Education Archives - Page 21 of 37 - Progressive Policy Institute

Opportunities for Innovation: Community Responsive Special Health Services in Charter Schools

Posted on May 15, 2019September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, almost 25,000 students left the island. Puerto Rico’s Department of Education closed a quarter of its schools in response to their intensified economic crisis, damaged facilities and infrastructure, and decreased student population. Those students who remained missed an average of 78 days of school. Faced with this catastrophe, legislators passed the Education Reform Act on March 29^th, 2018, which, among other things, allowed for the creation of charter schools.

Charter schools (or Escuelas Alianzas as they are called in Puerto Rico) are free public schools that receive government funding but operate independently of the school district in which they are located. Freed from the top-down mandates that constrain district-operated schools, charter schools receive increased school-level autonomy in exchange for greater accountability for results. Puerto Rico’s Governor Ricardo Rosselló believed that the Education Reform Act could redesign the public school system to meet the demands of the 21st century, by decentralizing to give school leaders more autonomy.

The hurricane further damaged an already struggling system, critically impacting both health and education in Puerto Rico. According to a survey of over 95,000 students in Puerto Rico, 45.7 percent reported damage to their own homes, 32.3 percent experienced shortages of food or water, and 16.7 percent still had no electricity five to nine months after the hurricane. Many Puerto Ricans still do not have consistent access to clean drinking water, food, and health care.

The Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico—who had been waiting for this opportunity for years—opened Proyecto Vimenti, the island’s first and only charter school, under the leadership of executive director Eduardo Carrera. According to Carrera, the Boys and Girls Club opened the school with the intention to “break the generational cycle of poverty.” The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that 57 percent of children in Puerto Rico lived below the poverty line before the hurricane.

Through its partnership with the Boys and Girls Club, Proyecto Vimenti has been able to provide special services to its students. They provide special health services like eye exams and hearing tests in addition to many other offerings. When the school provided health screenings to their kindergarteners and first graders, they discovered that many of its students had untreated vision and hearing problems. Through these screenings, school officials were able to provide assistive supports like glasses early in a child’s education and thereby avoid many special education misdiagnoses.

However, Proyecto Vimenti is not the first charter school to see the connection between a student’s health and their academic performance. Students with health problems such as asthma, poor vision, diabetes, and tooth pain are more likely to be chronically absent, resulting in poorer academic outcomes and increased likelihood of dropping out of school. Unsurprisingly, children living in poverty are disproportionally affected by health issues. Charter schools, often serving the poorest students, are able to use their flexibility to form community partnerships that can provide these important health services within their schools. Their autonomy allows them to implement innovative solutions in ways that district-operated schools seldom can.

Consider the case of Native American Community Academy (NACA) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded in 2006, NACA, a charter school serving middle and high school students, has integrated health education and improving wellness as core elements of the school’s mission. NACA received a grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2011 to build a school-based health center. The health center provides a variety of services such as dental care and access to a primary care physician. The school leadership intentionally sought out community partners who had expertise with Native American students and the specific health problems their community faces. NACA now has over 150 community partners including the University of New Mexico and First Nations Community Healthsource. NACA’s model, which connects the specific health needs of the student’s community with student wellness, has been so successful that the network has grown to seven campuses throughout the state.

KIPP Ujima Village Academy and KIPP Harmony Academy in Baltimore also saw the value of connecting health services to their school. These two schools, housed in the same building, serve over 1,500 students, approximately 83 percent of whom receive subsidized meals. Within its building, KIPP houses a clinic run by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Program. KIPP and its health services partners believe they can reduce chronic absenteeism by providing urban children in poverty with health and psychosocial care.

Staffed by two nurses, a nurse practitioner, and a pediatrician, the clinic provides vision exams, dental services, and behavioral health care in addition to other primary services. Students can be treated on site, which means that parents do not have to leave work to take their child to an emergency center, and health staff can better manage students with a chronic condition, such as asthma or diabetes, because of the regularity with which they see them. In Baltimore, access to regular health care is especially important for students with asthma, as the prevalence of childhood asthma within the city is over twice the national average, approximately 20 percent compared to about 10 percent.

For KIPP, the results of the clinic are telling. After two years of operation, the two schools combined had a 23 percent drop in chronic absenteeism among students with asthma.

Funding realities make implementing health services in every public school a challenge. In a time when only 39 percent of public schools have a full time nurse, it‘s not surprising that only 2.5 percent of public schools offer on-site primary-care services. Indeed, the two KIPP schools received a five-year, five-million-dollar grant from the nonprofit Rales Center to fund their clinic

However, it’s also no coincidence that the Rales Center chose to bestow their grant upon a charter school. Dr. Kate Connor, the medical director of the Rales Health Center, explained that when deciding where in Baltimore to locate the new health clinic, KIPP was the obvious choice. She said, “[KIPP] is really oriented towards educational innovation, and their leadership had begun to recognize the necessity of providing comprehensive wraparound services in order to support students’ not just direct educational needs but other things that determine educational success and relate to educational success in the lives of kids and families.”

Creating a 21st Century Education System: Reinventing America’s Schools – An Abridged Version

Posted on May 1, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

For a century, our public education system was the backbone of our success as a nation. By creating one of the world’s first mass education systems, free to all children, we forged the most educated workforce in the world. The creation of standardized, unified school systems with monopolies on free schooling had a dramatic impact on this country, helping us build the most powerful, innovative economy on Earth.

But all institutions must change with their times, and since the 1960s, the times have changed. First television emerged to dominate the lives of young people, undermining their desire and ability to read. Then the cultural rebellion of the 1960s and ‘70s brought new problems, including widespread drug use and the decline of the two-parent family. Teen pregnancy soared, the percentage of children raised by single mothers tripled, arrest rates for those under 18 shot up, and gang activity exploded. Meanwhile immigration picked up, doubling the percentage of public school children from households that didn’t speak English, from 10 to 20 percent. At the same time, our Information-Age economy radically raised the bar students needed to meet to secure jobs that would support middle class lifestyles.

Today our traditional public schools “work” for less than half of our students. More than one in five families chooses something other than a traditional public school—a private school, a public charter school, or home schooling. Among those who do attend public schools, 16 percent fail to graduate on time. Even more graduate but lack the skills necessary to succeed in today’s job market. Almost a quarter of those who apply to the U.S. Army fail its admission tests, more than a third of those who go on to college are not prepared for first-year college courses, and almost half of them never graduate. Among industrialized nations, the U.S. ranks 22nd in high school graduation rates and in the bottom half in math, science, and reading proficiency.

Since 1983, we have seen wave after wave of school reforms. Unfortunately, most have been of the “more-longer-harder” variety: more required courses and tests, longer school days and hours, higher standards and harder exams. Few have reimagined how schools might function, given our new technologies.

Langhorne for Forbes, “Bookshare: How One Nonprofit Is Improving The Lives Of Students With ‘Reading Barriers'”

Posted on May 1, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Emery Lower loves to read. She loves Harry Potter, Bridge to Terabithia and Pride and Prejudice. Since beginning sixth grade, she’s developed an interest in graphic novels, especially mangas; in particular, she recommends The Tea Dragon Society. Each year that Emery has taken the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness exams, she’s earned a “masters grade level” score on the reading section.

Only a few years ago, however, Emery couldn’t read. By the end of first grade, she hadn’t finished a book independently. She hated reading and didn’t even like it when her parents read to her because they wanted her to look at the text as they read the story.

“Any time Emery had homework in kindergarten and first grade, it would take hours and a lot of crying – mostly her but sometimes me,” says her mother Brandy Lower. “She was mentally exhausted when she came home from school because she’d spent all day trying to decode words and not being able to do it.”

That’s because Emery, like millions of other children in the United States, suffers from dyslexia, a learning disability that affects areas of the brain that process language. People with dyslexia struggle with decoding: the ability to relate speech sounds to letters and words.

“I would look at the page and say a word out loud, but it didn’t click in my brain,” Emery says. “I didn’t know letters made words, that they had to spell something. I thought that any random group of letters could be a word. Reading was not fun at all for me.”

Then, she found Bookshare, and, slowly, her life began to change.

Continue reading at Forbes.

Langhorne for Forbes, “Fixing the Weak Link in the Charter Chain”

Posted on April 8, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In Washington, D.C., D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School recently celebrated its 15thbirthday by throwing a quinceañera for staff, students and families. In the traditional fashion, this coming-of-age Latin American celebration involved a lot of food, music and dancing.

The school had good reason to celebrate. The Public Charter School Board, D.C.’s charter school authorizer, ranked D.C. Bilingual as one of the top three charter elementaries in the city, with a top score in academic growth.

The dual-language immersion school also ranked first for student achievement among charter elementaries whose students were more than 40% English language learners and first among those with more than 16% special needs students. Not surprisingly, thousands of students are on its waitlist.

D.C. Bilingual’s 15th birthday is a particularly special occasion because just four years ago, it nearly closed due to poor fiscal management.

Continue reading at Forbes.

Langhorne for Forbes, “The Montessori Comeback”

Posted on March 27, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Because Montessori schools are often associated with progressive suburbanites and well-to-do private schools, many people don’t know that Dr. Maria Montessori originally developed her pedagogical approach while running a school for some of the poorest children in Rome. Unfortunately, with the exception of some Montessori magnet schools created as part of desegregation initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s, the Montessori model has been largely relegated to the arena of private schools since it arrived in the United States over 100 years ago. Over the last 20 years, however, the spread of public school choice and charter schools has led to a rapid growth in the number of public Montessori schools.

Only about 500 of the approximately 5,000 Montessori programs in the U.S. are located within public schools. The spread of public school choice has expanded the number of public Montessori programs, from about 130 at the end of the 1980s to around 500 in 2015. Public school choice and charters have allowed the Montessori model to return to its roots of educating low-income students. And because the Montessori model has historically been popular with middle-class families, many districts and public charter school leaders have been using it as a means to create economically and racially integrated public schools. However, as the demand for the model continues to increase, some of these leaders struggle with ensuring that public Montessori schools are serving the children most in need of high quality and different educational options.

Continue reading at Forbes.

Langhorne for Medium, “Why We Need to Make Public School Choice an Easier Choice for Low-Income Families”

Posted on March 19, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Most people who know me know that I’m a big believer in public school choice. To me, it’s a no brainer that when school districts create school attendance zones based on students’ home addresses, they are creating systems in which poor students will most likely attend poorly performing schools. Forcing students to attend a chronically failing school because of where they live sets them up for failure and reinforces cycles of generational poverty. When students have the option to attend any public school that they choose, it helps to unshackle their education — and by extension their future — from their family’s financial history.

But another reason I like public school choice is that it often leads to a variety of school models that can meet the needs and interests of a variety of students. Systems of public school choice usually have many unique learning models — computer-science focused, dual-language, diverse-by-design, arts-based, project-based, policy-oriented, and more — within their public schools. Districts that assign students using their home addresses rarely attempt to create an abundance of schools with innovative learning models. Imagine a district trying to force a parent to send their child to an arts-based school or a single-sex school, and you’ll understand the difficulty. It’s far easier for these districts to create cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all schools and hope that most kids succeed in them.

And so, without public school choice, it’s only affluent families — the ones who can pay for their children’s education or help them test into a selective public school — that have access to this menu of options.

Continue reading at Medium.

Community Responsive Rural Charter Schools as a 21st Century Solution to School Consolidation

Posted on March 15, 2019September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The West Virginia House of Delegates recently voted against Senate Bill 451, which would have allowed for the creation of public charter schools throughout the state. Critics of charter schools claim that they “drain money” from traditional local public schools. However, West Virginia has been draining money from its local public schools for years.

Since the 1900s, West Virginia has closed thousands of its schools. Smaller, rural schools were consolidated into larger, regional schools to increase efficiency and save money. In 1989, Governor Caperton accelerated school consolidation by forming the School Building Authority (SBA) which only provided funding for school-building maintenance and renovation if a school met SBA’s minimum enrollment requirements. Unsurprisingly, SBA’s one-size-fits all approach predominantly affected small rural schools, forcing them to consolidate. SBA and Governor Caperton claimed that this would save money, increase efficiency, and improve educational quality. What really happened was quite different.

Maintenance and transportation costs increased as thousands of students endured longer bus rides– sometimes up to two hours a day– on rough terrain. Students had less time for extra-curriculars. Grades dropped while student stress and unhappiness rose. School officials promised to offer more course options, including advanced placement, but these courses were eliminated.

Meanwhile, the number of state administrators increased as did their salaries. Ultimately, the consolidation did not save any money. On the contrary, it cost the state 1 billion dollars from 1990 to 2002.

School consolidation is an old solution to the enduring problem of cutting costs in rural areas. However, increases in transportation costs and bureaucratization often offset any savings so consolidation rarely results in lower per-pupil spending. To make matters worse, school consolidation negatively affects communities both socially and economically. Rural schools often act as the center of the community, and losing a school leaves a hole in the community that rarely gets filled.

Many rural communities want to keep their local schools; however, they need innovative 21^stcentury solutions to overcome their respective challenges in doing so.

Rural populations are becoming poorer, older, and less white. Unlike in metro areas, rural employment has not recovered since the 2008 recession.The National Center for Education Statistics has labeled more than half of rural districts in the United States as “high poverty,” with nearly half of their students considered economically disadvantaged. Rural schools typically receive less funding and spend less per pupil than suburban or urban schools, and they have been shown to be disadvantaged in Title I funding formulas. They spend twice as much on transportation. They also struggle to recruit and retain skilled teachers because of low salaries, geographical isolation, and poor recruiting incentives.

Charter schools, with their school-level autonomy and increased flexibility, could have been an innovative solution to the problem of consolidation in West Virginia.

Other rural communities have used the flexibility of charter schools to address state-forced consolidation initiatives. For example, the community of Tidioute, PA, with a population of only 654 had success in establishing a charter school when the district proposed closing its school as a part of a consolidation. Because of their remote geography, distance from other communities, and the icy conditions they face in winter, the community members felt it was important to have a school located within Tidioute. Their charter school capitalizes on their tight-knit community and local natural resources to offer their students place-based education and a family-like culture.

Community support, however, is hard won in rural communities. As in urban and suburban areas, traditional local schools are often at the heart of a rural community. Children attend the same school that their parents and grandparents attended, and community members sometimes view a new charter school as an invader. Sometimes, new charter schools in rural areas initially face opposition. That was the case with Upper Carmen Charter School in the remote ranching community of Carmen, Idaho. Carmen had lost its local one-room school in the 1950s after consolidating with neighboring Salmon school district. In 2005, Sue and Jim Smith used Idaho’s charter law to reopen the school as a charter school. Unsurprisingly, Salmon public school district strongly opposed this idea, making the Smiths fight a long uphill battle. However, with persistence and a dedication to understanding Carmen’s needs, the Smiths convinced community members that the charter school was the best option for their children. Sue and Jim’s hard work has paid off. Out of the state’s 490 K-8 public schools, Upper Carmen Charter School is in the 85^thpercentile for ELA and Math achievement, and Idaho’s State Department of Education recognized the school as a 2018 Top Performer in ELA growth.

Difficult problems require innovative solutions. Rural communities need a system that is flexible and responsive. Letting charters open doors that consolidation closed can bring schools back to the center of a rural community.

Langhorne for Forbes, “Separating Fact From Fiction: Five Important Findings About The Nation’s Charter School Landscape”

Posted on March 14, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Charter schools serve about three million students across 42 states and the District of Columbia. To clarify, charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold lotteries to see who gets in. Charter schools are freed from many of the rules that constrain district-operated schools. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are held accountable for their performance through contracts with authorizers.

Each state’s charter law empowers a variety of different agencies to authorize charters. The most common types of authorizers are a local school board, a state education agency, higher education institutions, and statewide bodies set up for the sole purpose of overseeing charter schools. Authorizers vet and approve charter school applications, and they also close or replace underperforming schools.

Based on both performance and sustainability, charter schools have been the most successful education improvement strategy of the millennium, and they’ve been particularly effective at educating low-income students. In places like New Orleans, Denver, and Washington, D.C., the charter formula – school-level autonomy, accountability, diversity of school design, and parental choice – has proven far more effective than the centralized, bureaucratic approach inherited from the 20^thcentury.

However, over the last few years, the growth of charter schools across the nation has slowed. In an effort to understand this decline in growth, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) examined charter school proposals and approvals over the last five years, analyzing 3,000 charter school applications to authorizers in the 20 states that oversee nearly two-thirds of charters nationwide. Their new report Reinvigorating the Pipeline: Insights into Proposed and Approved Charter Schools unearths important facts about the nation’s charter school pipeline, facts that also dispel some of the commonly perpetuated myths about charter schools.

Continue reading at Forbes.

Charter Schools in Rural Communities: An Opportunity for Career Preparation through STEM Skills Development

Posted on March 7, 2019September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The West Virginia House of Delegates recently shot down Senate Bill 451, abruptly killing a promising chance for education reform throughout the state. The bill, which would have allowed for creation of public charter schools throughout the state as well as an increase in open enrollment policies, would have created more educational options for all of West Virginia’s children. However, the teachers unions and their allies rallied against the bill, arguing that charter schools would take money away from public schools. This is, of course, nonsense, since charter schools are public schools. Nonetheless, West Virginia teachers walked out of their classrooms last week in protest of the bill, striking for the second time in the last 18 months.

The state’s House of Delegates missed a tremendous opportunity to ensure that all children in West Virginia have the best chance for academic success. Many of the jobs in well-paying industries that rural communities used to rely on, like manufacturing and energy, are no longer available or have adapted to the digital age so that today’s workers need higher-level skills, such as coding, equipment maintenance, or systems knowledge, to enter to the workforce. As a result, there’s an increasing need for the rural workforce to develop STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skills for STEM and non-STEM fields such as computer science and coding. Rural areas across the nation have been experiencing significant “brain drain” as young people leave their communities for better academic or economic opportunities elsewhere.

And, in a state where over 50 percent of the population lives in rural areas, the legislature can’t afford to miss opportunities to improve education.

Twenty-first century school systems built upon the pillars of autonomy, accountability, diversity of school design, and parental choice have resulted in dramatic and positive educational change in urban areas such as New Orleans and Denver. Essentially, these systems treat all of their public schools like charter schools. Rural communities can likewise benefit from the creation of public charter schools.

Many rural charters partner with local industry, higher education institutions, and the community to provide students with the skills needed to succeed in the local economy. Many rural charter schools such as North Idaho STEM charter academy in Rathdrum, Idaho offer dual-enrollment courses, which allow for students to earn an associate’s degree while in high school. These students not only save money by earning college credit during high school, but they also improve their skill set by taking career applicable courses. The Academy of Seminole, a public charter school in Seminole, Oklahoma, was founded by the leader of a local aerospace manufacturing company because his company had encountered difficulty in finding skilled local workers to fill their positions. The school has a partnership with the company, and it focuses on career and workforce development. It also offers dual enrollment courses through a partnership with a local community college, vocational certificates, and a business mentoring program that enhances students’ exposure to different types of careers.

Other rural charter schools have also used place-based education to draw upon their existing natural resources to encourage curiosity and teach STEM concepts while enhancing their connection to the community. Through a partnership with Oregon State University, Elkton Charter School in Elkton, Oregon, uses its proximity to the Umpqua River to create a natural resources curriculum where students engage in project-based learning: they study soil samples, mold, fungi, leaves, trees, and estuaries.

STEM-focused charter schools and school choice programs offer a potential solution for communities who wish to retain and adequately prepare their young populations for skilled careers in their community. Considering West Virginia is the third most rural state in the United States, it is a shame that lawmakers are failing to seize the opportunity to address the needs of students in rural communities by allowing for the creation of charter schools.

Langhorne for Forbes, “The Real Faces Behind the ‘Corporate Reform’ of America’s Public Schools”

Posted on February 28, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

With 2019 barely underway, the nation has already witnessed another set of highly publicized teacher strikes. Teachers unions and anti-charter activists have wasted no time in painting public charter schools as the culprit, blaming them for “draining money from public schools.”

To clarify, charter schools are public schools. They’re supported by taxpayer money and overseen by public organizations—often school districts. All charter students must participate in state tests and related accountability measures. However, charter schools are operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits, so they’re free from top-down mandates and bureaucratic red tape that often constrain district-operated schools.

In exchange for increased autonomy, charters are held accountable through performance contracts with authorizers, who close or replace them if their students aren’t learning enough. Most charter schools are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. If too many students apply, they hold a lottery to see who gets in.

Continue reading at Forbes.

New Ideas for a Do-Something Congress No. 5: Make Rural America’s Higher Education Deserts Bloom

Posted on February 26, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

As many as 41 million Americans live in “higher education deserts” – at least half an hour’s drive from the nearest college or university and with limited access to community college. Many of these deserts are in rural America, which is one reason so much of rural America is less prosperous than it deserves to be.

The lack of higher education access means fewer opportunities for going back to school or improving skills. A less educated workforce in turn means communities have a tougher time attracting businesses and creating new jobs.

Congress should work to eradicate higher education deserts. In particular, it can encourage new models of higher education – such as “higher education centers” and virtual colleges – that can fill this gap and bring more opportunity to workers and their communities. Rural higher education innovation grants are one potential way to help states pilot new approaches.

THE CHALLENGE: HIGHER EDUCATION “DESERTS” ARE HANDICAPPING RURAL AMERICA

For millions of Americans, distance is as big or bigger a barrier to higher education access as finances. According to the Urban Institute, nearly one in five American adults—as many as 41 million people—lives twenty-five miles or more from the nearest college or university, or in areas where a single community college is the only source of broad-access public higher education within that distance. Three million of the Americans in these so-called “higher education deserts” also lack broadband internet, which means they are cut off from online education opportunities as well (1).

Rural students have lower rates of college-going and completion.

More than four in five people in higher education deserts – 82 percent – live in rural areas. This could be one reason why fewer rural Americans attend or finish college.

In 2016, 61 percent of rural public school seniors went on to college the following year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, compared to 67 percent for suburban students (2). Only 20 percent of rural young adults between 25 and 34 have four-year degrees, says the USDA’s Economic Research Service, compared to 37 percent of young adults in urban areas (3). Moreover, the urban-rural gap in college degree attainment is growing. From 2000 to 2015, the share of college-educated adults rose by 7-points in urban locales compared to 4-points in rural areas.

Less-educated rural areas are falling behind while better educated cities leap ahead.

With more and more jobs demanding ever higher levels of skill, disparities in access to higher education are translating to vast disparities in the distribution of jobs and opportunity throughout the United States, including a widening urban-rural divide. Wealthy urban areas are getting richer, while rural areas are increasingly lagging.

The Economic Innovation Group (EIG), for instance, reports that of the 6.8 million net new jobs created between 2000 and 2015, 6.5 million were created in the top 20 percent of zip codes, which were predominantly urban (4). These prosperous, job-creating zip codes are also the best-educated. EIG further finds that 43 percent of residents in the top 10 percent of zip codes has a bachelor’s degree or better, compared to just 11 percent in the bottom 10 percent. While a four-year degree is of course not a prerequisite for a good living, the heavy concentration of highly-educated workers is indicative of the imbalance in economic opportunities between rural and urban areas.

Most of the nation’s least educated and most impoverished counties are rural.

If education and prosperity are linked, so conversely are poverty and the lack of educational attainment.

Out of 467 U.S. counties identified by the USDA as “low education” counties – places where 20 percent or more of the population has less than a high school diploma – 79 percent are rural (5). These counties tend to be clustered in the rural South, Appalachia, along the Texas border and in Native American reservations and also suffer from higher rates of poverty, child poverty and unemployment.

THE GOAL: ERADICATE HIGHER EDUCATION DESERTS AND ENSURE EVERY RURAL AMERICAN HAS HIGHER EDUCATION ACCESS

Better access to higher education in rural areas, especially for the many millions of “nontraditional” students who are now increasingly the norm (6), can help close the gulf in opportunity between urban and rural areas. Greater opportunities for convenient, affordable higher education would allow more rural Americans to finish their degrees or pursue occupational credentials, qualifying them for higher-skilled, better-paid jobs. Rural students would also benefit by not being forced to leave home for school – not only lowering costs for students but potentially slowing or even reversing the population declines plaguing rural areas. Institutions of higher education can also serve as engines of economic development in the communities they serve. They can work with businesses to turn out the skilled talent they need and provide research or other support.

THE PLAN: CREATE RURAL HIGHER EDUCATION INNOVATION GRANTS TO ENCOURAGE NEW MODELS OF HIGHER EDUCATION REACHING RURAL AMERICA

While it’s unrealistic to establish a new college, community college or university in every rural area that needs one, emerging models for delivering higher education potentially offer a creative, cost-effective and effective alternative. These new models can also expand the ability of workers to obtain high-quality occupational credentials, which in many instances are likely to be more practical, affordable and desirable than pursuing a two-year or four-year degree.

Some states, such as Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland, are pioneering new approaches, such as “higher education centers” and virtual colleges, that use technology to broaden students’ options for both traditional college education and occupational training (7). The Northern Pennsylvania Regional College, for instance, operates six different “hubs” scattered throughout the 7,000 square miles it serves, plus numerous “classrooms” using borrowed space from local high schools, public libraries and other community buildings. In addition to conferring its own degrees, it provides the infrastructure for other accredited institutions to extend their reach through “blended” offerings combining virtual and in-person teaching.

Similarly, Virginia’s five higher education centers provide physical infrastructure for colleges and community colleges offering classes as well as occupational training in fields such as welding, mechatronics and IT certification. In Maryland, the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center offers specific courses from ten different institutions, including Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. Though relatively new, these institutions are already establishing a track record of success. In South Boston, Virginia, for instance, the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center worked with more than 30 area industries and entrepreneurs in 2017, developed customized training for nearly 150 workers in local companies and placed 173 students into new jobs (8).

Congress should encourage all states to make rural higher education a priority and help more states experiment with new models for accessing higher education in remote areas. One way to do this is to provide seed money in the form of Rural Higher Education Innovation Grants so that states can stand up pilots, evaluate the effectiveness of new models and scale up promising approaches. These grants moreover do not need to be large – the Pennsylvania legislature initially appropriated just $1.2 million to launch what is now NPRC.

As a start, Congress should set aside $10 million in competitive grant funding for states. Funding for these grants could come from an earmark of the money collected from the 1.4 percent excise tax on large university endowments included in the 2017 tax legislation (9).

Read Here: New Ideas For a Do Something Congress No. 5

A Look Inside Monument Academy, a D.C. Public Charter School Designed to Serve Students in Foster Care

Posted on February 22, 2019September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The industrial-era public education system that America inherited from the last century no longer works for the majority of students. Because it is highly centralized and assigns students to schools based on their home address, it produces cookie-cutter schools that treat all children the same. However, that educational model is profoundly unfair to the majority of America’s children. Kids come from different backgrounds. They speak different languages. They have different interests and different learning styles. They arrive at school on different academic levels.

Whereas traditional public schools attempt to treat most students the same, public charter schools attempt to create best-fit learning environments that meet the specific needs and interest of their students.

When children land in the right school, they flourish in surprising ways.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Washington, D.C. The District has a universal enrollment, and nearly 50 percent of the public school students attend charter schools whose leaders have the autonomy to control their school designs and influence school culture. As a result, the District’s charter sector has an extraordinary number of innovative learning models– STEM, Classics-based, dual-language immersion, Montessori, etc.– creating a variety of educational options so that each student can find a best-fit school.

Reinventing America’s Schools and The 74 recently highlighted some of these unique schools in our Schools of the Future series. However, because D.C. has so many innovative schools, we simply couldn’t cover them all. As such, we encourage you to read Harvard Ed. Magazine’s piece on Monument Academy, a D.C. public charter school designed to serve kids in foster care.

Read the story here.

Valentine for BlackPressUSA, “Developing a universal enrollment system for all Memphis public schools”

Posted on February 21, 2019September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

On any given day, you can find Sarah Carpenter organizing parents in the Memphis area. A single mother of four daughters and 13 grandchildren, Carpenter was an advocate long before becoming co-founder and CEO of The Memphis Lift, which she describes as “a parent organization run by parents, for parents.”

Born and raised in North Memphis, Carpenter says her experience as a single parent prepared her to lead The Memphis Lift. “I have always been an advocate for my daughters and for other’s kids,” she says. “I started in 1995 when I was asked to help open a Family Resource Center in a high school and students without involved parents in their lives took to me. Parents would stop me and say, ‘They are passing my son on to High School and he can’t even read.”

Carpenter and her fellow co-founders met during the training component of a public advocate fellowship funded by the Memphis Education Fund, which educated parents about the landscape in Shelby County Schools (SCS). At the time, SCS had the highest number of “priority schools” –those in which student scores on state exams ranked in the bottom five percent – in Tennessee.

Carpenter and her colleagues have since visited more than 10,000 homes to educate others on the state of Memphis’s schools. SCS students can attend four categories of schools: traditional neighborhood schools, charter schools, charter schools in the state-run Achievement Schools District, and schools in the district’s Innovation Zone.

For Carpenter and her organization, ensuring that all parents – regardless of income – have access to all the options SCS has to offer is paramount.

Continue reading at BlackPressUSA.

Langhorne for The 74, “At D.C.’s Ingenuity Prep, Personalized Learning Hasn’t Replaced Teacher Time; It’s Put the Focus Back on Small Groups”

Posted on February 7, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When Aaron Cuny and Will Stoetzer were thinking about how they wanted to structure their own D.C. charter school back in 2012, they kept returning to the same question: “When were we doing the best work for kids?”

“For both of us, it came down to teaching in a small group setting, where you could think about how to reach kids individually rather than spending the majority of time and mental energy thinking about classroom management,” says Stoetzer.

Stoetzer was a special education teacher and Cuny a resident principal-in-training at D.C. Bilingual Public Charter School, a top-ranked elementary school in one of Washington’s middle-income neighborhoods. Both felt the city lacked quality educational options for kids in the neighborhoods that needed them most.

“In pockets across D.C., some schools had shown that when adults got it right, there was success at educating low-income kids,” says Stoetzer. “Schools like KIPP and D.C. Prep have been very purposeful about producing academic results for low-income kids. Their success inspired us, but we had differences in perspective about how that success might be accomplished.”

When they opened Ingenuity Prep a year later with Cuny as CEO and Stoetzer as COO, they located it in Ward 8, Washington’s poorest neighborhood, and built two essential components into the school’s design so that small group learning could be its main focus: co-teaching and computer-based learning.

Continue reading at The 74.

New Ideas for a Do-Something Congress No. 3: “End The Federal Bias Against Career Education”

Posted on January 29, 2019 by The Progressive Policy Institute

As many as 4.4 million U.S. jobs are going unfilled due to shortages of workers with the right skills. Many of these opportunities are in so-called “middle-skill” occupations, such as IT or advanced manufacturing, where workers need some sort of post-secondary credential but not a four-year degree.

Expanding access to high-quality career education and training is one way to help close this “skills gap.” Under current law, however, many students pursuing short-term career programs are ineligible for federal financial aid that could help them afford their education. Pell grants, for instance, are geared primarily toward traditional college, which means older and displaced workers – for whom college is neither practicable nor desirable – lose out. Broadening the scope of the Pell grant program to shorter-term, high-quality career education would help more Americans afford the chance to upgrade their skills and grow the number of highly trained workers U.S. businesses need.

THE CHALLENGE: THE AMERICAN ECONOMY DESPERATELY NEEDS MORE SKILLED TALENT.

For years, U.S. businesses have complained of a “skills gap” – the inability to find the right talent for the positions they are seeking to fill. Though some have questioned the existence of these shortages, new research finds that, while some lower-skilled sectors have a surfeit of workers, other industries do indeed face a real – and dire – need for skilled employees.

Healthcare, finance, and information technology are among the fields with the
greatest shortages of skilled workers.
A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Burning Glass Technologies finds that as many as 4.4 million American jobs are going vacant because companies can’t find the right employees. More than 1.1 million of these openings are in healthcare, followed by business and financial operations, office and administrative support, sales, and computers and math.

Many openings are in so-called “middle-skilled” jobs that require specialized training or education but not a four-year degree.
The vast majority of in-demand positions require some sort of post-secondary education beyond high school. In fact, the economy is shedding low-skill jobs even as demand for higher-skill occupations is rising. The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, for instance, estimates that as many as 6.3 million jobs for workers without a high school diploma have permanently disappeared since the recession (2).

While some of the fastest-growing occupations require advanced schooling and extensive training – such as occupational therapy, physician’s assistant, and nurse practitioner – many well-paying jobs don’t require a four-year degree (3). These so-called “middle-skill” jobs currently account for more than half of all U.S. jobs (4) and include such fields as cybersecurity, welding and machining, truck driving, and home health (5). These jobs might demand an associates’ degree, but, in many cases, instead require a certificate, certification, license, or other industry-recognized credential attainable without attending a traditional college.

Federal financial aid for higher education is largely unavailable for career education and training.
Despite the need for middle-skill workers, current federal policy is tilted heavily in favor of traditional college over career and occupational education. In 2016, for instance, the federal government spent more than $139 billion on post-secondary education, including loans, grants and other financial aid for students. Yet, of this amount, just $19 billion went toward career education and training (6).

THE GOAL: EXPAND AFFORDABLE ACCESS TO HIGH-QUALITY CAREER EDUCATION – ESPECIALLY FOR OLDER AND NONTRADITIONAL STUDENTS
Restrictions in federal financial aid programs – that shut out many career-focused programs – are a major source of the disparity in federal support for traditional college versus career education and training. Federal Pell grants for low-income students, for example, can be used only for credit-bearing programs offered by accredited schools that last over 600 clock hours and run at least 15 weeks (7). Many high-quality coding “boot camps,” for instance, often don’t meet this standard; nor do many other occupational courses, such as programs aimed at helping students earn a welding certification or a commercial drivers’ license.

For example, Delaware’s Zip Code Wilmington, a non-profit coding school, offers an intensive computer skills program that has helped students’ salaries jump from an average of $30,173 to $63,071. Yet, because Zip Code Wilmington is not a college or university and the coursework is only 12 weeks long, the $3,000 course is ineligible for Pell funding – which could it make it unaffordable for many students (8).

THE PLAN: BROADEN THE AVAILABILITY OF PELL GRANTS TO INCLUDE HIGH-QUALITY SHORTER-TERM CAREER EDUCATION
Congress should expand the federal Pell grant program to include high-quality career education and training programs in fields with demonstrated demand for workers. Making career education more affordable through so-called “workforce Pell” would increase the pipeline for skilled talent, thereby diminishing the “skills gap” among U.S. companies. It would also open new opportunities for older and displaced workers for whom going to college or returning to school is neither practicable nor desirable. And, given the growing recognition that higher education is a lifelong endeavor (rather than one limited to the young adult years), this shift would help modernize federal higher education policy to better suit the needs of students, workers and businesses.

One promising approach is the Jumpstart Our Businesses by Supporting Students (JOBS) Act, proposed in the 115th Congress by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Tim Kaine (D-VA), which would shorten the number of course hours required for Pell eligibility to 150 clock hours over eight weeks but also require that programs lead to an industry-recognized credential and meet other requirements for quality (9). Quality safeguards would help ensure that fly-by-night credential providers cannot exploit students – helping steer students toward top-flight programs.

Growing the Pell grant program need not come at the expense of higher education funding more broadly; potential sources for funding a Pell expansion include earmarking revenues from the excise tax on large university endowments (included in the 2017 tax bill), or limiting tax-preferred 529 college savings accounts, whose benefits overwhelmingly accrue to the upper middle class (10).

Although expanding Pell grants to more career education could ultimately make the program more costly, occupational credentials are typically much cheaper to acquire than college degrees, and the ultimate return – more workers in better jobs with better wages – makes the investment worthwhile.

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ENDNOTES

1) Restuccia, Dan, Bledi Taska, and Scott Bittle, Different Skills, Different Gaps, Burning Glass Technologies, 2018, available at https://www.burning-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/Skills_Gap_Different_Skills_Different_Gaps_FINAL.pdf.

2) Anthony P. Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera and Artem Gulish, Six Million Missing Jobs: The Lingering Pain of the Great Recession, Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, December 2015, https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/Six-Million-Missing-Jobs.pdf.

3) Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Burning Glass Technologies.

4) National Skills Coalition, United States’ Forgotten Middle, available at https://www.nationalskillscoalition.org/resources/publications/2017-middle-skills-fact-sheets/file/United-States-MiddleSkills.pdf.

5) Burning Glass Technologies, “Which Middle Skill Jobs Will Last a Lifetime?” June 20, 2018, available at https://www.burning-glass.com/blog/which-middle-skill-jobs-will-last-lifetime/. See also Anthony P. Carnevale, Jeff Strohl, Neil Ridley, and Artem Gulish, Three
Educational Pathways to Good Jobs: High School, Middle Skills and Bachelor’s Degree, Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, 2018, available at https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/3ways-FR.pdf.

6) Opportunity America/AEI/Brookings Working Class Study Group, Work, Skills, Community: Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class, Opportunity America, 2018, available at https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/3ways-FR.pdf.

7) 20 U.S. Code § 1088, accessed at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1088.

8) Anne Kim, Forget free college. How about free credentials? Progressive Policy Institute, October 2017, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/PPI_FreeCredentials_2017.pdf.

9) Office of Sen. Tim Kaine, “Kaine, Portman Introduce Bipartisan JOBS Act to Help Workers Access Training for In-Demand Career Fields,” Jan. 25, 2017, https://www.kaine.senate.gov/press-releases/kaine-portman-introduce-bipartisan-jobs-act-to-help-workers-access-training-for-in-demand-career-fields.

10) Kim.

Opportunities for Innovation: Community Responsive Special Health Services in Charter Schools

As the idea of “free college” gains popularity, Virginia and Iowa are instead focused on career and technical education.