I remember the first and only time I’ve ever yelled at a teacher in class.

Growing up in the U.S. as a female child of immigrants from Taiwan, this kind of behavior is practically sacrilegious; certainly scandalous and wildly antithetical to my traditional upbringing. I was raised above all else to not only revere education, but to literally show respect to educators and elders by being a dutiful, quiet, listening and obedient learner. This meant I was consistently rewarded at school for putting my head down and striving to be a “good student” and “high achiever,” but never for challenging authority or speaking up when something was wrong.

I broke that mold on the day that a substitute lecturer addressed my Ph.D. class.

“You can’t interview Asians because they won’t say anything substantive due to the norms of their culture,” she said.

Wait, what? I was in the first year of the top doctorate program in my field, and we were 20 educators-in-training being taught best practices of various communication research methods by supposed leading experts. This guest speaker was talking about how to run group interviews, and she, a white woman, was imparting what she learned from years of research with various U.S. populations, including “tips” on how to work with diverse communities.

“Asians have a politeness norm, so it’s difficult to get anything useful out of them,” she continued.

It was hard for me to hear anything after that, over the whooshing sound of blood rushing to my head, my heart pounding from the cortisol spike in my body. Did this professor really just wield her authority at the front of this room and say to an internationally diverse class of scholars, educators, and thought-leaders-in-training, that Asians — all the Asians — were not worthy of study or deep understanding because, in her professional experience as a white researcher, it was difficult to get people of different backgrounds to talk to her?

I spoke up. I don’t even remember exactly what I said, but I know I said it forcefully, interrupting her mid-lecture and vehemently arguing back. My voice was shaking and my face most certainly was red, but I said something to the effect of:

Asian and Asian American experiences and voices matter. Our humanity matters, but our unique experiences also matter. And we’re not just one homogenized, stereotypical group. And it’s really problematic and a glaring function of white supremacy to dismiss the importance of collecting information on the lived experiences of large swaths of people of color you deem unimportant because you didn’t establish a trusting relationship with them, so of course they wouldn’t talk to you. Accurate information directly impacts who gets what resources — aren’t you an educator and literal expert in communication and research? Shouldn’t you know that? And what depth of knowledge, background, or experience gives you the authority to speak on what works best culturally for Asians anyway?

At least, I hope I said something like that. I’ve spent so much energy replaying what happened, trying to process it with friends, ruminating about what I should’ve said or done instead, that you’ll have to ask my classmates how it really went down. My memory is tainted by the rage and stress of being unexpectedly triggered yet again by yet another racial microaggression in yet another school setting.

It’s the kind of experience I’ve studied as well as lived through. For my dissertation, I researched the power of youth activists creating and circulating counternarratives in response to racial microaggressions, the layered, subtle, and often unintentional forms of everyday racism experienced by people from marginalized racial and ethnic populations. A key finding from this work shows that mobilizing personal stories through a range of artistic and cultural expressions, outlets and collaborative networks can help individuals and groups process, heal from and speak back to these everyday experiences and their cumulative effects.

As a scholar, as an Asian American, and as a product of the U.S. school and university system, I wanted to find out how microaggressions shape the experiences of Asian American K-12 educators. In summer 2022 as part of the Voices of Change project, we at EdSurge Research convened and conducted group interviews with 80 classroom teachers, administrators, school counselors and literacy and tech coaches, who described how everyday experiences of casual racism persistently weigh them down by requiring tough mental calculus about whether and how to respond, and by reinforcing stereotypes about Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. Yet they also shared that they sometimes seize microaggressions as opportunities to push back against bias, in the moments when they’re willing to take on that extra burden.

Sharing the results of this study is important, primarily to validate the experiences of Asian American educators and also to inform others about the harms microaggressions cause in schools. I’ll offer my perspective, too, both as a professional researcher and a person.

What Are Microaggressions?

Microaggressions are the subtle, causal, everyday assaults, indignities and invalidations that people of color and marginalized communities face incessantly in this country. Often characterized today as “death by a thousand cuts,” the concept was first described in the late 1960s by professor of psychiatry and education Chester Pierce. In his work with Black families and students, Pierce reported “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and non-verbal exchanges which are ‘put downs’”¹ that control “space, time, energy, and mobility … while producing feelings of degradation, and erosion of self-confidence and self-image.”²

Since then, many scholars and researchers have expanded upon this work. Psychologist Derald Wing Sue developed extensive frameworks³ showing the depth and range of microaggressions, their impact, and the unrelenting frequency with which they occur for people perceived as “different” from an imagined “normal.” Critical race and education scholars like Daniel G. Solórzano and Lindsay Pérez Huber contextualize these harmful lived experiences through vivid storytelling and rigorous research,⁴ illuminating their lasting physical, psychological and social consequences.

The corrosive and life-threatening effects of exposure to chronic racism have also been long documented.⁵ Coping with chronic forms of overt, intentional racism is itself damaging enough and microaggressions are no different — they fester, layer and compound depending on context and other aspects of identity (for example, one’s gender, religion, class, sexual orientation, indigeneity, ability, immigration and/or citizenship status, etc.). For those having to incessantly navigate painful, disruptive experiences of frustration and anger, self-doubt and helplessness, regular exposure to these unpredictable expressions of social discrimination has also been linked to ulcers, insomnia, elevated blood pressure, heightened stress, anxiety, chronic pain, depression, suicide, and other life-threatening symptoms akin to those who have experienced severe traumatic stress.⁶

In other words, microaggressions may seem small, but their impact is big. Unlike more direct, overt, or deliberate acts of discrimination, microaggressions are often subtle, happen quickly, and are frequently, though not always, unintentional. Their assaultive power comes from their cumulative and lasting effects, from experiencing them all the time, unpredictably, everywhere, including in schools.

In our Voices of Change research, it became clear that Asian American educators face microaggressions all too often.

In our virtual learning circles, structured small group discussions where educators could connect, share resources and learn from each other, we discussed a range of issues weighing heavily on the minds of many U.S. educators — the lasting social and economic impact of COVID-19 and America’s ongoing racial reckoning; teacher burnout, trauma and mental health; low pay and low morale in the profession; public scapegoating of teachers; and the incessant escalation of demands on their time with shrinking professional resources.

We also talked about the realities of being Asian American educators, who represent only 2 percent of K-12 educators in the U.S. We discussed regular paradoxical experiences of both hyper-visibility and invisibility in their schools, and recounted the numerous damaging stereotypes and discriminatory moments they had to navigate with students and colleagues, often with little to no institutional support. Despite hailing from diverse urban, rural and suburban school communities across 18 states and D.C., a shared experience that repeatedly came up was the frequency and weight of casual, everyday racism they encountered as Asian Americans, many of which had gone unacknowledged for years.

For many participants, these small group conversations were the first opportunity they had to gather with other educators like themselves to bear witness to and process the repeated painful microaggressions they’ve endured, as well as the joys and successes they’ve had in bringing themselves fully to work and in modeling this for their students and other teachers.

Responding to Microaggressions

Everyday instances of casual racism are already insidious enough to bear, but the mental calculus one has to go through to figure out a response in these moments is part of the cumulative weight of microaggressions. As we heard in our groups, in a split second, educators have to decide:

What’s my goal — to educate, to call them out to do better, to defend or protect others, to preserve my own well-being? Is it safe to have a conversation with this person? Are there power differences at play or risks to my person or livelihood? Will others be harmed by my silence or my actions? Will I lose my job? Do I have the time and energy right now? Is it worth the emotional toll it will take?

For those who experience racism and interpersonal microaggressions frequently, the choice often feels like it’s between the lesser of two evils: Do I want to feel bad about not saying something at all, or do I want to feel bad about not saying the “right” thing at that moment?

The truth is, there is no perfect response. It’s tempting to fixate on it because we think that if we could’ve just found the perfect thing to say or do, or said something faster, or more exacting, it somehow could’ve made the interaction hurt less, or be less invalidating and harmful. Staying silent can sometimes feel like defeat or betrayal of self or others, yet we also feel angry, resentful and defiant that we have to experience this at all. So much emotional energy is expended attempting to reconcile the disempowering moment in order to reclaim our humanity. It is exhausting and often invisible to people who do not experience this.

People are often unaware of how their internal biases bleed out in everyday conversations with others, so one strategy for responding to microaggressions is rooted in a simple goal: Call attention to what’s not being said. Make the underlying assumptions visible by pointing it out. This can be accomplished in many ways — through a simple, quick statement or expression (like “ouch!,” or a grimacing “yikes”) before moving on; by making a joke or using humor to try and disarm the situation; by striking or pushing back; by taking the time to engage in further discussion to educate; or some combination of all of these tactics.⁷

For example, in our conversations with Asian American educators, one particular microaggression cropped up repeatedly across the various learning circles, rooted in the stereotypical idea of Asians as perpetual foreigners. That no matter how long a person has been in America, they are foreign or “other,” and therefore don’t belong. This manifests particularly in what many perceive as an innocuous question: “Where are you from?” (often followed immediately by “No where are you really from?,” as if one cannot be from here because they must be from an exotic, distant land). Other invasive and tokenizing forms of the question manifest as “What are you?” or demands to perform foreignness and “say something in that language.”

The educators in our circles shared with each other the range of what they do when this happens to them at school, depending on the situation and who it’s coming from.

“I have grown into an educator who believes that you’ve got to take it head on, vocally and preemptively,” said Robert Fung, principal of a public high school in San Diego.

In the learning circle he joined, he and other teachers and administrators discussed how it’s relatively manageable learning how to respond to the kids they work with, but often much harder to figure out how and when to have these conversations with other adults, like fellow teachers or parents.

“I look for opportunities to take those defining experiences and turn them into something that other people have to deal with now,” he said, using his position as a principal and those quick, fleeting, painful moments to prompt perspective-taking. “What I ask people is, ‘look, this is a question that I've gotten all my life and it's put me in this defensive place, so I want to turn it onto you and imagine if you were asked that, but your answer — “I'm from San Diego or I'm from Cleveland” — is not good enough … how would you respond to that question? “Where are you really from?”’"

He explained that he wants to nudge other people outside of their comfort zones, challenging the “privilege and entitlement” enjoyed by those who don’t regularly have to think about their race and who are not asked to justify where they come from. As a school leader, Fung intentionally creates space to engage in these tough but necessary conversations, which he’s found can open up dialogue in a way that is productive with adults, whether they are other educators or parents.

Similarly, when stereotypical interactions come from his teenage students, Fung looks for other meaningful points of connection. By being vulnerable and sharing experiences of what it was like also growing up with an undocumented parent, for example, he ultimately tries to emphasize, "Look, we are not that different simply because you think I'm this foreign person from another land. There is a way we can connect."

For the educators working with elementary- and middle school-aged students, many described turning microaggressions into opportunities for learning by using pointed but neutral follow-up questions to prompt student self-reflection, like “Why do you want to know?” or “Why is that important?” Questions like that force the asker to think about and articulate the assumptions underlying their questions.

First grade teacher Mayrin Bunyagidj in Northern California, for example, said that she will often respond by asking her young students clarifying questions. “I always just go back with … what do you mean by that? … Are you asking about my culture, what languages I speak, or what my family history is?” This invites her 6- and 7-year-olds to continue being curious and make connections with others, but to also start paying attention to the precision and consequences of their communication.

Yet for others working with older youth, the strategy is to put the microaggression back on them. When Whitney Aragaki, a high school biology and environmental science teacher in Hawaii, hears “What kind of Asian are you?”, she immediately challenges the frame. “I turn it around, ‘What kind of white are you?’ ‘What kind of whatever are you?’ ‘What kind of brown are you?’ It’s extremely offensive if you were to phrase it in any other terminology, so if you do that, then it sounds like, ‘yeah, that is racist.’” By putting the question back on the asker, they are forced to feel what it’s like to be asked such a problematic question. People are stopped in their tracks and compelled to check themselves.

Aragaki also reflected to her group that in these kinds of conversations, she noticed the person who is being ‘othered’ is often the one being asked to disclose something personal about themselves first, which can make the conversation feel risky and not safe to join. When students ask about alternative ways they can connect with someone whom they perceive as different, she will advise that “if you want to know something, offer something up first and then engage in conversation. ‘My favorite food is this, or this is my favorite dinner at home. What’s yours?’” It becomes more of an exchange as opposed to a one-sided demand for information.

While most of the educators we talked to felt equipped to handle conversations about identity, difference and belonging with the students under their care, the deep frustration and exhaustion came from having to constantly field invalidating interactions from colleagues, bosses, parents, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) trainers, and other adults at school. They wish that people who ask "Where are you really from?" or "What kind of Asian are you?" would ask themselves which stereotypes they are trying to project onto what group of people. What do they want to know? And why is it important? If these question-askers are seeking to make a connection, is there another way they can do so, without reducing the connection point to a racial or ethnic stereotype?

As these examples above show, there are a range of ways to respond when something like this comes up, and it’s going to differ based on context and goals.

Personally, when people ask me “What are you?”, I’ll sometimes smile, look them in the eyes and respond sweetly, “Human. What are you?”

Prepare for Discomfort, Denial, Defensiveness, Dismissal or Gaslighting

As the educators pointed out, responding to microaggressions is going to get uncomfortable. Depending on the speaker and situation, people will respond in a variety of ways if you point out that they acted in a way that caused harm. A common response is either denial or defensive dismissiveness: “I didn’t mean that” or “it was just a joke.” Other times, people lash out and try to deny your experienced reality by saying, “that’s not what happened,” “you’re too sensitive,” or “you’re taking it the wrong way.” They may try to keep the focus on themselves, prompting you to reassure them that they are “not a bad person.”

As one educator from our circles who asked not to be named shared, she is used to the casual racism she experiences daily in her job, being constantly mistaken for other Asian teachers or parents by both children and adults, or having to navigate stereotypical or racist questions about Asians. Like all Asian Americans, she picks which of those battles to spend her energy on, but it was different when she found out from another parent that kids in her child’s middle school class had tauntingly “thanked” the child for building the Transcontinental railroads after learning about it in the Western Expansion section of their social studies unit.

“I had a conversation with the administrator and the dean of students, and it was really hard, because their immediate response was to be defensive about it,” she shared with her group. They pushed back as if it were a personal attack on their character or values, saying, “We really believe that equity is at the center,” but to this educator, that was not the point.

“We can’t just say ‘we believe in equity’ and then be done with it,” she said. “The kids are talking about this; how are you equipping teachers to have conversations like this? … How are we going to help teachers to adjust their own biases and raise their own awareness and understanding so they know how to have a conversation instead of feeling uncomfortable themselves?”

In another learning circle, we heard from other seasoned educators that these conversations are always going to be uncomfortable because learning anything new is going to be uncomfortable, and that teachers and school leaders can learn to sit with the discomfort as part of the process of guiding others through it.

As a teacher of English as a second language and ethnic studies who works with older youth in Boston, Somy Kim has significant experience with facilitating complex conversations about identity, racism and history, and with it, the delicate task of helping students navigate the discomfort that comes with learning hard truths that can challenge their fundamental understanding of themselves and their worlds.

“Things that are consequential will of course make people feel uncomfortable, because it matters,” she said. “When it’s consequential and people’s feelings and impact is involved, then people are like ‘Wait a minute, I did that. I committed that microaggression just this morning. Does that make me a bad person? I don’t want to be a bad person.’”

Kim recalled a difficult moment when a Latina student was unknowingly but blatantly saying racist things about Asians in class. Kim had decided to let it pass, but her Mexican American co-teacher felt it was right to intervene, so they talked to the student privately later. The student grew defensive, saying, “I think you guys are calling me racist and I’m not racist.” Despite being careful to not call her out in front of other students and trying to calmly explain the reasoning behind their conversation, the student felt judged and like her character was being attacked. She was ultimately unable to hear the larger message. Despite Kim’s best efforts to build up trust again, Kim described their teacher-student relationship deteriorating after that.

“There's so much involved in learning that has to do with our own identity and how we see ourselves as good people,” Kim said. Especially “when real learning about historical truths that were hidden from us happens, people are going to be upset or people are going to be defensive, people are going to say, ‘that's not true’ … or … ‘was it that bad?’” she said. As an educator, she tries to prepare herself for the potential reactive emotional experiences of others by expecting it as part of the process of learning, and to model for students that it is going to be uncomfortable to grow.

“I've gotten to the point where I'm like, I'm bearing witness to and holding the hands of the people I'm learning alongside and just allowing it to happen, allowing the emotions and the rollercoaster to happen,” she described.

Other educators in her group understood how difficult it is to navigate these conversations, especially when everyone’s racial identity development, self-awareness and understanding of social context are in vastly different places. “It’s really hard,” commented high school English teacher Charlene Beh, especially, she added, “for students of color to have that recognition of ‘I can do harm to another student of color.’ That’s a lot.” One approach Beh takes in those moments is to pause if she can and seek understanding, asking, “What do you mean? I’m with you,” to try and work it out with them. “It takes time,” she admitted, but “continuing to extend those invitations of ‘let’s check in again,’” can foster trust to continue having the hard conversations that hopefully can then lead to learning outcomes for all.

“These conversations around anti-racism and equity are a long-term game,” Beh counseled. “Even within a year with a student who you had a good relationship with, and then it got less good because of those hard conversations … I try to have faith that, you know what, at some point there's a possibility that that student two years later, five years later, 10 years later, will think back and be like, ‘You know what, I recognize now we're all part of this racist system. So I said something that was racist, and in that moment I was fragile or I didn't treat it well. But now looking back, I recognize that that was part of my growth.’”

“I try to hold on to that sense of, we're planting seeds and sometimes those seeds take a super long time to grow,” Beh added. “But all we can do is just continue to plant those seeds and hope.”

---

References

¹ Pierce, C. M., Carew, J. V., Pierce-Gonzalez, D., & Wills, D. (1977). An experiment in racism: TV commercials. Education and Urban Society, 10(1), 61-87.

² Yosso, T., Smith, W., Ceja, M., & Solórzano, D. (2009). Critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate for Latina/o undergraduates. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 659-691.

³ Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. John Wiley & Sons.

Sue, D. W., & Spanierman, L. (2020). Microaggressions in everyday life. John Wiley & Sons.

⁴ Solórzano, D. G., & Huber, L. P. (2020). Racial microaggressions: Using critical race theory to respond to everyday racism. Teachers College Press.

⁵ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Racism and health. Retrieved November 8, 2023, from https://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/racism-disparities/index.html

⁶ Nadal, K. L. (2018). Microaggressions and traumatic stress: Theory, research, and clinical treatment. American Psychological Association.

⁷ Sue, D. W., Alsaidi, S., Awad, M. N., Glaeser, E., Calle, C. Z., & Mendez, N. (2019). Disarming racial microaggressions: Microintervention strategies for targets, white allies, and bystanders. American Psychologist, 74(1), 128–142.

© Master1305 / Shutterstock

During his yearslong quest for a bachelor’s degree, José Del Real Viramontes encountered trials at four different California community colleges.

At his first college, right out of high school, the young man born in Zacatecas, Mexico, hoped to play for the football team. But Del Real Viramontes never made it to tryouts, he says, and when his best friend left the college, he decided to leave, too.

At his second college, close to his home in East Hollywood, he says that he had a bad experience with the instructor about an early assignment in a developmental English course. That, plus feeling like as the oldest child he should clock hours working to earn money to contribute to his family’s household, pushed Del Real Viramontes out of school again, this time for three years.

At his third college, his enrollment came as something of a surprise. A friend filled out an application and submitted it for him. This institution fit just right. Del Real Viramontes joined its Puente program, which embedded him in a cohort of students in a math and English course sequence. The group studied Chicano literature, offering him the opportunity to read about experiences that reflected his own.

“I think that program was the first program that really provided this idea of transferring to a university,” he says. “We were in a very supportive environment.”

A transfer counselor sat in on class sessions. He took students on tours of university campuses and helped them build connections there.

“It’s ironic,” Del Real Viramontes says, “because I remember going to UC Riverside, where I work now, visiting, and never in my wildest dreams did I think I was gonna be back as a professor.”

Looking back now, at age 40, as assistant professor of higher education administration and policy in the University of California system, Del Real Viramontes can see what his story shares in common with the experiences of so many students who start out at community colleges hoping to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree.

They may intend to earn two years’ worth of general education credits at more affordable rates before transferring to a four-year college or university. They may want to boost their grades before applying to a more selective institution. They may prefer to start out at an institution close to home, one with smaller class sizes and an environment that feels more approachable. Or, like Del Real Viramontes, they may be the first in their families to attempt college and lack information about where else to apply.

But data shows these strategies don’t actually work for most of the people who enroll at community college. Six years after they start out at what is called a two-year college, only about a third of students successfully transfer to a four-year college. And only about 16 percent end up earning a bachelor’s degree.

It’s a disappointing status quo. It’s really unacceptable.

— John Fink

“It’s a disappointing status quo. It’s really unacceptable,” says John Fink, a senior research associate and program lead at the Community College Research Center. “As a system, that’s just not really living up to its potential.”

The transfer outcomes are even worse for Black students, Latino students, and low-income students, he adds.

This week, the U.S. Department of Education is hosting a national summit about improving transfer outcomes. It’s a goal community colleges have been striving for in recent years. But they can’t do all the heavy lifting alone, experts say. To successfully hand students off from one campus to another also takes effort and resources from the colleges that students hope to transfer to: institutions that grant bachelor’s degrees.

Four-year colleges and universities need to take “co-ownership” for transfer students’ success, says Tania LaViolet, a director at the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute.

As higher ed enrollment declines, will that finally start to happen?

Partnership Required

Many barriers block students from transferring to a four-year college, according to Fink, including bachelor’s-degree programs that don’t accept transfer credits and a lack of adequate advising.

“Too many students are just left on their own to navigate this process,” he says.

Some students get stuck in remedial or entry-level courses at community colleges. That’s what happened to Del Real Viramontes. Even though he fit in at the Puente program at his third college, he struggled to pass English 101 there, having trouble completing a research paper assignment. He attempted it three times, and then had to find a different institution where he could take the course again, he says, due to rules about limits on the number of times students are allowed to retake the same course.

To address this, community colleges have been doing away with developmental prerequisite courses and creating “guided pathways” that blend advising, career exploration and straightforward guidance about what courses to take that will apply toward a bachelor’s degree.

But without participation from four-year colleges, community college efforts are like a bridge that only spans half of a river.

“Right now, the status quo is that supports and advising for transfer students is too little, and too late, and really too absent the presence of the four-year partner,” Fink says.

A few pressures might incentivize four-year colleges to step up their efforts. For example, if it’s part of the mission of a bachelor’s degree-granting institution to educate diverse students and facilitate economic mobility, then supporting transfer students from community colleges fits the bill, LaViolet says.

After all, according to analysis from the Community College Research Center, in the 2020-21 academic year, half of all Hispanic undergraduates were enrolled at community colleges, as were 42 percent of Asian undergrads, 40 percent of Black undergrads and 39 percent of white undergrads. In 2015-16, community colleges enrolled more than a third of dependent undergraduate students whose families earned less than $20,000 a year.

Some public flagships are paying attention to the transfer pipeline’s potential for educating people of varied backgrounds.

“It helps us fulfill our mission as a public university,” University of Virginia president James E. Ryan told The Washington Post in 2022, “which is to be a place of opportunity, a place of social mobility.”

But LaViolet says it’s unlikely that the recent ban on affirmative action will motivate most four-year colleges and universities to recruit and retain transfer students as an alternative to race-conscious admissions. That’s because only a small sliver of such institutions are affected by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this summer on the issue. The majority already admit most of the people who apply and so don’t need nuanced admissions criteria anyway. And the relatively few selective colleges and universities in the country could only enroll a tiny fraction of the students who start out at community colleges even if they tried to recruit more.

Instead, there’s a different force at play that might work in favor of transfer students.

Higher ed leaders are concerned about the fact that college enrollment is on the decline, not only coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic but also because of national demographic changes that will shrink the pool of 18-year-olds to a smaller size than admissions offices have gotten accustomed to fishing in. Recent years have seen some colleges close or consolidate because of enrollment problems.

Improved transfer pathways could yield better enrollment. The pressure four-year colleges are facing these days to boost student numbers — and shore up the bottom line — could spur some to take action on transfer students, LaViolet argues.

“When you support stronger partnerships and collaborations with a local community college, what that does is it increases your market share … in reaching students who would not have come to you otherwise,” she says. “In an enrollment-challenged context, that’s critical to your business operations.”

Collaborations might look like a university agreeing to admit all students from a certain community college who meet specific academic criteria, an arrangement known as guaranteed or dual admission. In such cases, the institutions work out which credits will transfer and apply to which majors, effectively telling students, LaViolet says, “here is a four-year map to complete your bachelor’s degree.”

“It’s the clarity of the pathway and certainty you’re providing students that is at the heart of the value proposition,” she adds.

Successful partnerships tend to be forged between one community college and one four-year institution, which are often physically close to each other, LaViolet says. Examples include the partnership between Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University, called Advance, and a program that ties the University of Central Florida to half a dozen Florida community colleges, called DirectConnect. Most such partnerships are created between community colleges and public four-year colleges, LaViolet adds, but she sees an opportunity for more private institutions to do this, too.

LaViolet says top leaders help drive these collaborations, and Fink adds that academic departments and professors also have a role to play in doing outreach that helps transfer students. That might look like, for example, chemistry faculty at a university talking to chemistry faculty at a community college to align on course sequencing, instruction techniques and assessments of student learning.

“That really requires broad investment from faculty and other academic leaders at the university in particular, really reaching out to their colleagues to figure out what’s the right pathway to a specific major,” he says.

Policy might help, too. For example, new legislation in California will create a pilot program at the University of California, Los Angeles, to offer priority admission in certain major programs to students from some community colleges who earn an “associate degree for transfer.”

The Human Element

University outreach made the difference for Del Real Viramontes. One day, he visited the transfer center at his fourth community college, where he chatted with a peer mentor from UCLA. She eventually invited him to an opportunity at the four-year institution that she thought he might appreciate.

“That program,” Del Real Viramontes says, “changed my life.”

For six weeks, he could take a UCLA summer class and benefit from wraparound services. Del Real Viramontes applied, with a letter of recommendation from his English teacher at his fourth community college. He enrolled in a course about public policy — not knowing what public policy was. He says he received an A in the class.

Community college and transfer students, we are very resilient. We are very good at figuring things out.

— José Del Real Viramontes

“I think that’s one of the biggest reasons I am where I am today,” Del Real Viramontes says.

“Being able to be part of that program and doing well in the class, it allowed me to see myself at UCLA.”

He credits that experience with giving him the academic confidence he needed to transfer to a university. It exposed him to campus resources, so he knew where to go to find support. It offered him validation about his culture and background, and revealed how he could view the challenges he overcame at community college as preparation for bigger adventures.

It’s an example of how, as much as sorting out institutional policies and partnerships matter for transfer students, boosting students’ confidence and making sure they can access supportive advising are important elements, too.

“You could have the best major-specific articulation agreements, but if students aren’t using them or working with advisers to explore their options early on and develop a plan and change it as needed and keep progress along the way, all that great articulation work isn’t going to yield any fruit,” Fink says. “It’s not going to change the student experience.”

UCLA offers this kind of program for students through its Center for Community College Partnerships. Run by more than a dozen staff members and six dozen peer advisers, the center also trains community college staff and builds support among administrators and faculty at the university.

About a quarter of community college students who try to transfer to UCLA on their own succeed, according to Santiago Bernal, assistant director of the Center for Community College Partnerships. In contrast, about half of students who participate in the center’s programs are admitted.

For decades, the Center for Community College Partnerships “has been a national example of creating a transfer-receptive culture at a university, one that is affirming to Black and Latino [students] and men of color and women in STEM,” Fink says. “Staff have a regular presence at their partnering community colleges, to sort of help students plan and think about transfer to UCLA before they transfer.”

Del Real Viramontes ended up transferring to UCLA. He majored in Chicano studies, participated in the McNair Scholars program that prepares students for doctoral studies, and graduated with his bachelor’s degree. He went on to earn his Ph.D., and he now studies the college transfer experience, especially for Latino students.

It’s important to him to highlight the agency students exercise, and the cultural resources and relationships they draw on, when they face challenges along the transfer pathway.

“Community college and transfer students, we are very resilient. We are very good at figuring things out,” he says, describing the group as “very aspirational.”

Del Real Viramontes went back a few years ago to teach the summer program class that altered his own trajectory. He still keeps in touch with those summer students he taught.

In fact, he says, giving transfer students the chance to build relationships with other people who already successfully navigated similar paths is key to helping them feel like they belong at a university and can thrive there, too.

“Students involved in this class in the summer program,” he says, “they already see themselves at UCLA.”

© Photo courtesy of UCLA's Center for Community College Partnerships

Districts, families, communities and youth-supporting organizations all have vested interests in supporting the academic journeys of students, yet their decisions affecting education often occur independently. This disconnect is especially evident for students from communities that have historically and systematically been excluded (HSE) from opportunity and access in education: Black, Brown, Indigenous, those experiencing poverty, multilingual learners and students experiencing learning differences.

BIPOC solution providers are for-profit and non-profit education organizations led by people of color who have created programs, tools and models for districts and classrooms.

Despite decades of education reform efforts, HSE students' academic experiences and attainment are still moderated by social position and identity factors, such as race and socioeconomic status. Many seek to address these disparities by implementing education solutions at the district level. However, these solutions are often not co-created with HSE communities and families, and the diversity of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) solution providers does not reflect the HSE student population.

Solving deep-seated equity challenges in education is complex for a myriad of reasons. One key and solvable challenge is for solutions to be informed by the cultural and contextual expertise of the communities in which they’re implemented. One consideration is that BIPOC solution providers and developers likely possess deep community and cultural expertise but often lack the necessary access to share their solutions.

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“And just something didn't feel right about that to say, ‘Hey, why aren’t folks who are from the communities that we serve the folks who are actually building and leading these initiatives, right? Inherently, are we saying that they're not capable of addressing the community concerns that they have, right? Because for whatever reason, we're not creating pathways for folks to actually be able to come into whatever the solutions are.” — Solution Provider

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Digital Promise’s Center for Inclusive Innovation engaged in exploratory research through a pilot initiative called Learning Salons to explore this idea. These BIPOC solution providers hidden in plain sight are people of color leading high-value edtech companies who potentially have created the solutions that can effectively address districts’ needs.

The Imbalance Between the Need and Opportunity

Grounded in the spirit of the Inclusive Innovation Core Tenets, we outlined criteria for consideration when evaluating solutions for promise toward meeting an equity-based challenge:

• Centered in belonging and identity
• Natively designed to meet the needs of diverse students
• Reflective of the culture, languages and experiences of diverse students
• Inclusive of the voice and input of diverse communities

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Image Credit: Digital Promise

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Using criteria such as this will help source education solutions and BIPOC solution providers that wholly embody equity as a starting point for support for HSE student access and support. Still, a larger problem rooted in the stratification of opportunity for BIPOC solution providers remains.

BIPOC solution providers have the ability and determination to develop impactful education solutions. However, they encounter obstacles in establishing district relationships and contracts. Our report describes an effort to address the barriers to opportunity navigated by a sample of BIPOC solution providers we had the honor of working with over the past year, including:

• Human, financial and social capital barriers related to their social and professional networks, funding and the capacity it takes to navigate a complex education solution industry.
• Challenges associated with the nature of industry practice and district procurement practices.
• Sociocultural barriers related to perceptions of BIPOC solution providers and the sociopolitical climate surrounding equity-centered work.

These barriers all have implications for the visibility and success of solutions that are aligned to the needs of HSE students and, ultimately, how many HSE students are able to receive support designed with their needs in mind by people who understand—and in some cases, share—their experiences.

Amplifying BIPOC Solution Providers Through a Learning Salons Model

Digital Promise and our partners designed the Learning Salons model to create opportunities for school districts to broaden their lens on sourcing solutions to meet the needs of HSE students through a rapid-cycle approach anchored in each district’s problem of practice to discover innovative, equity-centered programs and practices.

The Learning Salons engaged district leaders and BIPOC solution providers in a collaborative experience focused on:

1. Defining the root cause of a district’s problem of practice.
2. Identifying a solution pathway to address the problem of practice with the goal of achieving student-centered outcomes.
3. Matching and adapting equity-centered learning solutions aligned directly to a district’s problem of practice to define opportunities for partnership and engagement.

Benefits and impact of Learnings Salons for district leaders and BIPOC solution providers:

• Prioritized opportunities for districts and BIPOC solution providers to collaborate on problems of practice to discover equity-centered, innovative and effective student-centered tools.
• Created a platform for BIPOC solution providers to share their deep content and context expertise on high-priority challenge areas and showcase their solution and its impact.

We supplemented the Learning Salons with a broader opportunity designed to engage leaders and decision makers from states’ district and charter school teams, practitioners, researchers and funders in a showcase of BIPOC-created solutions where they learned about undiscovered teaching and learning solutions and tools.

The Learning Salons approach helps to mitigate the equity gap by:

• Creating awareness of solutions and tools that are unknown to district leaders and decision makers.
• Fostering collaborations on co-designing solutions that align with district-specific challenges or problems.
• Building relationships between district leaders and BIPOC solution providers founded on a shared commitment to an equity challenge.

The Promise of Addressing the Needs of Historically and Systematically Excluded Students

When BIPOC solution providers are intentionally engaged and have a platform to showcase their talent and solutions, the opportunities for addressing inequity abound, informed by:

• The Value of Deep Equity Content and Context Expertise: BIPOC solution providers contribute their extensive knowledge and lived experience to address critical challenges. Their insights offer practitioners valuable perspectives, methods and successful models tailored to HSE students' needs, providing effective solutions for district leaders' equity challenges.
• Surfacing Culturally Relevant Solutions: BIPOC solution providers naturally integrate culturally responsive pedagogy into solutions for HSE youth. With inclusive research and ongoing enhancement, plus careful diversity of representation, they create impactful solutions. Their understanding of excluded students' authentic experiences drives meaningful, resonating change.
• Broadening the Definition of and Measurement of Impact: Like most BIPOC solution providers, BIPOC solution providers design products and programs to meet traditional standards and metrics that demonstrate solution impact. BIPOC providers may offer different perspectives on measures and progress indicators that are most meaningful to HSE students and communities, such as engagement and belonging, identity reflection, agency and other factors that are most important for HSE student achievement in education.

Reimagining a More Inclusive Future

If we are committed to a more inclusive future in education, we must also imagine a path that ensures HSE scholars have the support they need to thrive. Doing so means that we must actively seek out and embrace BIPOC solution providers as experts, given their experience and proximity to the challenges of HSE students. Changes in practice can lift the veil.

Three Practical Recommendations for Change

1. Redefine Solution Development Readiness Criteria: Evaluations of solution provider readiness should include relevant and equitable criteria with a laser focus on sourcing diverse tools, curricula and resources that support the HSE student population with intentionality.
2. Reconceptualize Expertise: Consider the cultural community knowledge and lived experience necessary to inform effective solutions for HSE communities that have historically been left out of district decision-making and education R&D processes.
3. Repave Procurement Pathways: Allow for consideration of lesser-known education BIPOC solution providers who have developed solutions that show promise for meeting the needs of HSE students, such as BIPOC and equity-centered education BIPOC solution providers.

These three small pivots in practice will take a meaningful step toward creating an education system where all students can learn, grow and thrive as their authentic selves with the support and resources they need. Breaking down the barriers makes room for solutions that reflect the growing diversity of the student body.

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To learn more about the Learning Salons and Showcases click here.

© Image Credit: michaeljung / Shutterstock

Back in March of this year, EdSurge published my article outlining the nearly 400-year history of higher education in America, how that past shapes the way the country views colleges today, and why microcredentials, while critical to the future of the U.S. economy, are causing a dilemma for the academy. Since then, I have enjoyed serving on various panels like those with the Colorado Business Roundtable discussing the future of higher education and its intersection with economic and workforce needs.

Several critical themes have emerged from these conversations that create burdens for workforce partners and higher education institutions. For one, agreement around the purpose of higher education is fragmented. In 2019, Brandon Busteed penned an article for Forbes that beautifully describes what I have witnessed in these discussions. Busteed described a "decidedly false dichotomy" where some argue that higher education is about preparing a person for work versus, more broadly, preparing a person for success. While I have enjoyed the dialogue, the fact remains that this intellectual discourse is being held amongst some of the most privileged and well-credentialed persons in society.

In these conversations, another critical theme emerges: the need for more decision-makers to understand that U.S. population growth has nearly flatlined. It is vital to note that this trend is NOT a blip but the result of a steady decline, and that higher education as a whole must address it. One implication is a recent prediction by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the labor force participation rate may fall from 62.2 percent in 2022 to 60.4 percent in 2032. A second implication is the absence of sufficient numbers of workers in professions such as health services, trade, and hospitality. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as of June 2023, the national labor force participation rate was 0.7 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels. That equates to 1.9 million workers who have left the workforce since the pandemic’s start in early spring 2020.

The lack of an available and prepared workforce in America adds unnecessary fuel to the fire of poverty that burns uncontrollably throughout our communities, and that leaders don’t seem to feel an urgency to extinguish. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Poverty in the United States: 2022 report, the supplemental poverty measure (SPM) rate in 2022 was 12.4 percent. This increase of 4.6 percentage points from 2021 represents the first increase in the overall SPM poverty rate since 2010. Furthermore, the SPM child poverty rate more than doubled, from 5.2 percent in 2021 to 12.4 percent in 2022.

To address our children’s hunger and our communities’ poverty, our educational system must be redesigned to remove the boundaries between high school, college and careers so that more Americans can train for and secure employment that will sustain them.

In 2021, Jobs for the Future outlined a pathway toward realizing such a revolution in The Big Blur report, which argues for a radical restructuring of education for grades 11 through 14 by erasing the arbitrary dividing line between high school and college. Ideas for accomplishing this include courses and work experiences for students designed for career preparation. Joel Vargas, contributing author to this report and JFF executive, spoke at length about his personal life story and reason for serving as an ambassador for educational redesign on my Discovering Your Mission podcast earlier this year. He said that, “We have to change the [educational] systems that students experience, because it is pretty obvious, our systems are designed to work against students as a whole.”

As a Policy Leadership Trust member of JFF, the Community College of Aurora (where I serve as president) has served as a national leader in the work to apply higher education to drive social and economic mobility in today’s society by aligning student learning outcomes directly with workforce needs. Such goals are achieved when the institution understands its responsibility in the fight to eliminate poverty and support equitable educational attainment by providing our students with key skills that are relevant and transferable throughout industries.

This commitment to student success is what students look for most, according to the Strada Education Foundation. In its most recent nationally representative study of more than 3,200 people who completed bachelor’s degrees since 2002, Strada found that graduates who reported they developed key skills during college earned $8,700 more in their first year after graduation than their peers who reported lower levels of skill development through college. As Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen, and its students have amassed more than $1.7 trillion in student debt, institutions must focus on providing the tools critical to thrive in a skills-based economy.

This year, the Community College of Aurora hosted U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, the Departments of Transportation, Energy, Commerce, and Labor, along with several national, state, and local officials for the Biden-Harris Administration’s nationwide Unlocking Pathways Summit series, which focused on helping young Americans access good-paying jobs. One component, Unlocking Career Success, is an interagency initiative that reimagines how our nation’s high schools prepare all students to thrive in their future careers. Guided by the four keys of dual enrollment, work-based learning, workforce credentials, and career advising and navigation, this initiative, in collaboration with JFF, aims to evangelize the need to revolutionize the American education and higher education systems.

The future of America depends on our ability as a community of educators, workforce partners, governmental agencies, and legislators to work together to develop seamless academic and career pathways for more students. Together, we can unlock upward social and economic mobility for our youth and for working adults. Failure is not an option; America is depending on us.

© Berit Kessler / Shutterstock

I’ve spent more than a decade working as a teacher and principal. In 2015, I left the classroom for a year to try something different and it completely reshaped my work.

I took on a role as a teacher recruiter at Achievement First, where my focus was working with principals to hire teachers. At the time, I had just finished my Teach For America commitment at my placement school, Miami Northwestern Senior High School, where I had the benefit of working in a historically Black community at a public high school with a majority Black staff and leadership team with members who looked like me.

Our Blackness was elevated and celebrated every day, so when I began recruiting, I was unaware of the racial disparity between America's teaching cadre and our nation’s student population.

I assumed that all Black students experienced Black teachers in school. I was wrong.

When I became a teacher recruiter, part of my job was to visit each school, observe classrooms and talk to students to get a better understanding of the atmosphere and personality of each school community. There was one trend that was consistent across the majority of schools I worked with: Most of the students identified as Black, while the majority of the teachers were white.

As a recruiter, I saw this picture clear as day and I wasn’t the only one. In fact, one of the principals I was working with looked me straight in the eye during one of our check-ins and said, “Damen, I need Black teachers.”

I didn’t have an immediate solution for her, but I did have a community I could tap into to find strong Black teacher candidates. I had graduated from a historically Black college (Morehouse College), I am a member of a historically Black fraternity, and many of my family members had ties to the education profession.

I turned to my network for referrals and it started to work. Some of the principals I was working with began hiring more Black teachers. One of them — the principal at Achievement First Brooklyn high school — hired six Black teachers that year, including me.

When I went back to the classroom after my year of recruiting, I noticed the problem again. Our students were majority Black but (at that time) our staff was mostly white. Though my decision to return to the classroom was helping to change the narrative in my own school building, the gap persisted and I wasn’t in a position to change it systemically.

Now, eight years later, I am the principal of that same school and I’m proud to say that every student has multiple Black teachers each year, an anomaly given that in the United States, only 7 percent of public school teachers identify as Black according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

This change didn't happen overnight — it took years to ensure that our staff reflects the diversity of our student body. To get there, I had to shift my mindset towards equity and applying what I learned from my role as a recruiter to refining our hiring process. But before all of that, I had to turn to history for a deeper understanding of how we got here.

Turning to History

When I started this work, it felt critical to understand why there are so few Black teachers in American public schools. The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision was revealing. Though the case nullified the Plessy vs. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal,” and created the landscape for racial integration in America's public schools, it decimated the Black teacher and administrator workforce. Widespread resistance to integration led to the firing, dismissal or demotion of 100,000 Black principals and teachers between 1952 and the late 1970s, according to Brookings Institution. Since the 1970's, the number of Black teachers has been on the decline.

There has been plenty of research to prove the positive effects a qualified and effective Black teacher has on Black students' academic and social outcomes. Black teachers can serve as role models whose presence can leave a positive effect long after a student graduates. When we do not prioritize hiring, developing and retaining Black teachers, we rob Black students of the benefits of having same-race teachers.

While learning about the history of the problem, I reflected on my own journey as a Black student, teacher and administrator. I grew up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood where most of my neighbors were white, which had a big impact on my experience with race in school. I never lived in a majority-Black neighborhood or attended a majority-Black school. But I did have Black teachers and administrators in school and in my community who made me feel seen and valued in spaces where I was the minority. In fact, my first elementary school principal was a dynamic Black woman whose kindness and warmth I still feel and keep with me as a principal today.

I carry these memories as reminders of the tremendous impact Black educators had on my confidence, identity development and academic success. Their representation was validating, motivating and propelled me not only to pursue excellence in my own education but to build a career in the field.

Turning a Problem Into an Opportunity

Becoming a principal was a career-defining opportunity in a number of ways, but mostly because it positioned me to make even more change at my school by turning a challenge into an opportunity. At the top of my priority list was hiring a diverse and effective staff that represented our student body.

As principal, I interview and make the final hiring decision on all staff, so the buck starts and ends with me. I have the power to create the team I believe students need, but to do that, I’ve had to rethink our hiring practices, including our recruitment strategy and interview process. I’ve prioritized ensuring that every kid under my care has the teachers they deserve, and have revised our practices to make it happen.

I made a few significant shifts to our hiring process. First, I navigate the national teacher shortage by leaning on a lesson I learned from recruiting and turning to my staff for referrals. Excellent people know excellent people, so whenever there is an opening or a departure, I look to my community for support which has led to tremendous success. My operations team, instructional staff and leadership team have all been made stronger by turning to those who work in my organization for candidate recommendations.

Second, I always include members of my leadership team in interviews to widen my perspective and mitigate any unconscious bias that may be at play. I intentionally pick a hiring committee that reflects the existing role, skill and life diversity present in my school, and after each interview, we use a competency rubric, not just our gut, to assess each candidate objectively.

Finally, I explicitly ask interview questions about race and its impact on our work as educators of Black children in the public education system. I’ll pose a question like this: “Leading for racial equity is something we value here at my school. Given your identity and personal values, what do you believe your role is in leading for racial equity?” Or, “What do you think your role is in dismantling systemic racism given your role as a teacher?” These kinds of questions allow my team and I to assess a candidate’s value’s alignment and commitment to our mission. These questions also make clear where my school stands, showing the candidate we care about diversity and are not afraid to talk about it.

When I took a year off from teaching to become a recruiter, I never thought it would shape my career the way it has. It taught me to question the status quo, to lean on history for a clearer picture on how some of the complex problems in education came to be, and most importantly, it reminded me that the presence of Black educators and school leaders is more than just “nice to have” — it is critical to the success of all learners, particularly Black students.

© phloxii / Shutterstock

Key points:

• Educators acknowledge that digital equity is of critical importance today
• What’s more, home internet is essential to helping students achieve learning outcomes
• See related article: Five action steps to shrink the digital divide
• For more news on equity and the digital divide, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership page

When it comes to digital equity, U.S. schools are well-positioned to help families get online with low-cost, high-speed internet options through the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), according to a new study from Discovery Education and Comcast.

However, the study also found that educators lack centralized resources and direct support necessary to successfully overcome barriers to the digital divide. Released to help support this year’s Digital Inclusion Week theme of “Building Connected Communities,” key findings include: 

• Nearly all educators surveyed feel strongly that digital equity is more important today than ever before. 
• 82 percent of families and 80 percent of educators surveyed feel strongly that high-speed Internet at home is extremely important to fulfilling learning outcomes. 
• While two-thirds of families and educators acknowledge their school’s interest in closing the digital divide, only one-third are aware of actionable measures being taken by the school district.  
• Only 39 percent of parents were aware of the ACP, and of those that were aware, just 13 percent of parents have signed up. What’s more, only 22 percent of educators surveyed strongly agree that administrators in their school districts are equipped with the necessary information to communicate options for high-speed internet access at home. 
• Data shows multiple disconnects between what parents pointed to as actual barriers to broadband adoption versus what teachers perceived as parents’ barriers to adoption. Addressing these will be critical to ensuring that school districts and digital navigator programs are effective in closing the digital divide for students. 
• There was a 52-percentage-point difference between the share of teachers who thought that cost of service was the primary barrier to adoption for families versus the actual share of parents who pointed to cost as a barrier. 
• Significantly larger shares of teachers thought that families did not live in buildings that were wired for broadband, did not know how to set up the Internet, and did not have devices than the share of parents who raised these barriers. 
• Findings from the study also support a recommendation for school systems to partner with proven and trusted programs such as those that include support from Digital Navigators — to help streamline communication, advocacy, and adoption strategies that lead to equitable opportunities for all students. Ensuring all ACP-eligible families are signed up is equally important in supporting district connectivity goals. 

To help further address these issues, Comcast is helping school administrators more quickly and easily access additional resources to get more households enrolled in the ACP during the back-to-school season through the Online For All Back to School Challenge, led by the U.S. Department of Education and Civic Nation. 

A new online tool from Comcast is designed to help administrators quickly and easily assess ACP eligibility in their school districts. They can also learn about which schools have the lowest broadband adoption rates in their area. This valuable data will enable school leaders to better tailor communications around the ACP and direct families to resources that can assist in supporting Internet adoption. 

“Ensuring every student in America has access to reliable, high-speed Internet in the classroom and at home is a top priority for Comcast’s Project UP. The combination of historic investments in universal broadband, public-private collaboration, and private industry support will together ensure that neither availability nor affordability stand in the way of achieving connectivity for everyone,” said Broderick Johnson, EVP of Public Policy and EVP of Digital Equity, Comcast Corporation. 

“At Discovery Education, we are on a mission to prepare learners for tomorrow by creating innovative classrooms connected to today’s world. Today, no matter where learning takes place, access to and adoption of high-speed Internet is an essential ingredient for student success. As Comcast’s education partner in this work, we’re proud to support efforts to ensure students and families have the tools necessary to meet the demands of the modern learning environment,” said Amy Nakamoto, EVP of Social Impact, Discovery Education. 

“Today, 17 million unconnected households are eligible for low-cost, high-speed Internet under the Affordable Connectivity Program. Civic Nation is partnering with the U.S. Department of Education, school districts, and organizations across the country through Online For All to close this gap and ensure every student and family has equitable access to learning, both at home and in the classroom,” said Kyle Lierman, CEO of Civic Nation. 

Additional key findings from the study include: 

• While educators believe their school district leaders are aware of the negative impacts the digital divide has on learning outcomes, there are numerous other factors being prioritized over home Internet adoption. 
• 86 percent of educators surveyed elevated student well-being as the most important issue for schools to address, followed by school safety, and equity and inclusion more broadly. This places more emphasis on policymakers, school officials, institutions, and the private sector to show how digital equity and home broadband adoption facilitate broader equity issues and level the playing field for families seeking opportunities for their children. 
• Further, coupling Internet access and adoption with an ability to address other school concerns, such as providing supports for student well-being and growth, has the ability to keep digital equity as a top priority for school leaders and help them serve broader needs for their students. 

There is widespread agreement that the pandemic forcefully evolved and rapidly closed gaps in the digital divide as schools moved swiftly to remote learning. This cultural shift was met with success stories of connectivity and technological advancements, but also shined a light on students and families who did not experience equitable access to learning because of lack of connectivity or devices, or other barriers that made remote learning cumbersome. 

This study and partnerships were made possible by Project UP, Comcast’s comprehensive initiative to advance digital equity and help build a future of unlimited possibilities. Part of Comcast’s $1 billion commitment is prioritizing Internet connectivity and its impact on education. In addition, through providing low-cost broadband through Internet Essentials to families and the Internet Essentials Partner Program (IEPP) for schools, Comcast continues to ensure there are no barriers to home connectivity that could impede learning. 

This press release originally appeared online.

After Carl Wieman won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2001 for, as he puts it, “shining lasers on atoms” in a new way that gave experimental proof to a theory by Albert Einstein, Wieman decided to shift his research focus. He devoted the bulk of his time and energy to studying how to improve teaching.

“I just could make a bigger difference in education,” he says.

Education research wasn’t new to Wieman, who these days is an emeritus professor of physics and of education at Stanford University. In fact he had been pursuing research to improve physics teaching for years, as a parallel area of work that people hadn’t paid much attention to. But with the fame brought by the Nobel, he hoped to raise the profile of educational research.

He argues that the traditional lecture method for teaching physics and other STEM fields has been proven ineffective, and that shifts to more active methods can greatly improve learning outcomes to make sure the next generation of researchers can make the next Nobel-worthy breakthroughs.

Wieman has led efforts to improve science teaching. He wrote the book “Improving How Universities Teach Science.” And he won the world’s top teaching award in 2020, the $4 million Yidan Prize.

So what has he learned in more than 20 years from applying his persistence (and much of the money he won from the Nobel) to studying teaching?

EdSurge connected with Wieman to find out, and to hear about his more recent efforts to improve how teaching evaluations are done at colleges to make them more useful — and more equitable.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: What was it that got you started in doing research on effective teaching?

Carl Wieman: It was really started by sort of a puzzle that I saw, which was that I had these graduate students come in to work in my research lab doing physics, and they'd had many years of great success in physics courses, but they really didn't seem to know how to do physics when they came in to work for me.

There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with them, because after they worked for me for a couple years, they turned into expert physicists. And so after I saw this happening over and over again, and I saw actually sort of a correlation, that the really top students in coursework never turned out to be the better physicists, I decided there was some fundamental question here about learning and thinking.

And so I just tackled this as a science question, and I started reading the research on how people learn — how people learn physics. … And it showed me there were much better ways to teach than what was being used in most of our courses.

Did you feel there has been something lacking in the teaching you had in physics when you were a student?

Well, I always hesitate to use myself as data. But in fact there were some pretty unique aspects in my education that is in the back of my mind when I'm looking at what's happening with other students. And in my case, I in fact got involved in doing physics research at a very early stage in my first year in college, and got heavily involved in it and decided this was a whole lot more interesting and worthwhile than taking courses.

And so I really spent my whole college career devoted to research and doing the minimal coursework I could get away with, essentially. And I managed to get lots of loopholes, to get away with a lot. And so for me, my education was overwhelmingly just actually doing research, interacting with other research students and graduate students in the lab. And the coursework, I never felt I learned terribly much from any of my classes, but it was very much secondary.

You talk about needing to change the paradigm of teaching physics and other STEM fields. Broadly, what do you think should change?

So the norm is really this paradigm of, you've got a brain, and it's a sort of fixed thing, and you fill it up with knowledge. And how well it can absorb that knowledge is just determined by the characteristics of that brain. And so colleges spend lots of time focusing on, ‘OK, how do we select the brains that'll absorb the most with admissions and tests and such?’ And then, ‘What material are we going to try and pour into them? What things do we cover?’ That's the old and still largely pervasive paradigm.

But I'd say what research shows us is a very different picture, which is that the brain is very, what we call plastic, it changes. So really you need to think about that these student brains come into the classroom ready to be transformed by their educational experience. And the better their educational experience, the more their brains are changed. And what's really happening is you're rewiring how the neurons are hooked up, and that's developing new capabilities in those brains. And so it's very much not an idea of a fixed brain with its capacity, it's how much new capability you can develop in a brain through proper education.

And the best form of that education that essentially does the best transformation of the brain is really having the brain practice the thinking you want it to learn. And so rather than sitting, listening to somebody, drone away, giving information where the brain is doing very little — essentially just taking in sounds — it needs to be actively thinking about ideas, solving problems, figuring things out with feedback and guidance as it's practicing. That it's strengthening, essentially, through the right kind of mental exercise. And so that's really the different paradigm, is how do you exercise the brain in the right way to best develop new capabilities in it.

You’ve famously compared lecturing to bloodletting. It sounds like you stand by that pretty harsh critique.

Yes. This was my soundbite, but it was effective, that lectures are the pedagogical equivalent to bloodletting. And this isn't just flippant. I mean if you look at it, for 2000 years people felt bloodletting was the treatment of choice and you could justify it because well, you let blood from people and look, they got better. And so obviously it was working.

And so much of the same thing is happening with lectures. You give lectures to a bunch of students, and some of those students actually turn out to be pretty good. And so obviously that means the lecture was effective and the students who weren't successful, their brains weren't very good. And so that's how you could continue to justify lectures as effective in very similar ways to how you justified that bloodletting was good. Yeah, it didn't work for all the people, but that was just the fault of those people who had poor systems.

I hear you even tested the value of your own lectures on students to show this?

One little study I did was, I sort of picked some important but non-obvious fact and lectured about it and then tested students on it half an hour later. And 10 percent of them actually remembered it. So 90 percent didn't get this.

And then actually later on I repeated this, but I presented this material in what we call an active learning environment, where rather than just telling students that they had to answer a question, they had to figure out a question about how something behaved and then get feedback on that. And then I tested them on that and overwhelmingly they all remembered it. So that was just a very simple but clear demonstration of what I thought was pretty good lecturing was not very effective.

You’ve led many efforts to reform college teaching and written a book on it. Are you frustrated that that hasn’t led to more change than it has?

I'm always frustrated because I'm an impatient sort of person. But at the same time, I have to admit that you're dealing with something that's very entrenched culturally and historically, and that's just hard to make big changes in things like that.

And there really has been quite a bit of change. I mean, you see aspects like the [Association of American Universities] launched a big program and its STEM education initiative six or seven years ago that is devoted to changing the teaching of introductory science courses. It represents the 60 or so leading research universities in North America, and it's calling on its members to change how they teach. That sort of thing would've been unheard of not very long ago.

One thing you’ve focused on more recently is teaching evaluation at colleges. Why that topic?

We’re trying to solve what I see as a really fundamental issue in improving education. And that's the methods for evaluating teaching, particularly at the university level, where I think everybody realizes that we don't have good ways of doing that.

The things that almost every university uses is student evaluations. And those have tremendous flaws to them. They're very biased, and they don't capture effective teaching practices at all. And everybody knows that they're highly flawed and they're probably going to be illegal because there's such good evidence that they are very biased against, for example, if you're a underrepresented minority or a female instructor in a white-dominated field, you just get lower evaluations even if you do this exactly the same as a white male does. So anyway, so it's a real problem.

People always say you can't tell [faculty] what to do. I'm convinced they really are doing what they get rewarded for. And right now the teaching evaluations are so meaningless. They really are counted appropriately, counted very little in the incentive and reward promotion system. So what you need is something that's a good meaningful evaluation that then could be taken seriously in how you hire and promote people, and then it'll make a big difference.

AAU has run a competition that then provided grants to I think five or six departments to come up with demonstration projects of better evaluation systems. So we'll see how that works out.

Listen to the full discussion, including examples of active learning methods shown to work and how Wieman thinks the pandemic has impacted teaching on the EdSurge Podcast.

© Stanford University

If colleges and universities want to close the graduation gap for their Latino students, their target goal is clear: help another 6.2 million Latinos earn a degree by 2030.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

That’s according to the think tank Excelencia in Education, which focuses on research and policy on Latino achievement in higher education.

Its analysis on the 2021 college graduation rates of Latinos highlights some dismal statistics. Compared to their white, non-Hispanic counterparts, Latinos generally graduate from college at lower rates and drop out at higher rates. That’s even as the number of Hispanic students pursuing higher education has increased over the past 15 years.

Latino and white students enroll in higher education at roughly the same rates — 21 percent for Latinos and 23 percent for white students, according to the analysis.

The gaps become evident when looking at who graduates.

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When Mayra Valtierrez talks about the students in New Mexico public schools who are learning English, one thing becomes clear: It’s an incredibly diverse population.

Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.

The New Mexico Public Education Department is tasked with serving not only students who have grown up speaking Spanish but also Native American children who are learning English and newcomers from other countries.

“We are a friendly state when it comes to taking any sort of refugees, or anyone who enters our state, so we have Spanish-dominant [English learner] students who come at any age, from being little to being youth,” says Valtierrez, the department’s director of language and culture. “We've been supporting some of our refugees from Afghanistan, for example, and from other places. Then we have the children of immigrants that were born here, and thus inherited a language from their family.”

Schools with English-learning students are tasked not just with ensuring that these children acquire the language but also, as with all other students, succeed academically and eventually graduate from high school.

But just how likely English learners are to graduate can vary widely depending on which state they live in.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that students who are English learners — sometimes called emergent bilinguals — generally lag behind their peers when it comes to high school graduation rates.

The data covers 10 years, starting with 2010-11 through the 2019-20 school year. The paper notes that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused difficulties for some states in collecting and reporting graduation data for the 2019-20 school year. Texas and Illinois did not provide information that year.

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ST. PAUL, Minn. — Robert Groven, director of the Minnesota Urban Debate League, has been coaching high school debate competitions for more than 30 years, and he’s noticed a marked shift in student behavior in the past decade or so.

During debate exercises, there’s been a “consolidation” around points of view that are more left-leaning, he says, and a reluctance to make the case for extreme right-leaning positions.

“I have a friend of mine from the University of Chicago who likes to say, ‘We do a great job of preparing conservative students to leave high school and college and go defend their views in the world, but we don't do such a great job of teaching left-of-center students how to defend those points of view, because we don't challenge them as often,’” says Groven. “To me, that's a problem from a pedagogical perspective.”

Groven made the point during a recent panel discussion about how best to encourage viewpoint diversity in classrooms, hosted by the Free Speech Project, a nonpartisan initiative run by Georgetown University. EdSurge was asked to moderate the session, which took place on the campus of Hamline University here.

The discussion tackled plenty of thorny issues facing K-12 and college instructors these days, including how to respond to pressures to ban books in schools, how to make classrooms a welcoming place for debate as schools and colleges grow more diverse, and how to respond to misinformation that students bring to classroom conversations.

The panelists were:

• Groven, who is also an assistant dean of faculty development and associate professor of communication studies at Augsburg University
• Kathryn Kay Coquemont, vice president for student affairs and dean of students at Macalester College
• Deborah Appleman, a professor of educational studies at Carleton College, and author of the book, “Literature and the New Culture Wars,” which asks the question: “Can educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts?”

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

What is different now when it comes to viewpoint diversity than a few years ago?

Deborah Appleman: I [used to be] a high school English teacher, but at Carleton I'm in the educational studies department. So my big concern for what's happening to the teaching of literature has to do with the people that I call my ‘thinking partners’ all over the country — secondary teachers, middle school teachers, even elementary school teachers, who are really under threat. That includes librarians as well.

If I think about what's changed at Carleton in the 37 years that I've been there, there are both external forces and internal forces. The external forces have to do with the conversation that the culture is having about cancellation, about what authors are OK, about what books are OK and what content is OK. And this seeps into the college culture within the context of a classroom.

And I need to preface it by saying I love my students, I'm here for my students. They're the most important thing that I think about. But so much has changed. One of the things that has changed is something that some of us call ‘the discourse of harm.’ So students come into the classroom extremely vulnerable and at the same time armed with a readiness to defend themselves against any perceived harm. And I cannot tell you how many conversations I've had with colleagues who are rethinking what they're teaching. People are anticipating moments of difficulty [and avoiding assigning books that might cause controversy.]

So on one hand we teachers have our own version of the Hippocratic oath: ‘First do no harm.’ None of us ever wants to cause harm for our students. On the other hand, we believe that learning is and should be uncomfortable.

So on the first day of my educational psychology class, I say … my job isn't to make sure that you're never uncomfortable. Actually my job is to make sure that you get uncomfortable intellectually with that kind of cognitive dissonance that will help you grow. That's become harder to do.

Kathryn Kay Coquemont: I want to compare something that happened in my formal education with what I think is happening with our current traditional-age college students' education. So it wasn't until I was a Ph.D. student in my 30s that I learned about the origins of racism toward Asians in our country. That’s where I learned about how Asian immigrants weren't allowed a pathway to citizenship. About how after the Civil War when Southern plantation owners wanted to underpay their Black former-enslaved people, so instead they brought in Asian immigrants from the West Coast who had been pushed out of those towns because of the anti-Asian sentiment, and how it bred discord amongst those two communities of color. I didn't know about the history of Hawaii and what we had done to have it become part of the United States.

When I learned this in my 30s, my brain was hopefully fully developed by that time. I had a lot of life experience on how to deal with these things that felt so personal and hard to grapple with and I was so angry about. And in high school I wasn't taught those things.

The cool thing right now is our students are coming with a totally different K-12 education. They might have been in AP African American history. They might have already learned about what oppression is on a short-term basis through TikTok. The ways that they're learning about these things and are starting to grapple with what that means for society and what that means for who they [are] as an individual is totally different than how I came into a classroom as a college student. And we should be rethinking what curricula is calling to them and challenging them.

Why do you think these changes have happened?

Appleman: One of the things … is what I call a pandemic hangover. For the students who did their first couple of years of college in their childhood bedroom with their stuffed animals behind them, there was a way of infantilizing that made them feel more vulnerable. They didn't come with a lot of the social interaction skills that you would expect people between the ages of 18 and 22 to already have.

Groven: I would say there's probably three things rolling there. One is simply that as a society, as conservative columnist George Will has said, that you can sort of write the history of America by looking at how more people are given a seat at the table of American democracy. And I think that's essentially what we see continuing to happen, that more people are getting a seat at the table, and as a result their views need to be included, and that's happening at all levels of society, including in education, higher education, and in debate.

I think a second is the diversification of the country. So just from a demographic perspective, and in particular the diversification of higher education, because a huge number of the issues we see now are really driven by who is in the classroom. If you roll the clock back 100, 150 years, higher ed was overwhelmingly white and male. And as a result, a lot of these issues simply didn't [seem] relevant, because it wasn't part of their experience. But now we have at Augsburg, we have, I think we're like 67 percent of students of color now. That means that if we are not talking about those issues, we are not talking about those students' lives.

And then the third piece is that there has been a development of a large body of research and scholarship and theory which talks about why these things should matter, not just to education, to pedagogy, but also to all the different realms in which we make decisions collectively as a society.

How can educators respond to these changes?

Appleman: So a couple of decades ago, a professor of literature, Gerald Graff, talked about ‘teaching the controversy’ — saying what's at stake, presenting both sides. So when you're teaching a book because the author has been censored. So recently I've been working with some students and teachers at Henry High School in Minneapolis, and they were going to offer a book written by Sherman Alexie, who's been ‘canceled’ because of his sexual misconduct allegations and admissions thereof. He's a wonderful writer, and in many ways irreplaceable for some of the work that he can do with kids.

So what the teacher did was to say, ‘OK, we have these books. We have another class set of this book or this book or this book, and here's what I want to tell you. Some people think that this book shouldn't be taught and here's a couple articles about why. And then here's a couple articles about what this book is and some reviews and let's read them, let's talk about them, and then let's have a discussion and then vote.’

Coquemont: The other thing I think about a lot is, ‘Who is built up and who has had a legacy of being built up in who they are, and who hasn't?’ … ‘Who has always had a mirror reflected back at them, and who has only ever had windows?’ And I think that's really sometimes the crux of it, is you're now giving options that are still inequitable, not because we are trying to reinforce inequity, but because the society they've lived in has been inequitable to them. And so one of the things I think about a controversial book is, can you deal with that controversy? Are you a healthier person to have that conversation when you've already had things that reflect who you are?

And I really worry about the state of K-12 education, by state, because it's going to be even harder, especially for those working in private colleges that have students from all different states where people have had very, very different experiences. That's always been true, but I feel like it's just furthered.

But maybe don't start with the controversy because maybe some of our students now have only had to deal with the controversy and been taught the controversy. Maybe start first with the things that uplift and reflect.

One of the things with controversy that I've noticed is the way sometimes we've also said that the emotion that's brought into spaces is somehow bad. And I do a lot of my work is de-escalation of emotion. There's a lot of that that's needed. But I also think about how do we even set up the conversation to say, ‘It's OK to bring emotion into this, but let's talk a little bit more about what place that has, because the emotion is really connected to the lived experiences that we want to honor.’

Listen to the full discussion on the EdSurge Podcast.

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A joyful class is a rigorous class.
A rigorous class is a joyful class.

I wrote this mantra on a sticky note and placed it on my desk as a daily reminder that my students’ right to access joy is just as important as academic rigor. During my third year of teaching, I struggled to envision what rigorous learning looks, sounds and feels like without joy. I had to ask myself: What is rigor? Why do we sacrifice joy for rigor in our classrooms? More urgently, why did I have so much anxiety about my Black students experiencing this joy in the classroom? We live in a racialized society that shapes our thoughts, practices and behaviors. None of us are exempt from the power of this influence and internalization. This is why our work of unlearning and relearning is important.

My experience in the classroom has taught me that educators who work with diverse student populations must interrogate our thought processes and internalized biases to transform learning environments from spaces of compliance to spaces of joy. In my classes, Radical Black Joy not only sustained us in our learning, but it became necessary to create liberatory spaces for students and transform relationships within the school community.

Cultivating a Culture

One day during my English class, Khalil, one of my sixth grade students, created a live soundtrack to accompany my lesson on mentor sentences. His musical equipment? Two pencils and a school desk he used for drumsticks and a drum:

Tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh

As educators, we must ask ourselves what we can do within our capacity to co-create a cultural landscape that decenters the white gaze and allows the full breadth of the human experience.

Tap-tap-tap

Tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh-tuh-tuh-duh

Tap-tap-tap

Don’t get me wrong, I love music. I grew up in a house where music blared from the speakers in our living room; our ancestors danced inside picture frames as beats reverberated throughout the walls of our many homes. Despite my love for music, I thought, there is a time and a place, right? Several questions ran through my head as I thought about how to respond: Did he have to do this while an administrator was observing me? How do I regain control? Give a warning? Take the pencils away? Redirect him? Of course, all eyes in the classroom were on me, anticipating how I would respond. I took a deep breath, preparing for the power struggle I expected to happen:

“Khalil, if you gon’ drop a beat, at least do a better one so I can drop a verse.”

“Oooooooh,” my twenty-eight students roared in unison.

“Aight, I got you,” Khalil grinned, accepting the challenge. Even Devon, as quiet and shy as he was, lifted his head to take in the action.

“After we get through this lesson on mentor sentence and all of you pair-share for edits,” I emphasized, setting the conditions.

“Bet!” the classroom agreed.

The students eagerly began working together to accomplish their tasks while I visited students who needed more support. I was quite sure that the administrator sitting in the back of the room felt that I had given in to chaos. A rigorous class is a busy class, but busy can be joyful, too.

My student taught me the power of Radical Black Joy and how it can be used to fuel belonging and learning performance in a community. Similarly, Sequoia Thompson and Eric Rey of SoCal Grantmakers said that, “Radical Black Joy means coming together to uplift what has been historically shunned. To return to the collective happiness that white supremacy insidiously corrupted to separate us from each other and ourselves.”

As educators, we must ask ourselves what we can do within our capacity to co-create a cultural landscape that decenters the white gaze and allows the full breadth of the human experience. How do we accomplish this? We allow students to co-create a space that prioritizes their joy with as much intensity as it prioritizes academic rigor.

Creating a Song

In the summer of 2017, rapper Cardi B dropped the Diamond-certified single, “Bodak Yellow”, and my students couldn’t get enough of it. The song activated their inner joy as well as their confidence, so I used this opportunity to establish our English Language Arts anthem, "Bodak Goals":

Said I got major plans

So I make major moves (Look)

I got major plans

That’s why I come to school

I got dreams so I work real hard

To make them come true

You got dreams

What you waitin’ on

We got work to do (ayyye)

We performed this song daily – sometimes in the lunchroom, at the start of class, standing on chairs, and even at school assemblies. We all set reading goals, including myself, and we worked rigorously to fully realize our goals. We measured our reading achievement using the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which uses Common Core standards to measure what students know and how they grow in math and reading. After taking the assessment, our class report revealed that we had achieved almost two years of reading growth. The combination of our classroom culture and reading growth achievement earned our class the 2018 Southwest Ohio Teach For America Classroom of the Year Award. More importantly, radical Black joy brought an air of magic to our classroom that was uniquely ours to hold and nurture.

Building a Movement

We live in a society that stories the Black experience with struggle, strife and death. Radical Black Joy gives students an opportunity to bear witness to the full expanse of Black humanity and community. In the summer of 2020, not only did my students bear witness to a catastrophic pandemic that uprooted their sense of normalcy, but they also bore witness to the power of the Black Lives Matter Movement right after the murder of George Floyd.

While many societal conditions threaten the welfare and culture of our classrooms, we must create opportunities to experience authentic joy.

With so much uncertainty and sorrow in the world, how could I center Black Radical Joy in my classroom,- particularly with the looming concern of learning loss that consumed the education community? The short answer: we dance. As administrators, educators, parents, and students, we found joy in our bodies. For Black History Month, students were not permitted in the school building due to public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consequently, the Black Culture Classic was born at DECA Middle in which staff members performed songs by Black artists that have brought joy to the world.

Despite not being able to meet in person, we shared this joy with our school community via social media and invited them to use dance to capture their own joy in the midst of chaotic and uncertain times. It is no surprise that Franky Beverly and Maze’s “Before I Let Go” accompanied our electric slide dance in the school parking lot as we launched our first district-wide Juneteenth celebration that same year. Students danced next to parents who danced next to teachers who danced next to senators. This was Black. This was radical. This was joy.

A classroom that centers joy is a classroom that centers leadership, culture and academics. Radical Black Joy sustains us in a society set up to restrict our humanity and limit our lived experiences. Though I was the teacher, my students taught me to yield to joy on our terms – without permission and apology. We do not always have to perform labor before we access joy. Joy is not something to earn but something that is ours to hold onto, regardless of our external conditions. While many societal conditions threaten the welfare and culture of our classrooms, we must create opportunities to experience authentic joy. This is where students come alive and engagement blooms. I challenge every stakeholder to reimagine how learning looks and feels. Our Black students’ learning experience depends on it.

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Education wonks have long raised the alarm about how school discipline is applied unequally among students of different racial and ethnic groups, with Black students facing a disproportionate number of office discipline referrals (ODRs). The effects of such practices can reverberate throughout a student’s life, according to the American Psychological Association, leading to worse mental health and lower grades.

“We know Black students are punished more frequently and more harshly, but what we didn’t really know was how much all of this discipline was shared across educators versus perpetuated by just a few educators,” says Emily K. Penner, an associate professor of education in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine.

Penner is part of a group of researchers who shed new light on this problem after they were able to pinpoint how a small number of teachers in one California district effectively doubled the discipline gap between white and Black students. The study on “frequent teacher referrers” was published in the journal Education Researcher this summer.

Jing Liu, assistant professor in education policy at the University of Maryland College Park, says that he and his fellow researchers were surprised by their findings. That’s in no small part because of what he says is a first in this field of research: access to data with a uniquely high level of detail that allowed the team to track how many office referrals were issued by individual teachers.

“It’s concerning that they’re just a small population of teachers [who are] much more likely to make a referral,” Liu says. “It points to our need to understand: Why are there such a small population of teachers making referrals, and how can we help them to stop this troubling pattern?”

The study also found that the ODR gap is being driven in particular by office referrals issued for interpersonal and defiance reasons, “which are arguably more likely to be subject to bias” compared to other less subjective circumstances, like fights.

Penner’s past policy work has examined the factors within education that harm students of certain races.

“We've just started to have this conversation about the role of educators, in particular, in school discipline,” she says. “A lot of the research about school discipline has really been on the student side, mostly thinking about outcomes for students. But really, it's not just a one-sided thing. There’s a whole institution with individuals in it that also contributes to what happens for school discipline for students.”

For Penner, the study’s findings open questions about the circumstances surrounding teachers who are high referrers. Is there a policy making them feel like they have to issue referrals, she offers, or are there particular school settings that lead to it? For instance, could their classrooms be in areas where more fights tend to break out?

The data covers four school years from fall 2016 through spring 2020 at a “large, diverse, urban-intensive school district in California,” as described in the paper. Liu says district leaders approached researchers with the data because of their desire to investigate inequity within student discipline at the school, and the conversation around referrals began with the district department that deals with student well-being.

“From reading the literature, we quickly find that lots of research on student discipline focuses on suspension, which is the end result of the discipline processes,” Liu says. “I really think that understanding the referrals — who are making them, who are receiving those referrals — can really help us to go a step further to understand the origins, the sources, of racial disparities in school discipline.”

Who Is in the Top 5 Percent?

Taking a step back to look at all the teachers who worked at the school district during the four years captured by the data, about one-third of them sent at least one student to the office with an ODR during any given school year. About half of those teachers issued five or fewer referrals during the time frame.

Researchers analyzed the gaps in the number of office referrals issued to white students and their peers in different racial and ethnic groups. (The data did not include suspension rates, which researchers describe as a disciplinary outcome of ODRs.) They were able to see the impact of teacher “top referrers” by starting the analysis with only teachers who issued one or two office referrals, then adding teachers who issued three to five referrals to the sample, watching how the number of referrals issued to each ethnic group changed as teachers who issued higher numbers of referrals became part of the sample.

When the top 5 percent of referrers — teachers who issued 46 or more ODRs in a school year — were added to the sample, the gaps in disciplinary action between student racial groups spiked.

The top 5 percent of referring teachers were responsible for creating the widest discipline gap between Black and white students. Before they were added to the sample, the data showed that Black students were issued 1.6 ODRs for every one ODR issued to white students. After the top 5 percent of referring teachers were added, that ratio jumped to 3.4 office referrals for Black students for every one issued to white students.

Top referrers gave Black and Hispanic students an outsized share of ODRs relative to the proportion of Black and Hispanic students in their classes, according to the study.

Black students made up only 7 percent of students in the district and 12 percent of students in top-referring teachers’ classrooms. However, the analysis found Black students made up 22 percent of all students who received ODRs and 27 percent of students sent to the office by top-referring teachers.

While still disproportionate, the racial gaps were less severe between white students and students from other groups, such as Hispanic and Asian students.

Researchers also found that teachers who were white, early in their careers, and teaching at middle schools to be “the ones who engage more in extensive referring,” the study says.

“I think in middle school, there's just a lot of new routines and developmental changes that are happening for students, lots of different kinds of boundary-testing and escalated expectations in terms of self- management,” Penner says. “A disproportionate number of folks in the top 5 percent were novice teachers, so it does underscore the need for continued support and in-service preparation around classroom management, around routines for supporting disruptive students and engaging with them.”

Black and Hispanic teachers were less likely than their white colleagues to both issue an office referral and to be in the ranks of top referrers. Asian teachers were even less likely to issue a referral but were just as likely as white teachers to rank among top-referring teachers, “suggesting varied referring behavior among Asian teachers.”

Liu says when it comes to teaching experience, teachers notably rely less on office disciplinary referrals once they reach 11 years in the profession. The data shows that the number of times teachers sent students to the office began to fall once they hit three years of experience.

There’s still work to be done to understand why some teachers are reaching for office referrals so frequently.

“We think it's very possible that new teachers are coached to follow a procedure around what happens with student discipline,” Penner explains. “A more veteran teacher would kind of know how to massage the situation or react to students in a way that could de-escalate things, and a [novice] teacher might not have that in their repertoire yet.”

Next Steps

Since the publication of the study, Liu says more school district leaders have reached out to ask the researchers for a similar analysis of their office referral data, including a partnership that’s in the works with a school district in North Carolina.

As for the California district that’s the subject of the recent study, Liu says that the research team is working with the school district to identify teachers in the top 5 percent of referrers — not to punish them, but to learn what’s contributing to their high rate of ODRs and find ways to support them.

“We may need to provide more support to junior teachers, [assign them] a less challenging student body, or more target PD for those teachers,” Liu says, “but by identifying this group of teachers who are more likely to be referrers, we’re more likely to reduce the number of referrals and racial gaps.”

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When people think about thinking, they typically conceive of the brain as a kind of machine or muscle that is strictly confined to our skulls. As Rodin’s famous sculpture of the thinking man propping his chin on his hand, we imagine the mind as all in our heads.

But what if those typical metaphors for our brains are limiting our capacities to think and learn?

That’s the question posed by science journalist Annie Murphy Paul, who points to research emphasizing the many ways that thinking is influenced not just by what’s inside our skull, but by cues from our body movements, by our surroundings, and by other people we’re interacting with.

Paul, who says she reads academic journal articles for fun, first encountered this argument when she came across a 1998 paper by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, who argued that the human mind extends into the world around it. And that sparked her interest in digging into learning science research that she’s gathered into a recent book, “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.”

Those who design our tech, she argues, are particularly prone to a brain-bound vision of the mind, forgetting that users of smartphone apps and computers are situated in bodies and move about the world in physical space with others.

EdSurge recently sat down with Paul to dig into her arguments about rethinking how we think, and what educators can learn from the research.

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

EdSurge: What is it that you think is missed in popular notions of our mind?

Annie Murphy Paul: Our education system is very much dominated by what you might call a brain-bound model, which is the idea that thinking happens inside the brain. It's sort of sealed inside the skull. And moreover, that intelligence is the kind of lump of stuff that's either bigger or smaller, and we can weigh it through tests and assessments.

And that's challenged by the notion of the extended mind, which as I mentioned comes from philosophy. … It was an article by philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and they started off that article by saying, ‘Where does the mind end and the rest of the world begin?’

And that to me was a really provocative question, a potentially generative question, in part because it seems like it has an obvious answer or a conventional answer, which is that, ‘Well, the mind stops at the skull, right? The mind is sort of identical with the brain.’ And that's the kind of model that dominates our education system.

But what Chalmers and Clark were saying was that the mind extends beyond the head into the rest of our bodies, into our physical surroundings, into our relationships with other people, into the use of our devices, our technologies. And that to me was a really exciting idea because it meant that if we could improve the quality of those raw materials that we do our thinking with — and if we could improve our skills and abilities at using those outside-the-brain resources — that was a kind of new way to get smarter. It didn't mean that our only option was to exercise the brain or make the brain smarter or stronger. We actually could improve the quality and our use of all these outside-the-brain resources as a way to get smarter and more effective.

You talk about three main ways that the mind can be thought of as extended, and I’m hoping to go through them one by one. The first you talk about is “embodied cognition.” What is that and why is it important?

Embodied cognition is the idea that we don't just think with our brains, we think with the sensations and movements and gestures of our bodies. So I'll just start with that first one — sensations. That actually has a less jargony name, which goes by our gut feeling.

We all know what that means, that there's a kind of wisdom or a kind of informed sense that our bodies seem to have that might elude our conscious minds. And there's a term called interoception that describes that flow of internal sensations and cues that our educational system and our culture more generally tends to tell us to ignore. But what embodied cognition suggests is that we should actually be tuning in a lot more to those interoceptive sensations through meditative practices like the body scan, and that those interoceptive sensations actually have a lot to tell us about the situations that we find ourselves in.

How does that play out in classrooms?

Yeah, so the brain-bound approach to thinking and learning, which is dominant in our education system, suggests that all we need is our heads. And these days, especially when we're in Zoom meetings, we can actually feel just like we're heads, or a brain and a vat. But in fact, the human organism thinks with our whole bodies, which includes our internal sensations and our physical movements and our gestures. So the more we can bring the body into learning, the better. I find that we are good at doing that with young children with early education, we think it's okay for them to run around and to interact with materials and use manipulatives. But as students get older, we have this notion that they should put all that away and start doing things just in their head.

But what the science of embodied cognition shows is that the more we can sort of externalize our thoughts and our thinking processes, get them out of our head and express them through our bodies or learn through our bodies and our senses, the better our learning will be. So I think we need to bring some of that early education spirit of having the body be part of learning into middle school, high school, college, all of that, because we are embodied creatures. We can't be anything but embodied creatures, even as adults. And so embodied cognition suggests that this head-first or brain-bound approach to learning is really misguided.

What about the second category of research you tackle in the book, which is known as situated cognition?

Situated cognition is the idea that where we are, our physical environment, affects the way that we think. And that's one way in which our brains are really different from, say, a computer, which works exactly the same way. My laptop works the same way in my home office as it does if I were to take it out to a park and sit on a park bench. But human brains are not like that. They're exquisitely sensitive to context, and we think differently, say, in the outdoors than we do in an interior space. So given that it's a good idea for us to be aware of how our physical spaces are affecting the way that we think, and we can intentionally use them in the sense of going outside to restore our attention and replenish our attention, or we can design our interior spaces, our learning and working spaces to support intelligent thought in ways that the brain-bound model doesn't really allow.

The third area you explore in the book, it's distributed cognition. What's that look like?

That pushes against another really strong current in our culture, which is this idea of this individualistic streak — that ideas and thoughts belong to one brain, that they're sealed inside an individual head, when really we are such fundamentally social creatures that we learn to think and we learn to speak language in a social context. And thinking and learning is always irreducibly social and shared and collective.

So that's another way of thinking about intelligence is that it's not a lump of stuff sealed inside one person's brain. It's really a collective enterprise that we need to think about in social terms.

Some of these ideas that you've talked about sound a bit like common sense. Why has it taken so long to, or why many people may still not, realize these things that you're talking about?

Yeah, I agree. The extended mind, which is a relatively new idea in philosophy, is just reminding us of what was always true, which is that human beings have bodies. We're embedded in physical spaces, and we're a part of these dense social networks that describe us as full human beings. And, unfortunately, in a lot of settings, including educational settings, but also work settings, we're encouraged to think of ourselves as just brains, as just heads. And so the extended mind kind of invites us to remember what we have forgotten as a culture.

What are some takeaways for educators at older levels to do differently based on this research?

I’ll take one from each area of research.

One is bringing the body into learning — bringing physical movement and gesture as much as possible into the classroom.

The second one would be thinking really carefully about the spaces in which we were having kids learn, and trying to get them outside as much as possible. And then when they are inside, thinking about what kind of cues and signals are present in the physical environment that I think are particularly important are cues of identity. Kids should be able to look around and see cues that remind them of who they are in that particular environment, what role they're playing as scholar or artist or thinker. So I think it's useful for teachers and others to look around and see, ‘What are my kids seeing when they enter their classroom or their school?’

And then the third is this social piece. I think now that we're all back together in person and not doing remote schooling so much anymore, we can really take advantage of what psychologists called ‘groupiness.’ That's an actual scientific term. And that refers to a sense that a group of people isn't just an assemblage of individuals. They're really an entity unto themselves: a group. And that sense of groupiness tends to get people on the same page, people learn better, think better, and remember things better when they do it together with other people in that kind of cohesive, connected way.

You note that there are equity issues in education that stem from this research.

One of the exciting things to me about the extended mind is that it's another way of looking at issues of equity and equality. We have this idea that we can rank people according to how much intelligence they have in their brains, but if you shift to looking at things through an extended mind lens, then it's really about, well, what is the quality and the accessibility of the outside-the-brain resources that this person has?

Because our students don't have anything like equal access to, say, the freedom to move their bodies, or access to green spaces, or to safe spaces, to quiet spaces. They don't have equal access to helpful mentors or really skilled teachers or motivated peers. And if all of those things really matter for how effectively intelligent, how successful academically a person can be, then we need to shift away from thinking that intelligence is something sealed inside a person's head — it's more out here, in the world.

Hear the complete interview on the EdSurge Podcast.

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Calculus is a critical on-ramp to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). But getting to those careers means surviving the academic journey.

While there’s been progress of late, it’s been “uneven” and Black, Hispanic and women workers are still underrepresented in some STEM fields. Traditional methods of calculus instruction may be knocking students off the path to these vital occupations, which is why advocates warn that getting diverse students into these careers may require instructional models more responsive to students. Meanwhile, the country is struggling to fill vacancies in related fields like semiconductor manufacturing, despite sizable investments — a feat that may require stabilizing the pipeline.

Good news: There's mounting evidence that changing calculus instruction works for the groups usually pushed out of STEM. At least, that’s according to a randomized study recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

The study — which involved 811 undergraduate students at Florida International University, a large public university in Miami — is perhaps the biggest randomized study of active learning methods in calculus, says Laird Kramer, a physicist at the university and one of the study’s authors. Researchers tapped alternative models of calculus teaching that have shown evidence that they work, according to Kramer.

The study, which occurred over three semesters, randomly assigned students to either learning through lectures, the old-school way, or through “active” calculus instruction that emphasizes student engagement. Those active methods limited the amount of lecture time, instead focusing on small groups and using “learning assistants,” other undergraduates who were on the teaching team. Instead of sitting through lectures and working through procedural rules, students in the experimental groups were expected to focus on calculus concepts such as derivatives. Outside of class, they worked on problems on their own, while during class, they thought like mathematicians by reasoning out problems with limited guidance.

Its conclusion? That the traditional lecture method of teaching calculus isn’t as effective as active models. Those who learned from active methods did significantly better across race, gender and major, according to the study. (Students majoring in biology saw the biggest bump.) Over each of the three semesters of the experiment, there was a “medium/large effect size.”

It’s common for students who are used to learning math from lectures to be reluctant to think critically at first, learning assistants from the study say. But eventually, they get it. “[The students] move away from that algorithmic knowledge of mathematics, just following steps and just working like a little robot,” says Daniela Zamora Zuniga, a former economics student who was a learning assistant from 2019 through 2022.

Zuniga, now graduated, learned calculus through the active learning model, and it led her to pursue math courses outside of the degree requirements, she says.

That’s similar to something she noticed in other students who took the course. The students she’s kept up with, Zuniga says, report carrying an understanding of calculus forward into other STEM courses. That can relieve the pressure they feel around advanced math, freeing up mental space to devote to science, Zuniga adds.

Sometimes, in these classrooms, students who are apprehensive of calculus because they might have weak background knowledge can end up being the best students, says Juan Sanchez Quintana, a senior at Florida International University who was a learning assistant during the study. Quintana assisted the experimental classrooms, and says that his participation has fueled his desire to teach college math after he graduates. Quintana, a math education major, estimates that he’s been a learning assistant for about 120 class periods. In the end, he came away as a proponent of the model, because “I’ve seen it work.”

That these newer methods of teaching impart more learning isn’t surprising to the study authors. But, Kramer says, the research does serve a purpose by adding to the store of evidence that these methods work. He and his co-authors hope that bringing scientific rigor to the studies of these methods of teaching calculus might sway skeptical colleagues to change how they teach.

Widening the Gateway

As a gateway course to STEM, calculus can be seen as a make it or break it moment for students, especially ones who are typically excluded from these careers. “If you're struggling, it's a barrier for you,” Kramer says.

In conducting the study — funded by the National Science Foundation — researchers wanted to let students experience what it’s like to be a mathematician.

The researchers figured that Florida International, one of the largest public research universities in the country, had a unique chance to help students who are underrepresented in STEM disciplines better connect with the subject matter. The university has a lot of Hispanic and women students, two underrepresented groups, the study notes. Whether many of those students pass calculus varies: In the six semesters leading up to the study, the pass rates for introductory calculus — which included classes taught using some limited active learning methods — spanned from 13 to 88 percent. Failure could mean potential biologists, mathematicians or engineers being pushed out of the field.

Kramer and others have been experimenting with active teaching methods for a number of years, and wanted to break the notion that some students are born with natural abilities in calculus and that teachers are supposed to identify the gifted few. “Our study shows that [any] student can grow” under the right circumstances, Kramer says. “And that's really our responsibility as faculty, is to put students in environments where they can succeed, and [where] they are going to be able to achieve things that they might not have thought possible.”

Kramer projects certainty that these models are effective. These ways of teaching can be a lot more fun, too, Kramer says. But they break the preconceived notion of calculus as a weed-out course, he says, which can raise the hackles of professors skeptical of education research, and that increases the need for strong evidence.

Will this latest study be enough to convince colleagues to wander away from traditional lecturing methods?

“It should be very compelling evidence to anybody who looks at the study,” Kramer says. But people are messy. “My suspicion is that people will even be skeptical over this, even though it has a strong effect size, we've taken care of all the potential biases, as best as humanly possible, and it is published in Science, which is known to be an extremely rigorous process,” Kramer adds.

Instructors may still cling to lecture models, Kramer says, perhaps because “it helps their ego that they get to be the sage in front of a bunch of students professing how awesome they personally are.”

Nevertheless, there were possible limitations to the experiment that bear mentioning.

While the researchers say it was impossible to randomize the teachers, since the instruction relies on specialized knowledge, students were randomly assigned to either traditional classes or active learning classes. Randomizing the teachers could have raised more problems than it solved by introducing potential biases around active learning, Kramer argues.

But for some observers, this is a notable limitation. Jon Baron, a former chair of the National Board for Education Sciences and former vice president of evidence-based policy for Arnold Ventures, has called the study “encouraging but less than definitive” since it failed to randomly assign teachers.

A learning assistant noted another potential hindrance: These models don’t inspire as much enthusiasm when taught online.

When Quintana, the learning assistant, took calculus during the pandemic campus closures, the active learning methods were already in place, he says. But, Quintana notes, because students like himself were so fatigued by virtual learning, it didn’t really have as big of an effect. They didn’t interact in the breakout sessions as much, and didn’t really want to be there.

Still, to Quintana, it beat suffering through lectures.

“I can't even think how long it would have been for me to take calculus without any type of active learning, like, no learning assistance at all,” Quintana says.

© Photo By Ground Picture/ Shutterstock

My daughter recently called me in a panic. She said, “I’m not getting into Brown!” I wondered what she was talking about. She had just finished her junior year of high school and hadn’t applied to college yet. Then I realized why she was calling. Two days earlier the United States Supreme Court ruled to end affirmative action. On the heels of the ruling, multiple voices, from legal experts to the Biden administration, explained how colleges and universities can still consider how race affects an applicant’s life, but all my Black daughter heard was: “You don’t belong here.”

Millions of Black, Indigenous and Hispanic students are processing the news. The myth of American meritocracy was shattered for them. Because of our historical systems of structural racism, losing affirmative action laws will make it harder for college applicants from marginalized communities to get an equitable shot at attending their dream colleges — even for the most gifted students.

In these times of lost hope, what our young people need to hear are the same words I told my daughter when she called me: “You are an intelligent, caring, hard-working person with a remarkable story of perseverance. If a college doesn’t accept you, then it’s not where you are supposed to be and it’s their loss.”

In short, our young people need to know they belong.

I have dedicated my career to advancing equitable access to education, helping bring high potential students from historically marginalized communities to top colleges and universities. As a former teacher and in my roles as the executive director of two pre-college programs — the MITES program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke TIP at Duke University — I have seen firsthand how developing a strong sense of belonging is critical for student success.

Researchers have found that young people who experience disrespect, rejection or exclusion are absent from school more often, less engaged in class and earn lower grades — and Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students are at heightened risk of hearing these kinds of messages. The inverse is also true. Studies show that feelings of belonging increase engagement and performance, and reduce dropout rates.

Because young people from racially marginalized communities are more vulnerable to feeling like they don’t belong, it’s critical for these youth to hear that they deserve a high-quality education and are qualified to attend their choice of college.

The reality is that our country has work to do. We have a long way to go to make students of color feel like they belong and to get to a place where the student population at colleges and universities reflects our nation’s changing demographics. When you compare the U.S. population with the racial demographics of students at the top 20 American colleges, according to U.S. News & World Report Best National Rankings for the 2022-23 school year, the data reveals that students from racially marginalized communities, especially Black and Indigenous students, are grossly underrepresented at America’s top universities.

These results illustrate that current college admissions practices at top colleges are not yielding equitable admission opportunities. Further, the practices are not addressing inequities in American history that impact higher education institutions, including the colonization of Indigenous land and culture, the more than 250-year enslavement of Black people, and Jim Crow laws and redlining practices that still place many Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students in under-resourced neighborhoods and K-12 schools.

The Supreme Court decision will keep us on this unjust, inequitable path. We know this because it’s happened before.

In 1996, California banned race-based admissions policies at public universities with the passage of Proposition 209. Prior to that year, the student populations of California’s flagship universities, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) were mostly representative of the state’s college-eligible population. After Proposition 209 was enacted, underrepresented minority students were 40 percent less likely to be admitted to UC Berkeley and UCLA, according to a study led by researcher Zachary Bleemer. The study also showed that the ban resulted in many Black and Hispanic students enrolled at less competitive campuses.

In an interview with NPR, Bleemer said “Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities. But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”

The long-term economic outcomes of Bleemer’s study are also concerning. The study found that Black and Hispanic students were less likely to earn graduate degrees or enter lucrative science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields and these outcomes contributed to a 5 percent average annual decline in applicants’ wages in their 20s and early 30s.

Unless colleges proactively engage students from racially underrepresented communities through pre-college programming and other recruitment strategies that create a sense of belonging for our students and families as early as elementary and middle school, their fate could be the same.

Right now many universities are quietly determining how this Supreme Court ruling will impact their admissions practices. At the same time, our Black, Hispanic and Indigenous high school students are watching and deciding where they should apply to college. Like my daughter, these students are looking for messages and actions that restore their confidence and belief in an equitable review of their academic performance and lived experiences.

It’s time for families, teachers, guidance counselors, and colleges and universities that still believe in creating an equitable education system to send loud, clear, and repetitive messages to our beloved Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students: Yes! You belong.

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I have always felt connected to Indigenous peoples. Perhaps it is because I am Mexican American and colonization is a part of my ancestry. Perhaps it is because the virtues of Mexican and Indigenous spiritualities in Texas and Minnesota, where I’ve split my whole life, are so universal that it’s hard to not be drawn to their teachings and practices.

As a writer, my Indigenous culture shows up in my poetry. As a teacher, it filters through my relationships with students and into the curriculum I curate. When I was a student, I struggled to see my people represented in curricula, so when I design Spanish and social studies classes, I work to decolonize my lessons and reclaim Indigenous history.

This past June, I received an email inviting me to participate in a webinar on Gratitude-Based Learning (GBL). At first, I was convinced I found a pedagogy ingrained with Indigenous wisdom that could further decolonize my teaching. However, during the seminar, the facilitators jumped directly into piloting GBL activities with attendees. I could not engage because there was no mention of how Native and Indigenous teaching informs gratitude-based learning; the very notion of centering gratitude comes from Indigenous culture, and it felt as if the seminar leaders had appropriated it, claiming it was a novel method of learning.

I fixated on the missed opportunity to honor the Indigenous histories and peoples of North America. I had hoped the seminar would address the tendency to ignore the impact of Indigenous practices in teaching; instead, it was just another example of appropriation. The whole experience left me wondering: How do we honor the original teachers of this nation? How do we, as educators, empower ourselves to affirm Indigenous knowledge as foundational to our practice and move closer to a pedagogy of justice and gratitude in our curriculum? The short answer: it starts with us.

Gratitude Is An Indigenous Practice

When we think about gratitude as a pedagogical practice, we should invoke the teachings of “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. In this book, she speaks of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address presented aloud to school children. The address is a prayer of gratitude, reminding ourselves of our inalienable connections to all beings and nature. Kimmerer advises readers that “we must learn to practice gratitude, not just as a fleeting emotion, but as a way of life.”

For me, then, to speak of GBL without acknowledging their contributions is to directly co-opt the wisdom of Indigenous peoples. In doing so, it makes me wonder, what else have we unknowingly appropriated from Indigenous culture? Looking closely at how education has evolved in recent years, we might find that long before the advent of GBL, Indigenous ways of knowing or Indigenous knowledge systems, which emphasize gratitude, collaboration and relationship as foundational to learning, influenced education. Many independent schools like mine have “Portraits of a Graduate”, an outcomes-oriented document that outlines the academic and life skills every graduating student is expected to master. Lifelong competencies such as collaboration, relationship building, becoming a visionary and caring for the Earth are often included as essential to student success beyond their brick-and-mortar education.

Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on creating cultures of belonging and connection not only socially, but within the physical spaces of our schools – a practice that can be traced back to Indigenous living and tribal teaching. It seems, too, that more and more schools plant gardens. Reconnecting students with the natural world as a sacred place to be cared for is yet another method of learning steeped in Indigenous ways of knowing and the fulfillment gained from connecting with nature.

Taking Up and Taking Back

As an educator, I want to adopt a take-back mindset that honors the Indigenous educators and historians who came before me. Hence, when I saw that the facilitators of the GBL webinar were appropriating Indigenous culture, I had to speak up. When the facilitators asked if we had any questions, one of the members of my Zoom breakout urged me to speak up. Shaking and nervous, I told the group how skeptical I was of GBL because it did not give any credit to Indigenous ways of knowing. Little did they know, my courage to question came from knowing that at one point, I also excluded Indigenous history.

In college, I learned about the first wave of feminism as a group of white women fighting for the right to vote. I taught the same topic to high school students in my women’s studies class 20 years later. While I thought I was inclusive and did the work to decolonize my teaching and curriculum, my perspective changed after my social studies department chair encouraged me to watch “Without a Whisper,” a documentary that reveals the influence the Haudenosaunee of Upstate New York had on the formation of the 19th-century women’s suffrage movement. The documentary humbled me and transformed my thinking by unraveling a lie I was taught. I believed that the progress toward women’s equality was because of white women, when in truth, the Haudenosaunee were the original feminists.

Two years ago, when I got the opportunity to teach the Indigenous origins of feminism, it felt liberating to right a wrong. My students and I were ignited with a new sense of purpose and realization that our struggle toward justice and equality actually needed to include all women.

Realizing how exclusionary history could be propelled me to do more. Currently, my Latine identity course has an extensive lesson on redefining La Malinche, a Nahua woman who was Hernán Cortes’s interpreter and guide during the conquest of Mexico. In my advanced Spanish classes, students learn about the Mayan Genocide during the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War. I also highlight slain Honduran Indigenous environmentalist Berta Cáceres, whose fight for access to clean water and affordable land for her people continues today.

Building these lessons into the curriculum makes me feel closer to my ancestors and reminds me how connected my teaching is to Indigenous ways of learning. I want to make it a common practice to interrogate the history we’ve learned and fully embrace the indelible mark Indigenous peoples have left on who we are as educators.

Reclaim Indigenous Practices Together

Speaking up at the GBL webinar was one of the most transformative moments of my school year. Mere hours after it concluded, one of the facilitators reached out to me and apologized for not recognizing the Indigenous origins of GBL. She extended an opportunity to discuss the issue further, and I welcomed the chance to follow up.

In our conversation, the organizers asked me what I thought would be the ideal way of incorporating Indigeneity into their next webinar. In my opinion, the facilitators had to be transparent about the ancestral Native roots of GBL and honor Indigenous activists and teachers like Winona LaDuke, Tara Houska and Linda Legarde Grover who have influenced our teaching practices. Ironically, my conversation with the facilitators centered on gratitude and collaboration; subconsciously, we communicated within Indigenous knowledge systems and found a way to honor the owners and producers of this important framework.

While my own Indigenous roots come from present-day Latin America, I am responsible for decolonizing curriculum and giving ownership of pedagogical practices used in our schools back to Indigenous peoples.

If we want our students to seek truth and justice, we must be willing to be co-leaders and participants in the search. Intentionally including Indigenous culture and GBL as a pedagogy requires ongoing and conscientious work. As teachers, we must continue to use our voices to reclaim Indigeneity within our schools and explicitly name the tools Indigenous people have given to us to be great educators. When we affirm the history of Indigenous cultures in classrooms, our schools become communities rooted in gratitude and healing.

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Twice a week, Rofiat Olasunkanmi, 22, heads back to Brooklyn to her alma mater, Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School. Now a senior at New York University, Olasunkanmi helps high school seniors navigate applying to college, a process she personally recalls being dominated by concern about finances and a general sense of anxiety because no one in her family did it in the United States before her.

Her older siblings received degrees in Nigeria, where her parents still live, so she’d had to figure out a lot on her own, a burden she now tries to alleviate for the students she works with. She aims to support them from start to finish, beginning with applications for the City University of New York at minimum and then moving on to the Common Application.

“But I’m not there every day, and Common App is very lengthy,” she said, “so they need to ensure that they’re doing the parts that they need to get done while I'm not there.”

Rofiat Olasunkanmi helps high school seniors apply to college. Photo courtesy of Olasunkanmi.

The Common Application was first created with the goal to simplify the college admissions process by allowing students to submit one application to multiple institutions. However, as Olasunkanmi mentioned, it takes significant time to complete, an estimated six to eight weeks, according to admissions counselors.

The COVID-19 pandemic complicated the application process further with disruptions to in-person advising, testing and extracurricular activities. But barriers to completion predate the pandemic.

During the last pre-pandemic college application cycle, 2018-19, nearly 1.2 million students accessed the Common App, created a profile and began working on at least one application. But a quarter of those students, almost 300,000, did not end up submitting any application through Common App, according to a working paper published this August.

Researchers characterized this subset of students as “non-submitters.”

“Non-submitters” were more likely than students who submitted applications to have lower educational-occupational aspirations, be racial minorities, have parents who completed lower levels of education and live in communities with lower socioeconomic status — but they were not less academically qualified.

Colleges across the country have doubled down on trying to attract students as enrollment numbers decline. Direct admission has proven to be an effective method of appealing to students who hadn’t already been planning to attend college. But the students who start applications without hitting the “send” button, the “non-submitters,” largely fall into a different category. They are presumably already interested in college.

So, why aren’t they completing applications?

Identifying ‘Non-Submitters’

During World War II, the U.S. military noticed that certain parts of the airplanes that returned from battle had more bullet holes than others. As a result, leaders decided to reinforce those areas, expecting that would help the planes better withstand enemy fire.

But this strategy had a fundamental error. It’s one relevant to past research about barriers preventing students from enrolling in college, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of the “non-submitters” study.

The error, known as survival bias, directs focus on those entities that passed a selection process but overlooks others that didn’t make it through. The military focused on holes in the planes that survived enemy fire. But really, leaders should have considered the holes in the planes that did not make it home.

Likewise, higher education institutions have tried various strategies to boost student enrollment but haven’t stepped back to ask, “Who is not completing applications?” Odle said.

He and Preston Magouirk, chief data officer at the nonprofit DC College Access Program, took that step back. They outlined key factors that can predict non-submission, using data students put into their Common App profiles coupled with community indicators from the American Community Survey administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and school features from the Common Core of Data maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. (Magouirk was a senior manager of research and analytics at Common App while conducting the study.)

Overall, they found that 24 percent of students who started the Common App in 2018-19 did not complete it. The highest rates of non-submission were among American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students (as well as students who did not report their race or ethnicity on Common App), and the lowest rates were among white and Asian students. While students who identified as Black or African American and Latino represented a small fraction of all Common App users during the study year, both groups were overrepresented in the non-submitter population, with non-submission rates of 27 and 26 percent, respectively.

Submission rates also varied by community. The higher the unemployment rate in a ZIP code, the higher the likelihood of non-submission among students who lived there, the researchers found. Further, rates varied by school type. Students attending public high schools were more likely to not submit applications they’d started than students attending independent or private high schools. Students at Title I schools, which serve high numbers of low-income students, were more likely to not submit applications they’d started (28 percent) compared to students at non-Title I schools (22 percent). Compared to applicants, non-submitters were also less likely to report having a parent with a college degree.

Students who ultimately submitted the Common App visited the platform more frequently. The essay, in particular, appeared to be key in distinguishing between students who finished and didn’t finish their applications. Out of the students who eventually applied, 94 percent wrote at least 100 characters for their essay; whereas just 43 percent of students who did not write at least that much ended up applying.

What is most distinct about these findings, the researchers said, are the academic similarities between submitters and non-submitters.

“It would be so easy for people to just say, ‘well, they're probably not college material,’” Odle said, referring to non-submitters. This study shows otherwise. Students who submitted and students who did not submit applications had very similar GPAs and SAT/ACT scores.

Of course, there are other ways to apply to college beyond the Common App. While the platform connects students with more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities, its data alone does not provide a comprehensive look at all pathways to higher ed.

Separate from the research by Odle and Magouirk, Common App conducted an internal analysis using National Student Clearinghouse records to track what happened to non-submitters beyond its own platform, said Mark Freeman, vice president of data analytics and research at Common App. The analysis found that the average Common App non-submitter is still likely to enroll in college after high school — but using another platform, such as applying directly to an institution.

This underscores the fact that people who access the Common App at all have a high baseline enrollment rate. For the 2017-18 academic season, for example, 71 percent of Common App users who did not submit an application through the platform still attended college within the next academic year, according to the analysis. More than half (56 percent) attended an institution that does not accept the Common App, but some students attended institutions that do (14.5 percent).

While this analysis looked at the year prior to Odle and Magouirk’s study, the results should look very similar, Freeman said.

However, Common App non-submission still seems to be related to college-going outcomes, Odle said. After all, the enrollment rate of students who completed the Common App — 88.4 percent — was higher than the enrollment rate of students who started but never finished it — 71 percent.

Counseling Students to Submit Applications

Dorma Lozada, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, recalls going through the college application process herself a few years ago. “I understood the language of the applications,” she said, which she attributed to her mother’s experience attending college in Puerto Rico. When filling out financial aid forms, her mother had the needed documents prepared, for example.

Lozada, 21, now assists students preparing for college at her high school alma mater, the Facing History School several blocks away from John Jay. Her work is supported through the same program that Olasunkanmi participates in, which trains college students to provide individualized support to high school seniors.

The high school students Lozada works with often do not receive the same insight from their parents that she did from her mother, she said. And many of her students’ parents do not speak English. She translates what she can, but it’s a challenge to alleviate families’ uncertainty about college, and specifically fears about affordability.

While Odle and Magouirk’s study focused on predictors of non-submission rather than strategies to support application completion, its findings point to possible solutions. Because submitters typically came to the Common App platform more times and completed the essay portion, for example, maybe more involved and sustained college counseling could help more students finish their applications.

The work that Olasunkanmi and Lozada do is an example of that counseling, which varies in quality and quantity across the country and in individual school districts. While the ratio of students to school counselors in the U.S. has narrowed over time, it remains well above what the American School Counselor Association recommends. These counselors assist with postsecondary planning but also boosting academic achievement and interpersonal skills. ASCA recommends a ratio of 250 students for every one school counselor. During the 2021-2022 school year, the latest year for which data is available, the nationwide average was 408-to-1.

High school seniors in 21 states shared how a lack of counseling affected their college application process in surveys conducted by the national nonprofit YouthTruth.

“I am almost done with my senior year and not once been talked to or notified about end of year requirements for graduation let alone college,” a male student reported. “Because of this I have decided that college is out of the picture and that I guess I'm just not good enough.”

Sometimes we have students that are very enthusiastic at the beginning of the application, but by the end, they're not.

— Rofiat Olasunkanmi

Others reported not knowing about application deadlines, and when they learned of them late in the application season, they assumed college was just off the table, said Jen de Forest, director of organizational learning and communications at YouthTruth.

“There were a lot of kids, particularly Latinx kids, who described not having social capital in the process, unless they had a sibling to guide them through,” de Forest said. “If they had a sibling, the sibling was a really crucial bridge.”

Olasunkanmi has found this to be the case with her students in New York, too.

While her older siblings did not go through the college application process in the U.S., they attended and completed college, so she had that example set for her. For her students at Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School, many lack personal connections who chose the college pathway themselves. While these students may want to attend college and eagerly begin applications, they do not always follow through as they commonly see siblings and peers going straight to the workforce.

“Sometimes we have students that are very enthusiastic at the beginning of the application,” Olasunkanmi said, “but by the end, they're not.”

Like Lozada has seen, Olasunkanmi said this decreased buy-in from students is often contingent on the support they receive — or don’t receive — outside of the Bridge Coach program. Olasunkanmi knows from her own experience that a lack of parental input is not always an intentional choice. Some students’ parents are not familiar with the U.S. college admissions process, while others are busy juggling work or other responsibilities.

Setting Different Expectations

Yet Olasunkanmi’s parents did expect her to attend college. “African parents, they don't play with education,” she said. That meant her own college aspirations aligned with her family’s expectations.

Across the country, however, large aspiration-expectation mismatches have been found. YouthTruth's most recent survey of over 25,000 high school seniors in the class of 2023 found that 74 percent aspired to go to college but only 66 percent expected to go to college.

Olasunkanmi thinks this mismatch is at least in part due to a lack of diverse representation on college campuses. Overall, white students are the largest racial demographic in the U.S. college population, regardless of whether the institution is public or private, or a two- or four- year school (although public two-year institutions comparably have more minority students). Meanwhile, Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School is composed of mostly Black students (81 percent), with 14 percent Latino and 3 percent white students.

Career expectations likely also contribute to the mismatch. In the Common App study, submission rates varied widely by students’ reported educational plans, with higher rates of non-submission found for those who aspired to attain an associate degree compared to higher degree levels. The non-submission rate essentially doubled for students who never selected any degree goals.

Rates also varied based on students’ intended career field, with students who reported aspiring to work in occupations that generally require advanced levels of education (engineers, policymakers, physicians, etc.) having high application submission rates, while students who reported aspiring to occupations that don’t typically require a postsecondary credential (homemaker, farmer, etc.) had low application submission rates.

While college may not be a match for everyone’s career goals, ruling out college as an option because of expected job plans at such a young age is limiting, given that research shows those aspirations often change over time, Odle cautioned.

This was true for both Olasunkanmi and Lozada. After graduating high school, Olasunkanmi started at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, before transferring to NYU. She thought she wanted to be a nurse before she had the chance to work closely with a counselor, who spoke with her about the multitude of career options there are in health care. Now, she plans to work as a health care manager in a hospital or medical center. Lozada, who is majoring in political science and minoring in economics, initially thought she’d be a lawyer, but she is now set on becoming an elected official.

Cost is easily the biggest barrier to enrollment for both the never-enrolled and the previously enrolled, according to the latest Gallup and Lumina Foundation State of Higher Education report for 2023. YouthTruth reports seeing students become more concerned about the return on investment for a college education.

Transparency in what students can expect from the college experience, particularly overall cost, is key to helping them feel more confident to enroll, according to Bryce McKibben, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University. “It is so opaque,” McKibben said of the college price tag. “You don't necessarily know how much it's going to [cost] even in the next year, let alone over the length of your degree. As a result, it's very easy to make the conclusion that it may not be possible or that you're going to end up in loads of debt.”

The Hope Center regularly conducts surveys assessing students’ basic needs. The latest 2020 results from more than 195,000 students showed rates of basic needs insecurity increased among the general population, and intention to enroll in college dropped.

“We don't necessarily have data on the level of which those folks who never entered may have struggled with those challenges,” McKibben said, “but the fact that there are three-in-five students experiencing basic needs insecurity obviously presents huge warning signs of folks who are sort of at the margin.”

Odle and Magouirk hope that their research leads to changes that help more students successfully complete college applications. As for how the Common App plans to build on this work, Freeman said the organization will conduct a survey of non-submitters.

As Olasunkanmi and Lozada both begin their senior year of college, they’re thinking about how they can leverage their knowledge to beat back inequity in who makes it to college, and who succeeds beyond higher education, too.

Their advocacy work has already begun, one high school senior at a time.

“At the end of the year, they turn around and they're like, ‘thank you so much for helping me,’” Lozada said. “‘If it weren't for you, I would have not been able to complete these applications.’”

© Studio623 / Shutterstock

Usually, when I begin writing an essay, I’m hopeful, or at least determined. Not this time. I’m making myself write this essay, even though it scares me. Writing about bodies – about my body – scares me. Our bodies are so sexualized and commodified that talking about them in school or in relation to school feels almost forbidden.

When we talk about our bodies, especially bodies perceived as feminine, many people immediately think about sex. This reductive perspective, indicative of how deep the madonna-whore complex is embedded in our collective psyche, deprives us of the opportunity to discuss our bodies, the site of all contact with the world around us, with the nuance and fullness of our lived experience. Our bodies – and this essay – are about so much more than sex.

For years, decades even, having a body has felt like a burden, a liability. Becoming a teacher has exacerbated this immensely. I am doing the work of building a relationship with my body that is authentic to my values and beliefs and not my conditioning. Doing so within schools and institutions that have been used to uphold and pass on predominant cultural norms and values for centuries has been challenging, to say the least.

I know that the same forces of socialization that warped my perception of and experience in my body are acting on my students every day, inside and outside school. Our bodies carry us from our homes to our classrooms and facilitate the reading, writing, speaking and listening that learning often requires. In essence, our bodies and how they are perceived shape our classroom experience in ways that can support or detract from our learning.

In one-off conversations and acute moments, my students have shared their experiences, struggles and concerns about their bodies with me but rarely is there space made for discussion about these realities in more public, group settings. What are we telling our students when their bodies only come into conversations in sterile anatomy and sex education lessons or punitive dress code conversations? What happens when our students’ perceptions of their bodies come primarily from social media, the feedback of their peers, or their own self-consciousness without guidance from the adults in their lives who care about them? I want more for them, for us all. I want there to be space to discuss our bodies in their fullness, beyond their sexualization and commodification.

Attention Not Invited

Throughout my 29 years of experience in schools, both as a student and a teacher, the volume of societal expectations has consistently drowned out my wants and needs in relation to my body. In my first job interview at a public high school where I would spend my first year teaching, my body and the clothing that covered it were spotlighted from the beginning of our conversation.

There was no air conditioning in the small office where the three staff members of the school and I sat. It was July in New Orleans. After we all finished introducing ourselves, I was visibly sweating in my sleeveless top and blazer. The woman who would become my assistant principal asked if I wanted to take off the blazer. I thought for a moment and declined. She smiled and told me that that was the correct answer and that my outfit would have been inappropriate if I removed it. The sleeveless top in question revealed no cleavage or hint of my undergarments, but, apparently, it would have still been unacceptable in this room or one that contained students. This set the tone for the rest of the interview and my employment at that school. Moving forward, I selected my outfits accordingly.

Despite my desperate attempts since then to hide my body like Billy Eilish so that it would not determine how I’m perceived, I have been sexually harassed at every school I attended or worked at. Sometimes, I reported these incidents, but not all the time. Throughout my career, I mastered the art of firmly and decisively shutting down inappropriate comments from students without damaging relationships, but these moments are much rarer than incidents with adults who regularly make unprovoked remarks about my body shape to this day. The response from school administrations has ranged from wholly supportive to skeptical.

Our Bodies Are More Than Anatomy and Sex Education

There are so many things about my body that I would rather talk about than its shape, attractiveness, or lack thereof. I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD and fibromyalgia that impact my physical capacity and reactions. I am also autistic, which informs my interoception and sensitivity to stimuli. I have been socialized as a woman and many of my experiences with my body reflect this identity, though I have no personal investment in the gender binary. I have finally accepted that I am, relative to most people, short. I have a visceral reaction to touching things that are cold or sticky. Each of these things is more important to me than whether or not I am desirable by heteronormative societal conventions.

I want to talk to my students about how sexualization has impacted them and affirm that their bodies are more than how they are perceived through this lens. I want to provide space for my boys who wear sweatshirts in the heat of New Orleans summer to hide their shape so peers won’t judge them for being too big; for my girls who are sent home from school by administrators who believe the supposedly inappropriate amount of visible skin is a bigger issue than their presence in the classroom; and for my nonbinary students who often find themselves left out of gendered conversations entirely.

I want discussions about our bodies to be more expansive than this. I want to talk about which of our family members we see when we look at our own faces and how we feel about it. I want to talk about how and where emotions, positive and negative, manifest in our bodies and how we can work with them. I want to talk about consent: what it is, what it isn’t and how to navigate it in unclear situations so that everyone feels safe in their own bodies. I want to talk about how what we eat impacts our bodies and how complicated making decisions about our food is. I want to talk about our minds and how they operate and shape how we process and make meaning of what’s happening around us. I want to celebrate how unique our bodies are and interrogate the diversity of experiences we’ve had in them. I want to give my students space to talk about all these things I’ve had to work out on my own, at great personal cost.

Possibilities and Dangers

In my first week of class this year, I asked my seniors if they thought our class theme, “Bodies,” should be discussed in school. They spoke brilliantly and at length about how important doing so was to them and how excited they were that space was provided for them to explore the topic.

I believe there is space in our curriculums to discuss our bodies in their fullness and that teachers can manage these conversations with the grace and expertise we use to address other complex topics. I also believe that students want and need the space to process all the experiences that inform their self-images. I believe these conversations can be held without crossing into a territory that is inappropriate for school.

Luckily, I have my school’s support in conducting discussions, assigning readings and providing writing prompts about our bodies. However, I fear our bodies and discussions about them will continue to be made more taboo, and perhaps illegal, in some cases. Right now, for instance, there are vicious culture wars that demonize life-affirming healthcare for trans children and portray queer educators like me as groomers, despite the overwhelming evidence that dangers to our students often come from more conservative institutions of society and within our children's homes.

I know we can support our students in understanding their bodies, but I am afraid we will bow to pressure to avoid talking about them entirely. Moreover, I’m afraid of what doing so will cost.

© New Africa / Shutterstock

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Math professor Martin Weissman is rethinking how his university teaches calculus.

Over the summer, the professor from the University of California at Santa Cruz spent a week at Harvard to learn how to redesign some of the math courses his institution offers related to life sciences. Right now, they are part of a “leaky pipeline,” Weissman said. Thousands of students go through these courses, he adds, but a lot of them don’t graduate with degrees in those fields.

This story also appeared in USA Today

Falling off that path can lock students out of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers. And despite some “uneven” progress in recent years, STEM fields are just not as diverse as industry leaders would like. Some educators place a share of the blame on calculus courses, which can push out otherwise interested students.

That’s a phenomenon Weissman noticed at his university. “There are math requirements for those majors. And students slowly seep off and change majors because they have difficulty with the math,” he says.

UC Santa Cruz sees a lot of underrepresented students disproportionately drip out of that leaky pipeline, Weissman says. That includes a number of Black, American Indian, Alaska Native and Hispanic students. Biologists at the school look at the math taught in traditional calculus courses, he adds, and wonder why it’s even being taught, because the math isn’t practically useful for the field. Meanwhile, the calculus instruction has to be slowed down enough that it’s not as effective for math people as it could be.

“I think we're in an uncomfortable zone, where a lot of calculus classes are serving no one,” Weissman concludes.

Around the country, “math wars” are raging over attempts to increase equity by playing down calculus from the curriculum in favor of statistics or computer science, or by delaying when students take algebra. But there’s also a quieter revolution taking place that applies a different strategy to achieve the same principles. Its aim is not to abandon calculus, but rather to yank calculus instruction into the 21st century, by teaching students through the use of real-world problems. Changing the way calculus is taught, proponents argue, helps more students find math approachable and relevant, making them therefore more likely to succeed while studying it.

This is the more responsive approach that Weissman studied in July at Harvard, where he joined two dozen other college educators from around the country, tucked inside the air-conditioned, blackboard-walled rooms of Harvard’s Science Center. The week-long training ran from mornings into afternoons, with chummy lunch breaks in the faculty lounge, or the buzzing cafe in the Science Center lobby. The educators sat through lectures on pedagogy, the finer points of math and how to apply it to actual biological problems.

Sessions were prone to explanations such as how “physics-based simulations” became the buzzword in Hollywood, leading animation teams to use modeling techniques for hits like “Frozen,” “Brave” and “Toy Story,” which include life-like representations of walking through snow and bouncing curly hair. These digressions were placed alongside technical explanations of “cardiac defibrillation,” the rippling of electrical pulses as they move through the heart, as a way to show how to connect complicated math to the world outside of the classroom.

The training also had the educators plan, observe and teach classes based on these principles to eager high schoolers enrolled in a summer camp on campus.

The teaching experts who sponsored the training hope it will prepare college instructors to become “advocates,” empowering them to explain and defend the rigor of this way of teaching calculus to skeptical scientists from other departments. They expect it to be only the opening shot in an academic revolution.

But if calculus instruction is going to change, it may take some persuasion.

A Silent Revolution

The trouble with calculus is widely understood. The solution? Less so.

As these Harvard training sessions took place, the California State Board of Education finally approved a new framework that sets out to make math more culturally responsive and inquiry-based. It’s an attempt to respond to some of the pressures Weissman identified by kindling students’ math interest.

But it’s been controversial, causing “knock-down, drag-out math wars” that have included parent protests, threats and academic-on-academic social media spats about whether calculus should be reworked. That’s in part because the framework prioritized alternatives to calculus and also recommended delaying Algebra I, an onramp course to high school math and a critical juncture in the race to calculus, until ninth grade for most students. Critics have alleged the framework rejected rigor for “wokeism.”

In fact, many of recent attempts to keep calculus from being an obstacle to a STEM career focus on deemphasizing calculus, instead directing students to take other math courses like statistics or computer science.

The idea for the Harvard sessions came from a quieter attempt to revolutionize math instruction, relying on similar ideas, emanating from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Over the past decade, UCLA revamped its calculus for life sciences courses, focusing them more strictly on math concepts and real-world biological questions, rather than on procedural rules for derivatives and integrals — which its advocates describe as a paradigm shift for calculus instruction.

This idea is what drew instructors to sweaty Cambridge in July. UCLA’s model caught the attention of the Harvard math department, which decided to host a training over the summer for college instructors looking to refashion their own calculus courses. The session was meant to catalyze change, encouraging those instructors to open their own revised courses modeled on the ones being taught at UCLA.

A room of educators gets schooled on the rigors of mathematical modeling in the life sciences. Photo courtesy of the Harvard University Department of Mathematics.

As part of that, the college instructors observed and taught lessons to teenagers participating in a summer program being hosted at the same time at Harvard. It was meant to allow the educators to see these new methods in action, and to try them out personally.

In an early morning class, bleary-eyed and still vibrating from coffee, the instructors met with high school-aged students. The students had previously “warmed up” by grappling with datasets on COVID-19 mortality rates, trying to figure out what that data meant for policy.

“What’s your morning process?” the instructor asked.

The students, broken up into groups around tables, considered the question. “Brushing teeth” was the most common response.

The students then learned to map out the likely impact of teeth scrubbing on plaque growth, before pivoting to other possible applications of advanced concepts like vector spaces and differential equations.

During classes like this, instructors for the program studiously referred to these methods as “change equations,” a non-threatening phrase substituted to prevent the high schoolers from shying away from intimidating language like “differential calculus.” It’s connected to the claim that these classes can capture the rigor of advanced math, only without the anxiety it usually brings.

That’s a key part of the sales pitch for the course. “Our class has no prerequisites. Period,” says Alan Garfinkel, one of the UCLA professors who designed it, when asked by a teacher about talking to students about prerequisites in calculus.

That’s not typical. When this subject is usually taught, it’s done procedurally. Students are given a set of rules for solving these equations and then drilled on them, with the “why are we learning this?” question answered afterward. But students in these classrooms confronted the problems they wanted to solve first, only getting the equations after the curiosity had set in.

It left an impression. “Today I got to be a teacher again! Euler’s method to 20 amazing High School students with varying levels of mathematics background! Loved honoring that mathematics is a web of ideas as opposed to a linear trajectory filled with pre-requisites,” one instructor posted on social media.

Many of the educators at the event said they were attracted by the desire to increase student engagement and to make math more relevant to students’ lives.

But the impact the educators hope for reaches beyond the classroom, too. If high school and higher education can get more students to reason mathematically, it will make them productive thinkers, says Lindsey Henderson, a secondary math specialist at the Utah State Board of Education, who attended the training. That’s what the businesses in Utah’s Silicon Slopes, the state’s burgeoning tech sector, say they want, she adds.

For Weissman, of UC Santa Cruz, the fact that this course is being taught at a large institution already is important. When it comes to math instruction, he says, “There are always people promising revolutions.” But UCLA’s method does seem to work for large institutions, according to Weissman. The University of Arizona now offers a version of the class. A study of the course published by its creators suggests it’s been successful in engaging underrepresented students.

And Weissman doesn’t foresee much of a fight in implementing it: “I'm not beholden to a traditional textbook, so I don't have to make sure that I cover certain methods that I really do think just don't need to be taught anymore.”

Change Equations

At the same time the week-long workshop for instructors took place, Harvard also ran a two-week program for high school students based on the idea that high schoolers can be taught to solve problems using principles of advanced calculus.

The teacher workshop included designing and teaching classes to that class of 36 high schoolers, something the attendees weren’t warned about more than a day or two before.

“We wanted a way to have workshop participants see what's possible in the classroom,” says Brendan Kelly, the director of introductory math at Harvard and one of the event organizers. If you haven’t seen students thinking through the problems, it can be hard to vividly imagine what it might look like in your classroom, Kelly says.

The traditional sequence for math in middle school and high school is algebra I, geometry, algebra II/trigonometry and then pre-calculus, with advanced students making it to calculus. Increasingly, calculus is seen as a necessary bolster for competitive college applications.

For the high school summer program at Harvard, though, only algebra II was required. Students at the program had mostly taken AP Calculus, though not all of them had. One student said she had only taken pre-calculus before entering the course.

Student campers gave high marks to the experience.

“For me, like, I've honestly never considered a major in math,” says Judy Yen, a rising junior from the private Taipei American School in Taiwan. Yen wants to enter the medical profession, and the course left her considering a math double major or minor in her future, she adds.

For others, the lesson was that math can lead to benefits beyond school. “I can actually get jobs rather than just studying. Really, I can actually, maybe get a job that's related to math,” says Charles Sciarrino, a rising senior from Staten Island Academy, a college preparatory day school in New York. “And I just find that really cool,” he adds.

Still, it was a Harvard summer school class, implying that most students who participated not on scholarship had access to the funds to afford summer school in Massachusetts — which cost $5,300 for tuition and room and board for the two-week program — not to mention a prior interest in math. Will it translate to other schools and contexts?

There’s some privilege there, Kelly admits. But he firmly believes that the learning that happened there is possible anywhere: “I think it's a real deficit mindset to think that first-generation or low-income students wouldn’t have that same enthusiasm and curiosity. I just fundamentally disagree with that. Young people are curious about the world. And when you put compelling questions in front of them, they respond with excitement and engagement.”

The 28 educators at the workshop training seemed positive. “The course helps gain access for a broader range of student populations, for us to get students excited about math and cross-pollinate to all the other divisions as well,” says Steven LeMay, an associate professor at Curry College, a private college in Massachusetts, who attended the training.

LeMay was tasked with figuring out whether the revamped calculus will work for Curry, and he seemed generally optimistic. Curry College likely won’t have the fight that UCLA reported in attempting to transition its students, LeMay predicts. The college doesn’t have a standalone math major, and there’s been a push from LeMay’s colleagues to freshen the school’s technology use, LeMays says.

Other higher ed instructors, however, expressed concern over whether it would translate into their less resource-rich colleges. Their institutions, they say, were worried about whether their students would get transfer credits at other colleges for these courses, and they were skittish about possibly disrupting their own institutions’ math departments by keeping students from more traditional calculus classes.

In the end, Kelly of Harvard says, the dream is to have similar courses that integrate calculus concepts in life sciences, economics, social sciences, physical sciences and engineering taught at colleges and high schools. (Kelly has taught a similar modeling course for economics and social sciences for the last few years.)

But it’s hardly a foregone conclusion. One major challenge to spreading this method of math instruction more broadly? Money. The Harvard summer training was popular with potential teachers, but it was hard to get funding to support the program, Kelly says. He reports that he was unsuccessful twice in applying for a grant from the National Science Foundation — which Kelly attributes to a general lack of enthusiasm for attempts to alter calculus and a belief that it wasn’t a proper training course — but it was funded by a gift from an anonymous Harvard alumnus to the math department. Continuing the work will mean securing sustainable funding, he adds. That may be easier now that the first session has wrapped up, Kelly predicts.

But it’s still early days, Kelly says: “I think across the country, we are barely getting off the ground.”

© Photo courtesy of the Harvard University Department of Mathematics.