OPINION: America’s teacher shortage is worse than you think. But there’s a way to fix it

When I was an assistant principal in Chicago, I would post a job opening for a physics teacher and get 20 applications. A call for an English teacher might yield 150. That was the late 1990s. By the time I left the district, the same postings were lucky to bring in one or two qualified candidates. Principals were calling the central office and saying, “Send me whoever you have.” What happened to all the candidates? That question has never been fully answered in the national conversation about teacher shortages, in part because too much of that conversation has been devoted to arguing over whether a shortage exists at all.

hechingerreport.org

Pace of college closings picks up, with more projected

Pssst — wanna buy a college campus? There’s a sudden market in abandoned campuses, an outgrowth of the accelerating rate of colleges closing in the face of falling enrollment, rising debt and other problems. More than 440 of the nation’s private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities are now at risk, based on enrollment trends, debt and other measures, according to projections by Huron Consulting Group. That’s a quarter of the total. Among the most endangered: small, rural and religiously affiliated institutions. And how to dispose of the real estate is among the least of the challenges facing shuttering campuses and the students they serve.

hechingerreport.org

As fewer young people choose college, this district wants to ensure they have career options

NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — For the last year, Niagara Falls High School senior Ciara Johnson has ripped up tile, torn out walls and built custom cabinets in her high school construction class. To get a taste of each of the trades, the students here have been renovating the former cafeteria kitchen in the old high school campus downtown, a once bustling area now marked by vacant storefronts. Ideally, the seniors will graduate this summer and get a job or, like Johnson, enroll in a trade school that will lead to a career.

hechingerreport.org

Too hot for summer school?

Two days before the sweltering July 4 weekend, Martina Meijer, a New York City elementary teacher who occasionally substitutes over the summer, covered a class. The city's summer school program had just begun and that day temperatures reached 100 degrees. "Even though the AC was on, it wasn't working very well," said Meijer. "There was no programming, no schedule, no plans shared." For four hours straight, Meijer and her students remained in the classroom. The stifling heat drained their energy, leaving them lethargic and making it difficult to focus. When she called the main office to ask if she could take them to the gym or outside for recess, school officials told her the weather was too hazardous, she said.

hechingerreport.org

The island without childcare for babies

This story was reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th, and reprinted with permission. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. For as long as anyone remembers, no childcare center on Kauaʻi has had a single opening for an infant or toddler. Not one. On this tropical island lush with vegetation, the childcare landscape is desolate. Kauaʻi is the only major Hawaiian island that has gone without center-based infant and toddler care for most of the past 15 years if not more — the data just doesn’t go back any further.

hechingerreport.org

Could a public campus really close? The fight to save Southern Oregon University

ASHLAND, Ore. — When Ulysses McCready was in fifth grade, a group of Southern Oregon University music students hauled instruments to Orchard Hill Elementary School to help get local kids excited about joining the middle school band. It worked on McCready, who picked up the flute and soon fell in love with music. “That day I was like, ‘I am going to be in SOU’s music program one day,’ ” they said. A decade-and-a-half later, McCready, now 26, transferred from a local community college to Southern Oregon, in Ashland, both because of that childhood exposure and because it’s the only four-year university in the region and they needed to stay close to their family.

hechingerreport.org

A leading school shootings researcher says he was wrong

Scientists rarely announce that one of their long-held ideas has failed. But that is exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the nation's leading scholars of school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before fellow researchers at the annual meeting in April of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). “We were wrong,” Astor told the audience. For decades, Astor believed that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. He advised national policymakers and issued recommendations. Schools responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.

hechingerreport.org

OPINION: Walking away from education technology isn’t the answer to the latest backlash

In too many classrooms in America, the scene is the same: children staring at tablets, headphones on, silent. Some are working through reading programs. Some have already finished and found their way to something else entirely. The teacher circulates. The education technology industry calls this personalized learning. Somewhere, a dashboard is registering all this as engagement. Nobody in any of those classrooms would agree. I know because I’ve spent a decade navigating this industry from the inside, building some of the technology that teachers, students and soon my own sons will use.

hechingerreport.org

The next literacy challenge: Teaching students how to write

HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. — It was the middle of a writing lesson in Gabrielle Grace’s first grade class at Sand Creek Elementary in suburban Denver, and students were furiously jotting down details about their summer plans, the first step in composing a paragraph on the topic. Except for 6-year-old Dean, who was already done. “This stuff was just too easy for me,” he said. He pointed to his worksheet, fully filled out with a topic sentence (“I do many things over the summer”) and a list of his summer activities (“park, ipad and vacation”).

hechingerreport.org

Many game sites evade school web filters

The Hechinger Report is creating a print edition, and wants young artists to contribute. Find out more here. This spring, I spoke to a mom in suburban Washington, D.C., who was growing increasingly worried about a lack of filters on her kids’ school devices. During class this year, her kids watched Kendrick Lamar videos on YouTube, she told me. One came home knowing the words to a semaglutide commercial. Parents at the school shared concerns that their fourth graders regularly played a game called BitLife, a text-based life simulation game created in 2018.

hechingerreport.org

Facing political attack and falling enrollment, colleges take the fight to … each other

It seemed like a win-win: a proposal to let community colleges in Illinois award bachelor’s degrees in certain subjects to rural residents and working adults who live beyond commuting distance of four-year universities. The change would not only make things “easier and more affordable for students,” according to backers including Gov. JB Pritzker; it would increase the supply of workers with the skills employers need. But four-year universities lined up against it. And a political ally, flanked by several of their presidents, was blunt about why: It would cut into their business.

hechingerreport.org

Education researchers warn political review of federal grants could reshape what gets studied

The research behind the influential “science of reading” movement was built over decades through federally supported research spanning cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics and classroom studies. Education research organizations say a proposed 100-page sweeping overhaul of federal grant rules, which would add a new review by political appointees, could make it harder to produce similar important bodies of evidence in the future. The federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) says its proposed changes are intended to strengthen accountability, transparency and oversight of taxpayer-funded grants. The May 29 proposal would revise the rules for issuing and overseeing grants, including those awarded by the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, two major sources of federal education research funding.

hechingerreport.org

OPINION: How a small town in rural Maine built a public school that serves a whole community, including infants and toddlers 

For years, early childhood leaders have been asked to solve structural problems with predictable answers: Improve quality. Expand access. Support families. Retain educators. Strengthen transitions into kindergarten. All of it matters, but none of it can be fully accomplished with our fragmented system, one in which Head Start, child care, public pre-K, special education and K-12 are all funded separately, governed separately and operated separately. On their own, these programs don’t always fit the needs and realities that many families with young children are actually facing. That’s why in rural Skowhegan, Maine — a community facing significant challenges, including poverty, transportation barriers and a shortage of care options — we decided not to work around that fragmentation but to fix it.

hechingerreport.org

Why are so many kindergartners chronically absent?

LOVELAND, Colo. — Just beyond the front doors of Namaqua Elementary School, past a banner that reads “attendance matters — every school day counts,” a stuffed wildcat in sunglasses sits in the lobby, observing the comings and goings of students. The school mascot is called Wyatt, and the students are told that he monitors attendance. Are the children arriving on time? Did they make it to school today? Wyatt is one prong of the elementary school’s strategy to reduce chronic absenteeism, which is common even among the youngest students. Nationally, the grade with the worst attendance record before high school is…

hechingerreport.org

Teachers save time with AI. Their students may pay the price

Artificial intelligence is often promoted as a way to make teachers more effective by helping them write lesson plans, generate classroom materials and provide feedback to students in seconds. But one of the first randomized trials testing AI in real classrooms found that it can also undermine learning. Students whose teachers were given access to an AI teaching assistant felt less motivated to learn. The damage was especially pronounced among students whose teachers were already weaker instructors, as measured by their performance before the experiment began. Their students also scored lower on standardized final exams, the researchers found.

hechingerreport.org

OPINION: Poor Southern states have a brain drain problem. Public universities can and should be doing more to help 

Confidence in higher education is declining across the United States. Fewer Americans say a college degree is very important: A growing share believe the system is headed in the wrong direction, particularly when it comes to preparing students for employment. Not surprisingly, college enrollment has fallen in recent years. And nowhere are the stakes of this decline more visible than in high-poverty Southern states like Louisiana and Mississippi, where economic opportunity is unevenly distributed and just one in four adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. For families struggling to make ends meet, the promise that education will lead to better opportunities may feel distant or unrealistic.

hechingerreport.org

As college graduates fret over finding jobs, a record shortage of workers is projected

Even as job seekers fret about artificial intelligence and tech behemoths announce massive layoffs, Matt Walsh is finding it surprisingly hard to help technology companies hire certain kinds of workers. That’s what Walsh’s recruiting firm, Blue Signal, does. And in specialties including semiconductor production, “the unemployment rate is probably negative 20 percent,” the CEO of the Phoenix-based search company said. “It’s ridiculous. There just aren’t enough people.” College graduates booed commencement speakers who hyped AI, which has steadily reduced the number of entry-level jobs available, and Meta cited AI when laying off more than 8,000 workers in May. 

hechingerreport.org

Don’t let AI raise your kids

In 2020, a 14-inch tall robot named Moxie was introduced to the world as a way to help children build social and emotional skills through conversations and interactive games guided by artificial intelligence. Kids became enthralled and attached to the oblong teal robot, referring to it as their best friend. Four years later, Embodied, the company that created Moxie, shut down. Children were distraught as parents broke the news to them that the $799 toy would soon stop working. Social media videos showed the fallout: One girl sobbed as her tearful father consoled her.

hechingerreport.org

OPINION: The days of ‘good guy’ capitalists are over. College students are right to turn against the tech elites

The students booing artificial intelligence at commencements across the country are not just worried about jobs. They have learned an urgent lesson from the not-so-distant past. They know that the familiar promise of empowerment and creativity will continue to give way to the pathologies of the online surveillance economy: viral slop, commercial manipulation and addictive apps — this time on automated steroids. The utopian promise of the tech industry is on life support. The hope that it would empower workers and revitalize democracy soured sometime between the massive data breach of the…

hechingerreport.org

Schools try to block kids from accessing dangerous content and games online. Little kids are outsmarting them

When Jodi Carreon’s son returned to school full time after the pandemic, she expected teachers would roll back the use of the laptops they had relied on while students were home. But soon after her son started second grade, Carreon realized he was still using a Chromebook throughout the day. Then the teacher sent a note home: Her son was playing Minecraft and watching YouTube instead of doing his work. Could Carreon urge him to focus? “In my mind, I was like, ‘What do you expect? He’s 7 years old. Of course he’s going to want to play games,’” said Carreon, whose experience prompted her to later create the California-based advocacy group San Marcos Unified School District Parents for Intentional Tech.

hechingerreport.org

Faster solutions, lower test scores: How AI is eroding math skills

When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them. This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS…

hechingerreport.org

PRINCIPAL VOICE: Our off-track high school students weren’t terribly interested in school until we dug into hands-on learning

As a former teacher and now school leader, I know nothing is worse than missing the mark with your students. It is both disillusioning and frustrating to know that you are failing to provide them with the necessary tools to drive their own learning. It was this realization that convinced me that something needed to change. We needed to do high school differently. In 2017, the staff and I examined the model and curriculum of our alternative public high school to try to understand why a significant number of our students were failing to graduate or to engage in further learning afterward.

hechingerreport.org

Can this city succeed in having all eighth graders take algebra where others have failed?

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Ask parent Janina Matuszeski what she has valued most about her twins’ experience in the Cambridge Public Schools to this point, and she is quick to cite the diversity and teacher quality. If there is one area in which the schools have performed less well in serving her children, who just completed eighth grade, it has been math. “Both my kids have been bored in math for many years,” said Matuszeski, a consultant and former lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “They’ll learn a concept in a day or a day and a half, and then the class will cover it for another two weeks.”

hechingerreport.org

Threats of more closings have colleges and students worrying about how to save themselves

Glass doors lead to the light-filled lobby of a redbrick and limestone chapel at one end of a grassy quad, where lectures and receptions were held and students testified about their faith. Original artwork hangs on the walls on the way to the music department, chaplain’s office and recital hall, along with brass “leaves” listing the names of past financial boosters formed into the shape of a tree. This visit to Trinity Christian College, in Palos Heights, Illinois, isn’t real. It’s virtual, captured just before the college closed in May so students and alumni could remember the campus, which is being sold off to repay…

hechingerreport.org

OPINION: We need to ask better questions about how and if career pathways are working

For years, policymakers, educators and employers have debated whether career pathways — programs that connect high school students to postsecondary education and careers — actually work. We’ve framed the conversation as apprenticeship versus college, workforce training versus liberal arts and careers versus academics. While new findings from Rodel and RTI International — in one of the most detailed studies yet examining pathways-participating students’ outcomes after high school — are encouraging, they also expose how little we still understand. We need more detailed information about what actually happens to pathways students after high school.

hechingerreport.org

As international enrollment falls, U.S. students face program cuts and higher prices

Harrison Keller was starting only his second year as president of the University of North Texas last fall when he was abruptly confronted with a big problem. Enrollment was down. And the source of the crisis made it much worse: In the wake of Trump administration moves to deny and revoke visas, deport international students and impose travel bans, 2,800 students from abroad who the university expected to show up had stayed away. Full-tuition-paying international students — especially graduate students, who Keller said bring $20,000 to $25,000 each to his bottom line — are critical to balancing the budget, underwriting services and keeping costs lower for their domestic classmates.

hechingerreport.org

Key to helping boys in school: Make them feel safe to be themselves

OAKLAND, Calif. — It’s a Friday morning at Oakland Unity Middle School, a public charter school nestled between residential buildings in East Oakland, and Austin Razavi is announcing the morning advisory prompt. “I’ll give you 10, 15 seconds to think about it,” Razavi said to the group of 15 mixed-grade middle school boys who had arranged desks into a messy circle. “Then each of you share something most people don’t know about you.” There was some shuffling and silence. Several boys asked for more time, then one piped up. “I like to play videos,” he said.

hechingerreport.org

Advertising, training fairs, free tuition: How one state is trying to get more men into college

BENZONIA, Mich. — Maggie Bacon is seeking men. On a recent Friday, she attached flyers about an upcoming education and training fair to more than 500 pizza boxes, one of the ways she’s tried to persuade men in this northern Michigan town to enroll in college, a certificate program or even just a single course. “On a Friday night when somebody wants to watch a basketball game or some other sporting event, they’re probably gonna order pizza,” said Bacon. “Part of that target was those working-age adult men.” Bacon runs BEST Benzie County, a local group that works to support education from pre-K to college, part of a statewide network committed to building a college-going culture.

hechingerreport.org

Blending algebra and geometry: An approach to high school math slowly gains favor

In James Bell’s math class at Chapman High School, sophomores are trying to pinpoint exactly where two lines cross. The students in this rural Kansas high school already solved for that meeting point in previous lessons, using graphs and other techniques. But this recent lesson shows them how to use a matrix — a box made up of rows and columns representing a system of equations. Matrices are often used in engineering or video game design to calculate the locations of two objects moving through space. Traditionally, this kind of complex linear algebra would be taught in the third year of high school math, when many students would take Algebra II.

hechingerreport.org

OPINION: The real college crisis isn’t enrollment. It’s completion, and it’s time to start asking why

Imagine a student who starts taking college courses while still in high school through a dual-enrollment program. By the time they arrive on campus as a first-year student, they already have credits completed. They are the first in their family to attend a four-year institution. Focused. Capable. Working part-time to help support things at home. They make it through their first year. Then their second. Somewhere along the way, things shift. An unexpected expense. A change in work hours. A delay in financial aid. Nothing dramatic on its own, but enough.

hechingerreport.org