Chalkbeat

Germany, known for sorting kids into college and vocational tracks, takes a more flexible approach

2024-03-19T09:00:00+00:00

This story about German vocational training was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

COLOGNE, Germany — Neriman Raim, a 16-year-old student in this northwestern German city, thought that after finishing school she’d want to work in an office.

But two years ago, she did a two-week internship in an architect’s bureau, and it was tedious. Later, a placement working with kindergartners led her to consider a career as a teacher — but not of kids this young. The next school year, she spent three weeks supervising older children as they did their homework.

Neriman now plans to become an educator working with grade-school children. After finishing school this summer, she’ll participate in a year-long placement to confirm that teaching is the right career for her before going to a technical college. Her internships offered a glimpse of what working life could look like, she said: “I could see what a day is like with kids.”

Neriman is taking part in Kein Abschluss ohne Anschluss, or KAoA, — or “no graduation without connection” — a program that has been rolled out across the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to help students better plan for their futures. Young people get support with resumes and job applications; in ninth grade, they participate in short internships with local businesses and have the option of doing a year-long, one-day-a week work placements in grade 10.

“You don’t learn about a job in school,” said Sonja Gryzik, who teaches English, math, and career orientation at the school Neriman attends, Ursula Kuhr Schule. “You have to experience it.”

Neriman Raim, 16, thought she wanted to work in an office — until she actually tried it. The KAoA program allows students to get work experience in school and think about their future goals.

Germany and other Western European countries have long directed students into career paths at earlier ages than in the U.S., often placing kids onto university tracks or vocational education starting at age 10. Students in Germany can embark on apprenticeships directly after finishing general education at age 16 in grade 10, attending vocational schools that offer theoretical study, alongside practical training at a company. College-bound kids stay in school for three more years, ending with an entry exam for university.

The apprenticeship system, which is credited with keeping youth unemployment low, has drawn strong interest in the U.S. amid growing disenchantment with university education. Youth apprenticeships have begun to pop up in several U.S. states, and career exposure programs are expanding. “Many of the best jobs our country has to offer don’t require a college education,” wrote workforce training advocate Ryan Craig in his recent book “Apprentice Nation: How the ‘Earn and Learn’ Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America.”

But in Germany, the hundreds-year-old vocational system has faced headwinds. There is longstanding criticism that low-income students and those from immigrant backgrounds are channeled into vocational fields and away from more academic ones. More recently, despite the high demand for workers in the trades, students and their parents are increasingly hesitant about vocational education. Germany’s labor market has become digitized, and young people are keeping their options open before settling on a career path. Meanwhile, the pandemic had an outsized impact on vocational training, forcing many programs to close for long periods. And recent immigrants may be unaware of voc-ed’s high standing.

All this has led more students to choose to attend university. Yet many drop out: According to recent data, up to 28% of students fail to complete a degree. The figure for students in humanities and natural sciences is even higher, up to 50%.

This high failure rate, coupled with labor market needs, has led policymakers to tweak traditional vocational models to make them more flexible. Students in the academic track increasingly have access to both apprenticeships and university, and some students who complete vocational qualifications can still go on to attend a university, where options for combining practical experience with academic studies are growing.

German schools put more focus on career pathways

The program Neriman participates in, KAoA, is part of a wave of efforts to engage all students, not just those bound for vocational programs, in workforce preparation. All ninth and 10th grade students in North Rhine-Westphalia must do a three-week-long practical internship. Those on a vocational track begin apprenticeships after completing 10th grade, while students hoping to go to university attend academic high school for three additional years. The program encourages students from all backgrounds to think about their futures in concrete terms, said Bernhard Meyer, a teacher at Ursula Kuhr who coordinates KAoA in 11 towns across the Northwestern region.

“We have every type of possibility,” Meyer said. “And there’s not only apprenticeship or university, there are some studies in between.”

Related: Middle schools are experimenting with themes like math, sustainability and the arts. But is it all just branding?

At Ursula Kuhr Schule, students in the school’s woodworking lab build birdhouses and toy cars. A state-of-the-art kitchen lets students develop their culinary skills. An extensive garden, full of herbs, and boasting a hen house, offers an opportunity to test out horticultural skills.

Students take field trips to learn about different jobs. For example, on a trip to the airport they learn about positions such as flight attendant, fire service, security or aircraft mechanic. Employees from Ford, which has a plant in Cologne, visit the school to talk about their work with students and parents.

While university is free in Germany, students who study vocational fields can achieve financial security earlier on.

Students build a rainbow lamp together with teacher Frank Rasche during a woodworking class at Ursula-Kuhr-Schule, a vocational school in Cologne Chorweiler, Germany. The country faces a shortage of students pursuing careers in the trades.

Businesses in Germany seem keen to participate in vocational training. Chambers of commerce and industry support company-school partnerships and help smaller businesses train their interns. Students are even represented in unions, said Julian Uehlecke, a representative of the youth wing of Germany’s largest trade union alliance.

The goal of apprenticeships is to offer training in the classroom and in the workplace. The system gives students “a pretty good chance of finding a well-paid stable job,” said Leonard Geyer, a researcher at the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research.

Lukas Graf, head of the Swiss Observatory for Vocational Education and Training described the “basic principle” of Germany’s program as providing all-around training: “in the classroom, in the seminar room, and training in the workplace.”

Mile Glisic, a 15-year-old student at Ursula Kuhr Schule, is doing a long-term work placement at a hardware store and considering an apprenticeship in sales. Earning money while training for a career will help him understand financial planning, and prepare him for a future in which he has a house and family, he said. “I think it’s better because you start to learn what to do with your money when you’re younger,” said Mile.

While the KAoA program has rolled out across all 2,000 schools in this region of Germany, including those that focus on university preparation, Ursula Kuhr Schule prioritizes practical education. Students, more than half of whom come from minority backgrounds, begin career orientation when they are just 12 or 13.

Parents hesitant on vocational options

Backers of vocational training say it supports social inclusion by giving young people training that allows them to secure well-paid, stable jobs. But, as in the United States, many argue it limits the prospects of students from marginalized backgrounds and reproduces generational inequalities. This is “a huge debate,” said Graf, of the Swiss Observatory.

To Graf, the value of either a university degree or practical study depends on the particular courses chosen. A university graduate in a field like philosophy, for example, might end up with fewer well-paid opportunities than someone with vocational education training, he said.

The pandemic deepened many parents’ ambivalence about vocational training. While university teaching continued through online platforms, on-the-job training came to a stop when companies had to shut down, said Hubert Ertl, vice president and director of research at Germany’s Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training and professor of vocational education research at the University of Paderborn.

Parents have a big influence. Research by Ertl’s institute shows that when students express interest in a vocational program, their parents often talk them out of it and push them toward higher ed instead. “That’s often not doing the young people any favors,” he said.

His organization works with schools and parents to tackle preconceived ideas about vocational education. “We’ve started to engage with parents quite directly because parents often don’t know about the vocational programs at all, and they don’t know what opportunities they afford.”

Tim Becker, 20, is doing an IT apprenticeship after completing the university entry exam at his academically oriented high school in Cologne. At first, his parents, who worked for CocaCola, were uneasy. German parents usually want their children to go to university, “especially if they go to a gymnasium,” Becker wrote in an email, referring to academic high schools.

But in school, his career classes urged students to compare the benefits of university to a practical qualification. For Becker, who’d always loved computers, hands-on training beat out academic theory. “I am just not that guy that likes to sit all day in any lectures at some university,” he said. Some of his old classmates have already dropped out of college and are pursuing internships, he added.

Teacher Frank Rasche oversees a student during woodworking class at Ursula-Kuhr-Schule. Germany is known for sorting students into academic and vocational tracks, but now the lines are blurring.

Parents at Ursula Kuhr attend meetings, called “future conferences,” with their kids several times a year. Mile’s parents, who moved to Germany from Serbia when he was 9, have met his teachers frequently. “I know that they were very happy with it,” he said, referring to his career path. “They had some questions about it. But I think they’re thinking good about it because, I mean, it’s only doing good for us.”

Neriman’s mother, who is a nanny, “loved the idea” that her daughter would teach in grade-school, Neriman said. The teachers and staff at Ursula Kuhr help students gain confidence about their futures, she said. “The teachers do everything for us — they don’t want anyone to finish school and have nothing.”

Labor market needs drive educational changes

Other European countries are seeing similar labor market needs. Denmark, whose minister for education trained as a bricklayer, is facing a significant skills shortage in vocational fields, said Camilla Hutters, head of the National Center for Vocational Education, a Danish research organization.

In the 1960s, practical and project-based learning was common in Danish schools, Hutters said. That changed in the 1990s, when Denmark scored poorly on international rankings like the Program for International Student Assessment. Now, economic needs are causing a swing back to vocational and career education.

Today, Danish students as young as 6 might visit a workplace or spend a week learning about a particular career, she said, and discussions are under way to further integrate practical learning in primary school. Danish leaders also want to improve collaboration with business across the education system, including at the university level, Hutters said, where an increasing number of courses are likely to involve working with a company. Political leaders are discussing reforms that would “improve practical learning in the whole system,” she said.

But a tension between on-the-job training and academia persists in Danish thinking, she added. Although policymakers want to expand the practical element across all levels of education, university still remains the goal for many students and their parents. “This is a little bit of a mixed tendency at the same time, right now in Denmark,” she said.

Back in Germany, Becker will finish his internship in September 2024 with expertise in IT services and network security. Throughout his training, he has earned money — and will get up to €1,260 (roughly $1,360) per month in his final year — which has meant he could avoid taking on part-time work as some of his college friends have done. “You don’t need to sit all day in university and go to work in the evening to pay your bills,” he said.

And it suits him. He grew up surrounded by computers, tinkering alongside his dad, and that love of technology persisted through his teens. He likes working with his hands and doing, “something where I can learn practical things,” he said.

Long-awaited FAFSA fix means students from immigrant families can finally finish aid applications

2024-03-18T20:41:17+00:00

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Many students breathed a sigh of relief last week when federal education officials announced critical fixes to the federal application for financial aid that allows parents without Social Security numbers to contribute information to the form.

The change means tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others who are eligible for federal financial aid can finally complete their FAFSAs. But it also leaves families and college counselors scrambling to get through the process months after other students. And some families are still encountering problems.

“It can be very discouraging for students and families who feel like they’re doing all the right things and yet are still coming up against barriers,” said Amanda Seider, who oversees the Massachusetts branch of the college access group OneGoal.

Chalkbeat reported in January that a technical glitch had blocked students with undocumented parents from completing their financial aid applications for over two months. That left many educators and college access groups worried that students who already face higher barriers to college would be deterred by the delays — piled on top of an already difficult rollout of the new, supposedly easier FAFSA. Some colleges and scholarships award aid on a first-come, first-served basis, so students who apply later are at a disadvantage.

During that time, students were left to navigate a confusing array of options, including whether they should just sit tight and wait for a fix, or try a partial workaround that could put them at a higher risk of making a mistake on their application or would require them to come back and fill out more paperwork later.

And there are still outstanding issues. As federal officials put the new fix in place, they uncovered two more issues affecting the same group of students that still need to be resolved.

That means parents without Social Security numbers will have to enter their financial information manually, instead of having it pulled directly from the IRS. And in some cases — when a parent enters a name or address that doesn’t exactly match what their child put down, for example — parents are still getting error messages that block them from filling out the form. Federal officials said last week they would work to fix the issue “in the coming days.”

Federal officials estimated that around 2% of financial aid applicants were affected by the original Social Security number glitch, which would equate to hundreds of thousands of students in a typical year.

The issue caught the attention of dozens of Democratic House members, who sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging the department to fix the problem quickly. In a press release issued last week, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman of California said the glitch was a “completely unacceptable error” that had caused “fear, stress, and missed opportunities for many kids across my district and the country.”

“I hope to see the Department take the steps necessary to ensure issues like this never arise again,” Huffman said.

The rollout of the new FAFSA has been riddled with problems and delays. Education department officials have blamed insufficient funding and significant technical challenges in updating old systems. Republicans have accused the administration of being distracted by dealing with student loan forgiveness. Outside observers have said all these factors and more played a role, according to news reports.

FAFSA applications are down 33% compared with this time last year, according to federal data tracked by the National College Attainment Network.

In the meantime, many colleges have pushed back deadlines as they wait for student financial information that will help them assemble aid packages. And families are waiting.

Now, college counselors and advisers say they’re working to make sure students know what to do if they continue to encounter glitches. They’re also trying to keep students’ spirits up and getting them ready to compare their financial aid and acceptance packages when they come in.

“The most important thing we can do is to share information about how to go about entering information manually, how to make sure that as they are completing those steps that it requires a lot of precision,” Seider said. “We really want to make sure that students and families are being proactive, and not experiencing this as their shortcoming, but rather saying ‘Hey, this system has been a little confusing, we need some help with it.’”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Few students signed up for career scholarships, as lawmakers look to expand the law

2024-01-10T19:19:06+00:00

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Update: The Indiana legislative session ended on March 8, 2024. Here are the education bills that did and didn’t pass.

Just over 200 Indiana students received state funding for job training in the first year of the state’s Career Scholarship Accounts program, state officials said Wednesday, as lawmakers consider expanding the allowed uses for the money to include paying to get a driver license.

These accounts were the centerpiece of Republican lawmakers’ plans to “reinvent high school,” during the last legislative session, and allowed students to access state funding for workforce training outside of their schools. Advocates said the law would open more doors for students whose schools didn’t offer certain training programs, while critics said it lacked transparency, and could affect funding for high schools’ career and technical education programs.

State officials anticipated that 1,000 students in grades 10-12 would participate in the program during its first year, with each one eligible to receive up to $5,000 for job training and related expenses. Lawmakers appropriated $15 million over two years for the scholarship accounts.

While 574 students applied for the program, around 40% were rejected because they did not have job training lined up, said representatives from the Indiana Treasurer’s Office during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Wednesday. The program is jointly administered by the treasurer, the Indiana Department of Education, and the Commission on Higher Education.

The 234 students who were approved for scholarship accounts received an average of $3,200 each for curriculum and course material, they said, for a total allocation of $1.17 million.

A total of 30 organizations have been approved as providers for job training, including Indiana University, Ball State, and Ivy Tech, according to the higher education commission.

Lawmakers are considering a bill during this year’s session that would make changes to the law, including allowing students to use the funding to obtain driver’s licenses so they can commute to job training — something that advocates say would encourage participation.

House Bill 1001, authored by Chuck Goodrich, a Noblesville Republican, also seeks to allow students to use scholarships earmarked for attending college after high school for job training instead — a proposal that was rejected last year.

Proponents of the driver’s license provision said that allowing students to use the funding for licenses would open the program to those who otherwise could not get to work sites. The original career scholarship bill provided funding for transportation, but did not specify driver’s licenses.

“Driver’s licenses are a big barrier to growing the program. Kids couldn’t get to where they needed to get,” said Abhi Reddy, legislative counsel at the Treasurer’s Office.

However, Rep. Ed DeLaney, an Indianapolis Democrat, noted that offering funding for driver’s licenses through one program might motivate students to drop academic paths in favor of pursuing a job training scholarship.

The education committee rejected DeLaney’s amendment to remove the provision allowing students to use college scholarship funds — like the 21st Century Scholarship aimed at low-income students — for job training.

It also turned down a separate amendment authored by DeLaney that would’ve required that students be paid for the work they do during their job training opportunities.

“The potential for abuse is all through this bill, and this is one example where the abuse would directly affect the student,” DeLaney said.

HB 1001 passed the education committee and will move to the House.

You can track this bill on the General Assembly’s website.

This story has been updated with a total allocation for career scholarship accounts from the treasurer’s office.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit schools are enrolling more migrant students. Can the district meet their needs?

2024-02-26T19:29:50+00:00

As an influx of school-aged migrant and refugee children have resettled with their families in Detroit in recent weeks, schools are working to quickly adapt to meet their needs.

Some are more prepared than others.

Detroit Public Schools Community District campuses on the southwest side of the city have long served diverse student groups and have many Spanish-speaking teachers and administrators who can easily communicate with parents. But a large number of students who have recently migrated to the U.S. are being placed in available shelter beds on the city’s east side, where schools have historically served children with different needs.

“It’s no fault of the schools,” said Elizabeth Orozco-Vasquez, CEO of Freedom House Detroit, a nonprofit that supports asylum seekers and refugees. “It’s just that they’ve never had to prepare for that before. Meeting the needs of a new population of kids is a big ask to put on an already tasked school system.”

Translation services in those schools are often limited. Additionally, transportation for kids to attend schools in southwest Detroit can be difficult to arrange, advocates say. The district is required by the federal McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act to help students without a fixed address maintain school stability.

“We are seeing a lot of school-aged children come in, primarily in schools outside of southwest Detroit that aren’t necessarily prepared for children coming from other countries who don’t speak English,” said Orozco-Vasquez. “It’s a resource that has to be built.”

About 70 families who recently arrived from Venezuela enrolled their children in DPSCD, according to the district, and the number continues to grow. Administrators say they are providing language interpretation and translation, and training staff to understand new students’ unique needs. In the long term, the district is considering establishing newcomer programs, which would centralize students at specific schools to streamline services for migrant and refugee children.

Detroit hasn’t seen the large numbers of migrants and refugees arriving that large cities like Chicago and New York have in recent months. But some of the families arriving in Detroit are coming from those cities because shelters and humanitarian organizations there are overwhelmed.

DPSCD is working to meet students’ needs

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in an email all schools in the district are now receiving support as they adapt to meet the needs of migrant students. Staff are being trained to use translation tools, to identify curricular resources to help students learn English, and to address the trauma the kids may have experienced.

The district has formed a small team of teacher training and support coordinators specializing in English language learning to deploy to schools with newcomer students, he said. DPSCD is also continuing to collaborate with community members through its Bilingual Parent Advisory Council as well as the Office of Family and Community Engagement to meet the families’ needs.

Staff can request a live interpreter and document translations, said Vitti. The district also offers over-the-phone and remote video interpreters, and students and staff are able to use Microsoft Translate.

“The district is working with all school leaders and teachers to make sure that they are fully aware of these resources and use them consistently to communicate with families who need language services,” said Vitti.

Part of the challenge, said Orozco-Vasquez, is that the newly arrived students are speaking many languages. In addition to Spanish-speakers, some speak Portuguese or French.

Some nonprofit organizations work with school districts to fill gaps in providing language support to refugee students. Samaritas, a faith-based statewide nonprofit, works with DPSCD.

“If there is no comprehensive ELL program in place, we work with the school on providing that,” Rawan Alramahi, supervisor of Samaritas’ school impact program.

Funding from a $94.4 million settlement – from a 2016 lawsuit that alleged Michigan failed to teach Detroit students to read and described inadequate education for English language learners – will likely allow the school system to hire more academic interventionists to work with English language learners, the superintendent said. A task force formed to identify how DPSCD should spend the settlement recently recommended the district do so.

The settlement funding will also be used to help the district determine whether there is a need for more newcomer programs to be developed at schools in DPSCD to “better serve first- and second-year immigrants,” Vitti said. There is one existing program at Western International High School that provides academic and social support to newcomer families.

“Through this strategy, newly arrived students with limited English skills would be assigned to these schools so we can concentrate resources for support, such as ELL teachers and [academic interventionists],” said Vitti.

The planned Health Hub at Western International, which will provide medical, dental, and mental health care, will also have a resource center with services for newly arrived families, said Vitti. Other Health Hubs, which will expand over the next three years at schools across the district, may also have the same focus, depending on need, according to the superintendent.

For migrant students who experience homelessness or are housed in shelters, the district will provide all the services guaranteed by the McKinney-Vento Act, which mandates that unhoused students be allowed to quickly enroll in schools, stay in the same school even if they move outside of enrollment boundaries, and receive transportation to their schools regardless of the distance, among other protections.

Overall, the district’s system for identifying students who need services through the act has improved, said Vitti. The need for transportation services with that funding has increased in the community across the board and is not unique to newcomer or refugee students.

“Newcomer and refugee students are not always homeless, but when they are, we are committed to providing transportation services,” said Vitti.

In the past, there were concerns about DPSCD’s ability to educate English language learners, who graduate from high school at lower rates compared to their English-speaking peers. Parents expressed a need for more language access in the district, and felt their concerns were ignored.

Inequities for ELL students is not unique to DPSCD. Michigan ranks among the lowest in the nation for funding for students who are not native English speakers, according to an analysis by The Education Trust-Midwest.

Last year, the state passed a historic school budget that provided $1.3 million more in funding for ELL students.

Some migrant families arrive from Chicago, New York, Texas

Most of Detroit’s migrant students have come from Venezuela, according to the school district.

Others are coming from Columbia, Angola, Senegal, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Orozco-Vasquez said there is a mix of families coming from larger cities like New York and Chicago as well as various cities in Texas, where officials have struggled to keep up with the growing need for services for migrants, as well as people coming directly from their countries of origin.

Samaritas is currently serving more than 250 school-age children, and has recently seen more families coming from Venezuela and Cuba, along with families from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

Both Freedom House and Samaritas said most of the newly arrived school-age children they serve have enrolled in DPSCD, and some are attending charter schools in Wayne County.

The increase in the number of families migrating to Michigan isn’t expected to slow anytime soon – officials expect to see a 40% increase in refugees settling in the state this year, which would amount to more than 3,600 people. As demand for temporary housing grows, the Office of Global Michigan this week asked residents to open their homes as part of a refugee support program.

Michigan has long been a destination for refugees and asylum seekers. Though the recent influx of migrants is sizable, it’s not the largest the state has experienced.

In 2013, more than 3,400 Iraqi refugees resettled in Michigan. And after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, more than 2,000 refugees came to live in the state.

DPSCD has also previously seen influxes of migrants. More than 40 refugees from Afghanistan enrolled in the district in May 2022.

Navigating a foreign school system

Ivan Nakonechngi, 13, works on his computer at home on Wed., Feb., 21, 2024 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

In addition to DPSCD and other schools in Wayne County, refugees are also being placed and enrolling in schools in Macomb, Oakland, and Genesee Counties.

One mother, Svitlana Nakonechna, 33, arrived in the U.S. three years ago after fleeing the war in Ukraine with her son, Ivan Nakonechngi, now 13.

Nakonechna is still learning English, and she communicates with Ivan’s teachers at South Hills Middle School in Bloomfield Hills Schools through an online translator application in email and on video calls. The mother tries to keep up with Ivan’s grades and when his work is due.

“Usually, I keep track of that since she’s not really good with English,” said Ivan, who began learning English in school in Ukraine.

Ivan Nakonechngi, 13, left, poses for a portrait with his mother, Svitlana Nakonechna, 33, in their home on Wed., Feb., 21, 2024 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Nakonechna said through an interpreter that she doesn’t know much about the curriculum Ivan is being taught, but she trusts he’s learning because she sees he’s engaged in his school work.

Though her sponsors and Samaritas have been helpful in enrolling her son in school and navigating the system, Nakonechna worries what may happen if she has to move out of the housing she receives through her employer to another school district.

“If we move from this place to another city and I need to find a new school, I still will need help because I don’t know how to handle it by myself,” she said.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

¿Cómo se completa la FAFSA si un padre no tiene un número de Seguro Social?

2024-02-22T23:35:07+00:00

Los formularios de ayuda federal financiera, conocidos como la Solicitud Gratuita de Ayuda Federal para Estudiantes o FAFSA (por sus siglas en inglés), pueden dar acceso a mucho dinero para que los estudiantes paguen por sus estudios universitarios.

Los estudiantes que son ciudadanos estadounidenses, residentes permanentes y ciertos estudiantes sin ciudadanía pueden obtener ayuda financiera, sin importar el estatus migratorio de sus padres. Los estudiantes, los padres y el cónyuge del estudiante, si es un adulto casado, todos tienen que proporcionar información personal financiera para que los estudiantes reciban esta ayuda, aunque los padres o el cónyuge sean indocumentados.

Este año, hay un nuevo formulario que supuestamente es más simple y fácil—y los estudiantes de familias con bajos ingresos deben recibir más dinero que años anteriores. Pero el proceso ha tenido algunos problemas técnicos, especialmente si uno o ambos padres no tienen un número de Seguro Social. En este momento, el formulario disponible en línea no permite que esos padres proporcionen la información financiera necesaria—y eso significa que los estudiantes no pueden enviar sus formularios.

Los funcionarios federales dicen que el problema se solucionará a mediados de marzo. Mientras tanto, hay un par de alternativas disponibles si tu estudiante debe cumplir con las fechas límite de algún programa estatal, universitario o para solicitar becas en las próximas semanas.

Esto es lo que debes saber:

El primer paso es que los padres creen su propia cuenta.

Crea una cuenta de ayuda federal para estudiantes donde proporcionarás información. Los padres que no tengan un número de Seguro Social deben seguir las instrucciones para verificar su identidad a través de TransUnion. Para hacer esto, quizás sea necesario que proporciones ciertos documentos.

A veces TransUnion no tiene toda la información correcta. Si TransUnion no puede verificar tu identidad, llama al Centro de Información sobre Ayuda Federal para Estudiantes (FSAIC, por sus siglas en inglés) al 1-800-433-3243. Ahí abrirán un caso y te enviarán un mensaje por correo electrónico con instrucciones sobre el tipo de documentos que puedes proporcionar.

Los funcionarios federales dicen que están tratando de simplificar y facilitar este proceso, y que están agregando más agentes que hablan español para que contesten las llamadas.

El siguiente paso es proporcionar información financiera básica.

Ten a la mano tus declaraciones de impuestos de años anteriores, cheques de tus ingresos o salario e información bancaria mientras completas los formularios.

Este proceso es sencillo para las personas que tienen un número de Seguro Social. Para aquellas sin un número de Seguro Social, el proceso es un poco más complicado.

En este momento, si no tienes un número de Seguro Social, debes completar algunos pasos adicionales. Usa estas alternativas solo si tu estudiante necesita cumplir con ciertas fechas límite en las próximas semanas para una universidad o beca en particular. La razón es porque, más tarde, deberás regresar y hacer algunos cambios cuando los formularios se arreglen verdaderamente.

Puedes completar un formulario impreso. Haz clic aquí para encontrar el formulario en español. En la sección donde te piden un número de Seguro Social, ingresa todos ceros y proporciona un Número de Identificación Personal del Contribuyente o ITIN (por sus siglas en inglés) si tienes uno. Los padres pueden completar el formulario impreso sin pasar por el proceso para verificar su identidad.
Puedes usar una alternativa en el formulario en línea. No ingreses ningún número en el espacio donde piden el número de Seguro Social del padre o cónyuge. Al hacer esto, tendrás que ingresar manualmente la información sobre los ingresos e impuestos de la persona. El padre o cónyuge no debe completar su propio formulario todavía. Cuando haya un arreglo permanente en un par de semanas, el padre o cónyuge podrá regresar al formulario en línea, aprobar su información y agregar su firma.

Si tu estudiante no necesita cumplir con ciertas fechas límite en las próximas semanas, los funcionarios federales recomiendan esperar hasta que el problema se solucione para que puedas usar el proceso más simple en línea que otras familias usan.

¿Qué se debe hacer si el estudiante no tiene un número de Seguro Social?

La mayoría de los estudiantes que no tienen un número de Seguro Social no cumplen con los requisitos para obtener ayuda financiera federal. Sin embargo, algunos estados ofrecen ayuda financiera a ciertos estudiantes indocumentados. Hablen con el asesor universitario en la escuela de tu hijo o en la oficina de ayuda financiera en las universidades a las que enviaron una solicitud de admisión.

¿Tienes más preguntas?

Hablen con el asesor universitario en la escuela de tu hijo. Recuerden que no tienen que pasar solos por este proceso. El gobierno federal calcula que cientos de miles de estudiantes han sido afectados por este problema, así que muchas personas enfrentan las mismas dificultades.

El gobierno federal también ofrece un centro de ayuda telefónica llamando al 1-800-433-3243. Advertencia: el tiempo de espera puede ser largo.

Lee más: Familias inmigrantes tienen problemas para completar la FAFSA. Aquí te informamos.

Traducido por Alejandra X. Castañeda

Kalyn Belsha es reportera nacional de educación con sede en Chicago. Se habla español. Para comunicarte con ella, envíale un email a kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

A glitch blocks thousands of immigrant families from a new, simpler FAFSA. The fix is TBD.

2024-01-25T22:20:06+00:00

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Update as of Feb. 21: There are now two workarounds for the Social Security number problem, one a paper form and the other online. Federal officials promise a permanent fix is coming in March.

Like many high school seniors, 18-year-old Jocelyn is trying to get through her college application to-do list.

She’s applied to 10 colleges so far. Northeastern University in Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago are her top picks. She’d like to study veterinary medicine and work with animals like her two cats, Strawberry and Copito.

With the help of her sibling, Jocelyn completed her portion of the federal application for financial aid in around an hour. But now she’s stuck. That’s because her mom doesn’t have a Social Security number, so she hasn’t been able to add her financial information.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid that debuted last month was supposed to be easier for students and families to complete. And in many ways it is: It’s shorter, and it pulls tax information directly from the IRS instead of asking families to enter it themselves. The goal is to get more students to apply for aid and attend college.

But the form was released months later than usual, leaving students much less time to complete it and schools scrambling to offer help. On top of that, many families have experienced glitches. One of the biggest issues is that parents who don’t have a Social Security number can’t enter their information right now, and workarounds from prior years are gone. Potentially tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others with legal status — who are eligible for federal financial aid regardless of their parents’ immigration status — could be affected.

Federal officials say a fix is on the way, but can’t say when. Education advocates say there needs to be a stronger sense of urgency to resolve the issue, as some colleges award aid on a first-come, first-served basis.

Eighteen-year-old Jocelyn shows the Instagram video she watched to make sure she filled out her portion of the FAFSA correctly.

“We need to be working around the clock,” said Amalia Chamorro, who directs the education policy project for UnidosUS, a civil rights group that advocates to improve educational opportunities for Latino students. “We do worry that this is just another hurdle, another barrier, another way that they’re getting the message that they don’t matter, that they’re not as deserving of pursuing post-secondary education. That’s not the message that we want them to get.”

Jocelyn, whose last name Chalkbeat is withholding so as not to jeopardize her mother’s immigration status, is feeling stressed. But she’s trying to stay optimistic that she’ll be able to check this off her list soon, too.

“I didn’t want to turn in the FAFSA form late, and now I’m going to have to wait,” she said. “I know that my other friends have turned it in already, and I feel like I’m a little behind.”

Why some students are getting stuck on new FAFSA

Jocelyn isn’t the only one of her classmates having trouble.

On a visit in mid-January to Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago, just two of the 15 students in her class that helps students prepare for and apply to college had managed to complete the FAFSA. The high school serves predominantly Latino students from low-income families, many of whom will be the first in their family to attend college.

Some students got tripped up trying to add their parents as “contributors” to the FAFSA, a new step that requires them to sign up for an account and verify their identity. In the past, students could more easily fill out their parent’s portion for them.

That has presented challenges especially for families who are unfamiliar with the financial aid process, who have language barriers, or who worry about sharing personal information with the federal government.

When students are the first in their family to attend college, or there are immigration concerns, “You’re going to have a lot of paranoia, you’re going to have a lot of anxieties around it,” said Josh Kumm, who teaches Jocelyn’s class in partnership with OneGoal, a nonprofit college access organization that works in over 30 high schools in Chicago.

Eighteen-year-old Breann Sanford was one of the lucky ones who got through.

It helped that her mom was familiar with the FAFSA — she filled one out when she took a few college classes — and Sanford’s college and career coach knew just what to do when Sanford accidentally entered her email instead of her mom’s in one instance.

“It was a big help,” she said. “I knew I had a lot of different support options that I could go to if I needed help.”

Breann Sanford, 18, was able to submit her FAFSA successfully by mid-January. In her class at Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago that helps students apply to college, only a few completed the form without challenges.

Others are struggling for other reasons. During the recent visit, 18-year-old Ángel Serrano said he was still trying to tell his mom that he’s applying to college and needs her help with the financial aid form. His window to do that is on Wednesdays — the only day she’s not exhausted or working, Serrano said.

Another student in the class needs financial information from his mom, but they’re no longer living together or on speaking terms.

“You’ve got all these other things going on,” Kumm said. “It’s not just socioeconomic, it’s also the social-emotional parts of the family dynamics … That’s complicated.”

One-on-one help is key, but some FAFSA issues need federal fix

One-on-one support has been crucial for students to navigate FAFSA hiccups, though school counselors and college coaches have been swamped with requests for help. Sometimes the fix is to sit on hold with the U.S. Department of Education for hours — a step that’s impossible for many working parents.

Elve Mitchell, the senior director of program operations for College Possible in Chicago, a college access organization that works with a half-dozen high schools in the city, said one big thing his organization’s coaches are working on is making sure students and parents know the right questions to ask when they finally do get through to a live person on the department’s helpline.

Another way school staff and coaches are trying to help is by finding other ways students can work on their applications, such as fine-tuning a personal essay or using a federal student aid estimator to do some rough comparisons of college costs.

But for students whose parents do not have Social Security numbers, there isn’t much a school counselor can do right now.

When Jocelyn met with her school’s college and career coach this week, the advice was to sit tight, keep checking the federal government’s website, and wait for “the green light on what to do.”

Schools like Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago have been stepping in to offer students help when they've struggled to complete the new FAFSA form.

In the past, parents without a Social Security number could enter all zeros and sign a paper form.

The education department set up a new process for these parents to verify their identity through a credit agency, but educators say it’s not working consistently. Parents have had to call the federal helpline, open a case, and then share documents that prove their identity.

“For someone who’s undocumented, it’s very scary to give the federal government any documentation,” said Tony Petraitis, a college and career curriculum specialist for Chicago Public Schools, who’s been assembling how-to guides with screenshots to support school counselors. “For one of our most vulnerable populations, it’s a pretty big deal.”

Even if the credit agency produces a correct match, these parents still can’t share additional information on the FAFSA until the federal government comes up with a fix.

Chamorro, of UnidosUS, hopes the added delays and frustrations don’t deter students from applying to college.

“We don’t want them to give up,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Frustrated with FAFSA? There is a paper form, but it might not be the best option.

2024-02-13T19:37:25+00:00

Leer en español

As many students continue to experience technical glitches preventing them from submitting their application for federal financial aid online, there is one potential workaround: an old-fashioned paper form.

But college access organizations and financial aid experts caution that for many students, this may not be the best route.

Here’s what you should know before you fill out the paper version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA:

What is the paper FAFSA form? Where can I find it?

Federal officials have long released a paper version of the FAFSA, though only a small share of students submitted a hard copy in recent years, which is why you may not have heard about it before now.

You can find a paper copy of the FAFSA in English here, and in Spanish here.

Why might I consider filling out a paper FAFSA form?

Right now, parents who don’t have a Social Security number cannot add their information to their child’s online application for college financial aid, and in some cases may not be able to obtain login credentials to access the online system.

That’s because of a technical glitch federal officials say they are working to fix. A senior official for the U.S. Department of Education told reporters on Monday that officials are meeting daily to try to resolve the issue, but right now there is no timeline. This problem has prevented thousands of students whose parents are immigrants from completing the FAFSA.

The paper form allows parents and spouses without Social Security numbers to write in all zeroes, as they could in past years online, and to provide an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, if they have one. Parents can fill out the paper form without going through the identity-verification process blocking some from obtaining login credentials online.

If your college, state, or scholarship organization has a hard deadline to submit the FAFSA, and that’s coming up, you may want to consider filling out the paper form as a way to meet that deadline. Once you mail in the paper form, the day the application is received in the mail will be marked as your submission date.

Should I wait for the online form to be fixed instead of filling out the paper form?

If you don’t have a pressing FAFSA submission deadline, it may be a better option to wait for the online form to be fixed, said MorraLee Keller, a senior director at the nonprofit National College Attainment Network.

That’s because paper forms will be processed after online applications, so you risk putting yourself farther back in the processing line if you go the paper route. That matters because some colleges award aid on a first-come, first-served basis.

Federal officials recently announced that they won’t be sharing students’ information from online applications with colleges until March. Already, because of delays in the FAFSA process, colleges have less time to put together financial aid packages and students will have less time to review them and make decisions. If you fill out a paper form, a college may not review your financial aid application until April.

The paper form also leaves more room for mistakes, as the instructions can be more complicated to follow. If you’re considering filling out the paper form, reach out to a college counselor at your school or a college access organization for help, especially if you’ve never filled out a FAFSA before.

“It’s all those families out there who don’t have someone guiding them that there would be potential that they could make mistakes on the paper form, even though there’s pages and pages of instructions,” Keller said. “There’s a lot more guidance in the online form.”

If I fill out the paper form, can I still fill out the online form?

Yes. If you mail in a paper FAFSA and then fill out the online version, the federal government will rely on the online version and treat the paper copy like a duplicate submission.

And if you make a mistake on your FAFSA, don’t worry: There is a process to submit corrections, too.

“We just want to encourage families to stay the course,” Keller said. “Don’t give up on the idea of higher education or going to college because the form is a stumbling block right now.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

FAFSA form completion could become a Michigan high school graduation requirement

2024-01-23T20:13:14+00:00

Michigan students would be required to complete a federal financial aid form to graduate from high school under a bill that supporters hope will help remove a barrier to the pursuit of higher education.

The proposal would bring Michigan in line with about a dozen other states that have passed laws to make completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid a graduation requirement. A few more states are contemplating a similar rule.

The FAFSA is used to determine a student’s eligibility for federal grants, work-study funds, and loans. It’s also used in some cases to determine whether a student qualifies for state or and private aid, as well as tuition assistance programs offered by the state’s major universities to students from low-income families.

State Sen. Darrin Camilleri, a Democrat from Trenton, said he introduced the bill to help students recognize the post-secondary opportunities available to them.

“In 2023, only about half of graduating high school seniors completed a FAFSA in Michigan, and this year was not an outlier, " he said during a Senate Education Committee hearing in October. “On average, Michigan students are leaving nearly $100 million in federal aid on the table simply because this form is not filled out.”

Skeptics of the bill have been concerned that the FAFSA requirement would force families to disclose sensitive financial or personal information, either to complete the form or to seek a waiver from the requirement. The bill has been modified to address some of their concerns.

Others say it would add a new burden on college counselors to help students comply. The online form can be confusing, and usually requires students and their parents — or anyone else who might help pay for a child’s education — to set up separate accounts and logins and complete their respective parts of the form.

The federal government’s rollout of a new FAFSA form with fewer questions was supposed to make the process easier. But the changes have not gone as smoothly as intended since the soft launch on Dec. 31, with numerous reports of technology issues.

“I’ve spoken to colleagues who have their own kids who are seniors and are filling out FAFSA this year,” said Wendy Zdeb, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals. “They thought the form would be easier this year, and they have found that not to be true. It took them a lot more time, and these are people who are already familiar with the process.”

Expect more such challenges for people who are not familiar with the form.

Ninth-graders Omari Pennington and Brayden Lewis said they had never heard about the FAFSA.

They are both interested in going to college but haven’t talked with a counselor at Detroit Public Schools Community District’s Henry Ford High School about the opportunities available to them yet.

Both children of single mothers, Omari and Brayden said it might be difficult for their moms to find the time to fill out the form with them if it were a requirement.

“My mom is busy,” said Brayden. “She goes to work from like 7 to 12 in the morning.”

But both Omari and Brayden said they can see the benefit the bill might have in allowing more kids to see that there is funding available for their education.

States with FAFSA requirements see higher completion rates

Onjila Odeneal, senior director of policy and advocacy in Michigan for the Institute for College Access and Success, said that overall the bill will help a lot of students see college as something they can attain, especially in low-income and minority families.

“A lot of kids are not completing FAFSA because they don’t think post-secondary education is possible for them,” Odeneal said. “It’s important for them to be aware of what’s available for them.”

Filling out the FAFSA unlocks grants and funding from Michigan universities, such as the University of Michigan’s various tuition discount programs and its Go Blue Guarantee, and Michigan State University’s Spartan Tuition Advantage.

The form is also required for students to qualify for money from two key state programs. One of them, the Michigan Achievement Scholarship gives up to $5,500 a year for qualifying students to attend an in-state public university, $4,000 a year to go to an independent nonprofit college, $2,750 for community college, or $2,000 for career training programs. The other, Michigan Reconnect, pays tuition at local community colleges for students age 21 and older.

States that have adopted the requirement have seen big increases in FAFSA completion rates among high school seniors. Texas’ FAFSA completion rate went from about 50% to around 63%. In Louisiana, 2020 research by the Century Foundation found the requirement helped close the gap in FAFSA completion rates between school districts in low- and high-income communities.

However, the research also revealed information gaps and other hurdles for students applying for aid.

For example, the number of applications with incomplete information was higher in districts with higher rates of students of color and students from low-income families. English-learners also had difficulty interpreting the form, and students who didn’t have documented legal immigration status struggled to fill it out because they didn’t have Social Security numbers.

Zdeb, from the principals group, worries that the legislation undermines the efforts of educators to destigmatize the idea of going to trade and technical schools, rather than four-year colleges, after high school. “This is kind of contradicting that message,” she said.

Camilleri noted that the bill would still help many students pursuing those educational options, because FAFSA is also used to determine eligibility for federal Pell grants, which can be used to attend some trade and technical schools.

Bill allows for waivers from FAFSA requirement

Under the most recent iteration of the bill, the law would take effect with this year’s sophomore class — the high school graduating Class of 2026 — and require every public school student to submit a FAFSA form to the U.S. Department of Education, unless they receive a waiver. School districts and the Michigan Department of Education would be required to compile data on how many students complete the form and how many receive waivers.

Parents could sign a waiver to exempt their children from the requirement. Waivers would also be available for students 18 or older, emancipated youth, and youth experiencing homelessness, among other circumstances, such as when parents or guardians are unwilling or unable to submit their part of the form.

The bill would require the newly created Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential to create an information packet on the FAFSA for school districts to distribute to high school students.

School districts would have to come up with funding they need to enforce compliance with the legislation, according to a fiscal impact analysis of the bill.

A big concern for administrators and school groups is whether high schools have enough counselors equipped to take on the new task. Michigan ranks among the lowest in the nation for the ratio of counselors to students, and the problem is especially acute in rural areas.

“There couldn’t be a worse time to put another initiative on our counselors and administrators,” said Zdeb. “Their focus right now is on student mental health and making sure kids can graduate. Putting another thing on them is not good timing.”

Odeneal acknowledged the shortage of counselors but said the bill should provide the impetus and the time — two years before it takes effect — for schools to hire more.

Legislation changed to address privacy concerns

The current version of the bill reflects changes made to address questions about privacy.

Groups including the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center argued that the bill would require parents and students to disclose sensitive information such as immigration status in order to get a waiver from the requirement.

“We were able to work with legislators on some meaningful changes to the bill and we have now shifted our position to neutral,” said Christine Sauvé, the center’s community engagement and policy coordinator, said Monday. “Significantly, the updated version involves community partners in the development of the waiver form and allows vulnerable students to opt out due to privacy concerns.”

The changes were important to protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students, students who are victims of child abuse and neglect, and other vulnerable populations who may not want or be able to disclose why their parents can’t sign a waiver, Sauvé said.

“The updated bill also adds a requirement for school districts to take reasonable steps to provide language access to students and families with limited English proficiency throughout the FAFSA submission and opt-out process, ensuring that materials will be translated into the language spoken by the family,” Sauvé said.

Hannah Dellinger covers K-12 education and state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Pensó que la universidad estaba fuera de su alcance. Aquí te contamos cómo lo logró.

2023-02-14T17:00:00+00:00

Read in English.

Chalkbeat Colorado es un noticiero local sin fines de lucro que informa sobre las escuelas públicas en Denver y otros distritos. Suscríbete a nuestro boletín gratis por email en español para recibir lo último en noticias sobre educación.

La madre de Sabastian Ortega lloró cuando él le dijo que había sido aceptado en la Colorado School of Mines. Él pensó, mientras hablaban por teléfono, que ella estaba llorando de alegría. No lo estaba.

En cambio, a su mamá le preocupaba que la familia pudiera pagar sus estudios: sin ayuda económica del estado, solo la inscripción es $20,600 anuales para estudiantes residentes. Y vivir en el campus puede costar unos $40,000.

“Me afectó mucho”, dijo Ortega. “Acabé llorando cuando colgué la llamada, porque me preguntaba: “¿Cómo voy a pagar por esto?” Se preguntaba después de la llamada: “¿Qué voy a hacer?”

Gracias a un consejero de la secundaria, Ortega solicitó numerosas becas y finalmente consiguió una beca completa para asistir a la Colorado School of Mines, una escuela de ciencias e ingeniería ubicada en Golden. Pero Ortega, de 21 años y ahora estudiante de tercer año, es uno de los pocos habitantes de Colorado con bajos ingresos que ha podido asistir a la universidad pública más selectiva de Colorado.

Entre las universidades públicas, la Mines tiene la sexta tasa de inscripción más baja de estudiantes con beca Pell del país según un análisis de Education Reform Now. En 2020, más de una cuarta parte de todos los estudiantes universitarios de primer año de Colorado recibieron becas Pell, pero en la Mines, solamente un 13.4% tenía esas becas.

Para calificar para una beca Pell, los estudiantes tienen que demostrar necesidad financiera. Entre los beneficiarios del programa Pell, los datos federales muestran que cerca de un 93% son de familias que ganan $60,000 o menos al año.

La proporción de estudiantes que reciben becas Pell en una universidad se ha convertido en un indicador indirecto de cuántos estudiantes de bajos ingresos asisten a una institución. La cantidad de estudiantes con becas Pell es importante porque muestra el grado en que esa institución está ayudando a estudiantes de todas las clases sociales a encontrar oportunidades.

Cómo pagar por la universidad

¿Necesitas más información sobre ayuda financiera? La Solicitud Gratuita de Ayuda Federal para Estudiantes, conocida como FAFSA por su nombre en inglés, ayuda a los estudiantes a obtener dinero gratis para pagar la universidad. La FAFSA te dirá si tienes derecho a una beca Pell, por ejemplo.

Aquí te mostramos por qué debes llenar la FAFSA — aunque todavía no sepas con certeza si vas a ir a la universidad.

Para obtener más información sobre la ayuda financiera en la Colorado School of Mines, los estudiantes o los padres pueden llamar a la oficina de ayuda financiera al 303-273-3301 o al número sin cargos 1-888-446-9489. También puedes enviar un correo electrónico a finaid@mines.edu.

Y habla con tu consejero de universidad en la secundaria. Él o ella te puede ayudar a encontrar más apoyo y a entender cuáles son tus opciones.

Los líderes de la universidad quieren que la Mines sea más representativa de la composición económica y demográfica del estado. Muchos de sus esfuerzos para conseguirlo — por ejemplo, presionando para que las escuelas K-12 ofrezcan más clases avanzadas de matemáticas y ciencias, estableciendo un programa federal para ayudar a los estudiantes a asistir a la Mines y animando a los estudiantes de pocos ingresos a unirse como comunidad — están todavía en sus inicios. Los administradores dijeron que hubo conversaciones durante años sobre lo que había que hacer, pero que fueron lentos en actuar.

Una lista de metas que la universidad espera lograr en 2024 y más allá incluye llegar a ser “accesible y atractiva para estudiantes calificados de todos los orígenes.” La cantidad de becas Pell ilustra lo lejos que está la escuela de lograr esa meta, y los administradores reconocen que hay trabajo por hacer para conectar a los estudiantes de bajos ingresos con una educación que ofrece una de las inversiones con más retorno económico del país.

El presidente Paul Johnson, que ha dirigido la universidad desde 2015, ha enviado un mensaje a los administradores para “redoblar los esfuerzos para resolver esto”, dijo Sheena Martínez, vicepresidenta adjunta de vida estudiantil para equidad y participación. El puesto de Martínez es nuevo y tiene por objeto elaborar estrategias para ayudar a los estudiantes de minorías raciales y a los que de bajos ingresos. Ella dijo que universidad la escuela está construyendo los cimientos que ayudarán a los estudiantes en los años venideros.

“Estamos trabajando para ser de elite, pero no elitistas”, dijo Martínez. “Y si hablas con estudiantes que provienen de áreas poco representadas, te dirán que históricamente no han visto a la Mines como un lugar disponible para ellos”.

Sabastian Ortega ganó una beca completa para asistir a Colorado School of Mines.

La preparación para una escuela como la Mines empieza desde temprano

Ortega empezó a interesarse por la ciencia, la tecnología, la ingeniería y las matemáticas (STEM) en la escuela intermedia. La secundaria Odyssey Early College and Career Options de Colorado Springs le preparó bien, dice. Cuando se graduó, ya tenía suficientes créditos para un título asociado de universidad.

Su experiencia en la secundaria no es la que tienen todos los estudiantes, dijo.

“La cuestión es que, si no tomas ninguna clase universitaria durante la secundaria, ya estás atrasado”, dijo Ortega.

Los líderes de la Mines saben que esto es un problema. La Mines requiere que los estudiantes tengan conocimientos previos en clases avanzadas como trigonometría, precálculo y química.

Muchos estudiantes de Colorado nunca toman esas clases, y los administradores de la Mines se están comunicando cada vez más con las escuelas secundarias para animarlas a incluir clases rigurosas y que otorguen créditos universitarios en matemáticas o ciencias, dijo Lori Kester, vicerrectora asociada de manejo de inscripción.

“Estamos tratando de comunicarnos con los orientadores de las escuelas secundarias y asegurar que encaminen bien a los estudiantes desde temprano para que puedan ser admitidos en la Mines”, dijo Kester. “Eso es realmente crítico para nuestro éxito”.

Los líderes de la Mines han creado algunas oportunidades para preparar a los estudiantes de pocos ingresos y lograr que se interesen por la universidad. Pero tienen limitaciones.

Programas como The Challenge Program preparan a los futuros estudiantes con clases de matemáticas y ciencias y seminarios sobre el manejo del tiempo y el estrés. La universidad ofrece programas de tutoría en la escuela intermedia DSST: College View Middle School, en el suroeste de Denver y donde casi todos los estudiantes proceden de familias de minorías raciales, y envía a estudiantes de la Mines a trabajar como voluntarios en escuelas de todo el estado.

La universidad también cuenta con un programa de verano que les permite a estudiantes de undécimo y duodécimo grado de minorías raciales, de primera generación o de bajos ingresos vivir y aprender en el campus.

Las iniciativas más recientes incluyen el programa Upward Bound Math Science Program en la escuela Alameda International Jr./Sr. High School. Se trata de un programa financiado con fondos federales en el que muchas universidades de todo el país han participado por décadas para ayudar a los estudiantes en desventaja.

Incluso cuando las escuelas empujan a los estudiantes hacia los programas STEM, es difícil conseguir que ellos persistan en ese campo, dijo Analise González-Fine, directora de iniciativas universitarias de la red de escuelas chárter DSST. La escuela se enfoca en desarrollar las destrezas en el campo STEM, pero muchos estudiantes quizás nunca terminen en una universidad como la Mines, dijo ella.

Alrededor de un 55% de la clase graduanda de 2022 de la escuela tenía intenciones de ir a una universidad STEM. Y un 25% de los estudiantes de familias de pocos ingresos dijeron que irían a una universidad STEM, dijo González-Fine.

Sabastian Ortega trabaja durante una clase sobre los procedimientos estándar de operación para los parámetros de calidad del agua. Él sabía que quería estudiar en la Colorado School of Mines y convertirse en ingeniero medioambiental, pero el alto costo de asistir a la universidad era un problema.

Ortega estuvo a punto de tomar un camino diferente — como tantos otros

Cuando llegó el momento de solicitar admisión a las universidades, Ortega no tenía otra opción — solamente solicitó admisión a la Colorado School of Mines. Él sabía que quería ser ingeniero medioambiental especializado en recursos de agua.

Participó en los programas de la Mines, por ejemplo, el Challenge. No obstante, las finanzas no funcionaron. Consideró unirse a la Guardia Nacional o dejar la universidad por un año para trabajar y ahorrar.

“Sentía que era la única forma de pagar la universidad”, dijo Ortega.

El costo de asistir a la Mines es sin duda el mayor factor decisivo para los estudiantes que quieren asistir a esa universidad, dijo Ortega.

Jill Robertson, directora de ayuda financiera, dijo que la universidad tiene programas de grants para los residentes de Colorado basadas en mérito (no en necesidad económica). La institución también ha redoblado sus esfuerzos para encontrar donantes que ofrezcan becas y ayudas para esos estudiantes.

La universidad también se ha asociado con las universidades comunitarias del estado, donde los estudiantes pueden obtener créditos para un diploma de la Mines pero sin tener que pagar la matrícula de la Mines.

Robertson dijo que la universidad ha tratado de limitar los aumentos en la matrícula anual para que coincidan con la tasa de inflación. Sin embargo, el estado gastado menos en educación superior en las últimas tres décadas, y por lo tanto todas las universidades del estado han aumentado sus precios de matrícula.

Hace diez años la universidad les cobraba alrededor de un cuarto menos por semestre a los residentes del estado. Los aumentos han perjudicado aún más a los estudiantes de bajos ingresos del estado, especialmente cuando las becas Pell solamente pagan hasta unos $6,900 al año, mucho menos que el costo anual para asistir. Por otro lado, las ayudas estatales solamente cubren una parte del costo para los residentes.

“Realmente tratamos de mantener el costo en un nivel razonable”, dijo Robertson. “Pero educar ingenieros realmente buenos es caro.”

Sabastian Ortega hace una pregunta durante una clase de ingeniería civil y medioambiental en la Colorado School of Mines. Él ha visto cómo sus amigos de orígenes similares a los suyos abandonaron la universidad en mayor proporción que sus otros compañeros.

No basta con admitir estudiantes. También necesitan apoyo.

La mayoría de los estudiantes de la Mines se gradúan en seis años, alrededor de un 83%, según datos federales. Pero en ese mismo plazo, la cifra de estudiantes de bajos ingresos que se gradúan de la Mines es menos, cerca de un 75%. Y la Mines no es la única universidad en la que eso ocurre. Las tasas de graduación de los estudiantes con becas Pell son más bajas en las universidades de todo el estado.

Ortega dijo que vio cómo amigos con antecedentes similares abandonaban los estudios en mayor proporción que sus amigos con mejor nivel económico. Muchos no podían equilibrar sus trabajos con la pesada carga de estudios, dijo. Los estudiantes de minorías raciales que quedan son mayormente estudiantes internacionales.

“Uno de mis amigos, su papá es dueño de una empresa petrolera”, dijo Ortega. “Por eso es difícil establecer una conexión cuando se trata de esa parte de su vida”.

La universidad ha empezado a reunir a estudiantes de primer año de orígenes similares para que puedan formar una comunidad que entienda sus luchas, dijo Martínez. La esperanza es que los estudiantes tengan un grupo de compañeros que les ayude en el camino.

Ortega dijo que ha visto que la escuela también se enfoca más en su Programa Multicultural de Ingeniería, que comenzó en 1989. Desde que él empezó en la Mines, ha visto más eventos y más administradores que aparecen para hablar de servicios financieros, de tutoría o de consejería, dijo.

“Creo que por fin se han dado cuenta de que tienen realmente que ayudar a estos estudiantes”, dijo Ortega. “Creo que se han dado cuenta de que para ayudar de verdad a estos estudiantes, tienen que lograr que ellos por fin sientan que pertenecen aquí”.

Ortega también intenta poner de su parte. Trabaja en la oficina de ayuda financiera varias veces a la semana. Su objetivo es que los futuros estudiantes de entornos como el suyo sepan que tienen un sitio en la Mines.

No quiere que ninguna mamá se preocupe o llore por el costo de la universidad, porque hay opciones. También intenta decirles a los estudiantes y padres que Mines ayudará a los estudiantes a conseguir trabajos que les darán dinero y contribuirán a cambiar el mundo.

“Es algo que me hubiera gustado que mi mamá tuviera”, dijo Ortega, “que alguien le dijera ‘todo va a salir bien’”.

Jason Gonzales es reportero que cubre temas de educación superior y la legislatura de Colorado. Chalkbeat Colorado colabora con Open Campus en periodismo sobre el tema de educación superior. Para comunicarte con Jason, escríbele a jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

La universidad es cara. Llenar la FAFSA te puede ayudar con los gastos.

2022-10-13T23:33:26+00:00

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El mes de octubre marca el inicio de la temporada para solicitar ayuda financiera y uno de los períodos más importantes para determinar si un estudiante de secundaria irá a la universidad.

La Solicitud Gratuita de Ayuda Federal para Estudiantes (Free Application for Federal Student Aid, o FAFSA), cuyo plazo de solicitud comenzó el 1 de octubre, ayuda a los estudiantes a calificar para obtener grants y préstamos federales o becas para pagar por la universidad. Llenar la FAFSA ayuda a los estudiantes a darse cuenta de que la universidad es una opción, dijo la directora ejecutiva del Departamento de Educación Superior de Colorado, Angie Paccione.

Alrededor de un 85% de los estudiantes que van a la universidad llenan la FAFSA, dijo.

“Sabemos que, si vas a ir a la universidad, completas esa FAFSA porque quieres asegurarte de obtener todo el dinero que puedas”, dijo Paccione. “Al mismo tiempo, los estudiantes que la llenan se dan cuenta de a qué escuelas pueden ir porque saben cuánto dinero van a tener disponible”.

El shock del precio de la matrícula es una de las principales razones por las que los estudiantes que quieren ir a la universidad acaban por no hacerlo. Sin embargo, para los estudiantes provenientes de familias de ingresos medios y bajos, el costo real de matrícula resulta ser mucho menor después de aplicar la ayuda financiera.

Llenar la FAFSA ayuda a los estudiantes y a las familias a tener una idea realista de lo que podría costar la universidad. Además, ayuda a los estudiantes y a las familias a decidir de manera informada si podrán afrontar ese gasto.

Los estudiantes y las familias tienen hasta el 30 de junio para presentar la FAFSA a fin de recibir ayuda para el próximo año universitario. Mientras más temprano los estudiantes y las familias envíen la solicitud, más fácil será resolver cualquier problema que pueda surgir.

A menos que un estudiante califique como independiente, los que tienen 24 años o menos probablemente tendrán que llenar el formulario con la información de su familia. También hay opciones para los estudiantes que no tienen la información de su familia o que son indocumentados.

Colorado ha luchado durante años para que los estudiantes llenen el complicado formulario. El año pasado, solo un 46% de los estudiantes que se graduaron de secundaria en el estado completaron la FAFSA, un porcentaje muy por debajo del promedio nacional del 57.5%.

El estado se ha enfocado más en aumentar esas cifras educando sobre el tema de ayuda financiera y requiriendo que las escuelas les notifiquen a los padres y a los estudiantes las ventajas de llenar la FAFSA. Esto es parte de un plan a largo plazo para que el porcentaje de estudiantes que completan la FAFSA en Colorado aumente a un 80%. Un grupo de trabajo también ha pedido que el formulario se convierta en un requisito para graduarse de la secundaria.

A continuación, los expertos en ayuda financiera ofrecen varios consejos para llenar el formulario.

Empieza el proceso ahora, aunque no sepas si vas a calificar.

Joe Donlay, Director de Ayuda Financiera de la Universidad Estatal de Colorado, aconseja que las familias y los estudiantes no esperen para llenar la solicitud.

El proceso de llenar el formulario puede llevar tiempo, ser abrumador, y a veces, parecer invasivo. El formulario pide una serie de datos financieros, como documentos de impuestos y los saldos en cuentas bancarias de cheques y de ahorro. El gobierno federal también podría darle seguimiento, y esto incluye pedir documentos adicionales.

Al final, el proceso puede valer la pena, porque abre a los estudiantes a una variedad de dinero para ir a la universidad, dijo Donlay.

Él aconseja que las familias llenen el formulario aunque sientan incertidumbre. Aunque el gobierno federal no les conceda dinero a los estudiantes y sus familias, alguien más podría hacerlo.

Sin la FAFSA, es posible que los estudiantes no tengan acceso a dinero gratuito, como grants o becas para ir a la universidad. Además, dijo Donlay, algunos podrían también calificar para préstamos de poco o ningún interés para pagar por la universidad.

“La FAFSA es realmente la clave”, dijo Donlay.

Donlay dijo que, para empezar, los estudiantes y las familias deben visitar FAFSA.gov. El sitio web federal explica con detalles cómo iniciar el proceso.

Las familias y los estudiantes cuentan con ayuda.

Sin embargo, no deberían pensar que tienen que enfrentar el proceso por su cuenta.

Ellos pueden preguntarles a los orientadores de secundaria qué documentos deben tener a la mano. Los padres y los estudiantes también deben estar atentos a eventos nocturnos de ayuda financiera organizados por las escuelas secundarias; en estos eventos podrán obtener ayuda adicional o hacer preguntas. Y pueden hacer listas de verificación para mantenerse organizados.

Los orientadores y los expertos en ayuda financiera también pueden facilitar el proceso hablando con las familias sobre la importancia de la FAFSA, poniéndoles en contacto con talleres y dándoles seguimiento.

Diana Madriz, directora asistente de acceso a la universidad en la Denver Scholarship Foundation, dijo que cuando trabaja con familias, para hacer el proceso lo más fácil posible suele preguntar sobre la vida en el hogar y lo que se aplica y no se aplica a los estudiantes.

Por ejemplo, si un estudiante o sus padres no son ciudadanos estadounidenses, es probable que necesiten ayuda para llenar los formularios de ayuda financiera y que deban consultar a un experto.

Sin embargo, la ciudadanía o el estatus legal de los padres no afectan que un estudiante obtenga ayuda financiera. El formulario no hace esa pregunta sobre los padres.

Madriz dirige a los estudiantes que no están aquí legalmente a la Solicitud de Ayuda Financiera del Estado de Colorado (Colorado Application for State Financial Aid, CAFSA). Esos estudiantes no son elegibles para la FAFSA porque ésta requiere contar con estatus legal en Estados Unidos, pero ellos de todos modos podrían obtener alguna ayuda a través de la CAFSA.

Al final, Madriz dijo que una gran parte de llenar el formulario es aliviar los temores y las preocupaciones y contestar muchas preguntas sobre las circunstancias individuales.

“Hemos tenido situaciones en las que creo que las familias sienten temor a compartir información”, dijo Madriz. “Pienso que es importante que nunca hablemos en términos absolutos, porque las cosas cambian todo el tiempo. Pero creo que podemos compartir lo que sabemos con las familias”.

Los orientadores tampoco deben tener miedo de hacer preguntas o pedir ayuda

Cuando se trata de finanzas, la situación de cada familia es diferente.

Cendy De la Torre, gerente de eventos de Denver Scholarship, dijo que los orientadores pueden hacer preguntas de manera cuidadosa a fin de fomentar la confianza de las familias o los estudiantes que podrían mostrarse reacios a llenar el formulario.

Ella agregó que preguntar sobre la situación legal, o si los miembros de la familia están distanciados, puede ser un tema difícil. Por eso, dijo que fomentar confianza es un elemento esencial para ayudar a las familias o a los estudiantes a llenar la solicitud. Su consejo es que los orientadores hablen en términos hipotéticos en lugar de hacer preguntas directas, permitiendo que los estudiantes y las familias sean quienes tomen la iniciativa de hablar sobre sus circunstancias.

Añadió también que los educadores y orientadores no son los únicos que ayudan a las familias. “Somos muchos los que pasamos por esos mismos retos”, agregó.

Madriz y De la Torre dijeron que a menudo se encuentran con numerosas situaciones en las que no saben a ciencia cierta cómo ayudar a una familia con el formulario.

Donlay y los departamentos de ayuda financiera de las universidades de todo el estado están dispuestos a ayudar. Él dijo que los funcionarios de ayuda financiera de las universidades pueden recomendar cambios en las palabras usadas en el formulario o en las preguntas financieras específicas en relación con la familia. Los orientadores no deben dudar en trabajar con las universidades, dijo.

“Siempre animamos al estudiante o a la familia a comunicarse con la oficina de ayuda financiera. Así nosotros podemos ayudar a determinar cuál podría ser la respuesta o la solución según esas circunstancias particulares”, dijo.

Los orientadores y las familias no deben sentirse desanimados si no consiguen resolver un problema.

Natasha Garfield, directora de becas de DSF, dijo que hasta los funcionarios de ayuda financiera, que han hecho este trabajo durante años y han capacitado a otros, a veces se encuentran con situaciones que parecen no tener solución. Sea cual sea la situación, las familias y los estudiantes pueden estar seguros de que la ayuda está ahí, aunque no haya una solución clara.

“Siempre son cosas que tenemos que superar y dar el todo para solucionarlas”, dijo.

Jason Gonzales es reportero que cubre temas de educación superior y la legislatura de Colorado. Chalkbeat Colorado trabaja con Open Campus en la cobertura de temas de educación superior. Para comunicarte con Jason, envíale un mensaje a jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

Dos hermanos hispanos querían ir a la universidad en Colorado. Aquí te contamos por qué solamente uno lo logró.

2021-12-02T23:47:15+00:00

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La alarma de Jimy y Luis Hernández los despierta antes de que salga el sol.

Los hermanos intentan moverse en silencio por la casa de sus padres en el noreste de Denver para no molestar a sus hermanos.

Luis, de 18 años, podría ver las noticias o ayudar a su mamá a preparar el almuerzo antes de salir hermano a la fábrica de cartuchos de tóner donde trabaja a tiempo parcial para ayudar a pagar la universidad. Está matriculado en la Metropolitan State University (MSU) en Denver.

Jimy, de 21 años, suele no pasar por la cocina porque se apresura a prepararse para su trabajo a tiempo completo pavimentando asfalto en una empresa de construcción. Él quería ir a la universidad, pero no pudo encontrar la manera de lograrlo.

Las rutas opuestas de los hermanos destacan los retos que enfrentan los varones hispanos para poder entrar a la universidad... y también para graduarse.

En Colorado, la mayoría de los graduados de secundaria hispanos siguen un camino más parecido al de Jimy. Menos de la mitad va a la universidad - una tasa inferior a la de los varones negros y las mujeres hispanas.

Jimy Hernández, en el medio, camina por la cocina de su casa de Denver mientras su mamá, Mariela Hernández, prepara burritos de chicharrón para la familia antes de que todos salgan a trabajar.

Pero incluso cuando entran a la universidad, como Luis, las probabilidades siguen estando en su contra. Solamente un 41% de los hombres hispanos que asisten a las universidades públicas de cuatro años de Colorado consiguen graduarse, según datos federales recientes. En los colegios comunitarios, menos de un tercio se gradúa.

Y todo esto resulta en enormes disparidades. Entre los estados, Colorado tiene una de las poblaciones más educadas, pero solo una cuarta parte de los residentes hispanos tiene una credencial universitaria, la cifra más baja de todos los grupos. Esto es en comparación con un 61% de todos los residentes de Colorado.

Esta diferencia supone un alto costo para las finanzas de las familias en un estado en el que 1 de cada 5 personas se identifica como de origen hispano. Además, tiene implicaciones para la prosperidad del estado. Para que Colorado cumpla su propia meta de que un 66% de sus residentes tengan una credencial universitaria, es esencial conseguir que más varones hispanos se matriculen y terminen la universidad.

En Colorado y en todo el país, sin embargo, los varones hispanos uniformemente se han pasado por alto en lo que respecta a la educación superior, dijo Wil Del Pilar, vicepresidente de política de educación superior de Education Trust.

“No creo que se hayan enfocado en eso”, dijo Pilar. “Si uno no está representado en la mesa o no empuja a la gente a pensar en esta población de estudiantes, creo que a menudo se les olvida que existen.”

Obstáculos a la educación superior

Múltiples razones llevan a que los varones hispanos a menudo no puedan recibir una educación universitaria.

Una de las barreras es el dinero. En Colorado, las familias hispanas tienden a tener ingresos menores al promedio del estado. Muchos varones hispanos quizás son los primeros de su familia en ir a la universidad. Ellos no pueden dejarse llevar por la familia para saber cuándo empezar a prepararse, dónde solicitar o cómo conseguir ayuda financiera.

Y a esto se le añaden las expectativas de algunas familias de que ayuden a sostener el hogar o a cuidar de los hermanos.

Si llegan al campus, los varones hispanos podrían descubrir que no hay mucha gente que comparte sus experiencias y entiende sus retos. Menos de uno de cada 10 profesores son hispanos, algo importante para que los estudiantes se sientan bienvenidos y para ayudarles a conectar con mentores que puedan guiarles.

5:51 a.m: Luis Hernández, a la derecha, mira las noticias mientras su mamá, Mariela Hernández, limpia la cocina antes de que ambos se vayan a trabajar a una fábrica de cartuchos de tinta y tóner. Su mamá y Luis trabajan en el primer turno del día para que él pueda ir a la Universidad Estatal Metropolitana de Denver.

Un camino nuevo hacia la universidad

Desde que eran niños, los hermanos Hernández entendieron que la universidad era una expectativa.

Como inmigrantes del estado mexicano de Zacatecas, sus padres Mariela y Jaime les recalcaron que hay que aprovechar todas las oportunidades en Estados Unidos. La universidad les abriría nuevas carreras en campos que estarían bien pagados y les aseguraría que iban a trabajar duro con sus mentes y no con sus espaldas.

“Mi sueño siempre ha sido que mis hijos tengan una vida mejor que la que yo tuve”, dijo Mariela Hernández. “Quiero que crezcan y hagan lo que les gusta, que no tengan que trabajar tanto como yo. Quiero que tengan una vida bonita.”

Pero la trayectoria de los hermanos Hernández resalta cómo el sistema universitario de Colorado (y del país) produce resultados desiguales, incluso dentro de la misma familia.

Luis ayuda a su mamá, Mariela, a trabajar en una fábrica de cartuchos de tinta y tóner. Ella le ayudó a conseguir el trabajo para pagar sus estudios en la Universidad Estatal Metropolitana de Denver.

Tres años después de graduarse del Denver Center for International Studies en Montbello, Jimy Hernández tiene una rutina diaria que no había anticipado. En la secundaria, Jimy era un estudiante con desempeño mediano pero se esforzaba y disfrutaba de la escuela. Él sentía que la universidad podía estar en su futuro. Consideró entrar en un programa de soldadura o en especializarse en artes culinarias o en convertirse en barbero.

Sus padres estaban involucrados en su educación. Ellos iban a todas las reuniones de padres y maestros y le animaron a triunfar.

Jimy trató de mantenerse involucrado en la escuela y en las actividades extracurriculares. Tomó el examen ACT y completó los cursos usuales de secundaria. Le gustaba especialmente la historia.

Los maestros y los orientadores académicos sugirieron que solicitara admisión a las universidades. Pero esa sugerencia no vino acompañada de asesoramiento práctico individual. Al no tener ayuda, no sabía por dónde empezar.

“Para ser honesto, los orientadores académicos realmente ayudaron más como los estudiantes de honor y todo eso”, dijo Jimy.

Jesse Ramírez, cuya Organización INSPiRE brinda mentoría para ayudar a estudiantes a entrar a la universidad, dijo que ha encontrado que muchos varones hispanos como Jimy simplemente son pasados por alto. Quizás alguien les hable de la universidad, pero rara vez se les proporciona ayuda práctica, dijo Ramírez.

La clave, dijo, es trabajar con los estudiantes y recordarles la universidad como opción constantemente para que no se desanimen. “Nosotros podemos mostrarles que, sea cual sea su pasión, una educación universitaria puede resaltarla”, dijo Ramírez.

Él ha encontrado que también ayuda tener hombres hispanos exitosos como mentores.

Sin nada de eso, Jimy nunca completó la Solicitud Gratuita de Ayuda Federal para Estudiantes (FAFSA), que abre las puertas a becas, y también a préstamos y grants del gobierno federal. Él solicitó algunas becas y recibió $1,000, pero no pudo decidir a qué universidad ir.

No sabía que las universidades comunitarias ofrecen muchos de los programas que le interesaban por una fracción del costo de las instituciones privadas con fines de lucro. Tampoco sabía por qué era importante llenar la FAFSA.

Lincoln College of Technology, la única universidad que trató de reclutarlo (privada y con fines de lucro), estaba económicamente fuera de su alcance. Un asesor le dijo a Jimy que graduarse con un diploma de soldadura le costaría unos $60,000. Esa cantidad de dinero era abrumadora.

Jimy sabía que ir a la universidad le permitiría ganar más dinero más adelante. Los datos federales muestran que los hombres con diploma universitario de cuatro años ganan en promedio casi $1 millón más durante toda su vida laboral que los que solamente se graduaron de secundaria. Y los graduados de una universidad comunitaria también ganan más.

Los hermanos Jimy y Luis se relajan en la mesa después de un largo día de trabajo y estudios.

Pero la realidad de renunciar a un sueldo fijo y asumir una deuda mayor le llevó a optar por trabajar. Fue cambiando de trabajo y finalmente aterrizó en la empresa de pavimentación de asfalto, que le ofrecía un sueldo de $21 por hora con beneficios y la oportunidad de progresar. Y su mamá dijo que está orgullosa de él — y de todos sus hijos — por lo mucho que trabaja.

Jimy se siente orgulloso de que su hermano pequeño esté logrando sus objetivos y sigue alimentando sus propios sueños universitarios. Pero Jimy no sabe por dónde empezar para volver a estudiar o quién podría ayudarle a saber cómo hacerlo.

Él recuerda cuando tuvo que decirles a sus papás que no iba a ir a la universidad. Podía sentir la decepción de ellos.

“Mis papás realmente no podían ayudarme”, dijo. “Luego, mi mamá entendió.”

Cómo Luis encontró un camino

Entonces, ¿cómo Luis consiguió entrar a la universidad, especialmente cuando se encontró con muchas de las mismas barreras que su hermano?

Luis también trabajó duro y trató de mantenerse activo. Fue parte del grupo que preparó el anuario de la escuela y tomó clases de inglés AP, geografía AP, y otras clases de nivel avanzado y universitario.

Fue uno de los pocos afortunados de su secundaria, predominantemente hispana, en ir a la universidad. En el año escolar 2019-20, aproximadamente una cuarta parte de los estudiantes de DCIS Montbello decidió obtener una educación postsecundaria, en comparación con casi la mitad de los graduados de las escuelas públicas de Denver.

Luis, a la derecha, toma notas en su clase de la tarde sobre atención informada por el trauma, donde el tema de la lección del día era la resiliencia. Él ha obtenido apoyo a través del programa Pathways to Possible para estudiantes desfavorecidos. No cree que hubiera podido asistir a la universidad si no fuera por el programa.

Aunque Luis apenas sabía por dónde empezar, el personal del Programa Pathways to Possible de MSU Denver se comunicó con él y le orientó sobre dónde ir, cómo pagar por la universidad, cómo elegir las clases y cómo matricularse en ellas.

Eso marcó la diferencia.

Mariela y Jaime celebraron el día en que Luis empezó la universidad llevando a la familia a cenar a un restaurante mexicano. Mariela sigue hablando de lo orgullosa que está de Luis.

“Es una bendición”, dijo Mariela. “Estoy agradecida con Dios, con mi esposo y conmigo misma por todo el trabajo que hemos hecho para que esté ahí.”

La graduación no es una garantía

Antes de la pandemia, solamente 1 de cada 5 varones hispanos terminaba una carrera universitaria de cuatro años en MSU Denver.

En su defensa, los funcionarios de la MSU de Denver dicen que sus estudiantes empiezan la universidad con más responsabilidades y retos en el trabajo, la escuela, la familia y la vida, y todo eso pueden dificultar el camino hacia la graduación. Dicen que la universidad también recibe en general menos dinero del estado para educar a cada estudiante que otras escuelas.

Michael Benitez, que dirige la oficina de Diversidad, Equidad e Inclusión de MSU Denver, dijo que el precio de la matrícula universitaria siendo menor que el de muchas otras universidades estatales. Eso ayuda a reducir la deuda y la carga de trabajo de los estudiantes, dijo. La universidad también programa las clases para acomodar a los estudiantes que trabajan, dijo Benítez.

Aun así, los varones hispanos se gradúan en tasas más bajas que cualquier grupo, excepto los varones negros, a pesar de que muchos estudiantes se enfrentan a circunstancias de vida similares.

Para impulsar las tasas de graduación y reducir las barreras, la universidad ha creado programas como Pathways. El programa Pathways, financiado con los fondos federales para el alivio del coronavirus, conecta a los estudiantes con orientadores académicos, ofrece orientaciones para estudiantes de primer año y proporciona ayuda financiera.

Luis dijo que el programa marcó una gran diferencia con solo ayudarle a entrar por la puerta. Pero el programa es minúsculo, con solamente 125 estudiantes, su demanda es potencialmente enorme. Es injusto, dijo Luis, que haya tan pocas oportunidades como Pathways, un programa que podría haber ayudado a su hermano.

“Pienso mucho en ello”, dijo. “Es triste que no haya podido ir a la universidad, porque realmente quería ir.”

Luis es un estudiante de primer año en MSU Denver, y espera convertirse en dentista después de graduarse de universidad. Trabaja tres días a la semana mientras asiste a clases a tiempo completo.

Luis se matriculó en otoño en MSU Denver como estudiante de primer año para hacer un sueño realidad: ser dentista. Siempre le gustó que le limpiaran los dientes cuando era niño y cómo se sentía después. Está tomando clases relacionadas con la medicina y espera ir luego a la escuela de odontología. Las clases son duras, dijo, pero su preparación en la secundaria le ayudó.

Para continuar en la universidad, Luis trabaja tres días a la semana. Eso hace que los días sean largos, lo que complica su meta más inmediata: graduarse. Estadísticamente, se enfrenta a un riesgo.

Los varones hispanos de las universidades de Colorado se gradúan a niveles muy inferiores a los de sus compañeros. Entre las universidades estatales de cuatro años, la MSU de Denver tiene la tasa de graduación más baja para los varones hispanos.

Un éxito en Georgia

Una escuela que ha estado a la vanguardia graduando estudiantes de primera generación es la Georgia State University. Esta institución educa mayormente a estudiantes de color que son los primeros de su familia en ir a la universidad o que tienen bajos ingresos. Sus estudiantes hispanos y negros se gradúan al mismo ritmo que los blancos.

Timothy Renick, que dirige el National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State, dijo que la universidad lleva cuenta electrónicamente de los factores de riesgo que cada estudiente enfrenta a diario, y esto incluye no cumplir los plazos de entrega escolares o tener problemas financieros. La universidad toma en cuenta 800 posibles riesgos. Eso significa que si una crisis laboral o de vida interfiere con los estudios, la universidad puede tratar de intervenir.

“En vez de esperar que los estudiantes en cada uno de esos casos diagnostiquen el problema y acudan a nosotros en busca de ayuda, nosotros nos estamos comunicando proactivamente con ellos en un plazo de 24 o 48 horas después de detectar uno de esos problemas”, dijo Renick.

En Colorado, ninguna universidad lleva notas tan detalladas sobre los estudiantes.

Los días de trabajo, Luis y su madre entran a trabajar en la fábrica a las 6:30 am. Él usualmente trabaja hasta la hora de almuerzo y luego se dirige a la casa para hacer la tarea o toma el tren para ir a sus clases. Su gerente le da flexibilidad para trabajar de acuerdo con su horario de clases.

Luis se levanta a las 7 de la mañana hasta los días en que no trabaja.

Luis se pregunta si podrá mantener el intenso horario de trabajo y de estudios a tiempo completo, pero dice que se siente equipado para hacerlo.

Él trata de ayudar en la casa o pasar tiempo con sus hermanos menores. En los raros días que tiene tiempo para sí mismo, dice que le gusta “disfrutar un poco de la vida.” Usualmente eso incluye ver un programa de televisión.

Dice que rara vez se siente demasiado cansado. Se apoya en la fuerza de su familia y en su orientador del programa Pathways. Tomó un seminario de manejo del tiempo, y por eso se siente preparado para controlar su agenda.

Sin embargo, le preocupa si podrá mantener el programa a largo plazo y qué retos podrían desviarle del camino.

Modelo de conducta para una familia extendida

Después de un largo día, los hermanos Hernández a veces pasan el rato juntos en el sofá. Luis suele hacer tarea en su computadora portátil. Jimy podría estar viendo las noticias o navegando en su teléfono.

También pasan tiempo con sus dos hermanos menores, Alejandro, de 13 años, y Brian, de 14. Los hermanos Hernández mayores tienen las mismas expectativas universitarias de sus padres para sus hermanos menores.

“Siempre les digo que se queden en la escuela y que hagan algo por sí mismos”, dijo Jimy.

Y Luis espera poder ser un ejemplo a seguir para sus hermanos, así como para otros varones hispanos que aspiran a obtener algún día un título universitario.

“Tengo mucha presión por ser el primero en ir a la universidad”, dijo. “Pero mis primos y hermanos me admiran y ven lo que estoy haciendo. Quiero ser una inspiración para ellos.”

Tennessee needs more students to finish higher education to meet job needs, report says

2023-12-13T01:36:41+00:00

Tennessee’s education system must do more to help minority and economically disadvantaged students earn postsecondary degrees in order to meet the state’s workforce needs, a report by an education policy and advocacy organization warned.

The State Collaborative on Reforming Education’s 2024 report, released at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, lauded Tennessee students’ overall progress on standardized tests since the pandemic, and a rebound in the number of students attending college during that time. But the group noted that fewer students were finishing college within six years of graduating high school.

For example, only 26% of the students who entered high school in 2012 had earned degrees or credentials by the summer of 2022, the report said. Black and Hispanic students have lower postsecondary graduation rates than their white peers. Among students who entered high school in 2012:

15% of Black students earned postsecondary degrees by 2022
16% of Hispanic students earned postsecondary degrees by 2022
30% of white students earned postsecondary degrees by 2022

“This is one of the most important data points in the report,” said David Mansouri, CEO of SCORE. “We know that the current pipeline, from K-12 to postsecondary education, and into the job market, is broken, and we are losing too many Tennesseans along the way who want and deserve better opportunities.”

Those numbers also don’t bode well in a state where only 56 workers are available for every 100 jobs, according to the report, and where 70% percent of business leaders say there are not enough trained workers to fill many of those jobs.

“To prepare Tennesseans for jobs enabling economic independence, the education system must better align and respond to the labor market,” the report said. “Tennesseans with postsecondary training valued by employers qualify for a larger portion of the state’s jobs, show greater resilience in the job market during economic downturns and experience greater earnings throughout their lifetime.”

To address the problem, SCORE recommends strengthening existing policies such as the Tennessee Promise program, which provides tuition assistance for students to attend community or technical colleges. SCORE said the program doesn’t go far enough to help students complete college, noting that only one-third of Tennessee Promise students earn a degree in six years.

It also recommends building more effective pathways between education and careers, such as providing clear information on which credentials and degrees are required for certain careers. And it calls for ensuring that K-12 education supports and meets student needs — for example, by finding more highly effective teachers for Tennessee’s low-income students and students of color.

Correction: Dec. 19, 2023: A previous version of this story stated that of the 26 % of Tennessee students who entered high school in 2012 and earned degrees or credentials in 2022, 30% were white, 16% were Hispanic, 15% were Black and 37% identified as other. The percentages for each racial or ethnic group are actually the rates within that group, not the number within the category of all Tennessee students.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools reporter Laura Testino contributed

Bureau Chief Tonyaa Weathersbee oversees Chalkbeat Tennessee’s education coverage. Reach her at tweathersbee@chalkbeat.org.

How Indianapolis-area students can earn college credit in high school

2023-12-07T16:10:41+00:00

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This article was originally published by WFYI.

More than a decade ago, only a quarter of Marion County public high school graduates earned college credit. Today, over half of all graduates earn dual credits from Indiana public colleges during their high school years.

The growing popularity of dual credit comes as the price tag of a secondary degree is questioned by debt-averse students, and Indiana’s college-going rate is stuck at the lowest point in a generation.

In Indianapolis, the number of high schoolers going directly to college after graduation fell to about 47 percent in 2021, according to the most recent state data.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, more students than ever were choosing to earn several types of advanced credit that count toward their graduation and can not only streamline the transition to higher education but cut the bill. Nearly 63 percent of Indiana high schoolers who graduated in 2021 had some type of college credit, a slight dip from the previous year.

In the next four years, state education leaders want to ensure that every Indiana high school provides students the opportunity to earn 30 core college credits, covering essential subjects like English composition, introductory biology, and chemistry. That’s called the Indiana College Core — a certificate earned by completing a set of coursework that can be transferred between all Indiana public colleges and universities and some private ones. Today more than 220 high schools offer it.

Proponents of College Core say it’s working. Over 1,800 students from the class of 2021 graduated with the Indiana College Core, and 90 percent of those students went on to attend college.

Those students could also save on the price of a degree. The Indiana Commission for Higher Education estimates the average cost for a year at a state public college at $22,000.

Students can still take classes for transferable college credit that work towards earning the Indiana College Core without taking all 30 credits needed to earn the certificate.

Michael Hansen with the Brookings Institution says many people are rethinking the purpose of college credit — including how it could be a pathway to enrolling in and completing college.

“I think, for many students, it does show them that maybe college isn’t that challenging, after all,” Hansen said. “I think some students just sort of tell a story about their academic ability during school, and they just feel like college is not for me, and so I’m not even going to try.”

High schools in Indianapolis provide various dual credit programs, with some large traditional schools like Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis Public Schools and Lawrence North in Lawrence Township, reporting around 68 percent of graduates earning credits, according to most recent state data.

Here’s how two Indianapolis high schools provide programs for students to earn college credits and, for some, even a chance at an associate’s degree.

Earning credit on a college campus

Rhymz Johnson is a junior at GEO Next Generation High School. He’s been at GEO since he was a freshman. He arrives at the school in the Meadows northeast side neighborhood every weekday morning around 8:30 a.m. A little bit later, he gets on a bus.

Johnson and two other classmates are headed a few miles to Ivy Tech Community College. It’s the first day of a new term in October.

Rhymz Johnson is a junior at GEO Next Generation High School. Johnson attends classes each day at Ivy Tech Community College as part of a program to earn credit or an associate degree that can transfer to an Indiana college or university.

Johnson, 17, said he feels more like a college student than a high schooler. This semester, he only has one class at the charter high school. The rest of his classes are at Ivy Tech, like the design technology class today.

“Every year since freshman year, I’ve basically had more college classes than high school classes,” he said about the Ivy Tech courses that also satisfy his graduation requirements.

Kevin Teasley, the founder of GEO Academies, said getting students on campus to take classes prepares them for the experience of navigating and learning at college.

“So they walk away with not only a bunch of credits, saving themselves and their family a bunch of money, but they walk away with a lot of experience,” Teasley said. “That’s the key. So if they get an associate’s degree, fantastic. But what we really want them to get is that life experience of going off to college.”

Teasley opened a Gary charter school in 2005. The goal was initially to thwart the high dropout rate in the Northwest region. What he found was a way to connect students with post-grad opportunities.

Now two GEO schools in Gary offer dual credit programs at local colleges. At Gary Middle College, aimed at non-traditional students, nearly 80 percent of graduates reported employment or college enrollment a year after graduation in 2020, according to the most recent data available.

The GEO Next Generation High School Indianapolis opened in 2020 and it offers the Indiana College Core. About 180 students are enrolled at the 7-12 grade school, according to state data. In 2022, 85 percent of students graduated.

“We’re in the business of dropping all barriers,” Teasley said. “We want our students to succeed. So if we have to provide transportation we do. We do pay for the tuition. We do buy the textbooks. We do provide academic and social supports. It’s a complete approach.”

The cost per credit hour for part-time students at Ivy Tech is $170.

Multiple times each day a bus transports students from GEO Next Generation High School on the city’s north east side to the campus of Ivy Tech Community College.

For Johnson, the experience at GEO Academy led him to reconsider a plan to take off time after high school.

“I think I’ll just go ahead and stick to it and just take another year at Ivy Tech, at least to try to get my associate’s degree,” he said.

Now, Johnson is considering transferring to a four year university after getting his associates to major in engineering.

College classes at your high school

Ben Davis University is a three-story building just outside the I-465 loop west of downtown. From the outside, it appears to be a traditional high school but is a partnership between the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township and the public Vincennes University.

The curriculum is designed for students to earn a diploma and associate’s degree to ease the path to a four-year college. Students take classes to complete one of four degrees and career paths: liberal arts, business management, information technology, and health careers.

The school district covers all the costs.

Gift Akintomide is a junior who picked IT as her focus. She said the smaller, more intimate educational environment at BDU led to her choosing the school over other options. About 390 students are enrolled at the 10-12 grade school, according to state data.

“There’s a lot fewer people [at BDU] than at other high schools. So you feel like you’re getting a tailored education and you have a more personal relationship with your teachers and your peers,” said Akintomide. “But I will say that the early college did draw me in as well. There are opportunities to grow from it.”

BDU students take college classes every other day from a Vincennes University adjunct professor. This semester, Akintomide is taking an advanced computer science class.

She chose IT because it’s a growing field and the skills she’s learning now will be transferable to whichever career path she lands on.

Vincennes counselors are also in the building to help students stay on track for their degree completion. Akintomide says she learned that if you collaborate with teachers to understand the college coursework, “you will excel.”

In 2022, 100 percent of students graduated. In 2021, nearly 95 percent of graduates reported they were employed or enrolled in college after graduating a year earlier.

Wayne Township offers other dual credit options outside of Ben Davis University. The Early College Career Center at Ben Davis High School offers a program for students to earn their diploma and associate degree in pharmacy technology, culinary arts, or precision machining.

Ben Davis University is part of the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township. Through a partnership with Vincennes University students can earn an associate degree when they graduate with their high school diploma.

“Wayne Township has always had pathway options for students so that they can individualize what they want to do during high school and what they want to do after high school,” said Rebecca Daugherty-Saunders, the district’s Director of College and Career Readiness. “We definitely have seen a growing trend of interest in career certification programs. And so we’re adapting to meet the needs of our students.”

The Area 31 Career Center, also based at Ben Davis High School, offers credentials in welding, cosmetology, and supply chain management. Students get school credit for hands-on work experience.

Akintomide, the junior at Ben Davis University, hasn’t nailed down exactly what she wants to do for her career but wants to go into the medical field. She is considering a major in bioengineering on a pre-med track and then continuing to medical school.

“I think it gave me an idea of what college is. I may not be like physically in an actual college. but it does let me know how the structure works,” Akintomide said about the school. “I also get to talk to the professors, and they let me know how it is at Vincennes University.”

Contact WFYI Marion County education reporter Sydney Dauphinais at sdauphinais@wfyi.org.

How the delayed FAFSA is impacting a new mandate for Indiana students

2023-12-07T11:00:00+00:00

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It’s the first school year that Indiana students are required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA. But they still don’t have access to the form.

The FAFSA is typically released in October. But this year, its release has been delayed as the federal government works on a new version that’s supposed to be easier and quicker to fill out. It’s now expected to be out by the end of the month.

All that change means it’s even more important for resources to reach every student individually, school leaders said.

The FAFSA is how students are considered for federal financial aid such as grants, loans and scholarships as well as some aid from states and individual colleges. Students can also access funds for a Next Level Jobs Workforce Ready Grant for a short- or long-term credential by filling out the form.

The new statewide requirement, which has some exceptions, is part of an effort by state leaders to boost Indiana’s college-going rate, which stood at about 53% for the Class of 2021, the latest data available. That’s roughly the same percentage as for the Class of 2020, although it declined for several years before that.

Filling out the FAFSA is considered an indicator of college-going, and nearly 48% of students in Indiana’s high school Class of 2023 completed the form, per a state dashboard. But the FAFSA delay could create a time crunch; of those students who completed the FAFSA, roughly 60% filled out the form by Dec. 31.

What families need to prepare for the FAFSA

One big change is when students and parents create their Federal Student Aid ID, which serves as a digital signature students need for the FAFSA

As part of creating the ID, they submit personal information to be verified, and the ID can take one to three days, said Bill Wozniak, vice president of communications and student services for INvestEd, which provides free FAFSA help in-person and via phone.

In the past, students and parents could create their FSA ID before sitting down to fill out the FAFSA or at the same time, but the latter is no longer an option, Wozniak said. So families need to have the ID ready before they start the form.

“It really launches the whole process,” said Rebecca Daugherty-Saunders, director of college and career readiness for the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township.

School leaders and others are telling students to create their FSA IDs now. Otherwise, for example, families might come to a FAFSA event in the spring expecting to complete the FAFSA there with experts to help them, but won’t be able to because they don’t have an ID ready to go.

How sports and free dinners help schools boost FAFSA completion

In years past, Wozniak said INvestEd would hold roughly half of its FAFSA events before the new year, in part because there’s typically a group of students who wanted to fill out the form around the time when college applications are due.

Plus, College Goal Sunday, a free event to help families fill out the FAFSA at locations across the state, is typically in October and in February. But this school year, it’s only on Feb. 25, 2024, said Wozniak, who serves as the event’s co-chairperson.

Still, INvestED has more than 900 events scheduled this year at high schools across the state, including ones this semester about the FSA ID and general information.

And districts including Warren and Wayne townships received the College Matters grant to increase college enrollment in Marion County; they are using it to help students fill out the FAFSA.

Both Ben Davis and Warren Central have added experts and support staff from universities and community groups to answer questions and work with students and families on the FAFSA. District leaders said they are looking for ways to make it as easy as possible for families.

At Warren, that means having people available to help before and during the school day at the district’s community resource center, in addition to the evening sessions for filling out the FAFSA.

It also means ensuring there is FAFSA information at events families attend, such as athletic competitions, said Laura Butgereit, coordinator for college and career readiness, school counseling, and family engagement for the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township.

At Ben Davis, the Indianapolis Urban League is providing hot meals for families during the FAFSA nights. That makes it easier for families to attend, Daugherty-Saunders said: “We’re taking time away from families outside of school. It’s their dinner time.”

Reaching all students can be difficult in a high school as big as Ben Davis, but it’s crucial, Daugherty-Saunders said. She added that teachers and counselors both work to reach seniors about their postsecondary plans.

Butgereit agreed that reaching each student is crucial to the new FAFSA mandate’s success.

“It’s going to come down to our counselors [and] support people working through all the seniors,” she said.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief. She also covers access to higher education and Warren Township Schools. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Public Schools students are taking longer than four years to finish college: report

2023-12-05T11:00:00+00:00

Most Chicago Public Schools students take five years or longer to finish college, according to a new report from the To&Through Project at the UChicago Consortium on School Research.

The report — titled “The Four Years Fallacy” — analyzed CPS students who graduated in 2015 and enrolled in college the following year. It found 30% finished their degree in four years, but when looking at college completion rates within six years, the rate climbs to 50%.

Most students — roughly 67% — finished their degree in five years, after one or two extra semesters, while 12% took longer. About 15% finished in four years, exactly eight terms, and 4% finished early.

Jenny Nagaoka, deputy director of the UChicago Consortium and senior advisor for the To&Through Project, said college graduation rates are most commonly reported by the federal government and higher education institutions as six-year rates, but that’s not how students and families think about college when they’re applying.

“The problem is that we call them four-year colleges,” Nagaoka said. “If I’m on a two-hour flight, and if it arrives three hours later and that’s considered on time, I’m going to be pretty unhappy.”

The report did not look at the reasons why students took longer, and the authors said there are many valid reasons students take more time. However, the report points out that taking longer than four years to complete a degree can create financial burdens, including more student debt, and can delay the start of one’s career and earnings.

When looking at a student’s race and gender, disparities in college completion emerge.

Young Black men are least likely to finish their degree in either four or six years, followed by young Black women and young Latino men. Young white and Asian American women have the highest college completion rates, followed by their male counterparts, according to the report.

“We’re seeing a lot more first-generation college students, a lot more low-income students, and we’re seeing more students who are going to college are racially diverse,” Nagoaka said. “What colleges need to do to make sure that students are successful has changed considerably.”

Brian Harris, Director of College Pathways with Chicago Public Schools, said it’s important not to “negatively stigmatize taking six years to finish college.”

“Our focus is on our students’ success in general as opposed to doing it within a specific amount of time,” Harris said.

CPS has a curriculum for all sixth through 12th grade students to help them think about their future careers and how to navigate college applications and enrollment, as well as prepare them academically to be successful in college classes, Harris said.

But once they’re on a college campus, that extra guidance and help can fade away.

“So much of persistence and completion is connected to the type of support they get on the college level,” Harris said.

He pointed out that the district has had a partnership with more than a dozen local universities and colleges since 2014 aimed at collaborating on the question of how best to support CPS students.

“We talk about financial aid, we talk about admissions policies, we talk about student affairs policies,” Harris said. “We have a pretty open line of communication with higher ed institutions in hopes that we get feedback on: How can we best prepare students for success at your institution?”

“And on the flip side, here’s what we’re hearing from our students in higher ed institutions. This is what our students need in order to be successful at your institution,” he said.

Harris noted that the data in the report looks at the Class of 2015 and said district officials anticipate seeing improved four-year and six-year college completion rates in the coming years.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Butler University launches two-year college with degrees free to most students

2023-11-03T17:16:48+00:00

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Students can earn an associate degree from Butler University at no cost to them, and continue on to earn a bachelor’s degree for $10,000, thanks to a new program.

On Friday, Butler announced it is opening a new two-year college on campus that will offer associate degrees in business and allied health. The program will start enrolling students in fall 2025.

The program is focused on Indianapolis-area students from low-income backgrounds, including students who are undocumented. The university said in its Friday announcement that it wants to make college more accessible and affordable for previously underserved students, and help them navigate the college-going process.

The program is designed as a commuter school, and its students will have access to the same resources and amenities as other Butler students, officials said Friday. However, students in the two-year program will also have additional support, including small classes, dedicated faculty advisors, mental health services, and financial aid, per a news release.

A majority of qualifying students will also qualify for Federal Pell Grants and the state’s Frank O’Bannon Scholarship. Those two sources of aid will cover the cost of the two-year degree, the university said.

Students who earn a 3.0 or higher GPA in their two-year program automatically qualify to continue at Butler to earn a four-year degree. Students with a lower GPA will be considered on a case-by-case basis, per the university.

If students continue work towards their bachelor’s degree, the Pell and O’Bannon funds will — along with aid from Butler — keep costs to the student to a maximum of $10,000, according to Butler.

Butler’s announcement is the latest effort from Indiana’s institutions of higher education to improve the state’s college-going rate. For the Class of 2021, the latest data available, the college-going rate was about 53%. That’s roughly the same rate as for the Class of 2020; the rate fell for several years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education released this fall showed enrollment in higher education increased by roughly 4,700 students from a year ago. That increase included a roughly 3,200-student increase in two-year schools.

Butler is launching its new college in partnership with the national nonprofit organization Come to Believe Network. The organization works to help colleges and universities start two-year programs as a pathway for students to earn associate and bachelor’s degrees, per a news release.

Butler will be Come to Believe Network’s third partner, joining Loyola University Chicago and University of St. Thomas – Minnesota. More than 80% of graduates from this model transfer to a four-year college or university, and 75% earn a bachelor’s degree in addition to their two-year degree, Butler University said.

Come to Believe credits that success in part to the mix of students having access to the amenities of the four-year campus with added support.

Across the state, Ivy Tech Community College and Vincennes University, which are two-year campuses, offer students the most options for two-year degrees.

However, several other universities and colleges offer a smaller number of associate degrees, per the Commission for Higher Education: Ball State University, Indiana University, IUPUI, Indiana Wesleyan University, Purdue University, the University of Saint Francis, and the University of Southern Indiana.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief. She also covers access to higher education and Warren Township Schools. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

Growth in Indiana college enrollment marks largest increase in 13 years

2023-10-18T18:29:57+00:00

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More students are going to Indiana’s colleges and universities this fall, and the share of students earning degrees on schedule has also grown in the last few years, the state announced Wednesday.

Data released by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education showed that enrollment this fall increased by roughly 4,700 students from a year ago. That marks the largest year-over-year increase in 13 years, per the state. The commission reported that there are about 244,600 students enrolled in Indiana institutions of higher education this fall.

The new state data shows a move in a positive direction for state leaders, who are aiming to increase the state’s college attainment after years of declining college-going rates. That includes several efforts aimed at college access enacted earlier this year by state lawmakers.

Per the state, the number of undergraduate students increased by nearly 3% over last year; the number of graduate students declined by less than 1%.

The enrollment increase includes roughly 2,500 students from Indiana, a nearly 2% bump for in-state enrollment.

Enrollment increased at both two-year and four-year institutions. For students from Indiana, enrollment in two-year schools is up by roughly 3,200, and enrollment in four-year institutions is down by roughly 700.

The commission also said that more students are completing degrees on time, with a 9% increase over the last five years.

Earlier this year, the state also reported that Indiana’s college-going rate is about 53% for the Class of 2021, the latest data available. That’s about the same as the rate for the Class of 2020; the college-going percentage fell for several years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The changes approved by state lawmakers this year to improve college access include automatically enrolling students into 21st Century Scholars, which covers tuition for qualifying students; requiring all students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to access more funds; and preventing state and for-profit private colleges and universities from refusing transcripts to current or former students who still owe money to the institution.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief. She also covers access to higher education and Warren Township Schools. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

How a Colorado community college attracted more older students to college

2023-10-06T21:34:49+00:00

Colorado’s community colleges have struggled to enroll older adults since the start of the pandemic, but several schools have been able to work against that trend by helping them with their busy lives.

For example, Pueblo Community College leaders have found ways to cater to and begin to attract older students, or those who aren’t recent high school graduates. The school has leaned into using remote learning, creating flexible class schedules, and offering more child care options to help older adults.

Those changes have made it easier for older students to see themselves on campus, state and school leaders say, while also focusing on the increasing demand among high schoolers participating in concurrent enrollment — a program offered to high school students to take college level courses and even earn an associate’s degree.

“We’ve tried to look at the whole student and make sure that they have the financial resources that they need, but also all of the support services that they need to be successful,” said Patricia Erjavec, Pueblo Community College president.

Overall, the state’s community colleges, as of the end of September, are educating 8.5% more students over last year, or about 84,000 students, up from 78,274 at the same time last year.

Community college enrollment remains below 2019 levels, but concurrent enrollment has helped reduce the losses in the last couple years.

Statewide, concurrent enrollment has increased by 18.5% over last year, or an increase of 5,651 students. On average, most high school students enrolled in the program only take a couple courses.

Degree-seeking student enrollment at the state’s 13 colleges varied this year. Students seeking a degree increased by 2% over last year, or about 1,000 students.

Degree-seeking students include those that have just graduated from high school and students who are going to college after taking a break from school. The state has struggled to get the second group, especially students ages 21-39, to enroll.

The slower rebound in older adults enrolling statewide can likely be attributed to the state’s economy, said Landon Pirius, vice chancellor of academic and student affairs of the college system.

Older students tend to enroll at higher rates during economic downturns to get job training that opens up jobs with higher pay. But Colorado has a strong job market, with one job for every two residents.

Yet, some of the most in-demand jobs require a college education and the state has created new free college training programs in fields such as health care, law enforcement, firefighting, construction, and teaching.

The state must continue to cater to adults through flexible class schedules and support that takes into consideration that many adults come to college with bills to pay and families to support, Pirius said.

“I think we can get there, but I think our systems currently aren’t set up to support adult students as well as they are students who are straight out of high school,” he said.

Pueblo Community College has so far increased concurrent enrollment numbers by 30% this year over last year, second only to Red Rocks Community College.

Erjavec said the school has expanded what it offers to high school students.

The school has a new law academy and enrolled more criminal justice students. Pueblo Community College also started a Friday academy, where concurrent enrollment students come to the school every week. They get to see what it’s like at college, Erjavec said, and help spread the word about the benefits of concurrent enrollment.

Degree-seeking student enrollment among older students has increased by 3.5% over last year. Schools such as Pikes Peak, Front Range, and the Community College of Denver also have boosted enrollment.

Erjavec said the region’s economy might be playing into why it’s seeing interest from older adults. Pueblo has lagged behind the rest of the state in economic growth as a manufacturing city that’s experienced a shrinking of industry in recent years.

Because of the area’s economy, more students might be looking for new opportunities through going to college, Erjavec said.

Her goal is to make it easier for adults to be on campus or take classes.

“We serve a very low socioeconomic, rural area,” Erjavec said. “I always tell my team we get one chance to make sure that the students get the best academic experience they can.”

So far, changes have come without big financial investments, Erjavec said.

The school has relied more on bolstering its remote or hybrid learning options, which especially helps adults who can’t always be on campus because of work or family obligations, she said.

School officials also are thinking about how to provide support or academic services outside of normal school hours.

And the school also has a new child care center at its St. Mary’s-Corwin campus, and she hopes to grow on-campus child care options. The goal is to make students comfortable on campus and build trust that the college can work for them, she said.

“I think we have a good reputation,” Erjavec said. “Students know that and they count on that when they enroll with us.”

Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

You can apply to college for free in Indiana from Sept. 25-29. Here’s how.

2023-09-22T11:00:00+00:00

Indiana students can apply to 36 colleges in the state for free next week, saving them hundreds of dollars in fees.

The fee is waived during College Application Week, which runs from Sept. 25 to 29. The effort is part of a push to increase college-going in the state, which stagnated at 53% of high school graduates from the class of 2021, and was declining before the COVID-19 pandemic.

While some Indiana colleges have no application fee, those that do range from about $25 to $65 per application, so the cost can add up quickly, said Michelle Ashcraft, senior associate commissioner and chief programs officer for the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, who leads the commission’s K-12 outreach team.

The commission has several initiatives aimed at increasing the college-going rate after high school, including automatic enrollment into 21st Century Scholars, which covers tuition for qualifying students; requiring all students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to access more funds; and pre-admissions, where students at participating schools receive a letter telling them which of the participating Indiana colleges they’d be admitted to if they apply.

The application fee waiver next week not only reduces the cost of applying for college, it also means students are researching colleges and applying earlier in the year, Ashcraft said. She added that increases their chances at merit scholarships and helps to meet early deadlines.

If a student hasn’t yet started an application or decided where to apply, Ashcraft said it’s still “very feasible” for students to apply to multiple colleges during College Application Week.

Colleges in the state have worked to streamline their application process, and in some cases, have one-page applications, she said, adding that if a student is undecided about college, this means they have the option for free.

However, Ashcraft said that if students have concerns about affording the application fee after this coming week, they should contact that school’s admissions office and ask if waivers are available.

How to apply to college in Indiana for free:

Below is a list of Indiana colleges and universities participating in College Application Week.

Students should go to the institution-specific application (not the Common App) on that school’s website and fill it out as usual. If a code is listed below, enter that when prompted, otherwise the fee should be automatically waived, Ashcraft said.

List of participating colleges

Anderson University
Bethel University
Caris College
DePauw University
Earlham College
Franklin College
Grace College
Hanover College
Huntington University
Indiana Tech
Indiana State University (Fee waived until Oct. 1)
Indiana University East
Indiana University Fort Wayne (Fee waived from Sept. 15 to Oct. 1. Use code: FWCOLLGO)
Indiana University Indianapolis (Use Code: INCOLLGO)
Indiana University Kokomo
Indiana University Northwest
Indiana University South Bend
Indiana University Southeast
Indiana Wesleyan University
Ivy Tech Community College
Manchester University
Marian University
Martin University
Oakland City University
Purdue University Fort Wayne (Fee waived from Sept. 25 to Oct 8. Use Code: CollegeGo2023)
Purdue University Northwest (Fee waived all of September)
Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
Saint Mary’s College
Trine University
University of Evansville
University of Indianapolis
University of Saint Francis
University of Southern Indiana
Valparaiso University
Vincennes University
Wabash College

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief and covers higher education. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

A path to the workforce and a pipeline of workers: Companies go to high schools for career training

2023-09-20T11:00:00+00:00

Every now and then, Ayden Corbett has to explain to surprised homeowners what he’s doing in their front yard.

Since the second semester of his senior year of high school, he has responded to field calls as an employee of the largest underground utility locating company in North America — the Indianapolis-based U.S. Infrastructure Company (USIC). The white truck and multicolored flags marking the location of water, power, and telecommunications lines usually give it away.

“You learn how to work with people,” he said.

Corbett graduated in 2022 from a unique program at the Hinds Career Center in Elwood that trains high schoolers for the little-known underground utility locating industry. As demand for the profession skyrocketed during the work-from-home boom of the pandemic, USIC representatives approached the career center about creating a high school graduation pathway that would lead to a diploma, an industry certification, and a job offer.

While still uncommon in Indiana, partnerships between schools and private companies that lead students directly into employment in highly specific trades are growing — the Hinds Center program is the newest among four that have been started statewide.

“Their goal is to have trained employees ready to enter the field; ours as a career center is to give students the workforce and soft skills to be employable in whatever they choose,” said Jim Pearson, director of the Hinds center.

And creating more of these programs is a top priority for state education officials, who have been charged under a new state law with reworking high school requirements to encourage more students to work and earn credentials before they graduate.

It’s part of an effort to counter Indiana’s declining college going rates by connecting high school students to in-demand and high-paying jobs without the need for postsecondary education.

Ayden Corbett, a 2022 graduate of the underground utility locating program, stands with his company truck.

“Young people are really wanting a variety of options for leading to viable, successful futures. That’s not necessarily a four-year degree,” said Rachel Rosen, senior research associate at the Center for Effective Career and Technical Education at MRDC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.

‘Employable in whatever they choose’

The underground utility graduation track at the Hinds Center is a slower version of the standard company training program, hosted inside a former sewing classroom that USIC equipped with a virtual reality system and a wall showing the typical utility connections on a home. The company also provides the two instructors, said Darrin Haynes, senior manager of career and technical education at USIC.

Students study the underground utility maps of Indiana cities like Westfield, where new home construction is booming, and learn to use the equipment that allows them to detect underground utility lines both through virtual reality and in the field. They spend part of the day at the center for career training, but also take traditional academic courses at their home high schools.

USIC has hired 14 of the 16 graduates of the Elwood program over two years, and fielded calls from its competitors looking to hire students as well, Haynes said. As of this year, students will also earn college credit at Indiana Tech upon completing the pathway.

One of the main draws of the track is the opportunity to start working during senior year, said Jacob Wright, another 2022 grad. Students who are at least 18 years old are paid the same rate as new hires to respond to calls to 811, the service that companies and homeowners are supposed to call before digging projects, according to Haynes.

“You get a job out of high school, a (company) truck second semester, and you get paid to take calls,” said Wright.

A hallway inside the Hinds Career Center in Elwood, Indiana, shows the 15 different career technical education paths offered to students.

Programs should connect to college and career

Several other local graduation pathways in Indiana offer students direct links to local companies, including the RV construction pathway at Wa-Nee Community schools, and a now-defunct aviation sheet metal pathway at Decatur schools.

The latter operated for a year before the pandemic created challenges for teaching and recruiting students, said Michael Gehrich, director of aviation at Vincennes University, which worked with Decatur schools on the pathway.

Like the utility locating program, the aviation pathway sought to expose students to a local industry that’s in need of workers, with a lower barrier to entry than existing dual credit aviation programs that require additional college education, Gehrich said.

Other similar programs can be found in New York City’s P-TECH schools, said Rosen, the researcher, which are six-year schools that partnered with companies to allow students to graduate with STEM skills, a high school diploma, and an associate’s degree.

Where vocational schools of the past contributed to inequity by directing low-income and students of color into low-wage jobs, modern career training can give students a window into their options, Rosen said.

“CTE in high school provides students an opportunity to explore what they don’t want to do as much as what they do want to do,” Rosen said. “We may see a failure because the student did not want to go into that field, but higher-resourced students have more opportunity to explore and make mistakes. If they wait till college to explore what they don’t like, there can be a real cost to doing that.”

The goal should be preparing students for a career with mobility, Rosen said.

Haynes said underground utility locating offers that mobility. Graduates can work for municipalities instead, move into management and training roles at USIC, or request to be relocated to another state.

The pathway opens a new option in a community where the college-going rate has dropped, said Haynes.

Darrin Haynes, senior manager of career and technical education at USIC, shows a training wall inside the Hinds Career Center classroom.

State data shows the rate for Madison County dropped 16 percentage points from 2015-2020, mirroring the state’s drop of 12 points in that time period.

Though no students have yet changed their minds about the senior-level course, Pearson said one advantage of the career center is that it has the flexibility to redirect students to one of its other career paths.

Plans to expand in Indiana and other states

Pearson said the Hinds center is open to working with other companies to develop local graduation pathways and meet workforce needs — but that they would need to work closely with educators on curriculum and standards.

The career center would aim to stay away from low-skill, low-pay tracks, but wouldn’t outright reject retail pathways, for example, if they led into supervision and management positions, Pearson said.

Haynes said that other companies interested in creating their own pipeline programs at local high schools need to commit to an upfront investment with a slow return. In addition to a workforce pipeline, one major benefit to USIC is that graduates have more time to absorb the training, and begin working with more experience, often making fewer mistakes than other new hires.

Haynes said the company isn’t working with students who are using Indiana’s new career scholarship accounts, which give students money to take career training outside of their schools. Those students could apply for a job with the company and take the training there, he siad.

A mural in Elwood is dedicated to Red Gold Tomatoes, a major manufacturer and employer in town.

The company plans to continue recruiting in high schools. Haynes said USIC has replicated the high school training program in Oklahoma and New York, and hopes to grow it further throughout Indiana and other states.

“Most of our graduates have moved out, have a place of their own. They start their lives in a way that we all dream of when we’re teenagers,” said Haynes. “We’re putting them on a pathway to do that.”

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Career-focused graduation pathway for English learners takes root in Perry Township

2023-09-07T19:10:06+00:00

For over a decade, Southport High School teacher Amy Peddie has led classes of students who are English language learners through the intricacies of getting ready for college, like filling out applications, finding financial aid, and writing personal essays.

This year, she’s teaching a class with a new emphasis: Getting ready for a career by writing cover letters, resumes, and professional emails. In a recent exercise, students contacted companies they were unfamiliar with to ask about job and training opportunities.

“One student said, ‘I thought this was an [English learner] class, but this feels like a work class,’” Peddie said.

Peddie’s course is part of a new graduation pathway for students who are learning to speak and read in English, where students can train for the workforce during high school and graduate with a job and a diploma in hand. It’s the first local graduation pathway in the state to specifically cater to English learner students who have limited English proficiency.

This pathway is part of a growing emphasis in Indiana and nationwide on preparing students for jobs without the necessity of a two- or four-year degree, as college-going rates have declined from several years ago and skilled trades face a worker shortage.

In Indiana, lawmakers have pushed to “reinvent high school” to make it more relevant to in-demand careers.

At Perry schools, which educate around 4,600 English learner students, the second largest population in the state, the pathway also gives students another way to meet Indiana’s graduation requirements and local hiring needs. Like the college-going class, it aims to help newly arrived students navigate a potentially unfamiliar process.

“If your choice is college, great, but if not, that’s not something to look down on,” said Southport Principal Amy Boone. “We want to have options and opportunities.”

Southport has around 600 students receiving English language services, Boone said, and district officials say they’re expecting a record enrollment this year of students who have recently relocated to the United States from other countries. In Indiana, this population grew 52% from 2017 to 2022.

The population is not only growing, but changing, Boone said: More students have arrived in recent years with less experience in formal education, both as a result of the pandemic and international conflict.

But once they enroll, they’re still required to meet Indiana graduation requirements that include demonstrating postsecondary skills. Students with extenuating circumstances could be granted a waiver, but this approach will be limited going forward under a state law passed this year.

If English learners are missing reading and writing skills in their first languages, a traditional career and technical education course may be inaccessible, even with the aid of translation, Boone said.

The new graduation pathway provides students who enrolled in U.S. schools in seventh grade or later a way to meet graduation requirements through classes on business math and personal financial responsibility, as well as internships and mock interviews. It’s also meant to help students develop their English proficiency through speech and English as a New Language classes.

In addition to being the first such local pathway for graduation in Indiana, Perry’s track for English learners is one of just two in the state that equips students with general career skills, rather than focusing on a specific trade or industry.

This year, an initial section of students piloting the pathway has already discussed what they hope to do after high school — answers that included working as barbers or cosmetologists.

Peddie said she hopes to take them on field trips to visit local salons and see that work up close. But she’d also like to introduce them to other industries, like manufacturing, where local companies are actively hiring.

Boone said the key to the program is to balance student interests with community needs.

Local staffing companies that already place the parents of Southport students in jobs are working with Perry schools on the new pathway.

The district itself could employ students to work on campus beautification projects, and then hire them after graduation knowing they have the required skills, Boone said. Southport High School, for example, recently hired a current student to work in the cafeteria.

“There’s been a pendulum shift,” Boone said. “We pushed for a long time on college, but there’s value in the trades, too.”

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Gen Z isn’t so sure about college, a new poll finds. Colorado counselors say that isn’t the whole story.

2023-08-03T23:09:06+00:00

Gen Z believes education after high school is necessary. They’re just not so sure about going to a four-year university.

It isn’t that the generation born between 1997 and 2012 doesn’t want to get a bachelor’s degree, according to a recent study by the ECMC Group. The cost of tuition, student debt, and not feeling prepared keep them from heading to a university. Some are more open to certificate programs, apprenticeships, two-year degrees, and on-the-job training as viable paths to a career.

The general attitudes of Gen Z students, documented in the report by the group that pushes to help students succeed, tracks similarly to what Colorado college counseling groups hear. Advisors say students they talk to are recovering from an unprecedented pandemic and they’re more cost conscious about their education. Gen Z students are putting financial security first.

“They’ve seen so many people just operate to survive during the pandemic,” said Melissa Muniz, the Latin American Educational Foundation student services and program manager.

With those attitudes in mind, counselors say there’s a balance in helping Gen Z students understand how to approach their education. About 65% of students say post-high school education is important, the report says. And almost 60% say they can be successful without a four-year degree.

Having a four-year degree has benefits. State data shows having a bachelor’s degree can open opportunities for more secure and higher-paying jobs that Gen Z students seek. Residents with a bachelor’s degree are also more mobile.

Nonetheless, financial worries persist about the high cost of tuition at a four-year university or the debt students might be saddled with after they graduate. The study says six in 10 teens worry about how to pay for their education. That can hold them back.

Students do have options in Colorado, and it’s true that some students can get what they want out of their education from a shorter-term program.

But the study shows not enough students feel they get the counseling they need to make the decision. About 63% said they need guidance on finances and 48% said they need education and career guidance.

“They’re operating from this place where they want to find something they love, they want to find something they’re passionate about doing,” said Muniz, whose nonprofit pushes for greater access to higher education among Latino and Hispanic students. “But they question how they are also going to have stability so that they can provide for themselves and for their families.”

Gabriel Guindon, Denver Scholarship Foundation college access director, said counselors always make sure students know about Colorado’s talent pipeline report that says about 92% of the top jobs statewide require schooling beyond a high school diploma. The Denver foundation helps students realize their college dreams through advising and financial aid.

Students also should get advised individually to find the best fit, whether that’s academic, financial, or social, he said. Guindon offers advice on how to pay for a four-year degree, but he doesn’t steer students just toward universities. He tries to help students see that an education beyond college is necessary and at their fingertips.

Gen Z’s openness toward other options expressed in the survey aligns with some of Colorado’s higher education priorities. Colorado’s higher education strategic plan calls for students to get a return on what they pay, help more low-income students get into programs after high school, and for colleges to work more closely with employers.

The state has been investing more in programs that connect post-high school education and industries that need more trained workers. Sometimes these programs lead to a bachelor’s degree and sometimes they don’t.

The state wants more high school students to leave with a certificate or credential that can lead to a job and has free high school programs where students can attend college-level classes and earn credit.

Colorado now offers free college and training in a range of fields where there’s a shortage of workers, such as teaching, firefighting, and law enforcement. These programs can help students find a track that fits their interests and offers good job prospects after completion. These programs expanded on Colorado’s CareForward program, which provides free education for health care fields.

Other examples include schools such as Colorado Mountain College, which partners with local employers to create practical training for students to get jobs on the Western Slope. Community colleges such as the Community College of Aurora have also cut some arts and humanities programs to focus on courses that prepare students for jobs.

Sachs Foundation President Ben Ralston said Gen Z attitudes he’s observed are also reactions to issues that should be challenged. The national survey says students want their interests to lead to fulfillment in their careers.

Ralston, whose nonprofit supports Black Colorado students, said he’s heard from many students who want to learn business or engineering because they care most about the money they’ll earn. Some students, however, have no interest in those careers and won’t find fulfillment, he said.

Adults shouldn’t forget a four-year education also can lead to jobs that may not pay as much, but help create a more robust society through art, literature, or teaching, he said. It’s on state leaders to help make jobs with high societal value worth the time students spend getting educated for them and to help students find value in creativity.

For instance, Ralson said Colorado needs more Black educators. The foundation and Teach for America Colorado have teamed up to provide financial and career development support to Black educators, through learning groups and a salary incentive.

Sachs Foundation Chief Operating Officer Pamela Roberts said Gen Z notions about higher ed also can be challenged simply by offering them information. Not every student has to go to an Ivy League school and most students realize that college is more affordable than they expect depending on where they go.

Muniz said, however, students too often don’t get the information they need to make dreams a reality.

“They know what it takes and they know what they might want to do,” she said. “But some of them are just lacking that confidence or lacking that ability or the resources to really understand how to take advantage of these opportunities.”

Correction: The original story incorrectly named the organization that worked on the study. The ECMC Group conducted the study.

Indiana’s newest college-going rate holds to previous year

2023-07-13T15:52:17+00:00

The newest college-going rate for Indiana high school graduates is about the same as it was for the graduating class the year before.

Last year, data from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education showed the high school class of 2020 had a 53% college-going rate, which was a significant drop even with years of declining enrollment, prompting concern from state leaders.

This year, the commission’s data showed that the college-going rate for Indiana high school graduates in the class of 2021 was a “mild decline,” the smallest decline in a decade, according to Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Chris Lowery.

The class of 2021 went to college at a rate of 52.9%, a half of a percentage point down from 53.4% for the class of 2020. That meant that about 400 fewer high school graduates went to college. This rate is the percentage of students going directly from high school to some form of college — which ranged from less than one-year certificates to four-year degrees.

The 2023 College Readiness Report, which includes data about the class of 2021, has not been released yet, but Lowery previewed the data as part of his report at the Indiana Commission for Higher Education meeting Thursday.

Lowery said he’s hopeful initiatives underway will boost the rate in coming years.

Also included in the preview of the data were college-going rates for several groups of students.

The college-going rate for Black high school graduates in the class of 2021 was 45%, an increase of two percentage points from the previous year, and it was 43% for Hispanic and Latino high school graduates, a drop of one percentage point.

Among 21st Century Scholars in the class of 2021, 80.8% went to college compared with 30.1% of students from low-income backgrounds who didn’t use the scholarship and 59.2% of students from high-income backgrounds.

The 21st Century Scholars program offers up to the equivalent of four years tuition and regular fees at an in-state public university or college to students who meet income and residency eligibility. Students must pledge to follow requirements like maintaining a minimum GPA.

Previously, students had to opt into the scholarship before high school, but a change in state law now means that all students who qualify will be automatically enrolled in the scholarship, but have the option to opt out.

Students in the high school class of 2021 had their junior and senior years of high school, the time when college decisions are made, interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lowery said the full 2023 College Readiness Report is expected within a few weeks.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief and covers higher education. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat Indiana partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Battle Creek scholarship program to pay up to 100% of college tuition for grads

2023-05-17T20:49:10+00:00

The Battle Creek high school seniors walked across the stage to enthusiastic applause as they formally announced their post-high school plans, but that couldn’t hold a candle to the big announcement that came after: A new scholarship program will pay for up to 100% of their college tuition and fees.

The Bearcat Advantage, part of a partnership between Battle Creek Public Schools and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, will ensure that district graduates have an opportunity to attend college. The scholarships begin with the Class of 2023, who graduate next week, Superintendent Kimberly Carter said during a decision day event — one of many held across the country during the month of May that celebrate the post-graduation plans of high school seniors. The district enrolls 3,753 students, including 279 seniors.

At this event, which was live streamed on YouTube, the scholarship announcement overshadowed those decisions. Students learned that if they have been enrolled in the district since kindergarten, they will have 100% of their tuition and fees covered. The amount decreases depending on how many years a student has been enrolled. For instance, a student enrolled for just the four years of high school will have 65% of their tuition and fees covered.

It was unclear Wednesday afternoon how much the foundation had provided to launch the scholarship program.

“It’s amazing,” said Kapree Richardson, a sophomore at Battle Creek High School. “This is like a good side door to a lot of things people can’t do. A lot of people want to go to college, but a lot of people can’t afford the terms of going to college.”

Kapree was uncertain himself. “This right here, it helps me out a lot.”

The scholarships cover tuition and fees at Michigan public or private colleges and universities. It is also eligible to be used at nearly 100 historically Black colleges and universities.

“This will change your life,” said La June Montgomery Tabron, CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. (The foundation is a Chalkbeat funder. Click here for a list of our supporters.)

The program is similar to the Kalamazoo Promise, which also covers up to 100% of tuition and fees for district graduates. Since it was announced in 2005, many other “promise” type scholarship programs have been created, including in Detroit, where eligible students can have their tuition costs covered through the Detroit Promise.

“This is our promise to this community,” Tabron said. “It’s our promise to all of you.”

The district and foundation have partnered for years. In 2017, the foundation gave the district a $51 million grant that was aimed at improving academic outcomes in the district. Carter said the grant helped the district create new academic and extracurricular programs for students, including career academies, dual enrollment programs, International Baccalaureate programs, and programs focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

“Over the last few years, our goal has been to use every resource, partnership and strategy available to make sure that each and every one of you succeeds,” Carter said. “For us, failure is not an option.”

The most recent data show that for the Class of 2022, the four-year graduation rate of the district was 58%, which is down from the pre-pandemic rate of 72% in 2018-19. For those who graduated in 2021 and enrolled in college, whether it was a four-year college or a community college, nearly 18% had to enroll in a remedial course because they needed an academic boost before taking more challenging college classes.

When the announcement came Wednesday afternoon, Carter was met with a loud round of applause. But Kapree said some students didn’t fully understand the magnitude of what they heard. But the adults knew. You could see many of them standing in ovation. Many were crying. “It was an emotional moment,” district spokesman Nate Hunt said.

“That is a blessing,” said Christina Taylor, who teaches high school geometry. “People should have been dropping to their knees. We are blessed beyond measurement. The only thing these children do is make sure they get to college. The resources are now there. That barrier has been lifted. Go home and let mom and dad know … the ball is in their court.”

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

Honorary Manual High diplomas given to former Denver students displaced by the school’s closure in 2006

2023-05-16T01:23:57+00:00

After the Denver school board voted in 2006 to close Manual High School, Manual’s 800 students were scattered across the city. Many graduated from different Denver high schools, a milestone that some who disagreed with the closure look back on with mixed emotions.

On Monday, a new Denver school board issued honorary diplomas to 11 former Manual students who did not have the opportunity to graduate from the 129-year-old high school, which is one of the city’s oldest and most storied with a long list of notable alumni.

Wearing black mortarboards, the former students accepted their diplomas and shook hands with board members and Superintendent Alex Marrero, who were dressed in full graduation regalia.

Shanita Lewis was a freshman when Manual closed. Lewis went on to graduate from Denver’s George Washington High School in 2009 but said she always identified with Manual.

“It’s been a long time coming,” she said after the ceremony. “It feels complete.”

Her sister, Oshanette, was a sophomore when Manual closed. She too graduated from George Washington, where she said students were disrespectful to who they termed “the Manual kids.”

DPS awarding her and her classmates honorary Manual diplomas “means a lot,” she said.

Oshanette Lewis was a sophomore when Manual High School closed. In this 2006 photo, she chanted with her classmates to protest the closure.

Marrero apologized to the former Manual students for the closure.

“We can never fully repair the pain that was caused,” said Marrero, who joined DPS in 2021 and wasn’t superintendent at the time of the closure. “We learn from it and we grow.”

Board Vice President Auon’tai Anderson, himself a graduate of Manual after it reopened, said the honorary diplomas were an effort to recognize “our past failure as an institution.”

“We are going to make this right,” Anderson said.

A previous school board voted in February 2006 to close Manual for low academic performance. It reopened in fall 2007 with freshmen and rebuilt its student body over the next several years.

The closure was in line with a philosophy held by the DPS administration at the time. Former boards and superintendents believed closing and restarting schools with new teachers and programming was key to improving test scores and better serving students.

But that approach was often traumatic for the students and families, most of whom were Black and Latino. The current administration has moved away from closing schools for low test scores, though it recently closed three schools for low enrollment.

Ten of the 11 honorary diplomas were awarded to former students who attended Manual when it was closed in 2006.

The eleventh was issued to Otis Taylor, who should have graduated from Manual in 1967 but was expelled for what Anderson said was “hair discrimination,” which is now illegal in Colorado. Taylor is a musician who was later inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, according to the school board proclamation awarding him an honorary diploma.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Scholarships, FAFSA, and transcripts: Three new laws aim to help Hoosier students reach college

2023-05-15T20:15:27+00:00

With an eye to addressing Indiana’s low college-going rate and the perception that college is too expensive, Indiana leaders approved three new laws aimed at improving college access.

The new laws aim to strengthen a state scholarship program, provide more information about financial aid, and limit colleges’ power to withhold transcripts from those who still owe money to institutions.

In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, the state’s college-going rate dropped to 53%, a decline of 12 percentage points from five years before. And there’s been a similar decline in adults who are looking for postsecondary opportunities, per the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

Improving college-going is about the “removal of barriers,” said Alison Bell, chancellor at Western Governors University Indiana. “There are a lot of complicated reasons why the college going rate is low.”

Plus, the state is coming up on its 2025 deadline to have at least 60% of Hoosiers with a credential beyond high school. When state leaders set that goal in 2009, that number was 33%, said Indiana Higher Education Commissioner Chris Lowery in his 2023 State of Higher Education address. It now sits at 54%, but that includes the addition of certificates that were not originally counted, according to the commission.

Higher education leaders and advocates for these bills stressed that finances are a particularly big barrier for students when they don’t know what’s available to them to help them pay for college.

Here what you need to know about three new laws:

21st Century Scholars program expands

The 21s Century Scholars program offers up to the equivalent of four years tuition and regular fees at an in-state public university or college to students who meet income and residency eligibility, and follow requirements outlined in a scholar pledge.

Previously, students had to sign up for the scholarship in middle school, before a no-exceptions deadline of June 30 after eighth grade.

But with the new law, eligible students will automatically become part of the program. After that, students and their families can decide if they want to continue to meet requirements to stay in it. State data showed that 48% of eligible students enrolled.

“It expedites the process,” said Vincent Isom, director of 21st Century Scholars at Indiana University Bloomington, referring to the new law. He said that students and their parents are no longer dependent on finding out about an application and submitting it.

Students required to seek out financial aid options

Indiana students, with some exceptions, are now required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA.

Advocates of the change said that millions of dollars in aid were being left on the table. Requiring the form would allow students to see their school funding options, they argued, and perhaps convince more students to enroll in postsecondary education.

The form is what students need to be considered for federal financial aid such as grants, loans, and scholarships. Completing the form is also considered a leading indicator of college-going.

States and colleges also use the FAFSA to determine eligibility for their respective aid programs.

Colleges can’t withhold transcripts

State and for-profit private colleges and universities can no longer refuse to provide transcripts to current or former students who still owe money — including fees and student loans — to the institution. They also can’t can’t charge a higher fee for the document for those who owe money.

This change removes a barrier for adult learners who want to finish their degrees, but still have payments to make. It often takes months for someone who is thinking about going back to school to make a decision, and not having access to a transcript can derail them, Bell said.

“When a student learns something, they’ve learned it,” said Bell, who advocated in favor of the change. “Withholding a transcript only removes the university’s verification that they’ve learned it.”

Improvements in college access, but more needed

While higher education experts agree these changes are a big step forward, they said that having the money to go to college is only one piece of access.

Access means having information and resources, not only as students are entering college, but also as a college student, said Maurice Shirley, an assistant professor in higher education and student affairs at IU.

He said that includes knowing things like what applications to fill out and where to find them, housing options, and what is needed for a major or to switch majors. And the information to students needs to be targeted and easy to find, said Shirley, given that there can be an information overload.

The change to automatically sign up students for 21st Century Scholars, the change isn’t a “magic wand,” Isom noted. But he said the new law will allow him and others to work with students to spend more time on benchmarks and staying successful in college, instead of on the scholarship application.

And the information to students needs to be targeted and direct, said Shirley who said there is information overload, so the easier it is to find answers to questions, the better.

Both Isom and Shirley agreed finances is an area that they want to see more improvement.

Isom said that students need to be prepared to handle their finances both during and after college.

Shirley said costs of college still need to be lower. One option is addressing tuition costs. But a second way, he said, is decreasing or providing aid for the fees that come with the tuition bill, from activity fees and housing to general living expenses like groceries, health care and so on, he said.

Gone are the days that a student could afford to pay their way through college by working a summer job and using that money during the school year, he added.

A college degree starts with housing help at this program for single mothers in Anderson

2023-04-27T12:54:41+00:00

Amanda Lowery was driving to school last summer when her phone rang. A few weeks earlier, the 32-year-old had started classes to earn her high school diploma. But what she really wanted was to go to college.

A single mother who dropped out of high school at 16, Lowery was working two jobs when she decided to go back to school. She struggled to balance going to class with working to pay bills and not having child care in the evenings or on weekends.

When she answered her phone, Lowery learned she was one step closer to moving into the Anderson Scholar House in Anderson, Ind. And when a second phone call during her history class made it official, she cried. She had a new beginning.

Anderson Scholar House helps single mothers who want a college degree but need housing and extra support. It doesn’t eliminate bills and other pressures of life, but creates a support system that stops those pressures from derailing college careers.

Participants can attend any college, as long as a majority of classes are in-person, and they have transportation to campus. The scholar house provides stable housing for the women — known as scholars — and their children — known as junior scholars — while also teaching life skills and providing guidance.

The aim is for scholars to leave as college graduates who no longer need the housing vouchers, food stamps, or other government assistance they previously have relied on.

It’s a simple concept, and it’s proven successful elsewhere. Plus it’s slated to grow, with two locations possible in Indianapolis.

Rosemary Baker, the family advocate who helps the scholars navigate day-to-day challenges, said it’s the first program she has seen that “did not put a Band-Aid” on people’s problems, leaving them no better off once it ends.

Instead, she said, once it ends, “you’re a new person.”

Anderson Scholar House provides stable housing for single mothers who are looking to earn a college degree.

Giving scholars the support and privacy they need

Last fall, Lowery was one of the first to move into the scholar house, which is actually a pair of apartment buildings. Four of the apartments are occupied. Renovations are wrapping up on four more, and there are several more to be renovated in the future.

Lowery lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her two-year-old daughter, Aaliyah. It’s a space they’ve made their own, from the jungle-themed bedroom for Aaliyah to the “perfect” two-seat kitchen table Lowery gushes about.

In the mornings, they get ready for school together before Lowery heads to classes and Aaliyah goes to day care.

“I’m like, ‘OK baby, mommy’s got to go to school and you got to go to school, we got to get ready, we got to put clean clothes on, brush our teeth, we’re gonna have a good day, learn new things,’” Lowery said.

In the evenings, they make and eat dinner together before Lowery does homework.

Challenges still happen: Aaliyah gets sick and needs to stay home, or Lowery’s car needs repairs. She balances school with working at Cracker Barrel. She still has bills to pay.

Lowery and the other scholars aren’t entirely on their own when it comes to living expenses. The program uses housing vouchers, so they pay a reduced rent. Many also use other assistance programs such as food stamps, and they have scholarships and grants for their education.

Aaliyah points to her toy box crafted by Doug Eckerty, the executive director of JobSource, which runs Anderson Scholar House.

The scholar house staff and providers help with applications and navigating paperwork. Scholars are urged not just to earn college degrees, but to do so in fields that are in demand and offer high wages.

Lowery said Baker — who works out of the scholar house — is her first point of contact when she wants to talk through a challenge and doesn’t know what to do.

“She can either tell me what I need to do, how to do it, or make a phone call to think it out,” Lowery said.

Baker is quick to say that she doesn’t make decisions for the scholars, and she respects their privacy. But what she won’t do is let them ignore their problems and hope they disappear.

“Sometimes, the decisions [the women] make are not good, but we have to allow them to make that [decision] and fall,” Baker said. “But we won’t allow you to lay there, we’re going to get back up.”

She added that each scholar needs support with different things, and the path isn’t always easy. There are lots of tears, but many are happy ones.

Last week, Lowery completed her Core 40 high school degree at The Excel Center, a free public school for adults. While the scholar house typically requires a high school degree to start, Lowery was taking dual credit courses from Ivy Tech Community College at the same time, which meant she qualified.

On the same day as her high school finals, Lowery registered for classes at Ivy Tech, where she has a full scholarship and plans to earn a degree in medical imaging. She’ll start with one class this summer before attending full time in the fall.

Scholars get help with academics, finances, mental health

Anderson Scholar House is modeled after Family Scholar House, which started nearly three decades ago in Louisville, Ky. But the idea of bringing it to Anderson started three years ago.

In early 2020, Doug Eckerty, executive director of the community action agency JobSource, wanted to expand social services in Madison County with something new to the area.

So Eckerty looked for ideas, and that’s when he learned about Family Scholar House.

It started in the 1990s, but opened its first residential campus in 2008. Since then, those living at the now five Family Scholar House campuses have earned nearly 780 college degrees for a graduation rate of 86%, said Cathe Dykstra, chief possibility officer, president, and CEO of Family Scholar House.

She added that of the residential scholars, 99% have exited to stable housing, 81% have exited with stable employment, and 66% have been able to move out while continuing their education, usually graduate school.

“When I first came across them, it seemed too good to be true,” Eckerty said.

After doing his research, Eckerty worked to bring the program to Anderson, which is now one of multiple affiliates of the Family Scholar House across the country. JobSource purchased a pair of apartment buildings in early 2021, and uses the Family Scholar House programming, but adjusts it as needed.

Anderson Scholar House has a staff of four as well as a slew of providers and volunteers who work with the scholars. They work with other community organizations for services like mental health, financial aid programming, and academic coaching. with other community organizations for services like mental health, financial aid programming, and academic coaching.

Volunteers provide babysitting and help with painting and furnishing apartments. Scholars have guidance and workshops on meal planning, appliance maintenance, and tax preparation. Financial classes help them prepare for housing after graduation.

There are monthly financial check-ins, midterm grade reports, and apartment checks. Not because the staff is nosy, but to make sure scholars are staying on track, Baker said.

Rosemary Baker, the family advocate for Anderson Scholar House, says the program changes lives and isn’t just a Band-Aid.

“Our goal is that if we see you slipping, sliding, or something going on, we address it with you,” Baker said.

As long as they are enrolled in college full-time and attend 75% of classes in person, participants can stay in their apartments. They also must have passing grades, attend workshops, and help out around the scholar house. Their children must go to child care or school. No other adults are allowed to stay the night or move in.

Potential residents can make progress towards living in the scholar house by enrolling in school, attending online workshops, meeting with financial advisers, and providing updates to Baker.

There’s a waiting list of nearly three dozen to move in. And Eckerty has plans to grow the program even more.

The biggest challenge is acquiring the housing and doing the renovations, he said. So when the opportunity to partner with Glick Philanthropies came up to help with a future Indianapolis expansion, it just made sense.

Staff at two locations owned by Glick Housing Foundation are currently training at pilot programs before they start working with potential scholars, said Ceceily Brickley, director of resident success with Glick Philanthropies. (Glick Philanthropies includes the Glick Fund, a fund of the Central Indiana Community Foundation which also funds Chalkbeat Indiana.)

College registration is just the next step

Finishing high school and registering for college on the same day felt empowering and exciting, Lowery said.

When Lowery learned last year that she and Aaliyah would be able to move into Anderson Scholar House, she cried. Now she has long-term plans that include a master’s degree.

When Lowery registered for college, Baker ended up crying, just like Lowery did when she got into the scholar house.

“She’s just our first success story,” Baker said.

A year ago, Lowery wasn’t taking high school classes yet, and she wasn’t living in the scholar house. Now, it’s her village. Lowery said Anderson Scholar House has taught her that big dreams are possible, a sentiment that she wants to pass to her daughter.

Lowery’s ultimate goal is to get a master’s degree in clinical social work and open her own rehab facility for those who are pregnant and mothers of young children with mental health and substance challenges.

“The scholar house has given me a future, it’s given me hope, it has given me a home, stability, a community of people that care about me and that care about my success,” she said.

Learn more or volunteer here: Anderson Scholar House.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief and covers higher education. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.Chalkbeat Indiana partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

FAFSA will be required for Indiana students starting next school year

2023-04-20T17:52:54+00:00

Indiana’s 2023 legislative session is under way, and state legislators have introduced more than 100 new education bills and bills impacting schools and students. For the latest Indiana education news, sign up for Chalkbeat Indiana’s free newsletter here.

Starting next school year, Indiana students will be required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

The requirement was approved by both the Indiana Senate and House and signed by Gov. Eric Holcomb on Thursday. It applies to all students, with some exceptions, but is not a requirement for high school graduation.

The new law makes filling out the form, known as the FAFSA, a conscious choice instead of happenstance, advocates said. They added that students would also have a better picture of the money available to them for college, and perhaps convince more students to enroll in postsecondary education, at a time when Indiana officials are concerned about the number of students who enroll in college. In the Class of 2020, 53% of students went on to college, according to state data.

The FAFSA is the form that students need to file to be considered for federal financial aid such as grants, loans, and scholarships, and completion is also considered a leading indicator of college-going.

States and colleges also use the FAFSA to determine eligibility for their respective aid programs. The new law would require students to submit the FAFSA by April 15 of their senior year, which is the deadline to be eligible for state aid in addition to federal aid.

And the money isn’t just for two- and four-year institutions. Filling out the FAFSA can also provide funds for students who want to use a Next Level Jobs Workforce Ready Grant for a short- or long-term credential.

The new law comes at a time when officials said students are leaving nearly $70 million in Pell Grants on the table, amid perceptions that higher education is unaffordable.

A state dashboard of FAFSA completion shows that about 44% of this year’s high school seniors in Indiana have completed a FAFSA.

Lawmakers have tried for years to pass this FAFSA requirement, and it was increasing the number of exceptions that got the bill the widespread support it needed to pass.

The exceptions are for students at certain nonpublic schools, and for students who have a parent sign a waiver (emancipated minors can also sign it for themselves) to decline to complete the form. A school principal or counselor can also waive the requirement if they are unable to reach the student’s parent or guardian by April 15 after “at least two reasonable attempts.”

Additionally, the requirement expires in 10 years, so lawmakers can reevaluate it. Indiana joined at least eight other states who have such a law.

This year, the deadline for state aid was extended to May 15 for students in the seven counties under a disaster emergency declaration due to recent storms: Benton, Johnson, Monroe, Morgan, Owen, Sullian, and White.

Regis’ inclusive education program offers students with intellectual disabilities support through college

2023-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Jen Anderman loves college.

She lives on campus at Regis University, is learning about world religions like Buddhism, and took on the persona of Benjamin Franklin once to present in a class.

Anderman, 25, always wanted to follow in her sister’s footsteps, but most colleges don’t offer programs geared toward students with intellectual disabilities who might need more support. Anderman also wanted a program that pushed her academically and allowed her to get the college experience she desired.

Jen Anderman, right, poses for a selfie with a Regis University student housing adviser.

In Colorado and nationwide, most colleges don’t offer programs for students with intellectual disabilities, which includes limitations in reasoning, learning, problem solving, or social or practical skills. Those colleges that do have limited spots.

Anderman, who is a person with autism, now is living her dream. Regis University’s Global Inclusive College Certificate program has offered Anderman and four other students at the Denver Jesuit school a full college experience for about two years, plus extra support to earn their certificate. Regis’ program launched in the fall and joined several others across the state that offer support for students with intellectual disabilities.

Anderman’s mom says Jen thrives when she gets to learn with students who learn in a variety of ways. Living on campus, she’s made plenty of friends. Home is just 20 minutes away, which means she didn’t have to go far to continue her education.

The program allows Anderman to take any Regis class, which she likes. She said that so far, she has enjoyed them all.

Regis offers a certificate requiring students to complete from 12 to 30 hours of school work over the course of one or two years. The program focuses on academics, but also teaches social skills, emotional regulation, career development, and independence, according to Jeanine Coleman, the certificate programs director. The program also offers tutoring, class preparation and other help.

Coleman hopes to add several more students to the program next year, and the school has received support from the GLOBAL Down Syndrome Foundation and the Anna and John J. Sie Foundation.

Recently the school announced it received $365,000 to help provide scholarships. The scholarships are crucial for many families who never thought that their children would find a college that works for their learning style.

“They just didn’t plan for that because they didn’t really think it was an option,” Coleman said. “There are just not very many opportunities for individuals with intellectual disabilities beyond high school.”

Statewide, the University of Northern Colorado, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and Arapahoe Community College offer programs tailored toward students with intellectual disabilities, said Tracy Murphy, Colorado Initiative for Inclusive Higher Education executive director.

Until 2016, Colorado was one of four states nationwide that didn’t offer specific programs for students with intellectual disabilities, Murphy said. Lawmakers that year passed a law establishing specific programs for students at colleges, and last year approved grants to support new or existing programs at higher education institutions.

Creating a more inclusive environment is good for students with and without intellectual disabilities, Murphy said.

Students at established programs have rushed fraternities and participated in student government, she said. They’re helping create acceptance and enabled others to see the value students with disabilities can bring to a school campus and jobs, she said.

“College students benefit from seeing that capability,” she said.

For Jordan Stewart, 18, the Regis program has boosted his confidence, his mother Cassy Stewart said. While Colorado offers high school for students with intellectual disabilities until they are 21, Jordan wanted most to graduate with his class and get a diploma with them, she said.

Regis helped Jordan thrive in a college setting. Previously, his mother had worried about his future because so few college programs work with his learning style.

Jordan Stewart has loved being a part of the school community. He enjoys the classes more than those in high school, and making friends is his favorite part of the experience.

“College makes me feel great,” he said, “and included.”

First lady Jill Biden visits Colorado, calls the state a model for workforce training

2023-04-03T21:02:13+00:00

First lady Jill Biden praised Colorado lawmakers for working across party lines to become a model in providing residents options to get workforce training in a visit Monday to the state’s Capitol.

Biden visited Colorado as part of a national tour to highlight President Joe Biden’s investments and commitment to workforce training and how states have used federal money to prop up programs to help Americans.

First lady Biden, a community college educator, focused mostly on Colorado’s community college programs during her talk with lawmakers at the Capitol. Over the last several years, the state has created programs to get more students to attend college and provide free training for in-demand fields. Biden said the state has become an example for others.

In recent years, Colorado leaders have focused more on educating and training residents, especially because it has relied heavily on bringing in educated workers from other states.

“I ask you to keep going,” she said. “Keep innovating.”

President Biden has made connecting workers to jobs a key part of his presidential agenda and has focused on investments that include pandemic relief money to develop job training in states. The administration has said its goal is to create more good-paying jobs for Americans.

Jill Biden also touted spending in the president’s 2024 federal budget proposal to improve workforce training.

Colorado has used federal money to create several programs in the last year that help residents connect to job training, especially with two job openings for every employee. Gov. Jared Polis has highlighted the need to get residents the skills they need to land jobs.

For example, she highlighted the $26 million in federal relief money Colorado is using to get students free training in health care fields.

The state plans to also expand the program primarily at community colleges over the next two years. A bipartisan bill backed by Polis would spend $40 million over two years to provide free workforce training for other in-demand jobs such as manufacturing, law enforcement, and teaching. Another bill would provide about 15,000 high school students from the Class of 2024 with a $1,500 scholarship to use toward approved training.

The state also put together a committee to focus on how to improve Coloradans’ access to jobs. One of the recommendations, called the Opportunity Now Grants program, provides $85 million to create or expand ideas that bring together industry and schools to create opportunity for students.

First lady Biden also highlighted that universal preschool is a major part of the birth-to-career pipeline that the Biden administration has pushed.

Colorado is set to start its universal preschool program this summer. Colorado also has supported apprenticeship programs, and offers high school students the ability to graduate with a college certificate or degree.

Biden said Colorado has shown there are people on both sides of the aisle who want to help employers find the workers they need.

“There aren’t red ideas or blue ideas,” she said. “They’re American ideas. And you all have been investing in these programs for years.”

State Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat, said Biden’s visit validates Colorado’s efforts to provide opportunities to more students in the state. He said the state has tried to innovate to get more residents the training they need. He hopes more states look at what Colorado is trying to do.

“It was time that we solved this problem in new and innovative ways,” Bridges said, “and that’s what we’re doing.”

A FAFSA requirement for Indiana students is one step closer to becoming law

2023-03-15T19:04:03+00:00

Indiana students could soon be required to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a shift that supporters say could give students more money to go to college and convince more of them to enroll in higher education in the first place.

The Indiana House Education Committee voted 11-1 Wednesday to advance Senate Bill 167, which would create the requirement starting with the 2023-24 school year, although there would be several exceptions. Lawmakers also amended the bill Wednesday to have the requirement expire in 10 years.

“This money is going to be spent somewhere, when we have a chance to put our hand out, let’s take advantage of it,” state Sen. Jean Leising, a Republican and one of the bill’s authors, told fellow lawmakers last week.

If the bill becomes law, Indiana would join at least eight other states who have this law.

The FAFSA is the form that students need to file to be considered for federal financial aid such as grants, loans and scholarships. States and colleges also use the FAFSA to determine eligibility for their respective aid programs.

By not filing out the form, students in Indiana are leaving $69 million in Pell Grants on the table, Leising said last week.

“That doesn’t even count the [other] scholarships, we don’t even have an idea of that money that’s lost,” she added. “We have got to do something about this.”

The legislation would require all high schoolers to complete and submit the FAFSA by April 15 of their senior year, which is the deadline to be eligible for state aid in addition to federal aid.

The bill includes exceptions for students at certain nonpublic schools, and for students who have a parent sign a waiver (emancipated minors can also sign it for themselves) to decline to complete the form. A school principal or counselor can also waive the requirement if they are unable to reach the student’s parent or guardian by April 15 after “at least two reasonable attempts.”

There was some concern about the bill during committee meetings. Rep. Tonya Pfaff, a Democrat, said during the vote that while she was supporting the bill, she still had concerns about the burdens on school counselors and wanted to work on that.

However, the exception in the bill to limit the attempts to reach families has eased that concern for others. And it could give the bill crucial support, after years of unsuccessful attempts to require students to fill out the FAFSA.

What FAFSA says about Indiana’s college attendance

Completion of the FAFSA is considered a leading indicator of college-going.

Just 53% of students in Indiana’s Class of 2020 went on to college, and many Hoosiers see college as too expensive. In a statewide survey by the Indiana Department of Education, only 27% of parents said postsecondary education is affordable.

A state dashboard of FAFSA completion shows that about 36% of Indiana’s high school seniors have completed a FAFSA.

It’s not that there aren’t efforts to get the word out from the state and other groups. Indiana has had College Goal Sunday, an in-person event to help families sign up, for more than 30 years.

But that doesn’t mean every student or family knows about the form or if it’s for them. And schools with higher rates of students receiving free and reduced-price lunch tend to have the lower completion rates, said Josh Garrison, associate commissioner for public policy for the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, in a previous House education committee meeting.

The legislation would make sure that filing out or not filling out the FAFSA is a choice, not happenstance of who found out about it, advocates of the bill said.

They added that filling out the form can also help reduce student debt. FAFSA qualifies students for government loans that have lower interest rates than the private loans that they would get without the form, Garrison said.

The committee meeting last week about the bill featured a show of support from organizations representing school boards, principals, and counselors, as well as public, private and community colleges in the state, and the Indiana and Indy chambers.

Will higher FAFSA completion mean more Hoosier students go to college? Officials hope so

2023-02-23T22:13:47+00:00

As higher education battles low enrollment and perceptions that it is too expensive, lawmakers and others are working to make sure more Indiana students know about the financial aid available to them.

This Sunday is College Goal Sunday, a free in-person event at locations around the state, to help families fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA. And earlier this week, lawmakers advanced a bill that would require most students to fill out the form.

The legislation and the College Goal event highlight arguments from public officials that millions of dollars in aid is being left on the table, money that could change a student’s decision about postsecondary education.

A new survey released earlier this month by the Indiana Department of Education shows that roughly 70% of high schoolers in Indiana plan to pursue education after high school.

But just 53% of students in Indiana’s Class of 2020 went on to college, state data released last summer showed. And only 27% of parents say it’s affordable, per the new survey.

Filling out the FAFSA would show Hoosier families more aid options and potentially change that, in turn, improve Indiana’s college going rate, leaders argue.

As of Feb. 10, roughly a third of Indiana’s Class of 2023 had completed the FAFSA, per Form Your Future, a national tracker of FAFSA completion.

College Goal Sunday offers FAFSA help

Students need to fill out the FAFSA to be considered for federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants. But the form is also used by many states and colleges as well as private aid providers to determine eligibility for state and school grants, scholarships, and more.

In Indiana, the deadline to file the FAFSA for state aid is April 15.

Senate Bill 167 would require all students, with certain exceptions like for those at some nonpublic schools and for students whose parents sign a waiver, to complete the FAFSA by that state deadline during their senior year. The Indiana Senate passed the bill earlier this week and it now awaits action from the Indiana House.

College Goal Sunday started more than 30 years ago and is now a model used in other states.

The event comes around like clockwork, and families can count on it as a way to get the form off their to-do list, said Bill Wozniak, co-chair of the event.

“The FAFSA is so critical and the most important form,” he said.

But he knows that despite strong interest in education after high school, many Hoosiers are uncomfortable with the financial aid process.

He’s heard it in his role leading College Goal Sunday, and as he’s traveled the state leading an advisory team from INvestED, a nonprofit that provides free financial aid advising to students and families. And a survey from INvestED shows the same.

Nearly 90% of Hoosiers see a value in education beyond high school, but 62% say understanding the process of paying for college is not easy, per the survey results released earlier this month. And of people who don’t enroll, 28% said it was because of the cost.

When it comes to FAFSA, families and students are often worried that they are on the hook for student loans just by filling out the form, or that they make too much money or it’s too difficult to fill out, he said.

But Wozniak stressed that the FAFSA doesn’t require people to take out loans and is a way for many people to qualify for aid beyond what’s earmarked for students from low-income backgrounds.

And events like College Goal Sunday can help not just by answering questions, but by calming nerves, he said.

Colorado remains highly educated but lost ground during the pandemic, report finds

2023-02-01T00:44:25+00:00

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Colorado remains one of the most educated states in the country despite losing some ground during the pandemic, according to a new report.

More Black and Hispanic Coloradans report having a degree or other postsecondary credential than did two years earlier, a small sign of progress in a state with large gaps in educational opportunity. The survey compared residents ages 25 and older in 2021 with 2019.

But many states made more progress toward improving college attainment than Colorado did.

The Lumina Foundation’s A Stronger Nation report released Tuesday provides an annual look at educational progress in the nation and individual states to show how well working adults are getting the skills needed to qualify for higher-paying, skilled jobs by earning college degrees, credentials or certificates. (Lumina is a funder of Chalkbeat. See our funders here and read our ethics policy here.)

Lumina uses A Stronger Nation to track the country’s progress toward the goal of 60% of the population getting a degree or credential of some sort. Forty eight states, including Colorado, have a goal to improve college attainment rates.

Here are five Colorado takeaways from the report.

Colorado lost some ground during the pandemic

Overall, in two years the nation improved college attainment levels by nearly 2 percentage points, to 53.7% in 2021 — its largest two-year growth, according to a news release. Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, and Vermont grew their college attainment levels the most during that span, said Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning.

Over the same period, Colorado regressed slightly, but remained a leader. The state dropped from 61% of residents having a degree or credential to 60.5%.

Colorado has a goal of getting 66% of its residents earning a college degree, certificate, or credential by 2025. But Colorado likely won’t reach that goal. The report says the state would have to significantly increase how many people it educates.

The report does not distinguish between people educated elsewhere who move to Colorado and people from Colorado who get a degree here. Historically, Colorado has imported a large share of its educated population while sending its high school graduates to college at rates below the national average.

Brown pointed to the pandemic as to why Colorado and some others experienced stagnant growth and ran into troubles.

The number of people that have earned a certificate or college credential dropped, likely because those programs are typically in-person, hands-on programs and had reduced enrollment during the early days of the pandemic.

Brown also said a boost in wages at entry-level jobs lured students away from education. And some people couldn’t go to college because they had to support their families or because they got sick.

College-educated Black and Latino residents grow

The Centennial State slightly outpaced the nation in growing the share of Black and Latino Coloradans with a college degree, certificate, or credential.

In the two years leading to 2021, Colorado Hispanic college attainment grew 3 percentage points, to 28.1%,. The Hispanic population in the nation as a whole also saw strong growth, up to 27.8%, a gain of 2.3 percentage points.

In Colorado, Hispanics still have the lowest share of college education among all residents.

Colorado’s Black education level beyond high school grew in the same two years by 2.4 percentage points to 40.3%. Black residents nationwide grew 1.8 percentage points to 34.2% in 2021.

Younger Native American residents less likely to go to college

In a troubling trend from 2019 to 2021, Native American college attainment levels have remained mostly flat for those ages 25 to 34.

The proportion of those with schooling beyond high school nudged up from 18.8% to 19.1%.

Those numbers have dropped precipitously since 2014, when 30% of the Native American population ages 25 to 34 had a college degree or credential, signaling that an older population of Native American residents are boosting college attainment levels in the state, with 35.4% of that population having a college education.

More Coloradans went back to school — and more dropped out

As Brown noted, the portion of Colorado residents with a certificate, credential, or who have some college shrunk. But when looking only at college attainment, the proportion of Colorado adults who hold a degree actually grew.

Brown said the report shows that many Colorado residents with a certificate or credential returned to school to further their education. Overall, the number of residents who hold a masters, bachelors, or associate’s degree increased.

Nonetheless, the number of Coloradans who enrolled but never finished college also increased.

Colorado has made a big push in recent years to get more people who dropped out of college to go back and finish. The full impact of those efforts won’t be clear for several more years.

It’s unclear how those migrating to or away from the state have impacted the state.

College education is concentrated in certain counties

The breakdown of which Colorado counties have the highest share of college-educated residents is hardly surprising.

Boulder, Broomfield, Douglas, and Pitkin counties lead the state in credentialed residents. Boulder boasts about 70.6% of its residents with a college degree or credential, and the other three hover at about 70%.

The lowest levels of college attainment, are in two Eastern Plains counties. Just 19.2% of Bent County’s residents have an education beyond high school. Nearby Crowley County is similar, at 19%.

Pa. high schools could start offering students K-12 education training next school year

2023-01-13T20:58:21+00:00

Starting next school year, Pennsylvania schools will have a new career and technical education option to offer students: K-12 education.

The program is just one of many ways the state is responding to a teacher shortage that’s created cascading staffing challenges across the Commonwealth.

Tomás Hanna, the state Department of Education’s chief talent officer, said the goal of the program is to expose young people to careers in education.

“We’re not saying that a senior in high school is going to come out teaching in our schools,” Hanna said at Wednesday’s state board of education meeting. “What we’re saying is we have to get young people into the profession and aware of the profession earlier, particularly men, women, people of color.”

Teachers of color are rare in many Pennsylvania schools, and nonexistent in some districts.

Statewide, less than 7% of teachers are people of color, compared to 37% of students, according to the state Department of Education.

Hanna said while teaching has historically been promoted to white women, many people of color don’t think about becoming teachers until later in life when it’s harder to change paths.

Data shows fewer people are entering the profession overall. Roughly 15,000 Pennsylvania college graduates received teaching certificates in 2010, compared to less than 5,500 in 2020.

Career and technical education programs exist at many Pennsylvania high schools, with subjects ranging from carpentry and welding to child care and dentistry.

While CTE, once called vocational education, can provide an alternative path for students who don’t plan to go to college, program offerings have increasingly been geared toward exposing students to fields, like education, that require a degree.

The creation of an education CTE program is one of many potential remedies mandated by recent amendments to the state’s school code.

A state Department of Education committee looked at standards from similar programs in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and several other states to come up with standards for Pennsylvania, said Lee Burket, the state’s director of career and technical education.

Burket said the department will add the new standards to its website and share them with schools this week.

Schools can choose to offer the program informally or with department approval; the latter makes them eligible for state and federal funding, she said.

In addition to the new CTE program, Hanna said, the state is working on many other solutions to the teacher shortage, including creating a grant program that partners schools with teacher preparation programs in their communities and modernizing the state’s certification process.

It often takes several months for the state to certify a new teacher. Hanna said officials want to get that down to 15 days.

“That is a moonshot, to be frank with you, but it’s a shot worth taking,” he said.

Pennsylvania is also working on its own Grow Your Own program, an apprenticeship that allows teacher candidates to go to school for free and get paid to student teach. The U.S. Department of Labor added teaching to its list of registered apprenticeships a year ago. Since then, eight states have created programs.

Philadelphia launched its own version this spring using money from the American Rescue Plan Act. The program pays for district-employed paraprofessionals to get their teaching degrees.

The fact that Philadelphia could have upwards of 100 new homegrown teachers in the next few years, many of whom are people of color and bilingual, is impressive, Hanna said.

Long-term funding is a concern, he said, which is why the state Department of Education is working with the state Department of Labor and Industry to make teaching a registered apprenticeship in Pennsylvania. Once that happens, a move that requires legislative approval, schools will have access to federal dollars.

Hanna won’t bring the project to the finish line though, since he’s set to leave his position this week to become head of secondary schools for the School District of Philadelphia.

Beyond High School: Tips from college graduates who took the scenic route

2022-12-22T17:04:11+00:00

This story first appeared in Beyond High School, a free monthly newsletter all about life after graduation in Colorado. Want news like this in your inbox every month? Subscribe below.

It’s what you can’t predict that makes the path to graduation difficult.

Just ask Diane Sanchez, 26, who dropped out of Colorado State University for financial reasons. She then had a daughter and decided to put her dreams on hold to care of her family.

Diane Sanchez

She was crushed. She wanted to graduate to fulfill her immigrant parents’ dream for their kids. But she said she made the right decision.

Two years ago, she went back to school online at the University of Colorado Denver. There she met a professor who mentored, encouraged, and supported her. She began to believe in herself, and she graduated this month with a bachelor’s in human development and family relations.

She now plans to enroll in graduate school. One day, she hopes to become a social worker helping other immigrant families.

“We have to be an example,” Sanchez said. “For me, it would be for the Latino community, for my siblings, and for my 4-year-old daughter.”

James Dolores remembered feeling lost when he started college. He was figuring out his identity, working full time, and trying to navigate college as the first in his family to go.

James Dolores

“I changed majors three times — I think it was four,” he said. “And then I finally just realized, I’m wasting money.”

Dolores, 30, needed to pause. After dropping out, he worked a hotel job and eventually taught ballroom dancing — which made him realize his real passion was teaching.

Almost a decade later in 2021, he graduated from CU Denver with a degree in Spanish. And this month, he graduated a second time at CU Denver with a masters in teaching. He works at North High School in Denver.

The pause gave him perspective, he said. And he wants others to know that getting to graduation, no matter how long it takes, is worth the journey.

Improving community college retention rates: Ivy Tech launches program with 10 ‘high-impact’ habits

2022-12-14T15:37:43+00:00

With Indiana’s college-going rate at a historic low, Ivy Tech Community College is piloting a new program to keep students on campus by making sure they have 10 specific habits.

The program — called Ivy Achieves – aims to ensure that once students go to college, they complete their degrees.

Retention is top of mind for those in higher education, especially coming out of the pandemic, said Dean McCurdy, provost for Ivy Tech Community College, which has 19 campuses and 25 satellite locations across the state, serving 157,000 students and a retention rate of 47% from last fall to fall 2022.

With Indiana’s college-going rate of just 53% — the lowest in recent history — and shifts in learning due to the pandemic, Ivy Tech leaders changed the way they think about what students need and want.

Ivy Achieves is one result of that mindset shift. Ivy Tech leaders created the 10 “high impact habits” by looking for what habits make a student more likely to stay. And the pilot program has promising signs as early data shows that the more habits students keep, the more likely they are to be registered for the spring classes.

Ivy Achieves program outlines 10 habits for student success

Looking at data and consulting with students, faculty, and staff, Ivy Tech considered more than 60 different student habits, McCurdy said.

One data point they considered, for example, was that first-time students are less likely to pass their courses than other types of students. And if they do fail in their first term, they are less likely to keep going to the next term or will enroll in fewer credit hours.

Additionally, officials considered that having a C or higher in a class is a predictor of retention, and course success rates are lower for students who are Black, Latino, two or more races, or eligible for Pell Grants.

Using this data, leaders looked for what habits stood out as the “most important drivers of success,” McCurdy said, and Ivy Achieves was born.

The program connects students with a “Campus Lead” or staff member on each campus who helps the student work on the 10 habits that will help them succeed in their first semester, but also in college in general.

Ivy Achieves initially started last school year at all campuses for all students, but was refined for the current school year and now focuses on “first-time college students who have historically been underrepresented in higher education.”

Ivy Tech is now piloting the program with 1,840 students on 10 campuses. The goal is to expand it to all 19 campuses.

The students in this pilot are first-year, first-time students who are seeking a degree and meet certain demographic criteria, such as coming from a low-income family or being Black or Hispanic.

There’s no need to opt in; officials said students who fit the criteria are automatically part of the pilot, and their campus lead reaches out to them about the habits and resources available.

The habits are behaviors and practices around academic planning, finances, and campus life that can be tracked in real time and have helped other Ivy Tech students, officials said. For example, McCurdy said the habit of registering more than 30 days before a term starts gives students time to arrange child care and transportation.

While it’s still early to have more data on Ivy Achieves in its current form, there have been some positive initial data points.

Ivy Tech had a 5.4% increase in retention of Black male students from fall 2021 to fall 2022, which was a five-year high. Campus leaders said that’s likely due to the early version of Ivy Achieves, as well as other programs on campus that are student led.

And for the students in the pilot program, the more habits they’ve completed, the more likely they were to be registered for the spring term.

As of this week, 37% of the students in the pilot completed five or more habits and 63% have completed four or more, per Ivy Tech. For students who maintained five habits, 87% are registered for the spring, but that percentage jumps to 94% for six habits and 97% for seven habits – the highest amount for this point in the term.

Overall, 58% of students in the pilot program are registered for the spring, according to the community college.

“Our goal is to get them through those milestones as soon as we can because early momentum is key,” McCurdy said. “We know that these things are associated with success, so now we are very focused on making sure we can provide these things for students.”

Ivy Achieves aligns with a growing emphasis on the first-year onboarding process at many colleges, said Karen Stout, president and CEO of Achieving the Dream, a national network of community colleges focused on transformation to address inequity.

And many of the habits of Ivy Achieves, like meeting with an advisor and having a roadmap, are “fairly consistent with what other schools say students need in the first semester.” If the initiative works, she said there could be potential national impact if other colleges apply these habits too, potentially for all students.

But she does see some room for additions in the habits. They could work in tandem with the well-regarded “early momentum metrics” linked to college success from the Community College Research Center – attempting at least 15 credits in the first semester, taking and passing college-level math and English in the first year, and taking and passing at least nine credits in the student’s field of study in the first year.

And Stout pointed out that some of the habits rely on factors outside of school. The ability to pay by the start of classes and register early depends on students’ financial situation and the college’s affordability, since students are balancing the costs of tuition with other expenses such as child care and books.

But that’s why supporting students throughout the college experience is so crucial, she said, whether they are struggling in a class or if they are looking for transportation because they have a flat tire or another issue with their car.

“By the time that grades come out, it is too late,” she said.

Giving students support with food, transportation, and more

Making sure students have the support to achieve the 10 habits is where the “Campus Lead” role comes in.

On the Evansville Campus, it’s Marcus Weatherford, the campus’s director of student experience. He works with students and staff to educate them about the 10 habits and guide them to resources.

He’s working with roughly 250 students, including Donny Payne, who came to Ivy Tech after graduating high school in spring 2022, and plans to one day transfer to University of Southern Indiana for an engineering degree.

After attending orientation, Payne went to the Lamkin Center on campus, where student resources are housed, and started talking with Weatherford.

At first, Payne thought resources like transportation help or the food pantry were for someone else, not him, Weatherford said.

But with Weatherford’s help, those resources kept Payne in school. A bus pass, for example, helped him get to campus this semester until he was able to get his own car.

“We were struggling at the house and didn’t have much for groceries… that’s helped a lot,” Payne said.

The barriers to staying in school are often greater for community college students than students at a four-year school, Weathersford said, and can be particularly discouraging to students in their first semester.

“Going to college can be an overwhelming process,” Weatherford said.

While older students might be proactive in asking for help, many will need time before bringing up their problems. So it’s important to have a point person invested in their success – like Weatherford and his colleagues – to ask students lots of questions, like if they’re eating well or whether any troubles at home are affecting their studying.

Before, Weatherford would wait for students to come with an issue and he’d direct them to the resources they need. Now, it’s about reaching students before that moment through email and texts as well as in person.

“If a student knows that there is a particular person who cares and is holding them accountable, it helps,” he said.

Payne agreed, saying he’s learned that if he doesn’t have what he needs, he can always go to Weatherford to ask for help. And Weatherford has watched Payne become a better advocate for himself.

Stout said she supports having a set meeting schedule between students and advisors or campus leads to create these relationships and set expectations.

“Students do not engage with those key support offices enough,” Stout said.

Colleges find ways to help students stay and feel belonging

Ivy Achieves is part of a larger effort to improve communication and in turn, retention with students throughout Ivy Tech, officials said. Colleges used to send all information to all students, said Jo Nahod-Carlin, Ivy Tech vice president for marketing, recruitment, and enrollment.

But now, she said information is more targeted and clear – removing higher education jargon and sharing information with the students who may need it.

If a student has said at any point that they need child care, they’ll keep receiving information about child care options, Nahod-Carlin said, adding students who haven’t filled out the FAFSA will get information about getting help with the financial aid documents.

Stout added that in an ideal situation, students don’t have to repeat themselves, but an advisor or campus lead or faculty member can look at student records to not only see their academics but a more holistic picture of the student’s experience to help pinpoint resources.

“Many are coming to college and have never had someone say they are ready for the college experience,” Stout said, adding that that holistic approach tells students that they belong and the staff is there to help.

And just like data helped inform the 10 Ivy Achieves habits, McCurdy said he’s excited to see the tools that will continue to be developed to help student success.

“Some of it is as simple as saying: in your program, if you were to take this course next, we would advise you to do that because students who’ve done that have been more successful or for you based on your own history, we would recommend that you take this course face-to-face,” he said.

Because ultimately, McCurdy said the goal isn’t just enrollment or retention or even graduation – it’s what college can do for the next step: a four-year university or a better job.

“Yes, we want to serve more students, but we also want to make sure that we are successful with the ones that we have and that success doesn’t just begin and end with us either,” he said. “College is not the destination.”

MJ Slaby is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat Indiana partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

COVID has left students less prepared for higher education. Here’s how colleges are trying to help.

2022-12-08T23:44:18+00:00

Arizbeth Cortez felt confident college would be just like high school and she’d ace all her classes. After all, she’d never received anything less than an A grade at Denver’s Bruce Randolph School.

On her first exam at the University of Northern Colorado, however, she got a B. It brought a flood of tears and worries that she didn’t have the skills to meet her expectations.

“I ended up with anxiety about exams because I didn’t know how to study very well,” said Cortez, 18, a freshman.

The challenge of college can be an eye opening experience for even the brightest student. But Cortez realized she didn’t know how to manage her time or know how to prepare for a test.

They’re skills she missed while attending high school during the pandemic, when she took her classes virtually for more than a year, rarely had homework, and most of the tests she took were open book. Most of her junior year was spent learning from home and she saw her mom and sister more than peers and teachers.

Cortez isn’t alone in her first semester struggles, which at times left her rattled. College leaders have encountered many more freshmen like her this year — students who don’t have the base of skills that will make them successful in college. And they all agree about the cause: nearly five high school semesters upended by the pandemic, and less accountability placed on students because of it.

Educators say students entering college this fall have fewer study and test-taking skills, such as simple tactics like preparing note cards or the value of study groups. They’re less communicative with professors when they need extra time to complete assignments, have difficulty staying on task, and have fewer coping mechanisms when adversity strikes.

University of Northern Colorado administrators say they have had to double down on efforts to help freshmen succeed, teaching basic skills to help them adjust and navigate the new environment.

The gap between how prepared freshmen typically are for college and how this year’s class is performing surprised Stephanie Torrez, the university’s student academic success assistant vice president, who has spent more than 26 years in higher education.

“This is who students are now. It’s not what I’ve expected, even from my own children,” she said. “I have a freshman in college here and he’s not the person he was two years ago.”

The college has a few strategies to help, such as an increased emphasis for peer mentors, tutors, and counselors to connect one-on-one with freshmen so they can figure out if they need on-campus resources.

University leaders say they are optimistic a focus on individual needs will pay off. The retention rate for the Class of 2021 was the highest it’s been in the last decade, offering hope that the school is on the right track. But they realize that as more students come unprepared, the school might need to increase the number of mental health counselors and train more staff on how to help when students are struggling with classes or with their mental health.

Caleb Quiroz, 18, right, presents his group project during University 101 class at the University of Northern Colorado.

Pandemic disruptions leave gaps in classroom, social skills

In 2021, Cortez returned to in-person classes for her senior year. While returning to the classroom was manageable, she felt less willing to interact with classmates. Even now, social situations are tough. It sometimes feels easier to close herself off.

“I have to tell myself it’s not so bad being social,” Cortez said. “But it can be scary. I’m used to always having my mom or my sister around.”

Those anxieties are showing up in lots of classes at the University of Northern Colorado this fall, faculty said. Students are disengaged and less motivated to attend events, even fun ones like football games.

College leaders know that ultimately, they have to meet students wherever they’re at to address those gaps, said Hollie Chessman, research director at the American Council on Education who studies student mental health and well-being. And students are heading to college after unique circumstances, she said.

Some schools have responded to the challenge by using federal relief money to increase mental health resources on campus. Others are using summer bridge programs to help students adjust to college life, Chessman said.

About 40% of University of Northern Colorado students are the first in their family to go to college. That’s a population that historically has needed more support to adjust to campus life because their parents can’t give them as much guidance. But even students from college-going families can struggle in a new environment.

One strategy: University 101, an elective offered to all freshmen. This fall, about a quarter of the freshmen took the class, similar to previous years.

But instructors have struggled more this fall within that class, which covers study skills, work-life balance, and stress management. Attending therapy counts as extra credit.

In a class that’s supposed to be low-stakes and teach students about accountability in college, this year, more students than usual have turned in assignments late, and they sometimes argue whether they should show up in person, said Jordan Martell, who has taught the class for four years.

Vianney Ocampo, 18, seated center left, asks a question to class leader Jordyn Faelber, 20, left, during University 101 class at the University of Northern Colorado.

Students are also more disruptive during class — talking during lectures or arriving late, Martell said. Students have also argued against a zero grade rather than do the work.

“Students kind of are struggling to have that awareness of accountability,” Martell said.

Still, now that the semester is wrapping up, some students are feeling more comfortable. Cortez chatted quietly with some peers on the last day of University 101, and says they have helped her break out of her shell.

The university’s Center for Human Enrichment, a program that supports students who are the first in their families to go to college, has provided crucial academic and other support.

Through one-on-one help, Cortez has learned how to study through repetition, and the value of note cards and color coding her notes. Staff encouraged her to get more involved with campus and provided a safe space for her to talk about what’s going on in her life.

“The program makes me feel like I am at home,” Cortez said.

New scholarships aim to make college more attainable in Michigan

2022-10-28T12:00:00+00:00

Grace Fawcett is intent on becoming a radiology technician.

She’s been looking into colleges that have radiography programs and recently settled on Jackson College. Now all she needs is $7,080 a year for in-state tuition and fees.

The new Michigan Achievement Scholarship will take care of a third of it if she qualifies, and that’s a big relief to Fawcett, a senior at Niles High School in West Michigan.

The program was introduced by Republican state Sen. Kim LaSata of Hagar Township in Berrien County and was signed into law this month. Income restrictions are low enough that 94% of community college students and more than 75% of students at Michigan’s four-year schools will be eligible.

“This is an absolute game changer for kids who are on the fence because they’re not sure about their financial status in terms of paying for college,” said Stiles Simmons, superintendent of Westwood Community Schools in Dearborn Heights.

Starting with the class of 2023, eligible high school graduates can receive between $2,750 and $5,500 per year.

The funding is guaranteed for students who have lived in the state for at least a year, will attend a Michigan college full time, and whose family contribution to college expenses is expected to be less than $25,000 per year based on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or FAFSA.

That’s much higher than the threshold for other kinds of aid such as federal Pell Grants, which are available to students whose expected family contribution is less than $5,846.

The higher contribution limit for the new Achievement Scholarship will capture a lot of middle-income students who wouldn’t qualify for other aid, LaSata said.

“This gets up into the middle class, and that was a priority for me to be able to get scholarships into the hands of as many students as possible,” she said. “I want to help as many students as possible in getting a degree.”

The scholarship program is estimated to cost $169 million in the 2023-24 school year and to grow to $562 million in four years.

Students who complete the FAFSA automatically will be considered for the Michigan Achievement Scholarship. Fifty-two percent of Michigan seniors already fill out the FAFSA to be eligible for federal loans and other grants.

“It’s nice that it notifies people without them really having to apply,” said Fawcett, 19. Many of her friends probably don’t know about the new scholarships and wouldn’t know to apply if they had to do it separately from the FAFSA, she said.

She expects to be eligible for $2,750 a year for up to three years, the amount designated for community college students. Students who attend an in-state private college or university can receive $4,000 per year for up to five years, and those attending one of Michigan’s 15 public universities can receive $5,500 for up to five years.

The new law also creates the Michigan Achievement Scholarship Private Training Program to provide up to $2,000 per year for two years for students to attend trade schools or receive other occupational training. To qualify, applicants must have lived in Michigan for a year, apply for all other available aid, and not have previously earned a college degree.

“Is it a cure-all that’s going to fix everything? No,” said Onjila Odeneal, Michigan director of policy and advocacy for the Institute for College Access and Success. “Is it going to encourage some students who otherwise wouldn’t have gone (to college) because of the cost? Yes.”

A state university student going to school for five years could wind up receiving $27,500, noted Dan Hurley, CEO of the Michigan Association for State Universities.

That’s significant, he said.

“This is supplanting monies that would be paid for out of family savings or student loans, and it may reduce the amount of hours that students have to work, whether during the school year or during the summer,” Hurley said.

It could be enough of an incentive for students to spend their post-secondary years in Michigan, and to stay after graduation to join the workforce, Hurley said.

“It’s a remarkably smart investment on the part of state lawmakers,” Hurley said. “It’s synergistic in terms of retaining young, degreed adults in the state as well as sending a strong message to employers and prospective future employers that we are a state that’s serious about building out a more talented workforce.”

Fawcett’s classmate Melody Palafox is considering both in-state and out-of-state schools. The scholarship is one more factor to weigh as she makes her decision. Choosing an out-of-state school would make her ineligible.

“For me personally, any amount of money is helpful,” said Palafox, 17, who will be the first person in her family to attend college.

In-state tuition at the state’s four-year public universities ranges from $10,800 at Saginaw Valley to $17,296 at Michigan Tech. Simmons said a $5,500 scholarship could make a difference, especially when combined with federal aid and other scholarships and grants students may receive.

For some, it could be the last chunk they need to be able to go to school, he said.

“At the center of this is hope,” Simmons said, “especially for low-income students or students who are the first to attend college in their families. This is hope. This reduces the financial barrier to college that so many of our families face.”

Fewer than 50% of Westwood students go on to college or a post-secondary job certification program, Simmons said. Michigan Achievement Scholarships could increase that, he said.

“I’m really over the moon about this because, in my mind, it places my students in a very advantageous situation regarding their post-secondary options,” he said. “It provides meaningful post-secondary opportunities.”

Tracie Mauriello covers state education policy for Chalkbeat Detroit and Bridge Michigan. Reach her at tmauriello@chalkbeat.org.

Why you should fill out the FAFSA — even if you’re not sure about college

2022-10-03T22:19:28+00:00

Leer en español.

October marks the start of the financial aid application season and one of the most important periods in determining whether a high school student will head to college.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), whose application period began Oct. 1, helps students qualify for federal grants and loans or scholarships to pay for college. Filling out the FAFSA helps students realize that college is an option, said Colorado Department of Higher Education Executive Director Angie Paccione.

About 85% of students who go to college filled out the FAFSA, she said.

“We know that if you’re going to college, you complete that FAFSA because you want to make sure you get as much money as you can,” Paccione said. “And, at the same time, students that fill it out realize what schools they can go to because they know how much money they’re going to have.”

Tuition sticker shock is a major reason students who want to go to college end up not going. But the true cost for students from middle- and lower-income backgrounds is often far less than the listed price of tuition after financial aid.

Filling out the FAFSA helps students and families get a realistic idea of what college might cost. It also helps students and families make informed decisions about whether they can afford it.

The deadline for students and families to submit the FAFSA is June 30 to receive aid for the next school year. The earlier students and families submit the form, the easier it is to work through any issues that might pop up.

Unless a student qualifies as an independent, those who are 24 or younger will likely need to fill out the form with family. And there are options for students who don’t have their family’s information or who are undocumented.

Colorado has struggled for years to get students to fill out the complicated form. Last year, just 46% of the state’s graduating seniors finished the FAFSA, well below the national average of 57.5%.

The state has put more focus on raising those numbers through financial aid training and requiring schools to notify parents and students about the benefits of FAFSA. That’s part of a long-term plan to raise Colorado’s FAFSA completion rates to 80%. A task force has also called for the form to become a high school graduation requirement.

Here are some tips from financial aid experts on how to complete the form.

Start the process now, even if you’re not sure you qualify

Colorado State University Financial Aid Director Joe Donlay’s advice for families and students is not to wait.

The process to fill out the form can take time, be overwhelming, and, at times, feel invasive. The form asks for a variety of financial information, including tax documents and banking and savings balances. The federal government might also follow up, including asking for additional documents.

In the end, the process can be worth it, because it opens students to a variety of money for college, Donlay said.

He advises families to fill out the form despite any uncertainty. Even if the federal government doesn’t award students and families money, someone else might.

Without the FAFSA, free money like college grants or scholarships might not be available to students. Plus, Donlay said, some might also qualify for low-interest or zero-interest loans to pay for college.

“FAFSA is really the ticket,” Donlay said.

Donlay said to get started, students and families should first start by visiting FAFSA.gov. The federal website has a detailed walkthrough of how to start the process.

Families and students have help

But families and students shouldn’t feel they need to tackle the process on their own.

They can ask high school counselors for help on which documents to bring. Parents and students should also watch for any financial aid nights hosted by high schools to get additional help or any questions answered. And they can make checklists to stay organized.

Counselors and financial aid experts also can make the process easier by talking with families about FAFSA’s importance, connecting them to workshops, and following up.

Diana Madriz, assistant director of college access at Denver Scholarship Foundation, said when she works with families she typically asks about home life and what does and doesn’t apply to students because she wants to make the process as easy as possible.

For instance, if a student or parent is not a U.S. citizen, filling out financial aid forms will likely require some help and they should check with an expert.

Parents’ citizenship or legal status, however, does not impact whether a student gets financial aid. The form doesn’t ask that question about parents.

Madriz directs students who aren’t here legally to the Colorado Application for State Financial Aid (CAFSA). Those students aren’t eligible for FAFSA because it requires legal status in the United States, but they can still get some college aid through the CAFSA.

In the end, Madriz said a big part of filling out the form is easing fears and concerns and answering plenty of questions about individual circumstances.

“We have had situations where I think families are a little apprehensive about sharing any information,” Madriz said. “I think it’s important for us to never speak in absolutes because things change all the time. But I think we can share with families what we know.”

Counselors also shouldn’t feel afraid to ask questions or for assistance

When it comes to finances, every family’s situation is different.

Cendy De la Torre, Denver Scholarship’s events manager, said counselors can ask careful questions to help build trust among families or students who might be hesitant to fill out the form.

She said asking about legal status or whether family members are estranged can be difficult questions to ask. She said that’s why building trust is an essential part of helping families or students with the application. She advises counselors to speak in hypothetical terms instead of direct questions, allowing students and families to take the lead about their backgrounds.

She added that educators and counselors aren’t alone in helping families. She said, “there’s a lot of us going through those same challenges.”

Madriz and De la Torre said they often run into numerous situations where they’re not sure how to help a family with the form.

Donlay and college financial aid departments across the state are willing to help. He said college financial aid officers can advise on new wording on the application or specific family-related financial questions. Counselors should not hesitate to work with colleges, he said.

“We always encourage the student or the family to reach out to the financial aid office and we can help determine what the answer or the solution might be based on those unique circumstances,” he said.

And counselors and families shouldn’t feel discouraged if they can’t figure out how to address an issue.

Natasha Garfield, DSF director of scholarships, said even financial aid officers who have done this work for years and trained others sometimes get stumped. No matter the situation, families and students can be assured that help is out there — even if there isn’t a clear solution.

“They’re always things we just have to muddle through and give our best shot,” she said.

Tennessee high school grad rate rebounds to pre-pandemic level

2022-09-29T00:33:50+00:00

Tennessee’s high school graduation rate has returned to pre-pandemic levels — and even slightly exceeded the state’s previous peak three years earlier, according to new data released Wednesday.

About 89.8% of public school students in the Class of 2022 graduated on time this spring, more than 1 percentage point better than the previous year, the state education department reported.

The previous high of 89.7% occurred with the Class of 2019, the year before the pandemic hit.

The bounceback is encouraging news after a three-year slide pulled back on nearly a decade of incremental increases totaling more than 4 percentage points under a workforce and economic development initiative prioritized by former Gov. Bill Haslam.

The latest numbers also add to evidence that Tennessee public education is recovering from a pandemic that rocked school communities and continues to complicate teaching and learning.

In June, Tennessee reported that student scores on state tests improved across all subjects and grades, largely returning to pre-COVID levels.

In a statement on Wednesday, Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn credited educators and families for positioning this year’s nearly 65,000 high school graduates to “achieve their dreams and goals.”

According to the U.S. Labor Department, a person with a high school diploma is likely to earn 40% more income over a lifetime than someone without one, and has a 33% greater chance of being employed.

They can earn even more with a post-secondary credential or degree. But mirroring national trends, Tennessee’s college-going rate declined during the pandemic, worsening a five-year trend that higher education officials have called a crisis.

The state’s college-going rate dropped 9 percentage points to 52.8% between the Class of 2019 and the Class of 2021, according to a recent report by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

The commission has been working on strategies to reverse that trend. But more students earning their high school diplomas is a good start.

According to the education department, more than half of Tennessee’s 147 school districts improved their graduation rates from 2021 to 2022, including two of the state’s four largest districts.

The rate for Memphis-Shelby County Schools rose by 2.4 percentage points to 80.1%, the highest since the 2013 merger of city and county schools. Hamilton County Schools increased its rate by 3.2 percentage points to 88.7%.

Graduation rates dipped slightly for Metro Nashville Public Schools (81.6%) and Knox County Schools (89.7%).

For more information on high school graduation rates for individual districts and schools, visit the education department’s website.  

This story has been updated with additional details.

Marta W. Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

With COVID aid, schools try something new: giving students jobs

2022-09-27T11:00:00+00:00

Kelly King was able to do something this summer she’d never been able to before: pay students to help others.

King, who works for the school district on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, used federal COVID aid to hire three rising high school seniors to staff a booth at a riverside park. There, as crowds flocked to a farmers market and free concerts, the students told residents how local schools could help families experiencing homelessness and offer other kinds of support.

The high schoolers, each of whom had experienced homelessness themselves, earned just over $10 an hour for the community engagement work. For two of the teens, it was their first paid job.

“We were very intentional about doing things that had not been done before,” King said. She noticed that the work taught the students customer service and financial skills, and when students reflected on their experience, they said it boosted their confidence, too. The paid job “made them think more positively about what was possible for their futures,” King said.

Across the U.S., schools are using their influx of COVID relief money in an innovative but overlooked way: to offer paying jobs to students. Programs like the one in Alaska are an example of how the funding is allowing schools to get creative with how they offer direct help to young people and expose them to new career paths — benefiting both teens looking for work and schools in need of staff.

“More career preparation, or even thinking about careers, is quite a good thing at early ages,” said Mary Elizabeth Collins, a professor at Boston University who has studied workforce development for vulnerable youth. “There are a lot of potential career pathways available to young people, and we as a society don’t do a great job of letting them know the range of things that they could go for, and what they need to get there.”

School leaders say the money is especially helpful for teens who can’t afford an unpaid internship, or who are struggling to balance their schoolwork with a late-night part-time job. If teens are working as tutors or mentors, the jobs also provide an academic and emotional boost for students’ younger peers. To work best, programs should offer students plenty of adult guidance, especially if they are working with younger children, Collins said.

When the Houston school district launched a peer tutoring initiative with iEducate, a local nonprofit, officials there specifically targeted students interested in education. Using COVID relief funds, the district is paying its high schoolers and local college students, many of whom are recent graduates, $14 an hour or more to tutor elementary schoolers.

It gives tutors “an opportunity to build those relationships with our scholars, to help with that learning loss from COVID in our schools,” said Joseph Williams, a district administrator who oversees the tutoring initiative. “It also gives them that experience to see what teaching is about, and hopefully build a pipeline of future teachers.”

The district has hired student tutors in the past, but the new funding dramatically expanded the support the district could offer. This summer, high schoolers and recent grads worked with 21,000 elementary schoolers, and the tutors are getting ongoing training in skills like managing a classroom and lesson-planning.

So far Houston schools have paid $560,000 to their student tutors, and officials budgeted another $2 million for the upcoming school year. Some 200 tutors will be working in schools as of next week, and the district is still looking for several hundred more.

In Tacoma, Washington, the district is spending $450,000 in federal relief on a jobs program that pays teens to coach elementary school sports and to tutor their younger peers.

Before the pandemic, students could volunteer to coach, but now high schoolers can be paid $1,000 for six weeks of work, with the district and city splitting the cost. That’s opening up the job to students who wanted to coach before but couldn’t afford an unpaid role.

The district also is paying high schoolers a $500 stipend to tutor elementary schoolers in math and English after school. Officials piloted the initiative with 34 student tutors last year, and plan to expand it this year. Tutors get specific training on how to help younger students with their homework in those areas.

“We’re not just dropping students in and saying ‘OK, go tutor,’” said Kathryn McCarthy, a spokesperson for Tacoma schools. “Our goal was just to think about: What can we do to help students who are interested in the profession of teaching gain some depth of knowledge? So really focusing on how to provide some instruction.”

Not all new jobs initiatives have that educational component. Faced with staffing shortages, some schools have started hiring students to work in cafeterias or maintain school grounds, NBC News reported last month — jobs typically held by adults that some educators fear are less likely to serve students’ career ambitions.

“Rather than treating it as low-paid labor,” said Jake Leos-Urbel, who has researched New York City’s summer youth jobs program, schools should be “treating it as an educational, youth development experience, and thinking about the adults who are going to mentor and support youth in that work.”

That’s the approach being taken by Memphis-Shelby County schools, where officials are using federal COVID money to offer students paid internships within the district and at local businesses.

Lori Phillips, who heads the district’s student, family, and community affairs work, said the initiative helps fill several gaps. While there are several summer work programs in the area, few offer job exposure during the school year. And at $15 an hour, the program also pays more than the fast food jobs many teens have, without any late-night schedules — so students can stay on top of their homework and participate in extracurricular activities.

The initiative also includes Saturday training sessions where students dress up in business clothes and work in small groups with local leaders on skills like interviewing and setting up a bank account.

The district had wanted to launch something like this for some time, but the federal COVID money sped up the work, and made it more equitable, too.

“You may have some businesses that are interested in hosting two or three students, but they may not be financially equipped to be able to pay those students,” Phillips said. “We wanted to make sure that regardless of where you are, all students are getting paid the same amount.”

The district spent about $360,000 to pilot the program last school year and this summer — employing more than 1,000 students — and has set aside at least $1 million to expand the initiative this year. Phillips hopes 1,000 students can get internships each of the fall, winter, and spring sessions.

The federal funds have also meant that schools can pay students for their expertise.

In Virginia’s Roanoke City Public Schools, Malora Horn set aside COVID relief money to hire a peer support specialist to work in the district office that supports homeless students and families. The specialist, who experienced homelessness as a young person, will recruit students to serve on a new homeless youth advisory council. Often these kinds of roles are unpaid, but Horn plans to offer students a stipend or gift cards to participate.

“This gives them a safe place to have them share their thoughts and ideas of other services that they may be needing, or challenges that they’re having that maybe we haven’t thought of,” Horn said.

Teens who’ve gotten to participate in these programs say they’re grateful for hands-on work experience.

As part of Houston’s program, 19-year-old Leonardo Cuellar has been tutoring students at an elementary school not far from where he grew up, while balancing college classes. It’s been a chance to test out teaching with a safety net, since he’s partnered with a classroom teacher.

Over the last year, he’s worked with small groups of students on their math and reading skills in both English and Spanish. When his struggling second graders improved in math, his partner teacher told him it was thanks to the weeks he’d spent helping them practice skills like subtraction on a mini whiteboard.

“This has made me sure that I wanted to do this,” Cuellar said. “When I was a kid, I didn’t have that help, so being that person to be able to help them really feels good.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado has big gaps in who finishes college. Can a post-pandemic push turn the tide?

2022-09-15T12:00:00+00:00

Leer en español.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores knew finishing college would be an uphill battle.

As the first in his family to go to a four-year university, he faced a struggle to pay tuition, buy textbooks and supplies, and balance a job while still helping to support his parents, who questioned the value of a college education.

Haro-Flores enrolled at the University of Northern Colorado in 2016, among a growing number of Latino Coloradans in the past decade heading to college. But like many in this wave, Haro-Flores never finished, contributing to the persistent gap in college completion.

Even as a more diverse group of students have enrolled in college, Colorado’s ethnic and racial gaps among bachelor’s and graduate degree holders barely budged from 2010 to 2020, Census data shows.

The gaps are even wider among those earning any type of postsecondary credential. As of 2020, almost 60% of white residents held some kind of college credential, including industry certificates. But only 38% of Black residents and 25% of Latino residents did.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores, 24, is back at the University of Northern Colorado after several tries at finishing his degree.

While other states also have gaps, the Centennial State has some of the largest in the nation between Black and Latino residents and their white counterparts.

The fissure will likely widen when the full impact of the pandemic becomes clear as students dropped out or chose not to attend college altogether. A healthy job market also has made residents question whether a degree was worth carrying long-term college debt.

Haro-Flores never expected his journey to mirror these state trends. In 2018, struggling to pay tuition, he dropped out of college. His parents’ immigration status meant his financial aid options were limited. He re-enrolled at UNC in 2019, but the pandemic forced him to quit again. He disliked online classes and wanted to work full time to help his parents, who had been laid off from seasonal jobs in warehouses and nurseries.

For some time, Colorado has wanted to shift away from importing a large number of educated workers to producing them. Part of its strategy includes earmarking $49 million in federal pandemic relief money to identify students who left school without finishing and help them complete their degree.

The need is pressing, as the demand for more workers with college training and Colorado’s sharply rising cost of living have complicated employers’ efforts to recruit and retain employees.

Former State Sen. Mike Johnston said the state has relied too long on bringing in talent from elsewhere.

“We’ve ridden that strategy as long as we can,” Johnston said. He is president and CEO of Gary Ventures, a philanthropy dedicated to helping increase school readiness, youth success, and economic mobility.

“We’re going to have to now prepare our own young people with the skills they need to enter the jobs we have, that will give them the income they need to pay for the housing we have,” he said.

Reginaldo Haro-Flores raises his hand during a sports management class this month at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

The old challenges collide with the new

Chalkbeat Colorado examined college-going trends as a part of Chasing Progress, a Colorado News Collaborative project on social, economic, and health equity among Black and Latino Coloradans.

Colorado’s low college-going rates have deep roots and complicated causes. Only half of all high school graduates enroll in college at all. Black and Latino high school graduates, who often attend under-resourced schools and have less support, go at much lower rates. When they get to college, many never finish. And the state has underfunded higher education for years, which means schools have less money to support students to graduation.

Census data released this year shows that in 2020, 48% of white residents held a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s 21 percentage points higher than the portion of Black adults and 31 percentage points higher than Latinos.

State data shows those disparities grow when comparing other types of college training, such as industry certificates and associate degrees.

Colorado is aiming to get some of the 700,000 residents who have some college but no degree back on campus.

The pandemic still poses challenges. Nationally, college enrollment has dipped by nearly 1 million students since COVID hit.

The state will need to persuade more residents that college matters, even though entry-level jobs now offer wages that are higher than ever.

More people question the value of college and the risk of high debt for it, said Iris Palmer, New America’s deputy director of community colleges. The research institute advocates for equitable access to education.

“That’s starting to erode how people think of higher education,” she said.

The state aims to equip 66% of residents with a college certificate or higher by 2025, but the compounding issues make the goal seem more elusive than ever.

Without access to higher-paying jobs, the majority of Black, Hispanic, and Native American Colorado residents are getting left behind, said Courtney Brown, Lumina Foundation vice president of impact and planning. The foundation pushes for more equitable access to higher education and has helped states set goals. (Lumina is a funder of Chalkbeat. See our funders here and read our ethics policy here.)

Reginaldo Haro-Flores, right, shakes the hand of freshman Alexis Vallejos-Diaz, whom he is mentoring at the University of Northern Colorado campus.

How to get students to finish what they started

Colorado leaders are taking steps to create more opportunity.

The state has encouraged high schools to add college-level classes to help students earn certificates. It created a scholarship in 2014 to offer tuition assistance and other support for students needing it.

In the past two years, the state named a statewide equity officer to focus on narrowing persistent gaps and convened lawmakers and community leaders to come up with a plan to tap into pandemic relief money to connect college students to jobs.

While those programs show success, the state still falls short, said Colorado Department of Higher Education Executive Director Angie Paccione.

That’s why the state has added more programs. They show promise, Palmer said. For example, 30 college campuses have adopted Finish What You Started, a program modeled after a successful Pueblo Community College initiative. The state aims to serve about 9,000 students by 2026.

The program provides financial aid for students to return to college and coaching to figure out individual college plans, as well as ways to stick to them and find a job after college. Coaches also help students find help on and off campus that could put food on the table or care for children.

While money is a huge incentive, helping students believe they can finish college is vital, said Richie Ince, director of the Pueblo model called Return to Earn. He and his employees check in on each student every other week to offer advice, encouragement, or connections to resources.

“I think we’re really successful because of that personal touch and just kind of looking out for them, really from the time they come back to the time they finish,” Ince said.

The Finish What You Started program brought Haro-Flores, now 24, back to school. He heard about it from one of his former high school advisers. The aid and counseling he’s received has felt almost too good to be true, he said.

He wouldn’t have gone back to school for a third time without the program and its funding, he said. UNC’s Finish What You Started coordinators told him they’d provide assistance for whatever he needed. That has happened, Haro-Flores said. Now he feels confident he can finish his sports exercise degree.

“This is the moment,” he said.

He hopes to graduate by 2024 and work in sports or management.

The aid that Haro-Flores has received through the Finish What You Started program at UNC has motivated him to finish his sports exercise degree.

Can Colorado sustain this effort?

Advocates say Colorado, too, must finish what it’s started in promoting college completion. The state, which studies show seriously underfunds higher education compared with other states, must continue to put in more money to stay on track.

Paccione, the state’s higher education executive director, likes to tell lawmakers, “invest in students now or pay them later.”

“If you don’t invest in the students now, these are the very students who will end up on our public safety social safety net,” she said. Studies bear that out.

Studies also show that college is worth a student’s investment. Michael Itzkowitz, who works for the left-leaning think-tank Third Way, said data in recent years allows schools to highlight how well their programs get students jobs and pay off. About 86% of all public college programs produce a return on what students spend on their education within five years, he said.

And there are also social benefits. Alfred Tatum, Metropolitan State University of Denver academic affairs vice president, said college helps students connect to health care, become more civically engaged, and contribute more to the state’s tax base. Instead of the general goal of educating the greater population, state leaders should consider instead how college graduates improve communities, he said.

But relaying those benefits to students can be difficult when some are worried about cost.

Over the past two decades, the burden of paying for college in Colorado has shifted more heavily to students and families. Tuition revenue funds 74% of undergraduate college budgets and 38% of two-year college budgets. That’s higher on average than in most states.

Janine Davidson, MSU Denver president, and John Marshall, Colorado Mesa University president, said that lawmakers must adequately fund schools so they can lower costs for students and improve support for students who need more help to finish college.

Without a consistent revenue stream, college administrators and staffers worry that Colorado’s efforts will weaken once the one-time federal money dries up.

They hope that success stories, like that of Darryl Sharpton, will drive home the importance of continuing funding.

Sharpton, 46, has tried several times in three states to finish college. At last, he thinks he can stick with it. At the Community College of Aurora, he’s found more support than he’s ever received before.

He’s studying to get a degree in computer science. College has provided him with a different outlook — about his own potential and his value.

“I want a career, not just a job,” Sharpton said, who previously worked delivering pharmaceuticals.

“There are so many people that want you to succeed,” he said. “My school is really taking care of me right now.”

Tina Griego, a Colorado News Collaborative journalist, contributed to this report.

How NYC programs fight ‘summer melt’ one student at a time

2022-07-26T20:10:56+00:00

Moe Sanders is about to become the first in her Bronx family to graduate from college.

The rising senior at Skidmore College initially planned to pursue a career in publishing, but now she’s preparing to become a college counselor.

She wants to help other first-generation college students like herself, inspired by those who helped her in a summer bridge program organized by Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that runs a network of New York City public schools.

In Urban Assembly’s summer bridge program recent high school graduates get coaching around the transition into college or other career-oriented paths after graduation. Coaches are recent alumni who attended the same high school just a couple of years before.

Research has shown that this peer-to-peer model is highly effective, and it’s offered by many organizations in New York City, a school district where more than 70% of students come from low-income families.

For many low-income and first-generation college students, the summer before their first year of college is nerve wracking. Between endless paperwork and financial aid decisions, some students never matriculate.

This is a phenomenon known as “summer melt,” which refers to high school graduates who apply, are accepted, and commit to a college, but never make it to campus in the fall. These students intend to attend, but something happens in the summer that leads them to “melt.”

Although it’s unclear how many New York City students are impacted by summer melt, research shows that nationwide up to 40% of low-income students who intend to go to college every year don’t make it to school in the fall.

Bridge programs can make a difference

Moe Sanders is an incoming freshman at Skidmore College.

As a Black girl attending high school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City, Sanders felt the odds were stacked against her. After graduating from the Bronx Academy of Letters, an Urban Assembly high school, Sanders relied on the support from her coach as she headed off to Skidmore College, located in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Having benefited from a coach, Sanders wanted to pay it forward. The summer after her freshman year of college, she became a coach herself and started supporting younger students.

“That’s when I kind of started my job as what I like to call a mini college counselor,” Sanders said.

And she hasn’t stopped. This is her third summer as a coach.

Urban Assembly is one of many bridge programs that try to prevent New York City’s students from “melting.” Their alumni are 90% Black and Latino, and 86% are from low-income homes. Among its summer bridge participants, only 12% “melt.”

The program, founded in 2008, hires recent alumni coaches to work 20 hours per week for 13 weeks during the summer months. While they coach recent graduates, they also receive training, mentorship, and professional development in topics such as financial literacy and time management. They practice leadership skills while modeling what life could be like after high school.

Stephanie Fiorelli, the group’s director of alumni success, said they hire one alum per high school to coach the senior class from May to August. “They’re kind of near peer mentors, and they pick up where the guidance counselors left off.”

The program empowers recent graduates to make their own decisions. “A lot of what we do in this bridge program has helped students feel that they have control over the choices they’re making,” Fiorelli said. “A lot of times students won’t persist in college or in job training programs because they feel they didn’t really get to make the decision for themselves. So, the coaches learn how to give them all options.”

Because a lot of the transition steps happen in the summer, it can be an overwhelming time for a lot of recent graduates.

Jay Champagne, deputy director of alumni success, said many students struggle with the financial aid process, especially those whose families have a tenuous relationship with money.

Champagne said sometimes coaches get on the phone with financial aid officers to help advocate for the recent graduates. “If you’re at the age of 18, 19 and you’re trying to figure out financial aid, it’s very intimidating.”

It’s even more complicated when students are selected for extra verification from colleges, said alumni success coordinator Angelina Lorenzo. Verification requires students to submit additional documentation to prove a student’s financial status. “They say financial aid verification is selected randomly. But we’ve seen that 99% of our students end up getting flagged for verification.”

Lorenzo, an Urban Assembly alumni herself and former bridge coach, said she has witnessed students being asked for proof that a parent is on food stamps or for a sibling’s birth certificate. And coaches are trained to support students in such situations.

But the role of coaches goes beyond supporting students going to college. They are also able to support those transitioning straight into the workforce.

Jade Hooker, a recent graduate of Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, is joining the U.S. Air Force. She wants to work with airplanes, and soon she’ll start training in aircraft maintenance. Before that, she’s enjoying the summer and preparing for what’s ahead.

“[Having a coach is] helpful because it’s basically the support system that you need. And they are able to give you resources or maybe get you in contact with other people that are thinking about doing the same things that you want to do,” Hooker said.

Bridge year-round

While Urban Assembly’s bridge program focuses on the alumni from the Urban Assembly high schools, other nonprofit organizations offer bridge training to a variety of public schools. One of them is provided by College Access: Research & Action, or CARA.

Founded in 2011, CARA trains coaches to work with students using the peer alumni model. Their program lasts the whole academic year, which means that coaches start working with students at the beginning of their senior year in high school.

CARA coaches work 10 hours per week year-round. They work at school buildings and hold workshops with their cohort on topics ranging from financial aid to imposter syndrome, a pervasive feeling of self doubt many first-generation college students experience.

Deneysis Labrada, director of the bridge program, said coaches also help first-generation parents understand more about the college process.

“It’s not only the students who don’t know about the college application process. The majority of the families are coming from other countries where the application and college system is very different from the U.S.,” she said. “They have no idea what it means to apply to college, apply to financial aid, and all the scholarship opportunities that New York offers.”

Labrada also said that the majority of New York City high schools don’t have a counselor solely dedicated to college and career. Rather, they have one guidance counselor that is dealing with student mental health and schedules and registration in addition to college counseling.

“For those schools that have one guidance counselor, having a bridge coach is a whole extra person focusing on college and career,” Labrada said.

In addition to that, due to the coronavirus pandemic, many colleges and universities have transitioned their admissions and financial aid offices into a remote system, Labrada said. Many of CARA’s bridge students are struggling to reach officers, saying that they are often on vacation or don’t answer phone calls.

“Some colleges are not necessarily supporting incoming students as structured as they did in the past. Many graduating seniors right now are getting frustrated because they’re not getting answers,” Labrada said. “Our coaches are coming in and trying to close that gap too, and trying to support however they can.”

Bridge coaches develop leadership skills

Nyeisha Mallett is an incoming senior at Cooper Union School of Art.

CARA coach Nyeisha Mallett is an incoming senior at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. She attended Medgar Evers High School in Crown Heights, where she didn’t have the opportunity to participate in a bridge program.

She learned about the coach position through her cousin, and she joined the program during her first year of college. She’s currently finishing her third run as a coach.

“[This job] wasn’t something I planned to do, but definitely something important. And I like to do important things,” she said. “If I’m going to do something, I want to make sure that the time that I’m spending is important to somebody else.”

Mallett said her work goes beyond helping students with paperwork. Her role includes encouraging them to be as informed as possible about the decisions they’re making. One example she said comes up often among students is understanding the cultural shock of going from a high school that is predominantly people of color to predominantly white institutions, or what’s referred to as PWIs.

“We talk a lot about PWIs. I go to a PWI, and it’s still hard to navigate. For students of color who might have a hard time understanding that transition, it’s important to have those conversations with them,” she said.

“There are times where students come to me and they’re like, ‘What is your experience like? And I’m real about it. I went to an all Black Caribbean school. So it was a huge shock to me that I’m still navigating right now,” she said. “I tell them the experience about being the only Black person in the class. I want to make sure that they are aware that that could happen.”

If Mallett were a high school senior now, she would’ve been able to sign up for the city’s department of education bridge program. This year, they are offering a “next step texts” program, where alumni coaches support recent graduates via texting. Students from any public school can participate.

Bridge programs not only support high school graduates to transition into life after graduation, but also they offer a job opportunity to young adults that allows them to explore a career in the education field.

Sanders, the rising senior at Skidmore, has fallen in love with supporting other students who came from the same background as her to succeed after high school.

She said she loves working with students who want to take big leaps to better themselves through education.

“I see how important this work is, especially as a Black woman coming from a low-income area. People don’t believe in us. Even being in [predominantly white institutions], people still don’t think Black students and students of color can do it,” she said. “To be a part of that process for other students is kind of magical.”

Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley is a reporting intern for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Marcela at mrodrigues-sherley@chalkbeat.org.

Recent Indiana high school grads: Tell us what’s next for you

2022-07-19T18:05:58+00:00

In recent years, Indiana has seen a significant decrease in the number of high school students going to college. The Indiana high school class of 2020 saw a college-going rate of only 53%, which is 6 percentage points less than the previous year.

This trend impacts students of color and low-income households the most. Boys in high school also saw a sharp decrease in the college-going rate with just 46% compared to the college-going rate for girls remaining at 61%. We understand that behind these trends are deeply personal decisions being made by students and their families. If you are a recent high school graduate, we want to hear from you here at Chalkbeat.

You can respond to this form until Monday July 25, at the end of the day. You can also reach the reporter, Helen Rummel, directly at hrummel@chalkbeat.org or at (317) 737-9316. We’re always listening at community@chalkbeat.org.

If you are having trouble viewing this form on mobile, go here.

Make more money, faster: Indiana banks on the appeal of a one-year college certificate

2022-06-27T21:11:08+00:00

Four years is a long time.

Noemi Lozano sometimes hears that from students, who can’t imagine studying and paying for four years of college for a bachelor’s degree.

But Lozano, who connects families with resources for River Forest Schools in Northwest Indiana, doesn’t want those students to completely give up on getting a college education. So she offers a low-risk option:

Just go to college for one year.

In that year, students can earn a certificate that qualifies them for a skilled job. They can decide to keep studying, or they can get a job making more money than, say, in a retail or restaurant job.

“It’s a great start to just look at short-term goals,” Lozano said. “Then you go from there. It can take you anywhere.”

Plus, for hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers, that one year of college could come at no cost, though few seem to know that.

In Indiana, people who don’t have college degrees can get the training to become welders, electricians, medical assistants, web programmers, or truck drivers — for free.

The Next Level Jobs Workforce Ready Grant foots the tuition bill for certain certificates in high-demand fields. The state touts that grant recipients increase their salaries by a median $6,800 a year after completing such training programs.

It’s part of Indiana’s bid to increase the number of college-educated adults and meet changing workforce needs. And it’s an attractive deal as students are questioning the value of college amid skyrocketing tuition and the albatross of student loan debt.

“Especially for working adults, they need a quick solution,” said MJ Michalak, vice president of public affairs for Ivy Tech Community College. “They just need something to get them to that next step.”

Still, advocates and experts say the state can do more. It’s not clear how effective the grant is in advancing students’ careers. Officials don’t track how many students drop out without finishing the certificate, nor do they look at what kinds of jobs graduates go on to hold.

And a bright spot in the program — that it attracts more Black and Latino students — could also pose the danger of steering students of color away from four-year colleges and into lower-paid jobs.

“If we’re only pushing Workforce Ready Grants on our students of color, then we’re going to be in a not-helpful situation,” said Rachel Santos, education policy director for the Indiana Latino Institute. “It’ll feel good for a little bit, and then we’ll be looking at a ton of inequity.”

The Workforce Ready Grant pays for adults without college degrees to obtain free workforce training as part of a larger push in Indiana to help more Hoosiers get skilled jobs.

What the workforce grants pay for

When Laura Rucoba was job hunting, she applied to so many places and got denied so many times.

Having worked in restaurants, at Lowe’s, and in an elementary school as a paraprofessional, Rucoba wanted to work in a hospital or doctor’s office but learned she needed to have a certification.

College had always been at the back of her mind. But life was busy. Rucoba, 41, was raising two children and didn’t want to take on student loan debt.

“I just thought it was something that was impossible for me to do,” Rucoba said. “I just couldn’t comprehend how at an older age, I could go back to school.”

Rucoba found out about the Workforce Ready Grant from Lozano, her sister, and enrolled in a medical assisting certificate program, which advertises salaries ranging from about $31,500 to $49,000.

Since finishing her technical certificate last year, Rucoba has worked in a pediatrics office in northwest Indiana, checking in patients, taking vitals, reviewing charts, and giving shots. The pay is better than her previous jobs, she doesn’t have to work weekends, and she sees opportunities to advance if she earns additional certifications.

“I truly enjoy what I’m doing right now,” Rucoba said. “I’m in a spot right now where I thought I was never going to be.”

The Workforce Ready Grant is part of a larger initiative called Next Level Jobs, launched five years ago, that focuses on helping Hoosiers get skilled jobs. The state prioritizes five industries: advanced manufacturing, building and construction, health and life sciences, information technology and business, and transportation and logistics.

Within those areas, Indiana identified certain certificate programs that it would pay for through the Workforce Ready Grant, such as cybersecurity, HVAC technician, and supply chain management.

Unlike many scholarships, students don’t need to qualify financially to receive the grant. They can use it at certain providers, such as Ivy Tech. During the pandemic, the state extended grant eligibility to additional programs and to college-educated people seeking to switch careers.

The state makes a relatively modest investment in the workforce grants, spending $3 million per year. To reach more students, Indiana stretches its dollars by combining the grant with need-based federal Pell Grants and other state funding for adult students.

The pandemic has delayed Indiana from looking at what one expert considers the most important outcome: whether workforce grant recipients went on to get jobs.

But what are the results?

Since its start in 2017, nearly 60,000 students have used the Workforce Ready Grant.

But here’s where the picture gets a little cloudy.

The state doesn’t know what happens to Workforce Ready Grant recipients. Overall, about 33,000 students have finished certificates. But the state doesn’t track a total completion rate — or completion rates by program — that would show how many students dropped out and how many are still in progress.

That’s a statistic the state hopes to eventually be able to crunch. Regardless, Indiana’s higher education leader Chris Lowery acknowledged that more students should be finishing their programs: “I’d like to see us have a greater completion rate,” he said. “I’m not satisfied with that. I think it needs to be higher.”

The pandemic has also delayed the state from looking at what one expert considers the most important outcome: whether grant recipients went on to get jobs.

And not just any jobs — but better jobs than they had, in the fields that they studied.

“The best way to center quality is to focus on the labor market outcomes of people who go through this training,” said Shalin Jyotishi, senior policy analyst for education and labor at New America, a public policy think tank.

It’s not enough to report that graduates make more money, Jyotishi said, because that doesn’t necessarily mean a person is no longer facing poverty or that they have landed a job in their field that pays well and offers good benefits.

“That’s where a lot of those programs tend to mess up,” Jyotishi said. “They tend to report an increase in earning, and that is a great outcome, but it doesn’t necessarily achieve the goal of economic security.”

California, for example, surveys community college students on career and technical education outcomes — although only about a third respond — and publicly reports how many work in jobs related to their field of study, how many earn a local living wage, and their median earnings.

Jyotishi pointed out that some of the professions supported by the Workforce Ready Grant, like pharmacy technician or phlebotomist, can still be low-paying jobs.

In Indiana, state officials say they don’t want to burden providers with the additional request to report job outcomes. Instead, they say jobs data is already available, through the same back-end tracking of state workforce data that shows the $6,800 median wage increase.

It’s just that because of other demands created by the pandemic, state officials haven’t looked yet at the data to see whether grant recipients secured better jobs with their new qualifications.

Noemi Lozano has her sights set on a bachelor’s degree after completing a certificate in business. “I started with a certificate — it was a little step,” she said. “Once I started, I said, I am not just stopping.”

Concerns about students of color

Last year, Indiana ramped up marketing for the Workforce Ready Grant, more than tripling efforts to spend $2.5 million on hyping the program.

“Build a better future for free,” billboards and newspaper ads say.

“Employment situation changed? Wondering what’s next?” social media ads ask.

Still, not enough people know the opportunity exists, advocates say, and those who pursue it don’t always have clear pathways to jobs or further education.

The state is trying to reach two types of students: recent high school graduates around 18 years old, and adults who have been out of school for some time.

Adults who have jobs, families, bills, and other responsibilities are likely the toughest student population to reach. Going to college as an adult means rationalizing the expense and time to study, and possibly even giving up a job that supports a family.

The payoff has to be worth it.

In recruiting students for the Workforce Ready Grant, state higher education officials believe they’ve unlocked a key strategy that has the potential to improve college enrollment across the board. Aside from billboards and Facebook ads, the state has also turned to trusted messengers like community organizations and churches.

The Indiana Latino Institute is one of those organizations. Among its education programs, the group works with high schoolers on applying for financial aid for college.

Rachel Santos, the institute’s director of education policy, says students often are unaware of the free training opportunity, and she worries there’s some confusion about who the grant is supposed to serve.

She’s not surprised that the Workforce Ready Grant has attracted a larger share of Black and Latino students among the overall college-going population.

“There’s an urgency right now with people really feeling the cost of living going up,” Santos said.

Still, Santos believes bachelor’s degrees should remain the larger goal. She wants to see the state take a more intentional approach to showing how a student can advance from a certificate to an associate degree to a bachelor’s degree, so that students of color aren’t further tracked into lower educational attainment rates.

It’s often harder than it should be for students to know how to “stack” credentials and transfer credits, she said.

“We should not just be pushing our Latino students toward the Workforce Ready Grant because it’s a paid program and we need more people doing hard labor in the workforce,” Santos said. “It has to be seen as a small piece of the bigger picture.”

Noemi Lozano, the parent liaison, uses herself as an example when she talks to families about postsecondary options. She also works on Latino college outreach for the state through its Padres Estrellas program, or Star Parents.

Lozano had started studying business before putting college on pause while she raised a family.

Then, one day, her children brought home a flyer from school about the Workforce Ready Grant. With her children heading to college, and her tuition paid for by the grant, Lozano found she had no excuse for not going back to school.

She earned a business certificate, then finished her associate degree. Now she’s transferring her credits from Ivy Tech to Indiana University-Northwest to work toward her bachelor’s degree.

“I started with a certificate — it was a little step,” Lozano said. “Once I started, I said, I am not just stopping.”

Stephanie Wang covers education in Indiana, including pre-K, K-12 schools, and higher education. Chalkbeat Indiana partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Stephanie at swang@chalkbeat.org.

‘Where did it all go?’: Four NYC high school seniors reflect and look ahead

2022-06-27T17:18:56+00:00

When the pandemic gripped New York City in March 2020, high school sophomores had no idea that their remaining two years would look nothing like they had imagined.

Many of those sophomores are graduating now, having navigated school closures and two unusual years marked with grief and isolation. City officials celebrated the full reopening of public schools last fall, but the year was not nearly as normal as anyone had hoped.

“It’s been weird because I don’t really feel like part of the school — like, I kinda had to remember where everything was again as a senior,” said 18-year-old Alexandra Cruz, who graduated this month from Millennium Brooklyn High School. “I think it would have felt like more of a community if I had been there for the full four years.”

Like students in other grades, some seniors worried about contracting COVID and infecting high-risk relatives at home, especially as a winter surge emptied schools for weeks in December and January. But on top of the anxiety of being around peers for the first time since the pandemic hit, seniors also had to decide on what came after high school.

For many others in the Class of 2022, returning to the building was a boon. It meant seeing their friends and teachers again and learning in a classroom instead of through a screen. And for some, it was why they made it to graduation.

We spoke to four high school seniors who graduated this month about their experiences and what they plan to do next.

Zhenghao Lin was anxious about a full return to school amid the pandemic, but now he says it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. He is looking forward to college and making new friends.

ZHENGHAO LIN, 18, FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT HIGH SCHOOL, BROOKLYN

Zhenghao Lin felt overwhelmed the moment he stepped into the crowded hallways of his school in September, his first time back since March 2020.

Fearing he would contract COVID, Zhenghao, one of about 3,000 students, wore a face shield over his mask. He was afraid to touch door handles or stand too close when talking with others. He worried his peers would judge him for feeling nervous. He feared he might be subjected to racist bullying as he had in the past, because of rising anti-Asian hate crimes.

“I was not really able to, like, learn things that first few months because I felt constantly distracted,” said Zhenghao, who was diagnosed with anxiety disorder in 2020.

The pace of instruction also frustrated him because it felt slower than his virtual classes from the previous year. Students rarely asked questions during virtual learning, but they frequently raised their hands in person.

School staffers often stopped him in the hallway to ask how he was. He would say he’s not OK.

They would refer him to a counselor, who typically had a packed schedule. Zhenghao, however, was already seeing a therapist in private practice. Those twice weekly sessions helped him turn a corner in March, when the city dropped the school mask mandate.

Zhenghao continued wearing his mask, but he found that seeing his classmates’ faces and working with them in groups helped him connect with them and read their facial expressions, which were friendlier than he’d expected. To his surprise, he didn’t experience any racist bullying or comments, which he credited to advocacy campaigns across the city raising awareness about anti-Asian hate crimes.

Through therapy, he began to understand that he was at low risk of becoming severely ill from COVID, having been fully vaccinated without any high-risk conditions.

Zhenghao stopped striving for 100’s in every class, he said, and allowed himself to miss some assignments. He also dropped his AP Chinese and physics classes. He didn’t need them to graduate, and he found them too stressful and difficult.

As Zhenghao gets ready to attend a small liberal arts college in Vermont in the fall, he already has an idea for his future career: He’s planning to become a therapist.

Kekeli Amekudzi, a Brooklyn Tech senior, had to balance in-person learning and taking care of her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer during her freshman year.

KEKELI AMEKUDZI, 18, BROOKLYN TECH HIGH SCHOOL

Kekeli Amekudzi missed 30 days of school this year.

Most of those days she was taking care of her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer before Kekeli’s freshman year and took a turn for the worse last year.

“There’s just, like, so many responsibilities that I have to take care of,” Kekeli said.

The city considers Kekeli someone who was “chronically absent,” for missing at least 10% of school days. More than a third of students citywide were on track to have missed at least a month of school this year.

During remote learning, Kekeli could help her mother get to doctor’s appointments and work on schoolwork from the waiting room. She had more time to cook and clean.

Returning to school this year meant Kekeli could see her friends more regularly, but it was challenging to balance in-person learning with responsibilities at home. Being inside the 6,000-student high school, the nation’s largest, also brought concerns about reinfecting her mother, who’d already had COVID while in the hospital.

Kekeli’s teachers met with her to catch her up on assignments, and some deadlines were extended. She found it helpful to vent to a teacher during office hours about the stress of school or her mom’s illness.

A sense of normalcy continued to feel out of grasp.

Kekeli plans on studying environmental science and international law at Emory University in Georgia.

COVID cases began rising in December and exploded in January with the omicron surge, causing stress and absences among students and teachers, prompting students to organize a walkout at Brooklyn Tech. Less than three-quarters of students were at Brooklyn Tech on the Friday after winter break ended, according to data compiled by PRESS NYC, a group advocating for stronger COVID protections in school.

Her extracurricular activities, such as the debate team, remained virtual. Field trips for her favorite environmental science courses were paused until the spring.

Kekeli received some help while applying to college, but she had to navigate some details on her own, such as figuring out what financial forms she needed.

She is planning to attend Emory University in Georgia, where she wants to major in environmental science and international law. She’s considering a gap semester to help her mother transition to a home health aide.

She feels that she and her peers made it through one of the hardest times in New York City’s history. She has tried to take action, participating in climate marches, protests over gun violence, and abortion rights — making friends along the way.

But Kekeli is still grappling with a sense of loss that many graduating seniors feel.

“When we came in freshman year, we came in with so many expectations with, like, what our final year would be, and so many events were getting canceled or postponed or just weren’t done because of COVID,” Kekeli said. “There’s just been this sense of like, where did it all go?”

Abrahan Castro German, 19, is a graduating senior from English Language Learners and International Support Preparatory Academy in the Bronx. He spent much of his time in high school grieving the deaths of family members.

ABRAHAN CASTRO GERMAN, 19, ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT PREPARATORY ACADEMY, THE BRONX

Abrahan Castro German spent the previous school year mourning the loss of a beloved uncle, who died of COVID in his home country, the Dominican Republic.

Abrahan, who immigrated to the Bronx in February 2019 and is learning English, navigated that grief alongside remote school, which he described as “very difficult” because it was hard to get extra help from teachers.

So he felt both happy and nervous to be returning this past fall to his Bronx high school, ELLIS Prep, which serves under-credited, over-age students who are new to the United States.

But halfway through this school year, he suffered a new blow. On New Year’s Day, Abrahan’s older brother died in a motorcycle accident back home.

School staff and his friends noticed that the normally bubbly, well-liked teen — known by one counselor as “The Mayor” — was quiet. Sometimes he asked to leave for the day, but staff wouldn’t let him, he said. He stopped doing much of his homework.

He missed his mother and grandmother, who are in the Dominican Republic, and would stay up at night looking at photos of his brother and uncle on his cell phone.

“I’m thinking about what feeling my brother went through in the accident, what feeling my mother went through when she lose my brother,” Abrahan said.

Teachers and guidance counselors saw his grades dipping in every subject and urged him to keep up. They worried he was falling off track to graduate.

He visited guidance counselors daily explaining how he was physically in the classroom, but his mind was on his family.

At one point, a counselor told Abrahan that his brother would have wanted him to graduate. He said he wanted to give up, but the counselor replied, “You need to try, and you can.”

Abrahan said he began feeling like himself again around March. He credited ELLIS staff and his friends for helping him work through his grief, as well as family back home who encouraged him to stay on track. He began catching up on school work. He decided that he needed “to wake up” and think about his future.

As the school year wrapped up, Abrahan was still seeing his counselors every day. Pulling a C-average, he was accepted to Guttman Community College in Manhattan. Abrahan plans to take a course over the summer to improve his English, according to a counselor.

Abrahan said he’s nervous about Guttman, especially seeing new students and new teachers, and leaving his ELLIS family behind.

But he feels driven to stay on track and “try – for my future, for my brother’s son, for my mom.”

Alexandra Cruz, a senior at Millennium Brooklyn High School, struggled with severe anxiety and keeping up with her academics during the chaotic school year.

ALEXANDRA CRUZ, 18, MILLENNIUM BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOL

A year and a half of remote learning was bad for Alexandra Cruz’s mental health. But returning to school full time proved to be just as difficult.

Alexandra, who said she has severe social anxiety, was nervous to see hundreds of other students again, at a school where just 17% of students are Hispanic like her.

While the year started off OK, it took a turn during the winter’s omicron surge. Many peers were out sick. On the Monday before winter break, just under half of the school’s students came to school, according to data compiled by PRESS NYC. Alexandra stayed home that week as a precaution.

She struggled to make up a week’s worth of old assignments and keep up with new ones.

Her grades were slipping, and she was pulling all-nighters to keep up with what felt like mounds of homework, longing for the flexibility and leniency of remote learning. It was also tough to stay engaged in class while her friends were out sick.

“It was just so hard for me — I just didn’t have anyone to talk to,” she said.

She felt teachers weren’t checking in enough to find out why students were struggling to keep up. Seventy-three percent of the school’s teaching staff is white, Alexandra pointed out, which also felt alienating. Sometimes, she just wanted “a nice Hispanic woman” as a teacher who could relate to her.

Alexandra found some solace in her weekly meetings with a school guidance counselor, where she could drop in and “vent” if she felt too overwhelmed during class.

She began worrying about college in April while also studying for her AP exams. She’d narrowed down her choices to SUNY Oneonta and Clark University in Massachusetts, but COVID rules prevented visitors from seeing the dorms at Clark, so she couldn’t “get the full picture.”

By May, when school calmed down, she had come to a realization after months of dealing with her social anxiety: It’s OK that she’s not friends with many of her classmates.

“I feel like a weight has been lifted off,” Alexandra said. “All these people in my class — I can’t connect with these people. I already have my friends. I’m just sort of looking forward to the future.”

Alexandra decided on Clark University. She chose a school outside of the city in order to get a fresh start somewhere new.

“I’m going to try to join clubs with people of color so I can talk to people who I can connect with,” Alexandra said. “It makes me nervous, obviously, but I’m excited.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

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High school graduates in NYC: Tell us, what’s next for you?

2022-06-27T17:06:55+00:00

As students and teachers reunited in classrooms this year, challenges remained: many still grieved over lost loved ones, battled mental health issues, and struggled to readapt to in-person learning.

For many students, the pandemic changed the course of their lives.

Increased stress and anxiety among students has led to a strong aversion to being in the classroom, one possible reason behind the rise of chronic absenteeism in NYC public schools. While some high school graduates were able to continue moving forward, we know that other students were not ready to return to normal and had difficulty transitioning because of multiple setbacks. For instance, many students had to take care of ill relatives or work to financially support their families, as economic insecurity also soared during the pandemic.

The likelihood of high school graduates pursuing a four-year degree dropped from 71% to 51% in the last two years, according to ECMC Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students succeed academically and professionally. The percentage of teens who believed education beyond high school was necessary also decreased.

Chalkbeat wants to hear from New York City high school graduates about how your school year went, and what’s ahead for you.

Tell us:

What are your thoughts and plans beyond graduation?
What advice would you give to upcoming high school seniors?
How could schools better serve students?

We look forward to receiving your submissions on the form below. Questions? We’re always listening at community@chalkbeat.org. If you are having trouble viewing this form, go here.

Rate of Indiana high school students headed to college drops to 53%

2022-06-10T16:01:57+00:00

The number of Indiana high school students who are heading to college has fallen to 53%, a significant drop after years of declining enrollment, according to data released by state officials in a Thursday morning meeting.

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education data is for the state’s 2020 high school class, the first to graduate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data shows the college-going rate has dropped 6 percentage points over the last year — 12 percentage points lower than five years ago — with widening gaps for students of color and students from low-income families.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused drops in college enrollment, but the commission stressed that enrollment saw a decline even before then. The commission cited the perceived cost of higher education and low unemployment rates as possible factors in the continued decline.

“I want to make clear, though, that we cannot just blame this on the pandemic,” Sean Tierney, ICHE associate commissioner for policy and research, said at the meeting.

Dhanfu Elston, chief of staff and senior vice president for strategy at Complete College America, said a competitive job market often can force students to reconsider higher education plans.

“Whenever a student can potentially get a job paying well beyond minimum wage, in some cases, double and triple that amount, it’s going to make them rethink everything,” Elston said.

In order for higher education institutions to see students return, they will have to emphasize the long-term benefits, Elston added.

“There’s also this recognition that institutions don’t always do well, especially for minoritized populations — under-resourced students, first-generation students, rural students, community colleges — in letting them know: This is what you can do. These are the careers. Here’s the demand in our particular field.”

While college enrollment has decreased across the nation, Indiana’s college-going rates have fallen further than most states. Currently, the college-going rate nationwide is 63%, with Indiana trailing 10 percentage points behind.

The college-going rate among Black students in Indiana fell by 7 percentage points, meaning the group now has the lowest college-going rate by ethnicity at 43%. Hispanic and Latino students’ college-going rate also dipped considerably, with a 6 percentage point decrease to 44%. The trends also fell more steeply among low-income students, where only about 1 in 3 high schoolers pursues higher education. However, 81% of the 2020 class of 21st Century Scholars, a program that pays some or all of the tuition for lower-income students, are going to college.

The education attainment rates in Indiana – working-age adults who have completed some form of higher education – are also low when compared to national averages. The state has set a goal for 60% of the adult population to complete some form of higher education by the year 2025, but currently Indiana stands at just 48%.

The report revealed that in 2020, 61% of women went to college while only 46% of men did. This is the first time in recent years where less than 50% of men sought some form of higher education. In keeping with national trends, the gender gap in higher education in Indiana has widened over the last 10 years.

“Men, in many cases, are working to try to figure out how do they support their families,” Elston said. “In many cases, the opportunities and the disparities in wages between men and women allow for more men to see opportunities than for women.”

Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Chris Lowery said the data was startling and pushed the board to consider the next steps to increase higher education enrollment.

“Indiana’s sharp one-year college-going decline is alarming, and we have to treat it as such,” Lowery said in a statement Thursday morning. “We know individual lives and the state’s economy depend on and thrive with an educated society,”

A study presented by the commission found that while the majority of Hoosiers still feel favorably toward higher education, there are negative views motivated by its perceived cost. Currently, higher education is most frequently associated with four-year bachelor’s degrees, leaving out associate degrees and trade school certificates.

Correction: June 10, 2022: A previous version of this story gave an outdated figure for Indiana’s higher education attainment rate.

Chalkbeat Indiana partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Helen Rummel is a summer reporting intern covering education in the Indianapolis area. Contact Helen at hrummel@chalkbeat.org.

‘Overcame statistics’: IPS students graduate despite COVID challenges

2022-05-25T22:30:39+00:00

Senior Class President Saul Rodriguez still remembers a speaker he met when he was a freshman at Indianapolis’ Arsenal Technical High School. He said he never forgot her telling his class that, statistically speaking, most of them wouldn’t make it to graduation.

On Tuesday, Rodriguez stood before 412 of his fellow classmates. Tech’s class of 2022, dressed in caps and gowns, looked on from the crowd at Clowes Memorial Hall. Rodriguez chuckled at the story.

Glancing around the packed auditorium, he said, “I can say that we proved her wrong.”

Rodriguez’s statement drew roaring cheers. The class can dismiss her doubts as irrelevant now, he said.

“You being seated here today shows that not only did we overcome people’s expectations, but we also overcame the statistics as well,” Rodriguez said, “doing so with flying colors.”

As more parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, friends, children, and cousins arrived, officials asked guests to squeeze together to make room. Cheering supporters crescendoed into a celebration of the moment they had waited years for.

Rodriguez was part of a senior class of around 500 students. He reminded his peers of everything they endured over the last four years: mask mandates, other COVID 19 protocols, remote learning, political protests, and losses of jobs, families, and lives. All affected the class’s education in ways Rodriguez said no one could have expected.

“If I had to compare what we have gone through throughout these last four years, I would say it was like a dumpster fire,” he said.

Now the students are graduating as college enrollment is falling, and talk of a recession continues.

All that doesn’t include personal struggles.

“There was also adversity that each of us faced that we don’t talk about,” Rodriguez said.

Graduate Kamickia Weathersby endured hardship while at Tech — and emerged primarily grateful.

She lived unhoused all four years of high school.

“I know what it feels like to be hungry,” Weathersby said. “And to be homeless.”

On Tuesday she thanked Arsenal Tech for providing a community and a home that supported her. She specifically mentioned Assistant Principal Crishell Sam and social worker Jacquelyn Powell.

Weathersby said she would carry her gratitude long after leaving school. “I love it here,” said Weathersby, dressed in a bright white dress. “If I could do over the past four years, I wouldn’t change anything.”

She said she plans to attend Ivy Tech after graduation and to start a non-profit supporting unhoused people in Indianapolis.

Graduate Sana’a Kirby’s mother died in May 2020. Now, Kirby is determined to go to college, because that’s what her mother motivated her to do.

“I wanted to show her what I could do,” Kirby said. “I could be at my best.”

Kirby will study at the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI.

Cameron Whistler said he struggled with online classes and with the decision to go to college. He plans to attend Marian University.

Wearing black velvet dress shoes purchased specially for the big day, Whistler said he’s excited now to take on a new challenge at college, and make his own life. He had arrived on Tuesday with his grandmother Elizabeth Cowans, 62. She smiled when thinking about Whistler’s future plans.

“I’m feeling very proud,” she said. “I’m proud of everything he puts his mind to.”

Helen Rummel is a summer reporting intern covering education in the Indianapolis area. Contact Helen at hrummel@chalkbeat.org.

Reading list: How Colorado could improve college access for students

2022-05-18T18:31:30+00:00

Chalkbeat Colorado and Young Invincibles are hosting a conversation on May 18, 4 p.m. MT to talk about what’s getting in the way of Colorado students going to college and graduating — and what’s working to get them across the finish line. RSVP to hear from:

Jason Gonzales, the higher education and legislative matters reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado
Nicole Cappellino, a first-generation Colombian student studying criminal justice at the University of Colorado Denver
Nathan Cadena, Denver Scholarship Foundation’s chief operating officer
Cecilia M. Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver and director of partnerships for the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges
Malcom Lovejoy, a senior at Campo High School who is preparing to attend Rice University this fall after graduation
Will Simpkins, vice president for student affairs at Metropolitan State University of Denver
Luis Borrego-Castaneda, graduating student from Colorado School of Mines

Colorado is a highly educated state but doesn’t send enough of its own high school graduates to college. And fewer students of color and those from rural communities hold advanced degrees.

Chalkbeat Colorado launched its higher education coverage in 2020. Building off our reporting, we want to host a conversation about the “two Colorados.” What are the barriers preventing students, especially students of color or those from rural backgrounds, from getting to and through higher education? What do students and educators want to see change? What are the success stories that Colorado can learn from?

During a May 17 discussion hosted by Chalkbeat Colorado and Young Invincibles, students, experts, and educators will speak about their suggestions for bettering access to Colorado higher education. Read on for Chalkbeat’s reading list for event attendees and anyone who wants to better understand how these issues are playing out in Colorado schools and beyond.

We hope you find these compiled stories helpful. Do you have any remaining questions? Or story ideas for us? Reach out at co.tips@chalkbeat.org. And want to stay up-to-date on all of the most important higher education news? Sign up for our Beyond High School newsletter.

Rural Colorado students go to college at low rates. One tiny school goes against the trend.

A train passes a small brick station in Fowler, Colorado.

Fewer than half of rural Colorado’s high school graduates go to college, a rate that’s about five percentage points below the state average.

The reasons are complex. College can feel far away, geographically and culturally. Colleges sometimes haven’t done enough to make degrees feel relevant to the interests and experiences of rural Coloradans. The cost can deter students unsure if college will improve their earnings. College recruiters don’t often stop at rural high schools.

Tiny Fowler, with its lone high school of about 110 students, shows how rural communities can use a partnership among educators, parents, and the broader community to foster the idea that college degrees will contribute to success — whether graduates return to Fowler or move to a bigger city.

Read more in our story.

Two Hispanic brothers wanted to go to college in Colorado. Here’s why only one made it.

Jimy Hernandez and his younger brother, Luis relax at the dinner table at their home in Denver.

Jimy and Luis Hernandez are two brothers who both aspired to attend college one day. Only one of them pursued higher education after high school. The brothers’ divergent paths highlight how Colorado’s, and the nation’s, college system produces unequal results — even within the same family.

And even if they do get to campus, Hispanic men may find not many people share their experiences and understand their challenges. Fewer than one in 10 tenured professors are Hispanic, which is important in making students feel welcome and in helping them connect with mentors who can guide them.

Read more in our story.

Colorado graduates Hispanic men at low rates — but it can improve

Schools like Adams State University, Colorado State University of Pueblo, the University of Colorado Denver, and MSU Denver have been designated Hispanic Serving Institutions.

Hispanic men go to college at the lowest rates of any student group in Colorado, and all the factors that make it hard for them to get to campus — tight budgets, family obligations, unclear pathways, and few mentors — follow them through college.

These outcomes are not inevitable. Around the country, a few institutions have nearly eliminated these gaps by developing systems that catch students before they stumble, rewarding professors for doing more to connect with students, and creating communities that embrace students on campus. The efforts start with a clear message from leaders that this work is a priority and not an afterthought or an extra.

Read more in our story.

A Denver scholarship foundation wanted to know how to help Hispanic men get to college. Here’s what it found

Students sit during a class at the Metropolitan State University of Denver.

What barriers do Hispanic men face getting to and graduating from college?

That’s the question Denver Scholarship Foundation leaders asked Hispanic men about their challenges. They variously listed a lack of funds, information, support, and individual attention, plus family responsibilities.

Hispanic men who did graduate reported having family support. Or they decided to continue with college despite the costs, and had teachers or mentors who saw their potential. They benefited from encouragement from an early age.

Read more in our story.

How Colorado could get more students to complete FAFSA

Yvvonne Burrell and Sir Martin look at scholarship information in the Future Center during a school day at Manual High School. The Future Center provides the students a place to receive information about financial aid, scholarships and colleges.

FAFSA opens up the possibility for students to gain scholarships and federal grants to pay for the cost of college, and every year Colorado students leave about $30 million in federal financial aid unclaimed. A report by 20 experts calls for nearly doubling the FAFSA completion rate to 80%, from 45% — or to at least move into the top 10% of all states in the measure.

The report recommends the state offer grants for student aid counselors, beef up marketing to spread the message about the benefits of FAFSA, partner with organizations to help students complete the FAFSA, incorporate FAFSA into student academic plans, and eventually add FAFSA completion as a graduation requirement.

Colorado lawmakers took up some of these recommendations in House Bill 1366, which passed with bipartisan support. The bill calls for online tools to make filling out the financial aid form easier and ensures students know about the financial aid form as part of their individualized career and academic plan.

Read more in our story.

Caroline Bauman connects Chalkbeat journalists with our readers as the community engagement manager and previously reported at Chalkbeat Tennessee. Connect with Caroline at cbauman@chalkbeat.org.

Bronx high school students get a crash course in urban planning

2022-05-03T21:34:32+00:00

Nestor Rivas grew up near the South Bronx’s sprawling St. Mary’s Park, where families host barbecues and children play baseball.

But it wasn’t until Rivas began researching the park as part of a new urban planning curriculum at his school, that he realized something: Unlike Central Park or Union Square, St. Mary’s doesn’t have food vendors.

“You go to different parts of uptown Manhattan, and they have these parks with foods and like, these farmer’s markets,” said Rivas, 18, a senior at Laboratory School of Finance and Technology in the South Bronx.

That disparity didn’t exactly upset him, he said, “but more so, I questioned it.” So Rivas and eight other peers dreamt up a proposal to create food kiosks at the park that they could rent out to local restaurants.

It’s a first-of-its-kind curriculum in New York City’s public schools that got Rivas thinking more deeply about his local park, where there have also been concerns about drug use and sanitation — two issues other students highlighted. Launched by New York City’s Department of City Planning and molded by four government teachers, the 12-week pilot course taught Rivas and roughly 60 of his peers about how to advocate for their neighborhoods and what a career in urban planning looks like.

The course culminated in a fair last week in the school cafeteria, where they pitched ideas to city officials and lawmakers. Their ideas were based on “real stuff — the stuff of life,” said Adolfo Carrión Jr., commissioner of the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, who inspected various projects and talked to students last week.

“The kids understood that if you’re in the park with your children or your family or your friends, you have to walk 7-10 minutes to get a snack or something to drink, so they said, ‘Why don’t we built the kiosks, rent them out, and people can start businesses, and it can give a family the convenience and safety of keeping the kids there,’” Carrión, former Bronx borough president and city councilman, said of the food vendor project. “That’s really super-practical stuff and really cheap to implement.”

The course began to take shape last year, when a team of city planning officials who focus on increasing outreach to local communities emailed schools about creating lessons around urban planning. The four government teachers at Laboratory School of Finance and Technology seemed to have the most interest in taking on such a project, planning officials said.

In February, the urban planning curriculum became a part of three government classes at the school. First, students shared what they thought the South Bronx had to offer and what it needed more of. Then, planning officials told the students about what urban planning is, and how advocacy works. Teachers surveyed the students to see what projects they wanted to pursue, and they landed on three things: St. Mary’s Park, affordable housing, and a new jail site that’s coming to the neighborhood as part of a de Blasio administration plan to replace Rikers Island with a smaller network of borough-based jails. Each class focused on each of those topics.

With the help of planning officials who visited every week, the students did what an urban planner or a developer might do. They came up with project ideas, researched and gathered data to make their arguments, and identified the people who would be affected by their proposals. At one point, they took on various roles to simulate the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure so they could understand the formal process behind making a proposal come to life.

Students took on various roles, such as developers and city planning commissioners, and some completed the class wanting to improve their public speaking skills, planning officials said.

High school seniors are usually checked out by this time of year, said Juan De Jesus, one of the teachers who led the class. But these students stayed interested because they were proposing their own ideas and therefore felt “that they can actually have a real impact.”

At one point, De Jesus’s students asked him whether city officials would take their ideas seriously.

“If you guys don’t care about it, and you guys are just thinking this is just another assignment for a grade, then why would I want to invest in your ideas if you’re not invested in it yourselves?” De Jesus recalled telling them. “And I think that was kind of the reality check for them, and they were like, ‘OK, I really do have to care about this, or no one else will.’”

Asked if he would take any of the ideas he saw at the fair seriously, Carrión said, “Absolutely.”

A group of students at Laboratory School of Finance and Technology in the South Bronx rehearse their pitch for cleaning up St. Mary’s Park, the day before a fair where elected and city officials were invited to review their proposals.

On the day before the fair, students sat in their groups with their completed presentation boards loaded with pictures, data, maps, and diagrams. Then they rehearsed their presentations.

Brianna Rodriguez, 17, opened her practice elevator pitch with, “OK, so this is my proposal,” which was about improving sanitation in the park. When she finished, two planning officials in the class encouraged her to instead open with her story about seeing dog poop and syringes on the ground.

So when Rodriguez made her pitch to Carrión during the fair the next day, she began by saying, “I went to the park this weekend, and the sanitation was not that great.” The commissioner responded by telling Rodriguez that she’d done “nice work.”

Brianna Rodriguez, 17, pitches an idea to Adolfo Carrión Jr., New York City’s commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development, about improving sanitation at St. Mary’s Park.

It’s unclear if the class will return at the school or if it will be expanded. Planning officials are going to analyze the program and get feedback from the school on what worked and what didn’t before making a decision.

Rodriguez, who’s heading to college this fall, said the class didn’t persuade her that she should become an urban planner. But she felt like she “actually contributed something” to the community by coming up with her idea. She has dreams of opening a community center where Bronx residents can get therapy, and she thinks the class gave her some insight into the work she’ll need to do to make that happen.

Rodriguez did say the class required a lot of research and work, which was tough to juggle. At the same time, she said she now understands how much work goes into planning projects across the city.

“We’re going to college soon, so I feel like it is time we start stepping up to the real world, and I really like that we got, like, a little piece of what it’s like inside the Department of City Planning and how we can be potential contributors to the future,” she said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Memphis’ Power 1,000 internships aim to help high school students gain work skills

2022-04-25T21:25:02+00:00

Kaleb Sy is just a junior at East High School, but he already has his career aspirations all mapped out: First, he wants to become a criminal defense attorney, working his way to the Western Tennessee United States Attorney’s Office with an ultimate goal of representing the Volunteer State in the U.S. Senate.

As he wraps up a semester-long internship in Memphis-Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray’s office, he feels he’s one step closer to achieving those dreams.

“I’m truly learning something new every day,” Sy said. “After a long day of school and even knowing I have to do homework after school, I’m excited to be here because of the simple fact that I know I’m coming here to learn valuable soft skills from highly intelligent people and to just learn from them as I progress as a human being and as a man.”

Sy is one of more than 350 MSCS students participating in the district’s Power 1,000 internship program, launched this semester. The program, which aims to help improve college, career, and technical education in the state’s largest district, allows 11th- and 12th-graders to work alongside district leaders and major corporate partners across the community for up to 10 hours a week.

Students who participate can get not only valuable internship experience early at some of Shelby County’s largest employers, but also a little extra cash: The work pays $15 an hour, well above Tennessee’s $7.25 minimum wage. The wages are covered by ESSER Fund money from federal COVID relief programs.

With more than 350 students participating in Power 1,000 this semester and over 600 applications for the summer iteration, district officials say they’re well on the way to meeting their goal of reaching over 1,000 students.

MSCS is among a growing number of districts encouraging students to complete internships during high school so they can get a jumpstart on exploring fields of study and career options — years before they choose a career path.

District officials hope they deliver some of the same benefits of college internships, which allow students to “try on” a potential profession and learn skills that are specific to their field and so-called soft skills — such as critical thinking, leadership and communication — that could be used anywhere.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk found that a high school internship program was especially beneficial to low-income students of color, who found it to be “a new and formative experience for many students who had not ventured beyond their neighborhood.” Over 90% of MSCS students are children of color, and nearly 60% are considered economically disadvantaged.

Investigating the experiences of 229 low-income students of color who participated in a new high school internship program between 2011 and 2015, the researchers found that, when properly supported, high school internships “serve as an innovative educational space that nurtures students’ passions, encourages deeper learning, values their communities, and promotes self-reflection regarding their place in the world.”

How the in-house internship program came about

Power 1,000 came about after a recent district survey of nearly 30,000 students found an overwhelming majority wanted access to internship experiences while in high school, rather than waiting until they had picked their career or college major, said Billy Walker, the district’s director of student affairs.

“It really all started with those student voices,” Walker said. “And they didn’t just want an opportunity to work — they really wanted to get into their passions.”

As administrators began to discuss what a new district internship program could look like, they realized their own headquarters on South Hollywood Street was an untapped resource.

“We’re a district of 95,000-plus students, but in our Central Office, we had no students buzzing around,” said Jasmine Worles, strategic planning manager in the office of MSCS’ chief of staff. “That just felt like an oxymoron.”

“And we work with all these vendors, but what are we doing to make sure that our students have experiences with all these organizations we partner with?” Worles added, noting local businesses and corporations like AutoZone, Junior Achievement, Peer Power, Carroll’s Roofing and Construction, and Quintessential Sweets are among those providing training and internship as part of Power 1,000.

Although there were already several “amazing” internship programs throughout the community, like the City of Memphis’ MPLOY Youth summer program, Worles said, it made sense for MSCS to start its own. The second-largest employer in the Memphis metropolitan area, MSCS employs about 6,000 teachers, as well as accountants, carpenters, radio broadcasters, counselors, attorneys, law officers, nurses, and IT specialists, among others.

“We have so many leaders and experts across departments that span different industries just within our district,” Worles said.

Students work after school, no later than 8 p.m., during the spring session of the program, which started in February and runs through May. Hours during the summer session in June and July will be more flexible.

All students get training in general work and soft skills, but beyond that, the internship experiences vary from student to student, based on their interests. The application includes basic personal information and questions about their top career interests, transportation and any needed modifications like wheelchair access. It also includes a personality test that helps organizers match students with a job.

Also part of Power 1,000 is a collaboration with Peer Power, a Memphis nonprofit that traditionally recruits and trains high-performing college students to tutor in public schools. High school students in this program can tutors and mentor elementary and middle school students. They also receive their own mentor, free ACT preparation, as well as career and job readiness training.

Those students help the district fill a critical need as it expands tutoring for academic recovery after the pandemic amid staffing shortages — a national issue worsened by COVID.

District officials hope the tutoring program will encourage more students to consider a career in education. In the fall, MSCS reported having 200-plus teaching positions still open — up from 63 the previous fall — and across Tennessee, the number of new educators graduating from teacher training programs has decreased by nearly one-fifth over five years, according to a recent report.

“Our juniors and seniors are prime seeds for us to start to cultivate and grow,” Worles said.

Learning respect for the work teachers do

Sophie Barker has no plan to be a teacher. The Central High School senior dreams of becoming a forensic psychologist or anthropologist who researches the motives of criminals.

Still, she’s learned invaluable skills as an English tutor for three elementary school students during her last semester before graduation. She plans to use the skills when she heads to college in the fall and tutors struggling students as part of a work-study program.

And from working with a third-grader at Idlewild Elementary and two first-graders at Rozelle Elementary, Barker said, she’s developed a new level of respect for elementary school teachers.

“They really do it all — arithmetic, English, science. And their patience for kids, especially younger ones who have less of an attention span, is incredible,” Barker said. “I just love my job. I love being around people that I can grow from and I can learn from.”

Sy, the aspiring senator and a self-proclaimed government nerd, says he’s enjoyed every part of his internship — from the afternoons he spent shadowing Walker and other district administrators in Ray’s office and learning the district’s “inner workings” to receiving soft skills training at AutoZone’s headquarters and starting a recycling program in the district offices.

Sy says what he’s enjoyed the most about the experience is working alongside people who love their work, and he’s more motivated than ever to “stick to his why.”

“I’ve met a lot of people and doctors in my days, and they’re not always really passionate about their jobs,” Sy said. “But people like Dr. Walker, he genuinely loves his job.”

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

How much money do high school graduates make? Indiana digs into the numbers.

2022-04-19T11:00:00+00:00

What happens to students after they graduate from high school?

Schools largely don’t know. At South Bend schools, for example, officials know that fewer than half of graduates went on to college in the past two years. But they don’t follow the other 55%.

“It’s certainly harder to track,” said Rafi Nolan-Abrahamian, assistant superintendent of accountability and innovation. “And there’s less certainty in outcomes and the quality of the information you’re getting.”

That could soon change. For the first time, what students do after high school will contribute to how Indiana gauges school performance, through a new dashboard expected to launch in the fall.

How many students enlist in the military? How many of them hold steady jobs 10 years after graduation? How much money do they make?

All of those outcomes can paint a fuller picture of how well K-12 education prepares students, experts say.

But beyond tracking enrollment in Indiana colleges, finding the data is proving tricky. What state officials know so far is just a small slice of the whole story, and they haven’t yet broached how to use the limited information.

“There’s a philosophical question as well as a data accuracy question here,” said Christy Hovanetz, who focuses on school accountability as a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd. “Should high schools be accountable for what happens to a student six years after they leave high school? … [and] how accurate of information can we gather on students six years out?”

Giving context to the data

The state cast a wide net to look at employment after high school, examining anyone with an employment record reported through unemployment insurance data.

That broad employment rate includes people who could have worked for a brief stint or made little money. But it also excludes Indiana graduates who find jobs in other states.

To attempt to better capture employment, the state also calculated a sustained employment rate and median wage that filters out short-term jobs. It focuses on those who worked for most of the year and made at least minimum wage.

The state recently published the employment outcomes, ahead of the upcoming K-12 dashboard. At first glance, the data seems to indicate that in 2020, students who graduated high school the previous year made a median income of about $22,000.

But that’s missing a lot of students.

The figure doesn’t include anyone who dropped out of high school. It doesn’t include students enrolled in Indiana colleges. It doesn’t include graduates who moved away to other states. It doesn’t include those working part time.

In fact, the median wage calculation only includes roughly 13,000 out of some 75,000 graduates — or about 18% of graduates.

So that $22,000 figure doesn’t truly represent earning prospects. It’s also hard to draw conclusions about who it does represent.

Because of the data caveats, it’s difficult to analyze trends. Do employment rates taper over time because of something happening in the labor market, or because the state can’t keep tabs on as many students?

The state will also eventually need to set goals to help people understand what a $22,000 median wage or, say, a 66% employment rate after 10 years means.

“Is that good or not?” Hovanetz said. “It’s hard for the general public specifically to make a lot of contextual sense out of it.”

Many still support collecting the data, if imperfect. State officials and policy experts say they hope the numbers spark more conversations on how schools can set students up for life after high school and perhaps fuel better data collection moving forward.

Still, Hovanetz says Indiana is ahead of the curve on connecting life outcomes to K-12 education — not just proxy indicators for how prepared a student is to be successful, but what a student actually accomplishes.

How schools can use the data

For now, the after-high school outcomes won’t be tied to the way the state grades schools.

But state officials hope the new information puts the focus on how schools prepare their students. It moves the goalpost beyond high school graduation, said Jason Callahan, Indiana’s assistant secretary of student pathways and opportunities.

“From a policy standpoint, we are really looking to move that terminal end point beyond a high school diploma, thinking about postsecondary and work-based experiences that lead to life-fulfilling careers,” Callahan said.

The numbers could help illustrate how much students could make depending on what paths they pursue after high school, he said. In trying to increase higher education attainment rates, state officials often emphasize that a credential or degree can lead to significantly larger lifetime earnings — on average, about $22,000 more per year.

Some experts caution, however, against pressuring high schools to push all students toward college and say the data needs to show how students can be successful in different ways. It’s also difficult to know whether a student’s success can be directly attributed to something a high school did.

There’s a clearer pipeline between high school and college, said Nolan-Abrahamian, the South Bend administrator. High schools tie many strategies to preparing students for college, like offering dual credit courses. But even though schools teach workforce skills, he said it’s less clear how K-12 education can improve outcomes for students who don’t go to college.

“Postsecondary enrollment is something schools have direct control over, and something they’re actively working students toward,” Nolan-Abrahamian said. But when it comes to employment or enlistment, “it’s harder to say how schools would directly plan toward those outcomes.”

Kae Petrin contributed to this story.

How Colorado Mountain College sets example in practical preparation for jobs

2022-04-18T21:46:03+00:00

By the time Kelli Adrian graduated from Colorado Mountain College’s teaching program, she had worked in three schools at four different grade levels. Her hands-on experience led to three job offers.

Three years after graduation, Adrian, 38, said her CMC education gave her the training and connections she needed to get hired at an elementary school in Eagle, a town in the central Colorado mountains.

The college also offers other programs designed to get students jobs in the region once they graduate. They include training in nursing, but also community-specific job preparation such as avalanche science, ecosystem science and stewardship, and fire science with a focus on wildland fires.

The programs are carefully built to ensure students stay connected to local jobs, a practice lawmakers want to spread at public colleges.

A bill in the Colorado legislature would provide $91 million to expand or create programs like those at Colorado Mountain College. House Bill 1350 won unanimous approval from the House Education Committee and needs to pass the full House and Senate.

Funding includes $95 million from the federal money sent to states to respond to pandemic impacts. The legislation is a result of a yearlong state study that recommended how to use those funds.

Along with the bill to help schools train regional talent, lawmakers filed bills to better track student data and the return on investment, as well as to create more opportunities for students to earn what are called stackable credentials. Stackable credentials are training and certification that can be gained over time, rather than in one stint at school.

“The idea is we need to drive funding for local use for local needs,” said Rep. Julie McCluskie, a Dillon Democrat, who sponsored the bill.

Not every college degree leads to a job within the graduate’s home community.

For example, Adrian earned a political science and international studies degree at Colorado State University years before enrolling at Colorado Mountain College.

Her first degree boosted her earning potential and marketability, but it didn’t automatically mean she would get a local job where she graduated. Adrian spent years working as an events coordinator before enrolling at Colorado Mountain College.

CMC not only connected Adrian to a community of employers, but also taught her how to put together a resume, clarify her goals, and make sure she got the certifications she needed to launch her teaching career. She didn’t have that help when she earned her first degree.

“If you graduate from CMC, you’ve worked closely with the surrounding community and they know that you’re very, very well trained,” Adrian said. “You’re trained for what employers are looking for.”

Colorado Mountain College is a public college supported by local taxpayers and offers industry certifications, and also associate and bachelor’s degrees. Its main campus is in Glenwood Springs. It has 10 other mountain town campuses.

School leaders credit the college’s connection to its communities as a reason why it has prioritized programs that meet the needs of mountain towns.

Matt Gianneschi, CMC chief of staff, said taxpayers demand that the college provide the training necessary to get students jobs right after graduation. To further the school’s mission to serve its community, Gianneschi sits down with local chambers of commerce leaders once a month to discuss what employers need.

He said the school maintains budget reserves to build new programs, or ends them if they’re not useful any longer to the community. It also repurposes programs if the job market has shifted.

Financial and programming flexibility allows the school to react nimbly to job market changes, Gianneschi said.

He said that’s why the $91 million would go a long way to allowing school leaders statewide the flexibility to think about how their schools serve communities. He also expects the money to further the school’s mission.

“It’s all about connectedness with community and quality in having academic experiences that lead to sustainable-wage careers,” Gianneschi said. “Even if our enrollment declines, but we’re still providing that support to our community, we can consider ourselves a success.”

Too few metro Detroiters are earning post-high school degrees, report says

2022-04-06T18:48:54+00:00

The number of metro Detroiters enrolling in college or post-high school training programs was already declining pre-COVID, but now it’s falling even lower. The number of residents earning degrees is also declining, raising concerns that employers will continue to struggle to find qualified workers.

The Detroit Regional Chamber raised those concerns in a State of Education report released Wednesday. The report uses regional, state, and national data to paint a grim outlook for metro Detroit and students who are Black or Latino or come from low-income homes. The report also says that efforts to get more residents, particularly adults, to earn degrees or certificates have stalled

Currently, just half of the 11-county region’s residents have a postsecondary credential, which includes two-year and four-year college degrees or a certificate in fields such as nursing or welding. The goal is to get that number up to 60%, but that won’t happen if enrollment continues to decline or those in college don’t finish.

“COVID has taken a toll and has made a bad situation even worse,” said Sandy Baruah, president and CEO of the chamber.

If the percentage doesn’t improve, the implications aren’t just dire for employers trying to fill jobs, Baruah told reporters this week.

“One of the reasons this issue is so important is (that) the level of educational attainment has a direct impact on an individual and a family’s economic security,” Baruah said. An individual’s financial stability is also directly related to the financial stability of a community. And “employers will go where the talent is,” he said.

Here are some of the concerning statistics the report highlights:

Even before the pandemic, there were concerns about regional postsecondary enrollment, particularly for students graduating from Detroit schools. The report shows that from 2018 to 2019, the percentage of high school graduates who didn’t enroll in college or a certificate program grew from 28% to 34% for the region. The number rose from 38% to 53% in Detroit.
Undergraduate enrollment in Michigan dropped by 8.9% between 2019 and 2021. That compares to a drop of 8% for the nation. The report says that fewer students enrolling in postsecondary education will mean employers won’t have enough qualified workers to fill jobs that pay middle class or higher wages.
The undergraduate enrollment data is even worse for students who graduate from schools with a large number of students from low-income homes. Their enrollment rate fell by 10% nationally between 2019 and 2020. Regional data was not available.
Nationally, 74% of students who started college in the fall of 2019 returned in the fall of 2020. For Black students, it was 65%, and for Latino students, it was 69%.

There were a few bright spots in the data. The percentage of students who graduated from high school in 2014 and are on track to graduate from a postsecondary institution within six years is on the rise. Postsecondary graduation rates are also on the rise.

The chamber is involved in or leading a number of initiatives to boost postsecondary numbers, including the Detroit Promise, which provides scholarships for students in the city to attend a community college or four-year institution. The chamber is also a member of Launch Michigan, a nonpartisan advocacy group that has pushed for changes to the state’s education system that will ensure more students graduate prepared for postsecondary success.

The Chamber’s Detroit Reconnect initiative is aimed at helping adults enroll in a higher education. In 2019, there were more than 676,000 adults in the region with some college credits, but they had not earned a degree or credential.

“If we can get a big chunk of them, that could make a big difference, you know, right away,” Baruah said.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. Contact her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

It’s time for colleges to prove their value, Indiana leader says

2022-02-09T22:09:28+00:00

Through 13 years on the job, Indiana’s higher education leader has sought to assuage the unrelenting skepticism of whether college is worth it.

As she approaches retirement, Commissioner Teresa Lubbers put the question back on colleges Tuesday in her final state of higher education address at the Statehouse.

It’s up to colleges to prove their value, Lubbers said — to bring costs down, to be more flexible for nontraditional students, to show how a degree or certificate matters in the workforce.

At a time when the future of higher education is uncertain, she said, the colleges that will survive “will resist the temptation for incremental change, but rather embrace the reality that students — young and older — will expect a dramatically different system of learning and ways of showing their competence.”

The college-going rate among Indiana’s high school graduates has fallen to 59%, down from 65% five years ago. Enrollment is particularly dropping among men and students of color.

Despite the perception of higher education institutions being slow to change, Lubbers said the pandemic has shown they can quickly adapt.

College officials acknowledge the challenges ahead. At IUPUI, for example, Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer Kathy Johnson is thinking about how to reach more working adults once the pandemic subsides and emphasizes the need for work-based learning opportunities.

“COVID has forced us to come to a turning point perhaps faster than we otherwise would,” she said. “The ways of doing our work have shifted. That can be to the benefit of students.”

Stephanie Wang covers higher education for Chalkbeat Indiana, which partners with Open Campus.

Proposed Indiana law could unlock millions in college financial aid

2022-01-26T23:08:04+00:00

Indiana students miss out on an estimated $65 million in free money for college, simply because many don’t fill out the federal financial aid application.

But what if high schools required every student to complete the financial aid form?

That’s up for discussion in the legislature for the third year in a row. And supporters say the need to help students afford a postsecondary education is becoming a more pressing problem as Indiana faces declining college enrollment.

“It’s a student equity issue. It’s a workforce development issue. And it’s ultimately an economic mobility issue,” said Jason Bearce, vice president of education and workforce development for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

The Senate Education and Career Development Committee unanimously advanced a proposal Wednesday to require all high school seniors to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA. The bill would allow families to opt out of filling out the form, or principals and school counselors to waive the requirement for students in extenuating circumstances.

Indiana ranked in the bottom half of states last year for FAFSA completion, with 55.9% of seniors filing. Less than 60% of high school seniors nationally completed the FAFSA.

And there’s more at stake than the $65 million in Pell Grants that the National College Attainment Network estimates Hoosier students would have qualified for. The FAFSA also unlocks state-level financial aid, as well as scholarships offered by individual colleges.

But officials representing K-12 school associations raised concerns that mandating the FAFSA would add another burden to overtaxed educators.

“We become the FAFSA police,” said Terry Spradlin, executive director of the Indiana School Boards Association.

While he wants students to be able to access financial aid, Spradlin said he is worried educators would have to spend too much time tracking down families who don’t intend to seek financial aid — families who know their income is too high, or whose children who plan to enter the workforce or join the military.

Sen. Shelli Yoder, D-Bloomington, backed the bill but echoed the concern about putting more work on school staff: “Right now our school counselors are just inundated with severe mental health issues among students.”

Still, supporters said they want to ensure students are choosing to not seek financial aid, rather than missing out on an opportunity they don’t know about. Filling out the aid application can help dispel the notion that people cannot afford to attend college.

Tuition at Ivy Tech Community College, for example, would be easily covered by a Pell Grant, said MJ Michalak, Ivy Tech’s vice president of public affairs.

“When you talk about free community college, we already have that in Indiana for the students who have the most need — if they file the FAFSA,” she said.

A handful of other states, including Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois, have made completing the FAFSA a graduation requirement. Louisiana, the first state to adopt such a law, has the highest rate in the nation of students completing the application — 78%.

In Indiana, the proposed FAFSA mandate has passed the Senate in each of the past two years but stalled in the House. Last year, balking at the idea of a requirement, lawmakers in the House instead suggested providing a financial incentive to schools based on how many students complete the FAFSA. But the bill ultimately didn’t make it through.

Bill author Sen. Jean Leising, R-Oldenburg, said she brought the proposal back this year because she thinks it’s more important than ever.

“The reality is, unfortunately, our participation rate in Indiana continues to decline,” she said. “We’re leaving a lot of money out there that would benefit not just our four-year college-bound students, but also the two-year (college students) and even those kids that want to participate in the Workforce Ready Grant.”

FAFSA filing rates are falling in particular among Black, Latino, and rural students, and those from low-income families, said Indiana Commission for Higher Education official Josh Garrison.

He believes the proposal’s benefits outweigh the burden.

“It’s easy to get lost in percentages and large numbers, but it’s important to remember these are students who are sitting in classrooms right now, who are missing out on the opportunity for postsecondary education and the opportunity for a better life,” Garrison said. “This is just not something that can wait another year.”

Stephanie Wang covers higher education for Chalkbeat Indiana, which partners with Open Campus.

Tell us what you want to read about higher education in Indiana

2022-01-11T16:55:07+00:00

What’s the value of a college degree in Indiana? What challenges stand in the way of earning one?

Roughly 60% of Hoosier adults don’t have a degree or certificate beyond a high school diploma. That used to not matter as much in Indiana’s old manufacturing economy. But today, state officials and experts alike say those without a higher education are struggling to compete for decent jobs and a livable wage.

This year, Chalkbeat Indiana is expanding its coverage of higher education in partnership with Open Campus — and we need your help.

Our reporting will continue to focus on educational equity, examining how Indiana’s higher education systems serve students of color and students from low-income backgrounds. We will also cover Indiana’s push to offer job training through credentials and certificates, as well as the connection between postsecondary education and workforce development.

Tell us what you’re interested in reading in our higher education coverage by filling out the form below.

Having trouble viewing the survey? Go here.

Stephanie Wang covers higher education for Chalkbeat Indiana, which partners with Open Campus.

Indianapolis scholarship pays off college bills, giving students another shot at a degree

2022-01-11T16:55:02+00:00

Tapiwa Mzumara felt stuck.

She was tired of working long hours at a shoe store in the mall, earning just enough money to make ends meet and listening to her friends talk about a college experience she didn’t have.

As a teenager, Mzumara thought she’d go to school to become a doctor or a lawyer. She knew she could excel if given the chance. But her financial aid had fallen through, and when she tried to take some classes anyway at IUPUI and Ivy Tech Community College, the full cost of tuition strained her family’s finances.

By her early 20s, going back to college was on indefinite pause. “I decided I wasn’t going to go back until I could get a more stable situation,” Mzumara said.

Then, six years after graduating from high school, Mzumara received an email offering her another shot.

Indy Achieves, a fledgling city education initiative, would settle her $200 outstanding balance with Ivy Tech and pay for her first semester back. This opened the door for her to return to college to study biotechnology. Now she’s serving as student government president and is on track to graduate this year.

For tens of thousands of Hoosiers, the cost of returning to college is more than just tuition — it requires cash up front for unpaid bills from their previous attempts at degrees. These aren’t the colossal student loan debts that have consumed millions of Americans, but smaller missed payments to colleges for classes, fees, textbooks, or other supplies.

Indy Achieves is one program trying to knock down this barrier. As part of $2 million in city-funded scholarships each year, Indy Achieves gives “completion grants” to local students at Ivy Tech’s Indianapolis campus and IUPUI to eliminate the unpaid tuition and book bills that lock them out of re-enrolling.

Out of about 82,000 people across Indiana who owe money to Ivy Tech, the statewide community college system, officials say the median outstanding balance is $550. It’s a dream-ending amount for some students.

“That can be a significant burden for a student to get that kind of money,” said Indy Achieves Executive Director Matt Impink.

This type of scholarship could pave the way for a critical population of students to gain a postsecondary credential, Impink believes. Ten percent of adults in Indiana have some college experience but no degree, and policymakers have zeroed in on the need for some type of credential to lift wage and career prospects.

Among the roughly 900 students awarded completion grants since 2019, Indy Achieves officials say the results are promising. Last school year, for example, three-quarters of completion grant recipients at Ivy Tech graduated or stayed in school — far higher than the average student. At IUPUI, that rate is even better, at 92%.

But Indy Achieves officials know there are thousands of people they aren’t reaching — all of them potential college graduates.

“We know there are more students out there that have stopped out of Ivy Tech and IUPUI,” said Esther Woodson, Indy Achieves’ director. “It’s just, how do we connect with those students? How do we find them? Because we know they’re out there.”

Offering a ‘fresh start’

Mzumara actually meant to delete the email offering her a completion grant. “I wasn’t in school anymore, so I didn’t need to hear about back-to-school stuff,” she said.

When she accidentally opened it, the email seemed too good to be true. She wondered if someone was playing a prank on her, and she resolved not to get her hopes up.

Thousands of those kinds of emails have gone out in recent years — not just about Indy Achieves — and it seems many students have a similar reaction.

In late 2019, for example, Ivy Tech tried to offer a “fresh start” for students with unpaid bills. The community college sent emails to 17,000 students across Indiana, offering to forgive debts for students who owed less than $1,500 if they met certain GPA requirements and finished school. Ivy Tech also automatically wiped out all balances under $50.

After hearing interest from some 800 students, Ivy Tech was prepared to waive about $1 million in outstanding balances, according to a news report.

But just 163 students came back to school.

Ivy Tech officials called it a moderate success, particularly since community college enrollment has dipped as people face health, family, and financial challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ivy Tech also recently removed another significant consequence of unpaid bills. Last month, the community college stopped barring students who owed money from obtaining their transcripts, which had prevented them from transferring credits or proving they had attended college.

“We understand that the purpose of Ivy Tech is to serve our students and serve our community, and get them on the path to a sustainable career and future,” said Ivy Tech Indianapolis Chancellor Lorenzo Esters. “Why would we be a barrier to that success?”

Out of about 82,000 people across Indiana who owe money to Ivy Tech, the statewide community college system, officials say the median balance is $550.

When Indy Achieves asked scholarship applicants why they wanted the opportunity, officials heard about deep economic needs. They heard from parents struggling to provide for their children but wanting to be role models, people who experienced financial hardships, and students who didn’t want to give up on the progress they had made.

And colleges across the country have realized that eliminating these small debts can be worth far more than what students owe, Impink said, in tuition and, eventually, degrees.

“It’s something that can be very useful in getting a large amount of students back on the right side of things,” he said.

Making the case to return to college

In northeast Indiana, a local community foundation tried a similar tactic last year. In partnership with area universities and colleges, the Degree Finish Line program promised to forgive outstanding balances and provide up to $5,000 in a forgivable loan to adult students who finish their degrees and stay in the region.

But it has only received two or three takers so far.

“There’s a learning in that for us in higher education — that it is harder to get people to come back,” said Liz Bushnell, executive director of the Questa Education Foundation. “Is there a way for us to intervene when students are at risk of dropping out? That might be the priority.”

Seeing the same challenge, Indy Achieves also offers completion grants to students in danger of dropping out, to help them stay in school.

“We’re trying to find the right sweet spot for students who are going to get the grant and graduate as quickly as possible,” Impink said.

The two local campuses help Indy Achieves identify and reach out to potential scholarship recipients. In the two years since its launch, the program has targeted completion grants toward students who are doing well in school, who fill out the federal financial aid application, and who are close to graduating. The average grant at Ivy Tech is $1,100, and grants top out at $2,500 at IUPUI.

But the program is looking to broaden its reach. With the pandemic depressing college enrollment, Indy Achieves hasn’t yet spent its entire $2 million annual budget, which also includes “promise scholarships” to cover other gaps in financial aid.

“It’s an enormous group of potential college graduates that are tricky to engage with, because they’re at all different points of life,” Impink said. “I think we have really figured out a few things on how to execute this program, but the challenge now is really expanding it and getting a lot more folks in the pipeline.”

Officials agree that financial help is just one piece of the puzzle in making college accessible.

Esters, the Ivy Tech chancellor, says it can be challenging to persuade adults to return to college, particularly if they don’t know about opportunities or don’t see the long-term benefits.

“I think so many people are afraid to return because they’re worried, ‘Well, I’ve been out too long,’” Esters said. “When we can connect the meaning or purpose of that learning to potential work, then they’re more likely to return.”

Now that she’s on track to finish her associate degree this year, Tapiwa Mzumara plans to go for her bachelor’s degree and has her sights set on dental school.

Seizing the opportunity

For Mzumara, the path to college was full of hurdles. Her mother battled chronic illnesses, her family couldn’t afford college, and she didn’t qualify for financial aid because of her immigration status.

Even the Indy Achieves grant was just the beginning. The city program paid off her outstanding debt — about $200 — and footed the tuition for her first semester back, about $2,000.

To cover the rest of her education, Mzumara sought scholarships for women in technology and DACA recipients. She ran for student government president, receiving another scholarship when she was elected. To enter a lottery for yet another scholarship, Mzumara joined the chancellor’s fitness club, walking at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She won that one, too.

This year, almost a decade after graduating high school, Mzumara will earn an associate degree in biotechnology. She plans to transfer to IUPUI to finish her bachelor’s degree, and after volunteering at a mobile dental clinic, she has set her sights on dental school.

None of those plans are certain. Mzumara is applying for more scholarships to pay her way. But her return to college, she said, has taught her patience.

Rather than feeling daunted by the challenges, Mzumara sees the possibilities. Because maybe, like that email out of the blue a few years ago, there’s an opportunity waiting to be seized.

“I don’t think I would’ve been able to go to college as soon as I did,” Mzumara said. “And who knows what would’ve happened? Maybe I wouldn’t have gone at all.”

Stephanie Wang covers higher education for Chalkbeat Indiana, which partners with Open Campus.

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High school graduation rate dips for second straight year in Tennessee

2021-11-24T00:50:11+00:00

Tennessee’s high school graduation rate has declined again, according to new data released Tuesday.

About 88.7% of public school students in the Class of 2021 graduated on time this spring, down almost a full percentage point from 2020, according the state education department.

The rate also fell by the slightest of margins the prior year. That decline, however, came after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the state to relax graduation requirements soon after the virus emerged — and likely would have been more pronounced without the emergency rule.

While the 1 percentage point slide over two years may not sound like much, it pulls back on nearly a decade of hard-fought, incremental increases totaling more than 4 percentage points under an initiative prioritized by former Gov. Bill Haslam. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, Tennessee’s graduation rate peaked at 89.7%.

(Scroll to the bottom of this page to look up how your local high school did in 2021.)

The pandemic’s impact on graduation rates will become clearer in the years to come and will hinge on how well students and schools recover from the disruption. Other data points to reason for concern. For example, state test scores from this spring showed a dramatic reversal of Tennessee’s previous academic gains.

In a statement, Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn vowed to improve graduation rates with new learning initiatives that already have begun. Tennessee launched summer camps and tutoring programs this year and also provides workshops to prepare high school students to take the ACT college preparatory test.

“The department was prepared for the negative impacts of the pandemic on our statewide graduation rate, but we are confident that ... we can resume the upward trajectory in graduation rate and ensure we are preparing Tennessee students for success,” Schwinn said.

Last year, overall graduation numbers stayed steady nationally. However, the number of graduates immediately enrolling in college declined sharply, especially interrupting the college plans of students who graduated from high-poverty schools, according to a recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Just as with Tennessee’s first pandemic test results, this year’s graduation data showed higher-than-average declines among students who are considered the most vulnerable.

The graduation rate dropped by almost 2 percentage points to 80.8% for students who are considered economically disadvantaged — and to 71.3% for students with disabilities.

Three of Tennessee’s four urban school districts saw declines, while Memphis-based Shelby County Schools stayed steady at 77.7%. Rates dropped by 1.5 percentage points to 85.5% for Hamilton County Schools; 1.2 percentage points to 81.1% for Metro Nashville Public Schools; and 1 percentage point to 90% for Knox County Schools.

But there were a few bright spots involving the 63,283 graduates in Tennessee’s Class of 2021.

The state reported 37 districts improved their graduation rates from 2020 to 2021. And 37 districts saw 95% or more of their high school seniors earn their diplomas within four years.

Below, find your high school’s graduation rate in our searchable list.

School	System	Graduation rate	Change from 2020
Anderson County High School	Anderson County	95.7%	-1.5
Clinton High School	Anderson County	94.0%	0.5
Oak Ridge High School	Oak Ridge	90.9%	-1.6
Cascade High School	Bedford County	98.6%	0.3
Shelbyville Central High School	Bedford County	87.5%	-1.1
Community High School	Bedford County	93.5%	-2.2
Big Sandy School	Benton County	93.8%	-0.6
Camden Central High School	Benton County	-	-
Bledsoe County High School	Bledsoe County	92.3%	-0.7
Heritage High School	Blount County	94.0%	-0.2
Samuel Everett School of Innovation	Blount County	-	-
William Blount High School	Blount County	93.4%	-0.4
Alcoa High School	Alcoa	-	-
Maryville High School	Maryville	96.1%	-0.1
Bradley Central High School	Bradley County	94.7%	3.1
North Cleveland GOAL Academy	Bradley County	83.3%	-9.8
Walker Valley High School	Bradley County	97.4%	-1.4
Bradley County Virtual School	Bradley County	-	-
Cleveland High	Cleveland	90.9%	2.5
Campbell County Comprehensive High School	Campbell County	91.1%	-3.8
Jellico High School	Campbell County	85.7%	7.8
Cannon County High School	Cannon County	86.9%	-7.1
East Side Elementary	Cannon County	-	-
Carroll Co Tech Center	Carroll County	-	-
Central High School	Hollow Rock - Bruceton	89.5%	-5.6
Huntingdon High School	Huntingdon Special School District	-	-
McKenzie High School	McKenzie	94.0%	-4.9
Clarksburg School	South Carroll	-	-
West Carroll Junior/Senior High School	West Carroll Sp Dist	98.6%	-
Carter County Online Academy	Carter County	-	-
Cloudland High School	Carter County	93.1%	2.5
Hampton High School	Carter County	94.3%	1.6
Happy Valley High School	Carter County	85.5%	4.6
Unaka High School	Carter County	87.8%	-5.8
Elizabethton High School	Elizabethton	93.0%	1.5
Cheatham Co Central	Cheatham County	89.2%	-4.2
Harpeth High School	Cheatham County	89.7%	-1.7
Sycamore High School	Cheatham County	84.8%	-8.6
Riverside Academy	Cheatham County	-	-
Chester County High School	Chester County	93.3%	-2.8
Cumberland Gap High School	Claiborne County	98.4%	-
Claiborne High School	Claiborne County	91.3%	-2.8
Clay County High School	Clay County	97.4%	-1.1
Cocke Co High School	Cocke County	92.4%	0.6
Cosby High School	Cocke County	94.9%	-2.9
Coffee County Central High School	Coffee County	92.5%	-0.8
Coffee County Raider Academy	Coffee County	-	-
Tullahoma High School	Tullahoma	90.4%	-2.7
Crockett County High School	Crockett County	94.1%	-1.7
Cumberland County High School	Cumberland County	91.7%	-1.9
North Cumberland Elementary	Cumberland County	-	-
Stone Memorial High School	Cumberland County	89.2%	-4.5
The Phoenix School	Cumberland County	81.3%	-1.5
MNPS Virtual School	Davidson County	96.2%	11.2
Antioch High School	Davidson County	74.8%	-6.3
Nashville Big Picture High School	Davidson County	-	-
Cane Ridge High School	Davidson County	81.3%	-2.2
East Nashville Magnet High School	Davidson County	97.5%	-0.8
Glencliff High School	Davidson County	61.2%	-1.6
Harris-Hillman Special Education	Davidson County	-	-
Hillsboro High	Davidson County	89.8%	0.2
Hillwood High	Davidson County	85.2%	-0.5
Hume - Fogg High	Davidson County	-	-
Hunters Lane High	Davidson County	81.0%	0.9
John Overton High	Davidson County	83.8%	3.7
Middle College High	Davidson County	-	-
Cora Howe School	Davidson County	-	-
Maplewood High	Davidson County	69.5%	0.3
Martin Luther King Jr School	Davidson County	-	-
McGavock High	Davidson County	76.7%	-2.9
Nashville School Of The Arts	Davidson County	93.3%	-0.9
Pearl-Cohn High	Davidson County	79.7%	3.7
The Academy at Opry Mills	Davidson County	75.9%	-11.8
The Academy at Old Cockrill	Davidson County	68.4%	-7.2
Stratford STEM Magnet School	Davidson County	76.3%	-4.2
Whites Creek High	Davidson County	82.7%	5
The Academy at Hickory Hollow	Davidson County	79.0%	-8.8
Transitions at Bass	Davidson County	-	-
The Cohn Learning Center	Davidson County	-	-
Lead Academy	Davidson County	90.0%	-3.3
KIPP Nashville Collegiate High School	Davidson County	89.4%	4.3
LEAD Southeast	Davidson County	92.6%	-
Intrepid College Preparatory Charter School	Davidson County	78.6%	-
Knowledge Academies High School	Davidson County	86.2%	-5.7
STEM Prep High School	Davidson County	96.2%	0.2
RePublic High School	Davidson County	86.5%	-3.6
Riverside High School	Decatur County	95.9%	-0.7
De Kalb County High School	DeKalb County	83.6%	-8.3
Creek Wood High School	Dickson County	94.3%	-1.4
Dickson County High School	Dickson County	93.9%	-1.6
Burns Middle School	Dickson County	-	-
Dyer County High School	Dyer County	94.7%	-2.7
Dyersburg High School	Dyersburg	92.3%	-4
Fayette Ware Comprehensive High School	Fayette County Public Schools	90.5%	0.2
Clarkrange High School	Fentress County	97.4%	-1
Franklin Co High School	Franklin County	91.9%	-1.2
Huntland School	Franklin County	98.5%	-0.4
Humboldt Junior/Senior High School	Humboldt City Schools	87.1%	4.4
Milan High School	Milan	98.1%	0.3
Peabody High School	Trenton	-	-
Bradford High School	Bradford	92.3%	-1.5
Gibson County High School	Gibson Co Sp Dist	92.9%	-0.4
South Gibson County High School	Gibson Co Sp Dist	97.7%	0.9
Giles Co High School	Giles County	86.5%	-7.7
Richland School	Giles County	95.5%	-3.3
Grainger High School	Grainger County	94.7%	1.6
Washburn School	Grainger County	-	-
Grainger Academy	Grainger County	88.9%	7.9
Chuckey Doak High School	Greene County	93.3%	-1.1
North Greene High School	Greene County	95.7%	-0.2
South Greene High School	Greene County	91.7%	-5.2
West Greene High School	Greene County	85.2%	-9.6
Greeneville High School	Greeneville	98.4%	2.2
Grundy County High School	Grundy County	89.0%	-4.1
Morristown East High	Hamblen County	92.2%	-3.7
Morristown West High	Hamblen County	89.0%	-5.1
Brainerd High School	Hamilton County	74.8%	2.9
Central High School	Hamilton County	79.9%	-4.4
Chatt High Center For Creative Arts	Hamilton County	-	-
Chattanooga School For Arts And Sciences Upper	Hamilton County	99.0%	-
East Hamilton High School	Hamilton County	89.9%	0.4
East Ridge High School	Hamilton County	87.2%	-0.4
Hamilton County Collegiate High at Chattanooga State	Hamilton County	98.5%	-
Hixson High School	Hamilton County	81.6%	-1.9
The Howard School	Hamilton County	66.8%	-6.1
Ooltewah High School	Hamilton County	87.1%	-0.7
Lookout Valley Middle / High School	Hamilton County	94.6%	0
Red Bank High School	Hamilton County	86.4%	5.6
Sale Creek Middle / High School	Hamilton County	95.5%	3.1
Sequoyah High School	Hamilton County	89.7%	4
Signal Mountain Middle/High School	Hamilton County	98.3%	0.3
Soddy Daisy High School	Hamilton County	85.8%	-4.2
Tyner Academy	Hamilton County	84.4%	-8.3
Hamilton County Virtual School	Hamilton County	53.8%	-
STEM School Chattanooga	Hamilton County	98.5%	-
Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy	Hamilton County	-	-
Ivy Academy Inc.	Hamilton County	90.9%	-
Hancock High School	Hancock County	90.7%	-2.6
Central High School	Hardeman County Schools	93.2%	7
Middleton High School	Hardeman County Schools	89.2%	-1.5
Hardin County High School	Hardin County	92.7%	0.9
Cherokee High School	Hawkins County	92.5%	-2.8
Clinch School	Hawkins County	-	-
Volunteer High School	Hawkins County	94.8%	-2.1
Haywood High School	Haywood County	92.0%	1.5
Lexington High School	Henderson County	91.6%	-5.9
Scotts Hill High School	Henderson County	98.1%	0.8
Henry Co High School	Henry County	98.6%	0.7
Henry County Virtual Academy	Henry County	-	-
East Hickman High School	Hickman County	91.3%	0.6
Hickman County Learning Academy	Hickman County	-	-
Hickman Co Sr High School	Hickman County	96.4%	-0.1
Houston Co Middle School	Houston County	-	-
Houston Co High School	Houston County	90.8%	-3
Mc Ewen High School	Humphreys County	97.2%	-0.2
Waverly Central High School	Humphreys County	91.5%	-3.3
Jackson County High School	Jackson County	88.5%	7.1
Jefferson Co High School	Jefferson County	96.0%	0.1
Johnson Co High School	Johnson County	90.7%	-5.5
Austin East High/Magnet	Knox County	75.2%	-3
Bearden High School	Knox County	93.5%	3.1
Carter High School	Knox County	94.0%	-2.5
Central High School	Knox County	77.0%	-5.6
South Doyle High School	Knox County	78.2%	-7.9
Farragut High School	Knox County	97.5%	-0.1
Fulton High School	Knox County	76.4%	-3.9
Gibbs High School	Knox County	90.0%	-4.1
Halls High School	Knox County	95.8%	1.2
Hardin Valley Academy	Knox County	93.2%	-2.8
Karns Middle School	Knox County	-	-
Karns High School	Knox County	89.4%	-4.1
Knox Adaptive Education Center	Knox County	41.7%	29.2
Powell High School	Knox County	93.6%	-0.4
Ft Sanders Education Development Center	Knox County	-	-
West High School	Knox County	91.1%	-0.1
Dr. Paul L. Kelley Volunteer Academy	Knox County	88.7%	9.7
L N STEM Academy	Knox County	98.5%	-
Career Magnet Academy	Knox County	98.2%	-0.3
Lake Co High School	Lake County	82.0%	-4
Halls High School	Lauderdale County	-	-
Ripley High School	Lauderdale County	94.6%	-3.3
Lawrence Co High School	Lawrence County	93.3%	-2.1
Loretto High School	Lawrence County	-	-
Pioneer Virtual Academy	Lawrence County	-	-
Summertown High School	Lawrence County	96.6%	0.9
Lewis Co High School	Lewis County	98.1%	6.8
Lincoln County High School	Lincoln County	93.9%	-1.7
Lincoln Central Academy	Lincoln County	83.3%	-
Fayetteville High School	Fayetteville	97.6%	-
Greenback School	Loudon County	92.7%	-5.6
Loudon High School	Loudon County	93.6%	-2.6
Lenoir City High School	Lenoir City	89.9%	-2.1
Central High School	McMinn County	98.3%	1.4
McMinn High School	McMinn County	89.3%	3.4
Adamsville High School	McNairy County	98.6%	2.1
McNairy Central High School	McNairy County	93.3%	-2.1
Macon County High School	Macon County	88.0%	0.7
Red Boiling Springs School	Macon County	95.1%	2.8
Jackson Central-Merry Early College High	Madison County	-	-
Liberty Technology Magnet High School	Madison County	73.1%	-5.7
Madison Academic Magnet High School	Madison County	-	-
North Side High School	Madison County	85.6%	-2
South Side High School	Madison County	91.0%	0.6
Marion Co High School	Marion County	88.4%	-0.9
South Pittsburg High School	Marion County	88.6%	-3.9
Whitwell High School	Marion County	88.2%	0.6
Marion Virtual High School	Marion County	-	-
Richard Hardy Memorial School	Richard City	85.7%	4.9
Cornersville School	Marshall County	89.6%	-6.3
Forrest School	Marshall County	93.9%	-3.6
Marshall Co High School	Marshall County	90.5%	-1.4
Columbia Central High School	Maury County	79.7%	-7
Culleoka Unit School	Maury County	88.6%	-4.6
Hampshire Unit School	Maury County	87.9%	-4.7
Mt Pleasant High School	Maury County	91.1%	7.9
Santa Fe Unit School	Maury County	94.6%	3.3
Spring Hill High School	Maury County	92.4%	-0.5
Virtual Academy of Maury County	Maury County	76.5%	-
Meigs County High School	Meigs County	97.4%	-
Sequoyah High School	Monroe County	81.3%	-11.1
Sweetwater High School	Monroe County	90.9%	-3.8
Tellico Plains High School	Monroe County	88.1%	-8.2
Kenwood High	Montgomery County	89.4%	-1.7
Montgomery Central High	Montgomery County	93.0%	-1
Clarksville High	Montgomery County	93.3%	-2.5
Northeast High	Montgomery County	90.8%	-2.5
Northwest High	Montgomery County	94.0%	2
Rossview High	Montgomery County	96.3%	-2.3
Middle College @ Austin Peay State University	Montgomery County	-	-
West Creek High	Montgomery County	92.0%	-1.8
Moore County High School	Moore County	90.2%	-8
Central High School	Morgan County	95.7%	-
Coalfield School	Morgan County	-	-
Morgan County Career and Technical Center	Morgan County	96.3%	-
Oakdale School	Morgan County	-	-
Sunbright School	Morgan County	-	-
Obion County Central High School	Obion County	88.6%	-3.8
South Fulton Middle / High School	Obion County	94.2%	3.5
Union City High School	Union City	83.2%	-9.1
Livingston Academy	Overton County	90.5%	-0.1
Perry County High School	Perry County	83.9%	-14.7
Perry County Virtual School	Perry County	-	-
Pickett Co High School	Pickett County	97.7%	-
Copper Basin High School	Polk County	93.2%	-4.8
Polk County High School	Polk County	86.9%	-6.6
VITAL: Upper Cumberland e-Learning Network	Putnam County	-	-
Cookeville High School	Putnam County	92.2%	2.3
Monterey High School	Putnam County	90.6%	-4.3
Upperman High School	Putnam County	91.1%	-0.7
Rhea County High School	Rhea County Department of Education	82.9%	-6.3
Harriman High School	Roane County	88.2%	-10.6
Midway High School	Roane County	98.1%	4.5
Oliver Springs High School	Roane County	91.7%	-5
Roane County High School	Roane County	98.8%	0.1
Midtown Educational Center	Roane County	56.6%	-17.9
Rockwood High School	Roane County	91.3%	-5.9
East Robertson High School	Robertson County	97.7%	0.7
Greenbrier High School	Robertson County	94.6%	4.3
Jo Byrns High School	Robertson County	96.0%	-0.6
Springfield High School	Robertson County	90.5%	-4.2
White House Heritage High School	Robertson County	94.5%	-1.9
Robertson Co. Virtual School	Robertson County	-	-
Robertson County Phoenix Academy	Robertson County	76.9%	-4.1
Tennessee Connections Academy 9-12	Robertson County	67.4%	-16.9
Blackman High School	Rutherford County	93.3%	-1.8
Central Magnet School	Rutherford County	-	-
Eagleville School	Rutherford County	-	-
Holloway High School	Rutherford County	95.8%	-1
Lavergne High School	Rutherford County	91.7%	0.1
Oakland High School	Rutherford County	95.7%	2
Riverdale High School	Rutherford County	92.7%	-4.1
Rockvale High School	Rutherford County	95.3%	8.9
Rutherford County Virtual School	Rutherford County	-	-
Smyrna High School	Rutherford County	96.1%	0.3
Siegel High School	Rutherford County	95.7%	-2.5
Stewarts Creek High School	Rutherford County	96.8%	0.1
Scott High School	Scott County	93.5%	-1.2
Oneida High School	Oneida	96.9%	-1.1
Sequatchie Co High School	Sequatchie County	84.4%	-9.4
Gatlinburg Pittman High	Sevier County	-	-
Northview Senior Academy	Sevier County	96.3%	-0.5
Northview Junior Academy	Sevier County	-	-
Pigeon Forge High School	Sevier County	95.9%	1.2
Gary Hardin Academy	Sevier County	69.7%	7.2
Sevier County High School	Sevier County	93.8%	0.3
Seymour High School	Sevier County	97.6%	3.3
Bolton High	Shelby County	74.7%	-11.3
Germantown High	Shelby County	93.7%	-3.6
Southwind High	Shelby County	79.9%	-7
Avon School	Shelby County	-	-
B. T. Washington High	Shelby County	83.3%	-3.1
Central High	Shelby County	86.5%	5.1
Cordova High School	Shelby County	78.8%	-6.5
Craigmont High	Shelby County	58.6%	-16.7
Douglass High	Shelby County	77.3%	-1.6
East High	Shelby County	96.1%	12
Hamilton High	Shelby County	59.4%	-1.8
Hollis F. Price Middle College	Shelby County	96.4%	0.9
Kingsbury High	Shelby County	71.3%	5.8
Kirby High	Shelby County	71.8%	-5.2
Manassas High	Shelby County	73.0%	7.8
Melrose High	Shelby County	65.2%	-2.2
Middle College High	Shelby County	95.8%	-
Mitchell High	Shelby County	82.8%	3.2
Oakhaven High	Shelby County	85.9%	13.2
Overton High	Shelby County	76.3%	0.4
Raleigh-Egypt High	Shelby County	81.0%	8.7
Ridgeway High	Shelby County	80.1%	-3
Sheffield High	Shelby County	53.7%	5.2
Shrine School	Shelby County	-	-
Trezevant High	Shelby County	63.0%	0.2
Westwood High	Shelby County	76.5%	0.5
White Station High	Shelby County	84.9%	-1.9
Whitehaven High	Shelby County	90.4%	3
Wooddale High	Shelby County	71.3%	5.5
Northwest Prep Academy	Shelby County	59.0%	-2.5
Carver College and Career Academy	Shelby County	-	-
Memphis Virtual School	Shelby County	54.5%	7.5
DuBois High School of Arts Technology	Shelby County	-	-
DuBois High of Leadership Public Policy	Shelby County	-	-
KIPP Memphis Collegiate High School	Shelby County	78.7%	-15.3
City University School Of Liberal Arts	Shelby County	91.1%	-2.3
Memphis Academy Of Science Engineering Middle/High	Shelby County	94.7%	-3.1
Power Center Academy High School	Shelby County	93.3%	-4.5
Memphis Academy of Health Sciences High School	Shelby County	86.1%	0.4
Memphis Business Academy High School	Shelby County	90.8%	5.5
Soulsville Charter School	Shelby County	96.7%	0
Freedom Preparatory Academy Flagship	Shelby County	85.1%	-10.4
Memphis School of Excellence	Shelby County	-	-
Memphis Rise Academy	Shelby County	88.2%	-
Gateway University	Shelby County	-	-
Southwest Early College High School	Shelby County	-	-
Compass Community School Midtown Campus	Shelby County	97.1%	-0.1
Arlington High	Arlington	96.2%	1.3
Bartlett High School	Bartlett	96.0%	-0.1
Collierville High School	Collierville	95.8%	-0.5
Houston High School	Germantown	91.4%	-3.2
Millington Central High School	Millington Municipal Schools	85.6%	-1.7
Gordonsville High School	Smith County	-	-
Smith County High School	Smith County	90.6%	-1.2
Stewart Co High School	Stewart County	95.8%	-2
Sullivan Central High School	Sullivan County	89.8%	-5.5
Sullivan East High School	Sullivan County	97.3%	5.1
Sullivan North High School	Sullivan County	93.6%	-0.6
Sullivan South High School	Sullivan County	96.4%	-1.7
Tennessee High School	Bristol	90.2%	-2.9
Tennessee Online Public School	Bristol	96.4%	-1
Dobyns - Bennett High School	Kingsport	94.7%	0.4
Beech Sr High School	Sumner County	94.9%	0
Gallatin Senior High School	Sumner County	93.9%	-1
Hendersonville High School	Sumner County	92.2%	-2.7
Merrol Hyde Magnet School	Sumner County	-	-
Portland High School	Sumner County	95.7%	2
E B Wilson	Sumner County	95.7%	-
Station Camp High School	Sumner County	97.1%	-0.5
Westmoreland High School	Sumner County	97.8%	-
White House High School	Sumner County	89.1%	-3.8
Sumner County Middle College High School	Sumner County	-	-
Sumner County Middle Technical College High School at Portla	Sumner County	-	-
Brighton High School	Tipton County	90.2%	-5.4
Covington High School	Tipton County	87.4%	-7.2
Munford High School	Tipton County	93.9%	-2
Tipton County Alternative Learning Center	Tipton County	-	-
Trousdale Co High School	Trousdale County	98.8%	1.2
Unicoi Co High School	Unicoi County	91.3%	-2.4
Union County Alternative Center	Union County	-	-
Union County High School	Union County	93.6%	-2.3
Tennessee Virtual High School	Union County	10.0%	-
Van Buren Co High School	Van Buren County	96.6%	1.8
Warren County High School	Warren County	90.7%	-4.6
Daniel Boone High School	Washington County	93.7%	-3.8
David Crockett High School	Washington County	89.8%	-5.1
University School	Washington County	-	-
Tennessee Virtual Learning Academy	Washington County	-	-
Science Hill High School	Johnson City	90.1%	-1.7
Collinwood High School	Wayne County	95.7%	0.2
Frank Hughes School	Wayne County	-	-
Wayne County High School	Wayne County	98.4%	7.6
Wayne County Virtual School	Wayne County	-	-
Waynesboro Middle School	Wayne County	-	-
Dresden High School	Weakley County	94.8%	-0.3
Gleason School	Weakley County	-	-
Greenfield School	Weakley County	93.5%	-
Westview High School	Weakley County	90.9%	-0.1
White County High School	White County	92.5%	-1.7
Brentwood High School	Williamson County	96.4%	-1.8
Centennial High School	Williamson County	95.2%	1.7
Fairview High School	Williamson County	95.0%	6.6
Franklin High School	Williamson County	96.2%	-0.1
Fred J Page High School	Williamson County	97.0%	0.1
Heritage Middle School	Williamson County	-	-
Independence High School	Williamson County	94.5%	-0.2
Longview Elementary School	Williamson County	-	-
Renaissance High School	Williamson County	-	-
Nolensville High School	Williamson County	98.4%	1.7
Ravenwood High School	Williamson County	98.2%	0.4
Summit High School	Williamson County	95.3%	-1.8
Green Hill High School	Wilson County	98.1%	-
Lebanon High School	Wilson County	93.9%	-0.6
Mt. Juliet High School	Wilson County	98.0%	0
Watertown High School	Wilson County	95.2%	-1.1
Wilson Central High School	Wilson County	96.6%	-1
Barry Tatum Academy	Wilson County	-	-
Alvin C. York Institute	Alvin C York Institute	96.3%	3.4
Tenn School For Blind	Tennessee School for Blind	10.0%	-5.8
Tennessee School for the Deaf Upper School	Tennessee Schools for the Deaf	70.6%	30.6
Gateway to Independence	Department Of Children's Services Education Division	-	-
Wilder Youth Development Center	Department Of Children's Services Education Division	19.7%	1.5
DCS Affiliated Schools	Department Of Children's Services Education Division	12.9%	2.1
GRAD Academy Memphis	Achievement School District	-	-
Pathways in Education - TN	Achievement School District	7.3%	0.8
Pathways in Education - Whitehaven	Achievement School District	-	-
Humes Preparatory Academy Middle School	Achievement School District	-	-
Fairley High School	Achievement School District	61.7%	-15.9
Martin Luther King Preparatory High School	Achievement School District	56.3%	-7.7
Hillcrest High School	Achievement School District	48.3%	-13
Bluff City High School	Tennessee State Board of Education	78.5%	-

2021 Tennessee graduation rates

Thomas Wilburn / Chalkbeat

Scholarships allowed me to graduate college debt-free. Now I’m paying it forward.

2021-11-19T13:00:00+00:00

The U.S has amassed $1.73 trillion in student debt. This saddling debt crisis has limited generations of young adults from accumulating wealth, disproportionately affecting Black students, who carry more debt than their white counterparts and has exacerbated the racial wealth gap for this population. Recent data shows that Black college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than white college graduates.

I am a Black college graduate who didn’t have the luxury of having my college tuition paid for by my parents. I attended a school where tuition and room-and-board ran approximately $20,000 a year, and still, I managed to graduate debt-free. I share my story not to boast but to offer the next generation of students advice with hopes that they, too, graduate free from backbreaking student loan debt.

Ashley McCullough

Preparing early for college was a key driver in my success, opening doors to many opportunities. While most students wait until their junior year to begin preparing for college, my mom, who is my biggest advocate and supporter, began pushing me as a freshman to take the free SAT and ACT prep courses my high school offered. (That early prep paid off when I was a junior.) She understood the intricacies that came with navigating college admissions and did not want anything to stand in the way of my success.

I also took advantage of college prep programs and internships. Through the education nonprofit NAF, I participated in a paid internship with Wells Fargo. My internship at the company helped me learn valuable skills in finance and money management. This experience boosted my resume and provided talking points for my scholarship applications.

I was determined to minimize my debt.

My test scores, GPA, and unique high school internship experience helped me stand out on my college applications, resulting in acceptance letters from more than a dozen universities. As I explored what each university had to offer, I knew that I wanted to attend a Historically Black College and University, or HBCU. Living in North Carolina, where there are 10 such schools, including public options, meant I could choose a school of my dreams while taking advantage of in-state tuition. After attending several college tours with my mom, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University became my first choice.

From the moment I decided North Carolina A&T was the school for me, my mom and I would tag team scholarship applications — no scholarship was too big or too small. Without a college fund, I knew the alternative route was to fund my education with loans. I also knew what that could mean for me long-term, so I was determined to minimize my debt.

At first, I believed I would only earn a free ride if one college awarded me the money. But the culmination of each scholarship would prove otherwise. After receiving multiple awards from organizations such as Thurgood Marshall College Fund and UNCF, among others, I exceeded $30,000 in scholarship funds for my first year. I realized that graduating debt-free was a real possibility. So long as I maintained a 3.0 GPA for the next four years (and I did), many of my scholarships would renew automatically.

In May 2015, I walked across the graduation stage with my head held high, knowing that I accomplished what so many others dreamed of. I am proud and grateful for the resources and family support I received throughout my journey.

Scholarships played a big role in my ability to graduate debt-free. And I have vowed to pay it forward. In 2011, I launched the Ashley B. McCullough Princess Project at my alma mater, Olympic High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. The nonprofit awards scholarships and assists parents and senior girls on their journey to and through college. This year, the Princess Project awarded $2,200 to help a student fund her education and pursue her dreams.

Going through college, I had a village of support behind me, and today I strive to be part of someone’s village by creating opportunities for more students like me to pursue their education. I want students to know that financial support is out there, that with a plan and a little determination, your degree need not mean decades of student loan debt.

Ashley McCullough is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, and a proud graduate of North Carolina A&T State University. She now serves as the accounting manager at the Los Angeles-based Thorn, a nonprofit that combats child sexual abuse material on the internet. McCullough is still giving back to the world as she does in her daily walk.

As Ford Motor Co. plants a new industry in West Tennessee, schools will need to feed the workforce

2021-10-01T21:32:25+00:00

Tennessee school leaders were among the last to learn about Ford Motor Co.’s plan to start building electric vehicles in West Tennessee, but they’ll be expected to be on the front lines of preparing skilled workers for the historic endeavor.

Ford, with its South Korean battery partner SK Innovation, will bring some 5,800 new jobs to the region to begin producing Ford’s next generation of electric pickup trucks in 2025.

This week’s announcement came from Gov. Bill Lee, a mechanical engineer businessman who has championed career and technical education, work-based learning, and apprenticeship programs since taking office in 2019.

The focus of those programs will have to sharpen now in K-12 schools across West Tennessee, where droves of manufacturing jobs dwindled for decades as companies moved those operations overseas to save money.

The new jobs — to build electric vehicles — will require different skills than those in traditional manufacturing.

“It takes a lot of math, reading, and critical thinking. It’s not a lot of lifting or repetitive manual tasks,” said Ann Thompson, director of workforce development for the state Department of Economic and Community Development.

Tennessee plans to launch a trade school at the $5.6 billion Ford complex, which will be built on the Memphis Regional Megasite in Haywood County, about 25 miles northeast of Memphis.

The school, operated by the state Board of Regents, will join the state’s 27 other technical colleges to help train many of the project’s first workers. Some of those campuses already have courses specializing in electric vehicle manufacturing.

But to provide a sustainable supply of workers, Tennessee must reach far beyond technical schools, community colleges, and universities — beginning with school systems in Shelby, Madison, Haywood, Fayette and Tipton counties.

“Everybody is going to have to up their game with career and technical education and work-based learning,” said Amity Schuyler, senior vice president of workforce development for the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. “It’s going to be more important than ever to introduce students early to real-world work experience.”

Thompson, with the state’s economic development office, said teachers also will have to understand the skills needed for occupations associated with electric vehicles.

“They’ll need a tremendous number of engineers, but not everybody has to be an engineer to be employed by these companies,” she said of expertise that will include supply chains, material handling, logistics, production, information technology, security, and much more.

Growing automotive cluster

With an abundance of low-priced land, trainable workers, and government incentive packages, Tennessee has been reshaped by the automotive industry since Nissan opened an assembly plant in 1983 on farmland near Smyrna, south of Nashville. General Motors followed two years later with its plant in Spring Hill, southwest of Nashville, and Volkswagen began building sedans in Chattanooga in 2011. Add in about 900 suppliers that have located in Tennessee and the industry today employs more than 75,000 Tennesseans.

The addition of Ford in the town of Stanton (population 438) brings a major automotive manufacturer to West Tennessee for the first time.

A rendering of Ford Motor Co.’s $5.6 billion campus, called Blue Oval City, planned for Stanton, Tennessee

The region hasn’t reaped many benefits from the state’s corporate and industrial recruitment successes. Ford and SK Innovation will be the first tenants on the 4,100-acre Memphis megasite which, except for improvements to infrastructure, has laid fallow since the state bought the property in 2009.

Memphis — as the region’s only major city and home to Tennessee’s largest public school district and a declining manufacturing sector — has seen its student test scores lag most of the state and its population shrink. That’s all under the weight of widespread generational poverty fueled by racial inequality and a “permatemp” economy heavy with contract and temporary workers.

While salary information isn’t yet available for the Ford project, state Sen. Raumesh Akbari basked in the news that West Tennesseans will build electric trucks in a few years — and what it will mean to encourage children from low-income families to pursue their studies.

“It’s actually difficult to overstate the significance of this announcement and the potential for transformative change that an underserved community will see from this historic investment,” said Akbari, who represents Memphis.

The focus now should be equipping students to take advantage of future opportunities driven by electric vehicles, said Schuyler, with the Memphis chamber.

“It’s workforce, workforce, workforce!” she said. “The immediate need is to build the plant facilities. The long-term goal will be to provide the workers needed at scale for when production begins.”

Tennessee’s campaign to land the Ford project was so confidential that state officials used multiple code words internally in the recruitment effort. No advance conversations were held with local school leaders, but the state provided Ford with lots of information about schools.

“They were very interested in the number of students, the number of work-based learning programs, apprenticeships, and examples of successful business partnerships in West Tennessee,” said Thompson. “Overall, they seemed most concerned about having a partner that recognizes it’s going to take all of these entities coming together to build the workforce they’ll need.”

Joris Ray, superintendent of Shelby County Schools, said new opportunities with Ford align with the Memphis district’s ongoing Reimagining 901 initiative to revamp academic offerings, with an emphasis on business and community partnerships.

“We’re transforming our college and career technology program around STEM, manufacturing, information technology, health sciences,” Ray said. “We would love to sit down with Ford leaders to talk about what they need from us to ensure our students are ready to go.”

Gov. Bill Lee visits students in a vocational program at Haywood County High School on September 28, 2021.

Near the future plant site, the 2,800-student Haywood County Schools has responded to existing local industry needs by offering courses and certifications in industrial maintenance, welding, coding, and health sciences.

That list will grow with Ford’s arrival, promised Superintendent Joey Hassell.

“We will work hard to be flexible within our career offerings,” he said. “What this means for students in Haywood County and all of West Tennessee is you can graduate high school, pursue post-secondary opportunities, and live and work in the community you grew up in.”

Driving change

Since auto manufacturing arrived in Chattanooga in 2011, leaders with Hamilton County Schools have worked closely with Volkswagen to change the conversation around workforce development.

“When big business comes to town, there’s an expectation that the local school system will help to provide an educated, well-trained workforce because it’s a lot easier to hire locally,” said Blake Freeman, the district’s academic officer overseeing partnerships with industry.

“At the same time, our community should expect that students are being equipped to move into high-skill, high-wage jobs. Everybody stands to benefit — including the community — because students who go on to well-paid jobs generate more tax revenue that then pours back into our schools,” Freeman said.

A student learns about digital fabrication in an e-lab operated through a partnership of Volkswagen and Hamilton County Schools.

In partnership with Volkswagen, the Chattanooga district operates 32 e-labs across all of its elementary, middle, and high schools. The goal is to develop essential workforce skills like communication and problem-solving as students learn to design and test prototypes through digital fabrication technologies.

For a few dozen high school students, the district also operates an on-site mechatronics academy at the Volkswagen plant. There, the students learn hands-on about the automotive industry and get training in robotics, computer programming, and coding.

“I would encourage any school district that stands to gain from a big announcement like Ford’s to begin having conversations as early as possible with your local chamber of commerce, as well as contacts for the company, “ Freeman said.

“You want to know their profile for future employees,” he said, “and you want to stay nimble.”

‘It’s finally here’: Are colleges prepared to receive a first-year cohort shaped by COVID-19?

2021-08-04T20:15:45+00:00

Clifford Armstead III’s hardest goodbye before college dresses up in his clothes and shoes and follows him around all day.

It’s his baby brother. Since the pandemic’s onset, Clifford (“CJ”) and his brother, nicknamed “SJ,” have grown used to staying up well past SJ’s bedtime — they’ll fall asleep on the couch together watching animated movies: the Cars series, Frozen, Big Hero 6. Now more than ever, the five-year-old “teddy bear” is Clifford’s mini-me.

“I tell him I’m going to FaceTime him when I get down there,” Clifford said, about when he heads to Howard University.

The brothers have always been close. The pandemic just brought them closer. And that will make the goodbye even more of a challenge.

For Clifford, as for many in his cohort of first-year college students, a year and a half of pandemic schooling and the rising threat of the delta variant have reshaped the questions they confront in the countdown to college move-in.

Across the country, as students, families, and schools face the prospect of a new COVID-19 surge, many colleges and universities are contemplating mask and vaccine mandates — and some young adults are reconsidering where they’ll be in the fall. Some feel a stronger pull from home and family, others grapple with loss, and many worry new coronavirus variants could render the transition even more isolating.

Those worries, mingled with hope, seemed to circulate through the line at Ada S. McKinley Community Services’ college trunk scholarship day at the end of July, where 50 rising first-years from Chicago picked up new technology, dorm essentials, and other school supplies to help ease their transition.

Among the students were Clifford, who is racing to see extended family before he leaves for Washington D.C., Kyelah Risper, who is wrapping herself in music as she counts down the days, and Kai Grover, who daydreams about her freshman fall even as she warily watches her school’s pandemic safety policies shift.

Clifford, who leaves for Howard University in a couple of weeks, is looking forward to an upcoming family reunion and college send-off, which will mark the first time in more than a year that he will see his grandmother, godparents, little cousins, and other family members all together.

“I get a little teary-eyed,” the Leo Catholic High School graduate said. “But I’m ready to go.”

Family is everything to Clifford, who plans to study architecture. After he graduates from Howard, Clifford plans to come home and build his relatives a strong, sturdy house, big enough to fit everyone at that family reunion, with a lot of room for the kids to run around.

“I want to give back to the community,” Clifford says. “Not just leave, turn around, and walk away.”

Faced with the decision between Berklee College of Music (“the Harvard of music”) and Jackson State University this spring, Kyelah Risper chose family ties — and Jackson State, where her aunt and uncle went to school. She’ll double-major in music education and business administration, with the dream of starting her own music school one day.

Before the pandemic hit, Kyelah split her time between work, school, and band practice. The Dunbar Vocational Career Academy graduate needed everything to be done — and done right — and she gave herself little room to breathe.

This year has forced her to slow down. She finally had time to write her first single, which she’s releasing soon on iTunes. It’s titled “Outthinker,” and it’s about women reclaiming expectations and refusing to let others decide their lives for them.

Kyelah is nervous but confident she’ll tackle the challenges ahead.

“I’ve been counting down for the entire month [of July],” said Kyelah, who leaves for Mississippi on Aug. 13. “I’m like, ‘Oh my god … I’m happy, I’m happy, it’s finally here.’”

Wendell Phillips Academy High School graduate Kai Grover has also reckoned with confidence this year.

In the spring of 2020, she moved out of her childhood home to live with her aunt and built a new life from the ground up. She’s her own worst critic, and the transition made her doubt her worth. Even though she had “always been a school person” and earned great grades, Grover felt surprised when she was accepted by more than 10 schools.

Are they really talking about me?, she wondered as loved ones cheered her on. Are they sure they got the right person?

“I’m not used to being in the spotlight,” she said. “Knowing that all these people are going to congratulate me, it makes me nervous.”

Kai will study communications at Quincy University on a merit scholarship — and already pictures it vividly in her mind:

She’ll have a whiteboard calendar full of post-it notes and a decorated nook for her computer in her dorm. She’ll walk around on campus with her friends, and grab food together at the dining hall. She’ll sit in the front row for all of her classes, and raise her hand often.

But new coronavirus variants and shifting safety policies are dampening Kai’s hopes. She’s not changing any plans just yet, but she’s worried that the latest pandemic wave will make it harder to socialize and build community.

That’s a future problem. For now, Kai is celebrating wins. Her internship just wrapped up, and the essay she wrote for Ada S. McKinley’s competition won third place.

“It definitely makes me a little nervous-happy,” Kai said. “Not like, nervous-nervous, but nervous-happy … I’m like, this is crazy right now.”

Grades count more than SATs in Michigan legislation to improve college access

2021-06-25T20:45:06+00:00

She earned A’s and B’s in all her classes, co-founded a group that supports Make-A-Wish Michigan, joined the Key Club, and volunteered to make lunches for Kids’ Food Basket, but it wasn’t enough to get her into her top-choice college.

Alyssa Green will always wonder if her SAT scores — disappointing, she says, but not terrible — are what kept her out of the University of California at Santa Barbara, the 30th ranked national university with an acceptance rate of 30%.

Like more than 1,500 schools across the country, the university recently stopped considering standardized test scores for admissions, at least temporarily. But Michigan high schools still reported the scores on transcripts.

“If it’s right in front of them it might still have some effect” on admissions decisions, said Green, 18, a recent graduate of East Grand Rapids High School who heads to the University of Colorado in the fall

The problem stems from a state law that requires schools to include Michigan Merit Exam results on student transcripts. For high school juniors, the SAT is part of the required assessment, and that score is reported on transcripts.

Republican state representatives have proposed dropping the scores from transcripts.

Sponsored by state Reps. Brad Paquette, Ben Frederick, and David Martin, House Bills 4810 and 4811 are part of a national trend to shift schools’ emphasis on standardized tests to more holistic measures.

The bills have been awaiting action in the House Education Committee since May. Chair Pamela Hornberger, a St. Clair County Republican, did not respond to questions about if or when the committee might take up the legislation.

If it passes, Michigan would join states like Colorado, which made similar changes last year.

A related bill that also would de-emphasize SAT scores passed the Michigan Senate on Wednesday. It cleared the House in April and now heads to the governor’s desk. Sponsored by state Rep. Sarah Anthony, a Lansing Democrat, the measure responds to obstacles students faced in scheduling testing during the pandemic.

Under Anthony’s bill, grades, not SAT scores, will determine 2020 and 2021 graduates’ eligibility for Michigan Competitive Scholarships.

The scholarship program provides up to $1,000 per year to students who demonstrate financial need and strong academic performance. Until now, the academic benchmark was a 1200 out of 1600 on the SAT. Nationally, 26% of students scored above 1200 last year, according to the College Board, which administers the test.

Anthony’s bill directs the Department of Treasury to decide on a new measure, such as grade point average.

The change could increase the number of eligible students, potentially raising the cost of the $29.9 million program, according to a Senate fiscal analysis. The analysis does not predict how many more students could become eligible.

“We had students across Michigan who — for no fault of their own — were not able to take the SAT,” Anthony said. “Many of the kids who would qualify for these scholarships really do need it. This could make all the difference for them.”

The SAT exemption in Anthony’s bill applies to 2020 and 2021 graduates but it could open the door to a permanent change and help other SAT bills awaiting consideration in the House Education Committee, including the ones sponsored by Paquette, Frederick and Martin.

Patrick O’Connor, college counselor and executive director of College Is Yours, hopes so. His organization advocates for public policies that improve access to higher education.

“Right now, Michigan public school students have no choice” about whether to show their SAT scores to the many colleges that don’t require them, O’Connor said.

“Once a test-optional school receives test scores they will be considered in the application,” he said. “The consensus among colleges is that they can’t unsee a bad test score.”

That may be true, but college admissions offices have enough integrity to disregard test scores on transcripts of students who indicate they don’t want them considered, said John Ambrose, director of undergraduate admissions at Michigan State University.

Universities such as Michigan State that have gone test optional have established equitable systems for decision making, he said.

“Does the state not trust admissions offices to make fair decisions when students have selected test optional?” he asked.

Michigan’s law applies only to public school transcripts.

“Private school students tend to enjoy a number of advantages in the college admission process already, and this clearly exacerbates the difficulties” for public school students, he said.

Recent Cass Technical High School graduate Joy James said she scored above average but still “wasn’t 100% proud” of her SAT results as a junior. She planned to take SAT prep courses at her school and church and then retake the test in her senior year, but the pandemic derailed her plans. Her junior year scores stood. They were printed on transcripts sent with all her applications, even ones that didn’t require them.

“I had to stick with my score that I’m not pleased with,” said James, 18, of Detroit. “I felt like it could’ve held me back from certain schools and certain opportunities so I was anxious,” said James, headed to Wayne State University to study fashion merchandising.

Even if she had retaken the test and improved her original score, it would have remained on her transcript.

The Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals supports the legislation.

It used to make sense to have the scores there, said Wendy Zdeb, executive director. Because almost all colleges used to require SATs, having them printed on official school transcripts saved students from having to pay the College Board to send them — currently $12 per report after the first four, which are sent free.

“It was a positive intent” she said.

Admissions offices are realizing that standardized tests are a barrier to access for historically underrepresented groups in higher education, said FairTest Executive Director Bob Schaeffer.

“Test scores are correlated very highly with family income, parental education and socioeconomic status. Test scores have very strong racial correlations, and test scores are subject to inflation through high-priced coaching,” he said.

Admissions offices realize that the factors that really matter — such as self-discipline, communication skills and the ability to work with others — aren’t captured on standardized tests, Schaeffer said.

In Michigan, test-optional schools include the University of Michigan Flint, Michigan State University, Wayne State University and 17 other colleges and universities.

“The system has changed. Now we have schools that are test optional” and sending scores with transcripts could harm students, said Deanna Green, Alyssa’s mother and a former Forest Hills guidance counselor.

If the legislation passes, the situation could be different for her son, Glenn, who will be a sophomore in the fall.

“If he applies to a test-optional school he doesn’t have to worry about it being on his transcript,” and if he does well on the SAT he can still request to have it put on his transcript, she said. “As it stands now, he has no choice.”

Indiana financial aid applications dip, pointing to fewer students heading to college

2021-05-17T14:20:32+00:00

In a typical year, Indianapolis school counselor Karen Matthews spends lunch breaks bribing high school seniors with free baked potatoes or nachos to come to her office and fill out college financial aid forms.

Matthews, who works at Beech Grove High School, said these “working lunches” have been her most successful tactic for encouraging completion of the federal aid application, which intimidates many of her students. The form requires answering over 100 questions and providing multiple records, including Social Security numbers, tax returns, and records of untaxed income.

“If we can just get them started, they realize it’s not that bad and they’ll usually finish it,” Matthews said.

Because of virtual learning and social distancing restrictions, Matthews had to pause her working lunches and other initiatives for 2½ semesters. At Beech Grove, only 33.8% of seniors have submitted the financial aid application this year, according to data from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

Statewide completion rates fell 6% compared with last year, even after the deadline extended from April 15 to Saturday. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, is required for students to receive federal and state aid and, often, to qualify for scholarships and aid from colleges and private organizations.

With fewer students applying for financial aid, experts say they expect a correlating decline in college enrollment.

“It’s not just a drop in FAFSA,” Matthews said. “Fewer students applying to college means fewer filing the FAFSA.”

The proportion of college applicants at Beech Grove dropped by nearly 20 percentage points this year, according to data from Matthews.

While some students’ interest in college has waned because the pandemic has devastated finances, college enrollment had been declining in Indiana even before COVID-19.

An April report from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education found college enrollment fell below 60% of high school seniors for the first time since they began collecting data in 2009, with only 59% of Indiana seniors enrolling in higher education in 2019. Data for last year is not available, but almost certainly will reflect a steeper decline, the state agency noted.

Furthermore, the students who most need financial aid are the least likely to apply for it, state education officials noted. Students eligible for the Federal Pell Grant, the aid package for those with the highest financial needs, have lower FAFSA filing rates than the class of 2021 overall.

In Indiana, only two schools, both private, had 100% FAFSA participation as of Wednesday: Park Tudor in Marion County and University High School in Hamilton County, according to data from the commission.

Charlee Beasor of the higher education commission said it’s common for seniors to jump right into the workforce when the economy is strong, because they can find high-paying jobs. That promoted a decline in college enrollment before the pandemic, she said.

Beasor, associate commissioner for communications and outreach, and her colleagues had hoped the pandemic recession might encourage more students to pursue college degrees — but the opposite occurred.

Matthews said every year, fewer students at her school see college in their future, and the pandemic accelerated this trend.

She said fear of student debt scares off many. College tuition at most schools has risen steadily for years, and on top of that, the pandemic recession crippled many families’ finances. In a survey Matthews sent to her students last spring, almost one-third said at least one parent had lost their job due to COVID-19.

“You can see the wheels turning,” Matthews said. “They’re thinking, ‘At this point, is it worth the investment of time and debt when I could join the military?’”

Aside from monetary concerns, Matthews said academic performance and mental health suffered at Beech Grove during over a year of virtual schooling, as students lost the structure of in-person school that had kept them organized. Saddled with lower GPAs, she said more students doubt their ability to get into and succeed at schools.

Matthews said in past years, she and other school counselors often gave seniors the push they needed to apply to college or submit the FAFSA.

“My students need a lot of hand-holding through the college application process,” Matthews said. “Without me having the ability to call their butts down to my office and have this discussion and say, ‘Open up that Chromebook and let’s do this,’ fewer of them are going to do that.”

Flora Jones, postsecondary readiness director at Indianapolis Public Schools, said the pandemic triggered a drop in college planning in her district, too.

“We do believe that the pandemic has been a cause in the drop in FAFSA completion based on the need for many of our scholars to help support their families and contribute to the household income,” Jones said in an email. “It is also apparent that many students are losing interest in attending college at such a high cost with no campus experience due to COVID.”

Student performance at IPS schools has also dropped off, as more than 40% of high school students in the district have failed one or more core class.

Encouraging FAFSA completion was difficult before; the pandemic made it harder.

College Goal Sunday, offering students and parents personal help in filling out the financial aid application, normally took place at 40 locations across the state. This year it went online, and attendance plummeted, said Bill Wozniak, co-chair of College Goal Sunday.

Without help from experts, the FAFSA fills parents with terror, Wozniak said. “They loathe going through the process, and then afterward they’re like, ‘Oh that wasn’t so bad.’”

Before they get to the FAFSA, students have to want to apply to college, Beasor of the education commission said. It’s important to show them the long-term benefits of more schooling, she said.

“If you have a bachelor’s degree in Indiana compared to just a high school diploma, you’re likely to make $1 million more over your lifetime,” Beasor said. “It’s that message, the ‘Look at the long-term picture,’ over the immediate ability to jump right into the workforce.”

Upcoming federal changes will make the FAFSA easier to fill out, Beasor said. In October 2022, the form will include fewer than 40 questions instead of over 100, and respondents won’t have to retrieve their own IRS tax records anymore — a new system will automatically submit them.

“The most important thing is that it’s going to be a simpler process for students and families,” Beasor said. “Hopefully that’ll help balance out the longer-term impacts.”

Correction: May 17, 2021: A previous version of this story said 40% of IPS high school students had failed more than one core class. Those students had failed one or more core class.

Indigenous students say they need more from Colorado universities. An in-state tuition bill is a first step.

2021-03-05T01:03:21+00:00

Indigenous students with historical ties to Colorado could soon get in-state tuition at public colleges under a proposal that recently cleared its first legislative hurdle.

Student advocates say the bill is part of a broader push on how Colorado schools need to address injustice against Indigenous people and ensure all Native American undergraduate and graduate students have the support they need to succeed, such as mental health and financial resources.

“As Native students, we’re here to remind these institutions that our people survived genocide. And we’re still here,” said Tessa McLean, 32, a University of Colorado Denver graduate student. “We just want our needs to be met.”

About 2,350 Indigenous students attended Colorado colleges in the 2019 school year, according to state data.

Many Indigenous students are the first in their family to attend college, find it challenging to adapt to a White cultural mindset, and lack a sense of community at school.

Senate Bill 21-029, introduced last month, would require higher education institutions, starting in fall 2021, to charge in-state tuition to any student who is part of a federally recognized American Indian tribe that lived within the state. At least 48 Indigenous nations historically called Colorado home, though today there are just two reservations — the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute reservations — within its borders.

The bill isn’t the first to be introduced on in-state tuition for Indigenous students, but has a clearer path to approval thanks to Democratic sponsors who include Senate Majority Leader Stephen Fenberg, Speaker of the House Alec Garnett and Rep. Adrienne Benavidez of Denver.

“I don’t think I know what would fix an injustice such as the one that has happened in this country. But I do think this bill is a meaningful step,” Fenberg said. “I would like Colorado to be a state that eventually gets to a place where we waive tuition” for those Indigenous students.

The measure received unanimous approval in the Senate Education Committee and will next be heard in the Senate Appropriations Committee. It’s estimated to cost $240,000 a year. The state would place the money into the College Opportunity Fund for use by the students. It’s unclear how many students would benefit.

Gov. Jared Polis won’t stand in the way of the bill’s passage. The Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs does not have a position on the bill, according to Polis spokesman Conor Cahill. But the governor is invested in the educational success of Indigenous students, Cahill said in a statement.

“Governor Polis is committed to working with tribal leaders and strengthening our government-to-government relationships so that we can tackle the unique hurdles facing our Native communities, including ensuring opportunities for academic advancement,” Cahill said.

Students push for changes and action

McLean and a group of other University of Colorado Denver students met with two CU system regents last fall to bring awareness to Indigenous students’ needs, and the meeting created momentum. She shared previous Indigenous student requests such as a state acknowledgement that the schools are on tribal lands and guaranteed in-state tuition for Indigenous students.

“Students before me had paved the way for other American Indians around advocacy,” McLean said, who is Ojibwe and moved to Colorado at a young age. “We’ve always been fighting for our own space. Always fighting for scholarships.”

In October, CU Regents and President Mark Kennedy issued the University of Colorado System’s first-ever land acknowledgement. University of Colorado Regent Vice Chair Lesley Smith, one of those who met with the students, said board members directed lobbyists to get an in-state tuition bill before lawmakers.

Other states have varied approaches to Indigenous student tuition, with Colorado’s bill mirroring Iowa’s approach to tuition discounts. Michigan grants tuition waivers to students who are at least one quarter Indigenous, enrolled in a recognized tribe, and have lived in the state for at least a year.

The Colorado bill has garnered support from college leaders despite possible dips in tuition revenue. A fiscal analysis performed for the legislature noted that the change might attract tuition-paying students who might have gone elsewhere, bringing in some revenue.

Smith said she’s pleasantly surprised by the reaction.

“This didn’t happen in a vacuum. This started with meeting with American Indian students,” she said. “And it’s important for all our students to feel welcome.”

Colorado State University President Joyce McConnell said the bill stands as recognition of the atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples by Colorado and the federal government. For instance, U.S. Army soldiers killed hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho people, most of them women and children, in the Sand Creek Massacre in eastern Colorado.

Racism and injustice against Indigenous people persists. When McConnell started her job, a mother called campus police on two Native American students during a tour of the school, saying they “stand out.” Campus police pulled the two teenagers from the tour and questioned them. The university issued an apology to the students.

McConnell said she’s worked to try and make Indigenous students feel more welcome on campus, including adding an advisory council to the president. The school has offered in-state tuition to Indigenous students with ties to the state since 2011 and last year began to offer in-state tuition to all Native American students from federally- and state-recognized nations and tribes. She’s heartened to see campuses across the state recognize the need to support the students.

“The fact that we’ve all come together says that this is something that really matters,” McConnell said. “It matters to our students, it matters to our campuses, and it matters to the state of Colorado.”

A step forward, but not the last

McLean said if the bill passes, Indigenous students must continue to demand recognition, safe gathering spaces, and academic and mental health support.

It took her 11 years to earn her undergraduate degree as she navigated numerous obstacles.

“We’re still living through historical trauma,” McLean said. “So I truly believe that we do need trauma centers on campus to help us recover and to even maintain good mental health.”

Fort Lewis College already waives tuition for Native students. The school originally was a boarding school for Indigenous students and has tried to evolve into a safe haven for Native students. Almost half its 3,850 students identify as Indigenous and school leaders there say it takes work to maintain an inviting culture.

Fort Lewis College President Tom Stritikus said all Colorado schools must consider the needs of Indigenous students and their many diverse cultural perspectives.

“You really need to understand and hear what their experiences have been and stay open to those experiences,” he said.

The school offers organic and free range food to students because Native American people have lived off the land, said LeManuel “Lee” Bitsóí, who is Navajo and Fort Lewis College’s diversity affairs vice president and a special advisor for Indigenous affairs. It also has built teachings that incorporate Native American culture and philosophy and programs that support first-generation Native American college students.

“We’ve just tried to create a home away from home,” Bitsóí said. “And that’s what we found to be very instrumental to Native American student retention, recruitment, and persistence.”

Tiffani Kelly, CSU Native American Cultural Center associate director, said it also takes a commitment to inclusion to serve Indigenous students. On her campus in Fort Collins, older athletic slogans such as “Defend the Fort” alienated Native American students.

“That’s not what they meant in the present day, but that’s literally what the fort was created for,” Kelly said. “To keep out and annihilate Indigenous populations.”

McLean says that the work to create inviting spaces for students can feel exhausting, but it’s important work and will continue.

“I think that this just means students need to continue to be persistent,” McLean said. “To be the uncomfortable reminder, or to be the pebble in somebody’s shoe causing discomfort, so that change will come.”

Colorado group aims to give colleges, universities a voice

2021-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Colorado college and university trustees have formed a coalition to jointly advocate for higher education in the state.

The Colorado Trustee Network on Wednesday announced it will fight to improve state funding, narrow inequities in graduation rates, and better align education with workforce needs.

Elaine Gantz Berman, the network’s co-chair, said colleges for years have lacked an organization to represent their concerns. (Berman is a funder of Chalkbeat. Find our supporters here and our ethics policy here.) The former Metropolitan State University of Denver board member said instead college presidents have shouldered the burden of advocating for their schools.

“Trustees wanted to come together to speak with one voice and use that power,” Berman said, who has sought to form the network for years. “The presidents seemed thrilled about it. They want the advocacy. They need it.”

The Colorado Trustee Network includes members from 12 boards representing public colleges, including regional colleges and the Colorado Community College, the University of Colorado, and the Colorado State University systems.

The network plans to first convene trustees and then explore how to best push for increasing state funding, how to address gaps in college opportunities, and how to connect students to jobs.

The network also presents a way for trustees to learn from each other, said Landon Mascareñaz, a Colorado Community College System board member. Colorado higher education boards are siloed and rarely share with each other, he said. By uniting, trustees could further a conversation about meeting student needs.

“There’s an opportunity for the emergence of a shared discussion around what’s going to move higher education forward,” Mascareñaz said.

Colorado has ranked near the bottom nationally in state investment in public higher education. Inequity crops up at many schools. White Coloradans, for example, graduate at a much higher rate than Black and Latino students. And the state has failed to provide low-income Coloradans access to training and jobs.

The pandemic and recession have exacerbated problems and cut into enrollment. In turn, that has reduced tuition revenues and forced statewide cuts to college and university budgets.

Last year, lawmakers slashed higher education funding by 58%. The state partially backfilled with one-time federal stimulus money. Gov. Jared Polis and House and Senate leaders want to restore that cut. But that’s not guaranteed.

University of Colorado Regent Vice Chair Lesley Smith said the state’s budget woes have helped bring trustees together.

“We need the resources to give students the support that they need to stay in school and graduate, because there is nothing worse than starting, getting a loan, and then leaving without a degree.”

Already, Smith said, all of the CU Board of Regents members are interested in the network. And the Colorado Trustee Network hopes former trustees will later join. About 100 appointed or elected trustees serve on governing boards across the state.

Network Co-chair Sarah Hughes said despite board members having varied perspectives, she believes trustees have commonalities that will contribute to a shared vision. Every trustee across the state wants to better schools and help students, she said.

“Whatever we can do to help amplify the needs of higher education, the needs of our students, our workers and our learners — there’s no downside to that,” Hughes said. “It’s going to be hard work, no doubt, but it’s absolutely worthwhile work.”

In spite of the pandemic, Michigan’s 2020 high school grad rates ticked upward

2021-02-27T00:11:03+00:00

Most of the students in Michigan’s Class of 2020 didn’t have proms, graduation ceremonies, or big parties because of the emerging pandemic, but they did manage to graduate in slightly larger numbers than the Class of 2019.

State data released Friday show 82% of the students in the 2020 class graduated on time, up from 81.41% the year before. It’s the fifth year in a row the state’s graduation rate has increased.

The data was released by the state’s Center for Educational Performance and Information.

State Superintendent Michael Rice called it good news in a statement Friday.

“It’s a tribute to the hard work last spring of educators, students and parents.”

The increased graduation rate comes after last year’s seniors had their school year upended just as they were preparing for the usual graduation pomp and circumstance. Buildings were ordered shut down in mid-March, a closure that extended until the end of the school year.

The state graduation rate is the percent of students graduating who began as freshmen four years earlier. The dropout rate for the 2019-20 school year was 7.7%, down from 8.36%.

Some students don’t show up in either of the graduation rate of dropout rate states because while they did not graduate on time, they are still enrolled in school and on track to graduate.

The statewide increase in graduation rates was driven partly by rate increases a handful of large districts. The Lansing district’s graduation rate shot up by five points. Oak Park and Hamtramck saw six and seven point increases respectively.

In the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the state’s largest, the graduation rate was 72.45%, down from 75.84% the previous year. The district’s rate has declined for three years in a row, a drop that coincides with the transfer of high schools that were part of the Education Achievement Authority back into the district.

The EAA was a state-operated school system that was created to operate some of the worst performing schools in Detroit. It disbanded in 2017.

Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, during a school board finance committee meeting Friday morning, discussed the EAA’s effect on the district’s overall graduation rate.

“This is not about graduation rates on their own declining,” he said. “It’s the impact and lag of the EAA schools being integrated back into the school district.”

That being said, Vitti noted, “I don’t want the board to get the impression that we’re simply … cleaning our hands and saying we’re not accountable for the graduation rates. That is farthest from the truth.”

He said the district has created its own accountability system for high schools that emphasizes graduation rates. And in the years since he became superintendent in 2017, the district has switched to a credit recovery program for students that is more effective. The district has also created a graduation tracker that shows how many students are on track to graduate on time.

“We use that data to problem solve with principals,” Vitti said. “And it allows us to intervene.”

District/School	GradRate4Yr2020	GradRate4Yr2019	Change (%pts)
State	82.07%	81.41%	0.66
Adams Township School District	88.00%	95.00%	-7.00
Jeffers High School	88.00%	95.00%	-7.00
Addison Community Schools	81.48%	83.58%	-2.10
Addison High School	84.62%	87.50%	-2.88
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Adrian Public Schools	82.43%	83.69%	-1.26
Adrian Community High School	56.52%	40.00%	16.52
Adrian High School	89.07%	91.24%	-2.17
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Airport Community Schools	86.40%	86.27%	0.13
Airport Center for Education	58.97%	45.16%	13.81
Airport Middle College	100.00%	83.33%	16.67
Airport Senior High School	97.45%	96.05%	1.40
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Akron-Fairgrove Schools	75.00%	87.50%	-12.50
Akron-Fairgrove Jr/Sr High School	80.00%	93.33%	-13.33
Alanson Public Schools	60.00%	75.00%	-15.00
Alanson Public School	62.50%	83.33%	-20.83
Char-Em Alternative Schools	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Alba Public Schools	66.67%	76.92%	-10.25
Alba School	80.00%	83.33%	-3.33
Alcona Community Schools	94.12%	94.44%	-0.32
Alcona Community High School	94.12%	94.34%	-0.22
Algonac Community School District	81.42%	88.00%	-6.58
Algonac Alternative Education	0.00%	25.00%	-25.00
Algonac Junior/Senior High School	94.79%	96.40%	-1.61
Allegan Public Schools	78.66%	64.02%	14.64
Allegan Alternative High School	46.15%	22.86%	23.29
Allegan High School	93.49%	93.60%	-0.11
Allen Park Public Schools	88.85%	87.29%	1.56
Allen Park Community School	57.14%	55.00%	2.14
Allen Park High School	94.80%	95.59%	-0.79
Allendale Public Schools	96.00%	95.48%	0.52
Allendale High School	99.41%	98.16%	1.25
New Options High School	80.95%	88.89%	-7.94
Alma Public Schools	88.24%	91.88%	-3.64
Alma Senior High School	88.24%	93.04%	-4.80
Almont Community Schools	94.78%	96.81%	-2.03
Almont High School	94.78%	96.81%	-2.03
Alpena Public Schools	82.87%	81.63%	1.24
Alpena High School	90.04%	87.59%	2.45
OxBow ACES Academy/Alternative	40.63%	65.12%	-24.49
Anchor Bay School District	92.99%	91.30%	1.69
Anchor Bay High School	96.82%	95.82%	1.00
Compass Pointe	27.27%	15.79%	11.48
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Ann Arbor Public Schools	91.25%	89.46%	1.79
Community High School	97.78%	96.80%	0.98
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Huron High School	94.28%	93.52%	0.76
Pathways To Success Academic Campus	52.63%	35.29%	17.34
Pioneer High School	92.01%	90.29%	1.72
Skyline High School	98.04%	94.80%	3.24
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	60.00%	33.33%	26.67
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Armada Area Schools	96.75%	96.15%	0.60
Armada Continuing Education Center	55.56%	87.50%	-31.94
Armada High School	99.30%	96.45%	2.85
Ashley Community Schools	78.95%	76.00%	2.95
Ashley High School	78.95%	79.17%	-0.22
Athens Area Schools	93.62%	95.45%	-1.83
Athens Junior/Senor High School	93.33%	95.45%	-2.12
Atherton Community Schools	65.12%	70.30%	-5.18
Atherton Jr. / Sr. High School	85.71%	80.52%	5.19
Atherton Vern Van Y Educational Center	42.31%	28.57%	13.74
Atlanta Community Schools	80.00%	84.62%	-4.62
Atlanta Community Schools	90.48%	84.62%	5.86
Au Gres-Sims School District	75.00%	82.61%	-7.61
Au Gres-Sims High School	76.32%	85.37%	-9.05
Avondale School District	73.91%	73.10%	0.81
Avondale Academy	46.67%	83.33%	-36.66
Avondale High School	96.54%	92.00%	4.54
Diploma and Careers Institute	14.81%	15.56%	-0.75
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Bad Axe Public Schools	78.26%	88.24%	-9.98
Ascent High School	59.26%	72.00%	-12.74
Bad Axe High School	91.80%	97.22%	-5.42
Baldwin Community Schools	76.19%	81.82%	-5.63
Baldwin Senior High School	80.00%	85.71%	-5.71
Bangor Public Schools (Van Buren)	52.29%	51.85%	0.44
Bangor Career Academy	20.00%	15.00%	5.00
Bangor High School	86.79%	87.50%	-0.71
Bangor Township Schools	87.25%	91.77%	-4.52
Bangor Township Virtual School	68.18%	70.00%	-1.82
John Glenn High School	94.08%	95.61%	-1.53
Baraga Area Schools	90.91%	66.67%	24.24
Baraga School	90.91%	71.43%	19.48
Bark River-Harris School District	92.00%	96.08%	-4.08
Bark River-Harris Jr/Sr High School	91.84%	96.08%	-4.24
Bath Community Schools	91.95%	91.30%	0.65
Bath High School	93.02%	92.31%	0.71
Battle Creek Public Schools	64.40%	71.81%	-7.41
Battle Creek Central High School	84.24%	85.13%	-0.89
W.K. Kellogg Preparatory High School	26.15%	42.65%	-16.50
Bay City School District	83.36%	85.43%	-2.07
Bay City Central High School	90.20%	93.44%	-3.24
Bay City Eastern High School	55.17%	56.00%	-0.83
Bay City Western High School	95.72%	91.55%	4.17
Beal City Public Schools	95.00%	96.67%	-1.67
Beal City High School	95.00%	96.67%	-1.67
Bear Lake Schools	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Bear Lake High School	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Beaver Island Community School	80.00%	100.00%	-20.00
Beaver Island Community School	80.00%	100.00%	-20.00
Beaverton Schools	89.41%	88.73%	0.68
Beaverton Junior/Senior High School	90.48%	88.57%	1.91
Bedford Public Schools	96.67%	93.52%	3.15
Bedford Senior High School	96.89%	93.96%	2.93
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Beecher Community School District	72.34%	56.67%	15.67
Beecher High School	76.74%	59.65%	17.09
Belding Area School District	94.90%	87.58%	7.32
Belding High School	95.42%	88.59%	6.83
Bellaire Public Schools	92.50%	96.43%	-3.93
Bellaire Middle/High School	92.50%	100.00%	-7.50
Bellevue Community Schools	81.82%	73.53%	8.29
Bellevue Jr/Sr High School	81.25%	73.53%	7.72
Bendle Public Schools	71.43%	82.50%	-11.07
Bendle High School	74.07%	82.50%	-8.43
Bentley Community School District	71.79%	73.91%	-2.12
Bentley High School BOLD Academy	17.65%	8.33%	9.32
Bentley Senior High School	88.89%	91.78%	-2.89
Benton Harbor Area Schools	55.85%	41.51%	14.34
Benton Harbor High School	64.19%	46.71%	17.48
Dream Innovative Academy	25.00%	36.36%	-11.36
Benzie County Central Schools	80.17%	70.34%	9.83
Benzie Academy	21.43%	24.00%	-2.57
Benzie Central Sr. High School	93.75%	85.06%	8.69
Berkley School District	96.89%	96.18%	0.71
Berkley High School	97.14%	96.42%	0.72
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Berrien Springs Public Schools	38.20%	36.16%	2.04
Berrien Springs Discovery Academy	25.00%	29.79%	-4.79
Berrien Springs High School	94.69%	95.33%	-0.64
Berrien Springs Virtual Academy	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
SUCCESS - Grand Rapids: Alger Heights	28.85%	32.65%	-3.80
Success - Belding	41.18%	42.42%	-1.24
Success - Edmore/Montabella/Vestaburg	42.86%	50.00%	-7.14
Success - Escanaba	37.10%	31.91%	5.19
Success - Grand Rapids Fuller Ave	31.11%	17.50%	13.61
Success - Howard City/Tri County	21.05%	13.04%	8.01
Success - Kenowa Hills	36.59%	17.95%	18.64
Success - Lakeview	19.23%	6.67%	12.56
Success - Menominee	41.38%	16.13%	25.25
Success - St Louis	29.03%	44.00%	-14.97
Success - Stanton/Central Montcalm	27.78%	32.26%	-4.48
Success - Three Rivers	40.43%	44.90%	-4.47
West Michigan Virtual - Battle Creek HS	36.00%	17.19%	18.81
Bessemer Area School District	94.12%	88.24%	5.88
A.D. Johnston Jr/Sr High School	94.12%	90.63%	3.49
Big Bay De Noc School District	0.00%	82.35%	-82.35
Big Bay De Noc School	0.00%	80.00%	-80.00
Big Rapids Public Schools	68.75%	75.39%	-6.64
Big Rapids High School	87.67%	93.84%	-6.17
Big Rapids Virtual School	26.19%	18.52%	7.67
Birch Run Area Schools	87.33%	85.62%	1.71
Birch Run High School	96.21%	92.91%	3.30
Birch Run Progressive High School	0.00%	35.71%	-35.71
Birmingham Public Schools	96.70%	97.36%	-0.66
Ernest W. Seaholm High School	97.15%	97.35%	-0.20
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Wylie E. Groves High School	96.23%	97.06%	-0.83
Blissfield Community Schools	92.08%	89.66%	2.42
Blissfield High School	92.78%	89.41%	3.37
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	66.67%	100.00%	-33.33
Bloomfield Hills Schools	96.04%	94.02%	2.02
Bloomfield Hills High School	96.69%	95.37%	1.32
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Wing Lake Developmental Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Bloomingdale Public School District	78.02%	71.08%	6.94
Bloomingdale Middle and High School	78.02%	71.95%	6.07
Boyne City Public Schools	83.47%	86.14%	-2.67
Boyne City High School	91.43%	94.32%	-2.89
Morgan-Shaw School	38.46%	20.00%	18.46
Boyne Falls Public School District	0.00%	83.33%	-83.33
Boyne Falls Public School	0.00%	83.33%	-83.33
Brandon School District in the Counties of Oakland and Lapeer	84.36%	81.66%	2.70
Brandon High School	85.51%	82.59%	2.92
Brandywine Community Schools	73.39%	65.91%	7.48
Brandywine Innovation Academy	23.81%	15.79%	8.02
Brandywine Senior High School	89.36%	90.16%	-0.80
Breckenridge Community Schools	94.34%	92.98%	1.36
Breckenridge High School	94.34%	92.98%	1.36
Breitung Township School District	97.74%	95.16%	2.58
Kingsford High School	98.47%	95.12%	3.35
Bridgeport-Spaulding Community School District	73.43%	77.21%	-3.78
Bridgeport High School	74.10%	80.77%	-6.67
Great Lakes Bay Early College	50.00%	0.00%	50.00
Bridgman Public Schools	93.88%	100.00%	-6.12
Bridgman High School	93.88%	100.00%	-6.12
Brighton Area Schools	94.99%	94.38%	0.61
Bridge Alternative High School	57.50%	55.56%	1.94
Brighton High School	98.38%	98.26%	0.12
Brimley Area Schools	93.55%	83.33%	10.22
Brimley Area School	93.55%	83.33%	10.22
Britton Deerfield Schools	93.94%	86.27%	7.67
Britton Deerfield Schools-Britton Building	96.88%	89.58%	7.30
Bronson Community School District	89.55%	92.05%	-2.50
Bronson Jr/Sr High School	93.65%	94.19%	-0.54
Brown City Community Schools	92.42%	92.75%	-0.33
Brown City Alternative H.S.	60.00%	33.33%	26.67
Brown City High School	98.31%	95.38%	2.93
Buchanan Community Schools	81.54%	83.33%	-1.79
Buchanan High School	95.92%	100.00%	-4.08
Buchanan Step Up	50.00%	50.00%	0.00
Buchanan Virtual Academy	22.22%	37.50%	-15.28
Buckley Community Schools	77.78%	90.91%	-13.13
Buckley Community Schools	82.35%	90.48%	-8.13
Bullock Creek School District	93.75%	92.00%	1.75
Bullock Creek High School	94.55%	92.00%	2.55
Burr Oak Community School District	80.00%	90.91%	-10.91
Burr Oak High School	86.36%	90.48%	-4.12
Burt Township School District	100.00%	80.00%	20.00
Burt Township School	100.00%	80.00%	20.00
Byron Area Schools	87.36%	92.47%	-5.11
Byron Area High School	89.41%	92.39%	-2.98
Byron Center Public Schools	96.34%	95.85%	0.49
Byron Center High School	96.34%	95.85%	0.49
Cadillac Area Public Schools	72.65%	79.84%	-7.19
Cadillac Innovation High School	31.43%	17.07%	14.36
Cadillac Senior High School	92.07%	97.85%	-5.78
Caledonia Community Schools	93.98%	94.27%	-0.29
Caledonia High School	94.52%	94.96%	-0.44
Camden-Frontier School	90.91%	95.00%	-4.09
Camden-Frontier K-12 School	90.91%	95.00%	-4.09
Capac Community Schools	84.85%	72.41%	12.44
Capac High School	94.55%	93.55%	1.00
Capac Virtual Education Program	16.67%	20.83%	-4.16
Carman-Ainsworth Community Schools	82.65%	81.04%	1.61
Bendle/Carman-Ainsworth Alternative Education	19.23%	26.67%	-7.44
Carman-Ainsworth Baker Career Academy	100.00%	88.89%	11.11
Carman-Ainsworth High School	90.67%	89.97%	0.70
Genesee Early College	92.86%	88.57%	4.29
Mott Middle College High School	87.50%	92.45%	-4.95
Carney-Nadeau Public Schools	53.49%	50.00%	3.49
Carney-Nadeau Public School	100.00%	89.47%	10.53
Phoenix Alternative High School	40.00%	0.00%	40.00
Caro Community Schools	84.78%	77.78%	7.00
Caro Alternative High School	50.00%	53.13%	-3.13
Caro High School	92.92%	92.22%	0.70
Carrollton Public Schools	83.65%	77.01%	6.64
Carrollton High School	96.12%	94.35%	1.77
Great Lakes Bay Early College	33.33%	0.00%	33.33
Omni High School	70.27%	46.94%	23.33
Carson City-Crystal Area Schools	71.95%	83.13%	-11.18
Carson City-Crystal Alternative Academy	21.74%	50.00%	-28.26
Carson City-Crystal High School	96.15%	96.77%	-0.62
Early College at Montcalm Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Carsonville-Port Sanilac School District	78.26%	66.67%	11.59
Carsonville-Port Sanilac H.S.	100.00%	91.30%	8.70
Caseville Public Schools	81.82%	66.67%	15.15
Caseville School K-12	81.82%	66.67%	15.15
Cass City Public Schools	91.57%	86.67%	4.90
Cass City Jr. and Sr. High School	92.59%	88.14%	4.45
Cassopolis Public Schools	71.79%	72.53%	-0.74
Cassopolis Alternative Ed.	0.00%	5.26%	-5.26
Ross Beatty High School	92.98%	97.01%	-4.03
Cedar Springs Public Schools	83.97%	92.53%	-8.56
Cedar Springs High School	90.28%	94.20%	-3.92
New Beginnings Alternative High School	25.00%	84.62%	-59.62
Center Line Public Schools	75.76%	71.68%	4.08
Academy 21	21.62%	12.90%	8.72
Center Line High School	90.60%	87.43%	3.17
Central Lake Public Schools	91.67%	100.00%	-8.33
Central Lake Public Schools	91.67%	100.00%	-8.33
Central Montcalm Public Schools	84.76%	90.63%	-5.87
Central Montcalm High School	84.47%	91.21%	-6.74
Early College at Montcalm Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Centreville Public Schools	90.79%	85.33%	5.46
Centreville Jr. /Sr. High School	94.29%	92.75%	1.54
Charlevoix Public Schools	97.14%	91.67%	5.47
Char-Em Alternative Schools	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Charlevoix Middle/ High School	98.55%	91.67%	6.88
Charlotte Public Schools	86.89%	85.08%	1.81
Charlotte Early Middle College	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Charlotte Public Schools Project Success	100.00%	57.14%	42.86
Charlotte Senior High School	89.54%	90.00%	-0.46
Chassell Township School District	72.73%	79.17%	-6.44
Chassell K-12 School	76.19%	82.61%	-6.42
Cheboygan Area Schools	86.08%	85.80%	0.28
Cheboygan Area High School	96.09%	96.88%	-0.79
Inverness Academy	61.11%	45.83%	15.28
Chelsea School District	98.54%	95.85%	2.69
Chelsea High School	98.99%	96.57%	2.42
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	80.00%	33.33%	46.67
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Chesaning Union Schools	89.34%	87.04%	2.30
Chesaning Union High School	93.81%	95.74%	-1.93
Chesaning Union Schools Alternative Education	40.00%	22.22%	17.78
Chippewa Hills School District	75.61%	67.97%	7.64
Chippewa Hills High School	89.17%	87.04%	2.13
Mosaic School	46.15%	21.43%	24.72
Chippewa Valley Schools	93.19%	93.75%	-0.56
Chippewa Valley Adult and Mohegan Alt. Educ.	31.03%	36.17%	-5.14
Chippewa Valley High School	97.39%	96.74%	0.65
Dakota High School	96.10%	96.58%	-0.48
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Clare Public Schools	81.88%	82.14%	-0.26
Clare High School	90.18%	93.75%	-3.57
Clare Pioneer High School	52.94%	22.22%	30.72
Clarenceville School District	88.00%	83.59%	4.41
Clarenceville High School	88.71%	84.13%	4.58
Clarkston Community School District	89.51%	93.73%	-4.22
Clarkston High School	95.56%	97.65%	-2.09
Renaissance Alternative High School	48.78%	85.43%	-36.65
Renaissance Virtual School	26.67%	100.00%	-73.33
Clawson Public Schools	82.35%	82.73%	-0.38
Clawson High School	83.08%	82.84%	0.24
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Climax-Scotts Community Schools	78.43%	72.58%	5.85
Climax-Scotts High School	97.22%	92.50%	4.72
Climax-Scotts Virtual Academy	16.67%	57.14%	-40.47
Clinton Community Schools	95.88%	98.82%	-2.94
Clinton High School	96.70%	100.00%	-3.30
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Clintondale Community Schools	41.06%	44.84%	-3.78
Clintondale High School	87.84%	93.55%	-5.71
Clintondale Virtual Academy	48.59%	56.07%	-7.48
Continuing Education Center	36.14%	28.57%	7.57
Creative Learning Center - Dearborn	31.33%	53.42%	-22.09
Creative Learning Center - Highland Park	21.57%	13.64%	7.93
Creative Learning Center - Madison Heights	25.00%	83.33%	-58.33
Creative Learning Center - Warren	52.17%	40.91%	11.26
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Clio Area School District	84.06%	78.99%	5.07
Clio Area High School	94.41%	93.04%	1.37
Clio Community High School	18.18%	6.67%	11.51
Coldwater Community Schools	87.44%	86.46%	0.98
Coldwater High School	87.74%	87.89%	-0.15
Coleman Community Schools	90.38%	92.50%	-2.12
Coleman Junior/Senior High School	90.38%	92.50%	-2.12
Coloma Community Schools	88.03%	82.43%	5.60
Coloma High School	93.64%	88.41%	5.23
The Bridge Academy	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Colon Community School District	89.47%	83.33%	6.14
Colon High School	91.89%	82.76%	9.13
Columbia School District	79.55%	72.79%	6.76
Columbia Alternative Education	21.74%	41.46%	-19.72
Columbia Central High School	93.07%	88.24%	4.83
Comstock Park Public Schools	94.53%	92.16%	2.37
Comstock Park High School	94.59%	92.16%	2.43
Comstock Public Schools	54.27%	66.87%	-12.60
Comstock Compass High School	20.37%	26.32%	-5.95
Comstock High School	87.21%	88.89%	-1.68
Concord Community Schools	95.08%	93.65%	1.43
Concord High School	95.00%	93.65%	1.35
Constantine Public School District	71.54%	71.03%	0.51
Constantine Alternative Education	3.70%	4.35%	-0.65
Constantine High School	93.48%	97.40%	-3.92
Coopersville Area Public School District	95.14%	95.63%	-0.49
CAPS Academy	75.00%	81.82%	-6.82
Coopersville High School	96.57%	96.84%	-0.27
Corunna Public Schools	92.05%	88.28%	3.77
Corunna High School	92.62%	88.28%	4.34
Covert Public Schools	62.96%	83.87%	-20.91
Covert High School	62.96%	83.87%	-20.91
Crawford AuSable Schools	83.64%	81.06%	2.58
Grayling High School	91.21%	91.89%	-0.68
Great Lakes Online Education	50.00%	28.57%	21.43
Crestwood School District	91.96%	93.07%	-1.11
Crestwood High School	93.04%	93.07%	-0.03
Croswell-Lexington Community Schools	89.06%	78.57%	10.49
Croswell-Lexington High School	95.09%	83.56%	11.53
Pioneer High School	47.83%	57.69%	-9.86
Dansville Schools	93.33%	83.87%	9.46
Dansville High School	94.83%	83.87%	10.96
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Davison Community Schools	88.60%	87.47%	1.13
Davison Alternative Education	46.88%	57.89%	-11.01
Davison High School	97.18%	94.89%	2.29
DeTour Area Schools	85.71%	100.00%	-14.29
DeTour High School	85.71%	100.00%	-14.29
DeWitt Public Schools	98.24%	98.82%	-0.58
DeWitt High School	98.24%	98.80%	-0.56
Dearborn City School District	94.67%	95.51%	-0.84
Dearborn High School	95.15%	96.99%	-1.84
Dearborn Magnet High School	66.67%	30.00%	36.67
Edsel Ford High School	96.19%	96.75%	-0.56
Fordson High School	96.40%	96.31%	0.09
Henry Ford Early College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Howe Trainable Center and Montessori	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Dearborn Heights School District #7	78.17%	81.44%	-3.27
Annapolis High School	82.97%	84.62%	-1.65
Dearborn Heights Virtual Academy	33.33%	50.00%	-16.67
Decatur Public Schools	81.36%	88.68%	-7.32
Decatur Jr Sr High School	82.46%	88.68%	-6.22
Deckerville Community School District	92.86%	90.00%	2.86
Deckerville Community High School	95.12%	89.74%	5.38
Delton Kellogg Schools	73.64%	71.07%	2.57
DK Academy	52.17%	26.32%	25.85
Delton-Kellogg High School	80.25%	82.61%	-2.36
Detroit Public Schools Community District	72.45%	75.84%	-3.39
Academy of The Americas High School	81.58%	83.33%	-1.75
Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine	92.68%	93.81%	-1.13
Breithaupt Career and Technical Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Cass Technical High School	96.03%	98.62%	-2.59
Central High School	54.79%	65.00%	-10.21
Cody High School	61.59%	61.59%	0.00
Communication and Media Arts High School	92.86%	96.97%	-4.11
Davis Aerospace Technical High School at Golightly	86.67%	85.71%	0.96
Denby High School	72.28%	76.42%	-4.14
Detroit Collegiate Preparatory High School at Northwestern	53.54%	65.57%	-12.03
Detroit International Academy for Young Women	88.89%	96.88%	-7.99
Detroit School of Arts	92.23%	96.84%	-4.61
Diann Banks-Williamson Educational Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
East English Village Preparatory Academy	60.53%	69.34%	-8.81
Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men	80.00%	80.00%	0.00
Henry Ford High School	70.64%	67.71%	2.93
Jerry L. White Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School	86.72%	85.82%	0.90
Mumford High School	80.00%	83.81%	-3.81
Osborn High School	50.36%	68.66%	-18.30
Pershing High School	72.15%	72.88%	-0.73
Renaissance High School	96.88%	98.00%	-1.12
Southeastern High School	90.91%	89.47%	1.44
West Side Academy of Information Technology and Cyber Security	41.88%	31.90%	9.98
Western International High School	66.40%	75.05%	-8.65
Dexter Community School District	97.60%	96.77%	0.83
Dexter Alternative School	83.33%	50.00%	33.33
Dexter High School	98.22%	98.51%	-0.29
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	0.00%	33.33%	-33.33
Dollar Bay-Tamarack City Area K-12 School	90.48%	96.00%	-5.52
Dollar Bay-Tamarack City Area K12 School	90.48%	96.00%	-5.52
Dowagiac Union School District	77.02%	72.51%	4.51
Pathfinders Alternative Ed	27.27%	11.11%	16.16
Union High School	89.84%	88.64%	1.20
Dryden Community Schools	92.50%	85.96%	6.54
Dryden High School	92.50%	85.71%	6.79
Dundee Community Schools	92.14%	91.10%	1.04
Dundee Community High School	99.07%	100.00%	-0.93
Riverside Academy	76.19%	64.71%	11.48
Durand Area Schools	91.43%	88.24%	3.19
Durand Area High School	94.12%	88.98%	5.14
East China School District	93.82%	91.59%	2.23
Marine City High School	98.45%	99.05%	-0.60
Riverview East High School	62.86%	60.53%	2.33
St. Clair High School	97.85%	95.68%	2.17
East Grand Rapids Public Schools	96.40%	96.67%	-0.27
East Grand Rapids High School	96.39%	96.67%	-0.28
East Jackson Community Schools	69.86%	71.62%	-1.76
East Jackson Secondary School	84.21%	84.13%	0.08
WAY East Jackson	8.33%	0.00%	8.33
East Jordan Public Schools	85.71%	85.00%	0.71
East Jordan Middle/High School	92.86%	89.47%	3.39
East Lansing School District	91.49%	88.93%	2.56
East Lansing High School	91.54%	88.84%	2.70
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Eastpointe Community Schools	69.38%	67.19%	2.19
Eastpointe High School	85.83%	79.89%	5.94
Eastpointe Virtual Academy	48.28%	45.71%	2.57
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Eaton Rapids Public Schools	81.74%	77.27%	4.47
Eaton Rapids High School	94.32%	91.38%	2.94
Greyhound Central Performance Academy	23.33%	22.86%	0.47
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Eau Claire Public Schools	60.78%	79.17%	-18.39
Eau Claire High School	90.91%	88.37%	2.54
W-A-Y Eau Claire	10.00%	0.00%	10.00
Ecorse Public Schools	53.46%	67.47%	-14.01
Downriver Virtual Academy	0.00%	25.00%	-25.00
Ecorse Community High School	78.72%	74.63%	4.09
Hope Academic Academy	71.88%	91.67%	-19.79
SER Metro YouthBuild Learning Academy	34.78%	9.09%	25.69
Edwardsburg Public Schools	91.75%	92.34%	-0.59
Edwardsburg High School	92.20%	92.34%	-0.14
Elk Rapids Schools	87.23%	89.47%	-2.24
Elk Rapids High School	91.86%	92.94%	-1.08
Sunrise Academy	37.50%	66.67%	-29.17
Elkton-Pigeon-Bay Port Laker Schools	91.38%	93.55%	-2.17
Laker High School	92.98%	95.08%	-2.10
Ellsworth Community School	94.12%	100.00%	-5.88
Ellsworth Community School	94.12%	100.00%	-5.88
Engadine Consolidated Schools	51.52%	50.88%	0.64
Consolidated Community School Services	26.67%	29.17%	-2.50
Engadine Schools	92.00%	88.00%	4.00
Escanaba Area Public Schools	89.77%	77.78%	11.99
Escanaba Area Public High School	91.89%	77.65%	14.24
Escanaba Student Success Center	82.61%	82.35%	0.26
Essexville-Hampton Public Schools	86.33%	91.73%	-5.40
Garber High School	86.96%	92.37%	-5.41
Evart Public Schools	80.88%	82.05%	-1.17
Evart High School	81.82%	85.33%	-3.51
Ewen-Trout Creek Consolidated School District	92.59%	82.35%	10.24
Ewen-Trout Creek Consolidated School	92.59%	87.50%	5.09
Fairview Area School District	77.27%	75.00%	2.27
Fairview School	80.95%	78.95%	2.00
Farmington Public School District	93.17%	89.98%	3.19
Farmington Central High School	69.12%	50.82%	18.30
Farmington High School	97.07%	96.56%	0.51
North Farmington High School	95.85%	95.91%	-0.06
Farwell Area Schools	79.76%	81.74%	-1.98
Farwell High School	91.94%	89.47%	2.47
Farwell Timberland Alternative High School	53.85%	38.46%	15.39
Fennville Public Schools	81.90%	80.37%	1.53
Fennville Public High School	92.47%	88.42%	4.05
Pearl Alternative/Adult Education School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Fenton Area Public Schools	86.92%	88.96%	-2.04
FAPS-GEAR UP ACADEMY	45.45%	27.27%	18.18
Fenton Senior High School	95.20%	95.51%	-0.31
Lake Fenton High School	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Linden High School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Ferndale Public Schools	76.35%	75.63%	0.72
Ferndale High School	97.89%	96.88%	1.01
Tri County Educational Center	23.96%	25.84%	-1.88
University High School	98.13%	98.23%	-0.10
Fitzgerald Public Schools	78.91%	75.92%	2.99
Fitzgerald Senior High School	88.89%	88.18%	0.71
Fitzgerald Virtual Academy	24.14%	12.00%	12.14
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Flat Rock Community Schools	76.92%	77.27%	-0.35
Flat Rock Academic Virtual Academy 6-12	45.10%	31.11%	13.99
Flat Rock Community High School	96.58%	97.79%	-1.21
Flint, School District of the City of	52.33%	64.85%	-12.52
Accelerated Learning Academy	12.12%	21.05%	-8.93
Gateway to College-Mott Community College	14.29%	70.00%	-55.71
Southwestern Classical Academy	72.41%	78.32%	-5.91
Flushing Community Schools	87.14%	89.52%	-2.38
Flushing High School	91.78%	90.33%	1.45
Forest Area Community Schools	78.72%	76.74%	1.98
Forest Area High School	82.22%	78.57%	3.65
Forest Hills Public Schools	95.57%	96.68%	-1.11
Central High School	96.21%	97.81%	-1.60
Eastern High School	96.34%	97.89%	-1.55
Northern High School	94.72%	95.22%	-0.50
Forest Park School District	96.67%	100.00%	-3.33
Forest Park School	96.67%	100.00%	-3.33
Fowler Public Schools	95.56%	88.64%	6.92
Fowler High School	95.56%	88.64%	6.92
Fowlerville Community Schools	83.98%	86.34%	-2.36
Fowlerville High School	92.74%	92.08%	0.66
Fowlerville Online Learning Academy	27.27%	42.86%	-15.59
Frankenmuth School District	96.85%	96.85%	0.00
Frankenmuth High School	96.80%	98.40%	-1.60
Great Lakes Bay Early College	100.00%	0.00%	100.00
Frankfort-Elberta Area Schools	92.68%	93.18%	-0.50
Frankfort High School	92.50%	97.62%	-5.12
Fraser Public Schools	95.13%	94.19%	0.94
Fraser High School	95.35%	94.13%	1.22
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Freeland Community School District	92.86%	92.25%	0.61
Freeland Middle School/High School	94.21%	96.72%	-2.51
Great Lakes Bay Early College	75.00%	0.00%	75.00
Fremont Public School District	79.77%	83.41%	-3.64
Fremont High School	92.70%	96.45%	-3.75
Quest High School	33.33%	38.10%	-4.77
Fruitport Community Schools	88.69%	85.31%	3.38
Fruitport Adult Education	33.33%	0.00%	33.33
Fruitport Alternative High School	62.50%	72.73%	-10.23
Fruitport High School	94.87%	92.43%	2.44
Fulton Schools	58.90%	56.47%	2.43
Fulton Alternative Education	10.53%	36.59%	-26.06
Fulton High School	95.35%	96.77%	-1.42
Galesburg-Augusta Community Schools	71.62%	81.40%	-9.78
Galesburg-Augusta High School	79.37%	89.47%	-10.10
Garden City Public Schools	74.10%	74.07%	0.03
Burger Development Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Cambridge Alternative High School	56.76%	59.56%	-2.80
Garden City High School	94.42%	89.29%	5.13
Gaylord Community Schools	83.11%	83.40%	-0.29
Gaylord High School/Voc. Bldg.	84.16%	85.66%	-1.50
Genesee School District	91.67%	80.85%	10.82
Genesee High School	91.67%	82.61%	9.06
Gibraltar School District	89.31%	82.54%	6.77
Lakeshore Virtual School	34.21%	25.58%	8.63
Oscar A. Carlson High School	98.13%	96.36%	1.77
Gladstone Area Schools	84.07%	95.10%	-11.03
Gladstone Area High School	85.59%	95.10%	-9.51
Gladwin Community Schools	88.62%	90.85%	-2.23
Gladwin Community Alternative H.S.	63.64%	77.78%	-14.14
Gladwin High School	93.52%	92.03%	1.49
Glen Lake Community Schools	91.84%	87.76%	4.08
Glen Lake Community School	91.84%	87.50%	4.34
Gobles Public School District	80.00%	78.33%	1.67
Gobles High School	83.33%	78.85%	4.48
Godfrey-Lee Public Schools	84.67%	78.62%	6.05
East Lee Campus	65.22%	60.42%	4.80
Lee High School	96.88%	91.58%	5.30
Godwin Heights Public Schools	86.05%	86.26%	-0.21
Godwin Heights Learning Center	43.48%	40.00%	3.48
Godwin Heights Senior High School	94.41%	93.17%	1.24
Goodrich Area Schools	95.85%	98.91%	-3.06
Goodrich High School	96.86%	98.91%	-2.05
Grand Blanc Community Schools	89.05%	89.70%	-0.65
Grand Blanc Community High School	89.70%	90.52%	-0.82
Grand Haven Area Public Schools	86.65%	82.55%	4.10
Career Development School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Central High School	70.21%	57.78%	12.43
Grand Haven Cyber School	69.23%	43.48%	25.75
Grand Haven High School	93.53%	91.06%	2.47
Grand Ledge Public Schools	96.17%	92.16%	4.01
Grand Ledge High School	96.39%	92.41%	3.98
Grand Rapids Public Schools	80.92%	76.20%	4.72
Bethany Based School	0.00%	50.00%	-50.00
CA Frost Environmental Science Academy Middle High School	100.00%	93.62%	6.38
City Middle/High	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Grand Rapids Learning Center	72.73%	78.13%	-5.40
Grand Rapids Montessori Middle/High	93.33%	100.00%	-6.67
Grand Rapids University Preparatory Academy	100.00%	96.97%	3.03
Innovation Central High	93.01%	90.58%	2.43
Newcomers Community School	30.00%	16.67%	13.33
Ottawa High Transition	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Ottawa Hills High School	75.32%	68.75%	6.57
Southeast Career Pathways	59.26%	64.52%	-5.26
Union High School	89.00%	87.35%	1.65
Union High Transition	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Grandville Public Schools	96.25%	95.83%	0.42
Grandville High School	96.22%	96.04%	0.18
Grant Public School District	82.79%	87.31%	-4.52
Grant High School	92.31%	93.50%	-1.19
Grant Learning Center	0.00%	22.22%	-22.22
Grass Lake Community Schools	91.75%	82.86%	8.89
Grass Lake High School	91.75%	86.36%	5.39
Greenville Public Schools	89.53%	86.45%	3.08
Early College at Montcalm Community College	88.89%	100.00%	-11.11
Greenville Senior High School	91.38%	89.60%	1.78
Satterlee School	81.82%	37.50%	44.32
Grosse Ile Township Schools	98.56%	98.60%	-0.04
Grosse Ile High School	98.56%	98.60%	-0.04
Grosse Pointe Public Schools	95.81%	94.92%	0.89
Grosse Pointe North High School	93.88%	94.36%	-0.48
Grosse Pointe South High School	97.72%	95.38%	2.34
Gull Lake Community Schools	87.04%	85.08%	1.96
Gull Lake Gateway Academy	66.67%	77.78%	-11.11
Gull Lake High School	90.29%	87.86%	2.43
Gull Lake Virtual Partnership	87.76%	86.36%	1.40
Gwinn Area Community Schools	79.63%	71.43%	8.20
Gwinn Middle/High School	82.35%	71.43%	10.92
Hale Area Schools	88.89%	86.96%	1.93
Hale Area School	88.89%	86.96%	1.93
Hamilton Community Schools	89.32%	87.73%	1.59
Hamilton High School	96.67%	97.84%	-1.17
Hamilton Virtual School	0.00%	33.33%	-33.33
Pioneer Tech High School	31.25%	41.18%	-9.93
Hamtramck, School District of the City of	79.88%	72.10%	7.78
Hamtramck High School	89.87%	87.55%	2.32
Horizon High School	62.96%	54.62%	8.34
Hancock Public Schools	87.76%	78.95%	8.81
Hancock Middle/High School	87.76%	78.95%	8.81
Hanover-Horton School District	90.91%	86.84%	4.07
Hanover-Horton High School	93.02%	88.00%	5.02
Harbor Beach Community Schools	91.84%	91.30%	0.54
Harbor Beach Community High School	91.84%	93.33%	-1.49
Harbor Springs School District	95.65%	95.71%	-0.06
Char-Em Alternative Schools	50.00%	100.00%	-50.00
Harbor Springs High School	98.48%	95.45%	3.03
Harper Creek Community Schools	96.13%	96.14%	-0.01
Harper Creek High School	96.13%	96.14%	-0.01
Harper Woods, The School District of the City of	63.09%	63.66%	-0.57
Diploma Success Community School	33.85%	36.23%	-2.38
Harper Academy	94.12%	84.62%	9.50
Harper Woods High School	87.57%	88.61%	-1.04
Harper Woods Virtual Academy	48.72%	43.48%	5.24
Harrison Community Schools	70.75%	73.40%	-2.65
Harrison Alternative Education	45.45%	18.18%	27.27
Harrison Community High School	80.00%	83.54%	-3.54
Hart Public School District	87.50%	85.71%	1.79
Hart High School	89.41%	85.71%	3.70
Hartford Public Schools	76.47%	81.25%	-4.78
Hartford Alternative Education	22.73%	38.46%	-15.73
Hartford High School	98.57%	98.75%	-0.18
Hartland Consolidated Schools	95.59%	95.63%	-0.04
Hartland High School	97.68%	97.63%	0.05
Hartland Virtual Academy	60.00%	63.64%	-3.64
Legacy High School	81.82%	68.75%	13.07
Haslett Public Schools	95.07%	95.32%	-0.25
Haslett High School	95.41%	96.49%	-1.08
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Hastings Area School District	74.38%	80.62%	-6.24
Hastings High School	80.68%	81.33%	-0.65
Hazel Park, School District of the City of	43.00%	41.97%	1.03
Advantage Alternative Program	30.30%	28.13%	2.17
Edison	0.00%	50.00%	-50.00
Hazel Park ACCESS Alternative School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Hazel Park High School	80.63%	70.00%	10.63
Invest Roosevelt Alternative High School	50.00%	48.48%	1.52
Michigan Cyber Academy	9.72%	9.52%	0.20
Viking Virtual Academy	12.50%	14.29%	-1.79
Hemlock Public School District	68.00%	69.57%	-1.57
Hemlock Alternative Education	41.67%	55.56%	-13.89
Hemlock High School	72.09%	71.91%	0.18
Hesperia Community Schools	84.38%	81.43%	2.95
Hesperia Community Education	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Hesperia High School	93.10%	87.50%	5.60
Hillman Community Schools	69.44%	90.00%	-20.56
Hillman Community Jr/Sr High School	73.53%	93.10%	-19.57
Hillsdale Community Schools	89.15%	70.37%	18.78
Hillsdale High School	94.39%	80.00%	14.39
Horizon Alternative School	75.00%	42.86%	32.14
Holland City School District	86.04%	86.36%	-0.32
Holland High School	89.27%	90.91%	-1.64
Holland ViRtual Tech High School	82.61%	75.00%	7.61
Holly Area School District	89.78%	84.86%	4.92
Holly High School	90.71%	84.81%	5.90
Holt Public Schools	84.43%	85.54%	-1.11
Holt Senior High School	84.75%	86.72%	-1.97
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Holton Public Schools	81.25%	73.63%	7.62
Holton High School	95.74%	96.61%	-0.87
Holton Virtual Academy	38.46%	29.63%	8.83
Homer Community School District	93.24%	97.30%	-4.06
Homer Community High School	94.52%	97.26%	-2.74
Hopkins Public Schools	95.28%	91.15%	4.13
Hopkins High School	95.28%	91.96%	3.32
Houghton Lake Community Schools	64.29%	71.54%	-7.25
Houghton Lake Community Education	37.93%	40.00%	-2.07
Houghton Lake Jr./Sr. High School	85.07%	90.70%	-5.63
Houghton-Portage Township School District	95.79%	95.24%	0.55
Houghton Central High School	95.79%	95.24%	0.55
Howell Public Schools	91.32%	92.31%	-0.99
Howell High School	90.67%	94.01%	-3.34
Innovation Academy	100.00%	84.38%	15.62
Hudson Area Schools	68.13%	70.19%	-2.06
Hudson Area JR/SR High School	90.00%	98.11%	-8.11
Hudson Tech Alternative	13.64%	41.46%	-27.82
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Hudsonville Public School District	96.87%	94.78%	2.09
Hudsonville High School	97.09%	95.63%	1.46
Huron School District	94.06%	91.67%	2.39
Huron AI Center FRCS FRHS Program	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Huron High School	94.97%	92.96%	2.01
Huron Valley Schools	92.33%	91.74%	0.59
Harbor High School	66.10%	59.68%	6.42
International Academy	97.40%	100.00%	-2.60
Lakeland High School	97.48%	98.78%	-1.30
Milford High School	92.62%	90.91%	1.71
Oakland Opportunity Academy	81.82%	42.86%	38.96
Ida Public School District	95.19%	99.11%	-3.92
Ida High School	95.96%	99.05%	-3.09
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Imlay City Community Schools	94.92%	96.34%	-1.42
Imlay City High School	97.22%	96.30%	0.92
Venture High School	86.36%	95.65%	-9.29
Inland Lakes Schools	89.80%	86.36%	3.44
Inland Lakes Secondary School	89.80%	86.36%	3.44
Ionia Public Schools	72.27%	79.92%	-7.65
Douglas R. Welch High School	12.50%	34.15%	-21.65
Ionia High School	88.24%	94.62%	-6.38
Iron Mountain Public Schools	67.62%	68.38%	-0.76
IM-K Community Education	15.79%	32.14%	-16.35
Iron Mountain High School	96.97%	93.02%	3.95
Ironwood Area Schools of Gogebic County	77.46%	79.41%	-1.95
Gogebic Co. Community Education	33.33%	16.67%	16.66
Luther L. Wright K-12 School	92.16%	96.30%	-4.14
Ishpeming Public School District No. 1	88.61%	82.35%	6.26
Ishpeming High School	92.75%	89.66%	3.09
Ishpeming-Negaunee-NICE Comm. Ed. Division	75.00%	57.14%	17.86
Ithaca Public Schools	93.67%	96.67%	-3.00
Ithaca High School	93.67%	97.75%	-4.08
Jackson Public Schools	71.53%	72.54%	-1.01
Jackson High School	87.36%	89.86%	-2.50
Jackson Pathways	59.52%	16.67%	42.85
South Central Michigan Virtual	46.43%	32.43%	14.00
Jefferson Schools (Monroe)	82.50%	90.00%	-7.50
Jefferson High School	80.85%	90.70%	-9.85
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Jenison Public Schools	97.28%	95.28%	2.00
Jenison High School	97.08%	95.28%	1.80
Jenison International Academy	100.00%	95.00%	5.00
Johannesburg-Lewiston Area Schools	94.12%	88.68%	5.44
Johannesburg-Lewiston High School	94.12%	88.68%	5.44
Jonesville Community Schools	89.76%	70.80%	18.96
Jonesville High School	96.04%	85.33%	10.71
Jonesville Pathways	72.22%	45.83%	26.39
Kalamazoo Public Schools	76.05%	73.44%	2.61
Kalamazoo Central High School	86.50%	86.38%	0.12
Kalamazoo Innovative Learning Program	16.67%	91.15%	-74.48
Loy Norrix High School	79.89%	81.36%	-1.47
Phoenix Alternative High School	53.85%	47.73%	6.12
Kaleva Norman Dickson School District	85.71%	72.50%	13.21
Brethren High School	85.71%	74.36%	11.35
Kalkaska Public Schools	72.28%	82.71%	-10.43
Kalkaska High School	79.35%	88.79%	-9.44
Kearsley Community School District	79.83%	82.41%	-2.58
Kearsley High School	85.05%	82.71%	2.34
Kelloggsville Public Schools	81.28%	82.08%	-0.80
54th Street Academy	52.94%	60.00%	-7.06
Kelloggsville High School	92.81%	88.44%	4.37
Kenowa Hills Public Schools	91.18%	85.29%	5.89
Kenowa Hills High School	94.47%	89.53%	4.94
Kenowa Hills Pathways High School	75.86%	70.59%	5.27
Kent City Community Schools	90.00%	97.80%	-7.80
Kent City Alternative High School	16.67%	0.00%	16.67
Kent City High School	98.75%	100.00%	-1.25
Kentwood Public Schools	84.08%	78.94%	5.14
Crossroads Alternative High School	48.57%	29.23%	19.34
East Kentwood High School	90.70%	86.76%	3.94
Kingsley Area Schools	91.21%	91.53%	-0.32
Kingsley Area High School	91.11%	91.45%	-0.34
Kingston Community School District	86.36%	80.00%	6.36
Kingston High School	86.36%	82.76%	3.60
L'Anse Area Schools	86.27%	90.77%	-4.50
L'Anse Area School	89.58%	92.06%	-2.48
L'Anse Creuse Public Schools	89.53%	86.98%	2.55
DiAnne M. Pellerin Center	45.21%	49.50%	-4.29
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
L'Anse Creuse High School	97.99%	94.83%	3.16
L'Anse Creuse High School - North	96.77%	97.07%	-0.30
Laingsburg Community Schools	92.86%	96.20%	-3.34
Laingsburg High School	92.86%	96.20%	-3.34
Lake City Area School District	81.91%	77.42%	4.49
Lake City High School	86.21%	80.90%	5.31
Lake Fenton Community Schools	94.83%	96.28%	-1.45
Fenton Senior High School	100.00%	95.51%	4.49
Lake Fenton High School	95.91%	100.00%	-4.09
Linden High School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Lake Linden-Hubbell School District	94.12%	85.37%	8.75
Lake Linden-Hubbell Schools	94.12%	85.37%	8.75
Lake Orion Community Schools	96.14%	95.03%	1.11
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lake Orion Community High School	97.18%	96.69%	0.49
Learning Options High School	86.67%	82.50%	4.17
Lake Shore Public Schools (Macomb)	82.50%	80.17%	2.33
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lake Shore High School	92.78%	89.72%	3.06
North Lake High School	27.91%	27.03%	0.88
LakeVille Community School District	83.33%	82.00%	1.33
LakeVille High School	82.95%	82.65%	0.30
Lakeshore School District (Berrien)	92.34%	94.37%	-2.03
Lakeshore High School	92.76%	94.76%	-2.00
Lakeview Community Schools (Montcalm)	84.62%	87.21%	-2.59
Early College at Montcalm Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lakeview High School	85.71%	87.65%	-1.94
Lakeview Public Schools (Macomb)	94.70%	92.10%	2.60
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lakeview High School	95.51%	92.66%	2.85
Lakeview Sch. District (Calhoun)	89.61%	88.92%	0.69
Lakeview High School	93.57%	89.97%	3.60
Lakewood Public Schools	89.81%	89.71%	0.10
Lakewood High School	90.91%	89.71%	1.20
Lamphere Public Schools	86.10%	90.16%	-4.06
Lamphere Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Lamphere High School	89.44%	93.55%	-4.11
Lansing Public School District	69.22%	64.12%	5.10
Beekman Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Eastern High School	82.35%	79.33%	3.02
Everett High School	79.94%	82.27%	-2.33
J.W. Sexton High School	75.76%	77.97%	-2.21
Woodcreek Achievement Center	25.00%	0.00%	25.00
Lapeer Community Schools	80.37%	83.25%	-2.88
Center for Innovation	62.22%	47.22%	15.00
Lapeer High School	84.57%	88.89%	-4.32
Lawrence Public Schools	91.67%	79.41%	12.26
Lawrence Jr/Sr High School	94.29%	79.41%	14.88
Lawton Community School District	88.61%	88.75%	-0.14
Lawton Accelerated Academic Center	12.50%	50.00%	-37.50
Lawton High School	98.55%	92.75%	5.80
Leland Public School District	88.57%	90.91%	-2.34
Leland Public School	88.57%	93.02%	-4.45
Les Cheneaux Community Schools	78.57%	100.00%	-21.43
Cedarville School	78.57%	100.00%	-21.43
Leslie Public Schools	81.30%	79.21%	2.09
Ingham Virtual High School	27.27%	18.18%	9.09
Leslie High School	89.00%	92.50%	-3.50
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lincoln Consolidated School District	84.26%	84.24%	0.02
Early College Alliance	88.24%	90.00%	-1.76
Lincoln Senior High School	92.41%	90.30%	2.11
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	43.24%	33.33%	9.91
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Lincoln Park, School District of the City of	81.42%	78.08%	3.34
Lincoln Park High School	83.62%	79.43%	4.19
Linden Community Schools	96.04%	93.98%	2.06
Lake Fenton High School	66.67%	100.00%	-33.33
Linden High School	96.97%	0.00%	96.97
Litchfield Community Schools	85.71%	78.95%	6.76
Litchfield High School	90.00%	78.95%	11.05
Livonia Public Schools School District	94.27%	93.66%	0.61
Churchill High School	90.99%	91.89%	-0.90
Franklin High School	94.10%	92.02%	2.08
Stevenson High School	97.28%	96.88%	0.40
Lowell Area Schools	92.86%	94.36%	-1.50
Lowell Senior High School	98.51%	97.23%	1.28
Unity Alternative School	10.00%	25.00%	-15.00
Ludington Area School District	91.49%	87.86%	3.63
Ludington High School	91.43%	88.89%	2.54
Mackinac Island Public Schools	0.00%	75.00%	-75.00
Mackinac Island School	0.00%	75.00%	-75.00
Mackinaw City Public Schools	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Mackinaw City K-12 School	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Madison District Public Schools	81.82%	85.16%	-3.34
Madison High School	98.77%	91.89%	6.88
Madison Preparatory High School	62.07%	84.09%	-22.02
Madison School District (Lenawee)	87.85%	92.55%	-4.70
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Madison High School	88.24%	92.47%	-4.23
Mancelona Public Schools	88.89%	79.41%	9.48
Mancelona High School	90.32%	79.41%	10.91
Manchester Community Schools	97.78%	93.20%	4.58
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Manchester Junior/Senior High School	97.37%	94.51%	2.86
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	100.00%	33.33%	66.67
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Manistee Area Public Schools	80.00%	90.99%	-10.99
Manistee Middle High School	84.69%	92.66%	-7.97
Manistique Area Schools	95.00%	84.29%	10.71
Manistique Alternative Ed Center	80.00%	61.54%	18.46
Manistique Middle and High School	96.36%	92.59%	3.77
Manton Consolidated Schools	93.75%	83.61%	10.14
Manton Consolidated High School	94.94%	84.75%	10.19
Maple Valley Schools	85.54%	77.78%	7.76
Maple Valley Jr/Sr High School	90.67%	85.71%	4.96
Maple Valley Pathways High School	20.00%	33.33%	-13.33
Marcellus Community Schools	98.08%	93.75%	4.33
Marcellus High School	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Volinia Outcome Base School	100.00%	81.82%	18.18
Marion Public Schools	76.67%	96.15%	-19.48
Marion High School	76.67%	96.15%	-19.48
Marlette Community Schools	96.43%	88.24%	8.19
Marlette Jr./Sr. High School	96.36%	89.55%	6.81
Marquette Area Public Schools	85.99%	84.48%	1.51
Marquette Senior High School	95.12%	93.12%	2.00
Vandenboom Alternative High School	45.00%	34.38%	10.62
Marshall Public Schools	75.81%	70.37%	5.44
Marshall High School	87.56%	95.29%	-7.73
Marshall Opportunity High School	59.38%	46.67%	12.71
Martin Public Schools	96.97%	95.92%	1.05
Martin High School	96.97%	95.83%	1.14
Marysville Public Schools	94.95%	94.15%	0.80
Marysville High School	95.43%	94.15%	1.28
Mason Consolidated Schools (Monroe)	93.67%	87.95%	5.72
Mason Senior High School	95.45%	87.84%	7.61
Mason Virtual Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Mason County Central Schools	91.60%	93.22%	-1.62
Academy of Science Math and Technology Early College High School	100.00%	91.67%	8.33
Mason County Central H.S.	90.70%	94.17%	-3.47
Mason County Eastern Schools	96.15%	87.50%	8.65
Mason County Eastern Junior High/High School	100.00%	87.50%	12.50
Mason Public Schools (Ingham)	92.92%	92.89%	0.03
Mason High School	93.21%	93.64%	-0.43
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Mattawan Consolidated School	93.53%	91.43%	2.10
Mattawan High School	93.53%	91.43%	2.10
Mayville Community School District	68.52%	84.00%	-15.48
Mayville High School	68.52%	83.67%	-15.15
McBain Rural Agricultural Schools	92.96%	91.95%	1.01
McBain High School	92.96%	92.86%	0.10
Melvindale-North Allen Park Schools	87.69%	89.32%	-1.63
Melvindale High School	88.01%	89.70%	-1.69
Memphis Community Schools	96.43%	90.00%	6.43
Memphis Junior/Senior High School	96.43%	90.00%	6.43
Mendon Community School District	87.23%	83.67%	3.56
Mendon Middle/High School	87.23%	83.67%	3.56
Menominee Area Public Schools	95.05%	89.69%	5.36
Menominee High School	95.05%	89.69%	5.36
Meridian Public Schools	92.13%	90.91%	1.22
Meridian Early College High School	92.13%	90.91%	1.22
Merrill Community Schools	87.50%	90.70%	-3.20
Merrill High School	87.50%	90.48%	-2.98
Mesick Consolidated Schools	81.82%	86.84%	-5.02
Mesick Consolidated Jr/Sr High School	81.82%	89.19%	-7.37
Michigan Center School District	100.00%	88.54%	11.46
Michigan Center Jr/Sr High School	100.00%	88.54%	11.46
Michigan Department of Corrections	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Michigan School for the Deaf	28.57%	47.06%	-18.49
Mid Peninsula School District	76.92%	100.00%	-23.08
Mid Peninsula School	83.33%	100.00%	-16.67
Midland Public Schools	90.72%	90.29%	0.43
H.H. Dow High School	93.73%	90.18%	3.55
Midland High School	90.36%	91.18%	-0.82
Milan Area Schools	87.74%	83.33%	4.41
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Milan Alternative Education	25.00%	16.67%	8.33
Milan High School	93.98%	92.68%	1.30
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	50.00%	33.33%	16.67
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Millington Community Schools	94.39%	91.87%	2.52
M.A.L.C.	70.00%	53.85%	16.15
Millington High School	97.87%	98.00%	-0.13
Mio-AuSable Schools	89.19%	80.39%	8.80
Mio-AuSable High School	91.67%	82.00%	9.67
Mona Shores Public School District	94.85%	94.30%	0.55
Mona Shores High School	95.17%	94.30%	0.87
Monroe Public Schools	86.28%	82.06%	4.22
Monroe County Middle College	96.67%	100.00%	-3.33
Monroe High School	92.86%	89.68%	3.18
Orchard Center High School	60.00%	57.75%	2.25
Montabella Community Schools	78.13%	79.63%	-1.50
Montabella Junior/Senior High	77.78%	80.85%	-3.07
Montague Area Public Schools	84.85%	89.83%	-4.98
Montague High School	91.30%	96.36%	-5.06
White Lake Area Community Education	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Montrose Community Schools	77.93%	73.33%	4.60
Hill-McCloy High School	98.98%	89.13%	9.85
Montrose Alternative Education Center	33.33%	39.39%	-6.06
Morenci Area Schools	88.14%	84.38%	3.76
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Morenci Middle and High School	89.66%	85.71%	3.95
Morley Stanwood Community Schools	90.36%	87.10%	3.26
Morley Stanwood High School	93.75%	88.04%	5.71
Morrice Area Schools	89.29%	93.55%	-4.26
Morrice Area High School	89.29%	93.55%	-4.26
Mount Clemens Community School District	62.71%	67.24%	-4.53
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Mount Clemens High School	68.00%	68.89%	-0.89
Mt. Morris Consolidated Schools	51.55%	60.00%	-8.45
E.A. Johnson Memorial H.S.	84.54%	86.84%	-2.30
Mt. Morris Education and Community Center	32.56%	38.89%	-6.33
Mt. Pleasant City School District	74.02%	72.67%	1.35
Mt. Pleasant Senior High School	91.44%	92.34%	-0.90
WAY - Oasis	3.33%	9.38%	-6.05
Munising Public Schools	92.16%	83.87%	8.29
Munising High and Middle School	93.88%	83.87%	10.01
Muskegon, Public Schools of the City of	81.94%	81.74%	0.20
Muskegon Community Education Center	97.73%	77.78%	19.95
Muskegon High School	82.05%	86.42%	-4.37
NICE Community School District	95.12%	91.03%	4.09
Westwood High School	95.12%	91.03%	4.09
Napoleon Community Schools	87.27%	85.71%	1.56
Ackerson Lake Community Education	68.00%	47.06%	20.94
Napoleon High School	93.67%	95.12%	-1.45
Negaunee Public Schools	97.78%	94.95%	2.83
Negaunee High School	97.78%	94.95%	2.83
New Buffalo Area Schools	88.64%	93.48%	-4.84
New Buffalo Senior High School	92.86%	95.56%	-2.70
New Haven Community Schools	82.08%	77.08%	5.00
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lake Huron Virtual & Hybrid High School	60.00%	37.50%	22.50
New Haven High School	91.67%	83.95%	7.72
New Lothrop Area Public Schools	96.25%	98.67%	-2.42
New Lothrop High School	96.25%	98.67%	-2.42
Newaygo Public School District	96.46%	87.85%	8.61
Newaygo High School	96.46%	89.42%	7.04
Niles Community Schools	72.34%	74.42%	-2.08
Niles Cedar Lane	55.17%	60.71%	-5.54
Niles Comm. Schools Adult Education	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Niles Senior High School	93.48%	97.01%	-3.53
Southside Special Educ School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
W-A-Y Niles	27.27%	6.67%	20.60
North Adams-Jerome Public Schools	83.33%	100.00%	-16.67
North Adams-Jerome Middle/High School	81.82%	100.00%	-18.18
North Branch Area Schools	87.57%	92.39%	-4.82
North Branch High School	93.59%	96.57%	-2.98
Quest High School	64.00%	65.00%	-1.00
North Central Area Schools	100.00%	96.43%	3.57
North Central Area Senior High School	100.00%	96.43%	3.57
North Dickinson County Schools	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
North Dickinson School	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
North Huron School District	93.33%	85.29%	8.04
North Huron School	93.33%	85.29%	8.04
North Muskegon Public Schools	97.59%	98.55%	-0.96
North Muskegon High School	97.59%	98.55%	-0.96
Northport Public School District	71.43%	75.00%	-3.57
Northport Public School	71.43%	75.00%	-3.57
Northview Public Schools	87.62%	86.60%	1.02
Northview High School	96.68%	96.31%	0.37
Northview Next Career Center	53.85%	44.12%	9.73
Northville Public Schools	97.40%	97.22%	0.18
Cooke School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Northville High School	99.22%	98.84%	0.38
Northwest Community Schools	78.21%	80.72%	-2.51
Northwest Alternative High School	33.33%	36.00%	-2.67
Northwest High School	87.31%	87.96%	-0.65
Norway-Vulcan Area Schools	93.55%	96.15%	-2.60
Norway High School	93.55%	96.15%	-2.60
Novi Community School District	93.20%	95.48%	-2.28
Career Preparation	20.00%	87.50%	-67.50
Novi High School	96.23%	96.26%	-0.03
Virtual Learning Academy Consortium	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Oak Park, School District of the City of	67.35%	61.08%	6.27
Oak Park Alternative Education Center	43.72%	32.95%	10.77
Oak Park High School	93.42%	93.92%	-0.50
Oak Park Virtual Academy	37.50%	78.95%	-41.45
Oakridge Public Schools	79.86%	80.69%	-0.83
Oakridge Fusion	30.77%	22.22%	8.55
Oakridge High School	91.89%	94.07%	-2.18
Okemos Public Schools	95.65%	92.20%	3.45
Okemos High School	96.79%	92.60%	4.19
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Olivet Community Schools	93.70%	94.66%	-0.96
Olivet High School	93.65%	95.38%	-1.73
Onaway Area Community School District	95.35%	100.00%	-4.65
Onaway Senior High School	95.35%	100.00%	-4.65
Onekama Consolidated Schools	100.00%	91.89%	8.11
Onekama Consolidated Schools	100.00%	91.89%	8.11
Onsted Community Schools	84.07%	83.62%	0.45
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Onsted Community High School	87.16%	84.40%	2.76
Ontonagon Area School District	95.65%	92.31%	3.34
Ontonagon Area School	100.00%	92.31%	7.69
Orchard View Schools	56.77%	48.29%	8.48
Orchard View Community Education	27.27%	3.57%	23.70
Orchard View High School	87.31%	85.04%	2.27
Oscoda Area Schools	96.61%	86.30%	10.31
Oscoda Area High School	96.55%	91.18%	5.37
Otsego Public Schools	93.04%	83.42%	9.62
Otsego High School	95.83%	90.45%	5.38
Otsego West Campus High School	80.00%	53.33%	26.67
Ovid-Elsie Area Schools	90.98%	82.86%	8.12
Ovid-Elsie Comm. Ed./Alt. H.S.	45.45%	46.67%	-1.22
Ovid-Elsie High School	98.29%	95.28%	3.01
Owendale-Gagetown Area School District	85.71%	80.00%	5.71
Owendale-Gagetown Jr/Sr High School	85.71%	85.71%	0.00
Owosso Public Schools	85.90%	84.35%	1.55
Lincoln Alternative High School	46.67%	45.83%	0.84
Owosso High School	92.23%	95.50%	-3.27
Oxford Community Schools	92.39%	88.24%	4.15
Oxford Bridges High School	85.00%	66.67%	18.33
Oxford High School	99.32%	97.56%	1.76
Oxford Schools Early College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Oxford Virtual Academy	73.17%	46.15%	27.02
Parchment School District	80.15%	76.35%	3.80
Barclay Hills Education Center	43.33%	42.11%	1.22
Parchment High School	97.80%	90.63%	7.17
Paw Paw Public School District	79.04%	80.53%	-1.49
Cedar Street Community and Family Center	15.79%	38.10%	-22.31
Paw Paw High School	88.81%	89.87%	-1.06
Peck Community School District	100.00%	91.18%	8.82
Peck Jr./Sr. High School	100.00%	91.18%	8.82
Pellston Public Schools	87.50%	89.80%	-2.30
Char-Em Alternative Schools	50.00%	100.00%	-50.00
Pellston Middle/High School	92.86%	93.62%	-0.76
Pennfield Schools	90.97%	92.12%	-1.15
Pennfield Senior High School	92.72%	93.21%	-0.49
Pentwater Public School District	85.71%	100.00%	-14.29
Pentwater Public School	94.74%	100.00%	-5.26
Perry Public Schools	91.07%	74.04%	17.03
Perry High School	91.07%	74.04%	17.03
Pewamo-Westphalia Community Schools	97.73%	96.51%	1.22
Pewamo-Westphalia Middle/High School	97.73%	96.51%	1.22
Pickford Public Schools	100.00%	80.00%	20.00
Pickford Public Schools	100.00%	94.12%	5.88
Pinckney Community Schools	87.80%	86.88%	0.92
Pinckney Community High School	87.80%	86.88%	0.92
Pinconning Area Schools	84.00%	75.28%	8.72
Pinconning High School	86.60%	74.71%	11.89
Pine River Area Schools	94.12%	90.48%	3.64
Pine River Area High School	94.12%	91.57%	2.55
Pittsford Area Schools	83.33%	91.67%	-8.34
Pittsford Area High School	88.89%	91.67%	-2.78
Plainwell Community Schools	88.19%	84.78%	3.41
Plainwell High School	94.68%	96.22%	-1.54
Renaissance High School	64.10%	34.48%	29.62
Plymouth-Canton Community Schools	89.66%	89.22%	0.44
Canton High School	95.47%	93.79%	1.68
Plymouth High School	96.43%	96.54%	-0.11
Salem High School	95.56%	94.66%	0.90
Starkweather Academy @ Fiegel	24.32%	15.38%	8.94
Pontiac City School District	59.33%	63.81%	-4.48
Kennedy Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Pontiac High School	70.83%	74.06%	-3.23
Port Huron Area School District	78.42%	80.82%	-2.40
Harrison Center	8.11%	15.63%	-7.52
Port Huron High School	85.78%	91.02%	-5.24
Port Huron Northern High School	91.32%	90.94%	0.38
Portage Public Schools	93.60%	92.53%	1.07
Portage Central High School	97.14%	98.77%	-1.63
Portage Community High School	50.00%	54.00%	-4.00
Portage Northern High School	96.62%	95.13%	1.49
Portland Public Schools	72.50%	88.08%	-15.58
Portland High School	73.72%	89.86%	-16.14
Posen Consolidated School District No. 9	94.44%	90.91%	3.53
Posen Consolidated High School	94.44%	90.91%	3.53
Potterville Public Schools	82.54%	90.63%	-8.09
Potterville High School	82.54%	90.63%	-8.09
Public Schools of Calumet, Laurium & Keweenaw	66.67%	73.53%	-6.86
CHS-Horizons School	33.33%	43.75%	-10.42
Calumet High School	76.67%	78.81%	-2.14
Public Schools of Petoskey	76.99%	90.87%	-13.88
Char-Em Alternative Schools	25.00%	100.00%	-75.00
Petoskey High School	79.17%	94.30%	-15.13
Quincy Community Schools	91.11%	91.21%	-0.10
Quincy High School	92.13%	91.21%	0.92
Rapid River Public Schools	96.15%	97.14%	-0.99
Tri-Township School	96.15%	97.06%	-0.91
Ravenna Public Schools	90.59%	92.21%	-1.62
Ravenna High School	91.67%	94.67%	-3.00
Reading Community Schools	82.46%	86.00%	-3.54
Reading High School	83.93%	86.00%	-2.07
Redford Union Schools, District No. 1	62.61%	63.35%	-0.74
Redford Union High School	75.68%	74.87%	0.81
Redford Union Virtual Learning	39.13%	33.33%	5.80
Stuckey Center	10.00%	16.67%	-6.67
Veritas	73.91%	70.97%	2.94
Reed City Area Public Schools	89.92%	85.07%	4.85
Reed City High School	89.92%	87.02%	2.90
Reese Public Schools	92.31%	81.43%	10.88
Reese High School	92.31%	81.43%	10.88
Reeths-Puffer Schools	89.20%	87.75%	1.45
Reeths-Puffer High School	91.94%	91.35%	0.59
White Lake Area Community Education	66.67%	0.00%	66.67
Republic-Michigamme Schools	100.00%	95.00%	5.00
Republic-Michigamme School	100.00%	95.00%	5.00
Richmond Community Schools	94.64%	95.04%	-0.40
Richmond Community High School	95.50%	94.87%	0.63
River Rouge, School District of the City of	83.47%	80.39%	3.08
River Rouge High School	87.79%	82.86%	4.93
River Valley School District	95.35%	83.78%	11.57
River Valley Middle/High School	95.24%	83.78%	11.46
Riverview Community School District	92.61%	90.48%	2.13
Riverview Community High School	96.60%	95.67%	0.93
Riverview Virtual Academy	60.00%	38.46%	21.54
Rochester Community School District	96.75%	96.45%	0.30
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
John M. Schultz Educational Campus	93.55%	72.22%	21.33
Reuther Middle School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Rochester Adams High School	97.90%	98.87%	-0.97
Rochester High School	97.39%	98.21%	-0.82
Stoney Creek High School	97.62%	91.73%	5.89
Rockford Public Schools	92.39%	93.11%	-0.72
River Valley Academy	15.38%	36.36%	-20.98
Rockford High School	97.52%	97.71%	-0.19
Rogers City Area Schools	98.04%	93.65%	4.39
Rogers City High School	98.04%	95.08%	2.96
Romeo Community Schools	93.04%	89.36%	3.68
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Romeo High School	92.94%	89.82%	3.12
Romulus Community Schools	72.73%	64.78%	7.95
Romulus Adult Education Alternative	0.00%	50.00%	-50.00
Romulus Senior High School	89.47%	81.40%	8.07
Romulus Virtual Learning Center	17.24%	15.15%	2.09
Roscommon Area Public Schools	95.00%	83.15%	11.85
Roscommon High School	95.00%	82.56%	12.44
Roseville Community Schools	88.70%	86.18%	2.52
Achievement High School	0.00%	50.00%	-50.00
Roseville High School	90.38%	89.82%	0.56
Royal Oak Schools	92.61%	93.52%	-0.91
Churchill Community Ed. Center	62.07%	63.64%	-1.57
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Royal Oak High School	97.06%	98.83%	-1.77
Virtual Learning Academy Consortium	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Rudyard Area Schools	88.00%	89.36%	-1.36
Rudyard Area Schools	88.00%	91.30%	-3.30
Saginaw Township Community Schools	75.71%	80.15%	-4.44
Great Lakes Bay Early College	84.62%	0.00%	84.62
Heritage High School	85.63%	93.42%	-7.79
Mackinaw High School	25.49%	20.00%	5.49
Saginaw, School District of the City of	81.22%	81.13%	0.09
Arthur Hill High School	90.91%	90.17%	0.74
Ruben Daniels Community School-ETC	28.57%	28.00%	0.57
Saginaw Arts and Sciences Academy	94.55%	95.65%	-1.10
Saginaw High School	89.29%	86.92%	2.37
Saline Area Schools	94.34%	96.54%	-2.20
Early College Alliance	92.86%	90.00%	2.86
Saline Alternative High School	62.50%	73.33%	-10.83
Saline High School	96.88%	98.45%	-1.57
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	14.29%	33.33%	-19.04
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Sand Creek Community Schools	88.24%	100.00%	-11.76
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Sand Creek High School	89.80%	100.00%	-10.20
Sandusky Community School District	83.64%	94.59%	-10.95
Sandusky Junior/Senior High School	83.64%	94.59%	-10.95
Saranac Community Schools	92.45%	78.18%	14.27
Saranac Jr/Sr High School	92.45%	78.18%	14.27
Saugatuck Public Schools	85.96%	97.22%	-11.26
Saugatuck High School	85.96%	97.22%	-11.26
Sault Ste. Marie Area Schools	81.28%	80.28%	1.00
Malcolm High School	63.16%	46.15%	17.01
Sault Area High School	90.44%	91.52%	-1.08
Schoolcraft Community Schools	85.37%	84.42%	0.95
Schoolcraft High School	85.37%	84.42%	0.95
Shelby Public Schools	81.32%	79.22%	2.10
Shelby High School	86.05%	87.14%	-1.09
Shepherd Public Schools	82.44%	82.40%	0.04
Odyssey Middle/High School	46.15%	51.85%	-5.70
Shepherd High School	95.00%	93.55%	1.45
South Haven Public Schools	79.62%	78.65%	0.97
South Haven High School	88.32%	86.93%	1.39
WAY South Haven	23.53%	26.32%	-2.79
South Lake Schools	94.69%	94.03%	0.66
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
South Lake High School	94.55%	93.89%	0.66
South Lyon Community Schools	96.43%	91.37%	5.06
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Oakland Opportunity Academy	88.89%	42.86%	46.03
South Lyon East High School	99.16%	93.95%	5.21
South Lyon High School	94.77%	90.16%	4.61
South Redford School District	88.51%	88.81%	-0.30
Lee M. Thurston High School	93.46%	93.13%	0.33
SOAR Academic Institute	63.16%	77.50%	-14.34
Southfield Public School District	87.82%	87.58%	0.24
Kennedy Learning Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Southfield High School for the Arts and Technology	94.22%	92.80%	1.42
Southfield Regional Academic Campus	62.65%	66.67%	-4.02
University High School Academy	98.94%	99.12%	-0.18
Southgate Community School District	73.12%	72.51%	0.61
Asher School	28.21%	10.71%	17.50
Beacon Day Treatment Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Southgate Anderson High School	91.63%	88.66%	2.97
Sparta Area Schools	86.02%	90.37%	-4.35
Sparta Senior High School	86.96%	90.37%	-3.41
Spring Lake Public Schools	97.96%	98.36%	-0.40
Spring Lake Alternative Education	86.67%	91.67%	-5.00
Spring Lake High School	99.42%	98.65%	0.77
Springport Public Schools	87.14%	83.33%	3.81
Springport High School	87.14%	85.51%	1.63
St. Charles Community Schools	79.78%	75.00%	4.78
Great Lakes Bay Early College	100.00%	0.00%	100.00
St. Charles Community Middle/High School	95.45%	93.65%	1.80
St. Charles Virtual School	30.00%	13.33%	16.67
St. Ignace Area Schools	96.15%	92.86%	3.29
LaSalle High School	96.15%	92.86%	3.29
St. Johns Public Schools	94.26%	93.62%	0.64
St. Johns High School	96.85%	97.09%	-0.24
Wilson Center	81.25%	66.67%	14.58
St. Joseph Public Schools	96.70%	92.91%	3.79
St. Joseph High School	97.05%	92.91%	4.14
St. Louis Public Schools	87.32%	94.81%	-7.49
St. Louis High School	87.14%	96.05%	-8.91
Standish-Sterling Community Schools	89.52%	92.11%	-2.59
Standish-Sterling Central Jr/Sr High School	92.50%	92.04%	0.46
Stephenson Area Public Schools	84.38%	96.00%	-11.62
Stephenson Middle/High School	87.10%	96.00%	-8.90
Stockbridge Community Schools	93.00%	80.21%	12.79
Stockbridge Jr/Sr High School	93.68%	81.52%	12.16
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Sturgis Public Schools	84.07%	87.23%	-3.16
Sturgis High School	94.21%	93.56%	0.65
Sturgis Schools Adult Education Center	26.09%	50.00%	-23.91
Summerfield Schools	90.57%	93.55%	-2.98
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Summerfield Junior/Senior High School	91.67%	100.00%	-8.33
Superior Central School District	91.43%	82.76%	8.67
Superior Central School	94.12%	82.76%	11.36
Suttons Bay Public Schools	69.32%	55.21%	14.11
Suttons Bay Senior High School	100.00%	90.91%	9.09
Suttons Bay Virtual School	54.90%	35.71%	19.19
Swan Valley School District	93.71%	91.89%	1.82
Great Lakes Bay Early College	100.00%	0.00%	100.00
Swan Valley Adult and Alternative Education	66.67%	66.67%	0.00
Swan Valley High School	98.44%	95.56%	2.88
Swartz Creek Community Schools	85.62%	83.99%	1.63
Swartz Creek High School	97.58%	97.63%	-0.05
Swartz Creek Virtual Learning Center	31.11%	12.20%	18.91
Tahquamenon Area Schools	89.47%	90.74%	-1.27
Newberry Area School	89.47%	90.74%	-1.27
Tawas Area Schools	91.09%	90.91%	0.18
Tawas Area High School	91.84%	91.84%	0.00
Taylor School District	65.49%	65.49%	0.00
Taylor High School	83.48%	80.43%	3.05
Taylor Virtual Learning Academy	22.37%	32.39%	-10.02
Tecumseh Public Schools	88.24%	81.60%	6.64
JCC/LISD Academy: A Regional Middle College	75.00%	100.00%	-25.00
Tecumseh High School	96.55%	96.47%	0.08
Tecumseh Virtual Academy	77.59%	54.76%	22.83
Tekonsha Community Schools	94.44%	90.48%	3.96
Tekonsha Schools	94.44%	90.48%	3.96
Thornapple Kellogg School District	94.35%	91.82%	2.53
Thornapple Kellogg High School	94.32%	92.66%	1.66
Three Rivers Community Schools	89.13%	88.62%	0.51
Three Rivers High School	92.42%	90.24%	2.18
Traverse City Area Public Schools	90.51%	84.97%	5.54
Central High School	96.39%	93.77%	2.62
Traverse City High School	14.63%	8.77%	5.86
West Senior High	97.10%	93.85%	3.25
Trenton Public Schools	97.39%	97.88%	-0.49
Trenton High School	98.24%	97.88%	0.36
Tri County Area Schools	96.32%	89.70%	6.62
Early College at Montcalm Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Tri County Senior High School	96.27%	90.24%	6.03
Troy School District	94.34%	91.61%	2.73
Athens High School	96.81%	97.51%	-0.70
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Troy College and Career High School	47.54%	32.86%	14.68
Troy High School	98.56%	97.21%	1.35
Ubly Community Schools	100.00%	94.64%	5.36
Ubly Community High School	100.00%	94.64%	5.36
Union City Community Schools	83.78%	89.74%	-5.96
Union City High School	85.92%	89.61%	-3.69
Union City High School Early College	0.00%	100.00%	-100.00
Unionville-Sebewaing Area S.D.	90.16%	91.67%	-1.51
Unionville-Sebewaing High School	90.16%	91.67%	-1.51
Utica Community Schools	95.53%	94.21%	1.32
Adlai Stevenson High School	95.82%	95.38%	0.44
Eisenhower High School	98.30%	98.37%	-0.07
Henry Ford II High School	98.86%	98.46%	0.40
UCS Alternative Learning Center	55.71%	40.00%	15.71
Utica High School	96.13%	94.78%	1.35
Van Buren Public Schools	78.52%	84.19%	-5.67
Belleville High School	79.16%	85.27%	-6.11
Van Dyke Public Schools	79.04%	72.83%	6.21
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Lincoln High School	82.64%	78.81%	3.83
Success Academy	46.67%	45.45%	1.22
Vanderbilt Area Schools	50.00%	0.00%	50.00
Vanderbilt Area School	50.00%	0.00%	50.00
Vandercook Lake Public Schools	87.04%	80.00%	7.04
Vandercook Lake High School	91.84%	88.00%	3.84
Vandercook Lake Virtual Academy	66.67%	57.14%	9.53
Vassar Public Schools	85.29%	94.12%	-8.83
Great Lakes Bay Early College	100.00%	0.00%	100.00
Pioneer Work and Learn Center	33.33%	31.82%	1.51
Vassar Senior High School	85.07%	94.12%	-9.05
Vestaburg Community Schools	43.61%	47.56%	-3.95
Early College at Montcalm Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Vestaburg Community Alternative Education School	5.00%	11.11%	-6.11
Vestaburg Community High School	97.78%	87.88%	9.90
Vicksburg Community Schools	84.11%	83.86%	0.25
Vicksburg High School	94.74%	95.24%	-0.50
Vicksburg Pathways High School	41.18%	12.50%	28.68
Wakefield-Marenisco School District	100.00%	89.47%	10.53
Wakefield-Marenisco School	100.00%	89.47%	10.53
Waldron Area Schools	75.00%	80.00%	-5.00
Waldron Area Schools	100.00%	80.00%	20.00
Walkerville Public Schools	90.00%	77.78%	12.22
Walkerville Public School	90.00%	82.35%	7.65
Walled Lake Consolidated Schools	92.00%	93.09%	-1.09
Oakland Opportunity Academy	29.63%	42.86%	-13.23
Walled Lake Central High School	90.69%	93.87%	-3.18
Walled Lake Northern High School	96.77%	97.55%	-0.78
Walled Lake Western High School	94.54%	94.70%	-0.16
Warren Consolidated Schools	88.68%	88.24%	0.44
Cousino Senior High School	94.27%	94.72%	-0.45
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Sterling Heights Senior H.S.	89.14%	91.11%	-1.97
Warren Consolidated Community High School	65.00%	56.58%	8.42
Warren Mott High School	93.31%	90.40%	2.91
Warren Woods Public Schools	80.80%	81.46%	-0.66
International Academy of Macomb	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Warren Woods Enterprise H.S.	53.33%	60.53%	-7.20
Warren Woods Tower High School	88.84%	86.64%	2.20
Waterford School District	86.84%	85.22%	1.62
Children's Village School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Kingsley Montgomery School	33.33%	16.67%	16.66
Virtual Learning Academy Consortium	66.67%	100.00%	-33.33
Waterford Durant High School	60.53%	59.76%	0.77
Waterford Kettering High School	94.50%	95.11%	-0.61
Waterford Mott High School	90.97%	88.15%	2.82
Watersmeet Township School District	75.00%	100.00%	-25.00
Watersmeet Township School	75.00%	100.00%	-25.00
Watervliet School District	56.36%	67.74%	-11.38
W-A-Y Watervliet High School	15.63%	12.90%	2.73
Watervliet Senior High School	85.94%	96.20%	-10.26
Waverly Community Schools	94.12%	87.97%	6.15
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Waverly Senior High School	95.04%	91.44%	3.60
Wayland Union Schools	84.18%	74.71%	9.47
Career Connections Academy	75.00%	76.47%	-1.47
Wayland High School	87.72%	94.69%	-6.97
Wayne-Westland Community School District	78.95%	75.96%	2.99
John Glenn High School	92.95%	85.90%	7.05
Tinkham Alternative Education	37.65%	38.67%	-1.02
Wayne Memorial High School	84.91%	81.45%	3.46
Webberville Community Schools	90.70%	91.11%	-0.41
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Webberville High School	90.48%	92.68%	-2.20
West Bloomfield School District	96.62%	94.63%	1.99
International Academy	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Oakland Early College	94.83%	100.00%	-5.17
Oakland Opportunity Academy	100.00%	42.86%	57.14
West Bloomfield High School	97.37%	94.74%	2.63
West Branch-Rose City Area Schools	94.41%	80.00%	14.41
Ogemaw Heights High School	95.04%	80.62%	14.42
West Iron County Public Schools	97.92%	100.00%	-2.08
West Iron County High School	97.92%	100.00%	-2.08
West Ottawa Public School District	89.32%	89.81%	-0.49
Dunes Alternative High School	69.23%	71.43%	-2.20
West Ottawa High School Campus	92.29%	92.19%	0.10
Western School District	81.48%	81.10%	0.38
Western High School	87.56%	89.10%	-1.54
Woodville Community Center	55.81%	44.00%	11.81
Westwood Community School District	54.09%	52.54%	1.55
Robichaud Senior High School	80.00%	91.94%	-11.94
Westwood North Academy	43.33%	40.63%	2.70
Westwood Virtual Academy	42.42%	25.58%	16.84
Westwood Heights Schools	63.18%	51.48%	11.70
Academy West Alternative Education	49.51%	33.59%	15.92
Hamady Community High School	93.59%	96.47%	-2.88
White Cloud Public Schools	78.79%	89.87%	-11.08
White Cloud High School	78.46%	91.03%	-12.57
White Pigeon Community Schools	93.33%	85.45%	7.88
White Pigeon Jr/Sr High School	97.67%	85.19%	12.48
Whitefish Township Schools	100.00%	83.33%	16.67
Whitefish Township School	100.00%	83.33%	16.67
Whiteford Agricultural School District of the Counties of Lenawee and Monroe	97.96%	98.04%	-0.08
Monroe County Middle College	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Whiteford High School	97.87%	98.00%	-0.13
Whitehall District Schools	83.93%	87.21%	-3.28
White Lake Area Community Education	6.67%	0.00%	6.67
Whitehall Senior High School	96.55%	93.04%	3.51
Whitmore Lake Public School District	91.94%	89.47%	2.47
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Washtenaw International High School	100.00%	97.06%	2.94
Whitmore Lake High School	94.44%	89.39%	5.05
Whittemore-Prescott Area Schools	90.00%	91.84%	-1.84
Whittemore-Prescott Jr/Sr High School	90.00%	93.75%	-3.75
Williamston Community Schools	95.48%	93.46%	2.02
Virtual Learning Academy Consortium	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Williamston High School	95.45%	95.83%	-0.38
Wolverine Community School District	85.00%	81.25%	3.75
Wolverine Middle/High School	85.00%	86.67%	-1.67
Woodhaven-Brownstown School District	86.44%	81.07%	5.37
Maple Grove Alternative High School	11.11%	4.55%	6.56
Woodhaven High School	91.67%	91.94%	-0.27
Wyandotte, School District of the City of	83.62%	81.42%	2.20
Jo Brighton Skills Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Madison School	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Roosevelt High School	92.50%	90.83%	1.67
The Lincoln Center	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Wyoming Public Schools	82.99%	83.07%	-0.08
Wyoming High School	84.95%	84.52%	0.43
Yale Public Schools	88.89%	86.62%	2.27
Phoenix Alternative School	16.67%	0.00%	16.67
Yale Senior High School	92.03%	91.28%	0.75
Ypsilanti Community Schools	72.06%	68.53%	3.53
ACCE	39.34%	46.67%	-7.33
ACTech High School	82.80%	84.06%	-1.26
Early College Alliance	100.00%	90.00%	10.00
Washtenaw Alliance for Virtual Education	34.38%	33.33%	1.05
Washtenaw International High School	98.46%	97.06%	1.40
Ypsilanti STEMM Middle College	92.59%	77.78%	14.81
Zeeland Public Schools	92.25%	94.14%	-1.89
Venture Academy	72.73%	79.49%	-6.76
Zeeland East High School	94.95%	96.00%	-1.05
Zeeland West High School	95.02%	98.35%	-3.33
ACE Academy (SDA) -Glendale, Lincoln, Woodward, Jefferson	20.51%	6.52%	13.99
AGBU Alex-Marie Manoogian School	97.37%	100.00%	-2.63
AGBU Alex-Marie Manoogian School	97.37%	100.00%	-2.63
Academic and Career Education Academy	5.41%	12.20%	-6.79
Academic and Career Education Academy	8.00%	14.29%	-6.29
Academy for Business and Technology	45.83%	56.10%	-10.27
Academy for Business and Technology High School	50.00%	57.50%	-7.50
Advanced Technology Academy	84.47%	83.12%	1.35
Advanced Technology Academy	85.29%	83.12%	2.17
Alternative Educational Academy of Iosco County	11.94%	26.39%	-14.45
Alternative Educational Academy of Iosco County	12.00%	27.08%	-15.08
Alternative Educational Academy of Ogemaw County	22.64%	17.50%	5.14
Alternative Educational Academy of Ogemaw County	22.22%	20.00%	2.22
Ann Arbor Learning Community	39.68%	61.90%	-22.22
Ann Arbor Learning Community	45.45%	78.57%	-33.12
Arbor Preparatory High School	81.08%	88.73%	-7.65
Arbor Preparatory High School	81.08%	88.73%	-7.65
Arts Academy in the Woods	80.00%	86.41%	-6.41
Arts Academy in the Woods	79.41%	87.25%	-7.84
Arts and Technology Academy of Pontiac	85.71%	72.73%	12.98
Arts and Technology Academy of Pontiac	85.19%	72.73%	12.46
Battle Creek Area Learning Center	55.41%	67.16%	-11.75
Battle Creek Area Learning Center	57.63%	70.91%	-13.28
Bay City Academy	93.75%	69.23%	24.52
North Central Academy Campus	87.50%	88.89%	-1.39
Bay-Arenac Community High School	32.89%	32.69%	0.20
Bay-Arenac Community High School	36.67%	37.21%	-0.54
Black River Public School	95.89%	92.86%	3.03
Black River Public School Middle/High	95.89%	92.86%	3.03
Blended Learning Academies Credit Recovery High School	48.33%	36.96%	11.37
Blended Learning Academies Credit Recovery High School	53.49%	36.36%	17.13
Blue Water Middle College	66.67%	62.37%	4.30
Blue Water Middle College Academy	66.67%	62.37%	4.30
Bradford Academy	83.64%	87.60%	-3.96
Bradford Academy	85.85%	88.98%	-3.13
Byron Center Charter School	100.00%	93.33%	6.67
Byron Center Charter School	100.00%	93.33%	6.67
Canton Preparatory High School	91.30%	87.64%	3.66
Canton Preparatory High School	91.30%	88.64%	2.66
Capstone Academy Charter School (SDA)	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Capstone Academy Charter School (SDA) - South Campus	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Casman Alternative Academy	30.43%	0.00%	30.43
Casman Alternative Academy	28.57%	0.00%	28.57
Central Academy	97.50%	97.37%	0.13
Central Academy	97.50%	97.37%	0.13
Cesar Chavez Academy	91.12%	89.02%	2.10
Cesar Chavez High School	94.38%	90.59%	3.79
Chandler Park Academy	88.36%	94.30%	-5.94
Chandler Park Academy - High School	90.14%	94.30%	-4.16
Charlevoix Montessori Academy for the Arts	75.00%	100.00%	-25.00
Charlevoix Montessori Academy for the Arts	100.00%	100.00%	0.00
Charlton Heston Academy	89.13%	84.38%	4.75
Charlton Heston Academy	89.13%	84.38%	4.75
Charyl Stockwell Academy	97.96%	98.21%	-0.25
Charyl Stockwell Academy - High School	97.96%	98.21%	-0.25
Clara B. Ford Academy (SDA)	35.00%	39.29%	-4.29
Clara B. Ford Academy (SDA)	41.18%	50.00%	-8.82
Concord Academy - Boyne	87.50%	81.82%	5.68
Concord Academy - Boyne	87.50%	90.00%	-2.50
Concord Academy - Petoskey	100.00%	60.00%	40.00
Concord Academy - Petoskey	100.00%	64.29%	35.71
Conner Creek Academy East	88.61%	75.90%	12.71
Conner Creek Academy East - Michigan Collegiate	88.61%	75.61%	13.00
Cornerstone Health and Technology School	86.14%	94.55%	-8.41
Cornerstone Health and Technology School	87.88%	95.41%	-7.53
Countryside Academy	79.41%	88.89%	-9.48
Countryside Academy - Middle/High School	81.82%	92.00%	-10.18
Covenant House Academy Detroit	9.32%	12.20%	-2.88
Covenant House Academy Detroit - Central Site	16.07%	18.18%	-2.11
Covenant House Academy Detroit - East Site	7.89%	10.81%	-2.92
Covenant House Academy Detroit - Southwest Site	8.11%	12.50%	-4.39
Covenant House Academy Grand Rapids	14.88%	25.13%	-10.25
Covenant House Academy Grand Rapids	18.00%	26.96%	-8.96
Creative Technologies Academy	90.48%	92.00%	-1.52
Creative Technologies Academy	90.48%	92.00%	-1.52
Crossroads Charter Academy	82.98%	87.50%	-4.52
Crossroads Charter Academy (7-12)	84.78%	87.50%	-2.72
Da Vinci Institute	30.21%	28.13%	2.08
Da Vinci Institute (7-12)	30.77%	30.91%	-0.14
DeTour Arts and Technology Academy	33.33%	38.46%	-5.13
DeTour Arts and Technology Academy	33.33%	50.00%	-16.67
Detroit Community Schools	61.04%	86.25%	-25.21
Detroit Community Schools - High School	64.38%	87.18%	-22.80
Detroit Edison Public School Academy	97.78%	92.41%	5.37
Detroit Edison Public School Academy - High School	98.88%	93.59%	5.29
Detroit Leadership Academy	80.28%	74.12%	6.16
Detroit Leadership Academy High School	81.43%	76.83%	4.60
Detroit Public Safety Academy	87.10%	84.62%	2.48
Detroit Public Safety Academy	89.83%	86.84%	2.99
Flat River Academy	33.33%	57.14%	-23.81
Flat River Academy	33.33%	57.14%	-23.81
Flex High School of Michigan	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
FlexTech High School	60.92%	51.14%	9.78
FlexTech High School	62.96%	56.41%	6.55
FlexTech High School - Novi	81.03%	79.66%	1.37
FlexTech High School - Novi	81.82%	82.35%	-0.53
Frontier International Academy	87.68%	89.29%	-1.61
Frontier International Academy	87.68%	89.29%	-1.61
Gateway To Success Academy	41.03%	24.24%	16.79
Gateway To Success Academy	45.16%	28.57%	16.59
Grand River Preparatory High School	85.71%	85.12%	0.59
Grand River Preparatory High School	87.10%	86.55%	0.55
Grand Traverse Academy	97.62%	95.31%	2.31
Grand Traverse Academy	97.62%	95.31%	2.31
Great Lakes Cyber Academy	53.45%	49.48%	3.97
Great Lakes Cyber Academy - MS/HS	76.43%	60.87%	15.56
Henry Ford Academy	94.17%	95.33%	-1.16
Henry Ford Academy	95.76%	95.33%	0.43
Hope Academy of West Michigan	73.91%	57.89%	16.02
Hope Academy of West Michigan	73.91%	57.89%	16.02
Hope of Detroit Academy	81.13%	80.65%	0.48
Hope of Detroit Academy - Middle/High	85.71%	85.71%	0.00
ICademy Global	53.85%	57.89%	-4.04
ICademy Global	60.87%	78.57%	-17.70
Insight School of Michigan	43.00%	36.50%	6.50
Insight School of Michigan	52.20%	43.54%	8.66
International Academy of Flint	80.00%	76.32%	3.68
International Academy of Flint (K-12)	82.35%	76.32%	6.03
Jackson Preparatory & Early College	79.37%	85.71%	-6.34
Jackson Preparatory & Early College	81.97%	85.71%	-3.74
Jalen Rose Leadership Academy	94.87%	89.47%	5.40
Jalen Rose Leadership Academy	96.10%	90.43%	5.67
Kalamazoo Covenant Academy	6.67%	9.62%	-2.95
Kalamazoo Covenant Academy	5.88%	10.34%	-4.46
Kensington Woods Schools	68.18%	85.00%	-16.82
Kensington Woods Schools	68.18%	85.00%	-16.82
Lakeside Charter School - Albion	56.00%	23.08%	32.92
Lakeside Charter School - Albion	66.67%	28.57%	38.10
Lakeside Charter School - Kalamazoo	6.06%	33.33%	-27.27
Lakeside Charter School - Kalamazoo	15.38%	64.29%	-48.91
Landmark Academy	86.00%	97.44%	-11.44
Landmark Academy	87.76%	97.44%	-9.68
Life Skills Center of Pontiac	6.67%	24.44%	-17.77
Life Skills Center of Pontiac	10.71%	23.33%	-12.62
LifeTech Academy	44.90%	38.60%	6.30
LifeTech Academy	43.90%	43.75%	0.15
Lighthouse Academy	36.94%	32.58%	4.36
Lighthouse Academy	21.43%	31.25%	-9.82
Lighthouse Academy - Eagle Village	57.14%	80.37%	-23.23
Lighthouse Academy - North Campus	71.79%	54.55%	17.24
Lighthouse Connections Academy	68.75%	40.00%	28.75
Lighthouse Connections Academy	80.49%	57.14%	23.35
Madison Academy	85.71%	85.00%	0.71
Madison Academy - High School	87.80%	87.18%	0.62
Marshall Academy	83.33%	12.50%	70.83
Marshall Academy	83.33%	12.50%	70.83
Merritt Academy	97.92%	90.24%	7.68
Merritt Academy	97.92%	90.00%	7.92
Michigan Connections Academy	70.42%	73.97%	-3.55
Michigan Connections Academy	73.53%	75.00%	-1.47
Michigan Great Lakes Virtual Academy	49.39%	41.34%	8.05
Michigan Great Lakes Virtual Academy	54.36%	45.65%	8.71
Michigan International Prep School	33.72%	31.48%	2.24
Michigan International Prep School	41.73%	34.33%	7.40
Michigan Mathematics and Science Academy	79.49%	79.17%	0.32
Michigan Mathematics and Science Academy Dequindre	83.78%	90.48%	-6.70
Michigan Online School	13.23%	17.14%	-3.91
Michigan Online School	15.91%	28.24%	-12.33
Michigan Virtual Charter Academy	46.39%	38.74%	7.65
Michigan Virtual Charter Academy	52.69%	44.30%	8.39
Muskegon Covenant Academy	5.33%	17.54%	-12.21
Muskegon Covenant Academy	5.00%	15.56%	-10.56
Muskegon Heights Public School Academy System	63.64%	69.57%	-5.93
Muskegon Heights Academy	67.74%	71.11%	-3.37
Nah Tah Wahsh Public School Academy	100.00%	63.64%	36.36
Nah Tah Wahsh Public School Academy	100.00%	70.00%	30.00
New School High	93.33%	73.68%	19.65
New School High	93.33%	73.68%	19.65
NexTech High School	45.65%	67.35%	-21.70
NexTech High School	51.35%	66.67%	-15.32
NexTech High School of Lansing	42.86%	28.81%	14.05
NexTech High School of Lansing	47.62%	32.00%	15.62
The Early College @ Lansing Community College	33.33%	100.00%	-66.67
North Star Academy	75.00%	58.33%	16.67
North Star Academy	75.00%	54.55%	20.45
Oakland International Academy	83.12%	77.01%	6.11
Oakland International Academy - High School	84.21%	79.27%	4.94
Ojibwe Charter School	85.71%	66.67%	19.04
Ojibwe Charter School	85.71%	66.67%	19.04
Old Redford Academy	85.07%	71.07%	14.00
Old Redford Academy - High	87.02%	71.79%	15.23
Outlook Academy	42.86%	26.32%	16.54
Outlook Academy	37.50%	62.50%	-25.00
Pansophia Academy	57.14%	69.57%	-12.43
Pansophia Academy	58.82%	75.00%	-16.18
Pathways Academy	19.44%	10.20%	9.24
Pathways Academy	23.64%	8.11%	15.53
Pontiac Academy for Excellence	78.57%	83.87%	-5.30
Pontiac Academy for Excellence	80.49%	83.87%	-3.38
Regents Academy	4.76%	3.08%	1.68
Regents Academy	7.69%	4.65%	3.04
Relevant Academy of Eaton County	28.57%	13.51%	15.06
Relevant Academy of Eaton County	31.58%	13.64%	17.94
Riverside Academy	93.18%	96.10%	-2.92
Riverside Academy - West Campus	93.18%	96.10%	-2.92
Saginaw Learn to Earn Academy	16.67%	14.29%	2.38
Saginaw Learn to Earn Academy	14.29%	18.18%	-3.89
St. Clair County Intervention Academy	5.88%	5.26%	0.62
St. Clair County Intervention Academy	10.00%	0.00%	10.00
Star International Academy	96.63%	96.20%	0.43
Star International Academy	97.73%	96.15%	1.58
Success Virtual Learning Centers of Michigan	17.79%	19.41%	-1.62
Success Virtual Learning Centers of Michigan	20.67%	24.89%	-4.22
Summit Academy North	91.61%	90.98%	0.63
Summit Academy North High School	92.81%	91.67%	1.14
Taylor Preparatory High School	84.95%	93.33%	-8.38
Taylor Preparatory High School	85.87%	94.38%	-8.51
The Paris Academy	3.23%	7.81%	-4.58
The Paris Academy	3.70%	8.62%	-4.92
Trillium Academy	95.35%	95.65%	-0.30
Trillium Academy	95.35%	100.00%	-4.65
Universal Academy	96.55%	88.89%	7.66
Universal Academy	96.49%	90.57%	5.92
Universal Learning Academy	100.00%	96.00%	4.00
Universal Learning Academy	100.00%	96.00%	4.00
University Preparatory Academy (PSAD)	89.05%	91.78%	-2.73
University Preparatory Academy (PSAD) - High School	90.37%	92.41%	-2.04
University Preparatory Art & Design	91.38%	88.79%	2.59
University Preparatory Art & Design Middle/High	91.38%	89.62%	1.76
University Preparatory Science and Math (PSAD)	84.69%	91.53%	-6.84
University Preparatory Science and Math (PSAD) High School	84.69%	93.10%	-8.41
Uplift Michigan Academy	31.25%	26.47%	4.78
Uplift Michigan Academy	52.94%	44.44%	8.50
Virtual Learning Academy of St. Clair County	20.00%	17.95%	2.05
Virtual Learning Academyof St. Clair County	14.29%	16.00%	-1.71
Vista Meadows Academy	29.41%	15.15%	14.26
Vista Meadows Academy	40.00%	20.83%	19.17
Voyageur Academy	90.53%	80.41%	10.12
Voyageur College Prep	91.40%	81.25%	10.15
W-A-Y Academy	22.55%	24.65%	-2.10
W-A-Y Academy - Chicago Site	38.46%	27.27%	11.19
W-A-Y Academy - Roseville Site	66.67%	72.73%	-6.06
W-A-Y Academy - Vernor Site	15.09%	20.00%	-4.91
WAY Academy - Flint	45.24%	55.56%	-10.32
WAY Academy - Flint, Flint Campus	48.39%	56.52%	-8.13
WAY Michigan	30.51%	29.27%	1.24
WAY Michigan	28.57%	36.21%	-7.64
WSC Academy	66.67%	47.83%	18.84
WSC Academy - Ypsilanti Campus	64.71%	62.50%	2.21
Washtenaw Technical Middle College	78.61%	83.62%	-5.01
Washtenaw Technical Middle College	78.61%	83.62%	-5.01
Wellspring Preparatory High School	81.82%	70.41%	11.41
Wellspring Preparatory High School	82.89%	73.40%	9.49
West MI Academy of Environmental Science	87.88%	80.65%	7.23
West MI Academy of Environmental Science	90.63%	80.65%	9.98
West Michigan Aviation Academy	91.03%	93.62%	-2.59
West Michigan Aviation Academy	91.03%	93.62%	-2.59
Will Carleton Charter School Academy	54.55%	80.00%	-25.45
Will Carleton Charter School Academy	54.55%	80.00%	-25.45
Windover High School	42.55%	46.74%	-4.19
Great Lakes Bay Early College	75.00%	0.00%	75.00
Windover High School	32.26%	36.96%	-4.70
Youth Advancement Academy	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Youth Advancement Academy	0.00%	0.00%	0.00
Montcalm Area ISD	20.00%	7.14%	12.86
Wolverine Education Center	18.75%	18.75%	0.00

Graduation rates rose statewide despite the pandemic

The state does not report graduate counts when the numbers are so small that an individual might be identified. In these cases the graduation rate is reported as zero. Source: Michigan Center for Education Performance and Information.

More than a nudge: To get more students to and through college, intensive advising may be key

2021-01-26T14:53:23+00:00

Michelle Snyder’s job is to help more than 600 high school juniors and seniors through the college application process each year. It’s a daunting task in normal times, now made even tougher by the pandemic.

“The biggest tool in my toolbox was being able to walk to my classroom, grab the kid out of class and be like ‘Hey, this is due tomorrow,’” says Snyder, the college counselor for Crockett High School in Austin, Texas. “Right now, I’m just the scary college lady who sends emails.”

COVID is highlighting the downsides of losing face-to-face contact in many aspects of life, including education, just as more and more research underscores how critical school relationships can be to students’ success.

The latest example is a new study of College Forward, a Texas-based program designed to help low-income, first-generation students navigate the college application process. Students who randomly gained access to the program, which embeds recent college graduates in high schools like Crockett to offer support, saw their chances of enrolling in college jump by 8 percentage points.

The research contrasts with the disappointing recent results of low-cost efforts to boost college-going, while also pointing to a concrete way to help students from low-income families in the years ahead.

As more students return to school buildings, “Making sure that we continue to invest in these sort programs is going to be even more important,” said Gabrielle Lohner, one of the study’s authors.

College Forward embeds coaches in a number of Texas high schools, where they work with a group of first-generation or low-income students starting junior year.

At Snyder’s school, pre-COVID, the program offered after-school workshops on topics like filling out financial aid forms and one-on-one help from coaches. That support continues as students enter college.

“I’m in this environment of positivity and encouragement at all times,” said Alex Meija, describing his experience in College Forward at Crockett. Now a freshman in college, he joined College Forward with his best friend and quickly built a rapport with his coach, which helped ensure the college application process wasn’t just a difficult chore. “That’s honestly something every student needs.”

Not only are students in the program more likely to enroll in college — 66% versus 58% in a control group — they also are more likely to go to colleges with higher graduation rates, according to the study. Students who participated were also much more likely to have stayed consistently enrolled in college three years after high school: 45% versus 33%.

It’s too soon to say for sure whether the program affects students’ chances of actually earning a degree, but researchers will continue tracking it.

The evidence on College Forward is encouraging, even if the ongoing need for outside organizations to provide college help is disheartening to some.

“I don’t think College Forward should exist,” said Austin Buchan, the organization’s executive director. “In my perfect world, you better believe that we would not have a ridiculous student to counselor ratio in the state of Texas.”

But the kind of support College Forward provides is costly. The program spends $4,000 per student served, which perhaps explains why it doesn’t exist everywhere — and why enthusiasm has focused on low-cost alternatives in recent years.

A variety of those “low-touch” options have emerged as policymakers, researchers, and philanthropists, backed up by some initially encouraging research, hoped that low-income students might be “nudged” into college success. As those programs have expanded, though, research has shown they provide few, if any benefits.

An initiative by the College Board to mail packets of information about the college application process had basically zero effect on students’ likelihood of enrolling in college. A similar packet-mailing approach in Michigan also had little effect. Neither did a text message campaign encouraging students to fill out financial aid forms.

Another approach that has gained traction: virtual college advising, in which eligible low- and middle-income students can get tips from an outside advisor by text, phone, or email. So far, that initiative has produced modest gains. Participating students are slightly more likely to attend selective colleges or those with high graduation rates, according to two recent studies (though they are no more likely to attend college overall).

“I can tell you pre-COVID the number of meetings and conversations I had around tech-enabled advising and remote advising,” said Ben Castleman, a University of Virginia professor who co-authored the College Forward paper. “That was the trend.”

Castleman is the director of an institute focused on educational nudges and wrote a book promoting the idea. He still thinks they have some promise, but he’s grown more skeptical of efforts that try to help students without first forming relationships with them.

“I think we’ve seen in various educational contexts how hard it has been to replicate what we can do in person,” he said.

That doesn’t mean that more intensive programs always work, or that less intensive ones never do — there are notable exceptions to both. And perhaps the insights from each can be combined. Another study by Castleman found evidence that text message reminders are more effective when they come from students’ own high school counselors, rather than a third-party organization.

Still, the largest benefits seem to come from programs that go beyond a light nudge, offering counseling both in high school and in college as well as generous financial aid.

“There’s a thread: Some of the biggest impacts that we will see are from programs that are thinking about what are the root causes and what are ways we can try to help students to navigate the larger challenges,” said Dominique Baker, a higher education researcher at Southern Methodist University. “And that costs money.”

‘Reinvesting in the brilliance in our backyard’: Young Denver alumni push for change

2021-01-08T17:26:21+00:00

When TeRay Esquibel was 16, he found the power of his voice. It’s part of what inspired him a decade later to co-found Ednium: The Alumni Collective, a new group of young Denver Public Schools alumni advocating for policy changes in the district.

Esquibel was a student at Denver’s Abraham Lincoln High School when he became a father. His son was born three months premature, weighing less than 2 pounds. Esquibel had dreams of being the first in his family to graduate from college, but he also faced doubters.

Through an internship aimed at reframing young parenthood, Esquibel told his story and interviewed other teen fathers. He won awards and spoke to hospital staff about the microaggressions he’d experienced, such as his son’s doctors turning their backs to him.

“When I found my voice, things got really clear,” Esquibel said. “At a point in time when it didn’t feel like people saw me, finding a way to utilize my voice gave me power.”

That lesson stuck with Esquibel when he went to the University of Denver, and after he graduated. And it was on his mind the first time he gathered a group of recent Denver Public Schools alumni to meet with district officials, an effort that eventually became Ednium.

Most alumni involved with Ednium are people of color, and all are between 17 and 30. The group has two purposes: To empower young graduates by providing leadership training, and to advocate for things they wish they had when they were students. Ednium is seeking to become a nonprofit organization, and it has received funding from local philanthropies and support from education advocacy organization RootED, for which Esquibel works.

“This is reinvesting in the brilliance in our backyard,” said Esquibel, 27. “This is mobilizing the brilliance to be the powerful force for change that we claim we want them to be.”

Ednium’s first two requests to the district, where a majority of students are Black and Hispanic, are to make courses in ethnic studies and financial literacy requirements to graduate.

“A lot of the people around me, when they get to college, they’re being offered these credit cards and offered all this debt, not knowing what that is,” said Kai Suematsu, a 2018 graduate of George Washington High who is now a student at the University of Colorado Boulder.

As a high school freshman, Suematsu took a one-semester financial literacy course where he learned practical skills like the difference between savings and checking accounts and how to do his taxes. They’re skills he still uses today. But most Denver students aren’t learning the same things in school. Last year, the financial literacy class was offered at just four Denver high schools. Only 157 students in the 92,000-student district took it, according to Ednium.

“Why am I the exception?” Suematsu asked the Denver school board last month. “Why couldn’t my friends who are now in credit card debt have the opportunity to take those classes?”

Ednium alumni also spoke about the need for more ethnic studies classes. Former Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova, who resigned last month, had made increasing the number of students taking courses like African American history and Chicano studies one of her priorities. In 2019, only 8% of Denver high school students took an ethnic studies course. The number of courses offered at each high school ranged from several to none at all.

“In the fourth grade, I learned about our state bird,” said Richard Maez, a graduate of John F. Kennedy High School who now works for the district. “Seventh grade, I learned about the pharaoh Tutankhamun. Tenth grade, we explored the Roman Empire. And in 12th grade, we spent one week discussing the Mexican Revolution. It wasn’t until college that I was able to take a course exploring race and ethnicity and its impact on the United States.”

East High graduate Stephanie Lopez said it’s important for students to see themselves in the curriculum. “A cultural and ethnic studies curriculum can provide the space for students to see themselves, as well as the space to have real conversations about race,” she said.

Ednium’s advocacy dovetails with a push from current Denver high school students to diversify the curriculum. The school board has been receptive, passing a resolution this fall to add the “comprehensive historical and contemporary contributions of Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities” to the curriculum from kindergarten to 12th grade.

But the resolution doesn’t make ethnic studies a graduation requirement. Esquibel said he believes the district can both diversify the curriculum and prioritize ethnic studies. Thus far, Ednium has gotten a positive response from district leaders, starting with former superintendent Cordova and her senior staff, who have met with the alumni regularly.

“What I’ve been telling the alumni is we got their attention,” Esquibel said. “But now we’re at the hard part. There’s going to be resistance somewhere. How do we deal with it?”

Tennessee’s ACT average dips for second straight year after six years of growth

2020-11-24T17:37:54+00:00

Tennessee’s average ACT score declined slightly for a second straight year, while the number of students taking the college entrance exam also dropped, according to results released Friday.

Public school students in the Class of 2020 finished with an overall average of 19.9 on a scale of 36, down from 20 last year and 20.2 the year before.

The dips, while small, keep Tennessee on a downward trajectory after six years of slow but steady growth on the college entrance exam.

Equally concerning was an across-the-board drop in the percentage of Tennessee students taking the ACT test after record-high participation last year.

About 97% of students participated, down a full percentage point from the Class of 2019. Among historically underserved groups of black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students, the rates went down 2%. Participation by English language learners dropped from 97% to 91%.

While Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn characterized the showing as “relatively stable,” the results are a disappointment for a state that had been closing in on former Gov. Bill Haslam’s goal of reaching the previous national average of 21 by 2020. Just three years earlier, the state celebrated that its ACT average continued to tick upward — in defiance of a national slump — as Tennessee provided students with a free do-over for any student who wanted to retake the exam.

Haslam’s successor, Gov. Bill Lee, has invested more money in vocational education programs to get students ready for college and career. His administration has not identified improving ACT performance as a major strategic goal.

The declines in both scores and participation were not due to disruptions in testing or schooling caused by the coronavirus. Most graduating seniors took the exam during their junior year and had the option of retaking it in the fall of their senior year — months before the pandemic emerged in the U.S.

However, this year’s results don’t bode well for next year’s graduating seniors, whose testing was significantly disrupted by COVID-19. The Class of 2021 mostly took their exams this fall after the ACT’s springtime administration was canceled. Under the state’s retake program, seniors potentially could take the test again in December or next spring.

The latest ACT results represent the second round of recent data showing a decline in postsecondary readiness in Tennessee.

In September, the department reported a dip in Tennessee’s high school graduation rate, even as the state relaxed requirements for seniors to receive their diplomas during the pandemic.

The backsliding in both areas drew a sharp rebuke Friday from JC Bowman, who leads the Professional Educators of Tennessee.

“In less than two years, under this current administration, there has been a lack of focus on postsecondary readiness and measurable objectives,” he said in a statement.

Bowman urged state policymakers to “look at the lack of measurable goals for postsecondary readiness in the Tennessee Department of Education’s strategic plan and ask how they plan to address this in the future.”

The national ACT average now sits at 20.6, the lowest level in 10 years. It’s important to note that Tennessee calculates its average differently by excluding private school students and using students’ highest scores instead of their most recent ones.

Below, use our searchable, sortable table to find your local high school’s average on the college entrance exam.

District Name	School Name	2020 Average Composite Score	2019 Average Composite Score
Achievement School District	Fairley High School	14.5	13.2
Achievement School District	Hillcrest High School	15.3	15.5
Achievement School District	Martin Luther King Preparatory High School	14.3	15.7
Achievement School District	Pathways in Education - TN	*	14.6
Achievement School District	Pathways in Education - Whitehaven	*	*
Alcoa	Alcoa High School	21.7	21.1
Alvin C York Institute	Alvin C. York Institute	19.8	19.3
Anderson County	Anderson County High School	19.5	20.1
Anderson County	Clinton High School	18.5	18.8
Arlington	Arlington High	23	22.8
Bartlett	Bartlett High School	21.6	21.5
Bedford County	Cascade High School	20.6	20.8
Bedford County	Community High School	17.9	19
Bedford County	Shelbyville Central High School	18.2	18.3
Benton County	Big Sandy School	18.8	17.9
Benton County	Camden Central High School	19.5	19.2
Bledsoe County	Bledsoe County High School	17.8	18.3
Blount County	Heritage High School	19.3	18.8
Blount County	Samuel Everett School of Innovation	20.4	*
Blount County	William Blount High School	19.7	19.9
Bradford	Bradford High School	21.8	21.8
Bradley County	Bradley Central High School	18.6	19.3
Bradley County	Bradley County Virtual School	18.9	19.7
Bradley County	North Cleveland GOAL Academy	14.3	14.8
Bradley County	Walker Valley High School	21.1	21.7
Bristol	Tennessee High School	21	21.2
Bristol	Tennessee Online Public School	22	21.6
Campbell County	Campbell County Comprehensive High School	17	18.3
Campbell County	Jellico High School	17.1	17.5
Cannon County	Cannon County High School	18.9	18.7
Carter County	Cloudland High School	18.1	19.2
Carter County	Hampton High School	17.7	18.1
Carter County	Happy Valley High School	18.5	18.3
Carter County	Unaka High School	18.9	18.4
Cheatham County	Cheatham Co Central	18.4	18.8
Cheatham County	Harpeth High School	21	20.4
Cheatham County	Riverside Academy	*	*
Cheatham County	Sycamore High School	19.4	19.6
Chester County	Chester County High School	19.7	20.2
Claiborne County	Claiborne High School	17.5	18.5
Claiborne County	Cumberland Gap High School	19.6	19.3
Clay County	Clay County High School	18.3	18.9
Cleveland	Cleveland High	20.1	20.5
Cocke County	Cocke Co High School	18.2	18.4
Cocke County	Cosby High School	18.2	18.6
Coffee County	Coffee County Central High School	19.5	19.4
Collierville	Collierville High School	24.6	24.7
Crockett County	Crockett County High School	19.1	18.8
Cumberland County	Cumberland County High School	20.3	20.7
Cumberland County	Stone Memorial High School	20.8	20.9
Cumberland County	The Phoenix School	14.6	15.5
Davidson County	Antioch High School	16.5	17
Davidson County	Cane Ridge High School	16.7	16.8
Davidson County	Cora Howe School	*	*
Davidson County	East Nashville Magnet High School	17.8	18.5
Davidson County	Glencliff High School	16	15.9
Davidson County	Hillsboro High	21.6	19.9
Davidson County	Hillwood High	17.4	18.9
Davidson County	Hume - Fogg High	28.2	28.2
Davidson County	Hunters Lane High	16	16
Davidson County	John Overton High	17.5	18.1
Davidson County	KIPP Nashville Collegiate High School	21.3	21.1
Davidson County	Knowledge Academies High School	18.2	17.9
Davidson County	Lead Academy	18.9	18.9
Davidson County	Maplewood High	14.7	15.2
Davidson County	Martin Luther King Jr School	26	26
Davidson County	McGavock High	18.6	17.9
Davidson County	Middle College High	22.1	23.3
Davidson County	MNPS Virtual School	21.4	20.2
Davidson County	Nashville Big Picture High School	17.2	20.5
Davidson County	Nashville School Of The Arts	21.6	21.8
Davidson County	Pearl-Cohn High	14.7	15.2
Davidson County	RePublic High School	20	20.3
Davidson County	STEM Prep High School	20.3	19.9
Davidson County	Stratford STEM Magnet School	17.4	16.9
Davidson County	The Academy at Hickory Hollow	15.4	15.5
Davidson County	The Academy at Old Cockrill	15.6	16.8
Davidson County	The Academy at Opry Mills	16.6	17
Davidson County	The Cohn Learning Center	*
Davidson County	Whites Creek High	15.2	15.4
Decatur County	Riverside High School	18.8	19.6
DeKalb County	De Kalb County High School	19.4	18.9
Department of Children's Services	DCS Affiliated Schools	14.6	16.3
Department of Children's Services	Wilder Youth Development Center	*	14
Dickson County	Creek Wood High School	20.4	19
Dickson County	Dickson County High School	20.8	20.2
Dyer County	Dyer County High School	20.1	20.7
Dyersburg	Dyersburg High School	21.4	20.8
Elizabethton	Elizabethton High School	20.3	20.8
Fayette County Public Schools	Fayette Ware Comprehensive High School	17.6	17.2
Fayetteville	Fayetteville High School	20.1	20.6
Fentress County	Clarkrange High School	19.2	20
Franklin County	Franklin Co High School	18.5	19.6
Franklin County	Huntland School	18.8	19
Germantown	Houston High School	25.6	26.3
Gibson Co Sp Dist	Gibson County High School	19.6	20.4
Gibson Co Sp Dist	South Gibson County High School	21.6	21.8
Giles County	Giles Co High School	19.3	18.4
Giles County	Richland School	19.5	20.3
Grainger County	Grainger Academy	*	12.9
Grainger County	Grainger High School	19.3	18.5
Grainger County	Washburn School	16.7	16.6
Greene County	Chuckey Doak High School	18.7	19
Greene County	North Greene High School	18.6	18.6
Greene County	South Greene High School	18.9	20
Greene County	West Greene High School	19	18.2
Greeneville	Greeneville High School	21.9	21.9
Grundy County	Grundy County High School	17.2	16.9
Hamblen County	Morristown East High	19.2	19.6
Hamblen County	Morristown West High	20.3	20.5
Hamilton County	Brainerd High School	14.9	14.9
Hamilton County	Central High School	18.1	18.5
Hamilton County	Chatt High Center For Creative Arts	25.2	25.9
Hamilton County	Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy	20.8	19.3
Hamilton County	Chattanooga School For Arts And Sciences Upper	24.1	23.5
Hamilton County	East Hamilton School	21.6	21.8
Hamilton County	East Ridge High School	16.3	16.6
Hamilton County	Hamilton County Collegiate High at Chattanooga State	25.7	26.3
Hamilton County	Hamilton County High School	*	16.5
Hamilton County	Hamilton County Virtual School	*	*
Hamilton County	Hixson High School	19.6	18.6
Hamilton County	Ivy Academy Inc.	19.3	18.3
Hamilton County	Lookout Valley Middle / High School	19.2	19.6
Hamilton County	Ooltewah High School	20.2	19.6
Hamilton County	Red Bank High School	18.3	18.7
Hamilton County	Sale Creek Middle / High School	20.8	19.9
Hamilton County	Sequoyah High School	16.2	15.8
Hamilton County	Signal Mountain Middle/High School	25.8	25.3
Hamilton County	Soddy Daisy High School	21	21.2
Hamilton County	STEM School Chattanooga	24	23.6
Hamilton County	The Howard School	14.3	14.8
Hamilton County	Tyner Academy	15.9	16.6
Hancock County	Hancock High School	18.2	17.7
Hardeman County Schools	Central High School	17.5	17.9
Hardeman County Schools	Middleton High School	18	17.4
Hardin County	Hardin County High School	18.5	19
Hawkins County	Cherokee High School	18.2	18.6
Hawkins County	Clinch School	16.1	*
Hawkins County	Volunteer High School	18.8	19.3
Haywood County	Haywood High School	16.4	17.2
Henderson County	Lexington High School	20.5	20.5
Henderson County	Scotts Hill High School	20.2	21.2
Henry County	Henry Co High School	20.2	20.7
Hickman County	East Hickman High School	18.2	19.2
Hickman County	Hickman Co Sr High School	20.3	18.6
Hollow Rock - Bruceton	Central High School	19.5	18.8
Houston County	Houston Co High School	18.4	18.6
Humboldt City Schools	Humboldt Junior/Senior High School	16.5	17.4
Humphreys County	Mc Ewen High School	19.1	19.5
Humphreys County	Waverly Central High School	19.5	21.2
Huntingdon Special School District	Huntingdon High School	19.1	20.7
Jackson County	Jackson County High School	18.2	18.7
Jefferson County	Jefferson Co High School	19.9	20.1
Johnson City	Science Hill High School	22.7	22.7
Johnson County	Johnson Co High School	17.7	18.4
Kingsport	Dobyns - Bennett High School	22	21.9
Knox County	Austin East High/Magnet	16	16.3
Knox County	Bearden High School	22.9	23.1
Knox County	Career Magnet Academy	20.8	21.5
Knox County	Carter High School	18.6	18.8
Knox County	Central High School	20.7	20
Knox County	Dr. Paul L. Kelley Volunteer Academy	15.5	15.6
Knox County	Farragut High School	24.9	24.5
Knox County	Fulton High School	16.7	17
Knox County	Gibbs High School	19.6	19.8
Knox County	Halls High School	20.5	21.8
Knox County	Hardin Valley Academy	22.6	22.6
Knox County	Karns High School	20	19.9
Knox County	Knox Adaptive Education Center	*	*
Knox County	L N STEM Academy	26.5	25.7
Knox County	Powell High School	19.6	19.8
Knox County	South Doyle High School	19	18.7
Knox County	West High School	22.7	22.1
Lake County	Lake Co High School	18.1	18.7
Lauderdale County	Halls High School	20	19
Lauderdale County	Ripley High School	16.3	17
Lawrence County	Lawrence Co High School	19.2	19.7
Lawrence County	Loretto High School	19.9	19.5
Lawrence County	Summertown High School	18.2	18.4
Lenoir City	Lenoir City High School	20.3	20
Lewis County	Lewis Co High School	19.4	19.1
Lincoln County	Lincoln Central Academy	*
Lincoln County	Lincoln County High School	20.6	20.1
Loudon County	Greenback School	19.7	20.2
Loudon County	Loudon High School	20.1	19.7
Macon County	Macon County High School	19.6	19.6
Macon County	Red Boiling Springs School	18.7	18.9
Madison County	Jackson Central-Merry Early College High	20	19.8
Madison County	Liberty Technology Magnet High School	15.4	15.3
Madison County	Madison Academic Magnet High School	25.9	25.5
Madison County	North Side High School	16.6	16.8
Madison County	South Side High School	17.4	17.5
Marion County	Marion Co High School	19.5	20.1
Marion County	South Pittsburg High School	19.4	20.2
Marion County	Whitwell High School	18.6	18.6
Marshall County	Cornersville School	20	21.9
Marshall County	Forrest School	20.5	20.8
Marshall County	Marshall Co High School	18.6	19.9
Maryville	Maryville High School	23.8	23.5
Maury County	Columbia Central High School	18.1	19.2
Maury County	Culleoka Unit School	18.4	18.9
Maury County	Hampshire Unit School	18.8	19.8
Maury County	Mt Pleasant High School	19	19.4
Maury County	Santa Fe Unit School	20.3	19.8
Maury County	Spring Hill High School	19.3	20.2
McKenzie	McKenzie High School	20.4	20.5
McMinn County	Central High School	19.1	19.3
McMinn County	McMinn High School	19.8	20.4
McNairy County	Adamsville High School	19.1	19.4
McNairy County	McNairy Central High School	19.1	19.4
Meigs County	Meigs County High School	18.7	20.3
Milan	Milan High School	20.2	20.2
Millington Municipal Schools	Millington Central High School	18.8	18.4
Monroe County	Sequoyah High School	18.5	18.3
Monroe County	Sweetwater High School	18	19.1
Monroe County	Tellico Plains High School	19.5	19.3
Montgomery County	Clarksville High	20.9	21.5
Montgomery County	Kenwood High	17.9	18
Montgomery County	Middle College @ Austin Peay State University	25.9	25.5
Montgomery County	Montgomery Central High	20.1	19.8
Montgomery County	Northeast High	19.2	19.2
Montgomery County	Northwest High	18.8	19
Montgomery County	Rossview High	22.3	22.3
Montgomery County	West Creek High	18.9	19
Moore County	Moore County High School	20.6	21.7
Morgan County	Central High School	18.3	18.1
Morgan County	Coalfield School	17	17.4
Morgan County	Morgan County Career and Technical Center	13.2	14.6
Morgan County	Oakdale School	16.4	19.5
Morgan County	Sunbright School	16.8	17.8
Oak Ridge	Oak Ridge High School	22.7	23.3
Obion County	Obion County Central High School	19	19.7
Obion County	South Fulton Middle / High School	20.2	21.8
Oneida	Oneida High School	19.5	19.5
Overton County	Livingston Academy	19.6	18.7
Perry County	Perry County High School	18.7	17.3
Perry County	Perry County Virtual School	*
Pickett County	Pickett Co High School	20.4	20.4
Polk County	Copper Basin High School	19.3	19.3
Polk County	Polk County High School	18.5	19.1
Putnam County	Cookeville High School	20.3	21.1
Putnam County	Monterey High School	18.6	18.5
Putnam County	Upperman High School	19.9	19.5
Putnam County	VITAL: Upper Cumberland e-Learning Network	*
Rhea County	Rhea County High School	19	19.3
Richard City	Richard Hardy Memorial School	19.2	19.9
Roane County	Harriman High School	19.5	19.1
Roane County	Midtown Educational Center	14.7	15.3
Roane County	Midway High School	20.5	19.8
Roane County	Oliver Springs High School	20.6	20.2
Roane County	Roane County High School	21	20.9
Roane County	Rockwood High School	18.8	19
Robertson County	East Robertson High School	18.5	19.2
Robertson County	Greenbrier High School	19.7	19.7
Robertson County	Jo Byrns High School	19.2	19.5
Robertson County	Robertson Co. Virtual School	21.4	*
Robertson County	Robertson County Alternative Learning Center	15.9	14.7
Robertson County	Springfield High School	18.9	18.3
Robertson County	Tennessee Connections Academy 9-12	19.2
Robertson County	White House Heritage High School	21.5	21.3
Rutherford County	Blackman High School	21.7	21.2
Rutherford County	Central Magnet School	31.2	31
Rutherford County	Eagleville School	21.3	20
Rutherford County	Holloway High School	15.4	16.5
Rutherford County	Lavergne High School	17.8	18
Rutherford County	Oakland High School	20.5	20.1
Rutherford County	Riverdale High School	20.4	20.6
Rutherford County	Rockvale High School	19.1
Rutherford County	Siegel High School	20.8	20.9
Rutherford County	Smyrna High School	19.1	19.4
Rutherford County	Stewarts Creek High School	20.8	21.3
Scott County	Scott High School	17.6	18.6
Sequatchie County	Sequatchie Co High School	18.9	19.1
Sevier County	Gary Hardin Academy	15.4	16.7
Sevier County	Gatlinburg Pittman High	22.3	22.8
Sevier County	Northview Senior Academy	18.5	18.8
Sevier County	Pigeon Forge High School	18.5	19.3
Sevier County	Sevier County High School	19.7	20.4
Sevier County	Seymour High School	20.8	21.2
Shelby County	B. T. Washington High	14.2	14.8
Shelby County	Bolton High	16.7	17.7
Shelby County	Carver College and Career Academy	12.7
Shelby County	Central High	18.9	18.4
Shelby County	City University School Of Liberal Arts	17.1	15.6
Shelby County	Compass Community School Midtown Campus	17.7
Shelby County	Cordova High School	17.6	17.2
Shelby County	Craigmont High	15.3	16.1
Shelby County	Douglass High	15.2	15.3
Shelby County	East High	16.2	15.7
Shelby County	Freedom Preparatory Academy	18	19.4
Shelby County	Germantown High	20	20.4
Shelby County	Hamilton High	15.2	14.4
Shelby County	Hollis F. Price Middle College	20.3	20.1
Shelby County	Kingsbury High	16.2	15.8
Shelby County	KIPP Memphis Collegiate High School	16.9	16.3
Shelby County	Kirby High	14.9	15.3
Shelby County	Manassas High	14.9	14.7
Shelby County	Melrose High	14.9	15.9
Shelby County	Memphis Academy of Health Sciences High School	16.6	17.1
Shelby County	Memphis Academy Of Science Engineering Middle/High	17.3	16.7
Shelby County	Memphis Business Academy High School	17.6	18
Shelby County	Memphis School of Excellence	18.3	18.5
Shelby County	Memphis Virtual School	16.8	17.9
Shelby County	Middle College High	22.7	22.9
Shelby County	Mitchell High	15.1	15.4
Shelby County	Northwest Prep Academy	14	13.7
Shelby County	Oakhaven High	15.6	14.6
Shelby County	Overton High	17.4	18
Shelby County	Power Center Academy High School	16.6	17.4
Shelby County	Raleigh-Egypt High	15.3	16.3
Shelby County	Ridgeway High	16.4	17.2
Shelby County	Sheffield High	14.2	13.9
Shelby County	Soulsville Charter School	17.7	17.8
Shelby County	Southwind High	16.7	16.6
Shelby County	Trezevant High	14.6	14.2
Shelby County	Westwood High	14.5	16.1
Shelby County	White Station High	23.2	22.8
Shelby County	Whitehaven High	17.4	17.6
Shelby County	Wooddale High	15.3	15.4
Smith County	Gordonsville High School	20.6	19.6
Smith County	Smith County High School	18.7	19.3
South Carroll	Clarksburg School	17	20.4
Stewart County	Stewart Co High School	20	19.9
Sullivan County	Sullivan Central High School	19	20.5
Sullivan County	Sullivan East High School	19.8	20.1
Sullivan County	Sullivan North High School	17.9	18.5
Sullivan County	Sullivan South High School	20.5	21.1
Sumner County	Beech Sr High School	20.6	21
Sumner County	E B Wilson	18.9	19.1
Sumner County	Gallatin Senior High School	19.4	19.1
Sumner County	Hendersonville High School	22.6	21.9
Sumner County	Merrol Hyde Magnet School	30.4	30.3
Sumner County	Portland High School	19.2	19.2
Sumner County	Station Camp High School	21.7	21.7
Sumner County	Sumner County Middle College High School	25.3	26.8
Sumner County	Sumner County Middle Technical College High School at Portla	*	15.9
Sumner County	Westmoreland High School	20	20.4
Sumner County	White House High School	20.4	21
Tennessee School for Blind	Tenn School For Blind	*	*
Tennessee School for the Deaf	Tennessee School for the Deaf Upper School	*	*
Tipton County	Brighton High School	20.6	20.3
Tipton County	Covington High School	19.2	19
Tipton County	Munford High School	20.7	21.7
Trenton	Peabody High School	19.3	18.8
Trousdale County	Trousdale Co High School	20	21
Tullahoma	Tullahoma High School	21.8	20.4
Unicoi County	Unicoi Co High School	18.8	19.7
Union City	Union City High School	21.5	22.8
Union County	Union County High School	17	16.9
Van Buren County	Van Buren Co High School	17.7	18.9
Warren County	Warren County High School	18.9	18.7
Washington County	Daniel Boone High School	19.2	20.4
Washington County	David Crockett High School	19.7	19.2
Washington County	Tennessee Virtual Learning Academy	*	*
Washington County	University School	26.7	26.9
Wayne County	Collinwood High School	17.9	18.8
Wayne County	Frank Hughes School	22.3	17
Wayne County	Wayne County High School	17.3	18.3
Weakley County	Dresden High School	20.2	21
Weakley County	Gleason School	20.5	20.8
Weakley County	Greenfield School	20.1	22.1
Weakley County	Westview High School	20.5	20.7
West Carroll Sp Dist	West Carroll Junior/Senior High School	19.8	19.5
White County	White County High School	18.9	19.8
Williamson County	Brentwood High School	27.6	27.5
Williamson County	Centennial High School	23.3	22.8
Williamson County	Fairview High School	23.2	22
Williamson County	Franklin High School	26.6	27.1
Williamson County	Fred J Page High School	25.4	25.6
Williamson County	Independence High School	24.7	24.5
Williamson County	Nolensville High School	25	23.8
Williamson County	Ravenwood High School	27.4	27.5
Williamson County	Renaissance High School	25.3	25
Williamson County	Summit High School	22.9	23.8
Wilson County	Barry Tatum Academy	21.1	22.3
Wilson County	Lebanon High School	20.3	19.1
Wilson County	Mt. Juliet High School	22.7	22.9
Wilson County	Watertown High School	21	19.9
Wilson County	Wilson Central High School	21.4	20.6

Tennessee’s 2020 ACT composite scores by school

Source: Tennessee Department of Education

Correction: Nov. 24, 2020: A previous version of this story said no ACT retake is currently scheduled for the Class of 2021. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said Tennessee is covering the cost of seniors to take the exam again, possibly in December or next spring.

In a data-driven world, Tennessee looks to add more statistics coursework to high school math

2020-11-06T21:49:57+00:00

More statistics, less advanced algebra.

Tennessee is trying to make math education more relevant for more high school students preparing for college and careers.

After a yearlong review of its math standards from kindergarten through graduation, state education leaders believe that content being taught in upper grades isn’t as useful as it could be in a data-driven world.

The Tennessee State Board of Education gave initial approval Friday to proposed revisions that increase coursework in basic statistics, including understanding and using data. A final vote is set for February.

The changes would usher in a notable shift in high school math beginning with the 2023-24 academic year. Tennessee would join states like California and Georgia in elevating statistics, data science, and quantitative reasoning to prepare students for a world where those concepts and skills are critical to fields like marketing, finance, polling, insurance, education, and medical research.

“We are living in a statistical society,” said Stephanie Kolitsch, a math education professor at the University of Tennessee-Martin, who led teams of Tennessee math educators that developed the recommendations.

“We felt — based on several reports and the information we gathered about college and career trajectories — students were not getting the foundation of statistics that they needed to have,” she said Thursday during a presentation to board members.

High school math sequences are already crowded and packed with topics to cover. The additions would require rejiggering STEM-related coursework, shifting some content from the first three years of high school to fourth-year courses that are more specialized for science, technology, engineering, and math.

The swap drew questions from board member Robert Eby, a chemical engineer in Oak Ridge who has led major technical work in federal facilities that help produce nuclear fuel for the Department of Energy. He worried about delaying introduction of key math concepts like complex numbers until senior year. And because not every senior signs up for pre-calculus, some students might not be exposed to them at all.

“By pulling standards out, are we watering down that technical path?” Eby asked.

Kolitsch said she didn’t think so. Such concepts would still be taught to students pursuing technical careers and then reinforced in college, she said. Currently, more college freshmen in Tennessee are signing up for statistics than algebra and calculus.

“The vast majority of our students are not going into the STEM fields. And we think that their time would be better spent being prepped for something that will make them a mathematically literate citizen,” Kolitsch said about using math to solve real-world problems after graduation.

America is doing some soul-searching about how to modernize math education, especially in high school where scores have been essentially flat for decades on the Nation’s Report Card.

According to the latest round of federal tests released last week, U.S. high school seniors’ math scores didn’t improve between 2015 and 2019. While not broken down by state, the data showed that only one in four high school seniors is proficient or advanced in math, while 40% have math skills considered “below basic.”

In Tennessee, reviews of academic standards happen every six years in subjects that rotate on different years. A year ago, the state launched a website inviting Tennesseans to comment publicly on its math standards. Teams of math teachers from K-12 and higher education reviewed more than 30,000 comments and, based also on their own expertise, proposed revisions that garnered another 45,000 comments during a second round of public feedback. In September, their final suggestions were approved by a committee appointed by Gov. Bill Lee and legislative leaders.

Revisions proposed for K-8 math standards are mostly minor but would introduce statistical concepts at a younger age. The recommended changes for high school were harder to agree on, especially moving some content from Algebra II to a pre-calculus course offered in the fourth year of high school.

“We had long, involved discussions,” Kolitsch said. “The deciding factor in every case went back to the question: ‘Is this something that every student needs to know by the time they graduate high school?’”

The approved standards will be incorporated into new instructional materials, teacher training, and end-of-course tests. Next year, the state plans to launch a related review of standards for fourth-year high school math courses like pre-calculus, applied math, and statistics.

“Standards are the core and they drive instruction and they also drive an aligned assessment,” said Amy Owen, the board’s director of policy and research. “That’s why we have a couple-year gap to make sure all of those things are in place before these go into classrooms.“

You can see the proposed standards here.

Pandemic’s impact on Colorado’s colleges creates questions about the future of part-time instructors

2020-10-23T21:19:21+00:00

Life as an adjunct instructor means constant uncertainty, explained Alex Wolf-Root.

Adjuncts such as Wolf-Root, a philosophy instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder, are part-time workers who must contend with low pay and little job security. Many hold doctorates and perform research for free in the hopes they will someday land full-time employment at a university, he said.

And they are an outsized share of the nationwide teaching staff.

“The odds are stacked against you,” Wolf-Root said of ever getting a full-time job at a university somewhere. “But I like to teach, I like to help students critically engage.”

As the pandemic forces colleges and universities to slash their budgets, part-time instructors like Wolf-Root, the base of the teaching staff at colleges, are worried about partly or even entirely losing their teaching hours. Without the protections enjoyed by tenured faculty, adjunct instructors could see their positions cut and openings for college-level instructors diminish everywhere.

The situation doesn’t bode well for students.

Cuts to part-time positions could mean fewer course offerings and larger class sizes. If cuts extend to full-time faculty positions, students will feel the impact.

Studies show the rise in the use of adjunct faculty by colleges, among many negative effects, has lowered student GPA and contriibuted to a decline in student persistence from year to year, said Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.

“It’s not because adjuncts are poor instructors. It’s because we’ve structured their work so it’s impossible for them to create a quality teaching and learning environment,” Kezar said. “They’re hired last minute, don’t have time to prepare, and don’t have time to even understand what the textbooks are so they’re reading things at the same time as the students with very little input on what they’re teaching.”

Over four decades, the proportion of part-time professors has grown nationally to include about 40% of college instructional staff, according to the American Association of University Professors. That’s compared with 29% of instructors who are professors with tenure or on a track to tenure.

Wolf-Root, who is also the United Campus Workers Colorado union president, said CU Boulder also has an outsize share of part-time faculty.

So far, the university has not cut its part-time teaching staff. Nationally, over 360,000 college workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, Kezar said. The numbers don’t spell out how many of those workers are part-time instructors.

But professors such as Cecilia Orphan, a University of Denver assistant professor of higher education, said that she expects that schools such as CU Boulder and others could look to their part-time workers for cuts.

During the Great Recession, schools cut back on the number of tenured positions, she said. Schools hired back many after the economic downturn. This time around, the hardships could fall on adjunct professors because of the uncertain outlook of the pandemic, she said.

“It seems like they’re going to try and do everything they can to protect us, the full-time faculty, which could mean that they will hire fewer adjunct faculty,” Orphan said.

Thomas Bonn, a CU Boulder philosophy doctoral student, said some departments across the country are cutting funding for graduate students or have halted graduate admissions altogether. Graduate students teach about 15% of college classes nationwide. Many like Bonn also want to teach someday.

Bonn said the pandemic may push him in another direction, especially if adjunct professors start to lose jobs in greater numbers.

“I’d like to teach philosophy professionally, but given that COVID has greatly worsened an already terrible job market, I’m strongly considering alternative options,” he said.

To trim its budget, CU Boulder has imposed furloughs, cut salaries, and reduced hiring and some administrative costs. Its enrollment this fall has fallen, and it has received less state money due to the pandemic-induced recession.

School spokeswoman Deborah Mendez-Wilson said the school doesn’t anticipate any further cuts this school year and that the priority is a high-quality learning experience for students.

“Specific personnel decisions are being made at the school and college level, and the campus continues to emphasize the priority of serving our academic mission in these decisions,” she said. “We value our adjunct and part-time faculty, whose classroom contributions greatly benefit students pursuing their academic goals at CU Boulder.”

Kezar said schools nationwide could still lose more students in the spring that would prompt further financial hardship.

While worries persist, both Kezar and Wolf-Root said they hope colleges rethink how they view staff — not just through a cost-cutting lens, but also as a question of maintaining their quality of education.

Wolf-Root said dissatisfaction with working conditions, among other issues, prompted adjunct instructors to unionize in the spring. He hopes the newly formed United Campus Workers Colorado can work with the school to ensure adjuncts are treated fairly.

“People need to think bigger and reimagine, like, why do we have these institutions and structures?” he said. “Let’s make them work for us.”

It’s not just imperative for bettering working on a campus, Wolf-Root said, but also for the students who have worked and sacrificed to invest in their education.

Some Detroit students need more support in college. A new team of charter schools wants to change that.

2020-10-08T16:35:47+00:00

Four charter school management companies in Detroit have entered an unusual collaboration to help their graduates succeed in college.

Detroit students often don’t get the support they need to earn a four-year college degree, especially if their parents didn’t attend college. The companies want to reverse that trend: They promise that within a decade, 90% of their high school graduates will complete a full year of college coursework — much higher than the state average.

People with bachelor’s degrees earn 31 percent more on average than those with an associate’s degree and 84 percent more than those with a high school diploma over their lifetimes. Members of the charter school collaborative chose to focus on improving college outcomes rather than directing their students toward career and technical education.

“You’ve got a group of schools here who are really committed to college or bust,” said Jack Elsey, executive director of the Detroit Children’s Fund. “They recognize that we talk about careers more in places where kids are poor than we talk about college. I think you have a group of schools here who recognize that their kids are fully capable of going to college and doing well. But it’s not going to be easy.”

Strategies may include hiring additional college counselors or staff to follow up with graduates to ensure they’re on track to complete their first year of college.

The group, called the Detroit Charter High School Collaborative, promises to share data and best practices around college attainment, an unusual level of cooperation between private management companies in Detroit. It’s part of a larger effort organized by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce to prepare more people to enter the workforce in southeast Michigan.

Members plan to meet in coming months to settle on shared strategies. The Detroit Children’s Fund, a nonprofit, will provide funding and information about best practices for supporting recent graduates.

The collaboration means “more access to resources for students, it puts them in a better situation of opportunity,” said Ralph Bland, president of New Paradigm for Education, one of the largest charter networks in the city.

The companies, which also include Equity Education, Promise Schools, and University Prep Schools, collectively serve more than 3,000 students, many of whom are African-American and economically disadvantaged.

They are fueling a citywide effort to give Detroit students the support they need to earn a college degree. Individual teachers work to encourage students to follow through on college applications. The Detroit Promise scholarship aims to lighten the financial burden for standout learners. And the Detroit district set aside money to ensure every school has a person dedicated to preparing students for college.

The barriers facing high school graduates in Detroit are daunting, especially if they don’t have family members who attended college, or if they are among the 85% of city students who are economically disadvantaged.

Over the last year, Chalkbeat spent time with recent graduates to show just how much support many need to succeed in college. Nearly half of graduates from Detroit’s main district who make it to college must take remedial courses. Among Detroit charter school graduates, that figure is between 32% and 75%.

Their goal — 90% of students completing a year of college — is ambitious. Between 25% and 60% of 2017 graduates from schools run by participating management companies completed one year of college coursework within two years of graduating. Statewide, that figure is just 52%, one reason Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made higher education attainment a pillar of her education policy.

Danielle Jackson, CEO of University Prep Schools, said the collaboration would help the network identify new ways to help students choose colleges and navigate challenges once they’ve arrived on campus.

“Every one of our students can graduate from college, we know they can,” Jackson said in a statement. “It’s up to us to figure out how we can get them there.”

Schwinn, Lee ‘sound the alarm’ about learning loss while pushing for in-person classes in Tennessee

2020-09-24T01:34:11+00:00

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn estimated Wednesday that Tennessee’s proficiency rates will drop by 50% for third grade reading and even more for math because of schooling disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The learning loss, she said, is expected to be especially hard on younger students and disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, such as students of color, those from low-income families, and children with disabilities.

Schwinn and Gov. Bill Lee said the projections should “sound the alarm” about the potential long-term impact of the coronavirus on children. Speaking during the governor’s weekly news conference on COVID-19, they made their case for getting students back into school buildings as soon as possible during the public health crisis.

State officials estimate that about half of Tennessee’s 1 million public school students are learning remotely this fall, with the largest districts in Memphis and Nashville operating 100% virtually. The governor has been adamant that school systems should provide both in-person and online learning options and that learning happens best inside of a brick-and-mortar classroom.

However, several educators told Chalkbeat they have questions about the data used to formulate the projections, as well as the administration’s emphasis on getting kids back in classrooms instead of empowering district leaders and parents to make those decisions based on local community spread of the virus.

“My biggest question is, where did this data come from? What districts provided it?” asked Joey Hassell, superintendent of schools in Haywood County, near Memphis. “We have not provided any data and, as far as I know, the state has not asked for it.”

In Memphis, the state’s largest district, Shelby County Schools, began testing students this week to see how much knowledge they retained since last school year. Those results are expected in mid-October.

Schwinn said the state’s estimates for learning loss are based in part on a study the Tennessee Department of Education conducted in June in partnership with the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, also known as CREDO, and the education nonprofit NWEA. She also cited early diagnostic testing data voluntarily provided by some school districts, as well as the results of an optional state assessment that more than 30,000 students statewide reportedly took at the beginning of the academic year.

“That’s given us a relatively good landscape, or at least a prediction of what that will look like statewide,” Schwinn said.

Asked for details about the data and which districts contributed, a spokeswoman for the department could not immediately provide that information.

The state’s projections were shared one day after several school superintendents told state lawmakers that the gap in learning between high- and low-performing students has widened this year. One superintendent, Linda Cash of Bradley County Schools, said early testing showed that her district’s lowest-performing students had fallen behind up to another two years.

Schwinn said data collected by the state shows that learning loss is affecting students consistently across Tennessee, whether they live in urban, suburban, or rural communities. She was especially concerned about students learning to read in a state where only a third of its third graders have been reading on grade level.

“It is really hard to teach a child to read, but it is really hard to teach a child to read through a computer,” she said.

She and her boss said the state must act quickly to support student learning during the pandemic, but offered no immediate ideas.

“We’ve just gotten this data,” Lee said about the state’s next steps. “We have a real urgency to address it, and we’ll be doing it in the weeks ahead.”

State officials have not yet named members of a special commission that the legislature created in June to examine the educational challenges caused by the pandemic, including learning recovery. That panel is supposed to report its findings to lawmakers by Jan. 1.

Following the press conference, U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander praised the governor’s focus on getting more students back into classrooms.

“The message is clear,” said the Tennessee Republican, “that children, especially young children who are further behind already, need to be in school so they can be taught in-person so their learning loss is less dramatic.”

Hassell, who leads Haywood County Schools, said no one is arguing that point.

“I don’t know a superintendent who doesn’t think it’s wise for kids to return to school in person,” he said. “But those decisions during this unprecedented time have to be based on local context.”

Applications for student aid in Illinois fell during the pandemic

2020-07-13T19:32:11+00:00

High school seniors across Illinois were applying for financial aid at rates that could have outpaced or at least met those of previous years. But then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has plans for almost every high school student to apply for federal student aid. He has touted the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, also known as FAFSA, as a way to make college more accessible to students.

Since the start of the pandemic, however, numbers from the state Department of Education indicate students have found it more difficult to submit FAFSA applications. From mid-March to the end of June, the state saw about 4,000 fewer applications from high school seniors.

The state has seen a slight dip in applications overall. There were 15,000 fewer applications submitted from high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. The current FAFSA application completion rate is at 60.6 percent for high school seniors, down 4.2 percent from the previous year.

The drop in FAFSA forms is even more significant for low-income high school seniors — those who need it the most. FAFSA applications for MAP-eligible students in Illinois are down nearly 7 percent from last year, according to numbers from the National College Attainment Network.

Lynne Baker, the managing director of communications at the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, said low-income students, as well as students in rural areas may struggle to fill out FAFSA forms, in part because of a lack of access to critical technology. ISAC runs a grant program for low-income secondary students in remote areas of the state, and Baker said reaching students through technology had been a barrier even before the pandemic.

According to FAFSA data, seven out of 11 districts with less than a 30% FAFSA completion rate are located in rural areas. At Zeigler-Royalton Community Unit School District, in rural Franklin County, completion rates dropped from between 35% to 39% in 2019 to less than 20% this year. Similarly, at Williamsfield Community School District, completion rates dropped from between 45% to 49% to between 20% to 24% within the year.

Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools has maintained its historically high FAFSA completion rates throughout the pandemic. About 3 in 4 students submit a FAFSA at CPS, a district that requires seniors to have a detailed post-secondary plan in order to graduate, also known as “Learn. Plan. Succeed.”

Ladder Up, which partners with CPS to assist students with FAFSA applications, has continued to offer services virtually, but has seen a 95% drop in remote requests, Carly Oishi, the director of financial capability, said.

The dip in applications comes ahead of a new state law that aims to boost completion rates through graduation requirements. The law, which will take effect in the fall, mandates all high school students apply for federal student aid to graduate. Families can sign a waiver to opt out of the requirement.

Most students filled out their FAFSA application for the 2019-2020 school year before the stay-at-home order started. But, with uncertainty about school reopenings in the fall, completion rates could continue to drop off in the upcoming academic year, even if FAFSA applications are a priority.

As unemployment skyrockets around the country, many students have seen significant changes in their family income. The FAFSA application relies on tax returns prior to the pandemic, and students who are now experiencing a change in their financial circumstances may worry that their financial aid will not be enough, Baker said. The commission suggests students review the circumstances with their financial aid office instead of putting their plans on hold.

Students who contact their university can request a professional judgment, in which a financial aid administrator manually reviews and makes changes to a FAFSA. For universities, a professional judgment is a long and extensive process. Oishi said universities risk losing federal funding if just one professional judgment has an error.

“Administrators or financial aid officers (could push) back on how many professional judgments they would allow,” Oishi said. “ On the flip side, though, if you really need kids to go to your school to stay open, then they might not be able to have such a strict stance.”

Detroit valedictorians speak: ‘There won’t be another senior class that goes through what we went through’

2020-06-17T21:08:17+00:00

The global pandemic may have spoiled prom and graduation plans for Detroit’s high school graduates. But it has given them this: the knowledge that if they can overcome the effects of the coronavirus, they can crush any obstacle.

That’s a message we heard over and over again from some of the city’s valedictorians, whose accomplishments over the last few years put them at the top of their classes.

“We will use this as motivation … to go and succeed in our postsecondary options,” said Von Elson, a graduate of Jalen Rose Leadership Academy. “We won’t just go out as any senior class. We will go out as the best senior class to ever leave high school.”

In this unusual year, which saw school buildings shut down and learning shift online to halt the spread of the virus, Chalkbeat Detroit and Detroit Public Television’s One Detroit teamed up to give valedictorians in the Detroit school district and charter schools a virtual outlet to share their messages with the community.

This project features the videotaped graduation speeches of nearly a dozen valedictorians who opted to participate. They’re a small fraction of the dozens of valedictorians named by city high schools this year, so to see a full list, scroll down.

Here are excerpts from the valedictorian messages, and their individual speeches.

Shyla Butler

Graduate, Denby High School. Plans to attend Benedict College, majoring in psychology and social work and minoring in business administration.

“To my fellow graduates, I want you all to know that we’re not just limited to the stigma and the statistics that we are labeled under. I hope that you all choose a path that makes you truly happy and brings you peace. The fact that we’re all decorated with accomplishments is just a testament to our perseverance and commitment to excellence. As we part ways, I wish you all love, strength, and happiness. You will lose some, but you will also win some. You will hurt, but you will heal. Cherish your high school experiences, friendships, teachers, and the knowledge that you have gained. One day, you will reflect on those exact memories with a smile.”

Von Elson

Graduate, Jalen Rose Leadership Academy. Plans to attend Eastern Michigan University, majoring in engineering.

“This is a moment we’ve been waiting for our whole lives, the moment to graduate. And now it’s finally here … There won’t be another senior class that goes through what we went through, which is why we will go on to bigger and better things which will prove how a virus won’t stop us from becoming great.”

Sarah Kabala

Graduate, Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine.

“Now we stand here at the end of the maze, facing an obstacle that nobody could have predicted or has ever faced before. But now, it’s our turn, Class of 2020. Soon, we’ll be out. Though some of our plans have been halted or changed, we have to remember to not let the COVID-19 steal any more of our time. We must claim back our lives and accomplish our dreams.”

Ellington King

Graduate, Renaissance High School. Plans to attend North Carolina A&T State University, majoring in finance and minoring in political science.

“None of us will ever forget how this pandemic caused an abrupt end to our senior year. Sadly, what has happened is beyond our control. However, what is within our control is our mindset and how we choose to react. While some may use this time and this summer to sulk and become lackadaisical, we must use this time as an opportunity for growth. It’s an amazing time to learn a skill, strengthen personal weaknesses, and prepare ourselves as we enter college.”

Therron Montgomery

Graduate, Cass Technical High School. Plans to attend the University of Michigan, studying computer science and music.

“I want to thank my mom for getting me this far and giving me the best life I could have asked for … I’ve had some wonderful people help guide me on my journey to this point. So, I would like to thank Principal (Lisa) Phillips, our vice principals, faculty, teachers, counselors, and of course my friends for always being there for me. Even though we can’t have a traditional graduation because of this pandemic, we are still very fortunate to have reached this milestone in our lives. With everything we’ve been through, it’ll only make us stronger.”

Davielle Randall

Graduate, Detroit College Preparatory @ Northwestern. Plans to attend Henry Ford College and pursue a career as a dentist.

“In whatever you desire to be, be productive citizens, desire to be great. Remember, you can do anything you conceive of. Believe it, do the work, you can achieve it. We’re all in this together. Educate ourselves and be the change that is needed in this world. We have shown that we are resilient, courageous, and capable of overcoming adversities, like with the coronavirus, aka COVID-19. Many of us know someone who has been afflicted with this or succumbed to it, yet we are still here.”

Stephanie Rodriguez-Vazquez

Graduate, Academy of the Americas. Plans to attend Wayne State University and study film.

“I’m sad to have to say bye to all of you and will hold every memory that I’ve made with you close to my heart. Most of us have known each other since we were little kids, and now we get to see each other graduate. When I’m older and have a house of my own, I’ll look at my high school years and will … smile. I know these last four years was stressful and scary at times, but now look at us. Now we get to go on to the next chapter of our lives.”

Alexander Smith

Graduate, Mumford High School. Plans to attend Wayne State University and major in construction management.

“First and foremost, I would like to thank God, my family, my friends, and the whole Mumford staff that supported me throughout my high school years. We have so much more to accomplish, so we can remember the lessons here at Mumford. No matter what you do and where you go, always remember this day. What feels like the end is often the beginning.”

Tahiat Tisha

Graduate, Cass Technical High School. Plans to attend University of Michigan, majoring in computer science and minoring in business.

“The word valedictorian came from a Latin word, valedicere, meaning to bid farewell. So I’m here to bid farewell to all my lovely peers to a brighter and better future. No, it wasn’t fair to us to not have a proper prom … or a full blown graduation. But we have made all these sacrifices to keep our community safe. And that’s what makes us the most unforgettable class of 2020.”

Aniyah Williams

Graduate, Renaissance High School. Plans to attend Michigan State University, studying pre-medicine.

“My next piece of advice is to not make it your goal in life to be absolutely perfect. I challenge you all to not strive for perfection, but the purpose you have in the world. My last piece of advice to you all will probably resonate with you the most during these times, and that is to not worry about your setbacks in life, but to focus on how you can come back even stronger. Yes, I know this is not the senior year you guys wanted, but let’s make the best of it. Keep setting higher goals for yourself. Come back and show everyone that you still prevailed and made something of yourself.”

Mya Wilson

Graduate, Early College of Excellence. Plans to attend Wayne State University, studying pre-medicine.

“We were born in the midst of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and now we are graduating during a pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement. It always seems as though we are being tested but through it all, we remain strong and persevere. And when you have made a bad choice, it is never too late to make a good one. Remember, you are the creator of your legacy. With that being said, let’s graduate knowing that we, the class of 2020, are stronger than we think.”

Class of 2020 Detroit Valedictorians

These are the top students who earned the valedictorian honor in the Detroit Public Schools Community District and many of the charter high schools. Is your school missing? Send us an email to detroit.tips@chalkbeat.org

Academy of the Americas

Stephanie Rodriguez-Vazquez

Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine

Nowrin Islam

Tafsia Tonmi

Sarah Kabala

Cass Technical High School

Emmanuel Hernandez

Therron Montgomery

Tahiat Tisa

Central High School

Savannah Hicks

Cody High School

Deatrianna Hawkins

Communication & Media Arts High School

Tiara Carey

Davis Aerospace Technical High School

Alisha Owens

Detroit Collegiate Preparatory High School @ Northwestern

Davielle Randall

Aliyah Arnold

Denby High School

Shyla Butler

Cheyanne Robinson

Detroit International Academy for Young Women

Fabiha Siddika

Detroit School of Arts

Jaden Seldon

East English Village Preparatory Academy

Leniah Allen

Nyra Miller

Early College of Excellence

Mya Wilson

Frederick Douglass Academy for Young Men

Donivan Dion’Dre Peoples

Henry Ford High School

Danyelle McCann

Jalen Rose Leadership Academy

Von Elson

Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School

Anthony Cotton

Carrington Stubblefield

Mumford High School

Alexander Smith

Osborn High School

Kenyetta Fagan

Pershing High School

Delann Pillivant

Renaissance High School

Caira Blevins

MaKayla Glenn

Ellington King

Sade’ Ried

Aniyah Williams

Autumn Williams

Elissa Willis

Southeastern High School

Kashon Sanders

Western International High School

Ahlam Rahimee

West Side Academy

Johnnie Hornsby

Voyageur Academy

Alyse Davis

Detroit Community Schools

Nykia Tate

Eriana Wilson

With applications down, Tennessee colleges nudge Class of 2020 via new social media campaign

2020-06-16T19:16:28+00:00

The pandemic that disrupted senior year for Tennessee high school students is also affecting their college-going plans, with many of the state’s postsecondary schools receiving 25% fewer applications than this time last year.

Now, with 10 weeks left until fall semester begins, the state’s higher education community is encouraging the Class of 2020 and returning college students to turn in their paperwork for school.

Dozens of colleges and universities joined together on Tuesday to announce a monthlong social media campaign called #ItsGoTimeTN.

They’re seeking to reverse recent trends in Tennessee that mirror what’s happening nationwide as higher education institutions prepare for a semester of uncertainty under COVID-19. Administrators are developing social distancing plans for classrooms and dorms and stockpiling personal protective equipment to resume campus life as normally as possible.

“Our goal is to convey to students the importance of finalizing their college plans and ensure that fall 2020 continues the momentum we have seen in Tennessee in recent years,” said Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

Last year, about 62% of Tennessee’s graduating seniors went to college. Before the pandemic surfaced, the Class of 2020 had Tennessee leading the nation again in completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aide, which is considered a top indicator that students are pursuing educational opportunities beyond a high school diploma.

But disruptions and uncertainty created by the coronavirus have significantly slowed the flow of applications statewide, whether to universities, colleges, or community and technical colleges.

“Some of our schools have been down 20 to 25% since early spring,” said Russ Deaton, executive vice chancellor for policy and strategy at the Tennessee Board of Regents, which oversees 40 community and technical colleges and is the state’s largest system of higher education.

“The question is: Are students just delaying making their plans until later this summer, or have they decided not to attend this fall? We’re hoping that it’s not the latter,” Deaton said.

Faith Miller, who recently graduated from Overton High School in Memphis, is moving ahead with her college plans but understands why some of her classmates are hesitant.

“I’m worried about whether I’ll be able to go to classes in person or what things will look like. We still have no vaccine for coronavirus. We still have cases rising,” said the 17-year-old, who plans to attend Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee.

The challenge of paying for college is also heightened because of the related recession.

“How do you go from your mom or dad losing their jobs to going to college without any way to pay for tuition?” asked Miller.

Students planning to use a Tennessee Promise scholarship should remember that they are only eligible if enrolled full time in the fall semester immediately following high school graduation.

As for the uncertainties and challenges facing today’s college students, the Board of Regents has sought to acknowledge and assure them through its own TV and social media campaign titled “When You’re Ready, We’re Ready!” It’s also supporting the #ItsGoTimeTN campaign on social media along with the University of Tennessee System, the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, and the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, an education advocacy group also known as SCORE.

“We want to remind everyone that with today’s economic uncertainty and high unemployment, it is now more important than ever to earn a postsecondary degree or certificate to prepare for a rewarding career and high-demand job,” said SCORE President and CEO David Mansouri.

This year, Detroit’s graduation celebrations will be virtual. Here’s what high schools are planning.

2020-05-27T23:17:54+00:00

Over the coming weeks, the 36 graduating seniors at Academy of the Americas school in Detroit will don caps and gowns, and be recorded individually while walking outside their school.

Footage from those videos will be pieced together to provide a virtual equivalent of what is always a stirring moment during any graduation: the procession of graduates to begin the ceremony.

It’s part of a plan to make a June 22 virtual graduation feel as close as possible to a traditional commencement ceremony. “In the end, it’s for them,” Principal Nicholas Brown said. “We want to make it as special as possible.”

With the global pandemic upending the usual pomp and circumstance, schools across Detroit — and across the country and world — are pivoting to virtual celebrations. Elsewhere, the pandemic has led districts to recruit high-profile commencement speakers, and to take advantage of ski gondolas or the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for their socially distanced celebrations.

Every high school in the Detroit Public Schools Community District will be holding a virtual graduation over the next months, said Chrystal Wilson, spokeswoman for the district. The graduations won’t be livestreamed, but families, students, and staff will have access to them.

Some charter schools in the city are also planning virtual send-offs for their graduates. The Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, for instance, is planning a June 6 graduation event. Meanwhile, the Detroit Edison Public School Academy has planned home visits on June 4-5, a June 10 senior parade, and a June 16 virtual graduation. A Class of 2020 graduation video will be created from all of the events, said Ralph Bland, president of New Paradigm for Education, the school’s management company.

In the Detroit school district, the virtual graduations will wrap up more than a month of events to celebrate seniors in the district. Some schools have already begun to visit the homes of their graduates to deliver congratulatory yard signs and caps and gowns, and some are holding senior pinning ceremonies.

Beginning June 8, district graduates will be able to stop by their schools — at designated times and with social distancing measures in place — to do things such as turn in books and clean out lockers. In late July or early August, each school will hold an event that will allow the 2020 class to walk across the stage of their school auditorium and take graduation pictures with three family members. As with other in-person events, social distancing measures will be in place.

The virtual graduations will feature messages by Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, School Board President Iris Taylor and other board members, a welcome from the school administrator, speeches by the valedictorian and salutatorian, a message from a class representative, and a virtual walk across the stage, when each senior’s name will be read as their photo is displayed.

Brown said his school’s virtual event will also include a student singing the national anthem, and a speech from a DTE Energy executive. He said planning a virtual event has been a learning experience. They’ve already discussed an alternative to recording students walking in front of the school in their caps and gowns; this plan would have the students produce the videos at home.

“Doing it this kind of way is new. But we’ll give it the best we got,” he said.

Last Friday, a caravan of Academy of the Americas educators in more than 25 vehicles pulled off a celebratory parade through the city, stopping at the homes of the graduates, handing out their caps and gowns, and placing yard signs congratulating them on their accomplishments.

“It was great to see the smiles on their faces, how appreciative they were. They really felt special,” Brown said.

Here are the dates for the virtual graduations planned for Detroit district schools:

Academy of the Americas, 9 a.m., June 22
Ben Carson, 1 p.m., June 25
Cass Tech, 10 a.m., June 18
Central, 3 p.m., June 22
Charles Drew, 2 p.m., June 26
Cody, 3 p.m., June 9
Communication & Media Arts, noon, June 12
Davis Aerospace, 3 p.m., June 23
DCP at Northwestern, 9 a.m., June 24
Denby, noon, June 27
Detroit School of Arts, 10 a.m., June 23
DIA, 3 p.m., June 24
Diann Banks, 3 p.m., June 26
East English Village, 3 p.m., June 25
Frederick Douglass Academy, noon, June 19
Henry Ford, noon, June 25
JL White, 10 a.m., June 25
Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1 p.m., June 16
Mumford, 5 p.m., June 26
Osborn, noon, June 26
Pershing, noon, June 23
Renaissance, 5 p.m., June 22
Southeastern, noon, June 25
West Side Academy, 9 a.m., June 27
Western International, 5 p.m., June 27

Charter schools:

Detroit Edison Public School Academy, 4 p.m., June 16
Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, 2 p.m., June 6

If your Detroit school — district or charter — is planning a virtual graduation and isn’t included on this list, let us know at detroitl.tips@chalkbeat.org.

The coronavirus is pushing some colleges away from the SAT and ACT. Here’s who might benefit.

2020-05-18T20:54:48+00:00

The coronavirus means many colleges have temporarily dropped admissions testing requirements, given the uncertainty about when students will be able to take the SAT or ACT.

It’s an opening for testing critics hoping for permanent change. And some colleges are signaling a bigger shift is possible: Just last week, the president of the massive University of California system proposed scrapping mandatory admissions tests for at least four years.

Is that a good idea?

That’s a big question. But one recent study suggests the change might help more students with high grade point averages and low SAT scores — who are especially likely to be from low-income families — earn college degrees.

The findings add some clarity to a fraught debate about whether admissions tests help or hurt efforts to get students from underrepresented groups to and through college. That debate often hinges on which metric best predicts who will do well in college, rather than how those metrics open up or close off access to students who might benefit most.

“We have to get away from this idea that the goal of college is to admit students who are going to do great. The goal of college has to be to help students who wouldn’t do great without your help,” said Jesse Rothstein, a University of California, Berkeley economist who has studied the SAT. “That’s a very different thing, and it leads you to very different ideas.”

The study, conducted by UC Berkeley graduate student Zachary Bleemer, focuses on a California policy that guaranteed admission to a University of California school for students who graduated in the top 4 percent of their high school class. (The policy is now all but defunct.)

Bleemer zoomed in on students who, as a result of the policy, gained access to a middle-tier, selective UC school between 2001 and 2011. More than 40 percent of them were black or Hispanic, and most came from low- or middle-income families and had attended a low-achieving high school. They also had much lower SAT scores than their college peers.

This created a natural experiment: What happens to high-GPA students who get into selective colleges despite their low test scores? That’s a question with national relevance, since students who get good or decent grades but score poorly on the SAT or ACT are especially likely to be low-income students of color.

At first glance, Bleemer’s results seem discouraging. The students had a graduation rate of 77%, lower than the 83% average at their colleges. Lower test scores, in other words, accurately predicted lower rates of college success.

But this difference is fairly small, and Bleemer asks another important question: What would have happened to the students if they hadn’t gotten into one of those UC schools?

He answers this by comparing them to students who just missed the cutoff, and who generally went on to less-selective colleges with lower graduation rates. The program, it turned out, made a massive difference in participating students’ trajectories. Their 77% graduation rate would likely have been 55%.

“The return is very high,” said Bleemer. “Students who enroll at these competitive research universities, despite the fact that they have far lower SAT scores than their eventual peers — nevertheless, they become 25 percentage points more likely to earn a college degree within five years. And when you check in in their mid-20s, they’re earning $15,000 a year more than we expect.”

There was one apparent downside: students in the program — including those who went to college intending to major in science, math, or engineering — were less likely to earn a degree in a STEM subject.

With the exception of the STEM results, the study firmly counters the so-called “mismatch” hypothesis, or the idea that efforts to increase diversity on college campuses can backfire for students.

In fact, prior research, as well as a recent study on Texas’ “top 10%” approach, has found the opposite. Students, including those from underrepresented groups, are more likely to graduate at more selective universities, which also tend to have more resources and offer more support.

The findings suggest that colleges replacing test scores with an even greater emphasis on high school GPA or class rank could draw in more low-income, black, and Hispanic students, as well as students from low-achieving high schools. Those students may also stand to benefit the most from access to selective colleges.

That said, if colleges drop test scores but replace them with other measures that are just as correlated with family background, little will change. Moving away from test scores could also disadvantage many Asian-American students, who some contend already face discrimination in college admissions. And changes to admissions criteria will only go so far in addressing large disparities in college access and completion.

Notably, Bleemer’s study doesn’t challenge the central claim of testing organizations — that the scores predict who will do well in college.

“Despite the immediate effects of COVID-19 on admissions, it is clear that ACT scores add meaningful insight and significant value,” said Ed Colby, a spokesperson for the ACT. “We encourage colleges to consider multiple factors, including test scores, in a holistic admissions process to ensure that students can showcase their strengths.”

Other studies, though, have shown that other measures, including GPA and where a student attended high school, can offer a lot of the same predictive information.

Regardless, Bleemer’s point is that those predictions shouldn’t be the focus of college admissions at all.

“There are a lot of ways to increase a university’s graduation rate. One way to do that is to only admit high-testing, high-income students,” said Bleemer. “Whether that’s the appropriate policy outcome to have in mind seems highly questionable.”

‘It’s just not how I wanted to end my 1st year’: How college freshmen from Detroit coped with coronavirus

2020-05-13T21:08:03+00:00

One day soon, the weight of the coronavirus pandemic will hit Marqell McClendon.

The Detroit native will come to terms with the deaths of her uncle and great aunt. With the challenges of having to leave her college campus. With the disease that has devastated her community.

For weeks, though, McClendon kept her mind fixed solely on surviving a difficult shift to online classes. It’s a complicated transition that threatened to upend the momentum from her first semester, in which she did what seemed unthinkable a year ago: She made the dean’s list at Michigan State University.

“It hurts a little,” McClendon, a freshman, said as she contemplated her grades suffering as a result. “I’m trying the best that I can and my situation isn’t really my fault. But, it’s just not how I wanted to end my first year.”

Chalkbeat has been following McClendon and other first-year college students from Detroit this academic year, capturing their stumbles and successes to provide insight into what high school graduates from struggling communities need to succeed in college.

The abrupt, unsettling disruption to an already difficult first year has tested McClendon, as well as fellow college freshmen Kashia Perkins and Demetrius Robinson. None of them had ever taken an online class, so they were thrust into an unfamiliar learning environment with little preparation and with professors who were also feeling their way through this new reality.

Marqell McClendon, who just finished her freshman year at Michigan State, takes notes during an online lecture while completing her schoolwork from the bedroom of her Detroit home.

The global pandemic has also tested them in other ways. Robinson, a Central Michigan University student who dreams of taking over his family’s fitness business, has immersed himself in the details of COVID, lecturing his friends about taking precautions and being careful himself when he leaves home to cut his grandfather’s hair. He’s also had to mourn the loss of a family friend.

“I just wake up every day and do the things I know that I’m actually in control of.” - Marqell McClendon

Perkins, meanwhile, insulated herself by staying in her dorm on the MSU campus. The decision not to finish out the spring semester at home was a nod to her growing need for independence. But her insulation may also explain why she believes too much is being made of the seriousness of the virus.

As the virus spread through Detroit, shutting out the world around her was important for McClendon. She traded the solitude of her dorm room and favorite quiet spaces at Michigan State for the brick home she shares with her family on a quiet street on the city’s west side. Her bedroom and the home’s back porch are where she kept up with her studies. She tried not to think about the coronavirus, even though it has personally impacted her family.

Kashia Perkins, shown here in a fall 2019 file photo, remained on the Michigan State University campus to complete the spring semester after classes were moved online.

“It hit closer to home,” said McClendon, who last year was the valedictorian of her senior class at Cody High School in the Detroit school district. “What I’m actually doing … is not thinking about it at all. I just wake up every day and do the things I know that I’m actually in control of and I try not to worry about things too much.”

When we talked to McClendon several weeks ago, she said she hadn’t allowed herself time to mourn.

“I feel like I should try as hard as I can to focus on my schoolwork because I know that’s what everybody wants me to do instead of worrying. Eventually, I will mourn, because the semester is almost over.”

For McClendon and other Michigan State students, May 1 marked the end of finals.

‘I can’t do this online’

Despite the disparate ways they’ve coped with coronavirus, one thing unites the three: Their distaste for taking classes online and their worry that fall semester classes will also be conducted virtually.

“If this gets shut down until 2021, I don’t know if I’m going back to school. Because I can’t do this online,” said Robinson. “I would rather start school back when I can physically go back to the campus.”

Demetrius Robinson, seen here in a fall 2019 file photo, was worried that the fall semester at Central Michigan University would begin online. The university announced this week they will return to in-person classes.

The switch online has been difficult for students across the board. But it’s been especially hard for those from struggling communities like Detroit, where many children come from low-income families.

“Our students come from backgrounds where they were already facing certain barriers, already facing certain stressors when it came to persisting through college,” said Terran Davis, the alumni success coordinator at the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, the charter school from which Perkins and Robinson graduated. “This added pressure of the virus has definitely amplified some of these stressors.”

He and David Williams, who helps lead the college-going efforts at the high school, said the suddenness of the switch has been a factor. Some students don’t have the technology at home. Some don’t have the quiet space there to study. Others struggle to get school work done in the midst of family dynamics.

“The transition ... has not been smooth,” Williams said.

Some experts are worried about the emotional well being of college students nationwide who are coping with the pandemic. A national survey of 2,000 college students, completed in April by the advocacy group Active Minds, found that 80% of the students said COVID has negatively impacted their mental health.

“There are (mental health) resources still available to them,” said Jerry Caldwell, director of the Charles Drew Science Scholars at Michigan State. “We let them know that we are here to reach out to us if they have needs.”

“Our students come from backgrounds where they were already facing certain barriers, already facing certain stressors when it came to persisting through college.” - Terran Davis

The program helps students pursuing science and medical-related majors – most of them from underrepresented communities – with intense academic advising, academic coaching, career advising, and a connection to a tight-knit community. In the midst of the pandemic, they have worked to provide weekly “Zoom with Drew” activities, such as an event where the students played Pictionary and another night when they played trivia games.

They’re also making sure students have access to important resources such as food pantries, and tutoring. For instance, the program connected McClendon with someone to help her with her difficult chemistry class.

Longing for face to face connections

Anyone who knows Robinson, an extrovert who thrives when he’s around others, will understand why he dislikes online classes. He made it his mission as a freshman to meet as many people as he could and have his name known on campus.

“I like the face to face classes. I like going to my professors’ office hours. I like going after class, walking up to my professors and saying, ‘Hey, I didn’t quite understand what happened in class,” Robinson said.

This is important for Robinson. He struggled through his first semester, largely because he said he didn’t take advantage of opportunities to talk to professors about what he needed to work on to improve his grades. When we caught up with him earlier this year, he said he was finally feeling like a college student.

“I’m getting that feeling like, ‘Man, I’m really here. I’m here to stay.’ I’m settling down,” Robinson said in February. He had also begun spending more time talking to his professors and noticed a “drastic change” in his performance.

But then, while he was on spring break not even a month later, and visiting a friend who attends an Ohio university, the world changed. In-person classes were canceled and students were told not to come back to the university. Robinson had only a week’s worth of clothes and none of his school textbooks (“You weren’t bringing that book on your spring break.”)

He was still able to connect with his professors, but it wasn’t as easy. And, he said, there were the typical technical glitches that have come with such an abrupt switch to online classes, like the time everyone in one of his classes got disconnected from the live lesson, but the professor kept teaching because he didn’t know there was a problem.

Eventually, Robinson was able to visit campus and pick up the things he needed. Then he made a final trip last week to empty out what was left in his room. Robinson got some welcome news Monday afternoon. Central Michigan announced it is returning to face-to-face classes in the fall.

“Time to say bye bye until next year,” he said as he prepared to leave his dorm room for the last time as a freshman.

Kashia Perkins and other Michigan State University students are awaiting a decision on whether classes will begin in-person or online for the fall semester. The university will make a decision by early July.

A campus safe haven

Perkins grew up in Detroit, and that’s where her family is, but home to her this year was her dorm room at Michigan State. And that’s where she opted to stay when the university president announced classes were moving online and students were encouraged to go home.

“I’m more of a visual learner.” - Kashia Perkins

“I’ve gotten so used to being on my own that I’d rather stay in my own space and do my work here,” Perkins said.

She was among about 800 students who remained on the campus. But while the setting was idyllic, the venue for classes wasn’t. She struggled to keep herself motivated to get up and get her classwork done. Her self discipline, she said, has been lacking. And she doesn’t feel like she’s learning as much as she would in a face-to-face class.

“I’m more of a visual learner,” Perkins said. “I would like to see you sit with me and do a problem together so I understand it.”

But it’s not just the switch to online classes that has been difficult. She misses the activities she was involved in. From the beginning, Perkins has been passionate about getting involved in clubs and organizations on campus, including a dance club that puts on regular performances.

The coronavirus has taken a toll on Perkins’ home town (at last count, the city had 1,213 COVID-related deaths and 9,897 people test positive). Still, Perkins — who plans to change her major from human biology to nursing — downplays the significance of the virus. She said it doesn’t worry her because she thinks government officials are making the pandemic seem worse than it is.

“People with weak immune systems … that’s really who it affects,” said Perkins, who cites statistics showing that most people who get it will survive.

“That’s why I feel like they’ve blown it out of proportion. They know people in this world will survive. They’re making it seem like if you get it, you’re going to die.”

Nationwide, 80,820 have died of COVID. In Michigan alone, there have been 4,674 deaths.

As she looks ahead to the fall semester, Perkins is hoping for a return to normal. She said she became too lazy this spring as she learned online, so she’s hoping the fall semester doesn’t begin virtually. (Michigan State officials plan to make a decision by early July)

“That’s not a good way to start off. I want to start the school year off strong so I can end the semester strong.”

‘Everything was just harder’

Throughout the fall semester, McClendon was aggressively seeking help with a difficult math class, including approaching strangers in her dorm and asking for assistance. The persistence paid off. She earned a 3.8 grade point average and a spot on the MSU dean’s list.

Earlier this year, she was already concerned about the increased rigor of this year’s classes, which include chemistry, another difficult math class, and physiology. She was determined to maintain that grade point average.

Marqell, shown in this file photo from fall 2019, saw her grades decline during the spring semester after making the dean’s list in the fall.

Then the pandemic came, and suddenly, “everything was just harder,” McClendon said. “It’s harder to learn because basically we’re teaching ourselves.”

She struggled to keep up with her classes and to stay organized, especially for those courses where her professors record their lectures and students can watch the lectures at their own pace.

“Every time I look up, I’ll have three assignments due that I knew nothing about because it’s not like you go to class and then your professors remind you that you have something due.”

There were more than a few missing assignments. She also missed entire classes. It prompted her to create a chart so she could more easily keep up.

Math became an even bigger problem than it was last semester, and this time, the resources she relied on — such as going to the math resource center on campus and getting hands-on help — weren’t so handy.

“I think my grades are declining right now,” she said several weeks ago.

The confirmation came this week. McClendon passed all her classes. But she earned far fewer credits, dropping her cumulative GPA to a 3.0, still not bad for a first-year freshman.

But that’s not enough for this determined student, who puts a lot of pressure on herself to do her best.

“Hopefully, we’re not doing online next semester so I can do better.”

This story is part of a partnership with Detroit Public Television. It was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Can college programs in prison survive COVID-19?

2020-05-04T10:00:00+00:00

When coronavirus kept college professors from teaching in person at Maine Correctional Facility, officials reconfigured a prison classroom to hold classes over Zoom using the Internet from an administrator’s computer. Officials at Saginaw Correctional Facility in Michigan waived a ban on communication between volunteers and prisoners so that Delta College professors could instruct their students over email. At Great Meadow Correctional Facility in New York, college classes are postponed and graduation is cancelled.

Coronavirus has upended the semester for college students across the country—and thousands of incarcerated students are no exception. On the outside, professors are conducting classes over video conferencing and graduations will be live-streamed online. But in prison, where the majority of incarcerated people are cut off from the Internet, the options for distance learning are limited, leaving college administrators scrambling to figure out how to finish the semester from beyond prison walls. Many have found workarounds now that they can no longer enter the prisons. But they fear the coronavirus could undermine a critical component of college in prison: teaching in person.

Research shows that higher education in prison reduces recidivism and saves taxpayer money. In interviews with The Marshall Project college-in-prison administrators noted less often-cited benefits: College programs in prison build community, boost morale, and provide incarcerated students with an antidote to the despair and monotony of prison life.

For Pablo Negron, who is enrolled at Prison-to-College Pipeline at Otisville Correctional Facility, college classes keep him “busy and away from prison politics and negativity.” Taking classes has given him a “sense of accomplishment,” which makes him feel like his time behind bars wasn’t simply wasted. As he looks forward to life after prison, he says he is optimistic he’ll have more career choices with a college education.

How well college programs are able to adapt during the pandemic largely depends on their relationship with the corrections department for their state, and what resources they’re able to provide. Many prisons are operating with a reduced workforce, and can’t spare the staff to keep the college programs running. But there’s an understanding among prison officials of the value of education programs, especially during a crisis, says Ruth Delaney, who provides assistance to college sites for the Vera Institute of Justice.

“Tensions are high,” Delaney said. “Being able to give people something familiar, and engaging can really help to make sure all the resources are focused on fighting coronavirus.”

Many college administrators say corrections officials have bent over backwards to make sure college classes continue, but without laptops, tablets or an easy way to securely access the Internet, many college programs have had to put their semesters on pause. With classes on hold, some incarcerated students won’t be eligible for important incentives. In some state prisons, earning a college degree while behind bars could result in a sentence reduction through “good time” credit programs. In New York, for example, students could have six months shaved off their time for completing designated programming, provided they also have a clean disciplinary record.

For incarcerated students at Great Meadow, an isolated prison several hours outside of New York City, the disrupted semester means they’ll have to wait even longer before they’re eligible to transfer to facilities closer to home. Students are placed on an educational hold while enrolled in college programs, so they cannot be transferred to other facilities while they complete their degrees.

At San Quentin Prison in California, college classes are suspended until volunteers from the Prison University Project can return to teaching in person. It was a choice between keeping the students on track to finish the semester as planned or ensuring they received a high quality education, said Jody Lewen, the project’s executive director. In-person teaching is essential because students, who overwhelmingly come from marginalized communities, benefit from relationships with their peers and professors.

“It’s particularly important for students who don’t have lots of relationships to a wide range of economic and social networks,” Lewen said. “The professors are people who get to know you and give you guidance and advice.”

As coronavirus spread throughout New York in early March, Jessica Jensen decided it was no longer safe to hold classes at Otisville Correctional Facility. Jensen directs the Prison-to-College Pipeline program at John Jay’s Institute for Justice and Opportunity, which enrolls 52 men. At first, classes continued through the mail. Professors sent the remaining course materials directly to the prison and students completed their work on their own. The program designated several “clerks” who collected coursework and submitted it to the deputy warden. The warden then mailed the completed work to the professors, who graded it and returned it to the students.

Shortly after she reconfigured the semester, Jensen received some alarming news from the Department of Education: correspondence learning is not approved for programs that receive funding through the Second Chance Pell Program, which enrolls nearly 10,000 incarcerated students across the country. Any Second Chance sites wrapping up the semester through the mail would have to pause their classes or return the grant money.

“We have heard from numerous postsecondary institutions participating in the Second Chance Pell experiment that prisons’ responses to COVID-19 have created significant challenges for the continuation of instruction at prisons,” the department wrote in a statement issuing guidance to Second Chance programs. The department declined to waive the restriction on correspondence classes, and has offered several alternatives for distance learning, including teaching over email or on conference calls. They believe these methods allow for more “regular and substantive” interaction between teachers and students, as outlined in the grant requirements, than simply corresponding by mail.

Now, Jensen is working with New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to use the prison’s teleconferencing equipment, normally used for parole hearings. Jensen hopes they’ll be able to “approximate the Zoom experience,” allowing professors to directly engage with their students throughout the week.

A spokesperson for the department said they are working “with college partners to ensure our student population is able to complete required coursework and will continue working to ensure students are able to do so in the future.” The statement added that several facilities are “developing plans for distance learning through telephone and video conferencing.”

Research shows that earning a degree in prison decreases recidivism and boosts incarcerated peoples’r career prospects once they are released. A 2013 study by the RAND Corporation found that every dollar spent on prison education saves $4 to $5 dollars on the overall cost of incarceration in the first three years after someone is released from prison.

It’s not clear just how many incarcerated people are enrolled in college classes. Enrollments plunged after the 1994 crime bill eliminated Pell grants for incarcerated students. Prior to the 1994 ban, there were roughly 772 college prison programs in over 1,200 prisons nationwide, according to a 2017 report by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative public policy organization. By 1997, the Institute estimates, only a handful of college programs in prison remained.

But over the past several years, with new programs the Obama administration started and President Trump continued, college attendance in prison is on the rise. In 2015, the Department of Education piloted the Second Chance Pell Program, an experimental initiative to provide Pell grants to incarcerated students. The program, now in its third year, has provided college classes to roughly 17,000 incarcerated people. On April 24, the DOE announced 67 new Second Chance sites, doubling the number of Pell-funded college prison programs.

Members of Congress have also taken interest in higher education in prison. In April 2019, Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, introduced legislation to restore Pell grants for incarcerated students. The bill received bipartisan support in both the House and Senate before stalling in committee.

Finding their way back into prison classrooms after the pandemic will be a “heartbreakingly difficult equation,” says Max Kenner, director of Bard Prison Initiative in New York. The decision to leave was urgent: Classes ended in order to keep people safe. Returning to the prisons could mean sending faculty and staff into facilities where the virus may have spread unchecked. For incarcerated students, an extended lockdown could mean months without the community they’ve come to depend on.

As they wait to see what the fall semester holds, Kenner, like many others, hopes to maintain the foothold college programs have made in prisons over the years. If programs have to teach at a distance, they risk “losing the most meaningful part of what we do, which is classroom and community based work in the prisons,” he said. “The most important thing now is not leaving this crisis in a radically worse place than when we started.”

Whitmer pushes universal preschool, postsecondary education in State of the State speech

2020-01-30T02:22:34+00:00

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vowed to make free preschool available to every child in districts such as Detroit — and those in many other urban and rural communities — that have low test scores or high poverty.

It was a vow that received hearty applause Wednesday night during a State of the State address in which Whitmer also called for the state to invest more in early literacy and to provide better access to child care for parents who are in school or working full-time.

The vow could help Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s push to bring universal free preschool to a city where thousands of children are lacking access to a quality program.

The speech, Whitmer’s second as governor, represented a shift in approach. Last year, she heavily pushed bipartisanship. This year, after a number of battles with the Republican-controlled Legislature over issues such as fixing Michigan’s roads and funding schools, her tone was one of impatience. Her theme: It’s time to do something about education, roads, health care, and the economy.

Whitmer didn’t highlight many new education initiatives, though she did formally announce that her administration is working with five philanthropic organizations to help parents navigate the complex issues related to the state’s controversial Read by 3 law. As of this year, that law mandates schools hold back third graders whose test scores indicate they’re too far behind in reading. The five organizations include the Battle Creek Community Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, the Max & Marjorie Fisher Foundation, the Skillman Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. (Skillman and Kellogg are Chalkbeat funders).

“This punitive law could be a nightmare for families, and this initiative will give parents and students the resources and support they need to get through it,” said Whitmer, who shortly after she took office said she would like to repeal the law.

The law has raised plenty of concerns since it was passed in 2016, including over whether the state is investing enough money into helping students succeed.

Detroit Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, in a message on Twitter posted after the speech, questioned why Whitmer doesn’t instead work with the philanthropic organizations to change the law. He also said he doesn’t think the additional parent outreach is needed. The district has already been reaching out to parents to inform them about the law and their rights.

“Districts and schools can prevent retention by requiring a parent or teacher to refuse the retention. That’s it,” Vitti said.

Many districts, including Detroit, have invested resources into outreach to parents about the law. So have community organizations such as the Detroit Parent Network and the Education Trust-Midwest, which partnered to help parents understand their rights.

“The need for this work in communities across the state is undeniable, and we are pleased to see this type of collaboration highlighted in Governor Whitmer’s announcement today,” Amber Arellano, the executive director of Education Trust-Midwest, said in a statement.

Whitmer also targeted postsecondary education in her speech. Last year, she called for increasing the percentage of Michigan residents with a postsecondary education credential from 43.7% to 60% by 2030. She reiterated that push Wednesday night.

Whitmer isn’t solely pushing college, but the goal to increase the number of residents with some kind of degree or certificate comes as more research shows that economic mobility is strongly tied to earning a college degree.

For some students in the state, particularly those from low-income homes, getting to and through college is a challenge — something Chalkbeat has been exploring this academic year as we follow a group of Detroit and Newark high school students through their first year of college.

Whitmer pushed a previously announced campaign to get high school students to fill out the federal financial aid form, widely known as the FAFSA. And she pushed for support for legislation that would create a program, called Michigan Reconnect, to provide free training and degree programs for adults.

She also had a special message for high school students, including her own children:

“I have two words: Keep going. Make a plan for after high school. Find a program that’s a good fit for you, whether it’s a union apprenticeship, a community college, or a university.”

For the full text of Whitmer’s speech, read below:

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to fix a typographical error.

‘What we’re doing is not working.’ Why Detroit students struggle in college

2020-01-22T22:07:46+00:00

High school needs to be “harder.” Schools need to get rid of worksheets. And high school classes should be more like college classes.

These comments shed light on some of the struggles Detroit students face when they get to college. The insights come from a new Michigan Future report based on the experiences of 133 students who graduated from two charter schools and one traditional public high school in Detroit from 2014 to 2017.

The report could provide a road map for high schools that want to better prepare their students to succeed in higher education, as well as the colleges they’re attending.

“What we’re doing is not working,” said Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, a nonprofit organization focused on education and economic development. “We need to understand why it’s not working and then do something about it.”

The report comes at a critical time. More and more research shows that economic mobility is strongly tied to earning a college degree. And while getting to and through college is a challenge for many students, it’s particularly difficult for students of color and students from low-income families.

Chalkbeat has been exploring these challenges this academic year as we follow a group of Detroit and Newark high school students through their first year of college.

The nonprofit organization worked with the Berman Foundation to launch a scholarship program to provide a small amount of funding for textbooks for students who shared their college grades and completed surveys about their experiences.

Students said they needed additional support in four primary areas:

More rigorous coursework in high school to prepare for college-level work. Students said they weren’t just unprepared for the amount of work, but also “the intellectual challenge that they would be expected to participate in in college.” One had this message for school officials: “No more worksheets.”
Help developing successful academic habits. Students reported spending about 10 hours a week studying and preparing for college classes, when the research suggests they should spend 30 hours a week. That likely is because of their outside responsibilities, including work, according to the report.
Training in financial literacy, especially in understanding financial aid. For instance, students need help understanding how to set up bank accounts and credit cards and manage their finances responsibly.
Better cultural preparation, especially for non-white students matriculating to predominantly white institutions. Students report struggling to adapt in these environments.

The surveys revealed that just 18% of the students were on track to graduate in four years, while 48% were on track to graduate in five years.

Those numbers, author Sarah Szurpicki says in the report, are worrisome because taking too long to accumulate credit can increase the risk of students dropping out or losing scholarships.

Students considered on track for graduation in four years have at least a 2.0 grade point average and have accumulated an average of 15 credits a semester. Those on track for a five-year graduation have at least a 2.0 GPA and have earned an average of 12 credits a semester.

Glazer said that while some high schools in the city and some colleges have strong programs in place to help students succeed, none is doing everything it could.

He suggested that high schools could better prepare students if they were as focused on and held accountable for the college success of their graduates as they are for standardized test results.

What’s missing in most high schools, Glazer said, is a mission that all teaching and curriculum from freshman year onward is designed to prepare students to earn a college degree. Schools in other parts of the nation have been successful by focusing on teaching and curriculum that prepare students for college.

“It’s in their DNA,” Glazer said.

Catch up on Chalkbeat’s Ready or Not series here.

To read the full report from Michigan Future, read below.

To and through: What research says about what works (and what doesn’t) to help students complete college

2020-01-15T18:18:26+00:00

Getting to college is just the beginning of the challenge for America’s students looking to earn a degree.

About 40 percent of students who enroll in college for the first time won’t have a degree six years later, the latest data show. And the disparities here are striking: While two-thirds of white students who start college finish a degree in that time, only about 40 percent of black students and 50 percent of Hispanic students do. Students from more affluent families are also much more likely to earn a degree than students from low-income families.

These differences reflect the many barriers low-income students of color face in making it through college.

Chalkbeat has been examining those challenges in our Ready or Not series, which has highlighted how students’ K-12 schools and their colleges often fall short in preparing and supporting students — and how some schools are trying to close those gaps.

Some research provides other reasons for optimism. Studies show that certain policies, particularly tuition grants paired with intensive, in-college support, can substantially raise low-income students’ chances of completing college.

“The interventions that seem to yield the best success provide unified supports — the kinds of systems of support that may provide students financial aid but that also attend to the other structural barriers that students face, or the guidance and help they need in terms of how to organize their courses and organize their time,” said Lindsay Page, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

We’ve combed through dozens of studies to try to pin down what else we know about what’s working — and what isn’t — to help students make it to and through college. Here’s a rundown.

What helps: More and better high school counseling

Students who had a particularly good high school counselor were 1.5 percentage points more likely to attend college and 1.4 points more likely to stay in college through their first year, according to a recent Massachusetts study. Counselor diversity matters too: students of color were about 2 points more likely to attend and persist in college if they had a counselor of color.

Simply hiring more counselors can also help. One study found that hiring an additional college counselor led to a large jump in four-year college enrollment.

Research on other college advising and support initiatives — like programs designed to increase students’ interest in college or offer support through the application process — is mixed. Some have demonstrated clearly positive results, but others have had limited or mixed effects. Recent studies on virtual counselors, who communicate with students by video, phone, and email, show they have little if any impact.

What helps: Grants for college — usually

It’s clear that students and their families think about finances when enrolling in college — and more financial aid through grants (as opposed to loans) generally means higher rates of college enrollment, persistence, and completion.

Our best estimate of how much of a difference this can make: Every $1,000 in grants translates into a 1.5 to 2 percentage point increase in degree completion, according to an overview of 43 studies.

“Students would experience worse outcomes without this investment,” the researchers concluded.

Specifically, studies have found students benefit from state financial aid programs in California, Florida, Texas, and West Virginia, as well as programs that promise to pay tuition for public school graduates in cities like Kalamazoo, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; and Pittsburgh

Here’s another way to show the impact of financial considerations: research has found that fluctuations in families’ housing values — a measure of wealth — affect where students go to and whether they complete college.

There are some exceptions. For example, neither a merit-aid program in Milwaukee nor a “free college” initiative in New York had any effect on college enrollment. A need-based private scholarship program in Wisconsin failed to improve college completion.

Simplicity seems to be a key design feature. A recent study tested what happened when low-income, high-achieving high schoolers in Michigan were sent a letter offering them a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Michigan.

Those students’ likelihood of enrolling at the school jumped by 15 points; without the letter some of them wouldn’t have attended college at all. What’s notable is that those students were already eligible for full-tuition aid — they just may not have realized it, or were intimidated by the complicated paperwork.

KIPP Memphis Collegiate High School senior Roy Webster announces that he will be attending college at Washington University in St. Louis during the school’s Decision Day 2019.

What helps: Intensive in-college support paired with financial aid

The Dell Scholars program provides low-income students with a generous scholarship, monitors their progress throughout college, and offers coaching for those who need it. Research found that participating students were 9 to 13 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree — a very large effect.

This is one piece of evidence that programs are particularly successful when they combine tuition grants with extra support, like academic coaching or access to a social worker.

A recent study found that providing a coach increased the likelihood that Detroit community college students who had received financial aid would remain enrolled for a second semester by 8 percentage points.

Another successful example is ASAP at the City University of New York community colleges, a program that offers students financial aid as well as intensive advising and tutoring. The impact was substantial: 40 percent of students in the program earned a degree compared to 22 percent of students in a control group.

The model has been adopted by a number of Ohio community colleges — and again proved highly successful at increasing the likelihood students will graduate.

Less ambitious efforts are less likely to move the needle, research suggests. One comprehensive study at the University of Toronto found that exercises meant to help students improve goal setting and text messages with study tips did little to improve students’ grades or college persistence.

“More comprehensive, but expensive, programs that offer more intensive support to students for significantly altering study behavior may be necessary to make progress in helping incoming college students succeed,” the researchers concluded.

What helps: Going to better-resourced, more-selective colleges

Going to more selective institutions isn’t just a matter of prestige — it also seems to increase students’ chances of graduating. That’s especially notable because lower-income students are relatively unlikely to attend those schools.

There’s also evidence that students are more likely to get a degree if they enroll at a four-year, rather than a two-year college. (On the other hand, there’s also some research showing that if students are unprepared for a four-year college, attending one can hurt their chances of earning a degree.)

Much of this may be due to the fact that more selective, four-year universities tend to be significantly better resourced — and other research has found that higher spending means higher rates of college completion.

“Due to budgetary restrictions, less-selective public institutions often have large classes and provide little in the way of academic counseling, mentoring and other student supports,” explained David Deming, a Harvard researcher.

Without considering this, financial aid efforts can have unintended consequences. For instance, a Massachusetts program that awarded scholarships to in-state public colleges actually led to a decline in college completion rates. That’s because the program redirected students away from private and out-of-state schools where students were more likely to graduate.

Meanwhile, attending a for-profit college does not seem to hurt students’ chances of graduating, but doing so does appear to increase students’ debt loads and lower their average pay after graduating.

Kashia Perkins, a Michigan State University freshman, shown during her June graduation from the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy

What helps: Better schools and teachers before college

It seems obvious, but it’s worth saying: The quality of K-12 schools that students attend affects whether they will go to and do well in college.

Research has found that students with better teachers in grades 3-8 are more likely to attend college. Similarly, high school teachers directly affect students’ likelihood of planning to attend college. High schools that raise test scores also seem to improve students’ college grades and completion rates.

Other work has found that having high school teachers with higher expectations makes students more likely to finish college, and black students are more likely to attend college if they have a black teacher.

Higher K-12 education spending has been linked to better college outcomes, too. That’s shown up both in national research and in studies of Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin schools. The Texas study found that an increase in $1,000 of education spending annually throughout a student’s K-12 education translated to a 4-point bump in college completion.

Students who had much smaller class sizes in early grades were 3 percentage points more likely to attend college and 2 points more likely complete college as a result, according to one Tennessee experiment.

These findings make sense, since a students’ academic preparation is a key predictor for whether they will enter and complete college.

The type of high school students go to may also matter: small schools in New York City and early college high schools boosted college attendance and persistence.

What might help: Going to certain charter schools in cities

Nationally, it’s not clear that charter schools have any advantage over district schools in college outcomes. But some research has found that so-called “no excuses” charter schools in cities do boost college enrollment, particularly attendance at four-year colleges. Attending a KIPP charter middle school, for instance, led to an increase in college enrollment of 13 points. Going to the original Noble charter high school in Chicago had a similar effect. “No-excuses” schools in Texas and Boston have also been shown to increase four-year college enrollment.

What’s less clear is to what extent those increases in enrollment translate into higher college completion rates, since there hasn’t been much firm research on this question. The KIPP study, for instance, found that their students were 9 percentage points more likely to stay in college for two years, though that difference was not statistically significant.

Another form of school choice — vouchers for private school — has a mixed track record when it comes to college outcomes. Some programs seem to boost students’ college chances, while others make no difference.

What might not help: Nudging students toward college

It was an idea that took the education world by storm: perhaps low-cost “nudges,” like packets of information about applying to college or text message reminders to fill out financial aid forms, could improve college access and ultimately increase completion rates.

Initially, the research seemed promising. But as it’s been brought to scale, the results have been disappointing. For instance, packets of information sent out by the College Board had no impact on whether or where students went to college; ditto for an effort to remind students to complete financial aid applications.

“It’s a good lesson in thinking about the limitations of these kinds of interventions,” Page, the University of Pittsburgh professor, previously told Chalkbeat, referring to the College Board study.

Some hold out hope for these nudges, if designed differently. Another recent study conducted by Page found that a personalized set of text messages around financial aid — based on students’ progress through the forms — led to a 3 percentage point increase in college enrollment. It’s too soon to say whether that will translate into greater college persistence and completion.

There is also evidence that requiring high school students to take a college entrance exam (for free) can effectively nudge a small number of them to attend college who otherwise wouldn’t.

Yamin Reddick in a summer math class at Rutgers University-Newark. He had to pass his summer classes in order to begin as a freshman this fall.

What does not help: traditional remedial courses

Imagine a new college student who comes up just a few points short on the test necessary to avoid remedial classes. Another student just clears the bar, and so goes straight into regular classes. Which one does better?

Turns out, it’s the latter student: an overview of research found that remedial courses actually reduced students’ chances of earning a degree by 1.5 percentage points. Plus, common placement tests aren’t actually good predictors of who will do well in college courses.

That’s a big deal because remedial coursework is very common. Between one third and half of college students will take one or more classes designed to catch them up.

“By requiring students to take remedial coursework before they can take college-level courses and complete their degree, institutions immediately place remediated students at a disadvantage, said Judith Scott-Clatyon of Columbia.

An important caveat: remediation may be beneficial for students who are particularly low performing.

Many colleges have responded by creating alternatives to traditional remediation, including, considering factors other than test scores in remedial placement, conducting remediation during high school, integrating remediation with credit-bearing courses, streamlining and accelerating remedial courses, and accepting alternatives to traditional requirements like substituting statistics for algebra. Research suggests that these alternatives are promising.

One approach that hasn’t proven particularly successful, though, is replacing traditional remedial courses with computer-based instruction.

More charter operators are offering a plan B to alumni who drop out of traditional college. Will it work?

2020-01-08T16:55:15+00:00

Since he was a young child, Nick Chapa’s teachers told him over and over: you’re going to college.

That focus on higher education drew his family to IDEA’s flagship charter school in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, where students receive years of coaching in preparation for the college admissions process. But when Chapa actually got to college in 2009, his plans unraveled.

Struggling with deadlines and the anxiety he felt during exams, Chapa dropped out after his first year. After Chapa and his wife had a son, Chapa re-enrolled, hoping a change in major would help. But he left again after a semester, continuing his part-time job at Toys ‘R’ Us.

Then Chapa got a call from an administrator affiliated with the IDEA charter network. She told him about a new college program called IDEA-U that would allow him to take his coursework online with the support of a coach. Chapa signed up.

“I figured I didn’t have anything to lose,” said Chapa, now 28. “I guess I was desperate at that point.”

Chapa is now part of a growing effort by charter school operators to help their graduates earn college diplomas in a nontraditional way — by overseeing some of the college experience themselves.

By partnering with Southern New Hampshire University, which enrolls tens of thousands of students from across the country in its low-cost online college programs, the charter operators are coaching students through college. The university provides the coursework and confers degrees, while an arm or affiliate of the charter networks recruits and mentors students.

The Noble charter network in Chicago launched its partnership last year, following the IDEA network in Texas and Match Charter School in Boston. Together, the three programs now enroll nearly 1,000 students, and other charter operators say they’re watching closely.

It’s a notable extension of those networks’ mission, which for years has been to send their mostly low-income students of color to college. More recently, though, it’s become harder to ignore the reality that many of their alumni are leaving higher education without degrees.

“It’s clear for students who stay in college and complete how that support looks through our alumni counseling, but it just didn’t feel like we were doing enough for the students who were ‘stopping out’ of college,” said Eric Rapp, who oversees Noble’s program. “We saw this as an opportunity to provide something different and new and innovative to help re-engage those alumni.”

If successful, these programs will provide students another chance to earn a degree that could bolster their financial futures, while also boosting the charter networks’ college completion rates.

“Just like the charter school movement has been able to successfully set a new bar for student achievement” for K-12 students, said Phillip Garza, the chief college and diversity officer for IDEA Public Schools, “we believe that IDEA-U could set a new bar of access, persistence and completion rates for low-income, first-generation, minority students” in college.

So far, though, students in the programs have earned only a few dozen bachelor’s degrees. And the expansion of these programs worries some observers, who question whether students are getting a high-quality college experience — and whether the degrees students do earn will pay off in the job market.

How it works

IDEA launched IDEA-U in 2017 with around 40 students, including Chapa. Now, the program has around 400 students from across Texas enrolled, about half of whom are IDEA graduates.

Around 95 students are enrolled in Noble’s program, known as Noble Forward, which launched last year. Nearly all are graduates of a Noble school in Chicago.

Match’s program, initially called Match Beyond, began in 2013 by enrolling mostly Match alumni, but was spun off as a nonprofit called Duet in 2018. It now serves around 500 students who graduated from high schools across the Boston area.

The programs differ slightly, but the academics work the same way. Students enroll in one of a handful of “competency-based” degree programs offered by Southern New Hampshire University and progress by completing projects designed to show they’ve mastered key skills.

There are no lectures, professors, or class discussions, but students are assigned readings and videos. Students work at their own pace — instead of on a set academic calendar — re-submitting projects as many times as they need, though the university says students average around two tries. Their projects are evaluated by a university “reviewer” with at least a master’s degree.

“It very much feels like a workplace scenario where your boss is probably not going to give you a lecture before sending you out on a project,” said Amy Stevens, who oversees these programs for Southern New Hampshire University.

The charter networks then offer students an additional layer of academic and personal support. IDEA-U requires its students to come to its facility — open late and on Saturdays — for 12 hours each week, in addition to an hour-long meeting with their coach. In Chicago, Noble Forward coaches hold their one-on-one meetings at a public library or in a rented space that resembles a cozy bookstore.

In December, coaches Yara Shadid (left) and Angela Crawford Neven (center), and director Eric Rapp, work at the space Noble rents to run the Noble Forward program.

One Wednesday night in December, 25-year-old Afrodita Salgado met with her coach at a library in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Salgado’s 5-year-old daughter, Amelia, came too, wearing a T-shirt that said “Mama’s squad” and doodling as the adults reviewed her mother’s progress.

Salgado graduated from a Noble high school in 2013, and recently earned her associate degree in science from a Chicago community college. She hoped her next step would be the University of Illinois at Chicago, a four-year public university.

But she works full-time as a school clerk in addition to caring for her mother and daughter. At community college, most of her classes were held at night — still, she sometimes had to bring her daughter along — while most of the classes she wanted to take at UIC were in the morning. That schedule, plus the knowledge that her Pell Grant wouldn’t have covered the tuition, made her open to other options.

She enrolled in Noble Forward in October after learning about it from a family member and fellow Noble graduate.

“With this I can actually turn in quality work, instead of whatever I have at the moment,” Salgado said. “I do like having the interaction with teachers, but I feel like for me, right now, this is what’s going to work.”

The flexibility of online courses can keep students from falling through the cracks of a higher education system not designed for them, the charter programs say, whether they’ve struggled academically like Chapa or found the logistics of attending class daunting, like Salgado.

The additional support from coaches also makes a big difference, several students said. Southern New Hampshire University gives its partners access to data about when students are logging in and how many times it takes them to master a project, so coaches can see when students are struggling.

Angela Crawford Neven, who coaches Salgado and others in Noble’s program, said she sends lots of reminder texts and makes lots of check-in calls, assuring students they can restart their coursework even if they fall behind — a message they likely didn’t receive during their previous attempts at college.

“There are things that are going to come up: transportation or family issues or access to technology,” Crawford Neven said. “My main goal is to build a solid, strong foundation in a relationship so that they can feel comfortable coming to me with any of those issues.”

The cost factor

Southern New Hampshire’s partnership programs have another critical advantage: they are affordable.

IDEA-U costs $5,500 a year. Noble Forward costs students $6,000 a year, while Duet costs $7,000. That’s low enough that federal Pell Grants for low-income students cover most or all of the tuition. Southern New Hampshire University also offers scholarships to undocumented students, who don’t qualify for federal financial aid.

Students pay tuition to Southern New Hampshire University, which sends back a portion of that money to the programs to pay for the coaching and other wraparound support. Duet gets 57%, while IDEA-U and Noble officials both say they get around 40%.

The low cost can be especially appealing for students who have already accumulated student debt or previously defaulted on a student loan. Students who return to school are often under intense financial pressure, typically working and caring for children or other family members. Nearly all Noble Forward students work full-time, for example, and about a quarter are parents.

Students sometimes still struggle to pay. For this reason, Noble awards scholarships to cover transportation costs and emergencies, like a missed internet bill, while IDEA offers one-time, no-interest loans funded by donations from IDEA employees.

But the low cost also reflects what the students are getting: a pared-down academic experience that doesn’t involve many of the hallmarks of college.

Johann Neem, a history professor at Western Washington University who recently wrote a book about the purpose of college, worries that programs like these focus too much on helping students get a degree at the expense of experiences like building relationships with professors, exchanging ideas with other students in class, and completing hands-on research in labs.

“This is college reduced of so much of what makes college valuable for people’s hearts and minds,” he said of Southern New Hampshire’s online competency-based programs. “If that’s all people are getting from this, a degree … without the kind of rich intellectual experiences that traditionally have given that piece of paper value, we’ve done something wrong. We’ve cheated people.”

Instead, he said, universities should invest in making a liberal arts education more accessible to low-income students who want that, but need a more flexible schedule. States and the federal government could also spend more to help that happen.

Paul LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, has defended the program against this criticism before, saying it incorporates aspects of a liberal arts curriculum. The partners also try to make up for some of the missing socialization. IDEA-U, for example, holds monthly events for students. And others who’ve worked with Southern New Hampshire University, like Mike Larsson, who co-founded Duet and is now its CEO, argue that the curriculum is high-quality and rigorous.

“This isn’t some alternative program,” said Larsson, pointing out that students do interact with the person who reviews their work. “The curriculum is intentionally designed. There’s no mailing it in.”

IDEA-U students gather at the organization’s facility in Weslaco, Texas.

But because these partnership programs offer a limited number of degrees, there’s also some risk that students are taking courses that don’t match their career ambitions. Two students who want to be teachers, for example, told Chalkbeat they were working toward degrees in management and communications, respectively.

Larsson says more general degrees allow students to explore multiple career paths. And IDEA-U allows students to enroll in online programs that operate on Southern New Hampshire University’s traditional academic calendar — which lead to degrees in more subject areas — if they want.

Others, like Heather Lattimer, the dean of San Jose State University’s college of education, worry that if students decide they want to transfer elsewhere, it’s difficult to get credit for the work they’ve done. Noble, for example, advises students against transfers and tells them they should be prepared to finish their degrees with Noble Forward.

Lattimer, who studied a partnership between Southern New Hampshire University and Da Vinci Schools, a charter network in California that allows students to stay on for an extra year to take college classes and complete internships, sees promise in these partnerships for students who are older, need a flexible schedule, or can’t get to a college in person, especially when the programs offer extra coaching support. But she’s not sure they are a good idea for traditional college-age students.

“Not to say that our public universities and community colleges are perfect, we aren’t,” Lattimer said. “But they are the option that is both going to provide more comprehensive choices and pathways for students and is going to be recognized more broadly by future employers.”

The charter programs walk a fine line here, promoting the programs as a plan B, not a first choice, for their students. IDEA students can’t apply to IDEA-U until after they’ve graduated high school.

“We want to give them a crack at the traditional system,” Garza said. “We do believe in sending our students to the country’s best colleges, because [they] are set up to receive and support low-income, first-generation, minority students given their endowments, given their resources.”

The problem is, that support doesn’t always materialize, and sometimes isn’t enough. And that leaves students searching for other options.

Who benefits?

All of these partnerships are part of a program called College for America that Southern New Hampshire University launched in 2013. It’s since expanded to include a dozen “community partners” that enroll around 1,400 students.

But the university, known for its national marketing effort, has ambitious expansion goals. Working with charter school operators, which have close relationships with their students and expertise advising their alumni in college, offers access to a ready pool of students.

Rapp, of Noble Forward, said he knew at least two students who enrolled in the program after previously considering online college.

“But they were hesitant about the programs because they didn’t know anything about them, and there was a sense that the online programs weren’t legitimate,” he said. “Once we approached them with this option, the students trusted [it].”

Some charter operators who are looking to improve how they help students who’ve dropped out of college, like Uplift Education in Texas, say they’re watching these partnerships and are considering starting their own. Other networks are already experimenting with online college partnerships.

The New York City and New Orleans branches of the KIPP charter network, for example, have worked with Southern New Hampshire University over the last few years to allow high school students or alumni to take online college classes, while Collegiate Academies, a charter school network in Louisiana, has a partnership for its high school students.

“In general, there should be more models like this,” said Elena Sanina, who leads college access and alumni success work at the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit venture fund that has funded both Noble and Collegiate’s programs. “It might be something we see popping up across the country.”

Noble’s program is too new to have graduated any students. So far, 87 students have earned associate degrees through IDEA-U, while eight have earned bachelor’s degrees.

Data from Duet, which is the oldest of Southern New Hampshire University’s community partner programs, provide more insight.

Of the 793 students who’ve enrolled in an associate degree program through Duet since 2013, about a quarter graduated, a quarter withdrew, and half are still enrolled. Among the 163 students who enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program, 13% got their degree, 20% withdrew, and the rest are still enrolled.

Overall, Southern New Hampshire University officials say, about half of the students who start an online bachelor’s degree at the university, which includes full- and part-time students, get one within six years.

Expansion plans

Noble Forward hopes to enroll around 1,000 students within eight years. IDEA-U has plans to serve thousands of students across 30 locations over the next decade. Both say they plan to enroll more students who aren’t alumni as they grow. Duet, too, wants to expand to 2,000 students over the next four to five years.

The programs could change as they grow. Right now, IDEA-U shares a brand name and some resources with the K-12 charter network, but it’s technically a separate company that contracts with Southern New Hampshire University and employs IDEA-U’s staff — an arrangement Garza says prevents the mixing of taxpayer dollars meant to go to K-12 public schools with money for higher education.

That setup also means IDEA-U is allowed to take in a profit. (In 2019, Garza said, IDEA-U ended the year with a surplus of around $11,000.) IDEA officials are deciding whether it should become a standalone company, its own nonprofit like Duet, or maintain its connection to the network.

For now, the Noble charter network is running Noble Forward as a program of its own. Officials there say they take care to fundraise and budget separately to avoid mixing those funds with public dollars meant for Noble’s middle and high schools.

There are other open questions. Some students wonder how employers will view their online degrees. One experiment found that employers were less likely to call back applicants who held a business bachelor’s degree from an online for-profit college than if they attended a less selective public university or college. (Southern New Hampshire University is a nonprofit.)

Larsson, of Duet, says graduates of his program have landed jobs or gained admission to graduate school.

“Four or five years ago, we wondered if students were going to take a discount in the job market, but we have not seen that at all,” he said. “That college degree is often just the toll that people have to pay to get considered.”

Since Chapa enrolled in IDEA-U in October 2017, he has earned his associate degree. He estimates he’s about two months away from finishing his bachelor’s degree in management with a concentration in public administration, which he often works on while his 7-year-old son is at school. He’s hoping to apply for government jobs when he’s done.

“I feel like it’s a lot better than having no degree,” he said. “I’d much rather have an online degree, even if it’s a little inferior, which I don’t think it is. But even if it is, I’d rather have that than nothing.”

To learn more about the challenges low-income students of color face in college, and what colleges are doing to help them, read Chalkbeat’s Ready or Not series by reporters in our Newark and Detroit bureaus.

‘I can take a failing grade,’ but not homelessness: The hard choices some Detroit students make for college success

2019-12-09T22:58:20+00:00

It was a heavy moment during a panel discussion about college success when Myla Smith described the financial challenges that led to some impossible choices.

During her freshman year at Michigan State University, Smith said, the struggles she and other students from low-income backgrounds faced left them working as many hours as they could to bring in cash they needed to live. Financial aid wasn’t enough.

“Sometimes work was more important than class,” said Smith, a graduate of Osborn High School in Detroit who now works as a college advisor at a high school in Romulus. “Because, I can take a failing grade, but I can’t take being homeless. Do you guys understand?”

The discussion came during an event put on Friday by the Detroit College Access Network, an organization that coordinates efforts to ensure all students in the city have the opportunity to attend college. (Full disclosure: I moderated the panel discussion.)

Smith, who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, was one of four college students and recent college graduates that spoke to the audience about their experiences, both in high school during the college preparation process, and when they arrived on campus.

Ashley Johnson, the director of the college access network, said she hopes Smith’s story opens the eyes of some of the college officials who were in the audience.

“It was really powerful,” Johnson said.

The idea behind the panel discussion was to help people understand the challenges facing students from the city who go on to college. It’s also the goal of a series, called Ready or Not, that Chalkbeat launched in September. The series follows a separate group of recent Detroit high school graduates through what is often a challenging first year of college.

Nationally, only 60% of students who enroll at four-year institutions earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. That is the average for all students — the six-year college graduation rate is much lower for black students (40%), Hispanic students (55%), and students from low income families (49%).

Smith shared the stage with De’Ernst Johnson, a graduate of Davis Aerospace Technical High School who now is studying performing and fine arts at Schoolcraft College in Livonia. He spoke about the importance of having high school staff who invest time in helping students prepare for the challenges of college.

“I had an immense support team with the counselor at my high school and the assistant principal and a couple of teachers who not only saw the best in me but also told me about … how I could progress even more.”

He’s driven, in part, because he wants to set a good example for his younger siblings.

“I want to show them that there is another way of life out there and you don’t have to just go to high school and that’s the end of your education. You can go to college … and do anything you want to do.”

Anton Bronson’s moment of clarity came when he went to the college graduation of a cousin. He recalled seeing people graduating to go on to become doctors, nurses, and “careers I never heard of before.”

“It was kind of inspiring,” said Bronson, a graduate of Cass Technical High School now studying business at Oakland Community College.

America Yahya graduated from Voyageur College Preparatory High School in Detroit and is now studying social work and public health at Wayne State University.

She described growing up the youngest of nine children, with a mother who never went to school and a father who had to drop out of school in his native Yemen while in middle school. Before transferring to Voyageur, she said, she attended another charter school that didn’t push college and didn’t offer college preparatory classes. What helped, she said, was getting involved in an organization that helped her see the possibilities of college.

She urged those in attendance to do the same for other youth.

“Look to your neighbors, look to your community and see what you can do for them,” Yahya said.

Smith’s advice to those working with young people: Affirm them, and “tell them they can do whatever they put their mind to.”

She said that being the top student in her school meant getting a lot of attention from the staff. But, she said, “that took a lot of attention away from other students. They didn’t get pushed to go and contact colleges and to apply for scholarships.”

“Being a college adviser, sometimes I feel like I’m the only one telling students that they are worthy, that you don’t need to be in the top 10% to go to college. It’s very sad.”

Whitmer takes steps to make sure $100 million in federal student aid to Michigan students doesn’t go unspent again

2019-12-02T21:29:31+00:00

Money is a major barrier preventing many of Michigan’s young, low-income residents from pursuing a college education. Yet, last year about $100 million in federal student college aid went unspent.

That’s why Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is working with the Michigan College Access Network to increase the number of Michigan high school students who complete an application for federal aid. This year, just over half of the students who graduated in the spring filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, better known as the FAFSA.

The goal is to increase that number to 75% for the Class of 2020. Though the governor’s challenge is targeted at all Michigan high school students, it could particularly benefit students from low-income families. A statement from the governor’s office noted that an estimated 25,000 Michigan students who were eligible last year for federal Pell grants, which go to students from low-income families, didn’t fill out the crucial financial aid form that is required to get that grant. That left $100 million unspent.

For such students, a college education can have a lasting impact, given research that finds college students earn more and are less likely to live in poverty than Americans with just a high school diploma.

Financial challenges can be a barrier to entering and remaining in college.

“Perceived affordability is one of the biggest myths students encounter on their journey to furthering their education,” said Ryan Fewins-Bliss, MCAN executive director.

To boost the numbers, Whitmer is offering some incentives. The biggest: Schools with the largest increases could have high-profile Michiganders such as Whitmer or Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist as their graduation speaker, or the speaker at “decision day” ceremonies where students declare what college they’re attending.

The state expects 500 Michigan high schools to participate in the governor’s challenge, as well as a related campaign from the Michigan College Access Network that will allow them to track their progress online.

In addition to the three overall winners in the state, 10 geographic winners will be selected, and a group of students from those schools will have an opportunity to meet Whitmer or Gilchrist.

“Every student deserves a path to a quality, affordable postsecondary education, and filling out FAFSA forms can make an enormous difference for families across the state,” Whitmer said in a statement.

Since she took office earlier this year, Whitmer has pushed to increase the percentage of Michigan residents with a postsecondary education credential from 43.7% to 60% by 2030. In October, Whitmer announced Michigan is joining Complete College America, which works to ensure everyone has a path to college graduation through a number of initiatives, including one that gives colleges strategies to help students explore their interests and careers, as well as make progress toward on-time graduation.

The push comes at the same time Chalkbeat is chronicling the experiences of a group of recent Detroit and Newark high school grads through their first year of college. Chalkbeat’s goal is to capture the barriers they face that can upend even the most driven student’s college dreams. We launched the series with a look at the teens and the challenges they face. Last month, we wrote about some of the campus programs that provide support to those students.

Catch up on the Ready or Not series here.

It’s not just teachers: How counselor diversity matters for students of color

2019-11-20T19:59:50+00:00

In a recent study, a high school counselor offered this honest description of the uncertainty of her job: “Maybe later, I’ll start to see kids come back and they’ll be like, oh this helped or that helped,” she said. Still, “Sometimes I leave and I’m like, I’ve done nothing.”

Now, new research captures exactly how much of a difference a counselor like her can make — and it’s substantial, particularly for low-income students.

That study appears to be the first to quantify how individual counselors affect students. Better counselors boost students’ chances of graduating high school and enrolling in and remaining in college, it finds. And students of color do much better when assigned to a counselor of color, seeing their chance of graduating high school jump nearly 4 percentage points.

It comes as a number of other efforts to improve low-income students’ chances of enrolling and persisting in college have produced uneven results — suggesting the basic approach of adding counselors or helping existing ones improve deserves more attention.

Christine Mulhern, a Harvard graduate student, said she undertook the study because prior research on school counselors was so limited, but she suspected they made a big difference. “Talking to a lot of people, they said that their own school counselors had a big role in what they ended up doing,” she said.

Mulhern’s research was made possible by a key insight: Students are often assigned to counselors alphabetically by last name. Because alphabetization is essentially random, Mulhern — armed with a massive dataset from the state of Massachusetts — was able to study how more than 500 counselors affected the outcomes of nearly 150,000 students over a number of years.

Her first major finding was that counselors vary in their ability to improve students’ trajectories.

Students who had a counselor of far-above-average quality were 2 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school, 1.5 points more likely to attend college, and 1.4 points more likely to stay in college through their first year.

These effects were even larger for low-income students, students of color, and lower-achieving students. For instance, a very good counselor improved low-income students’ high school graduation rate by 3.4 percentage points and college enrollment by 2.9 points.

Students of color also benefited from having a counselor of color. Their chances of graduating high school and attending college each increased by 3.8 percentage points — an effect even bigger than having an above-average counselor.

However, 87% of counselors in Massachusetts were white, according to the paper. There does not appear to be recent national data on the demographics of public school counselors, but a 2011 survey found that about three quarters were white.

Surprisingly, considering research on teachers, more experienced counselors were no more effective than novice ones. Individual counselors’ ability was fairly consistent from year to year.

Mulhern’s research is similar to widely cited studies on teachers, which have shown that some are better at raising student test scores, and other outcomes like attendance, year over year. This line of work proved controversial, though, after it became the intellectual basis for tougher teacher evaluation systems that relied in part on student test scores.

Mulhern, for her part, is skeptical that policymakers should rush to implement new evaluations for counselors on the basis of her work.

“There are a lot of things counselors are supposed to be doing that I can’t measure, [like] mental health support,” she said. “I’m not sure that I want these measures to be used in evaluation, but at the same time, I think students can benefit a lot if schools can identify effective counselors. There may be some middle ground where more training is targeted to people who don’t seem to be doing as well as their peers.”

Meanwhile, a number of policymakers and philanthropists have focused on ways to boost high school students’ college attendance — without the help of school counselors. Those lower-cost efforts include packets of information mailed to high-achieving high schoolers, text messages to remind students to fill out financial aid forms, and virtual advisors to help them through college applications.

These efforts have generally had modest impacts at best. Mulhern’s research suggests a different tack: improving the quality or quantity of college counselors.

“This can work, and there’s already this huge infrastructure — all of these training programs, this whole profession devoted to this,” she said. “It may be useful to think of this problem from the perspective of individuals who have already been working on it for a long time.”

Mulhern research doesn’t provide clear insight on how to improve counselor effectiveness. But it does suggest — in line with past research — that hiring more counselors could help. She finds that at an average school hiring a new counselor would increase the entire school’s graduation rate by about half a point and college enrollment by nearly a full point. The benefits are even larger for low-performing students.

A separate recent paper on the experience of college counselors in an unnamed urban school district — which enrollment data suggest is Milwaukee Public Schools —offers a window into why.

Sometimes, counselors describe their job as providing optimism when students are down. “I think I’m still a safe place for them to go to,” one counselor explained. “I’m their cheerleader, trying to tell them you can do it, you’re okay. I’ll help you. What can we do?”

Other counselors describe focusing on helping students make post-high school plans. “Are you planning to go to college? Do you want to go to [the] military? What’s your plan? That kind of intimidates them,” one counselor described. Several said an especially delicate aspect of the job is trying to support students’ ambitions while providing realistic advice.

But for counselors, there are also more things to be done then time to do it. Many described being pressured to take on additional responsibilities, including coordinating standardized testing. In Milwaukee, one counselor is responsible for more than 300 students; in Massachusetts, the ratio is slightly lower.

“Typically in schools you have stuff popping off all day. So, you are responding to crisis,” one counselor told researchers. “I try to have a plan as much as I can … But sometimes you don’t get anything done in your plan.”

‘I just have to work hard for it.’ As Detroit students settle into their first semester of college, these programs provide needed support

2019-11-15T18:47:56+00:00

She’s scheduled office visits with her professor. She’s asked the teaching assistants for help. She’s dropped into the math learning centers.

But still, despite excelling in her other classes, Marqell McClendon has struggled in the low-level math class she’s taking during her first semester at Michigan State University.

“Sometimes when I’m in class and I’m learning, some things start to feel familiar from high school and I’m kind of like, ‘I learned this already but I don’t really understand it.’ And I don’t know why I don’t understand it because it looks familiar.”

So she’s finding help any way she can — watching educational videos online and, when the work seems impossible, approaching strangers in her dorm and asking them for help.

It’s an unfamiliar scene for McClendon, the valedictorian of her graduating class at Detroit’s Cody High School who’s used to students coming to her for help. Now, the tables are turned. She describes it as “bittersweet.”

Marqell is among a group of recent Detroit high school graduates Chalkbeat is following through their first year of college, for a series highlighting the complex dynamics that make it difficult for students from disadvantaged communities like Detroit to complete college.

The challenges students face — academic, financial, social — are why so many colleges have turned to programs that help ease the transition, from summer bridge programs that provide academic and social support during the summer between high school graduation and the beginning of college to similar programs that operate during the academic year.

The programs differ in structure, content, and length, but all reflect hope on the part of the colleges that giving first-generation students and underrepresented students extra support will pay off in terms of increased graduation rates.

Meanwhile, one study found that a third of students whose parents had no college experience dropped out after three years of school, compared to 26% of those whose parents had some college education and 14% of those whose parents had bachelor’s degrees. First-generation students are often at a disadvantage because their parents struggle to help them navigate college life.

Closer to home, nearly half of graduates from Detroit’s main district who make it to college must take remedial courses. For charter schools in the city, it ranges from 32% to 75%. Taking remedial classes comes with another set of challenges. It can be discouraging, particularly for students used to excelling in high school. But it can also be costly, given the students often are paying for classes that don’t count toward college graduation.

At MSU, McClendon is taking advantage of one such program that is geared toward students studying in the university’s College of Natural Science. Called the Charles Drew Science Scholars, it arms students – most of them from underrepresented communities – with intense academic advising, academic coaching, career advising, and a connection to a tight-knit community. At last count, 72% of the Drew students graduate from college in six years.

For McClendon, the Drew program has given her something she wouldn’t have gotten on her own: a small community of peers and adults she can turn to for help.

“They can actually cater to our individual needs,” McClendon said.

She may need it to get through her math class, which she must pass to get into the upper-level math she needs for her biomedical laboratory science major.

The first big test came when she took her midterm exam in mid-October. Walking out of the room that day, she wasn’t sure whether any of the work she’d put in would pay off in the final score.

This year, Chalkbeat reporters in Newark and Detroit are examining whether students from struggling schools are prepared for college — and whether colleges are prepared for them. Catch up on the Ready or Not series here.

***

Michigan State University freshman, Kashia Perkins, left, catches up with her “big sister” and MSU student, Kai Brown, on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019 on the MSU campus.

It was mid-afternoon on a drizzly Wednesday afternoon in Mount Pleasant, and inside Ronan Hall, the students in the first-year experience seminar class were peppering a couple of guest speakers with questions about loans and credit. But when the conversation turned too heavily toward credit cards, Marceil Davis interrupted.

“By and large, these are first-generation college students,” Davis, the teacher of the class, said from his seat in the back of the room, where he’d been observing while the guests spoke. “One of the worst things we can do, on top of loan debt, is to add credit card debt.”

It’s an important piece of advice, given that more than a third of college students report having credit card debt of $1,000 or more, according to a survey released earlier this year.

But in this class at Central Michigan University, the students are getting guidance from people like Davis, an academic advisor with a program at the university that is aimed at ensuring students like the ones in this class – either first-generation students or those from low-income families – can successfully navigate their freshman year.

“We’re Pathways,” Davis told the students. “We’re a little more up in your business. The reason we do this is to set you up for success.”

The Pathways to Academic Success program is funded by a state grant. Multiple other Michigan colleges run similar programs through the grant. At CMU, the program helps about 150 freshmen each year.

Demetrius Robinson, a recent graduate of the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit, is one of them. He said being part of the program provides distinct advantages for students.

“You get that experience that a lot of other students miss out on,” said Robinson, whom everyone calls Meech. “They don’t have the academic support, the academic advisers that we have or the resources we have available to us. I can come in here any given day and go… to the Pathways office and sit and get any kind of help I need.”

Mary Henley, the director of Pathways to Academic Success, poses for a photograph inside her office on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019, at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant.

Mary Henley, director of the Pathways program, said it has four goals: helping students increase their grade point averages, advance their academic standing each year, increase their acceptance into their major, and graduate.

“Those sound like very simple goals,” Henley said. “But we get students on campus, they get through high school and they do really well and they come to college and it’s a culture shock. We are there to help students like Meech navigate. He was a superstar in high school and you come to college and all of a sudden you’re starting over.”

Robinson, an extrovert, is already making a name for himself. He cuts hair and helps students with fitness training, something he’s been doing for years thanks to his family’s fitness business. He’s become involved in campus organizations, and recently became certified as a campus volunteer through Pathways, which will allow him to lead or assist with campus tours for prospective students, as well as participate in panel discussions for those touring the campus.

But like any first-year student, Robinson has faced challenges. He can cite times when he’s struggled to meet his professors’ expectations.

“I do what’s asked, but when I get my papers back, sometimes it’s like, ‘Dang, I thought I did everything,’” he said. “I’ve come to this realization that … I’m putting out my best work … but it isn’t enough.”

He’s dealt with it by talking to his instructors. He’s found them receptive to providing feedback. They’ve told him how he can improve his grades. Now, he said, he has a road map to finishing the semester with strong grades. He hopes to end up with mostly As and Bs, but said a C is possible.

Central Michigan University freshmen, from left, Demetrius Robinson Jr., 18, Nic’Quan Webb, 18, and Keegen Williams, 18, complete worksheets during their first year experience class on Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2019 in Mount Pleasant.

That his professors have been willing to help is surprising to Robinson.

“These professors actually do care and they do try to help you. Not just me. They help all students in the class.”

Henley, the Pathways program director, understands the challenges her students are dealing with. She was one of them decades ago, when she arrived on the CMU campus as a freshman in 1979. She struggled not only as a black student coming from Flint to a predominantly white institution, but also as a first-generation student.

“I’m able to offer students who are coming here the way that I did a smoother path,” Henley said.

***

Lately, Kashia Perkins has been mulling a decision that could dramatically alter her future.

When she arrived as a freshman at Michigan State University in August, she was on a path toward a degree in human biology.

Now, she’s not so certain.

Her biggest concern? Whether an undergraduate degree will be enough to land her a good job.

“I definitely would need to go to medical school. I wasn’t sure if medical school was for me.”

Perkins raised the prospect of switching to MSU’s nursing program with Kai Brown on a recent afternoon. Brown, who like Perkins is from Detroit, is herself majoring in human biology and is planning to go to medical school to become a surgeon. She urged her younger classmate to think hard before making a big switch.

“I’ve been in that space where I considered nursing and not medical school as my route,” Brown said. “You have time to decide if that’s your idea of what you want to do with your life.”

The two became connected through a university program called Big Sister Little Sister, which pairs incoming freshmen with older students who can help guide them through their first year. Brown, who graduated from Detroit’s elite Cass Technical High School, is a senior at MSU.

For Kashia, it’s a reversal of roles. She’s used to being the big sister. The one setting the example. The one her younger siblings look up to.

Now, she’s the one looking up.

“I thought it would be nice to have somebody who has college experience who could mentor me,” Perkins said.

Brown wishes it was something she’d done as a freshman at MSU. She lived in the same building that held most of her classes, so she recalls feeling isolated — from the university as a whole, but also from the African-American community.

She and Perkins were only recently paired, so they’re still getting to know each other. Brown is mentoring two other freshmen. All three little sisters are majoring in science.

“It’s important to have a mentor, especially in college, and especially for someone who may be a first-generation student,” Brown said. “It’s not always easy trying to lead your own way. So, sometimes, you might need someone to lift you up when you need it.”

Perkins is involved in several other activities, including a dance team. She said being involved helps with time management, because the frequent responsibilities force her to keep track of the school work she needs to get done.

Like McClendon, her toughest class at MSU is a low-level math class. But Perkins reports doing well academically overall. She’s also enjoying being on her own for the first time.

“It’s helping me become more independent,” Perkins said.

And two weeks after that initial conversation with Brown about her major, things were starting to firm up for Kashia. She’s now decided to stick with the human biology major for now.

“This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” Perkins said. “I just have to work hard for it.”

***

Kashia Perkins, a freshman at Michigan State University, poses for a photograph on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019.

The Drew Scholars program at MSU began 40 years ago as part of an effort to increase the number of underrepresented students going into science fields. The program takes in about 75 students annually, with the main criteria being strong high school grade point averages and strong performance on the SAT and/or ACT, with particular attention paid to math scores.

Well over 90% of the students involved in the program return for their second year at MSU, officials say. While similar programs also report positive results, it’s hard to make sweeping statements about the effectiveness of such efforts at colleges and universities because they all take different approaches.

Jerry Caldwell, the director of the program, said math is emphasized because all of the degree programs in the College of Natural Science require at least a semester of calculus. Drew students are required to live in Rather Hall during their freshman year, with nearly all living on the same floor as the program offices.

The residential piece is a crucial part of Drew Scholars, Caldwell said. The goal, he said, is for students to become part of a community and to feel connected to students with similar academic interests.

“This is a place where students can get lost,” Caldwell said, referring to the large campus that enrolls nearly 40,000 students. “It’s very important that they have a connection to something or somebody. We’re here to help them navigate that environment.”

McClendon already has benefited from a key part of the program: a requirement that students meet with an academic adviser three times each semester during their first year. During her first session, McClendon confirmed her suspicions that it would take her five years, not four, to earn her degree.

“It made me realize it’s a lot of work I have to put in,” McClendon said. “But it kind of got me mentally prepared for what I should expect.”

Students also must take a seminar class during their freshman and sophomore years, taught by Caldwell. Among the key principles of the first-year class: professionalism, connecting with faculty, time management, the teaching and learning process, community connections, and health and wellness.

Students are assigned an older student as a mentor, and there are a number of activities that bring alums of the program as well as professionals to campus to share their experiences. That’s how McClendon connected with a woman, a physicist, she hopes can be a professional mentor.

“It’s important to get those connections early because I may run into someone that can actually give me, like, a glimpse of what I think I want to do in the future,” McClendon said.

Central Michigan University Academic Advisor, Marceil Davis, talks to students during the first year experience class he teaches.

She learned how beneficial the program could be by listening to Antoine Douglas, who the last two years was a college adviser at Cody and is now working toward a master’s degree at MSU. Douglas helped her get into the program, and on the day she moved into Rather in August, he looked back at how it influenced him, a first-generation student who came to college knowing little.

“I was that kid that moved in that day, six years ago, and I was like, ‘What the heck?’” Douglas recalled. “The Drew program got me together. It shows you how to be successful. I can sing their praises all the time, because they got me through.”

With experience from the program to draw upon, McClendon is learning to advocate for herself. That’s how she ended up approaching strangers for help with that difficult math class. One night in particular, she was at a point where she thought she was in danger of failing. She figured, “I don’t have anything to lose.”

So she walked up to a young man who was studying in the common area of her dorm. And she asked him to help.

“He actually sat there for about an hour and a half and he helped me do my math homework and he helped me study for a quiz,” McClendon said. “He even told me that if I ever need help, I can just come knock on his door. It’s just nice that you can just run into people that are so willing to help you.”

Later, when she took her midterm exam, McClendon earned a B. But that’s still not good enough for someone who in high school was used to earning all A’s.

“That mindset kind of makes things better for me. It just makes me work a little bit harder.”

This story is part of a partnership with Detroit Public Television. It was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

I graduated from Detroit’s most prestigious high school. I still struggled when I got to college.

2019-11-14T17:18:15+00:00

My first year of college was a rough ride.

I had applied to Northwestern University pretty late in the game, but even though I attended Detroit’s most prestigious high school, I was sure I wouldn’t get in. After all, the acceptance rate was just 12%. But I saw no harm in trying, especially because my school had given me free application vouchers. Then I was accepted, and after a visit, some phone calls, and some very hefty scholarships, to my surprise I found that I was headed to one of the country’s most selective universities.

That turn of events was surprising enough. But nothing could have prepared me for what would happen once I got on campus.

You see, I’ve always been told I was smart. People in my neighborhood knew me as “the girl with the book,” and my friends told me I was weird because I liked to learn. I was always the teacher’s pet, and all of my teachers promised me I’d do great things in life. So walking into Northwestern, I was pretty confident that I’d do a great job, and have a good time in the process.

And for the first few weeks of school, that’s what seemed to be happening. I enjoyed my classes: an African American studies course, an introductory Spanish course, a writing and reporting class, and a sociology class focusing on cities. My first small assignments, long lectures, and short quizzes weren’t easy, but I found the work manageable. I began joining clubs and making friends.

But then, at just week five. I had my first round of midterms.

Exams may be scary for all college students, but I’m positive that nothing compares to the fear, anxiety, and overall disappointment I felt realizing that I hadn’t been prepared by my high school to be there. While I thought I understood most of the readings, study guide questions showed me I had not. Every time I thought I had studied the vocabulary and verb tenses enough, I would fail the small quizzes I gave to myself. And writing my first college essay? Let’s just say that without my school’s writing center, it would not have happened. It was frustrating, but even more than that — it was paralyzing.

All of a sudden I felt stupid. While others could still party and have a good time, I locked myself in my room, crying, trying to study, and mostly praying. All the information thrown at me confused me, and I didn’t have the first clue how to study. In my high school, I never really had to try. I gained no study skills, and rarely had to think critically. But at Northwestern, critical thinking was the only way to pass. I had to understand the readings enough to take them a step further and prove some sort of argument. I needed to be able to think through all the material and answer questions we may have never discussed. It was more than preparing for one exam at the end of my junior year — I had to actually learn and be able to use that knowledge now.

So, I studied. Or at least tried to. I was basically mindlessly doing quizlets, constantly rereading my textbooks and essays, and depending on our writing coaches for all my essay needs. I struggled to keep up with the pace and I constantly wanted to quit.

It wasn’t fair to me that I was struggling while everyone around me thrived because of the ways they had been set up for success.

Some of my classmates shared with me that they had had similar assignments when they were in high school. Then I would think about how easily I succeeded in high school, and wish that I had been given the opportunity to go to a school that challenged me to actually learn — not just to memorize what would be needed to pass the next test.

I also thought back to how hard it was for my college counselor to help me submit my applications, much less support me in my transition to college. In Detroit as in any cities, college counselors often play other roles that make them hard to access for actual college concerns. My own counselor had so many students that I actually ended up basically writing my own letter of recommendation.

And I thought about how no one had taken the time to have the tough conversation with me and my classmates about what we would find when we got to college. College is different. It’s nothing like high school, and it’s nothing like being in Detroit. Someone could have prepared me for the culture, and overall, shock of being in a new place that wasn’t created for people like me, but that never happened.

After my disappointing midterm grades, I realized that I would have to figure out a strategy on my own. I had to teach myself how to study, learn my own learning style, and consistently focus on reading in between the lines to succeed. I ended my quarter on a strong note, but only because of my hard work and the access to outside help that I had.

Still, I couldn’t help but think — what about those who don’t have what I do? Those who went to high schools with fewer resources than mine. Those who don’t have parents to call that can help them edit essays. Those who have to provide for their families and can’t focus solely on school. The ones who attend colleges where they don’t have access to dedicated counselors. Or those who might not have the skills to reach out for what they need, or who might have learned that asking for help wouldn’t yield any.

Michigan is facing a federal lawsuit filed by advocates who say the state has deprived Detroit children of their right to literacy. I learned to read, but my experience making the transition to college revealed to me that Detroit students will always have to work twice as hard just to be average. I went to the best high school in the city and didn’t know that until it was almost too late.

Imani Harris is a student at Northwestern University. In 2019, she was a summer intern in Chalkbeat’s Detroit bureau. A version of this piece originally appeared on the Detroit Students Blog.

About our First Person series:

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.

How sometimes-overhyped claims about the future of work drive XQ, the organization helping NYC open new schools

2019-11-06T20:58:00+00:00

Packed in the basement of a branch of the Queens Public Library, roughly 40 New York City educators heard about an exciting opportunity — the chance at major grants to start their own schools or revamp existing ones.

In the background was an unmistakable message. A video showed a classroom with a decrepit chalkboard, then shots of a new car and an iPhone. “So cars are now this, and phones are now this — but high schools are still that?” asked the narrator as the barren blackboard reappeared. “American high schools are based on the same model, and it’s been over 100 years.”

Teachers at the event may not have realized it, but XQ — the deep-pocketed group helping New York City fund the creation and overhaul of a number of city high schools — holds a distinct philosophy about what ails American schools. (XQ is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, which also funds Chalkbeat through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.)

It’s an idea that has captured the attention of philanthropists, futurists, business leaders, and politicians of many stripes: that the economy is changing incredibly quickly while public schools are all but frozen in amber.

The evidence for this is not nearly as strong as XQ suggests, though. The world and the economy are changing, of course — post-secondary credentials are more important to getting a high-paying job than they were a generation ago, for example. But there’s also evidence that the rate of change in the economy has actually been slowing, and some economists worry that the economy isn’t moving fast enough.

Meanwhile, XQ has made a few specific claims about the future of work that are misleading or wrong — notable since, in New York City, the education department has accepted not just the organization’s resources but its framework for starting a school. On New York City’s website, those interested in applying for a cut of the $32 million in promised grants are told to explain how their idea will “prepare students for the complexities of a fast-changing future, including the world of work.”

“If schools have failed to adapt to a changing world, then we have a duty to act,” said Jack Schneider, an education historian at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who has been critical of XQ. “Yet how certain are we that the proposed reforms are going to solve the problem?”

The economy is changing, but perhaps not as rapidly as widely believed

The idea that the economy is rapidly evolving seems obvious. Our phones are continually being updated; automated check-out kiosks are proliferating; we keep hearing self-driving cars are around the corner. Some futurists describe the world as being at the onset of the “fourth industrial revolution.” But the evidence for a massive, ongoing economic shift is fairly weak.

In fact, some economists are worried that the rate of economic change is actually slowing. In recent decades, people have been switching jobs less frequently, fewer start-ups have been created, and there has been weaker growth in economic productivity. And contrary to popular belief, there’s little evidence of a rapid rise in the so-called gig economy.

“Yes, we’re seeing change, but compared to past changes, they’re fairly incremental,” said Joel Elvery, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank in Cleveland, whose own work has found that shifts in occupations have slowed in recent decades.

That hasn’t stopped the narrative that schools need to transform to prepare students for the fast-changing future of work from gaining traction, including among business groups and prominent education leaders, like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

To Schneider, predictions about the future of work are useful to advocates because of their ambiguity. “Like the phrase ‘21st century skills,’ it’s as positive sounding as it is meaningless,” he said. “And that makes it a convenient package for almost any reform proposal.”

What is changing? Studies show, and XQ notes, that employers increasingly value interpersonal skills. American society is becoming more racially diverse. College degrees or other credentials are increasingly necessary for high-paying jobs.

And of course, no one can say for sure what the future economy will look like or how rapidly it will evolve. Michele Cahill, a senior advisor at XQ, says the organization’s goals for students — that they will be “holders of foundational knowledge” and “generous collaborators,” among others — will serve them well regardless.

“These kinds of goals are really what appear to both make for a purposeful education for young people, one that engages them in learning … equips them for adult life and for the economy, but also for more than that,” she said.

“You can’t argue that our politics, that our communities are not changing. We have a very complex society that these young people are growing up in.”

A New York City’s education department spokesperson echoed that sentiment. “We have heard directly from communities that education has to keep up with the changes and shifts happening in our world,” said Katie O’Hanlon. “To solve for the problems of tomorrow, students today need a skill set that goes far beyond what was typically expected in the past.”

But XQ has made a few specific, dubious claims about the future (and present) of work

XQ is pitching in $10 million to New York City’s initiative, called Imagine NYC Schools. XQ is also contributing much of the intellectual infrastructure. The application directs educators interested in pitching an idea to consult XQ publications like “Students in the 21st Century,” for example.

“It used to be common for Americans to graduate high school or college, get a job that would sustain a family, and stay in one field for life,” the opening section of that report says. “Nowadays, most people end up working multiple careers by the time they reach age 40.”

XQ cites no evidence to support this claim, and it does not appear to be accurate.

It’s true that young people change jobs more than older people, but that was true in the past, too. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics going back decades show the median length of time Americans spend in a given job has held fairly steady.

Other analyses show that workers, especially younger workers, are actually changing jobs less frequently than they used to.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat, XQ was unable to substantiate the claim in its report. A spokesperson pointed to other federal labor data that did just the opposite: While millennials held an average of 7.8 jobs between the ages of 18 and 30, baby boomers held slightly more, 8.2, during the same age range.

XQ has also promoted another future of work canard.

An image from an XQ video on the future of work. The video was taken down from XQ’s YouTube page after Chalkbeat inquired about the veracity of the statistic.

At XQ’s 2018 annual symposium, futurist Heather McGowan repeated a prediction that 65% of the jobs of the future hadn’t been created yet, though she acknowledged that the statistic was “debatable.” A promotional video released by XQ months later made a similar prediction: “Eighty-five percent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 have not been invented yet,” the XQ narrator declared.

But there is no credible analysis to support either number, and the predictions are wildly out of line with historical trends.

The XQ video was removed from YouTube after Chalkbeat inquired about the veracity of this statistic. (It does not appear that XQ has promoted this particular statistic in its published reports.)

When asked about this claim by Chalkbeat, McGowan acknowledged the statistic may not be accurate — “it was a silly, wild-ass guess” — but that it helped drive home her broader point.

“I use it because I need to get people’s attention that some large percentage of work tasks are going to change,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter. I could say 20% … If the provocation comes from a bigger number, fine.”

At the same XQ event, McGowan also claimed that life expectancy would reach 90 years “sometime soon.” Currently, American life expectancy is under 80, and has been inching downward in recent years. Asked about this, McGowan suggested that rapid advances in medicine to treat cancer and heart disease were on the way.

It’s not clear where all this leaves schools

New York City officials have also emphasized the changing world in explaining the Imagine NYC Schools initiative.

“We’re in the middle of massive shifts in society — the economy, the climate. Education needs to keep pace with those shifts and this initiative supports us in doing that,” deputy chancellor Karin Goldmark told Chalkbeat.

For educators in Queens and across New York City, how to design or redesign schools to do that and meet the expectations of both XQ and the city is not obvious. The advice offered is broad, like “Turn school design on its head. Start with your big idea, your vision.”

That is by design, according to XQ. “We’re not specifying a model. It’s not saying, this will do it,” said Cahill. “We’re specifying some design principles and some goals for people to grapple with in their communities.”

Ultimately, the New York City education department says it will decide which school ideas receive funding and which do not. A spokesperson for the department said criteria will include judgments about the school design and “involvement of student and community voice.”

In responses collected by Chalkbeat, some in New York City said the focus should be on more basic needs.

“Our schools need smaller class sizes,” wrote one respondent. “It’s not an innovation, it’s just good practice.”

“Innovation is secondary,” another commented. “First NYC students need everything that students in suburban schools get routinely.”

But others were enthusiastic, embracing the frame encouraged by XQ. “Innovation in schools today looks like making a meaningful connection between schools and the communities in which our students will soon play a more integral role,” wrote one person. “Schools need to update their pedagogy, design, and structure to align with the workforce in 2019.”

Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Wayne State offers free tuition for Detroit grads

2019-10-23T18:12:52+00:00

The largest university in Detroit plans to offer free tuition to students who graduate from any city high school.

Wayne State’s decision to waive tuition for Detroit graduates could be life-changing for hundreds of students every year.

While they will still face some costs, those students and their families won’t have to worry about covering the roughly $11,000-a-year tuition.

The program, called the Heart of Detroit Tuition Pledge, was announced on Wednesday at an event attended by Mayor Mike Duggan and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. It applies to students who start at Wayne State in fall 2020 or after.

Duggan said it would “help open the doors to a world class education to even more Detroiters at a highly respected university.”

The rising price of college is one reason Detroit children face a rocky path to a college degree, virtually a requirement for prosperity in today’s economy.

In 2017, 2,662 student graduated from high school in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, which enrolls about half of the students in the city. A year later, 28% had completed the first year of college, compared to 40% statewide.

Of those graduates, 157 were enrolled at Wayne State.

Wayne State President M. Roy Wilson said in a statement that the new plan would help more Detroit students obtain college degrees.

“Opportunity, accessibility and affordability are all pillars of the high quality education we provide, and the Heart of Detroit Tuition Pledge delivers on all those values,” he said.

To qualify for the tuition waiver, students must live in Detroit and have graduated from any school in the city, including charter, private, parochial schools, and homeschooled students.

They also have to be accepted at Wayne State, which typically admits students with an ACT score above 21 and an SAT math score above 500.

There are no income requirements for the tuition waiver, but students must first apply for financial aid and federal Pell grants. Wayne State will pay for whatever tuition costs aren’t covered by other programs.

Chrystal Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Public Schools Community District, said the district is working to “increase the number of students who meet college readiness standards. We are aligning our work and outcomes to the Detroit Promise and programs such as the Heart of Detroit to enable more students to pass the SAT and be prepared for college.”

Challenging academic requirements have limited the impact of the Detroit Promise, a scholarship program that covers tuition for Detroit high school graduates in Detroit.

The Wayne State tuition waiver doesn’t cover books, food, or housing. Books and other supplies cost $1,196 a year on average, according to Wayne State’s website. If Detroit students don’t have the option of living at home, room and board at the university costs more than $10,000.

Still, education leaders said they have little doubt that the new program will make a difference.

Mark Ornstein, CEO of University Prep Schools, one of the largest charter networks in Detroit, said “the faculty and staff at U Prep will do all we can to help our students prepare to receive this life-changing gift.”

How Gov. Whitmer hopes to get more Michigan students to complete college

2019-10-08T18:50:15+00:00

Fewer than half of Michigan residents have any type of education degree or certificate beyond high school. It’s a number Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is hoping to increase and a major reason the state is joining a national organization focused on improving college completion.

Whitmer’s office announced Michigan is joining Complete College America, which works to ensure everyone has a path to postsecondary success.

The announcement comes eight months after Whitmer, during her first State of the State address, called for increasing the percentage of Michigan residents with a postsecondary education credential from 43.7% to 60% by 2030.

It also comes just weeks after Chalkbeat Detroit (through a partnership with Detroit Public Television) launched the first installment of a yearlong series, called Ready or Not, that is following four Detroit high school graduates through their first year of college. The goal is to capture the challenges they face that can upend even the most driven student’s college dreams.

We introduced readers Sept. 18 to Marqell McClendon, Kashia Perkins, Demetrius Robinson, and Joe Thomas. We also introduced readers to some dire statistics: Nationwide, nearly 30% of the first-time students who enter college don’t continue past their first year. Only 60% percent graduate in six years, and the proportion is lower for black students and students from low-income families.

A thread:
Today, @Chalkbeat_DET launched the first installment of a year-long effort in which I’ll be following four Detroit high school graduates through the tough first year of college. Read my first piece here:https://t.co/AMV4TWhcFn
— Lori Higgins (@LoriAHiggins) September 18, 2019

In Detroit, nearly half of graduates from Detroit’s main district who make it to college must take remedial courses. For charter schools in the city, the number ranges from 32% to 75%.

While the national organization that Michigan is working with is focused on college completion, Whitmer’s goal of a postsecondary credential doesn’t just include four-year college degrees. It can also include credentials like an associate degree at a community college or a skilled trade certificate.

Whitmer said announcing the goal earlier this year was one of her first acts as governor because “every Michigander deserves a path to a good-paying job that they can support themselves and their families on.”

“When we break down barriers, especially for low-income students, first generation college-going students, and students of color, we can grow our economy, close the skills gap, and ensure every family can thrive here in Michigan.”

Catch up on the Ready or Not series here.

KIPP charter schools are getting more students to college — but it’s not clear yet whether more are getting diplomas

2019-09-26T14:30:00+00:00

Students who attended a KIPP middle school a decade ago were 13 percentage points more likely to enroll in college as a result, according to a new study of the country’s largest nonprofit charter school network.

KIPP cheered the results. “We made a commitment 25 years ago to help students climb the mountain to and through college, and these numbers show that we are moving closer to delivering on that promise on a national scale,” CEO Richard Barth said in a statement.

But the study can’t definitively say whether the charter network had an effect on students actually staying in college, and not enough time has passed to draw conclusions about college completion.

It’s the first rigorous attempt to measure the longer-term effects of KIPP, which pioneered an influential, much-debated “no-excuses” approach to running schools largely for low-income black and Hispanic students. KIPP, which just celebrated its 25th anniversary, now has 242 charter schools across the country in its network and recently won a large federal grant to continue growing.

The latest study builds on a 2013 paper that looked at about 1,000 students who applied to a KIPP middle school in 2008 or 2009. The initial research found that students who won the lottery had substantially higher math scores two years later compared to students who lost the lottery. (Other studies of KIPP have also shown that its schools produce large test score gains.)

The researchers continued to follow those students for this latest study. Attending KIPP, they found, had a large effect on four-year college enrollment: 52% of KIPP students enrolled in a four-year college within two years of completing high school, compared to 39% of those who didn’t go to KIPP.

That’s a big boost, comparable to the national gap in college enrollment between white students on the one hand and black and Hispanic students on the other.

But when the researchers looked at whether students remained consistently enrolled in college for four semesters, the KIPP advantage was less clear. Of the KIPP alumni, 33% persisted in four-year college, compared to 24% of the non-KIPP alumni. That 9-point difference was not statistically significant, which may reflect the study’s small sample of students but also means the researchers can’t say with confidence that KIPP made a difference.

The study focuses on students who entered a KIPP lottery at one of 13 middle schools; many also attended a KIPP high school. The authors estimate that each year at a KIPP middle or high school boosted four-year college enrollment by 2.5 percentage points and persistence by 1.7 points. (Again, the difference in persistence was not statistically significant.)

“For the students in this study, it is too early to say whether the strong effect of KIPP middle schools on college enrollment will ultimately improve rates of college graduation or lead to long-term improvements in employment and earnings after college,” write Thomas Coen, Ira Nichols-Barrer, and Philip Gleason of the research firm Mathematica. (The paper was funded by Arnold Ventures, the philanthropic arm of Laura and John Arnold; Arnold Ventures is also a funder of KIPP and Chalkbeat.)

Sarah Hayes, principal, crosses the cafeteria during lunch at KIPP DC Public Charter School in Washington, DC in 2008. Banners listing the year students will enter college line the cafeteria. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

But the authors say there’s reason to be optimistic.

“If a future study revealed that KIPP middle schools ultimately do have an effect of approximately 9 percentage points on college completion, that effect would be equal to more than a third of the degree-completion gap for black and Hispanic students,” the researchers explain.

This is a big “if,” though, since the study shows that KIPP’s college edge deteriorates after high school graduation, from a 13-point enrollment advantage to a 9-point edge two years in. That suggests that some KIPP students who are induced to attend college are dropping out without a degree and potentially with student debt.

KIPP leaders have spoken candidly about the challenges that many of their alumni face in college. In one survey of alumni, over 40 percent said that while in college they often or sometimes skipped meals for financial reasons. KIPP offers college advising services to alumni and, in some regions, emergency cash grants.

The study doesn’t show what aspect of KIPP’s approach — say, its college-going focus or its academic program — led to increased college enrollment.

It’s also possible that the results partially reflect other advantages KIPP has over nearby district schools, including the ability to spend more thanks to private fundraising and no requirements to replace all students who leave mid-year, minimizing one type of disruption. (Researchers have shown that students do not depart KIPP schools at higher rates than nearby district schools, rebutting a common criticism.)

KIPP is one of the largest charter school networks in the country, but it’s still only a slice of the charter sector writ large. Indeed, a recent national study of 31 charter middle schools — which tended to serve a more affluent student body than KIPP — found that they had no effect on college enrollment or persistence.

But KIPP has been a key model for the “no excuses” style of charter schooling, a somewhat disputed term which generally means high expectations, strict disciplinary standards, and an extended school day. (KIPP has said that it is moving away from aspects of this approach, including embracing restorative justice-style discipline.)

“No-excuses” charter schools have been shown to substantially raise test scores, but some critics have argued that these gains are unlikely to translate into long-term success, particularly after students leave such such a structured environment.

The latest study offers another data point, but the jury remains out.

Studies of the Noble charter network in Chicago and of “no-excuses” schools in Texas, including two KIPP schools, have found that such schools increase both four-year college enrollment and persistence. But a preliminary study in Boston — whose charter schools have been shown to dramatically raise test scores and four-year college enrollment — didn’t find clear evidence that charter students were more likely to complete a college degree.

“A growing body of lottery-based evidence shows that charters that boost test scores also boost enrollment in four-year colleges,” Sarah Cohodes, a professor at Columbia Teachers College, who has studied charter schools. “However, in most cases it is difficult to determine if the enrollment impacts persist through college and to degree attainment.”

“The new KIPP study is very much in line with this pattern, and unfortunately the only way to know for certain is to wait for enough students to get old enough that it is possible to track them to and through potential college graduation,” she said.

Watch: These Detroit teens have big dreams and a big goal: To graduate from college

2019-09-20T04:29:11+00:00

Earlier this week we introduced you to Demetrius Robinson, Kashia Perkins, Joseph Thomas, and Marqell McClendon and the beginning of their journey as college students.

Now you can tune into a video produced by Detroit Public Television that takes a close look at several of the students and the challenges they’ll face in their first year.

Chalkbeat Detroit is partnering with Detroit Public Television to spend the year following the four students. As we reported earlier this week, the first year of college for any student is difficult. Nationwide, nearly 30% of the first-time students who enter college don’t continue past their first year. Only 60% graduate in six years, and the proportion is lower for black and low-income students, like many of those who graduate from Detroit high schools.

Watch the DPTV video below. You can find all of our coverage here.

‘I can do it’: How four Detroit students hope to make it through the formidable first year of college

2019-09-18T17:30:41+00:00

Joseph Thomas was alone in his dorm room.

Perhaps that’s why his mind was racing. Why he couldn’t stop thinking about the future. He kept going over all the steps he needed to take over the next four years at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to achieve his dreams: a successful football season, a professional sports career, a practical backup plan.

And suddenly, while standing next to his desk, he had to take a deep breath.

“I told myself, I got to take it one step at a time,” the Detroit native said. “I have four more years.”

Four years.

That’s the goal. But here’s the reality: The first year of college for any student is difficult. Nationwide, nearly 30% of the first-time students who enter college don’t continue past their first year. Only 60% percent graduate in six years, and the proportion is lower for black and low-income students like Thomas.

And for Thomas and his classmates in Detroit, where years of tumult have taken their toll on local schools, the path to a college degree can be even steeper: Nearly half of graduates from Detroit’s main district who make it to college must take remedial courses. For charter schools in the city, it ranges from 32% to 75%.

Detroit graduates must navigate patchy academic preparation, culture shock, and often their own shaken confidence if they are to stay enrolled and on track to earn a degree that is their best chance to jump into the middle class as adults.

This year, Chalkbeat reporters in Detroit and Newark are examining whether students from struggling schools are prepared for college — and whether colleges are prepared for them. Catch up on the Ready or Not series here.

Local officials recognize the challenge. Some of the city’s publicly funded, privately managed charter schools — which enroll a little more than 32,000 Detroit students — have specific college-transition initiatives of their own. And Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the city’s main district, has made bolstering college readiness a top priority, in his first year installing college counselors in every high school.

Joseph Thomas, a freshman at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, is a spring graduate of Cody High School in Detroit.

“Students that we know are smart, we know they’re talented, but they’re just not given the right exposure and experience to ensure that talent is actualized when they go to college,” he told Chalkbeat. “That’s our responsibility. That defines why we have to get better as a system. It’s unconscionable that students would leave our system and not be ready.”

But future improvements won’t affect Thomas and his fellow graduates in the Class of 2019, who spent the summer preparing for their first semester of college. They’ve started the uncertain journey already.

Marqell McClendon, a freshman at Michigan State University, is a spring graduate of Cody High School in Detroit.

Marqell McClendon, the valedictorian of Thomas’ class at Cody High School, got into two of Michigan’s top public universities and while she’s pretty confident she’ll do well in most of her classes, math is another story. At Michigan State University, the school she chose, she’s taking a remedial class in math, her toughest subject, because she scored poorly on a placement exam.

It’s unconscionable that students would leave our system and not be ready.

Kashia Perkins and Demetrius Robinson, graduates of Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, spent part of the summer in programs meant to ease their transition to college. Perkins is also at Michigan State, where she’s giving herself pep talks as she wrestles with the fear of falling behind, while Robinson started at Central Michigan University, where he’s certain he can avoid a feeling that undermines so many students like him: that he doesn’t really belong on campus.

The four students all received enough scholarship and grant money to cover their college costs. But as the lead-up to the first day of class made clear, there’s much more to college than paying the bills.

Demetrius Robinson, Jr., a freshman at Central Michigan University, is a graduate of the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit

‘Do you want this degree or not?’

More than a month before the beginning of the academic year at Michigan State, Kashia Perkins was already sitting in a college class, trying to keep up with a teaching style that was more fast-paced than what she was used to in high school.

“She was just fast,” Perkins said of the math instructor. “I would just have to make sure I was keeping up with the pace … and make sure I slow her down and ask a question if I need to.”

She spent the month of July taking math and biology classes while living in a dorm, part of a “bridge program” designed to get incoming freshmen studying in the college of engineering acclimated to the rigors of college classes.

Kashia Perkins, a Michigan State University freshman, shown during her June graduation from the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy

Bridge programs have become increasingly common as colleges seek to recruit more students from underserved communities such as Detroit. Michigan State, for instance, has a number of them. The goals vary from program to program, but in general they seek to ease the transition to college and provide guidance and resources for freshmen if they run into trouble.

She also joined Detroit M.A.D.E. (Mastering Academics Demonstrating Excellence), a program that provides support to incoming freshmen from the city of Detroit specifically.

That she’s even at one of the state’s most selective universities at all is a dramatic shift considering Perkins’ first two years of high school.

She wasn’t serious about school, wasn’t paying attention in class, and she preferred hanging out with her friends. Her grades were suffering.

Then came a visit from her grandmother. Perkins thought she was there for a friendly chat. She wasn’t.

I just need to go in with the mindset that I can do it. And I will.

Her grandmother, in fact, was there to make a point. And she made it painfully clear Perkins needed to change her ways, telling her to “stop messing up,” and “get your act together.”

The message was effective. It set Perkins on a different path. She now calls it a turning point. But really, it was a return to normal. Her mother, Kymberly Burton, said Perkins was a go-getter from the beginning, and always on the honor roll until those early high school years.

She said she tried to instill in her daughter the importance of doing well in school, “because I didn’t want her to become a statistic,” Burton said. “I never doubted her.”

A key part of the turnaround for Perkins was when she enrolled at the Jalen Rose academy, where there’s a robust college-going culture. The high school has a team of adults whose sole job is to prepare students to enter and be successful in college, including an alumni success adviser who has a role that doesn’t exist in most schools: She works with students after they’ve graduated and enrolled in college, visiting them and helping with everything from financial aid to academic concerns.

Kashia Perkins, a freshman at Michigan State University, relaxes in her dorm room after a day of volunteering on campus.

School officials have invested in this college success effort because they were concerned that too many graduates were going on to college, but not lasting.

David Williams heads up this team and often reflects on his own background as someone who dropped out of high school in the 10th grade in Detroit. After later earning a general education equivalency diploma, he enrolled in college — because, he said, he wanted to be able to provide for his son — and now has a doctorate in educational leadership.

“I think one of the reasons I dropped out is … we didn’t see a lot of college successes,” Williams said. “We didn’t see a lot of people graduating from college. And the people who did, they would leave.”

Perkins finally got serious at Jalen Rose, and in June she graduated with a 4.1 grade point average during her time at the school. At Michigan State, she’s planning to major in human biology. She wants to become a pediatrician. It’s not surprising, given she said the toughest part of being away from home is being away from her sister, who is a toddler.

It’s also not that far from her childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, which she said was fueled by her dislike for how children in foster homes are treated and her belief that she could “be the person who stands up for them.”

Even as a pediatrician, she said, she can look out for children.

“I just always want to make sure kids feel good, they feel comfortable, safe, and stuff like that,” Perkins said. “It just always bothers me when kids are pushed aside or mistreated.”

And she doesn’t plan to fall into the trap that befell her during her first two years of high school.

“I’m at school to handle my business,” Perkins said. “I’ve matured since then. I just need to go in with the mindset that I can do it. And I will.”

A key strategy: Be careful about who she hangs out with. She’s heading to MSU with a group of friends with a similar mindset who she said will push her and check her if she gets off track.

Despite her confidence, Perkins said her biggest fear “is falling behind and not being able to catch up.” Overcoming that fear can be as simple as a solo pep talk.

“I just tell myself, ‘Do you want this degree or not?’”

‘I was trying really hard not to cry’

The crowd roared with applause as Marqell McClendon stepped toward the podium, ready to deliver her valedictorian’s address during Cody High’s graduation in June.

Just a few minutes before, during an introduction that was both emotional and hilarious, one of her favorite teachers had roasted her, outing her mastery of forging her mother’s signature on a field trip form. But the teacher, Jennifer Weaver, also provided a touching tribute, choking up as she contemplated losing her “right-hand” person.

“Marqell is the type of student that every teacher wants,” Weaver said. “She’s the one you trust to help you with things. She’s the one you want to represent your class in front of administration.”

Marqell McClendon, valedictorian of the Cody High School graduating class this year, reacts as a teacher introduces her during the June graduation ceremony.

Then, it was McClendon’s turn. A top student and dedicated debater who had been admitted to the state’s most selective public universities, she had prepared a speech in which she remarked on the transition that had marked her senior year, when three schools on the Cody campus merged into one. She also urged her fellow graduates to persevere beyond obstacles, telling them, “obstacles and difficulty are nothing to be ashamed of,” and urging them to remember three things if they ever feel stuck: Distance yourself from drama, don’t allow pride to get in the way of asking for help, and never quit. But even as she stuck to her prepared speech, Weaver’s words simultaneously had her wanting to fight back tears and feeling proud of her accomplishments.

It also had her thinking about the weight of that day, and how graduation “being the beginning of a new journey for me was emotional because I honestly don’t know what’s in store for me next.”

And she wasn’t ready to bask in the euphoria of graduation because, she said, “I know I’ll be right back at school in two months.”

That was in June. In late August, McClendon moved into her dorm, ready to begin studying biomedical science at Michigan State. Her goal: She wants to help impoverished countries solve medical crises.

“We in the U.S., we have way more resources than we actually use and there are more people, or more countries out there that could use that too. One of the first things I would do is travel and try to figure out those problems and then come back and find ways we can fix them.”

On move-in day, freshman Marqell McClendon chats with her former college advisor at Cody High School, Antoine Douglas, in the lounge of her dorm at Michigan State University

For now, McClendon’s most immediate challenge is her fall course load, which includes remedial math. It was something she predicted would happen in May during an interview with Chalkbeat, when she said she hadn’t felt challenged in high school and even went without a permanent English teacher for several years.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” she said. “I know it’s something I have to do, and I’d rather take those classes in order to help me than starting way above my ability.”

On her first day at MSU, she was unpacking all of her items from home, with help from her mother, sister and aunt, when a familiar face stopped by her room.

It was Antoine Douglas, who the last two years was the college adviser at Cody High in Detroit — placed there through a Michigan State program. It was a job that required him to help Cody students navigate the college preparation and application process, and McClendon was among those who benefitted.

But now Douglas, who is working on his master’s degree in business, is on campus full-time and is a residence hall director.

A lot of people in today’s society, a lot of teenagers, aren’t making it this far.

So when he stopped by her room on that first day, it was a reminder to McClendon that she has someone in her corner who lives close by and has many campus connections. It was Douglas, after all, who helped get her into the Charles Drew Science Scholars program at Michigan State, which provides support to students enrolled in majors through the College of Natural Sciences.

“He does like to check on us and make sure that we’re doing good,” McClendon said. “It was nice to see him and if I do need any help throughout the week or throughout the year even, I know he’ll be close.”

That kind of connection is important for first-year students, who can struggle with being on their own for the first time and not having their parents or teachers to lean on. For urban students from Detroit, it can be a culture shock.

The district is working to make that an easier transition. Vitti two years ago allocated enough money to ensure that every high school in the district has at least one person dedicated to helping prepare students for success. The district has expanded dual enrollment options for students that allow them to take high school and college classes simultaneously. And, he said, the district is putting more resources and time into improving performance on the SAT, which is important because a good score can qualify students for scholarship money through a program called the Detroit Promise.

That scholarship program is among the ways McClendon is paying for college. When she moved into her dorm Aug. 24, she dealt with a range of emotions — from the tears that began the day as she said goodbye to her close cousins to later, when her emotions were in check as she arrived at Rather Hall on the Michigan State campus — her mother, aunt, and sister in tow. She registered, got her key, loaded up three big bins with her stuff, then opened the door to her room.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” she said with relief.

‘I’m going to do everything full force’

At 17, Demetrius Robinson already sounds like a savvy salesman for the family fitness business he dreams of taking over when he graduates from Central Michigan University.

This business, he told his peers during a presentation at Jalen Rose in May, will be bigger than any of the centers that are popular now.

Why? “You’ll have to come to us. We’re going to meet all your needs. We’re going to make sure you’re taken care of.”

And then, drawing laughs from his classmates, he added, “We’re going to make sure you get that summer body.”

Brimming with confidence, Robinson has devised a plan with his brother. Cameren Robinson, who works in advertising and marketing in New York, will handle the business side. Robinson, who plans to major in athletic training, will lead the physical side of the company. And their parents, LaSandra and Demetrius Robinson, Sr.? “All they have to do is sit back and watch the business boom,” Robinson said.

In a state where nearly 40% of black male students don’t even graduate from high school on time, McClendon said he’s determined to be different, saying, “I’m going to do everything full force, how I planned it and the way it’s supposed to be done.”

“A lot of people in today’s society, a lot of teenagers, aren’t making it this far. So, it’s really an accomplishment for me. I’m really keeping my neighborhood, everyone around me, proud because they’re seeing I haven’t fallen into that trap that society has put young black males and females into. I’m proud of myself.”

Already, Robinson is making a name for himself on campus. When he visited for orientation in August, he showed an ease on campus, flashing his big smile, shaking hands and meeting new people. And he’s quickly established himself as a person to go to for haircuts and help with fitness training. It’s part of his plan to be as involved in college as he was in high school, where he played several sports and was in other organizations.

Like McClendon and Perkins, he’s also getting special help from his college, as part of a program meant to ease the transition for first generation college students and those from low-income families. He said learning has always come easy, but he plans to seek out tutors and late night study sessions if he begins to struggle. And, he said, he has to keep one thing in check: His habit of procrastinating. Too often, he said, he’ll wait until the last minute to meet deadlines. He said he’s always been able to turn in quality assignments. But that was high school. The stakes are now much higher.

Demetrius Robinson, Jr., participates in a pinning ceremony in May for students graduating from the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy.

As much as Robinson credits his parents for inspiring him, it’s clear that he and his brother have also inspired their parents, both of whom graduated high school and did brief stints in community college. His father, for instance, is back in school himself at Henry Ford College, working toward a physical therapy assistant degree. He eventually wants to become a doctor.

It started when his oldest graduated from college.

“Seeing him walk across the stage, I’m like, ‘Oh, I got to do something to keep inspiring them to keep moving forward.’”

You can do the work. You just need the opportunity.

One of the things Jalen Rose students learn about during the college preparation process is what they describe as the “imposter phenomenon” — that feeling of not belonging that students from urban areas like Detroit often feel when they go to college.

It’s a reality for many first-year students who arrive on campus and feel others who were exposed to far more opportunities are “better” than them, said Williams, the dean of college at Jalen Rose.

“Our job is to let students know that it’s an opportunity gap, it’s not an achievement gap,” Williams said. “You’re not less than. You can do the work. You just need the opportunity. But once you get to school, you might not be on the same level as the student sitting next to you, so it’s now your responsibility to work that much harder.”

‘I have to do it on my own’

Joseph Thomas has been feeling the pressure. He’s the first in his immediate family to go to college, an opportunity he says he wouldn’t have without football. He feels an enormous responsibility to be a role model to his younger siblings.

That pressure can be overwhelming. “But it’s what keeps me going,” Thomas, 18, said.

Joseph Thomas, a freshman at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, participates in a college decision day event at Cody High School in May.

He has family members who’ve spent time in prison, and he wants to show those younger than him that there’s a better way. It’s an important thing for Thomas, who’s tried hard and sacrificed so much to stay out of trouble. There were the parties he didn’t go to. Or the ones he simply made an appearance at. There were the times he turned down hanging out with a big group.

Seeing his family members imprisoned, he said, “made me think about how my little brothers and sisters would feel if they see me locked up. I just didn’t want to put that on them.”

He also wants his younger relatives to know that it’s possible to overcome obstacles.

Thomas was an honor roll athlete, always placing his school work on the same level of importance as playing football. When he participated in a college decision day event at Cody in May, in fact, he wore a black shirt with the words “More Than An Athlete,” written in green letters. At Cody, he participated in dual enrollment classes, taking courses taught by college instructors.

”I always went to class,” he said. “I never talked back to the teacher. I just knew what I was supposed to do.”

But not everything was easy for Thomas. When he was around 11, he says, he and his siblings bounced from home to home because of problems in their own home. He learned then how to be independent. He also learned, at an early age, that if he wanted something he had to get it for himself.

Joseph Thomas does a dance while walking across the stage during the graduation ceremony for Cody High School in May.

That’s how he came to play organized football. He wanted to play on a community team, but knew his parents couldn’t afford the equipment. So this savvy teen made the coach, who had a painting business on the side, an offer:

I’ll help you paint houses, he told him, to cover the cost of the equipment.

His ultimate goal is to play professional football. But he’s already preparing for what he calls his “fallback plan.” At Davenport — a growing university with multiple campuses across the state and a new initiative helping prepare students to teach in urban systems like the Detroit school district — he’s planning to major in industrial production management, which would prepare him for jobs overseeing operations at manufacturing companies.

He said he knows he will have to make academics a priority while playing football. “I can’t play football if I don’t do this work. I see myself as a student-athlete, not just an athlete. I already know school comes first,” he said.

So here he was now, more than four years after picking up that paintbrush, moving into his dorm room and preparing to start classes and his first college football season. He did it alone.

“Growing up, I’ve never really had that close support system that was with me every step of the way,” Joseph said. “But at the end of the day, I realize it’s your life and you have to make the best of the moments God blesses you to have and I just walk through every door that opens for me with my head high.”

This story is part of a partnership with Detroit Public Television. Watch a special segment about it during the “One Detroit” program at 7:30 p.m. Thursday. It was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Ready or Not: What happens when students from cities with struggling schools head to college?

2019-09-18T17:30:27+00:00

When Yamin Reddick and Marqell McClendon graduated from high school this spring, they began an increasingly common journey — but one with an uncertain destination.

For all the talk about whether college is worth its potentially crushing costs, graduating from college remains one of the only vehicles that reliably propels Americans out of poverty. College graduates earn more and are less likely to live in poverty than Americans with just a high school diploma. And while 45% of children who are born into poor families and don’t finish college stay poor as adults, just 16% of poor children who get degrees remain poor.

Lured by the promise of a better life, more and more students are pursuing degrees. Each fall, about two-thirds of high school graduates and GED-getters head off to college. Like the country’s population, today’s college-going students are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and include more low-income students among their ranks.

Institutions are great at enrolling students — they’re not great at graduating them.

But attending college is one thing; graduating is another. Nationally, only 60% of students who enroll at four-year institutions earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. That is the average for all students — the six-year college graduation rate is much lower for black students (40%), Hispanic students (55%), and low-income students (49%).

And for students in long-struggling cities such as Newark and Detroit, the statistics can be even bleaker.

In Newark, for example, just 44% of students who head straight to four-year colleges after high school earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to researchers who analyzed a sample of district, county, charter, and private high schools there. Among traditional, non-selective high schools such as the one Reddick attended, just 16% of graduates who immediately enroll in college earn bachelor’s degrees six years later.

In a new series, Ready or Not, two Chalkbeat journalists have set out to understand what those statistics mean for students like Reddick and McClendon — accomplished, driven young adults facing especially long odds in their quest for a college degree.

In Newark, Patrick Wall will be chronicling Reddick’s efforts to succeed at Rutgers University-Newark, which has won accolades for its support for low-income students. Lori Higgins is telling the stories of four Detroit graduates who have dispersed across Michigan to three public and private universities in their own quests for college degrees.

Our goal is to shine a light on the complex dynamics that are causing a “college completion crisis,” as a report by the Education Trust, an advocacy group focused on educational disparities, calls it.

Those dynamics include:

Segregated and under-funded K-12 school systems that struggle to prepare low-income students of color for college.
Structural racism that leaves a higher share of black and Hispanic families in poverty, forcing many of those young people to work more hours in college and live off campus, all while shouldering a higher share of higher-education costs, relative to income, than their affluent peers.
Elite colleges, which spend the most to educate their students and achieve stellar graduation rates, yet admit very few poor students.
And non-elite institutions — less selective four-year colleges, for-profit schools, and two-year colleges — which enroll the most poor students and students of color, and generally have far lower graduation rates.

“Institutions are great at enrolling students — they’re not great at graduating them,” said Wil Del Pilar, vice president of higher education policy and practice at the Education Trust. “When we create access, but we don’t ensure completion, we’re guaranteeing a promise unfulfilled.”

Nowhere are these dynamics more pressing than in Detroit and Newark. The local school districts are undergoing rapid changes after recently returning to local control after years of state management. And both cities have robust sectors of privately managed, publicly funded charter schools that are trying to boost their students’ odds of success. But even for the most ambitious students, years of bureaucratic tumult, poor academic preparation, and challenges in their own lives make success in higher education a difficult prospect.

Over the coming months, Lori and Patrick will share snapshots from local students’ first year of college, pull together data that illuminates disparities that begin long before students get to college, and profile efforts to improve the college transition.

We’ll also be involving our readers in an ongoing conversation about college readiness and completion — and sharing some snippets from behind the scenes of our Ready or Not reporting. Sign up below to join the conversation.

We’re talking about the future of our country, not just the future of a couple of kids.

The obstacles standing between the students and a college degree are daunting. But each of these students is armed with formidable intelligence and tenacity. And, in varying ways, their colleges and former high schools are trying to find ways to help get them to graduation.

Whether they succeed will determine the trajectory of these students’ lives. And, on a grander scale, whether more students like them can make it through college will show whether the country is ready to head in a more equitable direction — or not.

“We’re talking about the future of our country, not just the future of a couple of kids,” said Vincent Tinto, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University and an expert on higher education. “We’re talking about generating a future citizenship that’s diverse and representative, that becomes a powerful force in our society.”

This project was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Can virtual advising shift where students go to college? Yes, but only a bit.

2019-09-17T22:26:26+00:00

When Shannon Binns was navigating the college admissions process, she had a sounding board hundreds of miles away from her small hometown in Northeast Ohio.

That was Tally Erickson, a recent Swarthmore graduate who served as a virtual college counselor as part of CollegePoint, an ambitious initiative designed to push high-achievers from low- and middle-income families into better colleges.

“She was like the friend I needed to give me real advice, someone who actually understands how the process works, unlike pretty much everybody else in my life,” said Binns. “It was a really amazing thing.” She’s now a freshman at Columbia University, and says she probably wouldn’t have ended up there without Erickson’s help.

The experience paid off for Binns. Has it helped others?

Preliminary new research offers evidence that such virtual advising can change where students enroll in college — but only very slightly.

According to one study, students with access to CollegePoint were nearly 3 percentage points more likely to enroll in a college with a graduation rate over 70%. Another found that participating students were 1.5 percentage points more likely to go to a school rated as highly selective by Barron’s, though the schools weren’t any better by some other measures, including average SAT scores and graduation rates.

Neither study found that CollegePoint affected eligible students’ overall likelihood of going to college, which was high for such students regardless.

“They both suggest, in my view, a similar magnitude of effect,” said Ben Castleman, a researcher on the second paper and a University of Virginia professor. “And that’s a modest effect overall.”

It’s an early verdict on a program that has benefitted from major philanthropic support at a moment when more attention is being paid to making sure low-income students who get to college actually earn a degree. It was catalyzed in part by an influential 2012 study describing a “hidden supply of high-achieving low-income” students who are qualified for — but often don’t apply to — top colleges.

Bloomberg Philanthropies, which launched CollegePoint in 2014 alongside America Achieves, has pledged a combined $60 million over several years to CollegePoint and the American Talent Initiative, a consortium of colleges with graduation rates over 70%. (Bloomberg Philanthropies is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

“We are very pleased with the results that we see,” said Jenny Kane of Bloomberg Philanthropies, who noted that the research is ongoing.

CollegePoint is free for those eligible, but costs about $350 per student to run. College advisors communicate with their advisees via text, email, phone, and video chat, helping them decide where to apply, put together application essays, and understand the financial aid process. The advisors encourage students to consider colleges with high graduation rates.

Some of the advisors are full-time recent college graduates, whereas others are volunteer part-time college students and graduates. CollegePoint partners with four nonprofits to administer the program.

Students are eligible if they score at the 90th percentile of the SAT or ACT, have a high school GPA of at least 3.5, and report an annual family income of less than $80,000.

Those criteria, particularly the test score requirements, shape the pool of students who have access to the program. Black students made up just 8 percent of participating students in one study and 5 percent in the other, far below their share of the U.S. school-age population. Hispanic students were also slightly under-represented, while Asian students were substantially over-represented.

“Clearly those numbers are not what they should be or what they hope they would be for under-represented minorities,” said Bryden Sweeney-Taylor, who works on CollegePoint through America Achieves.

These disparities mirror those seen in the prior research on high-achieving low-income students — just 6 percent of whom were black. CollegePoint used similar criteria to identify eligible students. (Notably, though, among students deemed eligible, black and Hispanic students were slightly more likely to actually participate.)

Kane of Bloomberg Philanthropies said there are no imminent plans to change the eligibility criteria, but that that might be considered in the longer term.

The latest research also offers some insights into how the program might be made more effective.

The effects were larger for students of color when their advisor was also a person of color, according to one of the studies. And a third paper found that when CollegePoint offered a $400 incentive to students who applied to at least four selective colleges, the share of students enrolling in a high-graduation school was 2.6 percentage points higher than the students only offered virtual advising.

It’s too soon to say whether CollegePoint will achieve a key part of its goal — get students to graduate. Some recent research has found that even in instances where a program affects students’ chances of attending college, students aren’t more likely to actually complete a degree.

Still, the papers add to a growing body of knowledge about what kinds of programs can change students’ college trajectories.

A number of studies have shown that pricey initiatives — like generous scholarship programs, intensive in-person high school advising, and in-college academic and social support — can make a big difference. Traditional college counselors employed by schools make a difference, too, but they often face caseloads far larger than what is recommended — a fact that has gotten less philanthropic attention.

On the other hand, recent studies on narrower programs designed to “nudge” students into making different decisions have come to disappointing conclusions.

CollegePoint lands somewhere in the middle of the two approaches. Castleman, who is continuing his evaluation of the program, says he is still optimistic. “Their theory of action is built around a sustained individualized personal advising relationship,” he said. “I hold out the belief that that kind of model has the potential for a larger impact.”

‘The system really is unfair’: Paul Tough talks test prep, college admissions, and his new book

2019-09-10T04:02:03+00:00

Paul Tough is equal parts hopeful and disheartened.

The journalist known for “How Children Succeed” spent the last few years examining the American college landscape. His findings are the focus of his new book, “The Years That Matter Most.”

Those findings are complicated — and sometimes contradictory. On the one hand, Tough highlights individuals and organizations working to improve college access and support for the low-income, first generation students he profiles, like KiKi Gilbert at Princeton and Ivonne Martinez at the University of Texas.

Yet the system as a whole still drags its feet, with many institutions continuing to privilege wealthy students over those from low-income backgrounds. The College Board comes in for especially pointed criticism for the SAT’s role in college admissions and for what Tough argues is a lack of transparency around its research.

When you look at the big picture, Tough said, “It is hard to be as optimistic.” (Find our full analysis of Tough’s claims about the College Board here. The College Board has issued its own lengthy response disputing aspects of the book, which you can find here.)

Chalkbeat spoke with Tough about the book and what his research means for students. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Chalkbeat: This book, with its emphasis on systems and institutions in higher education, has a very different focus from “How Children Succeed.” Where did you get the idea for this book, and how was it influenced by your previous work?

Tough: Well, the original impetus to do this book came out of the one chapter of “How Children Succeed” that is about higher education, where I wrote about this organization called OneGoal in Chicago and especially about this one woman, Kewauna Lerma. I started for the first time to look into some of the overall data for how higher education was functioning in the United States, and I was really struck — the imbalances in higher education seemed even more extreme and more important than the imbalances in K-12 education. As I was writing that chapter, I thought there was a lot more to understand, and so once “How Children Succeed” was done I started trying to figure out how to write about it.

You seem very critical of the standardized testing machine — the weight put on the SAT and ACT in college admissions, the money poured into test prep, and the College Board itself. Yet you spend a lot of time describing Ned, an elite $400/hour SAT tutor, and you paint him in a very positive light. Why?

I really like Ned. I think Ned is very honest about what he’s doing and the role that test prep has in college admissions. So I think you’re right — I think I am critical of the emphasis that college admissions places on standardized test scores, but I think what I’m most critical of is any attempts to kind of conceal what’s going on. When I’m critical of the College Board, I think that’s what I’m critical of. I think that they have put a lot of emphasis in recent years on some projects to try to improve equity in higher education. And when I looked more deeply into a lot of those projects, they really weren’t having a lot of impact. I think the reality is that the SAT still plays the role in college admissions that it always has, which is that it is one more advantage for kids coming from affluence and one more obstacle for kids who are coming from low-income families and communities.

You talked in the book about what the College Board has tried and failed to do when it comes to leveling the playing field for low-income students. Do you think the college process would be more equitable without the College Board at all?

Well, I want to separate the College Board from the test it administers — the SAT — and the ACT, which I feel is just as much of a problem. I’m not quite ready to say we should do away with those tests altogether. But I do think that when colleges go test-optional, it allows them to consider a broader array of students and to admit students they wouldn’t be able to admit otherwise. And I think that’s a really positive thing.

There’s clear evidence that family income and test scores correlate really highly. They correlate more highly than high school GPA does with family income, and so they are always going to be an instrument that makes it easier for institutions to admit more rich kids and harder for them to admit more poor kids. I think they should be doing the opposite.

Do you feel like the tide is turning in the direction of test-optional? In 15 years, do you think colleges will still require the SAT or ACT?

I don’t know. Certainly there are advocates who feel like the tide is turning, but it’s turning pretty slowly. When I was doing my reporting at the University of Chicago [which has test-optional admissions], that was a big deal for the test-optional movement, because it was definitely the most selective institution that had ever done that. I would not be surprised if in the next few years an Ivy League or equivalent institution decides to go test-optional. Those institutions really don’t need those tests; they can admit excellent freshman classes without looking at kids’ test scores, and I think it’s possible that one of them would make that decision. I think that would be the real turn of the tide.

I don’t think that they’re going to disappear altogether. I think they make it easier for college admissions people to make their decisions, for better or worse. And I think there’s something in us as humans that really likes the kind of competition sense of being able to put a specific number on kids.

I want to home in specifically on the College Board’s replication of the Realize Your College Potential packets. That was a strategy that was proven independently to improve college access for low-income students. Then the College Board tried it themselves, and it didn’t work, but they did release the results, although that was about six years later. Is it fair to criticize them for suppressing research?

I mean, they released the results sort of after my book had gone to press, so I wasn’t able to include those. What strikes me is two things about the way they reported the results. One was, that they knew these results years ago and they chose not to reveal to the public that this replication wasn’t working. And I think there was a huge disparity between how much emphasis they put on the beginning of the process. There was a cover story in the New York Times Magazine in which David Coleman was saying this was going to do a lot to level the playing field, and [that stands in contrast to] how quietly and how late in the process they announced the data that suggested that it wasn’t working.

One last question about the College Board: you compare the College Board’s efforts to delegitimize criticism about the SAT to the tobacco industry’s misinformation campaigns. Tell me more about that.

I was talking, in that case, about this one particular scholarly book that was edited and compiled by either people who worked for the College Board or people who had worked for the College Board. The main case that I think it was trying to make was to say that test-optional admissions didn’t work and wasn’t more fair than using tests, in part because of this idea that rich kids were benefiting from grade inflation. And I don’t think it’s true, that rich kids were benefiting from grade inflation.

When you look at all of the data together, it’s clear that SATs tend to correlate most with income. And so I felt that the book … was there to kind of muddy the waters the same way that various corporations had tried to muddy the waters with research, including about climate change, including about the relationship between tobacco and cancer years ago. It wasn’t publishing things that were untrue, it was just trying to make it seem like it wasn’t set, like it was a place where there was still argument. Is the climate really getting warmer? Scientists disagree. Are SATs benefiting poor kids or rich kids? Scientists disagree. Whereas the fact of the data is really clear.

In discussing the factors that help low-income students persist in college, you often cited individual professors or programs that were successfully promoting belonging. Why do you think belonging is so powerful, and how can colleges cultivate it at scale?

I think there’s some really interesting research in the last decade or so about the power of belonging in helping college students, especially first-generation college students, persist and do better in college. The studies of it are pretty clear and scientific, but belonging is a pretty squishy idea. There’s no simple way to make someone feel like they belong. So partly it was the research that influenced me. But even more so, I think, it was the fact that the educators and the administrators who I thought were doing the best job of creating an environment where students were able to succeed, especially first-generation college students, they were putting a lot of emphasis on belonging in different ways.

Uri Treisman, the calculus professor who I followed at the University of Texas, was in his own way doing an amazing job of emphasizing that feeling and creating this real sense of togetherness and unity and belonging in his class. But I thought of some of the same things that Arrupe college, this two-year, relatively new institution in Chicago connected to Loyola University where Father Katsouros, the Jesuit priest who was the dean of students at that institution — he thinks about belonging all the time.

In the book you give lots of encouraging examples of specific colleges or individuals or programs that are helping low-income students access and persist in college, and you just named a few in relation to belonging. But these are just pockets of a vast university system. Do you find these examples from your research to be representative of larger trends in higher education, or just bright spots?

It’s a good question, and I’m not sure. I think there is a shift going on in higher education toward institutions taking more responsibility for their students’ success, and I do think that is shifting in more and more institutions. In higher education, there always was this kind of sink-or-swim ethos that dominated the way that a lot of higher education educators and administrators thought. “That’s not our job to help our students succeed; it’s their job to figure out college. And the ones who don’t succeed weren’t meant to succeed.” And I do think that that idea is changing.

More institutions understand, first of all, that it’s in their interest to graduate more students, but also that it doesn’t take a whole lot of work to create that sense of belonging — to give those struggling students the help that they need to succeed. And that when you do that, you not only have more graduates, but you have a more level playing field, a more representative collection of graduates. It’s hard to measure in any kind of empirical way, but I do think that’s changing.

There are lots of other things that I don’t think are changing. I don’t think admissions is getting more fair. Certainly there are bright spots that I focus on, but what I’m trying to do in this book is look more systemically at how higher education functions and who it functions for, and when I look at that, I don’t feel particularly optimistic.

Based on your research, what advice would you give to colleges?

I think that the most highly selective institutions out there can do a lot right now in terms of admissions. These are institutions that don’t really depend on tuition for their income. Right now they are admitting a whole lot of rich kids and not many poor kids, and they can just change that. That’s not actually that complicated a problem to solve.

For the much larger number of private institutions that don’t have those sorts of financial resources, I think the thing that they could do to be most helpful is to be more honest about what kind of pressures they’re under and how they affect admissions. So I wrote a chapter, as you know, about enrollment management. And I talked to a lot of admissions people, and they are under an enormous amount of pressure. And those pressures really don’t get talked about.

And then the third kind of institutions are public institutions, especially sort of less elite public institutions. I feel like those institutions need to do two things. One is, I think [they] really need to stay committed to the goal of public higher education and to see that as their mission, because I think that’s the most important sector of higher education. And I think that they also need to sort of tell the story of what they’re doing and help voters and citizens and legislators understand how our trend toward defunding higher education over the last decade or two is really a step in the wrong direction. These are the institutions that I think could do the most to level the playing field, to increase the number of young people with the kind of credentials they need to do well in today’s economy, and right now we’re just not helping those institutions enough.

Where does all this leave a student from a low-income family going to college in the next few years? After all your research, are you hopeful for that student, or worried? Why?

For individual students — and it was a remarkable two years getting to hang out with lots of young people — for the most part their stories are incredibly inspiring and hopeful. These are super smart kids who are experiencing a lot of difficult things in terms of achieving the social mobility they deserve. But many of them are really thriving — KiKi Gilbert, this young woman who’s at Princeton, or Ivonne Martinez at the University of Texas — they are accomplishing remarkable things in their lives, they’re going to be really much better than the places they started as a result. But when I look at the system as a whole, it is hard to be as optimistic as I feel when I look at the stories of individual students.

The system really is unfair, and it’s not getting more fair. If anything I think it’s getting less fair. And I don’t think that we right now are exerting the kind of public will on that system, and exerting it in the right way to make it more fair and more equitable. I’m sort of an eternal optimist and I think that could change, and one of the reasons I wrote this book was to try to help people connect those dots — to see where those inequities in higher education come from and what kinds of changes would be necessary to alleviate them.