COLUMBUS, OHIO –– The dire problems facing Columbus City Schools can be illustrated by comparing two buildings: Como Elementary School and Hamilton STEM Academy. Built as identical schools in 1954, they sit less than 2 miles apart, about 4 miles north of downtown.

Como has never undergone a significant renovation. Original floor tiles that an official said contain asbestos still cover a majority of the school, many of its plexiglass windows are no longer translucent and wires snake through the hallways, crudely affixed to the top of cinder-block walls.

While the building has been retrofitted with air conditioning and a new playground, “We can’t do everything,” admits T. Alex Trevino, the district’s director of capital improvements. In addition to its obvious physical shortcomings, the school, with a capacity of 400 students, has only 243.

Meanwhile, a $3.5 million renovation last year has transformed Hamilton’s 47,000-square-foot building, adding flooring that cuts down on noise, new windows and furniture, and walls full of cubbies with doors that make classrooms look neater. Freshly painted hallways are dotted with inspirational sayings. “The kids are excited about the building. It’s changed the school culture,” says principal Christopher Brady. Still, Hamilton is only two-thirds occupied, with just under 400 students in a building with a capacity of 575.

Six schools, including Hamilton, have undergone extensive renovations, with two more planned this summer. But in a district with 113 schools — most of them built before 1975 — the buildings are deteriorating faster than the city can fix them. The district spends some $544,000 on facilities and maintenance for each school every year, $86,000 more than the national average.

Like nearly every urban school district in the country, Columbus has significantly fewer students than it did just six years ago. At its peak in the 1970s, the district educated 110,000 students. By 2017, that figure had shrunk to 50,000. Today, the district has an enrollment of about 45,400.

Some of those students transferred to charter or private schools. An expansion of a state program has let more families use public dollars to pay for tuition. While 26,400 people applied for vouchers last school year, that to 91,100 in the current school year.

At the same time, the district’s schools were rated the worst in central Ohio. Columbus’s overall rating was a 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, ranking it last among 49 districts in Franklin County.

It’s clear that Columbus City Schools is facing challenges that defy easy solutions. But the course of action officials have settled on — closing schools and redrawing attendance boundaries — has been tried twice before, and failed. 

Earlier this year — after voters approved a $100 million levy to fend off teacher layoffs and fund infrastructure improvements and renovations as federal COVID funds run out — the district hired a consultant for $500,000 to assess its buildings. It also created a 22-person task force to consider which schools to shutter.

But there’s no guarantee this solution will work. Closing schools is the least popular action a district can take, and this marks the third time since 2016 that Columbus has tried to overhaul its operations. Both previous efforts were stymied, and a list of 20 possible school closures has already generated criticism from residents and union members.

“I’ve been on a school closing committee,” says Douglas Harris, the Schlieder Foundation Chair in Public Education at Tulane University. “Sometimes it can be in the best interest of the district, but it’s the last thing anybody ever wants to do.”

No one knows the reality of the situation better than Jim Negron. In 2018, he led the committee that proposed closing schools and redrawing attendance zones — a plan that was rejected by the Board of Education. The president of CK Construction is co-chairing this year’s task force as well, and he remains optimistic these decisions will set the district up for success for the next 20 years.

“This is really important work. There’s something special happening in Columbus,” he says.

There is a reason for Negron’s optimism. Columbus is the fastest-growing city in the country, according to a new study by the Bank of America Institute, and more people are likely coming. Intel is planning a $20 billion manufacturing plant in New Albany, about 15 miles from downtown. Honda and LG Energy Solution are teaming up to create a plant about 45 minutes southwest of the city to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles. New zoning rules will allow about to be built in Columbus.

All this makes some, including teachers union president John Coneglio, question why the district isn’t looking to spruce up more of its schools instead of closing them. “We’re dismantling schools without a plan to grow the district,” he says.

He worries that unused buildings might be turned into parochial or charter schools, which would siphon off more students from the district. Already, parents are getting texts from charter schools with offers to help fill out their paperwork, he says. Will the city “leave neighborhoods empty and ripe for charters to take our kids?” he asks. 

Coneglio, who was originally on the task force but resigned, says the district’s efforts have a “predetermined outcome, and their goal is to guide you to that outcome.”

When the task force revealed at a May 7 meeting the 20 schools that might be closed, so many union officials and city residents attended that the district had to create an overflow room so everyone could watch the proceedings, according to a in The Columbus Dispatch.

“There’s a lot more work to be done here,” board President Christina Vera said at the meeting. “This is not going to be an easy lift.” 

Afterward, Superintendent Angela Chapman tried to head off criticism when she answered a question about upset parents by saying: “I would say … to take a deep breath. These are initial recommendations that have been submitted to begin the conversation about where we go from here. … These are not the final recommendations.”

The task force is slated to send a final list to the seven-member Board of Education in June. Any changes would take effect in fall 2025.

Even before the task force made its initial recommendations, co-chair Al Edmondson admitted that informal lobbying had begun. “People call and say, ‘Don’t close my school down. My mom went there, I went there.’ But these buildings are old. Something needs to happen.”

Harris says he has found that closing schools works best when a district considers the effect on the community and not just how much money can be saved. He urges leaders to “find ways to keep teams together,” because bonds among families, teachers and principals are hard to re-create. 

A conducted by Harris and two colleagues found that closing the lowest-performing elementary schools can improve student achievement, but not if children are placed in worse schools.

While Harris admits the disruption of changing schools can impair learning, this is offset by transferring to a better school, he says. And future cohorts of students, such as kindergartners, would attend the better school without disruption.

But this “is contingent on closing the lowest-performing schools … which doesn’t often happen,” he adds.

Columbus’s board policy calls for the task force to consider 14 factors in deciding which schools to close; the first on that list is teaching and curriculum. Other items include the age and condition of the building, the number of students who will need to be relocated and enrollment trends. Task force members are also to make sure closures don’t disproportionately affect one section of the city.

Before the meeting, Negron said he had already heard from a lot of residents, and he expects — and hopes — to hear from more before the final recommendation next month. “There’s a lot of passion around the task at hand. That’s not unexpected. I expect to hear more, and I welcome that.”

Correction: Students from Columbus City Schools have transferred to both charter and private schools.

As a small illustration of her long, idiosyncratic writing career, Joy Hakim likes to tell the story of a chance encounter in an Oakland elevator.

On the way down after a speaking engagement, a woman handed her a slip of paper — it contained the phone number of her son’s private school. He and his classmates, she said, could really benefit from their school swapping out its traditional history textbooks for a set of Hakim’s.

Asked who she was, the woman admitted that she was a representative of one of the big publishing houses.

“I was appalled,” Hakim remembered. “But this is an industry where almost no one believes the books educate well — and scores prove that.” 

Hakim doesn’t know if the school ever switched over. But the episode underscores her uncomfortable place in an industry that has never quite embraced her. By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, her writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks.

Her most well-known work, a 10-volume history of the United States that began appearing in the early 1990s, remains in print. And at age 93, she’s still in the fight: Her newest series on biology debuted in September, continuing her tradition of wrestling with complicated ideas and difficult historical and scientific questions. 

But even after three decades, she remains unsure that she’s made much of an impact as textbooks with bigger promotional budgets enjoy much wider readerships. 

That view is belied by her legions of admirers. Praised by leading historians like David McCullough and James McPherson, she also may be the only textbook author to reliably receive fan mail. At one of her kids’ houses sit cases of letters, testament to the gratitude of two generations of readers. 

, podcaster and author of , who has championed deep subject matter knowledge in all areas of study, called Hakim “a force of nature.”

“Most textbooks are either extremely dry or so encyclopedic in their attempts to cover the universe of topics that they’re highly superficial and therefore boring,” Wexler said. “Joy Hakim understands how to use the power of narrative to bring topics in history and science to life.”

Wexler predicted that if more schools adopted Hakim’s titles, reading scores would jump because her work offers both the knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed on tests. 

And as the nation grows increasingly polarized about history, Hakim’s work eschews easy categorization. It is championed by liberals for not glossing over our dark past — and by conservatives for offering rigorous, challenging texts and sophisticated arguments.

, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City teacher, said Hakim’s history series “had a place of honor in my fifth-grade classroom and deserves a place of privilege in every school. It’s beyond her power to reverse the long-running and in American education, but she’s done her part to make real history accessible and interesting to those who seek it out, or who are engaged by it.”

Hakim’s books, he said, offer an important antidote to those that aim to trick kids into learning a little history via historical fiction or lightweight, fantasy-driven fare. “Hakim is winningly anachronistic by comparison: She takes history — and more pertinently her young readers — seriously.”

But she has often had to fight simply to be heard by school districts under adoption systems she sees as backwards. Teachers and students are hungering for good books, Hakim said, yet the adopted titles often stem from publishers’ long-standing relationships with state education bureaucrats, whom they lobby furiously. 

“I don’t think that they sell whether they’re good or crappy,” she said. “They sell because of this massive promotional effort that goes into them.”

‘I sat down and I started writing’ 

Hakim’s career as a writer for young people began simply, on a long car drive.

A one-time teacher and journalist — she taught in Baltimore for a spell and was both a business and editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk’s daily newspaper — by the 1980s, she was freelancing in Virginia Beach and raising three kids with her husband, a grain importer. She happened upon a notice for a hearing in Richmond, the capital, by a board looking for ways to improve school textbooks. At that pre-Internet time, it was a topic that aroused national attention. Hakim (pronounced HAKE-im) decided to check it out.

She expected to hear testimony from writers and editors. Instead, the publishers sent salespeople, who in her view stonewalled the proceedings by rhapsodizing about how beautifully designed and illustrated the books were.

“The whole thing was just a hoax,” she recalled. “The publishing industry was not serious about doing anything.”

Steaming, Hakim climbed back into her car and began the two-hour drive home. At some point, she thought to herself: Why not write her own history book?

“I sat down and I started writing,” she said.

Hakim didn’t stop for seven years, telling vivid personal stories of America’s founders, pioneers and others.

As she conceived it, the book aimed for a fifth-grade audience. To get direct feedback, she tapped a small group of 10-year-olds in her neighborhood, offering five dollars apiece to critique her manuscript. Hakim instructed the readers — mostly boys — to scrawl one of three reactions in the margins: G for Good, B for Boring and NC for Not Clear. 

Next, she invited classroom teachers to use the manuscripts in exchange for feedback. 

That one book ultimately became a 10-volume manuscript called . 

The books covered much of what she’d decided was important in American history — as she told one interviewer, from “people coming over the Bering Strait” to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

And they offered children a thrilling narrative. In a chapter on Columbus’ voyages, she wrote that after surviving the treacherous waters of the Sargasso Sea, the explorer’s men wanted to turn back: “The sea seems endless. On October 9 they say they will go no farther. Columbus pleads for three more days of sailing. Then, he says, if they don’t see land they may cut off his head and sail home in peace.”

But for all the books’ originality, Hakim lacked a publisher. Eventually she met a literary agent who successfully garnered the attention of Oxford University Press.

, in a review titled, “Showing Children the Dark Side,” said Hakim “frees children from the grasp of hoary American myth nurtured by novelists and historians; without sermonizing, she allows them to glimpse the horrific underside of the once magical word ‘frontier.'” 

Hakim, for instance, was among the first writers for young people to address the 1839 Amistad rebellion, devoting an entire chapter to the slave uprising four years before the incident rose to prominence with the .

Historian David McCullough called the series “a big breath of fresh air and the best possible news for the youngsters who get to read these books.” 

Princeton University historian James McPherson said he was “impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research,” telling one reviewer that Hakim’s books represented women and minorities in ways others hadn’t.

‘I have done something that’s quite different’

Like many authors, Hakim felt Oxford did little to publicize the series, leaving her to do much of the promotion herself. But in 1993, a family friend opened a key door: The composer BJ Leiderman, a long-ago classmate of one of her children, was by then writing for National Public Radio. He suggested to colleagues that they feature her, and soon Hakim found herself in front of a microphone at the network’s Norfolk affiliate. The result was a lengthy “Morning Edition” segment that helped introduce her to the world.

In the interview, she told host Bob Edwards, “The history books that are out there, most of them are committee-written, and committees can’t write. Committees have to be bland. So, I am doing something … that’s quite different.”

Looking back on the reception she got in 1993, Leiderman said Hakim was “progressive in the best sense of the word, searching out all different areas” to study.

All the same, he recalled, selling the books — sometimes on her own — struck him as a long, tough slog reminiscent of veteran rock stars playing small clubs to keep their music alive.

Despite the struggle — or perhaps because of it — “A History of US” soon became one of Oxford’s rock-solid titles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, said Damon Zucca, the publisher’s director of content development and reference. The series has also received “the most fan mail from kids, parents, and teachers, who have been sending ardent missives about these books to Joy and to us for nearly thirty years now.”

But keeping them in classrooms has been a battle. Hakim recalled visiting Oakland schools a year after the district adopted her books, curious how they were being used. She couldn’t find them anywhere. “They’d all been replaced,” she said. A few teachers told her they’d saved their copies and were literally hiding them in closets to keep administrators in the dark. 

At one point, Hakim even sued after textbook giant Houghton Mifflin purchased the books’ distributor, D.C. Heath. Fearing it was a bid to bury the titles, she pursued an antitrust violation. Civics-geek alert: The case eventually landed before the federal bench of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who 14 years later would rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Hakim eventually got the books out from under the big publisher’s purview. Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Eventually, “A History of US” gave rise to a companion with all-star voice talent including Morgan Freeman, Julia Roberts and Robert Redford. But by then Hakim was on to something new: a three-book series about the history of science, from Aristotle to Einstein.

Then as now, Hakim’s most fervent buyers are often private school teachers and homeschooling parents who are free to use materials that appeal to them. She also holds a kind of magnetic appeal to cultural conservatives like Lynne Cheney who have derided public school readings they view as mushy and politically correct.

Yet conservatives have also protested Hakim’s books. In one case, Texas parents organized a letter-writing campaign, telling state officials that the books were unpatriotic.

They’ve been banned at least twice, as far as Hakim knows — once quite recently after a parent complained that they were too liberal. She jokes that the honor puts her in good company. 

Asked how she’d categorize herself, Hakim doesn’t hesitate. “I’m just a teacher,“ she said. “My books talk. I’m in a conversation with these kids and I respect their intelligence — and they understand that.”

‘This is a tough chapter’

Ask about her workflow and Hakim will tell you that she is blessed with — or cursed by — a journalist’s penchant for accuracy, which often prolongs her creative process. In the case of the science books, she finished the last one — on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the origins of quantum mechanics — and her new publisher had submitted it for peer review, when she received an unsolicited email from an unfamiliar name with an mit.edu address.

It was from renowned physics professor , also editor of the American Journal of Physics. He’d read a piece in TIME magazine about her plan to write about Einstein and offered to read the manuscript.

Hakim sent him the first four chapters. A few days later, Taylor wrote back asking if someone had actually reviewed them.

He and Hakim met a few times and, in Taylor’s words, “got to know — and respect — each other.” In all, they spent the next year-and-a-half revising the book, to the chagrin of Smithsonian Books. “They were not happy with me,” Hakim recalled. “But I’m so happy that I did it.”

In the book’s introduction, Hakim wrote of the “private tutorial with one of the greatest physics teachers this country has produced,” adding, “Sometimes my head hurt with all the stretching.”

The book won several best-of-the-year awards, which she credits largely to Taylor’s influence. For his part, Taylor told The 74 that Hakim “made great contributions to high school science teaching” and deserves wider recognition. 

As with the history series, the science books found a devoted audience as Hakim challenged young readers to grasp hard topics and complex ideas. In a chapter explaining Galileo’s writings on relativity, Hakim urged them to “catch your breath, relax and be prepared to stretch your mind.” 

In the chapter, she described how an observer on shore, watching a ball fall from the mast of a moving ship, sees it move in an arc, while an observer on deck sees it travel in a straight line. Acknowledging that the idea seemed outlandish, she warned: “This is a tough chapter; stick with it; the ideas here are important.”

Indeed, when journalist and scholar Alexander Stille set out to capture the essence of Hakim’s history books in 1998, he concluded, “Instead of talking down to children in simplified language, her books invite children to make an effort.” He that “a grandmother from Virginia” could produce books superior to those of most publishing houses.

‘The world has changed’

Now, nearly 20 years after the science texts first appeared, Hakim is out with a new series for teens about the history of biology.

gave the first volume a coveted starred review, calling it “thoroughly engrossing and highly recommended.” 

The second book is due out in April, part of a planned four-volume series. Published by MITeen Press, the last two books won’t appear until 2025 and 2026 respectively, but Hakim jokes that at her age she may not live to see it in readers’ hands.

She has asked her publisher to pick up the pace.

At the same time, she remains unsatisfied about her previous work: Three decades after “A History of US” began appearing on shelves, Hakim says the series could use a refresh. 

“I wrote it 30 years ago, so some of it is really dated,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. For one thing, she wants to recast the role of women, a topic she didn’t adequately address in the 1990s, mostly due to her own blind spot. An avowed feminist, she now sees she didn’t step back enough and appreciate the importance of the women’s movement. 

“Thirty years ago, we were different people than we are today,” she said. “The world has changed.” 

Yet, oddly, little has changed in Hakim’s career. Her husband is gone and the “grandmother from Virginia” is now a great-grandmother, but she still feels like a disruptor and an outsider, angry that we don’t have “better books” in schools. After millions of words on the page and cases of fan mail, she admits that she has barely struck a blow in the nation’s larger battle with historical illiteracy.

The textbook industry that she set out to disrupt in the 1980s is still dominated by a handful of publishers — actually, consolidation has , not more, choices. Together, they still produce what she considers bland, formulaic books that are making the nation’s reading crisis worse, not better.

“I’ve worked all these years and I’m not sure what I’ve achieved,” she concluded. “I’ve sold some books, but I haven’t changed the field.”

With paradigms shifting all around us, we must reimagine and build a modern, equitable public education system that unleashes the creativity, confidence and compassion of young people to adapt and contribute to a fast-changing, interconnected world. 

Real and meaningful change is possible, but it requires a public education system that makes learning relevant and enlivening, supports students’ discovery and pursuit of their purpose, and integrates learning throughout the community. 

A by Transcend shows that they aren’t engaged or enthusiastic about school. Only 31 percent reported that what they learn in school is connected to life outside the classroom, and just 35 percent said they are learning about things that interest them. Only 18% of adults considered themselves very career-ready after high school in a by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

The time to reimagine American education is now.

Our team at Education Reimagined is working with educators, communities, and researchers to reconceive a modern public education system that shifts the brick-and-mortar model of schooling to one built on that offer deeply personalized opportunities to all students. 

Community-based, learner-centered education is an approach that promises to forge more equitable, meaningful and successful futures for our young people—and, consequently, our society. 

To help this vision become reality, we recently launched a research and development acceleration initiative. This effort is designed to catalyze the work of innovative sites, and crystallize the requirements for developing a forward-thinking public education system. This proactive step promises to expedite the evolution of public education, ensuring it meets the needs of the future. Education Reimagined aims to raise more than $20 million by the end of 2024, with the goal of creating five demonstrations of community-based public education systems over the next five years. 

At the core of these learning environments is a safe and nurturing home base, where learners develop relationships with advisors and peers who help guide them through their learning process. Learners also access learning hubs that offer vibrant, rich experiences centered on academic learning and skill-building within the context of interests and actual experiences. At field sites, they engage in real-world projects through internships and apprenticeships, allowing them to pursue their interests in a real-world setting.

In this system, children will learn everywhere — in parks, museums, libraries, businesses, homes, schools and civic centers. Learning is tangible, rooted in context, and intrinsically tied to each young person’s interests, aspirations and identity. 

This is not a fantasy. Community-based learning ecosystems are already creating new and exciting opportunities for hundreds of students in communities across the nation. A diverse group of learning communities are now leveraging this approach to transform the learning environment. Students in these sites are finding and pursuing passions that have the potential to last a lifetime.

At the brand new City View Community High School ecosystem in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, students’ home base is at the local Chamber of Commerce. They create personalized learning activities, connected to standards, through learning hubs that allow them to dive deeply into subjects that matter to them. Educators and advisors guide these community-based projects and allow students to explore topics at partnering local businesses, which are the field sites. This collaborative approach prepares them for their future, with direct access to careers in robotics, business ownership, fashion and video game programming. 

As core to the Columbus Learning Ecosystem Initiative, educators, business executives and community leaders have created interconnected learning opportunities for students to solve real-world problems in ways that prepare them for Ohio’s burgeoning economy. The state’s adoption of 5G has attracted a host of global giants like AWS, Google, Intel and others opening operations there — including manufacturing, data centers and more. Through home bases, learning hubs, and field sites, learners are granted the autonomy to identify problems and work alongside industry professionals to devise solutions.

These schools engage students directly in their interests and provide opportunities to solve real-world problems and create artistic projects they may be doing when they join the workforce. The possibilities are as endless as our imaginations. The enthusiasm and results of this approach are promising, but we need to learn more, which is what our R&D initiative is designed to do.

We have a bold vision. Many may argue it is too ambitious. Still, hundreds of educators and learners are listening and engaging in visionary conversations about the future of U.S. public education. Most exciting, however, is the growing number of educators, policymakers, parents, community leaders and others already making community-based learning ecosystems a reality for more students. 

We are at a pivotal moment in public education. If we want the best futures for our students and the world, community-based learning ecosystems must be the path forward. It is in our nature as humans to learn and grow. By supporting our young people in their educational journey, we enable them to transcend our wildest imaginations. This progressive step forward bodes well for all of us.

We know from decades of reform efforts that our education system needs a reboot with a fundamental redesign. It’s time to move forward in partnership beyond school reform to an education revolution. How exciting is that?

The programs, in which students are promised free college tuition if they graduate high school, have long been considered a silver bullet against the soaring tuition and loan debt blocking many young people, particularly those who are low-income, from earning degrees and finding fulfilling careers.

But in the last few years, college promise programs from Kalamazoo to New Haven, Buffalo, Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, have realized that paying tuition alone doesn’t always achieve the ultimate goal of making lives better. So they have added staff and built partnerships with business to start internship, mentorship and apprentice programs that give “promise scholars” a start on career paths.

Further highlighting the shift, college promise advocates nationally will hold their fourth Nov. 8 and 9 at the University of Tennessee. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and First Lady Jill Biden will speak at the event, whose major topics include “Empowering Career Exploration and Pathway Discovery” and “Building the Promise Pipeline of Workers.”

“We’re quick to say ‘Go to college, get your degree,’ but you don’t have that follow up piece of what do you do after that?” said Jade Scott, who works with the Detroit Promise through the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce Foundation. “So many students get lost in the shuffle, like ‘I’m done with my degree, what do I do now? And this is where we really come in.”

“Now, we’re talking about how we get them employed,” Scott added. “What are we doing to support you, as you make that journey from these college classes into an actual career that you genuinely enjoy, or that’s making you money, or that’s offering you a sustaining lifestyle?” 

Detroit Promise, with the help of the chamber, gave 450 students work experiences such as internships or job shadowing in the 2022-23 school year, Scott said.

The Kalamazoo Promise, perhaps the best-known promise program in the nation, considers the internship program it launched in 2022 so important it calls it “Higher Promise.” 

Cetera DiGiovanni, Higher Promise coordinator, said parents previously kept asking if Promise officials knew of open jobs while businesses repeatedly asked the program for help finding talent.

“We know that kids are graduating and no one has jobs,” DiGiovanni said. “We thought we would be the mediator to bring them together.”

David Rust, executive director of Say Yes Buffalo, said the evolution is natural. Say Yes Buffalo, which started as a scholarship program in 2011, placed 25 students in apprenticeships in the fall of 2022 and another 25 this year.

“It stands to reason that there will be refinements, expansion of features, because we know a lot more now about what scholars and students need,” he said.

College promise programs began in the 1990s with individual philanthropists adopting single schools and pledging to cover college tuition for any student that graduated from high school and enrolled in college. Anonymous donors in Kalamazoo started a citywide promise program in 2005, then other promise programs like Say Yes to Education expanded from single schools in the 1990s to the cities of Syracuse and Buffalo, New York, Greensboro County, North Carolina, and finally Cleveland in 2019.

States like Tennessee have also added statewide promise programs as the ranks have swelled to more than 400 programs nationally. The programs differ in what colleges they pay for, with some covering only the local community college, some only in-state public colleges and others including private universities that choose to be partners with them.

But once lauded for wiping out the worries of tuition debt, promise programs have found that students, particularly low-income students, also need chances to test drive careers they think they might like. They need mentors in their field. They need workplace experience before graduating and seeking a full-time job.

Sometimes students simply need a paycheck while they are in school to pay for rent, commuting to class and meals, which promise programs rarely cover. Or they skip college altogether because class time takes away earning time they need to help their families.

“Free college can be too expensive for students,” said Rust. “A lot of our scholars, over 50 percent, have combined family income below $40,000. So, we’ve seen this more so than ever throughout the pandemic, you (students) do what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do.”

There’s also benefit to the regional economy when students find careers that keep them in the city after college. 

In Columbus, Ohio, where a pilot promise program pays for Columbus school district graduates to attend Columbus State Community College, companies such as Nationwide Insurance and gas and electricity supplier IGS Energy are eager to take on promise students in college as paid interns.

John Wharton, 19, a second year finance student at Columbus State, started work at IGS this fall helping manage and audit customer accounts for $18 an hour. Because he has an interest in marketing too, his supervisors are also trying to find chances to work in that department.

“It gives you a sense of feeling for what the real world is,” said Wharton, who had never had a job before the internship. “This gives people a platform to gain insight, whether or not they actually want to do what they’re studying.”

Abdallahi Thiaw, 20, also a Columbus Promise student, also just started as an intern this fall with the Workforce Development Board of Central Ohio for $20 an hour for 20 hours a week. Since he is earning an associates degree in interactive media, developing apps and programs that can be used on mobile devices, the board has him developing a chat program for its website that lets users find out what services the nonprofit provides.

“It’s a big opportunity for students like me, because a lot of job fields will tell you that once you graduate, you need experience,” said Thiaw. “But the main issue is nobody’s offering experience, so how are you going to get that experience? But with this program, it offers students like me experience and on top of that, you get paid great wages, which really helps us in focusing on school.”

David Campbell, director of communications for the board, said matching students with work that fits their interest, like is happening with Thiaw, is ideal.

“That idea is the genesis of this program, that they need to work, they need to have some money, but it needs to be earned and still learn, right?” Campbell said. “It has to combine with their degree, so they get someplace at the end of it.”

A group of 14 Columbus high school students and their teachers walk behind the Columbus NBC TV-4 station, headquarters past a drainage pond and satellite dishes aimed at the sky.

They follow Ken Freedman, general manager of the station, to a chain link fence that surrounds a field – 2 ½ acres of dirt, debris and tree stumps- that the station owns but has never used.

Freedman has a task for the students as part of that district’s COVID-sparked summer learning program.

“What,” he asks the students, as he points to the field, “do we do with this?”

Researching and proposing a use for this all-but-ignored land will dominate summer learning for these students, with each given tasks depending on their strengths and weaknesses, requiring them to use math, public speaking, writing, art and even biology skills.

But there’s a lot more going on here than just going on here than just a summer project.

With many students needing academic intervention after the pandemic, school district officials in Columbus and Cleveland, are turning to “mastery” learning as a strategy to catch them up.

The mastery, or “competency” approach lets students learn at their own pace, making sure they fully understand key skills before moving on.

That could be a good fit when students return to school in the fall after making drastically different progress online or in very limited in-person classes.

The Columbus school district has built mastery concepts into its summer program to let teachers, students and the district test-drive them. The Cleveland school district, which uses it in a few schools already, hopes to expand its use quickly. District CEO Eric Gordon, long a fan of mastery, has named using more in schools as one of his top four priorities in the district’s post-COVID academic plan.

“Over time, [it] will actually close achievement gaps more quickly and effectively,” Gordon said.

Kenton Lee, head of secondary curriculum for the Columbus schools, said that mastery concepts have been a major topic in planning COVID recovery. Administrators, he said, are bothered by an increase in F grades in a difficult year when students may have learned material partially from home and can learn the rest now that they are back in classrooms.

“Mastery was brought up a lot,” he said. “The question is how do you operationalize it in a district that is as large as ours and to scale it.”

And leading the charge in Ohio and nationally, is the Cleveland-area Hawken School, a private school that opened a new mastery-based high school last fall to test and showcase the model, and is now partnering with Columbus as it explores mastery.

The Mastery School of Hawken had to adapt during the pandemic and couldn’t bring visitors in to demonstrate the highly-individualized model, but it hopes to promote it to private and public schools alike this fall as educators look at new ways to run schools after COVID.

“COVID really called for an attempt to try to personalize the school experience for kids in the face of de- personalizing of a deadly virus,” said Hawken Head of School C. Scott Looney, who dismisses traditional classrooms as too cookie-cutter and industrialized. “We were separated by masks and plexiglass and by technology and the industrial production model does that too. The combination made it really clear for people that we can’t go back.”

The mastery approach throws out standard expectations that students learn certain skills in a given grade or semester. It instead recognizes that students learn at different paces and may start a school year at very different learning stages. Schools give students time to learn at their own pace, repeating and reinforcing skills until they “master” them.

If students haven’t learned something by the end of a school year or grading period, they don’t get a D or F. That would be imposing a schedule on learning, instead of recognizing students might just be still learning the material. So schools give them an “incomplete” or “developing” or something similar, instead. In some cases, schools don’t even advance students a grade level each year, but whenever they show they are ready to move ahead, even mid-year.

Looney, one of the strongest backers of the approach nationally, said the upheaval of the pandemic calls out for schools to use mastery, instead of what he calls the industrialized approach of expecting students to all learn on a fixed and standardized timetable.

“The pandemic didn’t do anything but expose… the flaws of teaching the same kids the same thing at the same time with the same deadlines,” Looney said. “It’s not a good idea to begin with, but during a pandemic when some kids are home in Zoom and some kids aren’t, and some teachers are teaching with kids, it really got exposed for what it is, which is a machine.”

Teachers at the Mastery School of Hawken say the approach, which expects students to be at many different stages of learning any given skill, is perfect for a post-COVID world where students have missed varying amounts of classes and learning,

“Each student is just progressing along at their own pace and wherever they get to, they get to,” said teacher Nick Cheadle. “There’s much less pressure to get through any set of material than there is at a traditional school.”

Columbus has already shifted away from standard grading for elementary school students toward one more focused on progress that’sa key part of a mastery system. The district skips traditional A-F grades and instead rates student progress on multiple skills – for grades 1 through 5.

Students receive a 1 if they are doing work below state standards for a skill, 2 for progressing toward the standard, 3 for meeting it and 4 for exceeding it.

Parents, Lee said, still see a 1 on a report card and think their child is failing. But Lee said the district teaches parents that score is evolving and not a “permanent snapshot” of a child’s performance for a quarter. Ratings that low are normal early in a year and students can progress to meet standards over time.

Students already meeting state standards will receive other academic enrichment to learn beyond.

“Even that report card is a pretty big paradigm shift,” Lee said.

For high school students, the district has not made any broad changes yet, Lee said. But it hired Doris Korda, a former Hawken administrator who helped design the mastery school there, to train teachers for its summer program that federal COVID-recovery dollars are paying for. Mastery School of Hawken teachers will also support Columbus teachers over the summer.

Korda helped teachers plan several projects for students designed to grab student attention and have them learn academic and social skills by trying to solve real world problems. Teachers will target academic needs of students or help them learn beyond standards as they work on projects.

And students will demonstrate their mastery of the topic by giving presentations at the end.

In the case of the TV station project, students will visit urban farms to learn about using the land as a garden.They will look at using the pond to water plants. They will talk to neighbors, many of whom are immigrants, as well as to a neighborhood mosque and other civic groups. They will then present options to Freedman.

Taylor Rush, one of the teachers leading the project, said she hopes students will take ownership of the project and what they need to learn to solve it.

“The students are really going to get a chance to get hands-on and get more engaged through the excitement of creating a solution for a real world problem,” Rush said.

The in recent years, including at MC2STEM High School, which to let them keep working to fully learn academic, as well as social and emotional, skills.

Gordon has encouraged other schools to use mastery concepts over time, even saying last spring he had hoped to use more last fall – a hope that COVID and the district’s shift to online classes made impossible. He has repeatedly said that traditional grade levels and learning schedules force structure onto students that hurt learning.

In the district’s three-year recovery plan, which will be released in the next few weeks, Gordon plans to help schools already using mastery expand its use. But he wants to give other schools a year of staff training and planning time before expanding it further. Some district teachers are already teaching other teachers some mastery concepts this summer.

That’s important, say national experts on the model, who say it can take a few years to really learn and use well.

Both Cleveland and Columbus, however, are struggling with how mastery grading systems will affect high school students as they apply to colleges. Columbus hasn’t changed high school grades out of concerns that colleges won’t accept them.

Gordon this month is joining the governing board of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, a national panel of about 400 schools founded by Hawken’s Looney, to develop a common grading system and transcript for students using the approach.

That transcript, now in use at 14 schools, tosses aside traditional grades and grade point averages for an interactive and online report that shows where students stand in specialized skills that are normally just part of a grade in a traditional subject.

Math, for example, now includes whether a student is competent in things like statistical reasoning and scientific experimental design. And English is broken into things like language analysis and analyzing claims. Students are also rated on social and emotional skills like entrepreneurship, collaboration and self-direction.

Started in 2016, the consortium is already seeing successes. Twelve schools used the transcripts this past school year and had students accepted into 166 colleges using them, including Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To date, most have been private schools that have reputations and relationships with colleges. Gordon, who has been frustrated by not being able to use a full mastery grading plan at his high schools, hopes to change that – and to help convince more colleges to accept new transcripts.

“They (the board) believe that part of the case to be made for a mastery transcript is that it is not exclusive to elite, private schools but that it can be an outstanding demonstration of a student’s content and skills in the public K-12 sector as well.” Gordon said. “That traditional transcript has been a limiter in moving to a more full competency-based model.”

Looney is also glad to have him and to share ideas right in the same city.

“We can talk about ways we can reinforce each other’s work,” Looney said.