For high school students in search of a career pathway that combines the challenges of building a floating city with the difficulty of launching a rocket into space, there’s a relatively little-known college major that might float their boat — naval architecture.
Naval architecture first caught our attention in 2022, when it appeared in an EdSurge analysis of federal data about high-earning college majors. It stuck out among a slew of programs in the technology and medical fields. Then naval architecture topped our list of majors that yield high starting salaries for low-income students. (The U.S. Department of Education made a change in 2023 by classifying naval architecture in tandem with the related field of marine engineering.)
We set out to find out why a college major that pays dividends for students seemingly doesn’t have much name recognition.
What Is Naval Architecture, Anyway?
Naval architects are responsible for the entire design of a ship, says David J. Singer, the undergraduate program chair of naval architecture and marine engineering at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, marine engineers are focused on the engine room.
“The reason it's called ‘naval architecture’ is because the profession existed thousands of years ago, before the word ‘engineer’ came around,” Singer explains. “And so naval architecture, historically, was the hull shape. It was the architecture of the ship in terms of the whole form’s resistance, its seakeeping, its stability, its motions, its maneuverability.”
The types of jobs students can get with a naval architecture degree vary widely, he says. They can specialize in the construction of military ships; go into oil and gas or renewable energy; design luxury cruise ships; pursue maritime law, research and development; or work for regulators that ensure ships are constructed safely.
“If you want to be in charge of something huge at a young age, like a multibillion-dollar program, and work on the cutting-edge hardest problems, then you go work for the Navy at one of the warfare centers” as a civilian, Singer says. “If you want more of that corporate trajectory and make a little bit more money, you go defense contractor. It's one of the few professions that truly is global by nature, and that provides huge opportunities.”
The job of a naval architect is, perhaps unsurprisingly, important to the U.S. Coast Guard. Elizabeth “Elisha” Garcia is a professor in the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s naval architecture and marine engineering department. She says that understanding how to salvage ships is a big part of a naval architect’s job. That includes not just what to do with a boat that’s no longer usable, she adds, but how to safely modify boats for a new purpose — like transforming a river barge into one that can be used at sea.
“If your boat’s no longer floating upright for a variety of reasons, and you're trying to figure out what's next, are there human lives at stake that we need to get off? Are we gonna refloat the boat? Are we just gonna torpedo it and sink the boat?” Garcia says. “There's so many companies that work within that field, and they have to work with governments all around the world for that type of thing.”
Naval architects are highly sought-after, Singer says, because their expertise can’t be substituted by other types of engineers. Whether it’s a ship or oil rig, people work and live on the structures that naval architects create.
“I always tell my students that doctors can kill one person at a time. We can kill thousands, so the importance and the challenges we have are also commensurate with the dangers and the responsibility we have,” Singer explains. “I don't care if you're making an oil platform or you're making a military platform. You have lives and the environment under your purview as an engineer.”
Students can be excellent little actors in a traditional classroom, going through the motions of “studenting,” but not learning much. At that critical moment when a teacher chalks a problem on the board and asks everyone to write out an answer, for instance, one kid might stall by sharpening a pencil, another might doodle or feign writing, and another might stare into space — though not thinking about the problem at hand. Yet all seems well to the teacher at the front of the room, who, after a brief pause, reveals the answer.
That’s the argument of Peter Liljedahl, a professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who has spent years researching what works in teaching. And he’s found that in this common classroom format, very few students are actually thinking: maybe no more than 20 percent of them, and only 20 percent of the time, according to his experiments.
By thinking, he means actively engaging with the course material. The most problematic strategy that many students try instead, he argues, is what he calls “mimicking,” which he has especially found in the math classes he studies. These mimickers dutifully copy the problems presented in classes, but never grok the conceptual underpinnings, so they’re left able only to do problems that are nearly identical to what the teacher showed them.
These are the students who end up hitting a wall when math courses move from easier algebra to more advanced concepts in, say, calculus, he argues.
“At some point, mimicking runs out,” says Liljedahl. “And when that happens, students don't go from an A to a B, they go from an A to a D, because they haven't actually learned the things that they need to learn to set them up for success.” He argues that that’s why so many students get to college and have to repeat their first-year calculus course.
Liljedahl has developed a strategy for teaching that he says greatly improves how many students in a class are actually thinking about course material. He’s outlined the strategies in his book, “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics.”
But he has decided not to try to convince schools and school systems to adopt his system. Instead, he’s spreading the word to teachers one by one, through the book and by tirelessly speaking at conferences and other education forums.
And his ideas appear to be going viral. A search of YouTube or TikTok shows seemingly endless videos of teachers sharing examples of their adoption of the approach in their courses. That has made the book an unusual bestseller for a title on teaching practice, with more than 200,000 copies sold and editions translated into a dozen languages.
EdSurge connected with Liljedahl recently to hear what he’s found and learn why what he sees as faulty teaching practices have stuck around for so long.
Some educators on Reddit discussion boards have pointed out that Liljedahl has not published research on whether his approach leads students to earn higher marks on standardized tests, focusing instead on student engagement. But the researcher says he has heard from hundreds of teachers who have reported improvements in test scores.
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: Early in your teaching experiments, you tried a classroom with no furniture at all. How did that go?
Peter Liljedahl: So early on in the research, what we realized was we're going to have to break norms. And that kind of became the mandate: Break norms and see if it improves student thinking. Can we get more students thinking? Can we get them thinking for longer? And we were trying anything and everything.
And one of the things was, let's take the furniture out of the room. Let's see what effect that has. It was almost a lark.
The kids come in and there's no furniture — no desks, no teacher desk, no file cabinet, nothing, just blank. And we didn't really expect that much out of that.
Well, here's the problem: Thinking improved. We had more students thinking and thinking for longer. And it took a year and a half for me to understand why that was.
For those of you who are listening, I don't recommend taking out the furniture. Teachers don't like teaching in classrooms without furniture. Teachers hated it. And this actually raised an interesting tension in the research, because it was so participatory and collaborative, but one of the things I've learned is there's no point coming out with solutions that teachers don't want to implement. We don't need another socially engineered solution that nobody wants to do. It has to be something that's within reach, within feasibility and within approachability by teachers.
But at the same time, I'm not going to use their comfort level to limit the things that we explore. It just all has to work together.
So why did it work?
It actually comes from a theory from the 1970s. It's a theory called systems theory. So we have to think of any social situation, any sort of situation that we engage in, whether it's scouts or Brownies or a ski club or a track club or a book club or a classroom, any place that has an organization, any structure, think of that as a system. So what is a system? A system is a collection of agents and forces.
So in a classroom, who are the agents? There's a teacher and there's the students. Now what are the forces? Well, the teacher's applying force to the students and the students are applying forces on the teacher through their resistance or compliance and so on. But the students also apply forces on each other. And I don't mean every student applies a force on every student, but some students apply forces on some students and so on and so forth, but they're not the only agents in the system.
We also got colleagues pushing, putting forces on the system, and then parents and administrators and then the curriculum. So what you get is you have all these agents and they act like nodes. And then you have these forces and they act like edges, and they're pushing on each other. And then when you have all these forces and agents pushing on each other, eventually the system reaches a stable point, a stasis, right? It stabilizes and everything is sort of in harmony with each other. That doesn't mean that the forces have disappeared, they're still there, but everything's sort of balancing each other out.
Now, how do we change a system? Number one is when you try to change the system, the system will defend itself because you have all these forces that have now reached the stable point. If you now move one of these agents or introduce a new agent or increase a force from one of these agents, the system wants to restabilize and the most with all those forces and all those agents, it's more likely to restabilize back to the way it was.
And this is what we were seeing in the students in these ‘studenting’ behaviors we talked about earlier. When students’ studenting behaviors are just their habits, that's how they behave. And when a student walks into a classroom that looks like every other classroom they've ever walked into, they're going to invoke those same habits. If they're a slacker in this lesson, they're going to be a slacker in that lesson. They are constant in this regard.
So they bring these habits into the room, and then the room pretty much rewards that because it's got its own forces and those forces are more like every other room and so on and so forth.
So how do you achieve change in any setting if that's the case? Well, the way you affect change is you have to overwhelm the system. You either have to apply a single force or multiple forces in a way that overwhelms the stability of the system. So the system has to restabilize into a new form. And what taking the furniture out did was it was an overwhelming force. When those students walked into the classroom, this didn't look like anything they'd seen before. So they left their habits at the door and then they were willing to construct new habits inside this setting.
You don’t recommend taking out the furniture, but you do have a set of strategies you recommend for what you call a “thinking classroom.” What are the main aspects?
Well, for one, the workspace. What was the optimal workspace?
Before I tell you that, let me tell you what the worst workspace was. The worst workspace was having students sit and write in their notebooks. That one performed worse through a metric of thinking than any other workspace.
What was optimal? Having students work in groups at vertical whiteboards. Except it didn't have to be a whiteboard, it just had to be vertical and erasable. So like a window would work, the side of a file cabinet would work. … Blackboards worked. It just had to be vertical and erasable.
They stood in their groups.
Why standing?
It's not that standing is so good, it’s that sitting is so bad.
It turns out that when students are sitting, they feel anonymous, and the further they sit from the teacher, the more anonymous they feel. And when students feel anonymous, they disengage. And that's both a conscious and a subconscious act. And what standing up did was it took away their anonymity.
Just think back to the last time you went to a professional development workshop. Think about that. You were in this room and you were sitting down and you felt anonymous. And in fact, you may have put yourself in the back row of this room so that you could feel anonymous, so that you could disengage, right? This is not a phenomenon that's unique to kids. This is human nature.
So what was the optimal way to form a group? Well, it turns out that strategically constructing the groups like we see in a lot of elementary schools turned out to be a disaster. That was not conducive to thinking. Likewise, having students set their own groups was a dumpster fire — that was not conducive to thinking.
The optimal was to form groups at random. And it wasn't good enough that it was random. It had to be visibly random. They had to see that it was random, and it had to change frequently. About once every 60 to 75 minutes, we re-randomized.
And any task we give them had to be a thinking task. Thinking is what we do when we don't know what to do. If we already know how to do it, it's not a thinking task, it's an exercise.
Or busywork, I guess somebody might call it.
A thinking task had to be something that they don't know how to do — which means that if they're going to have to think, they're going to get stuck. But it also means that we can't pre-teach them how to do it.
So here we have in a thinking classroom: The students standing at the whiteboards in their random groups of three, one marker per group, working on these thinking tasks.
And that produced thinking classrooms. All of a sudden, overnight, we went from 20 percent of students thinking for 20 percent of the time to 80 percent of students thinking for 80 percent of the time.
You paint a pretty critical picture of common teaching practices. What are you doing to get the word out about these issues and your approach?
Building thinking classrooms is not a curriculum, first of all. It's a pedagogy, it's a framework for helping teachers enact whatever curriculum that they have to work with. Curriculum is mandated, pedagogy is professional. So this helps teachers enact whatever curriculum content that they have to get through.
And I respect teachers' professional autonomy. I think teachers should have the professional freedom to judge for themselves what's going to work for them. And if this is going to work for them, I'm there trying to support it. I don't want to mandate this because I don't believe that mandating pedagogy is an effective way to change pedagogy.
And it's like growing everywhere. … The projection for the number of teachers using it in Denmark is in the 90 percent [range]. It's starting to gain traction in Australia. And the book is also coming out in Mandarin. It's coming out in Korean, it's coming out in Greek and Turkish and Polish and French. And so we're starting to see this. It's all these exponential curves at different points of time.
Listen to the complete interview, including more details about what goes into a ‘thinking classroom,’ on the EdSurge Podcast.
While I’m not proud to admit it, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought teaching remotely would be a dream come true. It wasn’t that I didn't value, cherish and miss the face-to-face interactions I had with my students, but because I naively assumed that my more reluctant colleagues would see the light and finally embrace edtech. As a techie at heart, I envisioned a digital utopia where post-pandemic schools would become fully digitized with students and teachers always remote and online while still preserving the magic of human interaction.
But when I looked over my classes after returning to in-person instruction, I had the sinking feeling that I had exchanged the traditional model of student instruction with individual seats in rows and columns for a replica with devices instead. Are we just educational luddites or has the edtech revolution fallen short of its promises? As educators, we need to be more discerning and discriminating about the use of technology in our classrooms and be willing to admit when the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
The Hype Has Left the Building
The tech landscape at my school was far from unique before the pandemic. Between early adopters and strident naysayers, most teachers fell in the middle. Google classrooms were rarely used, and laptops, while ubiquitous, were primarily used during standardized testing season. The landscape seemed ripe for a tech revolution but it never gained the critical mass needed to be realized.
While I thought the integration of new tech at my school would be a good thing, it turned out to be mediocre, at best. Working from home on a subpar laptop, most of my time was spent waiting for things to load. Even the best tech couldn't drown out the sounds and distractions from neighbors in my building who were also forced to shelter in place and work from home. A dropped Internet connection – a minor annoyance in the best of times – became the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Ironically, though, it was the lack of human interaction that became the central issue. Chat messages were not able to mimic lively in-person exchanges between students, shared documents couldn’t replace collaboration in real-time, and a collage of student avatars was certainly no substitute for seeing students face-to-face — even in the rare instances when they would choose to turn on their device cameras. When tech adoption was voluntary, these shortcomings could be mitigated by using technology to enhance rather than replace human-centric teaching. When there was no alternative to making it the centerpiece, its deficiencies became impossible to work around.
Being a computer science teacher, I thought I had a natural affinity for technology that could translate into a successful tech-agnostic approach to curriculum and instruction; however, by Thanksgiving of the following year, I had led one too many uninspiring and demoralizing online classes where it felt like I was talking into a deep, dark void. Swapping stories with fellow teachers over the past year, it is apparent that these experiences are nearly universal. As the medium and the messenger, technology became the scapegoat for all the frustration and discouragement teachers and students felt at that time, including myself. Ultimately, when put to the test, the edtech boom in 2020 fell far short of its hype.
The Exhaustion Lingers On
The lingering fatigue many teachers and students are experiencing with edtech is real, and in hindsight, completely predictable. Lockdowns and hybrid classes during the pandemic gave edtech companies a golden opportunity to peddle their wares to a captive audience, and it gave teachers enthusiastic about edtech a virtually limitless playground to try out new tools and apps. The tech deluge also necessitated that users create multiple accounts on multiple platforms, each with its own dashboards to monitor and quirks to work around. “I just delete all the emails from tech companies and people offering PD because it’s just too much,” a colleague told me in the later stages of the pandemic.
Even students, the “digital natives'' whom many of us assumed would be much more facile with technology, eventually got tired of juggling so many different platforms. In each of my classes — from freshman introductory programming to my senior-level advanced placement calculus — as the months went on, I noticed much lower student engagement with numerous tech platforms I used to teach. Every new app seemed to fill the gap and provide features that other apps were missing, so it was tempting to try and find a use case for all of them, but the experience left us dazed, confused and apathetic.
Much of my time was spent learning keystrokes and navigating preferences instead of thinking about the more impactful question of how to incorporate technology in a meaningful way that would facilitate the human aspects of teaching and learning, like discourse and creativity. The time I spent fiddling and tweaking classroom tech gave me a harmless, mindless and justifiable escape from confronting the realities of an unprecedented worldwide pandemic, but these distractions were also emblematic of my worldview before the world changed. My preference for a technological solution above all others was as much an unconscious attempt to mitigate and hide deficiencies in my own teaching as it was about my belief in the superiority of bits and bytes. This was a hard truth to swallow, one which spurred me to delete more than a few accounts and intentionally cherish the slivers of human contact that managed to make it through digital filters and firewalls.
Observing my classes during these early days back to in-person instruction and seeing a sea of silent, unresponsive, and almost shell-shocked students, I felt more defeated, ineffective and powerless than at any other time in my career. There is an exhaustion that lingers from that experience, an exhaustion that teachers have not had the time and space to recover from before being thrown back into the classroom to make up learning losses and bolster social-emotional learning deficits.
Accepting What Never Was
As we continue on in this new school year, I finally feel a sense of normalcy has returned to our campus. Classrooms are filled with excited and happy student voices, but among us teachers, there is still skepticism about edtech that remains. While that may seem unfortunate, it is actually healthy and, in the long run, serves as a cautionary tale for us all. Like all of the human actors in the pandemic drama, edtech was forced into a role that it was never designed for.
Our humanity remains at the heart of good teaching, and tech is best used to support, enhance and facilitate the human-to-human interactions that underlie it. When it tries to assume a starring role and become all things to all people, its rapidly diminishing benefits become outweighed by its drawbacks. While my digital utopia never came to fruition, at least edtech has given us a better ability to distinguish between a dream and reality.
Since the pandemic, mental health strains on youth have been put in the spotlight.
Pandemic closures provided some students with a chance to notice how stressed they are at school, says Jayne Demsky, founder of School Avoidance Alliance, an advocacy group that provides professional training to schools.
The time away from physical classrooms gave children and teens an experience with which to contrast the regular anxiety of being at school. Now that in-person school is back in session, Demsky argues, schools now have to coax these students back into the building.
“Just like [adults] rethought our work-life balance, and our employers had to treat us kindly and reengage us and to show us why we should work for them — kids are the same,” Demsky says.
Many students are missing school completely, and the number of chronically absent students — defined as those who miss 10 percent or more of the school year — has increased. Since the pandemic, roughly 13.6 million students are chronically absent.
Some share of students missing from school are suffering from school avoidance, sometimes also called school refusal, which is when children experience severe emotional or physical distress about going to school.
These kids might be hiding in the corner crying under their covers, tantruming and glued to their beds, or holding onto a wall, so their parents can’t drive them to class.
— Jayne Demsky
Rather than just a distaste for school, refusal can be visceral.
“These kids might be hiding in the corner crying under their covers, tantruming and glued to their beds, or holding onto a wall, so their parents can’t drive them to class,” Demsky says.
Avoidance has become a crisis in recent years, one that schools aren’t prepared to handle, according to mental health experts. Long term, it can leave students unprepared for life. It can knock students off the traditional developmental path and leave them without crucial social and emotional skills, says Anne Marie Albano, a clinical psychologist with experience in school avoidance. Often, other psychologists who spoke with EdSurge noted, there are underlying conditions that can exacerbate anxiety around school as well.
The strain of mental health woes has ratcheted up pressure on schools to provide support. But schools are stretched thin for mental health staff, with as many as 100,000 more mental health professionals needed around the country.
Some districts have gotten creative. A school district in Virginia even constructed a middle school building with extra glass in the hopes that more natural light will serve as a palliative. But a more common approach has been to ink contracts with telehealth companies.
Still, for families and teachers trying to tackle school avoidance, it can mean that there are few resources for the specialized interventions students need.
There are no clinical diagnostic criteria for avoidance, which takes a different form for each child. But generally, it's marked by sustained absence, which gets harder to correct the longer the student is out of the classroom, Albano says. Unlike some other forms of absence, it won’t go away on its own but requires intervention that’s tailored to the student and can account for the deeper reasons a student is avoiding school, she adds. Those reasons tend to be highly specific to the individual students, she specifies.
But it’s hard to solve a problem you don’t know about.
Desperate Measures
Many parents have never heard of school avoidance, and educators aren’t comprehensively trained on it, according to activists and health care professionals. Not all clinicians even know how to treat school avoidance. For parents, “It’s scary,” says Demsky of School Avoidance Alliance.
Schools can conflate avoidance with truancy or other forms of absenteeism that fail to consider the anxiety causing it, Demsky says. (Demsky started her organization after her experiences with her own son’s school avoidance, which led the police to her doorstep and left her “on the verge of an emotional breakdown.”)
The nuance can get lost in efforts to get students back in physical classrooms.
Post-pandemic, legislatures have looked to increase penalties for students missing school. Penalties can range from fines to threats of jail time if the parents are found to have failed to get their kids to school. In Texas, for instance, lawmakers proposed hiking up the fines for truancy to cut down on absences earlier this year. It was controversial with family groups for penalizing missed school rather than remedying the root causes.
But treating refusal like truancy makes it harder to solve the problem, according to activists like Demsky. “I’ve spoken to families and they said, ‘hey, if I could pay $500 and go to jail for a week and have my kid get better and go to school, I would do it.’ So that just shows you how desperate families are,” she says.
Instead, Demsky calls for schools to recognize when refusal is occurring, and to follow evidence-based paths. That means psychological evaluations, finding out whether there’s an undiagnosed learning disability that’s making school acutely uncomfortable for the student, and other measures such as exposure therapy, she says.
In the schools she works with, that requires finding “a champion,” someone who has a connection with the student to help draw them back into the school, she says. In that, it’s similar to addressing chronic absenteeism in general, which Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, says boils down to meaningful relationships.
For beleaguered educators, it’s yet another hat they’re being asked to wear. But for some students, it may be crucial, activists say.
“Schools have to step in and take the place of those missing mental health professionals. And they really have to step up and become the support structure for these families,” Demsky says.
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.
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.
Imagine not only waking up to a pandemic, forced into an isolated space without the physical and emotional support you need for learning, but also discovering that the place you call home has been deemed unlivable. This was the reality for many of the students and their families at Luther J. Price Middle School (LJPMS) families after the city of Atlanta condemned property in the Forest Cove neighborhood in 2021.
There were over 300 families that resided in Forest Cove, and many of the children from these households attended our school. Even worse, we were still in the midst of a pandemic; not only did we have to create innovative ways to teach and reach our children virtually, but we also had to ensure that our children and families were physically safe, nourished and mentally and emotionally sound to cope with the trauma they just experienced.
The irony here was not poor property management that condemned the properties in this community – the homes had been unlivable for many years prior. If anything, the issue shed light on the lack of investment in the local communities where our students live and exposed the gap in mental health resources for students and their families.
As a school, we knew that if our students and families didn’t have the support they needed, student learning and engagement would be severely impacted. Over the last two years, I worked with fellow educators and administrators at LPJMS to strategize ways to put social-emotional learning at the forefront of our curriculum and student and family engagement plan. What started as a daunting task became a mission to reignite the passion and engagement of our students while strengthening our local community.
Developing a Framework for Student Engagement
As the School and Community Engagement Manager and Parent Liaison, I worked with a team of LJPMS teachers and administrators to adopt a framework to re-engage students and families and restore a sense of love and belonging within the surrounding community. We decided that implementing a framework incorporating social-emotional learning (SEL) would help our students and families cope and heal from the inside out. SEL is defined as the process of developing self-awareness, self-control, and interpersonal skills that are vital for school, work, and life success. When individuals are equipped with these skills, they can better cope with everyday challenges and positively improve all aspects of their lives, and given the situation that we were in, there was no better time than the present.
Once our school identified the need for SEL, we were able to re-channel our energy and focus on the inputs that would get our students back on track. Our educational spaces transformed into sessions and platforms where students and their leaders could authentically be themselves and thrive in safe and supportive spaces. Specifically, every classroom included spaces where students could decompress, take a break, or meditate to be productive in the classroom setting. Those spaces included things such as therapeutic herbal diffusers, earphones to listen to calming sounds, books and journals to write their thoughts. Students appreciated these spaces and were able to utilize them to self-regulate their emotions, find healthy ways to process trauma and become more productive and present learners in the classroom setting.
After we reached the pandemic's peak and students could return to the classroom, we also knew it would be important to help them identify the significance of their place in the community. We wanted them to identify positive attributes about themselves and then leverage these attributes to build personal, social and academic goals. Teachers began building lessons centered on identity formation, and soon after, students began to embrace their identity and individuality which transformed our classroom and community culture. One of the most impactful ways our students exhibited their newfound confidence was by advocating for a new nutrition program in the school. Over the span of a few months, students captured pictures, videos and feedback from fellow students to build their case. When students presented their findings to our district leaders, the data revealed that over 70 percent of the students within the school were not eating breakfast and lunch. Students made the connection between healthy eating habits and student performance and identified choices district leaders and teachers could make to build a better nutrition program for students.
This presentation resulted in the district adopting a new food program for our district that was culturally appropriate, appealing, and good for students. When students saw the results of the work they had done, this affirmed how identity, advocacy and doing the work yields positive results.
For me, it was heartwarming to see students find their confidence after such a tragic event and I’m glad I took advantage of the opportunity to make connections and build trust with students so that we could grow into the community we sought.
Family Engagement and Support
Just as we knew we could not instruct from a one-size-fits-all mentality, we also had to apply that same philosophy to student families. Our parents yearned to build upon their knowledge to support their children's learning journey. Witnessing firsthand the stressors many of our families experienced allowed our teachers and leaders in the learning community to understand how we could better support our children and the families we serve.
This was the beginning of my transition from the classroom to a role as a family engagement liaison. I asked to be a conduit to engage with our families to re-establish trust, ensure families feel welcomed and build a stronger connection between our school community and families in the Forest Cove neighborhood.
First, I started by establishing Parent University, a place where parents could come and access resources to create better conditions for themselves and their children. Parents can access resources such as GED coursework, resume writing, financial literacy and individual and family therapy. During this time, I also leveraged our in-house partnership relationship with Communities in Schools who provided a team of liaisons in LJPMS that could work with students and families one-on-one to understand basic needs and help them secure housing, medical assistance and meals.
We also made it a point to improve our relationship with our external community partners including COR, a non-profit organization that I worked with to provide programming and support to trauma-impacted students and families who are marginalized by poverty and race-based educational inequities. Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation has been a viable resource to our families displaced by the demolition of Forest Cove, in addition to families who are dealing with landlord/legal issues, or those who are survivors of intimate partner violence. Last but not least, Chris 180 – one of the premier mental health, child welfare and family organizations in the Southeast – has been readily available on-site to meet the mental and emotional needs of our students and staff.
A Community That Heals Together Stays Together
Through this process, we learned to relinquish what power we thought we had in this space and become vulnerable. We depended on one another, loved on one another, and supported each other at a time when so much was uncertain for us all.
This community exemplified resilience at a time when most would have given up. We tapped into our creativity and learned to work outside of the box. We became foot soldiers and fought for the social-emotional learning of our students and the well-being of our families. If they would not come to us, then we came to them. While we celebrate the impact of the work we have done, we know must continue to heal and build our community to keep our students and families engaged.
Of course, things will never be what they once were, but we are building a better school and community – more importantly, we are building leaders. Shifting from a role as an instructional leader to a school and community engagement leader was a blessing. In this role, I am able to do work that creates a bridge from the classroom to students’ homes and communities. While the displacement of our students and families tested our resolve, I am grateful to work with colleagues and peers who care about improving our students’ circumstances just as much as I do.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On a Friday morning in March, students and teachers gathered at a hip hotel here to reimagine what their high schools could be.
The delegation from Calvin Coolidge High School was thinking big — as in, global. For months, they’d been crafting plans to reframe their school’s curriculum around the United Nations sustainable development goals, 17 lofty targets that world leaders named as priorities in 2015 that include zero hunger, gender equality, and clean water and sanitation for everyone on Earth.
To explain this idea to the more than 100 people gathered in the hotel ballroom, students from Coolidge tossed around a colorful soccer ball. Each panel stitched to the ball represented one of the U.N. goals, which students referred to, casually, as “SDGs.” Each time someone caught the ball, he or she read aloud the SDG that landed face up, then reflected for a moment about what that global goal might mean locally, or personally.
A failing city is not a city, said one student.
No justice, no peace, added another.
If there is no community, there is no city, said a third.
This activity was part of a design workshop hosted by DC + XQ, a partnership between the city’s public schools and the nonprofit XQ Institute. Funded by Emerson Collective, a corporation that donates and invests money in social change efforts, XQ Institute currently supports programs intended to “rethink high school” at 30 schools and school districts nationwide. The organization describes its ultimate goal as graduating more students who have fundamental knowledge and skills, collaborate well, think creatively and are motivated to keep learning throughout their lives.
When I first came to this school, I felt as if student voices didn’t matter. It went from me feeling like my voice was never heard to me bringing out ideas that are constantly heard.
— Shamiyah McGee
XQ Institute hosts contests that award money and other resources to proposals for changing high schools, or for creating new ones. The organization helps teenagers, teachers and school leaders hone the visions they pitch over many months by guiding them through information-gathering activities like hosting focus-group conversations with parents and taking field trips to check out thriving schools in other cities.
The first two high schools to win the DC + XQ competition, in 2022, had embraced the themes of Afrofuturism and entrepreneurship. At this event in the hotel, representatives from other high schools in the city fine-tuned their own proposals, hoping to be selected into the second cohort of winners.
Although the verb keeps changing, D.C. is no stranger to attempts to “reform” or “rethink” its schools. Past efforts have yielded mixed results. And school district leaders here say they have encountered some skepticism about the DC + XQ campaign.
Yet as schools try to shake off the side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for fresh approaches to reach students seems clear. In the nation’s capital and nationwide, academic test scores are down and many students regularly bail on classes.
It’s a moment when XQ Institute’s agenda — that schools should offer more project-based learning, allow more flexibility in their schedules, and assign classwork more explicitly connected to career paths that interest students — may excite education leaders searching for solutions.
Yet measuring whether a redesigned high school is working as intended, and why, is difficult to do. And evidence about whether DC + XQ’s work makes a lasting difference in the lives of D.C. teens won’t arrive for a while.
In the meantime, the checkered history of school reform did not seem top of mind for students from Coolidge. Some said that simply being asked what they think about their high school had already improved their perceptions about education.
“When I first came to this school, I felt as if student voices didn’t matter,” said Shamiyah McGee, a rising junior who is participating in the redesign process. “It went from me feeling like my voice was never heard to me bringing out ideas that are constantly heard.”
Building Partnerships
XQ Institute launched with a bang. In 2015, it created the Super School Project, a contest to distribute millions of dollars to proposals for innovative high schools. In 2016, XQ Institute spent more millions on a public awareness campaign to promote its ideas about reforming education, papering its branding on buses and bus stops. In 2017, it advanced its message through a celebrity-studded network TV special, featuring Tom Hanks and James Corden doing karaoke on a school bus.
When wealthy donors and foundations have tried to improve schools by searching for a single innovation or intervention that will boost education — the way a new vaccine can dramatically improve public health — it usually hasn’t worked, said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.
“If you look at the sum total of the efforts, I’m not sure you’d give them the highest grades,” he said. “Focusing on education, education reform — whatever you want to call it — achieving better educational outcomes, as a philanthropist, is a good way to become humble rather quickly, because it usually doesn’t go as folks hope.”
Yet he thinks that philanthropy leaders are exercising more humility lately, including about education. He has observed that donors and foundation executives are doing more listening to the people closest to the problems they hope to solve. He thinks philanthropists are realizing “that in fact there might be a lot of expertise and experience in communities, maybe even in families themselves that are affected.”
That’s the approach that D.C. school leaders said they’ve been taking for the past few years as they started their own efforts to rethink the city’s schools. In 2018, D.C. Public Schools created a design lab, which invited principals, teachers and staff to workshop solutions to problems.
Then the district grew the effort into a wholesale redesign process with two high schools in D.C. neighborhoods where average income levels are lower than in the rest of the city and where the vast majority of residents are Black. School leaders talked with thousands of community members there, according to Paige Hoffman, deputy chief for school improvement at D.C. Public Schools.
“Too often, the folks who are closest to the problems or issues that we’re trying to tackle are furthest from decision-making,” Hoffman said. “And we thought we should change that, and we should shake that up.”
In these conversations, D.C. residents reflected on questions like What do you want to see out of school? and Why has school not been working?
In February 2022, XQ Institute and D.C. Public Schools formed its partnership to redesign high schools in the city, which granted the school district up to $25 million. (For comparison, in its 2022 fiscal year, D.C. spent about $2 billion in local taxpayer dollars on public education.)
To Hoffman, the timing felt right. The COVID-19 pandemic had weakened the city’s social immune system, undermining institutions like schools that help to prevent the spread of contagions like crime and unemployment.
When XQ Institute came calling, Hoffman said, “I think it was in many ways exactly what we as a school district really needed.”
After all, she had heard D.C. residents express that “we have not been in community together in years, and we desperately need to rethink high school, especially when we think about all that our students lost over the previous years and also all of the opportunities that are to come for them.”
Leaders at Coolidge felt similarly. When DC + XQ collected and shared information with them about how their students had fared during the health crisis, “the data was really compelling to us,” said Kira Rowe, a school counselor at Coolidge. “It was definitely eye-opening.”
Students at Coolidge said they wanted more hands-on learning and a deeper understanding about how school prepared them for the real world. They reported being anxious and depressed at higher rates than before the pandemic. And they wanted to change what felt to them like segregation taking root in their school building, creating tension between the two-thirds of students who are Black and the fifth of students who are English language learners, most of whom are Hispanic.
Calvin Coolidge High School is participating in the DC + XQ competition. Photo by Brylie Christopher Oxley / Wikimedia Commons.
Coolidge administrators and educators decided to develop a proposal for the DC + XQ contest. They sought to blend student well-being, sustainable practices and academic rigor. Then they happened upon the United Nations sustainable development goals, Rowe said, “which we just instantly fell in love with.”
Coolidge students interviewed their classmates to find out whether the theme felt meaningful.
“A question I had to ask them was which one of these SDGs they cared about the most. There was never a time a student said, ‘I don’t care about any of them,’” McGee, the rising junior, recalled. “It showed these SDGs actually can have a heart to heart experience with the students.”
Her personal favorite? “Gender equality — SDG 5,” she said. “I can connect myself to that.”
Because the global goals emphasize universal values, Coolidge leaders thought that they might appeal to students and families who had immigrated to D.C. from elsewhere. One evening, the school invited families from African and Central American countries to share a meal of Ethiopian and Latin American food and to talk about which sustainable development goals resonated most with them. The response was enthusiastic, school leaders said.
All this feedback suggested that the theme had potential to improve the school curriculum.
“Sustainable practices seem to be the only way to at least continue to give back to our planet, make it healthy as well, and make our students healthy,” said Coolidge principal Semanthe Bright. “Why not rethink Coolidge? We can’t go back to doing the same thing we did before the pandemic. Now is the time.”
Engaging Students
William Hayes-Jerome is a rising junior at Coolidge. He described himself as a student-athlete — he plays football for the school team — and as an advocate for his classmates. He’s observed that many of them don’t much like being at school.
Maybe, he said in an interview, eight hours of lessons is just too long.
“Most students don’t have the right attention span to be sitting there in the classes,” Hayes-Jerome said.
He suggested that it might help to change the schedule of the school day, so that it offers more opportunities for students to move around, and, he explained, to “actually communicate with somebody about how the day is going.”
Student disengagement is not a totally new problem. In surveys of 230,000 students in grades three through 12 conducted from 2012 to 2017 by YouthTruth, an education research and consulting nonprofit, only 46 percent of high school respondents felt that what they were learning in class helped them outside of school. And only 52 percent of students across middle and high school agreed or strongly agreed that they enjoyed coming to school most of the time.
Data and anecdotes suggest that the pandemic has only made those trends worse.
Studies from DC + XQ found some of the city’s students reported being bored in class, as well as feeling unsure of why they were studying the assigned curriculum. This dissatisfaction is tied to high levels of truancy in schools, said Keith Dysarz, head of state and local partnerships for XQ Institute. For example, nearly half of D.C. students (48 percent) were absent for 10 percent or more of the 2021-2022 school year, according to a report from the D.C. Policy Center, a research organization.
While there is a lot of focus on grades and test scores coming out of the health crisis, “academic learning loss does not happen in a vacuum,” observed Jen Vorse Wilka, executive director of YouthTruth. To succeed intellectually and emotionally, she explained, students need “strong culture, engaging learning opportunities that feel relevant and connected to students’ lives, relationships, a sense of agency, and an opportunity to express their own opinions about their learning.”
If students aren’t engaged, they actually aren’t learning.
— Keith Dysarz
Those qualities align with what XQ Institute leaders said they advocate for in redesigned high schools.
“If students aren’t engaged, they actually aren’t learning,” Dysarz said in an interview. “For us, engagement isn’t just a lesson hook, or, you know, maybe an interesting topic that they care about. It’s also, quite honestly, about making it relevant and real world.”
At the DC + XQ design day in March, students and teachers from Coolidge worked in small groups to rearrange Post-it notes on large posters attached to the ballroom’s walls, brainstorming activities related to the sustainable development goals that they hoped would be both educational and enjoyable to their classmates.
Ideas surfaced about planning field trips to a hospital; asking students to create community service events; making more use of the school garden; and using gallery walks to prompt students to respond to each other’s work.
Students at Coolidge High School are learning about the United Nations sustainable development goals.
Then the small groups met up, and students offered each other feedback on their ideas. Teachers and administrators chimed in, too. One student wondered aloud whether certain activities would seem too ordinary to other teenagers. An adult suggested that rather than trying to make a school exercise feel “fun,” they instead aim to make it “engaging” and “interactive.”
An idea floated about using social media as part of a classroom activity. That might be too distracting, someone said. Teachers snapped their fingers in agreement.
An educator reminded the students to consider how to design experiences for all of their peers — not just the kinds of students who earn all A’s (or show up to extracurricular design workshops). They talked about whether a little competition helps to motivate participation in class. They thought about how upperclassmen can help set a good example for younger students. They discussed the value of creating multiple activity options for their peers to choose from.
As the students broke back up into smaller groups, the conversation at one table dove into assignment ideas about the importance of water. Students and educators talked about the public health crisis in Flint, Michigan, where the water supply is tainted with lead. They talked about the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. Someone pulled up photos she had taken during a trip to Colombia of piles of waste she saw there.
By the lunch break, a seminar-style discussion about SDG 6 — clean water and sanitation — was well underway.
Coolidge students and educators participated at a DC + XQ design event. Photo courtesy of Kira Rowe.
Getting Flexible
Pulling off elaborate student projects requires a certain amount of flexibility in the curriculum and in the school day. And making schools more flexible is a top XQ Institute priority.
The prospect of more freedom appealed to science teacher Nikki Wallace when she joined the faculty of Crosstown High School, an XQ Institute partner and charter school in Memphis, Tennessee, which opened in 2018. The summer before the first school year, she collaborated with other teachers to design interdisciplinary projects relevant to real-world situations.
It was exciting. It was challenging. Wallace recalls the “struggle” of trying to devise a long-term assignment about traveling to Mars with a math teacher who wasn’t convinced that it would provide adequate math instruction.
“It wasn’t easy at all,” Wallace said. “It built up a lot of tension.”
Then she had to sell the idea to her students. The framing she used to introduce that project — what’s wrong here on Earth and why do we need to explore Mars? — didn’t land as well as she had hoped. She said that at first, her students got so stuck pondering earthly problems that their imaginations didn’t lift off into space.
And yet, she believes that project made a lasting impression. As those students progressed through high school, Wallace said, the one assignment they seemed to talk about most was the Mars project from that first year.
For a teacher like Wallace to take a risk and try a new instructional approach, she said, the education ecosystem has to have the right conditions to support her.
“You gotta have the willingness of the leadership team to be flexible,” she said. “If leadership sees the benefits, it allows for creativity to happen.”
In D.C., questions about how much flexibility educators and students really have to redesign their schools come up regularly, according to Hoffman, the district leader. After all, schools are governed by plenty of federal and district policies intended to ensure that they impart a rigorous education. School officials also must contend with budget constraints, the needs and interests of educator employees, and the logistics of keeping track of hundreds of teenagers from day to day.
Hoffman hears D.C. educators say, “You want me to dream big, but what parameters” — school rules and regulations — “are you going to pull down?”
So the district is experimenting with change. It’s running pilot programs that allow students to participate in internships during the school day. Leaders are also working to figure out whether certain career and technical courses can convey academic credit — like an engineering elective fulfilling a science requirement that counts toward a diploma.
“You have to figure out how to get comfortable with trying something, with failing, and then learning from that,” Hoffman said.
Creating Accountability
Will creativity in the classroom and flexibility in how students demonstrate their learning be enough to transform Coolidge?
In education, metamorphosis requires more than mere tinkering. So said Elizabeth Chu, executive director of the Center for Public Research and Leadership, an education research and consulting arm of Columbia University.
She argued that true change requires rewiring entire education governance structures, so that they stop delivering “uniform services” and instead prioritize “uniformly attending to the differences that kids and families present and meeting their unique needs.”
“When you're working with these schools, you have to be aware [that] classrooms are sitting within schools, are sitting within districts, are sitting within states, are sitting, obviously, within the federal structure,” Chu said. “And so it means rethinking the policies and procedures at every level of the system that allow for the flexibility and innovation that you need at the particular school level.”
And so, over time, XQ Institute has turned its attention toward influencing policy and reshaping whole school systems, not just individual schools. In 2018, it published a guide encouraging state leaders to adopt the nonprofit’s reform strategies. In 2022, Rhode Island approved new regulations for the state’s high schools after working closely with XQ Institute. Now, the nonprofit is leading an effort to change the national “seat time” requirements that mandate students spend a certain number of hours in the classroom to earn credits and credentials.
Spokespeople for XQ Institute emphasized the grassroots flavor of each school redesign effort. Yet these processes did not germinate totally organically.
The nonprofit’s guide for policymakers suggests a road map for how to prompt communities to change their schools. Step one: Announce a challenge, and make it “ambitious, inspiring, and different.” Step two: Move people to action, with incentives like money. Step three: Help guide the redesign process so that it focuses on “equity, innovation, and excellence,” perhaps by using the resources developed by XQ Institute.
Whether a reform effort emerged from the playbook of a philanthropy juggernaut might not matter much if it ends up working well for students and schools. But that’s not always easy to assess.
One reason why is that change can take a long time, and results can be uneven. For example, after philanthropists (including Mark Zuckerberg) gave $200 million in 2010 to reform public schools in Newark, New Jersey, student academic achievement actually declined for several years, according to the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. Eventually, math scores recovered and English scores surpassed their original levels, but by then, of course, some of the students who experienced the initial shock to the school system had aged out. And researchers found that much of the improvement could be attributed to students enrolling in different schools, rather than achievement going up at existing schools.
Another is that metrics can tell contradictory stories. For example, the D.C. Policy Center report found that the on-time high school graduation rate in the city has been been rising —from 68 percent in the 2018-2019 school year to 75 percent in the 2021-2022 school year — ostensibly a positive development. Yet the college enrollment rate within six months of graduation has been falling — from 56 percent for the class of 2019 to 51 percent for the class of 2021.
Some of the same organizations that poured money into school reform have since supported studies about what actually works. For example, in June, research firm MDRC published an analysis funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation about which frequently used school reform strategies are linked to better outcomes. They include:
Strengthening principal leadership
Using student data to improve teaching
Setting high standards for academic rigor
Enabling students to build personal relationships with educators
Empowering teachers to set goals and make decisions
Organizing teachers into teams that provide mutual support
Providing students extra academic help
Extending classes to allow for longer instructional time
Measuring these kinds of interventions early and often makes a difference in education reform efforts, according to Chu.
“A lot of these redesign processes, especially ones that are very user-centered, are extremely attentive to the process and very intentional in monitoring how things are going. So it’s not five years down the road that you’d realize things aren’t on the right track,” Chu said. “Let’s assess — kind of every single day, every single month, every single semester — how things are going, so that we are serving kids in classrooms today to the best of our ability.”
XQ Institute does help schools conduct audits at the start of their partnerships to assess what’s been working and not working well. These measure quantitative factors like student transcript data as well as qualitative feedback from students about how prepared they feel for life after high school, whether their academic options align with their personal passions and how supportive they feel their teachers are.
Yet XQ Institute does not see itself as the party accountable for ensuring the success of the changes it sets in motion. After all, as a spokesperson put it, flatly, in writing, “XQ does not operate schools.”
However, the nonprofit did share through a spokesperson that “XQ gathers data directly from our schools to understand student experiences in real-time and is also working with a best-in-class third-party evaluator, MDRC, who is conducting a longitudinal study about XQ schools’ impact on their students.” The firm is about a year away from publishing quantitative data, the spokesperson said.
For now, XQ Institute readily shares statistics indicating successes from the high schools it has worked with across the country. For example, at Crosstown in Memphis, 75 percent of the graduating class of 2022 planned to enroll in four-year colleges, according to XQ Institute, higher than the national rate of 47 percent. And 95 percent of its seniors graduated, compared to 80 percent in the surrounding district and 90 percent in the state of Tennessee.
These data points don’t show that, in its short existence, Crosstown has experienced leadership turnover, as well as a walkout among students advocating for a bigger say in how the school functions.
Of course, even if a reform effort worked wonders, it could still raise questions. Like, who gets to attend a redesigned high school and who gets left out?
“You think back to charter school models that have been around for a long, long time. The idea is that they can be laboratories of innovation, and then those innovations can infiltrate the rest of the public schools in that city — and that transfer doesn’t necessarily happen,” said Vorse Wilka, of YouthTruth. “The intention is laudable. And my question would be to what extent it plays out, and to what extent it is broadly accessible.”
And what are the ethics of testing out new school models on students in real time?
“When we’re talking about redesign, we are talking about experimentation to some extent,” Chu acknowledged. But she countered that “when we don’t make changes, and we kind of try and try and try again the same method, you might argue that that’s a less responsible form of experimentation, because we already have an evidence base that indicates that future performance will likely follow past performance, to some extent.”
We need to hold elected officials accountable for the choices they make, and the decisions they make, and what influence they choose to give to others, and who they listen to, and who they take resources from.
— Phil Buchanan
And what are the implications of a private organization giving millions of dollars to shape the operations of a city’s public schools?
“I think it’s complicated and nuanced, and that the most effective philanthropic efforts engage with those questions, and engage with the people they seek to help, to make sure that those people see that help as the help that they want,” said Buchanan, of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. “But then, also, we need to hold elected officials accountable for the choices they make, and the decisions they make, and what influence they choose to give to others, and who they listen to, and who they take resources from.”
Hoffman, of D.C. Public Schools, said she has encountered some fear and skepticism that D.C.’s redesigned high schools won’t serve students well. Or that the district isn’t serious about seeing the effort through. Or that the project is too idealistic and unrealistic at a time when plenty of youth in the city are worried about life’s basics, like safety.
“I am very frank that we need to earn your trust and we need to be showing you. Don’t just listen to me sit up here and pitch a great vision for you. Hold us accountable, right?” Hoffman said.
But she hopes city residents won’t simply critique from the sidelines, either.
“We also need community members at the table with us along the way,” Hoffman said. “The work of strong schools is not just the work of the public school system alone. It’s the work of families, it’s the work of community partners, it’s the work of higher ed organizations. It’s really about the community and the city.”
Seeking Transformation
Soon after the DC + XQ design session at the hotel, educators took three dozen students from Coolidge to visit the United Nations headquarters in New York City. They saw the golden general assembly hall. They watched world leaders deliberate during hearings. And, undeterred by a winter storm, some students caught their first glimpse of Times Square and the Empire State Building.
In June, DC + XQ named Coolidge as one of four schools in its second cohort of partners.
Coolidge students visited the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Photo courtesy of of Kira Rowe.
This coming school year, the high school will continue to refine its new vision. Coolidge will offer a capstone research class based on the United Nations sustainable development goals, which will support students in working on projects with partners including the Smithsonian Institution, the Humane Society, an urban farm and local universities. Students will have more opportunities to travel internationally. Teachers will have more opportunities to learn how to incorporate place-based learning into their classrooms.
Students list the ways that joining in the redesign process has already changed high school for them. Daisy Garcia-Vasquez, a rising senior, said she now has closer relationships with her teachers, and she feels a new sense of school spirit that doesn’t revolve only around sports teams. Hayes-Jerome said he feels like he’s helping to create real change by speaking out on behalf of his classmates.
McGee said she’s been inspired by “seeing so many students come together” through the redesign process. By listening to her peers at Coolidge and students at other high schools across the city, she’s realized that all of their thoughts pooled together can be distilled into one potent drop.
“We all have the same idea: We want school to be more of a safe and interactive and engaging environment for us,” she said.
About three dozen students toured the UN headquarters. Photo courtesy of of Kira Rowe.
That single bead of water may ripple out, into the wider city. McGee wants D.C. to support healthier food options — that’s SDG 3. Hayes-Jerome wants to see less gun violence in the city — that’s SDG 16.
Garcia-Vasquez said she hadn’t paid much attention to the environment before she learned about the SDGs. After taking a pilot version of the new Coolidge capstone class, though, she realized she’s passionate about the natural world.
“Something I would love for D.C. to change is the littering,” she said. “If you see trash every day, it makes you feel like you’re in a nasty environment. It changes your mood. If you live in a clean environment, you will feel better.”
Principal Bright said she looks forward to the day she can track graduates and see what contributions they’re making to the wider world because of what they learned at Coolidge.
“I would like to see how they have taken their capstone experience, their travel, as well as their research on the United Nations sustainability goals, and transform wherever they are in society,” Bright said.
That transformation need not wait for some far-off future. Educators at Coolidge said they are advocating to start D.C.’s first voluntary local review committee, to push the city they call home to work toward achieving the sustainable development goals.
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