue, and an instructional leadership and teacher preparation issue. How can teachers teach what they don’t know? 

Friends were already calling me to see if I could help a parent from their kid’s school who was struggling. Their struggles have continued to keep me grounded. 

Professionally, I had experience with advocacy at the federal level. As a volunteer, I had experience with local and state advocacy. My first step was to find out who is already advocating for kids in the dyslexia world. I didn’t imagine I was alone, and didn’t want to re-invent a wheel

First, I found a dyslexia echo chamber on Facebook. I then connected with a friend who had worked in City Council, has a dyslexic son, and eventually we formed a task force and met with nearly every member of NYC Council. We joined the Arise Coalition of Advocates for Children. I went to the International Dyslexia Association Annual Conference. I found Decoding Dyslexia, looking at change through state laws, and I now lead the NYC Chapter. I found parents fighting their school or school district to get their children appropriate instruction, just as I had.

Learning to Teach Other Parents Never Ends

The “teaching” side of my advocacy work got started in 2015 when I was asked to present to New York District 5’s Harlem Diverse Learner conference. My first presentation for Harlem parents was clearly too long and too scientific. 

Even so, afterward, many parents approached me in tears because either they had had trouble learning to read or their children were struggling. At the time, sadly, I had little to offer. I’m not a lawyer. I knew just enough to get myself in trouble talking about the legal tools that help families get their kids into private, specialized school placements. All I could do was recommend they get tutoring and legal assistance.

Taking part in panels with other parents who have different experiences has been helpful. Parents with different experiences, whether because they are people of color, have more economic challenges or have personal experience with their own reading struggles as well as their children’s, can really hit home. I can support the work by sharing information and connecting their stories to wider audiences through writing.

When I began testifying at city and state hearings, knowing what other families had experienced allowed me to compare my family’s story to that of other families who didn’t have the time, flexibility and other resources we have been able to invest in fighting for our son’s education. Usually, other parents with those stories have also been present to share their direct experiences.

Over time, I’ve learned to make my presentations less technical and more resonant. I continue to speak on panels, organize events and testify to policymakers.

Even better, the advocacy work I do in concert with other parents is working. The New York City Department of Education is working to retrain teachers and school leaders in the science of reading. We must do better for students, so I continue to learn all I can to become a more effective advocate.

This post originally appeared on Project Forever Free as “I Stood Up for My Kid When He Couldn’t Read, Now I Help Other Parents Do the Same.”

Photo by Prostock-studio, Envato Elements-licensed.

By: Debbie Meyer
Title: I Learned How to Fight for My Child When He Couldn’t Read. Now I Help Other Parents Do the Same.
Sourced From: educationpost.org/i-learned-how-to-fight-for-my-child-when-he-couldnt-read-now-i-help-other-parents-do-the-same/
Published Date: Fri, 01 May 2020 18:28:40 +0000

The Case for Keeping Students With the Same Teacher Next Year

The months after spring break are usually the time when teachers in every school across America look forward to crystallizing an entire year’s worth of human connection, learning and special classroom memories. The pandemic and the stay-at-home orders have brought an abrupt end to these milestones that usually define the school year.

But I believe that we can choose to finish what we started and give these last two months back to our students. When this summer ends and the next school year begins, we can choose to welcome our students back to the same teacher, but in the next grade level.

Yes, we can choose to loop.

The Positive Effects of Looping

Looping is when an educator continues teaching their current class into the next grade level. I looped with Jaachi, Karthik, Annaliesa, Claudia, Anasol and 60 other students through middle school and high school. This powerful experience influenced me to go from calculus to kindergarten in order to investigate how looping impacted kids in primary grades.

In 2018, I looped with Josue, Maliyah, and our entire Kindergarten class to 1st grade because of what we know about positive child-adult relationships in early childhood development. We see conclusive research and personal anecdotes nationwide about looping’s positive effects, yet adoption remains frustratingly low—only one in 50 kids will likely have the opportunity to learn from the same teacher next year.

When I began my career as a high school teacher 10 years ago, Laura was an 11th grader who lacked confidence in her math skills. However, she knew I would teach her again in 12th grade, so she challenged herself to enroll in collegiate-rigor calculus as a high school senior. Because I knew she worked best with a content-overview video before each lesson along with a copy of class notes, I was able to provide these supports for her on day one when we looped together. Not only did she soar that year, but the skills she gained gave her the confidence to unleash her inner entrepreneur—she is now the head of strategic partnerships for a clean-energy transportation company that she helped to create.

Personal relationships, which take time to cultivate, lead to academic growth and character development. When I met Brandon in Kindergarten in 2018, he was unfamiliar with the alphabet and didn’t know how to use numbers. On day one of first grade in 2019, I could begin right where we left off the year before. I knew that Brandon was ready for more complex letter sounds like “ch” and that we could begin with addition and subtraction to 20. The relationship and trust we developed led to huge growth for Brandon this year, and I’ll be able to pick up with him exactly where we left off when we return to class for the 2020-21 school year. This is because I’m looping again with Brandon and our class to 2nd grade.

These are real stories that form the backbone of why principals and district leaders should choose looping as a key staffing strategy at their schools for the 2020-21 school year. For districts, master schedules should be created with continuity in mind and could include a survey to determine who within their ranks would be interested in teaching their current class in the next grade level.

Districts could then use that information to create a master schedule that allows as many teachers as possible to loop during the next academic year. Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) predicts summer learning loss to be exacerbated as a result of COVID closures. Looping is a research-backed staffing strategy to help mitigate this nationwide disruption.

This upcoming school year, there will be 60 million school-aged kids like Brandon and Laura who will need continuity and teachers to know how to reach them on day one. That’s why we need looping now more than ever.

Photo by Rawpixel, EnvatoElements-licensed.

By: Mark Rogers
Title: The Case for Keeping Students With the Same Teacher Next Year
Sourced From: educationpost.org/the-case-for-keeping-students-with-the-same-teacher-next-year/
Published Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 23:01:08 +0000