Students who took part in a high-dose math tutoring program developed by in partnership with Oakland Unified School District improved their math scores, according to a recent Northwestern University study.

Children who received at least 10 sessions through MathBOOST saw their scores go up, on average, eight points more on a district assessment compared to those who did not.

MathBOOST, which started in 2023 as an offshoot of an earlier, pandemic-inspired effort around reading, culls tutors from the local community, many of whom do not have prior teaching experience.

Interested parties are trained and most win paying jobs — plus benefits — with the school district. Jessica Fyles, The Oakland REACH’s director of programs, said Northwestern’s findings validate their recruitment tactics.

“You can bring in community members, parents, aunties, cousins, sisters and brothers, to improve results for other people in the district,” she said. “This is untapped talent, people who have not necessarily been in schools before, but have so much knowledge of community. They know exactly what is at stake — and are ready to go all in.”

The Oakland REACH founder and CEO Lakisha Young said the model proves, too, that the people closest to the problem are the best suited to solve it. Unlike school leaders, or even teachers, parents are here to stay, she said.

“So they need to have more tools, agency and power to help close the achievement gap,” said Young, whose tutoring initiative this year expanded to a Fairview, Oregon, public school district and a Denver charter school network.

Meanwhile, Oakland Unified is in the process of taking over the MathBOOST program and is committed to its growth, said Alicia Arenas, the district’s executive director of elementary instruction.

“There is something special and impactful when students see members of their community working at their school sites,” she said.

Go Deeper:

• Tutoring Program in Oakland, Calif. Recruits Parents and Neighbors to Teach Math
  
• A Billionaire’s Gift Expands Reach of ‘Unapologetic’ Oakland Parent’s Group
  
• Oakland Study Finds Parents as Effective as Teachers in Tutoring Young Readers
  

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Last December, after a year and a half of blind alleys, impenetrable paperwork and bureaucratic stonewalling, it seemed like the complaints Sierra Rios had filed against her fifth-grader’s elementary school were finally getting a proper investigation. A lawyer in the Dallas office of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was asking hard questions of the school where Rios said her daughter, Nevaeh, was repeatedly denied special education services. 

But then, a few weeks into the probe, the San Antonio mother got a bounce-back email informing her that the attorney working on her case was no longer employed by the agency. As part of its plan to shutter the department, the Trump administration had fired 40% of the civil rights division’s staff and closed half of its regional offices. 

The March email did not say what would happen to Rios’ case. In May, she got a message asking for a form that had somehow not been transferred from Texas to the agency’s office in Kansas City, Missouri. Rios re-sent the document, but it no longer mattered. During the churn, she was told, the complaint had become too old to pursue. 

The saga is a vivid illustration of the awaits families of students with disabilities. For decades, the federal government has been a key avenue of relief for parents unable to get services for their children through complaints filed with their state, mediation, administrative hearings or due process cases. Now, with the department lurching toward closure, state-level officials may increasingly have the final word. And a 74 analysis shows that those systems, intended to help desperate parents like Rios, have never delivered on their promise. 

A ‘parent-friendly’ process that’s anything but simple 

Fifty years ago, under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, Congress created three ways parents could appeal to their state education departments if they felt their children were being denied accommodations in school. These mechanisms vary in complexity and effectiveness, but all were supposed to be simple enough for any parent to navigate. 

Families, or school administrators seeking help in resolving a disagreement, can file a complaint with their state in hopes that education officials will intervene if they find a district’s efforts lacking or improper. Parents can also ask the state to appoint a mediator who will try to bring both sides to an agreement. Most complicated, but potentially most effective, families can file a due process complaint, which kicks off a legal process that usually requires an attorney or skilled advocate. The complaint may start with a mediator but can progress to a formal hearing before an administrative law judge. If the dispute isn’t resolved there, the case can turn into a federal lawsuit.   

Some states pursue complaints quickly, with an eye toward resolving issues before they become intensely adversarial and expensive. Others lag or throw up procedural roadblocks, presumably trying to reduce the number of cases filed. 

Complaints can run aground at . The length of time a family has to file after the event they’re disputing differs depending on where they live and which mechanism they’re trying to use. If an email or letter doesn’t get a reply within a certain number of days, the case can be closed. Things must be done in a precise order, spelled out in legalese. 

In Rios’ case, she initially tried to open a state complaint against the principal of Nevaeh’s school in 2023. The Texas Education Agency rejected her request in a letter that she read as saying complaints cannot be filed against individuals, just schools and districts. (The agency says complaints can be filed against individuals.)

Rios assumed her complaint was dead in the water. A year later, with Nevaeh’s situation deteriorating as school staff, Rios says, grew tired of the family’s continued complaints, she did more research and opened a case at the Office for Civil Rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act.��

The law that created the state complaint processes, the IDEA, guarantees disabled students’ educational rights. By contrast, the ADA, passed in 1990, outlaws discrimination against people who need accommodations to access public facilities and programs — including schools. 

Families of children denied special education services can assert their rights under either law. When states fail to enforce a student’s educational rights under IDEA, families often file a discrimination complaint via the ADA.

In the 2022-23 school year, more than 54,000 state were filed in the U.S. and its territories, including due process complaints, written state complaints and mediation requests. The Office for Civil Rights had — half of them involving disability discrimination — when its staff was . For fiscal year 2026, which started July 1, the White House’s proposed OCR budget is $91 million, a 35% drop. 

At the same time, the administration wants to move $33 million that currently funds state advocacy clearinghouses into block grants that states — cash-strapped as their federal pandemic funds run out — can use for other things. This means families risk losing a second source of leverage: free assistance from experts.

If enacted, both budget cuts would also exacerbate socioeconomic and racial disparities in the services kids with disabilities receive, says Carrie Gillispie, a senior policy analyst at New America. This is because families in states where there’s little appetite for local enforcement depend on OCR to investigate discrimination.

“Those discrepancies that exist if these budget changes happen,” Gillispie says. “It’s a choice to continue to underinvest.”            

With the federal office a hollow shell of what it was six months ago, advocates say, families are likely to rely more heavily on their states. And how — and how well — each state helps students with disabilities varies widely. 

In fact, our analysis found great geographic disparities in the kinds of appeals families pursue and how far they make it in the multi-step processes. In the few places that have more than a handful of special education lawyers, primarily on the East and West coasts, due process cases often dominate. In the Midwest, where there are few or even no special ed attorneys or advocates, families must go it alone, and public officials frequently put up roadblocks to impede complaints parents file with their states. Here, there are fewer disputes — likely because parents often depend on schools to apprise them of their rights — and complaints are less likely to end in a written agreement. 

Rate of due process complaints per 10,000 children receiving special education services

Rate of due process complaints per 10,000 children receiving special education services for each state from 2014-15 to 2021-22 and how it compares with the national average. Hover over each state to see the year-by-year breakdown. Source: U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (Eamonn Fitzmaurice)

Information collected by the U.S. Education Department does not record whether outcomes are favorable for students. But attorneys and advocates say that for those who have access to expert help — either for a fee or pro bono, through an advocacy group — a due process complaint can yield a quick settlement from a district looking to end a family’s case and move on. 

Using state data submitted to the department from the 2014-15 academic year through 2022-23, the most recent available, we created the interactive map above showing how many cases are filed in each state and how they compare with the national average. To account for population differences, we have tabulated the rate of due process complaints per 10,000 children identified as qualifying for special education services in each state. 

In addition to national averages, we focused on four localities  — California, Texas, Nebraska and the District of Columbia — that illustrate different approaches to resolving disputes and how far in the process they proceed, and included an interactive chart for each.  

The process was , and to allow parents and schools to start with the least contentious, simplest and most inexpensive options. With some exceptions, a family can begin by filing a written state complaint or by requesting mediation, and, if no agreement is reached, open a due process case later on. If one side disagrees with the decision in a due process hearing, it can file a federal suit. In some circumstances, the losing party will be ordered to reimburse the other side’s attorney fees. 

In our analysis, we have excluded two statistical outliers: New York, where, because of a tangled legal history, two-thirds of recent complaints in the U.S. were filed; and Puerto Rico, where students are protected by federal law but the special education system is unique.

Finally, we look at trends in Texas, where advocates are cautiously optimistic that a decade-old federal intervention has nudged the process closer to Congress’ original vision. Advocates say changes made by Texas officials are getting families what they need faster, and with less red tape, all with an eye to heading off the most contentious options.     

Barring similar efforts by districts and state education officials to help families before disagreements become adversarial, advocates predict the system will become more litigious. By definition, that will make it more expensive for everyone involved, as districts and families are forced to spend money on attorneys and experts instead of the services children need. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision making it easier for families to file federal discrimination suits. 

The upshot, advocates say, could be an even more inequitable playing field, where families with access to attorneys and the ability to pay them have leverage and those who don’t are at the mercy of their states’ willingness to enforce their rights.    

Each process for resolving special education disagreements comes with major trade-offs — which are typically unclear for families trying to figure out where to start. 

A written state complaint is usually the easiest route for a parent going it alone. It’s free. The information needed to start is comparatively straightforward. The law requires states to finish investigations within 60 days, which is months or years faster than the alternatives. 

If, at any point, a parent and district come to an agreement, they can simply stop the process. If the state probe goes forward, a finding is issued. published in 2018 in the Journal of Special Education Leadership, district leaders surveyed the year before said 62% of state investigations that played all the way out concluded that a district was not compliant with the law. 

Caveats abound, however. In many places, state complaints can’t be appealed. A mediator or state investigator can determine that a student is owed compensatory services — academic or therapeutic time to make up for interventions they were improperly denied or money to pay for private services. But in practice, they rarely result in financial compensation for a student’s family. 

Though these agreements are often supposed to be legally binding, they don’t always carry the weight of a legal judgment, so schools can feel little pressure to make meaningful changes.

Finally, in order to get what their child was denied, families often must sign a non-disclosure agreement. This makes it hard for parents to compare notes about what services are available from their school and what they can reasonably ask for.  

In , families told the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates — a network of state and local professionals partly funded by IDEA — that the corrective actions called for in state findings are often inadequate and ignored by schools, with no state follow-up to ensure compliance. Parents also complained that state investigators are sometimes quicker to believe districts’ stories than families’, even in the absence of evidence. Mediators may fail to help parents and schools reach an agreement.      

By contrast, filing a due process complaint is not unlike filing a lawsuit. Indeed, if a disagreement isn’t resolved at a negotiation called a resolution meeting or by a mediator, an administrative law judge takes testimony, considers evidence and issues a ruling. If that does not end the dispute, either party may — provided it has the resources — continue the case in federal court.

But parents often don’t have the money to hire an attorney or advocate to take the case. Some states have just one lawyer who will accept special education cases. In part, this is because a family must win to have just its attorney’s fees covered. In addition, in most instances, plaintiffs can’t hire experts to counter testimony given by district witnesses.   

Until recently, anyway, lodging a complaint with the OCR instead of the state was often parents’ most attractive option.

Families in rural areas rely on state complaints for solutions 

In many rural states, such as Nebraska, families rely on written state complaints when their kids’ needs aren’t being met. Dispute resolution filings are rare because advocates and attorneys are few and far between, and the number of due process cases is low.

State complaints are supposed to be the fast, easy, least costly and least adversarial path to getting kids services without the expenses of hiring an attorney. But outcomes are often poor. 

“They are especially good for clear procedural violations that may impact the student,” says Amy Bonn, an Omaha-area attorney. “It’s basically saying, ‘Here’s where the district did something that did not comport with the actual law.’ ”

When IDEA was created, Congress envisioned the state complaint system to be the “most powerful and accessible option for parents,” but it often falls short in resolving noncompliance issues, according to a from the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. 

The organization stated in its that the system is “an often ineffective process that lacks transparency, impartiality and accountability by state educational agencies charged with administering the dispute resolution process.”

Once a complaint is filed, the investigation is in the state’s hands — and out of the parents’. Any decisions, including corrective actions, are made by the state within a 60-day timeline, and they usually can’t be appealed. 

“[Families] might get relief or they might not, but there are no judges or a hearing,” says Kathy Zeisel of the Children’s Law Center, an agency that takes cases and connects families with pro bono lawyers to file complaints. “You get systemic change, such as a district having to change policies,” instead of an accommodation to help a particular student.

But debates between families and school districts about special ed services that were not delivered during the COVID pandemic have begun to change the landscape, Bonn says. An increase in the number of parent advocates and lawyers who take special education cases has led to more filings in recent years.

“I think the culture is changing a little bit,” Bonn says. 

Due process comes with steep costs and barriers

With the federal backstop of the Office for Civil Rights disappearing, even more due process complaints are likely. They are expensive for both families and districts but effective — when the process is accessible to parents. 

Here are two examples of how this is playing out in states where the number of these complaints is rising quickly:     

In California, the dispute resolution process is available to financially stable, highly educated families confident enough to speak out about their child’s services, says Cheryl Theis, who worked as a parent advocate in Oakland for 18 years at the Disability Rights Education Defense Fund.

“IDEA is built on one fundamental premise: that every child has a parent who can advocate for them,” Theis says. “But there’s always been some power imbalance around how effectively a parent can participate and how hard they’re willing to push, and that’s been an ongoing problem.”

Over the past several years, California has received roughly the same number of mediations and due process complaints — which make up about 90% of filings, according to data from . The state had nearly 55 due process complaints and 56 mediation requests per 10,000 children in 2022-23.

Excluding the outliers not included in this analysis — New York and Puerto Rico — California’s due process case rate is the second highest in the country. But the number that proceed to the ultimate stage is miniscule. Less than 1% of the 4,401 cases filed in 2022-23 were heard by a judge, while 3,254 were resolved before the hearing stage. 

Advocates say this reflects a trend they expect to play out in other places: With large numbers of private law firms and nonprofits able to file pro bono cases, increasingly school districts are choosing to settle due process complaints quickly. Many California school systems now routinely purchase commercial insurance, which picks up most of the cost. This may seem like an inexpensive way to shorten what can be months of expensive arguments, but attorneys and disability advocates note that the insurance premiums come out of the district’s budget, which could be paying for needed services. 

Some families end up with better agreements for their children than they would using the state complaint process, advocates say. But even when families view a settlement as a win, Theis says, compensatory education often requires the parent to pay upfront for private services and get reimbursed from the district — another barrier for those who are low-income.

In the past two school years, Oakland Unified School District shelled out $579,588 in attorney fees and paid $823,964 to families to cover their legal costs in settlement cases, according to district financial records. The settlements forced the district to spend roughly $3.5 million on student services.

Oakland in previous years for IDEA violations. Systemic problems uncovered by investigations in 2007 and 2013 included staffing shortages, lack of special education curricula, deficient budgets and the placement of students in segregated special ed classrooms, according to Disability Rights California. 

The nonprofit filed a on the behalf of all special education students in the district. 

“If you look at those millions of dollars in settlements, like, how many teachers could you train, how many adaptive tricycles could you buy? What specialized summer programs could you create?” Theis asks. “It’s like this squeaky-wheel system where 10 people might need it, but only one parent is going to have the knowledge, the time and the finances to maybe get an attorney.”

In a statement the district said that since the pandemic, it has expanded its alternative dispute resolution program, which provides a neutral representative who can conduct IEP meetings or resolve issues with families without an attorney or legal fees.

“Additionally, we offer open office hours monthly for any family who wants to speak with a neutral special education attorney about their questions or concerns about their child’s IEP,” the district said.

In 2024-25, 31 cases went through the alternative dispute resolution program, and 29 were resolved with no attorney fees, the district said.

Our second example, Washington, D.C., has one of the highest rates of due process complaints in the nation, behind New York and Puerto Rico. In 2022-23, roughly 151 complaints were filed per 10,000 children. These numbers prompted a federal probe in March to investigate claims that D.C.’s traditional public school system is not meeting the needs of students with disabilities.

Advocates say D.C.’s special education issues are similar to those in the rest of the nation, but an oversaturation of disability lawyers and agencies has educated families about their children’s school services — and taught them to use litigation to get what they are entitled to under federal law. This, they say, contributes to the high filing numbers.

A from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that D.C. has the highest rate in the nation of due process complaints resolved without a hearing, which could indicate a “sue and settle approach” — which favors those who can afford attorneys. 

“It’s really a national problem that we are just disregarding kids with disabilities and not putting the resources into them,” says Zeisel, whose Children’s Law Center has roughly 250 cases at any given time, one-third involving families going through due process. “Parents have to sue, and kids lose almost a whole school year to try to get what [they need]. We would love to put ourselves out of a job and not not be litigating this stuff and go do something else.”

While advocates say the number of cases is still too high, D.C.’s filing numbers have plummeted over the last decade. In the 2011-12 school year, 805 due process complaints per 10,000 children were reported. The latest data available shows that D.C. had 151 complaints per 10,000 children in 2022-23.

The credits the drop to D.C. improving its capacity in handling cases and creating a student hearing office.

In 2023, the city paid more than $3.1 million to attorneys as a result of due process complaints against D.C. Public Schools, according to a 2023 inspector general .

Donovan Anderson represented the district in special education cases until he opened his own firm doing the same work more than 25 years ago. 

“Parents will reach out to me because they are searching for answers,” he says. “They are in disbelief with the quality of education that their child is receiving.”

Once Anderson files a on behalf of a family, the district has 15 days to hold a resolution meeting as a way to discuss the issues and potentially resolve them. He says almost all his cases end at this stage because continuing with due process is usually time-consuming and too costly for families. 

If nothing is agreed upon during the resolution meeting and a parent wants to continue to a due process hearing, the timeline can stretch to 75 days before any decision is made. Then there’s also more of a chance that families will lose their case and come out with nothing but debt after a long fight. 

Anderson says resolving a case during the resolution meeting makes the school district pay the family’s attorney fees — usually a few thousand dollars — but parents who lose due process are on the hook for the thousands more spent on lawyers and experts to testify during the hearing.

“If I settle the case in 15 days, the child [and] the parent can see tangible results in 30 to 45 days after meeting me,” he says. “I can make a lot more money if I have to go to a due process hearing, but it doesn’t necessarily benefit the child, because the parent has to wait that much longer to have tangible solutions.”

‘The therapist said it was self-defense’

Even the most cut-and-dried due process case — the kind likely to be resolved quickly and in a student’s  favor — can be prohibitively expensive just to file. Texas parent N.G.’s son, A.G., is autistic, nonverbal and very bright. (Because the family signed a nondisclosure agreement at the conclusion of the case — a common district demand — N.G. asked that they be identified by their initials.) 

A.G. could add and subtract in kindergarten, but his first grade teacher conflated his lack of speech with academic incompetence and gave him a picture of the number 1 to color. Bored, A.G. acted up, his mother says. A few weeks into the year, he wandered off and got lost in the school.

In February, he came home with a hand-shaped bruise on his arm following an occupational therapy session in school. “The therapist said it was self-defense,” N.G. says. “I said, ‘He’s 6 and he has low muscle tone.’ ”

It took her a month to find an attorney, hundreds of miles away. The lawyer charged a flat fee of $6,000 for his first three months of work. The family’s due process complaint was so stark and well-documented — N.G. had logged every interaction on a spreadsheet — that a mediator quickly negotiated a good settlement.      

Had the mediator failed, however, the family would have had to drop the complaint. After 90 days, the attorney would have needed to be paid by the hour — money N.G. would not necessarily have been entitled to recover.

Perhaps the best proof of the value of federal oversight of special education is to be found in Texas, where state officials have spent seven years overhauling how schools are held accountable for serving children with disabilities. Attorneys and advocates now routinely advise families to avoid due process altogether and file state complaints — the route Congress originally envisioned as the quickest path to securing help for kids.    

In 2016, a revealed that for years, the state had improperly denied services to hundreds of thousands of children by capping the number of special ed students districts could serve. In response, the U.S. Education Department ordered state officials to take a series of steps to find and evaluate children with disabilities.  

Since then, the number of special education students has increased by 67%, rising from 463,000 to 775,000. Meeting their needs has stretched Texas schools, which couldn’t simply conjure the staff — or funding — to beef up special education overnight. 

In 2022, Texas lawmakers lengthened the amount of time families have to file due process claims from one year after an episode to a more standard two years.

Conventional wisdom would hold that a tsunami of families seeking support and a longer window to complain when they don’t get it would send caseloads skyrocketing. But due process complaints have instead fallen, from 8 per 10,000 students in 2014-15 to 5.5 in 2021-22.

Meanwhile, the number of state complaints nearly quadrupled between the 2020-21 and 2022-23 academic years, rising from 261 to 979. The number of resulting reports — the documents that say what state investigators found — tripled, from 164 to 549. Also on the rise is the number of complaints withdrawn before the formal process begins — likely as a result of districts resolving disagreements quickly.    

Colleen Potts, supervising attorney for Disability Rights Texas, says the organization’s lawyers now see state complaints as the most effective way to get quick relief for students and families. 

“I’ve been doing this for 19 years, and the last two or three years we are getting consistently good outcomes in non-adversarial ‘meeting of the minds’ meetings, with resolutions that are acceptable to everyone,” she says. 

Indeed, districts often are quick to try to resolve disagreements before the state investigates. Potts encourages the attorneys she works with to list proposed remedies in their complaints even if they aren’t things a state typically requires a lagging district to do. 

In practical terms, this document can serve as a road map to getting a child’s needs met, she explains: “Anything is on the table.” 

In 2018, in response to the U.S. Education Department’s intervention, the Texas Education Agency drew up an for overhauling special education statewide. A key goal was making resources available to families and districts to help them resolve disagreements early. According to Jennifer Alexander, Texas’ deputy commissioner for special populations and student supports, 10% of state complaints are now resolved this way, even if investigators have already begun work on the case.     

As the state officials made the changes outlined in the strategic plan, they examined data on disputes to find out where things go awry, says Alexander: “Where it often breaks down is the family does not know the process and so can’t express to the district what they need.” 

To that end, in 2023 the state began offering to pay for trained facilitators to participate in the initial meetings where families and educators negotiate a child’s individualized education program — the legally required document that spells out how the student’s needs will be met. The cost to the state is $1,500 per negotiation.

Of the 20 facilitated IEP meetings that took place in 2024, 40% resulted in an agreement, Alexander says. During the first half of 2025, there have been 25 meetings, and 56% have resulted in agreements. Two negotiations are pending.

The state also created a parent-friendly special education online portal, , where a relatively simple automatically collects the information that is legally required to make a case pursuable, to head off situations like Rios’. 

When the form is submitted, the district immediately gets a copy. This, Alexander says, often prompts school staff to begin trying to resolve the disagreement. Any agreement is legally binding.     

The changes Texas has made are having an impact for students, advocates agree. And, they say, there is reason to hope that the new strategies for ironing out disagreements before they become heated will show other states that better, quicker communication can head off the costs faced by places like Oakland and Washington, D.C.

But without the possibility that federal officials will compel states to do better, any improvement will be piecemeal, says Robyn Linscott, director of family and education policy at The Arc of the United States.   

“You might have some states that try to step in and create or beef up a state-level backstop, whether it’s a special agency or ombudsman or something they already have in place,” she says. “And then you’ll have other states that are not necessarily going to see the value in trying to provide more stable resources for families to have recourse.

“This will leave us with this state-by-state patchwork.” 

Uncertainty remains for parents who fight for their child’s services

According to documents filed in a court case challenging the Trump administration’s mass firings, the U.S. Education Department said it dismissed more than 3,400 complaints between March 11 and June 27, . That’s more than 28% of the OCR’s caseload.   

Rios has yet to learn whether hers is one of them. After the May email informing her the case had been closed because it was too old, an advocate helped her compile a paper trail showing she had met every deadline. In the past, that has often convinced the agency to make an exception. 

Rios says all she wants is what she’s been fighting for this entire time — accountability from the school and a plan to make it right for Nevaeh. 

“She goes to school and she learns, but then she comes home and I’m reteaching the material,” Rios says. “On top of all of that, I’m now having to file complaints, follow up on complaints, send angry emails, follow up on those angry emails, make phone calls — like, I’m basically my daughter’s teacher, lawyer, advocate, I’m everything. 

“It’s a lot. I feel like there [are] programs and there are laws around these things for a reason.”

Clarification: An earlier version of this story misstated how a complaint against an individual in Texas was handled. Families are allowed to file special education complaints against individuals with the Texas Education Agency.

One student stacks up the counters instead, while another watches and giggles.

“Can someone tell me what expression we just made?” asks Yvette Munguia, the math tutor leading the lesson. “What is two times four?”

“Eight,” murmurs one student.

“Plus three?” she asks.

Silence.

With Munguia’s patient coaching, the students — who scored several grades below the 5th-grade level in math — work their way through the exercise. As they work together on the order of operations, they take long pauses to puzzle over basic addition and subtraction.

Munguia is one of more than 20 math tutors working in Oakland Unified Schools this year. Called math “Liberators,” tutors like Munguia were recruited and trained as part of a partnership between the school district and the nonprofit Oakland REACH. The parent-led math tutoring model follows the success of the Oakland REACH’s Literacy Liberator program, which produced , according to a 2023 report.   

The math Liberator program is a direct response to parent demand. In 2021, Oakland REACH surveyed district families about what they wanted and needed for their children. More than 80% asked for math tutoring. 

Both REACH and OUSD wanted to follow up with a very specific type of tutoring. They sought to engage parents and other guardians in learning more about how the district teaches math and how they can employ that approach at home with their children. 

During two evening workshops, parents were encouraged to confront their own insecurities about math. Math educators talked about the importance of building confidence in mathematical ability, particularly for students of color. Oakland REACH shared data, including the fact that  students of color in Oakland are performing at or above grade level in math this year. Data points like this are important, but they also reinforce the myth that students of color aren’t good at math, the group was told. To support students, it’s critical to flip that narrative. The way forward is a “growth mindset” — tutoring with positivity and confidence.

What came next was MathBOOST, a campaign to train and hire math tutors from the community — no experience necessary. The goal was twofold: support children with high-dosage math tutoring while providing paid opportunities for parents and caregivers.

“It should be the district’s responsibility to support students, and why not show families that they’re already doing this at home and they can do it in a way that pays them money?,” explained OUSD STEM coordinator Edgar Rodriguez-Ramirez. The district depends on volunteers to support teachers in classrooms, he said, but more often than not volunteers are from white, affluent neighborhoods. 

Part of shifting the narrative about student intellectual capacity is to invite family members to be present in the school, Rodriguez-Ramirez said.

“Families that have been wanting to volunteer in school have the opportunity to work,” he said. “They know how to raise their children. Now they’re adding value to the community.”

Oakland REACH and district staff trained tutors based on the high-impact tutoring program, which requires weekly small-group support, close monitoring of student progress, alignment with district curriculum and oversight by school staff.

During her tutor training, Mungia and other prospective math tutors met on Tuesday and Thursday nights for five weeks — with dinners provided — followed by two more days of professional development. District and REACH staff worked together to train the tutors to use iReady, an online assessment and teaching platform that the district uses to personalize student academic support.  

Now as a tutor at East Oakland Pride, Munguia has access to the same diagnostic student assessments that classroom teachers use and can pull lessons from the district’s math curriculum to help students catch up. Using that information, she can target where each student in the small groups she meets with need practice and support.

The students seem excited to work with her. Some show up early and have to wait their turn. In addition to her natural patience and ease with math — not to mention the stickers she hands out on Fridays — Munguia’s roots in the neighborhood are an added asset for the job. Having attended OUSD schools herself, Munguia speaks fluent Spanish. She lives close by and her nine-year-old daughter attends another local area public school.

“She has the trust of the students,” said East Oakland Pride Principal Michelle Grant. “And if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything. She’s good at what she does.”

Munguia previously worked as a caregiver and an instructional assistant at a community college in Oakland. She was looking for another job related to education when she saw an ad for the tutoring program on the job site Indeed. She had never taught math to young children, so her success with students at East Oakland Pride is a testament to REACH’s training.

“Liberators are proof that our communities are full of assets we can no longer afford to sideline if we want to fix a broken educational system,” said REACH founder and CEO Lakisha Young.

Thalia Ward, 25, graduated from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo three years ago and applied for a tutoring job because she wanted to go into teaching. 

The first step in the training, she said, was called a Fellowship. During their bi-weekly meetings, the tutors in training discussed readings they’d been given in advance.

“We worked through the different ways we learned math and how kids are learning math today,” Ward said. They heard from tutors who had started the previous year and also visited a veteran math teacher who was giving a summer school lesson.

“We saw that when expectations are high, students are more likely to exceed standards. A lot of us are working with students who are behind grade level, but that’s a sign that we should hold them to expectations. They need more personal time with an adult.”

Recruiting grandparents and caregivers

REACH developed Literacy Liberators in the fall of 2022 to supplement and support instruction during the pandemic, partnering with the school district and literacy nonprofit FluentSeeds to recruit parents, caregivers and community members to deliver tutoring. It’s a unique model, district leaders say, because it combines high-dosage tutoring with family and community engagement. 

“I don’t know of another model where you’re recruiting grandparents and caregivers, giving them a job, uplifting them to show the leadership skills to improve instruction,” said Rodriguez-Ramirez. “This model reclaims what it means to have a community school.” 

Tutors work from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day that school is open, he said, and earn between $16.33 and $19.17 an hour, with benefits.

Like Literacy Liberator model tutors, Math Liberators are encouraged to use their personal experiences with school in their work. Whether they found school difficult or relatively easy, personal experiences, one study found.

“It’s been a while since I was in elementary [school] myself,” said Munguia, who is 30. “I remember feeling shy, not wanting to speak up. I’m seeing the shy students and I can relate.”

While literacy tutors focus on students in kindergarten through third grade, math tutors work with third through fifth graders. Small groups — no bigger than four students — are still the model, but the math tutoring has a bigger emphasis on a “growth mindset,” since so many students, regardless of academic performance, don’t think they’re good at math.

“We don’t all have to be ‘math people’ to help our kids,” Rodgriguez-Ramirez said. “We wanted to address that math can be hard, but it’s because we didn’t learn it the same way.” 

During the parent workshops, families worked through the math problems that their children were learning so they would recognize their children’s homework. Helping children with math, Rodriguez-Ramirez said, doesn’t necessarily mean knowing the answers. It might mean figuring the problems out together.

“We want the kids to hear the same message at home,” he said. “Let’s talk about math without leaving it in the school.”

The program started in four schools, but this year it has expanded to 11 sites, with plans to grow further — not just in the number of tutors, but in their professional development as well. Tutors will receive continuous coaching, Rodrigues-Ramirez said, in pedagogy, including how to differentiate instruction for varying skill levels within a group.

REACH will also begin a virtual math tutoring pilot program in January, offering online tutoring to Black and Hispanic families in Oakland and Rochester, New York.

When school first started in September, Munguia helped classroom teachers during math instruction and got to know the students, said David Braden, instructional math lead at East Oakland Pride.

“She got to see the expectations for math, which are very high, and these kids have scored several grade levels below,” he said. And she’ll be getting deeper training in how to work with kids at different levels. “The trick is calibrating the instruction to align with what diagnostics say.”

Munguia appreciates the opportunity the program has given her. She has two associate’s degrees from Laney College in Oakland, one in Language Arts and the second in photography. She has no formal teaching experience but said she would love to be a classroom teacher someday.

“I’m ecstatic working here,” she said. “I wish I could help all of the kids, but I can only have four at a time.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to The Oakland REACH and The 74.

“The more the children know you and trust you, the more they’re willing to engage in what you’re trying to teach them,” said Susana Aguilar, one of ’s “literacy liberators.” 

The evaluation, from the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, calls community members “untapped pools of talent” in the effort to improve student achievement.

Oakland Unified’s model, said researcher and lead author Ashley Jochim, also has broader implications for how schools teach basic skills in reading and math. For too long, she said, one teacher has been responsible for modifying lessons to meet the needs of 25 or more students. 

“This model is clearly failing students and puts extraordinary demands on educators, especially coming out of the pandemic,” she said. “Oakland’s tutoring model shows what’s possible when we create the conditions needed to individualize instruction based on students’ learning needs.”

‘How far could they go?’ 

The Oakland REACH to improve literacy instruction before the pandemic and joined with the local NAACP to push the district to adopt a research-based reading program.

The group criticized the quality of remote learning during COVID. But then it created its own online to focus on structured reading skills and saw promising results. After five weeks of virtual summer learning, some as much as they would from two months of in-person reading instruction, data showed. 

“We saw these big gains. You can’t ignore that,” said Lakisha Young, the organization’s CEO. “We had to ask, ‘What does this look like for a paraprofessional who is appropriately trained, trusted and coached? How far could they go?’ ”

The group expanded to serve students during the school year, and last year, received a significant boost from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who donated $3 million to the organization. Its work, and its , has evolved, Young said, from “demanding to building.”

In statement to The 74, a district spokesman said its literacy efforts “have only been amplified and supported by partnering with a dedicated organization such as The Oakland REACH.”

As a bridge between the district and the predominantly Black and Hispanic community it serves, The Oakland REACH played a key role in finding a diverse mix of tutors that included a retired educator, a former security guard and several stay-at-home moms. 

“It’s personal to me because my daughter had to go through the process of long-distance learning,” Aguilar said in released with the report. “I completely relate to all the challenges that parents had.”

The prospective tutors completed an eight-week fellowship in which , a nonprofit trainer, taught them how to implement the district’s . But their preparation — the topic of a  — was carefully designed to address the challenges facing Black, Hispanic and lower-income job candidates who are juggling work and family life. The sessions included child care, meals, transportation and a $1,675 stipend.

The fellowship also gave tutors space to discuss personal experiences with literacy instruction — their own and their children’s.

“Their personal struggles,” according to the paper, “deepened their sense of commitment to students’ literacy needs.” 

In total, The Oakland REACH recruited 46 parents and other community members to tutor small groups of K-2 students who were reading below grade level. In a survey, about a third of the tutors said they felt somewhat or very unprepared to teach young children when they started, but grew more skilled with the help of ongoing coaching from FluentSeeds.

Aguilar now works at Manzanita SEED Elementary School, where her daughter Aliah is in fourth grade. She described the school, which has a mostly low-income Black, Hispanic and Asian student population, as a “melting pot.”

“When you’re serving underprivileged communities,” she said, “kids are more receptive if they see people who look like them.” 

Uneven results, ‘budget challenges’ 

The program has made its greatest impact in kindergarten. From fall 2022 to spring 2023, tutored students gained nearly a full extra year of learning on the widely used iReady assessment, compared to those who did not receive tutoring, according to the report. But there was little to no difference in outcomes between tutored and non-tutored students in first and second grade.

Those results are not unique to Oakland. Another recent study on a virtual early literacy tutoring model called OnYourMark found minimal impact in second grade. The lack of growth could be due to a mismatch between tutoring and testing, said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University professor who leads a nationwide tutoring research center and conducted the OnYourMark research.

If tutors are focusing on skills that an assessment doesn’t measure, “we won’t see learning gains, even if they have them,” she said. 

Overall, however, she described Oakland’s tutoring effort as a “proof point” that shows how well-trained community members with credibility among families “can meaningfully improve student learning.”

But there’s still room for improvement. Many tutors were drawn to the position because they care about Oakland students. But the current $16- to $18-per-hour pay rate is a barrier to recruiting more tutors and keeping them, Jochim wrote. 

Aguilar, a single mother, said that while being a tutor is “meaningful work,” it doesn’t pay enough to replace the salary she used to make at her previous human resources job in  Silicon Valley. She makes ends meet by delivering groceries for Instacart and recruiting students for a local college.

The district’s “” make the tutoring initiative a “promising, yet still-fragile set of reforms,” Jochim wrote. In March, the board the positions, but rejected the plan. The district has relied on federal relief funds to help pay the tutors and is “working out funding for these important positions” once those funds expire next year, a spokesman said.

The recent results should prompt Oakland to stop funding “less effective approaches” to tutoring and invest in what works, Loeb said. “This model is a good example of how community groups can provide these resources.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to and The 74.

Lydia Nichols recalls being “incredibly shy” when she started taking classes at during her junior year in the fall of 2021. The Cedar Rapids program takes students from different regional high schools and requires them to develop community-based projects for credit. By working in small teams and learning how to research topics at Iowa BIG, Nichols said her confidence grew. 

“They showed me that I did know what I was doing, and that my anxieties were just that: anxieties and that I needed to overcome them,” she said.

Lots of students struggle with shyness, anxiety and more. Even before COVID, most high school students were feeling bored and stressed, . During the pandemic, reported feeling sad or hopeless.

But there’s a bright spot. The CDC analysis also found youth who felt connected to adults and peers at school — like Nichols — were significantly less likely to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness than those who felt less connected. These kinships are also key ingredients in great high schools, like , that put a premium on and (two of XQ’s research-backed for high school transformation).

Nichols is a member of XQ’s Student Advisory Council, which provides a space for students to work alongside XQ and other students to help improve the high school experience. With a new school year on the horizon, I spoke with Nichols and two other SAC members. Each of the three attends or recently graduated from XQ schools that also emphasize . Below are excerpts from my conversations with Ella Correia, class of 2024 in South Bend, Indiana; Najid Smith, class of 2025 in Oakland, California; and Nichols, Iowa BIG class of 2023. Here are their six tips for how educators can improve relationships and learning.

1. Try Bonding Games

At the start of the 2022-23 school year, Smith said Latitude High’s educators divided the sophomores into two groups of more than 20 students each. The teens went on overnight camping trips to a Bay Area beach with a few of their teachers, where they hiked and made tie-dye shirts. More bonding exercises continued a day later when they played games and interviewed each other at the school. Students then made custom greeting cards for their peers, to thank them for the opportunity to get to know each other, Smith said. 

Educators have written about in an academic environment. At Iowa BIG, Nichols said teachers build in time for bonding activities with games like Jenga. 

“They know our mental health is very important to us,” she said. “And it’s very important for our projects that our mental health is good and we are able to work as a team, and we like our team members and we know the strengths and the weaknesses of our team members.”

At Purdue Polytechnic High School, which also emphasizes projects, Correia said bonding activities take place during advisory classes by students and teachers. Every Wednesday, students would play a game — like Uno — and recount a positive or negative about their day, she recalled. While some students were initially reluctant, Correia said everyone got to know each other better.

2. Show Your Students You Enjoy Helping Them

“As students, we feel what our teachers are feeling,” Nichols said. “We see when they’re having fun, we see when they’re enjoying themselves. And if we see that they’re disappointed in us, if we see that they’re not having fun, then it really does ruin the whole atmosphere.”

Nichols recalled feeling anxious about a fundraising project during her junior year because the marketing campaign needed a lot of work. But one teacher made time to help her overcome those anxieties by breaking down tasks and asking her simply to name three things she wanted to complete that week. 

“They really helped me understand that I can do more than I think I can,” she said.

Correia described herself as initially “hesitant” about asking questions in her high school classes because it’s easy to get discouraged when a question isn’t answered. But that changed after forging a connection with one teacher who made her feel like questions are welcome.

“She tells me all the time she’s always asking questions in [school] meetings,” Correia explained. “She wants clarification, and I think just her relating to me made me feel that it was OK — that if I am confused, I can ask questions and there are people out there who understand … and they’re willing to answer my questions and get me to where I need to be academically.”

Smith said teachers at Latitude schedule office hours each week to provide extra help for students, allowing them to meet one-on-one without asking. 

3. Create Educational Opportunities Outside of School

At PPHS, students work for eight weeks at a time on in-depth projects incorporating state standards for academic subjects such as history or science. Correia said this learning style “sticks more” because “we’re applying that knowledge into something fun that we’re physically doing.” She’s worked on projects involving the vertical farm Metropolis Greens, the Potawatomi Zoo and a children’s museum, all in South Bend, Indiana, where they meet professionals working in the industry who talk about what they do. These experiences, she said, gave her ideas about future careers and areas of study for college.

Nichols said working on community projects at Iowa BIG taught her that she enjoyed project management, which she plans to study at the University of Iowa this coming school year. 

For more ideas on rethinking the high school experience, read The XQ Xtra — a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month.

4. Make Learning Feel Meaningful 

At Latitude, students often during required subjects. For his humanities classes, Smith studied homelessness in Oakland by researching the cost of living, making podcasts and constructing a tiny house for homeless youth. He said many students goof around when they first start high school, but he’s seen their attitudes change through these experiences. “I think it’s because it’s not just learning something on paper, but you’re actually learning about it and deepening your knowledge,” he said.

Nichols especially enjoyed an Iowa BIG project that involved making a docuseries about Native American mascots in local schools. She and her classmates visited schools, interviewed state senators, superintendents and students and researched what it would take to replace the mascots in gyms, signs, uniforms and more. “We just dove headfirst into this,” she said. “We thought it might be a cool topic, and then we just met so many people and it was incredible to learn how to research.” Nichols got English credit for the class because it required writing, researching and presenting. But it left a bigger impression.

“In a traditional classroom, you’re just sitting there with a paper and you’re filling out the same paper as everybody else,” she explained. “You realize you’re just doing busy work. The teacher is going to throw this paper away as soon as you get done grading this year; your work is not going to matter in one year. But my projects within Iowa BIG [like the docuseries] matter. We brought up topics where people are going to think about this for a long time.”

5. Teach Students to Network through Internships

Latitude High gives students multiple opportunities for internships, gradually adding more as they move into the upper grades. Smith, who’s interested in coding, interned at an Oakland nonprofit that mentors Black males in entrepreneurship and technology. He said he learned about AI and practiced coding at different tech companies. “A lot of people say, you know, coding is just sitting at a computer 24/7,” he said. But his experiences showed him there’s teamwork involved, and “it’s a lot more fun than people really think it is.”

He said teachers play a big role in making these connections. “Every person at the school knows somebody in some field that they can get in touch with and be able to do an internship with,” he explained. “And I think that’s important because everyone has different interests.”

Correia had a biomedical engineering internship this summer that she learned about through her school’s relationship with Purdue University. She agreed it’s important for schools to pass on these opportunities to students. “A lot of students have a hard time finding opportunities that match their niche, as they haven’t yet had the experiences that the adults in their life have,” she explained. If administrators or teachers know what students are interested in, she said, they can help make connections and give students a taste of potential careers.

6. Create Opportunities for Student Voice and Collaboration

All three SAC members said they enjoyed how their schools give them choices and opportunities for collaboration. Correia said that’s important for any career. “You’re going to come in contact with people, and you’re always going to need to know how to collaborate with people,” she said. “It’s important to get feedback and different perspectives on your work.”

At Latitude, Smith said his subject teachers create groups of three or four students working together on assignments or projects. Students also take on different roles, such as leaders or facilitators, as they learn to cooperate. “We can disagree with somebody, but it’s more like we would prefer thinking you build on someone’s idea,” he explained. 

Making room for different perspectives is something the SAC members encourage teachers to do as much as they can. For example, because students have different styles of showing what they’ve learned, teachers should allow more options like presentations, written reports or podcasts. That’s important to remember not just at the start of a new school year, but daily. 

“Each kid is drastically different,” Nichols said. “You can’t have the same program for everybody. It’s just not fair to the students to have something that’s built for one type of student.”

Want more ideas for making your high school more student-centered? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

Imagine a high school class where students use 3D modeling software to create blueprints, gather around a mixing board to produce a song or turn their custom artwork into streetwear. These experiences are far from what we see in many traditional high school classes. 

Innovative educators are using to make their classes more engaging and relevant. More than an academic buzzword, PBL involves students in their learning by embracing real-world issues with hands-on solutions. It also gives them a taste of life beyond classroom walls, especially when a school works with community partners in business, academia or the nonprofit sector. 

Educators at XQ high schools engage students in meaningful PBL year-round. They’re among schools nationwide where educators enrich and strengthen their approaches to PBL by embracing , one of the six research-based for successful high schools. Learning becomes more when students take what they’re studying at school into the real world, seeing how academic concepts apply to places and people they know. 

Here are 10 examples of projects to inspire educators and community groups for the upcoming school year. 

1. Nurture Entrepreneurs

in Oakland, California offers students the opportunity to do long-term internships, particularly during their junior and senior years. Students can spend a month working with tech companies, local businesses, the courts and nonprofits in the Bay Area. When the pandemic posed challenges in arranging internships, Dean of Students Christian Martinez organized a two-hour class on Mondays and Tuesdays for seniors to gain financial literacy. He focused the class on the stock market, and encouraged students to develop brands and messages that resonated with their identities, cultures and histories. He ensured the course aligned with the state’s content standards, emphasizing research and evidence-based learning. Martinez said he came up with his idea for the class after seeing how the seniors didn’t seem excited about school when they came back in person during the pandemic. 

His students learned graphic design with software programs. They also had to pitch their ideas to community members, incorporate feedback and articulate the story behind their brand through presentations of learning. 

Martinez said he leveraged a grant from Nike to give each of his 16 students $500-$1,000 to have their hoodies, T-shirts and tote bags printed nearby. They then sold the clothes at Latitude’s big celebration of learning in the spring of 2022. Their brand names included “Cruzando Fronteras” (crossing borders), “Truth and Lies,” and “Humble Beginnings.” 

By the end of the spring semester, Martinez said, “I saw the spark that I needed to see from them for them to end the year in a place where they feel successful — regardless of whether they go to college or work.” 

2. Make Music

The Memphis Artists United Project served as a powerful platform for collaboration in the fall of 2022 between eight talented musicians from Memphis, Tennessee and the students of music production class, led by teacher Ty Boyland. Together, they embarked on a musical journey to create “,” a song addressing gun violence with a bilingual verse by a talented 12th grader, shedding light on the impact of guns within the Latino community. The song got attention from local media and at youth conferences, leading to conversations about how young people experience violence and what solutions they can propose. Also at Crosstown High: science teacher Nikki Wallacemakes some powerful community partnerships by working with local researchers.

Want more ideas for rethinking your high school? The XQ Xtra is a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

3. Start a Small Farm

At in Endicott, NY, students designed a greenhouse in their math class, building scale models. The winning model is now flourishing in a garden with multiple raised beds, small fruit trees, native berry bushes, a fence and an underground water reservoir that redirects runoff from nearby tennis courts. Principal Annette Varcoe said the students collaborate with a local farmer who encourages their understanding of agriculture, farming and the marketplace. 

In July of 2023, students added a trellis arch for climbing beans. They also harvested zucchini, cucumbers and rhubarb. Some cooked rhubarb pies in their café. Five 12th graders received internships and mentoring from Kathy, Dave and Eric’s Flavored Coffee Company. Students conducted surveys to determine which baked items to make and sell in the café. They are now working on an online ordering system and backend software to track sales and inventory for the 2023-24 school year.

4. Collaborate with Artists

Members of ’s class of 2022 responded to a devastating storm that hit the Cedar Rapids region in August 2020 and destroyed up to 70 percent of the local tree canopy. Students contracted with local chainsaw artists to turn fallen wood into sculptures. They auctioned the work for Trees Forever, a public-private partnership dedicated to “re-leafing” the damaged tree canopy. Over the three-month project, students had to engage and organize artists for the carving effort, obtain permits from the city government, generate publicity through the local media, and execute the sculpture auction. By the end, their “Splinters” project raised $25,000, nearly four times the students’ original goal of $6,000. A majority of the funds went to , with the rest paying the local artists for their time and skill. Student-led projects with community partners are the defining feature of Iowa BIG’s design.

5. Let Students Choose Science Projects

Student voice plays a significant role in projects at in Tennessee. For one project, students selected genetic diseases and conditions to study, then interviewed researchers, teachers, health professionals and those affected by these conditions. They created infographics to share their research, which were printed and displayed in the science wing to inform staff and students about genetic conditions.

6. Build a Community Garden

In partnership with the Houston Parks and Recreation Department, in Houston, Texas created community gardens in the adjacent 900-acre Herman Brown Park and later on the high school’s campus. The gardens now house more than 100 fruit trees throughout the school grounds on more than two and a half acres, providing many spaces for students to learn about the natural environment and contribute to the community. The school’s Career and Technical Education program has an educator in charge of coordinating community partnerships in agriculture, food and natural resources.

7. Build a Hydroponic System

At in Indiana, students built a hydroponic system through a science project. They conducted extensive research as they designed and constructed a method for growing produce sustainably and cost-effectively. The students then identified how to use those vegetables to address real-world community needs, such as providing healthy lunches to community members in food deserts. Students at this network of high schools work on projects with community partners throughout the year.

8. Make a Micro Museum

At in Sanford, Florida, students constructed a series of mobile micro museums to take around their community, educating residents, tourists and younger students about the history of the city of Sanford and Seminole County. Students met with historians and exhibit curators from the Sanford Museum to learn how to conduct primary research, preserve artifacts and build interactive designs. The year-long project started with design thinking for students to find out what elements of their community residents wanted to learn more about. Then, they built their traveling exhibits on topics such as natural history, agriculture, sports and media, and industry and technology. 

“In an age where history is more controlled than ever, it was amazing to see the students really become energized knowing their local history and how it connected with their own studies,” said Sanford Museum Curator Brigitte Stephenson. “It showed not only the power museums have, but also how important it is to have various ages give their input on how history is presented.” Currently showcased at the Sanford Museum in commemoration of its 65th anniversary, these micro museums will travel to elementary and middle schools, downtown businesses, Seminole State College and the Seminole County Administration Center.

9. Explore Local History with Artists

The partnered with , a local arts nonprofit for young people, allowing 10th graders to take a nine-week course led by Diatribe artists, focusing on the history of housing inequality in Grand Rapids. They learned about red-lining — the practice of excluding certain groups, such as Black people, from particular neighborhoods — and its long-term negative impacts. Students toured various neighborhoods, explored the city’s gorgeous, dynamic and learned how discriminatory housing practices have shaped their city’s look and feel. 

But, typical of the school’s approach, the course was more than just lessons and field trips. Students discussed what they learned and grappled with their reactions by creating poetry, story-telling and spoken word pieces. Teachers wanted students to understand how historical events like the Civil Rights Movement were experienced nationally and within the Grand Rapids community.The partnership with The Diatribe fit closely with GRPMS courses, which aimed to blend history with social justice and English language arts in a way that makes the past feel relevant to students’ lives. 

10. Make Green Alleyways Possible

Students at in Santa Ana, California, partnered with the local architectural firm to think about a new green alleyway project for the city, working alongside professional architects to model and learn the ins and outs of drafting tools. Círculos became so adept with project-based learning that its school board and the approved four PBL courses that will count towards California’s “A-G” subject requirement credit. The four courses are now available as an elective to all high schools across the Santa Ana Unified School District, the sixth largest district in California — showing how community partnerships and projects in one place can inspire more schools to try them.

Share examples of how your high school uses project-based learning with community partnerships with #rethinkhighschool on social.

Community partnerships are just one way to rethink high school. For more, check out The XQ Xtra, a newsletter for educators that comes out twice a month. .

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

provides all teachers with a 10% salary increase retroactive to Nov. 1, 2022, plus a one-time payment of $5,000.

This was a strike with unusual features, but they will become increasingly common as teachers unions continue to win generous compensation packages and greater influence over district operations. School systems will be forced to deal with these tactics, not just in California but wherever state law allows them to be employed.

Unfair labor practice strikes

A standard teacher strike over wages and working conditions — otherwise known as an economic strike — requires a long administrative process. In California, this means formally declaring an impasse in negotiations, which is followed by analysis and a report by an independent fact-finder.

But there’s a loophole. If the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as bargaining in bad faith, the union can legally walk out at any time.

The problem for school districts, and parents who want their kids in school, is that determining whether the union’s complaint has any merit cannot be made instantaneously. It may take months, or even years, before the state labor board can hear the case and render a ruling.

If there is no unfair labor practice, then the strike is illegal and penalties can be levied. But by then, it’s too late to matter, and the union has probably already won a settlement that ensures it will come out ahead financially.

So while the strike is ostensibly called to bring an end to specific alleged unfair labor practices by the district, its real purpose is to jump-start contract negotiations and bring about an advantageous settlement.

Union-friendly publications have articles on how to precipitate an unfair labor practice by an employer and so legitimize a strike. Among the suggested methods are to “” or to cite employers for “.”

Since 2019, school employees unions have conducted two unfair labor practice strikes in Sacramento, two in Los Angeles and now, two in Oakland.

Bargaining for the common good

This term is used to describe union demands for contract provisions that are geared to benefit a wider community than just teachers and school employees. These include restorative justice, ventilation, affordable housing and even climate change. The Oakland union sought contract language regarding housing vouchers and use of vacant district properties for housing students’ families, as well as union input on facilities upkeep.��

Asking for such things allows the union to position itself as altruistic, seeking more than just better compensation for its members. It also increases the scope of its influence over district operations. Many of these items may, in fact, be beneficial.

But the union is the legal representative for teachers, not for anyone else. The public at large did not elect the Oakland Education Association to decide what was “good” to bargain for. Nor is the union accountable for the consequences that might arise from its demands. The school board is supposed to represent the public and choose between competing desires and needs within an available budget — which brings us to the most disturbing aspect of the Oakland strike and its settlement.

School board leverage

There has been over the past couple of years about the politicization of school boards. Special-interest groups’ clout in politics is a problem as old as the Republic, but the situation in Oakland went well beyond the usual arguments over who funded whose campaign.

“The school board, which currently has six members, has been split on the issue of OEA’s common-good demands,” . “Three members, Jennifer Brouhard, VanCedric Williams and Valarie Bachelor, have joined the union in urging the district’s bargaining team to discuss the common good demands with OEA, while other directors have said the demands should be left to the school board to discuss and implement, or left to OUSD to partner with other organizations on.”

It’s true that all three of the named board members received union campaign contributions, but that’s just a standard public policy issue. These three have unique relationships with teachers unions.

Bachelor is employed as a .

Brouhard is the and sat on its executive board at least through the 2021 school year.

Williams was in October, after serving as treasurer of United Educators San Francisco and a member of the National Education Association board of directors.

The union went on an unfair labor practice strike despite having three teacher union activists on the school board. It claimed to be bargaining for the common good even though the common people were woefully underrepresented in negotiations. Lakisha Young, founder of the parent advocacy group The Oakland REACH, that her organization “has organized and mobilized hundreds of district parents and none of us have been a part of the process.”

She added, “OEA is replaying tactics Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) parents and students just experienced: say on repeat that the district is bargaining in ‘bad faith,’ avoid fact-finding, mediation, impasse and then strike!”

Kindergarten counts continue to dwindle in many states — evidence of falling birth rates and an ever-growing array of options luring parents away from traditional public schools. Experts fear those trends, as well as a and the looming cut-off of federal relief funds, amount to a perfect storm for U.S. education.

The $190 billion in pandemic aid that was provided to schools allowed many districts to temporarily salve the loss of funds tied to falling enrollment and to staff and programs. Those funds dry up in 17 months. As budget deficits grow and housing costs drive families out of urban areas, education leaders are staring down a host of unpalatable options, from half-empty buildings to staff.

“I’m not a pro-school closure guy. That’s the worst part of school reform,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant and a former Denver Public Schools official. “But if anyone was holding out hope for a bounce back, we have put that to rest.”

The Parkrose School District, outside Portland, Oregon, is one of many grappling with a budget shortfall.

“We have some decisions to make in the next few months,” said Sonja McKenzie, a board member in the district, where enrollment has fallen 12% since 2018. Now leaders might have to slash positions for special education assistants. Talk of layoffs is also surfacing in , and .

McKenzie went door-to-door last fall asking voters to approve a tax levy to fund 22 positions, reminding them that the district, where nearly 30% of students are Hispanic, heeded their call to hire bilingual family liaisons. Voters .

Some families, she said, have been “priced out” of the area, heading east to Gresham or across the Columbia River to Vancouver, Washington, where they can find more affordable housing. Those areas, McKenzie said, have “benefited from our challenges.” 

Desperation and aspiration

The 74’s enrollment analysis is based on figures from 41 states provided exclusively by Burbio, a data company, and additional data from the nation’s 20 largest school systems.

Since last year, enrollment has declined 2.5% in Chicago, 2.4% in Houston and 2% in Nevada’s Clark County, while New York and Los Angeles saw drops of just under 2%. The Hillsborough County district in Florida, which includes Tampa, and the Gwinnett County School District, near Atlanta, are the only two large districts where enrollment now exceeds pre-pandemic levels.

Large district enrollment trends from 2018-19 to 2022-23

The graphic below shows enrollment trends for the nation’s 20 largest school districts. Divided by region, the breakdowns include changes in overall enrollment as well as in kindergarten. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

In California, which has seen a whopping 5% drop in its student population since 2020, the enrollment decline has slowed, according to . But the downward slope in birth rates and exodus of parents from high-priced areas has left district and charter leaders with limited options.

Summit Public Schools in California’s Bay Area — a well-established charter network that spawned an online learning platform still used by 300 schools nationwide — will at the end of this school year. 

Following a community and in Oakland, the local school board decided in January not to close several schools. Now, amid an ongoing , the board is reconsidering whether to because of enrollment decline.

“There is always this quality and convenience tension,” said Lakisha Young, CEO of Oakland Reach, a parent advocacy organization. “Everyone wants a school in their neighborhood that they can walk their kids to.”

But she called the emotional debate over closing schools a distraction from more important issues — namely that a majority of students aren’t . A third of families in the city , and some have moved further inland to Antioch or southeast to the Central Valley. 

“If people have the opportunity to move to other places that are slower and quieter and safer, they are going to do that,” she said. “These decisions are not just made out of desperation, they are also out of aspiration.”

‘You just come here’

Some of those same aspirations are fueling a Republican push to give unhappy parents more options. Twelve states now offer education savings accounts, which allow families to use public funds to pay the costs of private school or homeschooling. Despite pushback from such programs take funding away from public schools and lack accountability, similar legislation has been introduced in several more states, including , and .

“This pandemic was the perfect incubation event that really caused homeschooling to thrive,” said Bob Templeton, another enrollment consultant with , a housing market research company. “We’re seeing this dramatic change in how we educate kids.”

In Texas, where the legislature is currently , existing options like charters and homeschooling have contributed to a decline in what Templeton calls the “capture rate” — the percentage of children from a particular community attending their local public school. 

“If they’re down 200 kids in kindergarten and it doesn’t return, then in five to seven years, that district is going to be down several thousand kids,” Templeton said. “You need to get ready to close schools.”

Statewide enrollment shifts since 2021-22

*Click the circle next to state to see districts with the greatest enrollment gain, greatest enrollment loss and % change for state’s largest district. (Click here if you’re having trouble viewing the chart)

He consults for districts surrounding some of the state’s large urban systems and used to be able to reliably calculate that 100 new homes would result in 50 more students. Not anymore. 

He also monitors between districts. One school system he works with, Pflugerville, near Austin, took in 584 students from other systems this year. But almost 5,400 transferred out to both charters and other districts. Leaders have put off closing schools for now, which Templeton said just “kicks the can down the road.” 

He and Eschbacher advise districts to stay competitive by designing school models that parents want. In some cases, that’s paying off. 

The San Antonio Independent School District has had success with a 2017 state law that provides incentives to partner with charters and nonprofit organizations to run schools. 

Rebecca McMains decided to enroll her daughter in one of them, Lamar Elementary, after considering close to 10 public, private and charter schools in the area. Because her daughter has disabilities and an “elaborate” special education plan, the choice wasn’t easy.

“I knew I was going to be heard at Lamar. They are very parent-focused,” said McMains. She said staff members respond to her texts and don’t push back when she has a request, like having a nurse accompany her daughter on a field trip to NASA. “I’m now being thanked for my advocacy.”

But some parents have found their local public schools loath to accommodate the needs of those they are used to seeing as a captive audience.

Jana Wilcox Lavin, a Las Vegas mom, runs Opportunity 180, a nonprofit that supports school choice and formerly led a that converted low-performing schools into charters. Nonetheless, she was willing to consider her Clark County neighborhood school for her daughter, who starts kindergarten in 2024.

When she called the local school to ask for a tour, officials turned her down, citing concerns about student privacy. She turned to a district administrator, who said she could visit the building but not observe classrooms. Spokesman Tod Story said that while no policy prohibits parents from visiting schools, officials “err on the side of caution to protect our students.”

 Lavin said she just wanted to make a well-informed choice.

“When I asked how I should assess if the zoned school was a good fit,” she said, “I was told, ‘We are your neighborhood school. You just come here.’ ”

An ‘absolute asteroid’ 

That’s less true than ever before. The options available to families have expanded so rapidly that researchers are struggling to keep up.

Counts of how many students are homeschooled are and private school enrollment figures can be a year or two behind. That’s one reason Thomas Dee, a Stanford University education professor who tracks enrollment trends, was unable to account for of students who left public schools. 

That uncertainty makes it hard to tell whether the American school system is experiencing temporary chaos or a more permanent sea change.

Nat Malkus, the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the pandemic an “absolute asteroid” of a disruptive event. Still, he doesn’t expect ESAs or other emerging models to cause as much damage to the public education system as predict.

“It’s hard to overestimate the incumbent’s strength,” he said.

That’s the case in Florida, where enrollment grew 1.3% this year and the Hillsborough district expects to keep building schools for years to come to accommodate growth. 

In states with declining numbers, like Oregon, district leaders are more wary. School choice hope to get an ESA initiative on the ballot next year, but McKenzie, the Parkrose board member, is concerned such a program would hobble district schools that are already strapped for cash.

“I can understand a parent may feel like they have a better option,” she said.“But it creates a divisive system of who has the resources and who doesn’t. Less resources for the classroom impacts the whole community.”

He’s also a star in Ben Adler’s 8th-grade science unit on gravity and kinetic energy at Oakland, California’s , a middle school in the city’s East Peralta neighborhood. Students are designing, building and launching rockets on Macbook Air laptops around their classroom — and trying to keep their “Kerbonauts” on track (and intact) for various space missions.

It’s clever, engaging and far more typical in 2023 than it was before the pandemic. Lessons like these mark a genuine shift in American schools. Indeed, though many campuses reopened in part during the pandemic because they concluded that children were not learning enough using digital tools during virtual learning, late pandemic schooling today is . 

Americans have spent huge chunks of the past three years thinking and talking about schools in binary terms — open or closed, in-person or virtual. But with schools all but universally open and back to a normal state (however imperfect), though, these dichotomies have gotten somewhat blurrier. 

Truth is, we didn’t reopen schools back to “normal” in-person learning over the past few years … so much as we brought daily virtual learning into real-world classrooms.��

It’s the new normal in U.S. public education — and it’s complicated. I’ve visited nearly 100 public school classrooms across three states in the past six months. I don’t recall seeing a single one without a computer screen projected onto the board at the front of the room. Lessons reliably include videos from curriculum vendors and/or the internet. On several occasions, I watched early elementary schoolers hold up badges hanging from lanyards around their necks to unlock laptops to play. Written assignments and quizzes — including Adler’s on rocketry — are often conducted on laptops and submitted online. As students type, teachers frequently project with animated graphics and sound effects. 

There’s no question that the pandemic shifted schools’ digital infrastructure. The extraordinary pressures of the past three years of crises forced significant new public investments in closing digital divides. Policymakers and schools poured emergency funding into purchasing devices like laptops, tablets, Chromebooks and internet hotspots so that all students would be able to access online lessons — . This made a real dent in longstanding digital divides, even if it didn’t wholly close them. Indeed, in January 2021, a survey of teachers still found that few of their English-learning students had reliable internet access. 

It’s far from clear what this means for the present and future of U.S. public education. Teachers I’ve spoken with express ambivalence about the degree to which digital technology has permeated campus. Most say that it’s created both exciting skills and pernicious challenges. 

When Downtown Charter Academy closed on March 13, 2020, it sent students home with two weeks of assigned work. As it became clear that the crisis was serious, DCA acquired digital devices and hotspots to ensure that all families could access distance learning. Within a few weeks, the school had moved its pre-pandemic schedule online. “It was 20 hours per day at first,” says Director Claudia Lee. “But it got easier.” 

But closing device and internet access gaps was just a first step. Many DCA students and families lacked the digital literacy to use and manage these new tools. This was also true across the state. A fall 2020 survey of linguistically diverse California families found that did not understand the pandemic learning instructions they received from their children’s schools. Further, responded that they did not have email accounts they could use. 

DCA teachers say that the logistics of the transition were relatively smooth. They also confirmed that they faced many of the problems that plagued virtual learning across the country. Student engagement was a struggle, with some students attending only sporadically and others switching off their cameras under the pretense that their connection was too slow to bear the video. “We visited some homes,” says Lee, “and found some situations that were hard. Kids were trying to learn in kitchens, for example, or other places with lots of noise and distractions around. So we brought a small number of kids back to campus to log on virtually — but socially distanced.”

The school reopened for full-time in-person learning in , but it was hardly a return to normalcy. By the end of that school year, DCA students’ academic outcomes were than peers in the surrounding school district, but that was only part of the story. In discussions during a daylong professional development session this January, many teachers noted that students were prone to online distractions and — worse yet — had become increasingly adept at using digital tools and resources to avoid doing their classwork themselves. Students brought these virtual learning habits back to their in-person classrooms. 

“We need to help them understand that your choices become your identity,” said one teacher who asked not to be quoted by name. “Like, ‘If you always lie, you’re gonna eventually be known as a liar. If you always cheat, you’re gonna eventually be known as a cheater.’ George Santos is a great example of why you shouldn’t make lying a habit.” 

And yet, these costs have attached benefits. Teachers are wrangling with new digitally infused questions around academic integrity, yes, but that’s also because they have continued to use Google Classroom and other platforms as part of their courses. These streamline student assignments, teacher grading and subsequent data analysis — and offer the potential for more effective and timely communication with students’ families. Indeed, teachers reported that, at this stage of the pandemic, many more of their families have and can use online communication tools like email, school communication apps (), and video conferencing to stay linked up to what’s happening on campus. In particular, Zoom parent-teacher conferences are much easier and more equitable than the old in-person-only model. 

As such, teachers spent much of the family engagement part of the January professional development session discussing how to unlock families’ new digital literacy abilities. Members of the 8th-grade team admit to one another that they aren’t meeting their initial goal of reaching out to at least five families each week through the school’s official communication app — and brainstorm ways to reset and hold one another accountable to that expectation. The 7th-grade team agrees that they could do more to engage students’ families, and devises a process for making and sending a two-minute Friday video explaining what 7th graders will learn in the coming week. Almost everyone agrees that the school needs a meeting to help get families familiar with — and logged on to — the school’s different digital platforms.��

As for the little green Kerbals in their spaceships, Adler emails, “Across all three days, no students were caught running any other program or browsing. A notoriously disengaged student became enraptured, and even turned in good marks on the follow-up assessment.” Students scored reasonably well on a subsequent quiz, with — for example — majorities of the 8th graders correctly identifying “apoapsis” as “the highest point in an orbit,” even though the term did not appear in any of the instructional materials other than the Kerbal Space Program missions. 

So: is digital literacy a key skill (or a skill set)? Or are digital tools a crutch for students? Or some murky mixture of both? These are potent questions for this moment, as , public launches of artificial intelligence tools and concerns about are creating a national discussion about technology and education. 

I truly don’t know. But I think we’re long overdue for a collective rethinking of just what we want from education technology. As we clamber out of three years of pandemic-steeped K–12 education, it presently feels like we’re drifting to a sleepy acquiescence of any and all digital learning tools without regard for their actual purpose. It’s time for educators, policymakers and families to adopt a more intentional, active stance when making education technology choices — with an eye to avoiding unreflective reliance on these tools.

Both CA Parent Power and Oakland REACH introduced a resolution to the school board that would give parents “.”

In California, open contract negotiations between school districts and unions can occur only if both parties agree. It looks like it could happen in Oakland.

“We support parents at the bargaining table,” said Kampala Taiz-Rancifer, second vice president of the Oakland Education Association.

District and union officials alike across the country have long resisted opening up the collective bargaining process to public scrutiny, never mind participation. Reasons range from a fear of posturing on the part of negotiators to a loss of control over the proceedings. I suspect the real reason is that closed-door bargaining enables each side to construct its own narrative about what the other side is up to.

“Only those at the table know what really transpires, and either side can be and usually is painted as villainous,” .

But open bargaining may be the only public education issue whose supporters include both the most militant teachers unions and the staunchest union critics.

Like the Oakland parent groups, union opponents such as the , the and the all see closed bargaining as a way for officials on both sides to work out inside deals, then present the public with a fait accompli.

This occurred most recently in Seattle, where, after a week-long strike, teachers and the public both complained of a lack of transparency. Only after teachers ratified the agreement did district officials wonder .

Closed negotiations are still the norm in most school districts, but the doors are slowly creaking open. Progressive unions and their allies are among the most prominent advocates of this exposure. Granted, their motives are self-serving, but that doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea. These unions are convinced citizens would be wholeheartedly on their side if they were present at negotiations.

Colorado voters approved a ballot measure 70% to 30% in 2014 that opened public-sector bargaining across the entire state. Though initially opposed, the Colorado Education Association has since embraced the new transparency, using negotiations as a way to rally members and the public to its cause.

“We want to be open and transparent with the community and public. Having that open bargaining allows for those conversations to take place,” .

The Chicago Teachers Union asked for open bargaining and got it, with .

Local teachers unions in Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington all pushed for open bargaining, and all for the same reason: to use it as an organizing tactic.

In Brookline, Massachusetts, the union brought more than 100 rank-and-file members to negotiation sessions to witness “.”

In Minnesota, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers went a step further. It brought 50 teachers, dressed them in union T-shirts and “prepped them for their role,” . They were allowed to speak in support of the union’s proposals for special education.

Merrie Najimy was president of the Concord Teachers Association when the union pushed for open bargaining. She later became president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association. “When they see the outrageous behavior of the other side and the dignified behavior of the teachers, as well as [our] visionary proposals, that’s where you win,” .

Jane McAlevey is a senior policy fellow at the UC Berkeley Labor Center who has long advocated for open bargaining as a way to increase member support. She believes open bargaining is a way for a union to display its trust in its members.

“Too many officials have very little faith in the intelligence of ordinary workers who could be involved in the union,” she said. “They’ll just say to me, ‘How did you control everybody?’ It’s always about control.”

It’s important to specify that “open bargaining” is a catch-all term, and there are various steps along the spectrum. Some districts simply make bargaining proposals public as they occur. Others allow silent, in-person public observation. Others, like Chicago, add online streaming. Formal public input while negotiations are ongoing is very rare.

Still, more sunshine is better than less. No one should be put off because unions might use open bargaining to manipulate public opinion to their cause. School district officials represent the public at the bargaining table. If they don’t trust the public to observe, never mind to participate, they should seek other employment.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

A newly formed coalition of Oakland parents, who say they are fed up with the state of their kids’ public school education, plan to present a resolution Thursday night that could give them a seat at the table during the Oakland Unified School District’s negotiations with the teachers union.

This coalition is made up of two parent groups: CA Parent Power, composed of typically more white and affluent families in Hills schools, and The Oakland REACH, which advocates for Black and Latino families from the city’s flatlands.

“When you think about the piss-poor education outcomes of our kids, the parents that we believe need to be most at the table are the parents who want to be at the table in a meaningful way,” said Lakisha Young, one of the parents calling for the resolution and the founder of The Oakland REACH.

The resolution asks the school board to allow families a chance for meaningful input on all labor agreement proposals, including collective bargaining agreements and memoranda of understanding.

Those negotiations are just getting underway this week as the current contract ends Oct. 31.

Gary Yee, president of the Oakland Unified School District board, said in an interview he is inclined to put the resolution on the agenda for full board discussion. 

Yee said the board should consider the parents’ request after 2½ years of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic that had them helping teach kids from home and working to keep them safe at school.

“The pandemic awakened a generation of parents to the awful reality that student outcomes in California, and especially in districts like Oakland, have been poor for decades,” said Megan Bacigalupi, a founder of the CA Parent Power group, in an emailed statement.

Both the district and the teachers union would have to agree to parents’ participation in the bargaining process, according to Felix de la Torre, general counsel with the California Public Employment Relations Board. Neither the school district nor the Oakland Education Association has commented on the parents’ proposal yet.

There is a phase of the negotiating process called sunshining that does allow for public participation. During this period of time, the union and the district each decide what issues they want to bargain over and disclose those to each other. 

Under state labor laws, the public can have a say in sunshining when both sides present their negotiating topics to the public during school board meetings, a time when the public has a chance to comment. 

In a statement, the California School Boards Association called parent participation “a negotiable item and possible if both parties accept that condition. At the same time, no individual party can unilaterally include parents, nor can parents insist on attending negotiations independent of an agreement between the district and union to do so.”

The new parent coalition is pushing for official support from the district to bring informed parents into the sunshining phase of negotiations, claiming there is a lack of transparency leaving parents in the dark and unable to take advantage of the moments when they can, in fact, legally have a say. 

These parents serve different constituents — but are coming together for this common goal.

“Given our partnership in coalition with the families in the Hills, they need the bridge created as well,” Young said.

Young started The Oakland REACH in 2016, to empower Black and Latino parents to advocate for their children. During the pandemic, fearful that flatlands kids were being left behind in distance learning, Young’s group began offering tutoring and classes that

CA Parent Power, led by Megan Bacigalupi, began in 2020 in response to what some families perceived as a slow response to reopening of schools during the pandemic, and was largely critical of teachers at the time.

Both groups share a distrust in the ability of the teachers union and the Oakland school district to represent their children’s interests during contract negotiations. They point to a long-term failure of Oakland Unified to improve student reading outcomes — of Oakland students are reading below standard, and in math, 70.9% are below grade-level standards.

Keta Brown, another Oakland REACH parent, has looked at the language around the collective bargaining agreement, and she doesn’t see “kids” mentioned.

“You got to make certain that the consumer, which is these babies, are a part of your process and that you are keeping them at the forefront,” said Brown, who lives in an area of East Oakland where her neighborhood schools have dismal math and reading scores. (She said she’s lucky she got her daughter into Edna Brewer Middle School, one of the district’s stronger middle schools. She commutes 25 minutes each way to get her child to and from school.) 

The Oakland Educators Association has long made the case that when it negotiates on behalf of teachers to increase pay and improve working conditions, it is in fact advocating for students. Research a quality teacher in a classroom is the strongest predictor of student success. The Oakland Unified district’s strategic plan is currently focused on improving student literacy and teacher quality and diversity. 

But for some families that have experienced failure over generations and don’t want to wait any longer for meaningful change, they want to be able to better understand and hopefully shape the next three-year contract that they say will affect their kids’ education.

This article originally appeared at , a community-supported public media newsroom based in San Francisco.

Now that effort has drawn the attention of one of the world’s wealthiest people, who happens to be giving her money away at a rapid clip. 

In March, just over five years after the group’s founding, MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, an unrestricted gift of $3 million. The donation is its biggest gift to date and nearly doubles the group’s revenue, according to recent .

The money, said founder Lakisha Young, will allow the group to “take our work to the next level” and plan for the long-term, which includes pushing to bring more parents and community members into schools in support roles.

The plan for the group is to map out a three-year growth strategy, expanding trainings that allow community members to become literacy tutors and work alongside teachers in the Oakland Unified School District.

“Our work needs to go where most of the students are,” Young said in an interview. 

California regulations restrict who can work as tutors, but she said the group is poised to lobby to tweak those regulations. 

Scott’s gift will also give the group a measure of stability as it pushes to bring in more funders. Having reliable funding, Young said, “allows the work to move just that much faster.” 

The donation was a surprise. Young said she got a call last October letting her know that an anonymous donor wanted to find out more about the organization. Then in March came the email with Scott’s announcement. Even now, Young hasn’t met or talked with Scott, who is known for in multi-billion-dollar flurries with little fanfare and posting notices to her , where she’s known simply as “Mom, writer, advocate.”

The $3 million donation represents a watershed moment for The Oakland REACH, which Young created in 2016, after an eye-opening experience trying to get her eldest daughter into a good public kindergarten. 

Many neighborhood schools at the time were in “school improvement” under No Child Left Behind, which meant they might well close within a few years. Young didn’t want that sort of disruption, so she placed her daughter’s name in a charter school lottery that offered just 11 slots. The lottery drew 93 applicants. 

Luckily, her daughter’s name popped up seventh, but Young said the victory “really sparked something in me” — a realization of how deeply unfair the system was to families of color. If thousands of families are forced to place their children’s futures in a hat and hope for the best, she recalled, “What do you think that kind of message is sending to them about what they have access to?”

Young created The Oakland REACH in December 2016 as a self-described network of “passionate and fearless parents” pushing to improve education in a city where more than 90 percent of students are non-white and nearly 60 percent receive free or reduced-price meals.

The group formed with 50 “unapologetic” parents across about 30 district and charter schools, “moms and grandmamas and daddies and uncles who were raised in Oakland, went to Oakland schools, were served poorly by those schools,” Young said in an interview last fall. As parents and grandparents, now they’re “basically saying, ‘This won’t be my child’s story. This won’t be my grandchild’s story.’”

She recalled how she chose her first members: “I don’t want the PTA parent. I want the parent that, when they come in, pencils move because they’re just coming in totally focused on, ‘What’s happening with my baby, what’s going on?’ They’re just solely focused on their kids.”

Since then, the group has pushed to shine a bright light on achievement in the city: Young last March that just 8.7 percent of Oakland eighth-graders scored proficient in math in fall 2021 — this in a city, according to the group’s December survey, where parents “showed a HUGE demand for math skills.” She noted that 81 percent of parents want “more high-dosage math tutoring. Parents want their kids to read and do math … well!”

‘Our families were already losing’

The group’s first big victory came in March 2019, when the city school board unanimously approved a policy change that gave families impacted by school closures and consolidations priority admission to schools they wanted their children to attend.

When COVID-19 hit exactly one year later, Young, with the help of the (CRPE), quickly built the digital Hub. 

Remembering back to the summer of 2020, Young said the group “didn’t have much to lose” by trying something new for online learning. “Our families were already losing. This was, actually, for us, an opportunity because kids were at home with their parents. It was an opportunity to do something really different and move from a ‘struggle’ model to a model of more privilege and abundance.”

In the program’s first five weeks, Young noted, assessments showed that 60 percent of K-2 students rose two or more levels on the district’s reading assessment and 30 percent rose three or more levels. 

“We did that,” she said triumphantly. “And we did that by bringing … teachers and a group of folks to the table that were doggedly focused on serving families. No politics, no adult politics, no drama. …I’m telling you: If we were doing that all the time, our kids would be able to read. Our kids would be good at math.”

Families on their own

In addition to training literacy tutors, the Scott donation will also jumpstart a planned math fellowship this fall that will help caregivers become tutors.

Family members taking control of learning is key in a district awash in news of , and . One need the group hopes to help with: Oakland’s insatiable demand for substitute teachers. Young envisions training “community educators” who don’t simply show up to a new school each day, but who have “an investment in that community” and remain there through multiple assignments.

Nationwide, districts will also soon be figuring out what to do when federal COVID relief in 2024. 

Through it all, Young said, most parents must continue trusting their children to a public education system that’s full of uncertainty. 

“Superintendents leave,” she said. “Principals leave. Teachers leave. Families don’t leave. So they have to have what they need.”

In essence, families must create the solutions the district needs. “We can scream and holler as much as we want about what the system needs to do,” Young said, but “we need to be creating the talent.”

Christina Barnes, a mother of two who works as a family liaison for the organization, recalled helping a grandfather who was taking care of a child but didn’t know how to use email or send text messages. As a result, he missed alerts about school closures and other important information. “He would call and say, ‘I didn’t know school was closed today.’” 

Barnes helped arrange a tech fellowship for the grandfather that gave him the skills he needed to stay informed and to help his grandchild keep up with school.

Guadalupe Canchola, a mother of three young children and a so-called “parent liberator,” works with many Spanish-speaking families who feel unsafe speaking up, mostly because of language barriers or fears about their immigration status. “I love to bridge these gaps between families and the school system, just so they know that no matter their situation, they have rights. Their kids have rights.”

In one recent case, a parent asked Canchola to sit in on her child’s IEP meeting for special education services. But the parent handled it well.

“Honestly, the way I saw her advocate for herself and her son was the biggest surprise and takeaway for me,” she said. In so many cases like these, parents get intimidated “or cornered into a decision that’s not ours.” The more parents know about their rights, she said, the better. “They have to listen to you. They have to meet your needs. That’s just very powerful.” 

Bree Dusseault, a principal with CRPE, said Young’s work to elevate the voices of parents is “getting very clear results” in student achievement, with literacy rates climbing “at a pretty significant pace” for the kids they serve. “She has this very, very deep belief that parents need to be in the driver’s seat — and deserve to be in the driver’s seat — and need to be a part of the larger narrative of what their children are achieving.”

A lot of Young’s success and impact, Dusseault said, is the product of years of work in Oakland — much of that “well underway before the pandemic.”

Giving away money ‘quickly and without much hoopla’

Scott, 52, is one of the richest people in the world — as of May 16, the placed her at No. 35, just above Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. Her net worth stands at $32.9 billion, though Scott has vowed to give away half the fortune in Amazon stock she got in a divorce settlement with Bezos. 

Since 2020, the one-time novelist has given away at least $8 billion, with a heavy emphasis on education, public health, climate change, gender and racial equality, food security, and LGBTQ rights 

In early 2021, she married Dan Jewett, a Seattle science teacher.

The New York Times that Scott hands out money “quickly and without much hoopla,” moving the focus away from herself and onto the beneficiary organizations, which have included historically Black colleges and universities, Habitat for Humanity chapters, community-based education foundations, and many others. Many of these organizations “fly beneath the radar of major foundations,” The Times noted.

Young said the donation will help strengthen families and move people’s focus away from the “the inputs of drama and the inputs of chaos” roiling the Oakland district. “It’s a lot, but the question is: What can we still be doing in this moment to make sure our kids can read and do math? And we believe it’s what we’ve created. Our kids do not miss a beat, regardless of the political hoopla. But how many other kids did miss a beat because of it?”

On May 2, I announced that I will be stepping down early from my role on the Oakland Unified School District board.

In many ways, I’m proud of the the district has made over the last 7.5 years. However, our core issue has not been addressed, and this is hurting our prospects as a district serving Oakland students and families.

Most schools are not meeting students’ academic needs, meaning that students aren’t being adequately prepared for their next steps, whether that is middle school, high school or college and career. Students who can’t read or do math at grade level often become frustrated and disruptive, and many eventually drop out. Even if they graduate, students who aren’t prepared for college-level work will often drop out of college and have difficulty advancing in their careers.

Our efforts to improve school quality have been inconsistent and not nearly ambitious enough. I am proud that we have expanded access to quality programs at several schools and have redesigned others to improve quality. But this has not been undertaken as the urgent, citywide strategy it needs to be.

Aside from not preparing students adequately, school quality drives enrollment, so our refusal to really take it on in a focused, consistent and fearless way is leading to budget cuts, school closures and other negative consequences. We have lost 17,000 students in the last 20 years, and we have struggled with high leadership turnover for most of our history. As long as we refuse to focus on school quality with urgency, focus and consistency, enrollment will continue to decline and we’ll continue to face budgetary decisions that cause disruption, or be taken over by the state for a second time.

For the board, I think our biggest failing is in how we use our time at meetings. Way too much time is spent on issues that (while important) don’t have much to do with how students are doing academically. When I was president, I tried to address this by ensuring that each board meeting had at least one item related to academics, to keep student success front and center. Other steps the board can take included forming a committee on academics, that would have more focused (and more frequent) conversations about student success. Now that the pandemic is winding down, board members can do more classroom visits to learn about schools’ strengths and struggles. The bottom line is that we need to spend more of our time on how students are doing, because that is our primary purpose.

We also need to say “no” more, which is hard to do. The district is not a jobs program, or a social justice organization, or a small business incubator, or a housing organization, although those things are important. As long as we are struggling to ensure that students can read at grade level, it is a disservice to our students and families to spend so much time on issues that are not central to our core mission.

I came to the district with a background in the labor movement. However, in the time I have been on the board, I have become increasingly concerned about the Oakland Education Association and their seeming lack of commitment to student success (as an organization, not as individual teachers).

It is not enough to say students aren’t doing well because of poverty, or the state doesn’t provide enough funding. Other districts with similar levels of poverty and/or funding are achieving much greater results. One reason is that our teachers’ association has consistently resisted efforts to address school quality, and organized others against such efforts as well.

It may be true that the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of our students, but the interests of teachers and students do not always coincide. For example, we needed to reopen for in-person learning much earlier than we did, because students were suffering, especially students that need special and intensive services. The association did everything it could to prevent returning to in-person instruction, even though they knew that we weren’t meeting our legal and moral obligations, in particular to our most vulnerable students.

The association’s refusal to engage on the issue of school quality is hurting our students. And its long-standing resistance to operating fewer schools (including the April 29 strike) is a large factor in why we have the lowest salaries in the county and struggle to attract and retain quality teachers and staff. We need to concentrate our resources in fewer schools in order to ensure stable staffing for students. Stable, high-quality staff is essential to school quality.

For our community partners, there needs to be a deeper commitment to focus on student outcomes and school quality. Our new strategic plan is promising in the sense that it addresses the need for all our partners to work in concert toward the same goal, which is literacy. This new approach (a citywide focus) bodes well for the future. A lot will depend on the new mayor and our ability to retain stable leadership of the union. New people often bring new priorities, but what we need is to stay the course and not get distracted by shiny new ideas. If our community organizations that serve youth and families could all get behind the literacy focus of the strategic plan, rather than bringing other initiatives to the table, that would help a lot.

Finally, the way Oakland shows up during times of disagreement is a huge red flag for our prospects as a district.

Disagreement is to be expected when there are differences of opinion about how to address the serious issues facing the district. There is no way elected leaders will always agree with constituents on how to solve problems because our roles are different. Teachers only have to worry about the students they are serving now; the role of board members is to think about the health of our whole system, not just individual schools, and also the future health of the district.

There is vigorous dissent, which is critical to democracy, and then there is trying to silence debate through intimidation and harassment, which is poisonous to democracy. The safety of our elected leaders matters, both our physical safety and also our ability to sleep at night, not have our employment threatened, etc. It is impossible to make progress for students under these conditions. If we don’t find healthier ways to disagree, there will not be anyone willing to serve in this district who is actually willing to take on the persistent, difficult challenges that are undermining our ability to serve students better.

To mark 24 months since schools shut down because of COVID-19, The 74 spoke with parents, educators, researchers and students across the U.S. We are running some of these interviews in their entirety to give complete accounts of where we’ve been and where some think we’re going.��

On leave from her job at Kaiser Permanente and trying to adjust to remote school with her two children, Toni Rochelle Baker of Oakland, California, found a new calling in the early months of the pandemic. When parent advocacy group Oakland REACH asked her to become a parent liaison, she thought, “I know what I’m scared of and what I’m facing over here, so let me help wherever I can,” she told The 74.��

In early March, philanthropist McKenzie Scott donated to Oakland REACH to expand its work on literacy and math tutoring programs. 

In a January interview, Baker spoke about her kindergartner’s disappointment with virtual kindergarten, losing her best friend to COVID-19 and the importance of cherishing “the little things.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Feb. 14 was 700 days since most schools began closing. That number even took us by surprise. What’s your initial reaction to it?

Toni Rochelle Baker: ​​Wow, this really happened. At first, I thought it’s going to be like two weeks. My thought was, “I’m kind of happy we get to stay home. The world gets to shut down. I need a little break.” What’s a break to a mother? We don’t get to have sick days.

What was the moment you realized everything changed? What were you doing before and after?

My kitchen, my dining room table had turned into a school. I had two kids at the table with computers doing virtual learning and I had no idea what that meant. They told us to sign on to some Zoom that I’ve never heard of before. All three of us were at the table because at that time I was working from home. I thought we’re all going to just sit at the table and do our work. Then I realized we’re sitting there and there are 25 other students on Zoom in kindergarten. It just got real. 

What decisions do you remember having to make in the first weeks after schools closed?

I was in shock. We were told we couldn’t leave our house. We shouldn’t be around family and friends. We should be isolated. I was happy at first because I needed the time to breathe, but on the flip side, I thought this doesn’t feel so friendly. I’m a people person. I’m used to being around people and being outside and enjoying nature. Now they’re telling us to be cautious. I thought, “Is the world coming to an end? Is this what it’s going to feel like?” It was scary and confusing.

They gave us curfews in our city and told us to stock up on food. I don’t live my life like that. I’m a single mother. I go grocery shopping when I can. We get what we need. I didn’t have a deep freezer. I didn’t have extra money just laying around to spend $300 on food. I didn’t have Wi-Fi at the time because I didn’t really need it. I have my phone and now I need Wi-Fi for three people.

What has been the darkest part of the pandemic for you?

My best friend, who is like my big sister, died from COVID. I talked to her three days before she went into the hospital, not even knowing that she was sick. She didn’t know she was sick. Then she goes into the hospital and passes away. I couldn’t go see her. I couldn’t go to the hospital.

Tell me about your children. How old are they?

Talia is 9, in the third grade, and Tatum is 6, and he’s in the first grade. [Before the pandemic], my daughter was already in elementary school and my son was in preschool. Every day, I would drop my daughter off at school and my son would be with me. There was a kindergarten class across the hall from her first grade class. My son, who wasn’t even going to that school,  would go get in the line with the kindergartners. y. He would fist bump the teacher. The teacher would say, “Give me a hug,” and he would literally go to her class every single morning, sit down at carpet time, snacktime and even do the worksheet activity. This is a true story. I didn’t know that God was setting it up for him. It got to the point where they put a picture of him on the wall. 

The following year when he was ready to go to kindergarten, I got a call from that teacher, and she said, “Oh my God. I got Tatum on my roster.” I was so excited because they already had a bond. But he never got to go to in-person kindergarten because the pandemic happened. He already had a relationship with the teacher before the world shut down, so he was able to maneuver through kindergarten. But I never imagined not being able to walk my son to kindergarten. Those are the most valuable years of life. 

What broke my heart was for him to say, “Mommy, I hate school. I hate kindergarten. I want to go back to preschool.” That hit me, and it hit me hard. He already had this perfect picture in his mind about kindergarten. It was like he was saying, “Wait, you didn’t tell me I was going to be on the computer.” He didn’t understand. I didn’t understand. It broke my heart because the other kids didn’t even have what he had — that relationship. 

Did you consider holding him out of kindergarten? A lot of parents did.

Absolutely not. My children are just like me — social butterflies. I’m in love with my kids, but my kids were on my last nerves during the pandemic. Those four walls just weren’t enough.

How did you get through the tough times? Who did you rely on?

I was just relying on God. I was getting ready to see his face. Outside of God, I had Oakland REACH. I had a support system. They gave us vouchers for food. They gave my kids free computers. They gave us Wi-Fi. They had these teachers — I don’t even know where they found these beautiful teachers with these loving hearts for these kids. There was a teacher who had a grandma’s touch and a mom’s heart, and she was just so warm. This is through a computer. I’ve never met this woman to this day in real life. I had the community of Oakland REACH behind me. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

I have been with them for a couple years. About two weeks before the pandemic, I was put on an administrative leave from work at Kaiser Permanente. They told me I was coming back, but then the world shut down. This parent-led group that’s like a family to me said, “We’ve got to put something in place for these families. Everybody is at home.” I said, “I’m willing to help. I know what I’m scared of and what I’m facing over here so let me help wherever I can.” When I first met this group, I told them if they ever had a position, to hire me because I love the work they do. I love the mission. I didn’t know the pandemic was going to open that door for me.

They created this hub and they needed family liaisons. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was teaching my kids, but I was bored as heck because I’m used to being a busybody. I started helping other families and other mothers, calling my friends and telling them about Oakland REACH.��

Describe a moment when you felt you were getting conflicting guidance or instructions.

The school didn’t even know what to do. They didn’t have a lesson plan. They said to log on to Zoom for an hour. That was it. Then you do these worksheets. You are your child’s first teacher. I do believe that. I read to my children, but [the school] is telling me I’ve got to be a kindergarten teacher and a first grade teacher and do my work. It just didn’t add up to me. Then not being able to be with friends and family because we didn’t know if we were going to infect each other or if we were sick — it was just scary. It was just me and my children, and it was lonely. 

Your children changed schools last year. What led you to make that decision?

My son got to finish the end of kindergarten. I was hesitant on sending them back to school, but their mental state was so bad. They needed to go back, be with people and feel some type of routine. I didn’t know if I was making a good choice as a parent. I didn’t know if they were going to actually keep my baby safe. They were going to school in Oakland, but we live in Walnut Creek [about 16 miles away]. I’m working from home and I’m commuting to Oakland every day just so they can have some sanity. He got to graduate from kindergarten. It was a drive-through graduation. 

When this school year came around, COVID was just everywhere. The previous year, they did the COVID tests, they did the sanitizer, they did the masks, they did all these precautions. And when school started back the next semester, all of that went out the window. I let it slide the first two days of school, but by the third day, I’m like, “What’s going on? Where are the masks? We’re still in this stuff, and it’s worse now.” I had to make an executive decision as a parent. My kid’s class got exposed and I didn’t like the safety of it. I was worrying, like I had knots in my stomach. I had to remove my children from there. [My son’s] class went on quarantine for a week and then I just never took them back.

What do you feel hopeful about now?

I feel hopeful we can ascend through this. I wouldn’t say we know exactly what we’re dealing with, but we’re cautious now, we’re aware. My hope is to find some sense of normalcy. Maybe this is the new way of living, taking it day to day. Nothing is predictable. Hold onto the memories that we had in the good times because this is the new way of living. I don’t think this thing is going away any time soon.��

You don’t feel like the pandemic is ending?

We’re still in it, and a lot of people are still not taking it seriously. A lot of people are not taking precautions. A lot of people just still don’t care. I’ve lost several people to death, but people don’t want to get vaccinated. People don’t want to wear masks. People don’t want to have social distancing. People aren’t washing their hands. I can’t even go to the grocery store and taste a grape. We’ve been doing that since we were kids, eating the grapes and strawberries at the grocery store. You can’t go to Costco and get the samples. It’s the little things. 

What would you tell yourself 700 days ago, if you could go back in time, given what we know now? 

Cherish your time because time is something we’ll never get back. Smiling with my friend, looking at her actual smile without a mask, the hugs we exchanged without feeling like we were going to kill one another, holding hands and walking through the park —  it’s the little things for me. The playdates, the sleepovers, eating out. 

You work with a lot of parents. What do you think the public hasn’t understood about parents during these past two years?

The world is in a pandemic, but the educational system for Black and brown children was in a pandemic way before that. It was already hard for us. Our kids are not getting everything that they need. Trying to navigate education and figure out the best solution for these babies, the leaders of the future, is difficult. We don’t have tutors, we don’t have money, we don’t have resources, we don’t have people we could call. It’s just us, figuring it out day to day and trying to keep our babies alive, healthy and safe.

“I’ve seen this across systems, not just Aspire, where we have these great educators in our schools, who just need support in accessing credential programs,” said Aspire Charter Schools senior special education director Lisa Freccero. “They’re invested in our schools; they want to work with our kids; they want to work in special education.” 

reported special education teacher shortages for the 2021-22 school year. With declines growing , states have rolled out cash incentives to retain and recruit more special needs teachers in recent months.

Facing similar vacancies, Aspire is acting fast to scale up their small grow-your-own program. So far, seven educators across their network of 36 California sites have participated. 

Now in its third year, Aspire’s Education Specialist Intern Sponsorship program creates a pipeline of school volunteers and classroom aides “already in the door,” Freccero said, providing a pathway for uncredentialed staff, predominantly Black and Latino adults — who also reflect the network’s 15,000 students — to stay with the school community.

Aspire staff are hired on as first year teachers at a salary of $56-59,000. Through one-on-one coaching with administrators — including feedback from senior teachers on recorded lessons — specialist interns learn by doing, applying strategies with students in real time, with daily guidance from their senior mentor. 

, Aspire’s Bay Area and Central Valley schools had persistent staff vacancies in special education. The last year saw specialist vacancies grow in their Los Angeles schools, where the Sponsorship program is now being expanded.  

One East Oakland site is operating with three full-time special education aides, about half of their usual team of five to six. Their Bay Area schools have the highest shortages, currently filled by contractors or substitutes, though all regions have vacancies in every special education role — from speech pathologists and specialists/teachers to school psychologists. 

“It’s a high turnover profession… We were trying to solve for that,” Freccero added. “When we talk to them, for the vast majority, [the] barrier was having to either stop their current job or simultaneously figure out a way to pay to go back to school and do a credential program.”

Michelle Ciraulo, a teacher in one of Aspire’s 36 schools in East Oakland, was planning to do just that: save up at least $10,000, while working full-time, to enroll in a credential program. If certified, she’d have a better chance of staying with her caseload of 10th- and 11th-graders and earn higher wages.

“The cost was a hindrance. I wanted to become an ed specialist next year, but I would have probably ended up having to do that with an emergency certification, which you can only do for one year,” she said. “[This] definitely sped up the process.” 

Ciraulo said she is also more in tune with general education teachers who she partners with in an inclusion class. Students with IEPs are assisted in general education classrooms.�� 

The connection between teachers is necessary, she said, to make stronger lesson plans and better support students. The program enabled her to form deeper connections with students, too.

“It was really a big incentive for me to just become a specialist but also to stay at this school site and continue to work with my kids and get to know them really well — and their families,” Ciraulo said.

Colleagues say that the model can also help prevent burnout many career educators experience around their fifth year. After juggling student caseloads, paperwork and learning to teach — often with little feedback or support networks — many feel overwhelmed from year one. Aspire’s model cuts down on learning curves via multiple mentors and gradually-increasing caseloads.

“Where do you think we should go next … What data do you want? What data do you need? What assessment should you use? … It takes a while to get that knowledge,” senior special education teacher Suzanne Williams said. “When you already have somebody right there next to you who has that knowledge, it’s beautiful, and it benefits the students the most.”

A parent of students with disabilities who started out as a volunteer in her childrens’ schools, Williams added that the first three years are typically the hardest for new teachers she’s witnessed in Modesto, a small city southeast of San Francisco. Williams said her mentee Stephanie’s first years were a success because of the Aspire model.

“She didn’t have to guess — she had somebody right there to ask. When she was writing her lesson plan, she was actually writing lesson plans that she was using each and every day […] She was all in 100% from the get go. We gave her a light caseload and then she worked her way up,” Williams said.

Stephanie would record general education teachers’ classes and her own instruction, and the three educators would pour over them in detail, providing and adapting to feedback. And in built-in “dry runs,” Williams roleplayed students as Stephanie practiced lessons. 

The mentorship took out the guesswork that typically comes with being the only, or one few, special education specialists at a site. By the end of the one-year program, Williams said it felt like her mentee had gained  three years of experience.

“She’s not focusing on all the things she needs to learn and needs to be. She already has that mentor right there, working hand in hand […] The person is going into that situation prepared or feeling confident,” Williams told The 74. “A confident teacher brings confidence to the students.”

The , derived from numerous sources that track immigration, details these students’ challenges and their impact on districts. Their number, difficult to ascertain on a national basis, represents a fraction of the 491,000 children under age 18 who arrived at the southern border in that same time period and remained in the country with unresolved immigration status in early 2020, according to RAND. The youngest among them were ineligible for school while some of the oldest never enrolled.

Roughly 75 percent of the children in the RAND study landed in just 10 states, including California, Texas, Florida, New York and Louisiana. Their arrival prompted the need for additional hires: RAND calculated that seven states would need at least 2,000 more teachers and other personnel to maintain student-staff ratios.

The need was even more acute in Los Angeles County and Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston: Each would need 1,000 additional educators, the organization concluded.

RAND researchers said they decided to study this population in part because their numbers have grown in recent years—and because their challenges are unique.

“Their needs are fundamentally different from those of many other immigrant children, and they are part of the future of the United States,” said senior policy researcher Shelly Culbertson. “They also have resilience and hopes and dreams—and by federal law they have a right to a public education.”

Despite a in 1982 that prohibited discrimination against students based on their immigration status, many young newcomers have been unlawfully turned away or shunted into inferior programs by school administrators who fear they will not graduate.

Oliver Torres, senior outreach paralegal at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has fought for the educational rights of newcomer children, said anti-immigration laws proposed and enacted across the country in recent years have had a chilling effect on many families, discouraging their participation in all elements of public life, including school.

Torres, a former English as a second language teacher, said new immigrants are so focused on simply reuniting with their loved ones — especially in the case of children separated from their parents at the border — that education has become less of a priority, a phenomenon he called “heartbreaking.”

Looking back to the years covered in the RAND study, he recalled the case of a 17-year-old boy from Guatemala held for more than six months at the controversial in Florida. The teen, who was only allowed outside for one hour a day, said he was pressured by staff to take medication to quell the emotional outbursts he suffered after being repeatedly told he would be reunited with his father only to see that promise broken. By the time of his release, the boy was too distressed to tend to his education.

“The idea of going to a two-hour night school class for English a couple of times a week seemed overwhelming,” Torres said. “It was such a level of trauma, that it was clearly going to take a significant amount of time to heal. All he wanted was just not to cry every day.”

Two districts serving new arrivals well

The teen’s experience echoed that of many undocumented children who have fanned out across the country in recent years. RAND, in addition to its nationwide view, also homes in on Jefferson Parish Schools in Louisiana and Oakland Unified School District in California, both of which have served these children for years. It lauded each for their admissions processes and for the academic support their immigrant students receive, including referrals for outside assistance.

RAND also praised the districts’ efforts to address students’ social-emotional needs, but administrators from both point to numerous ongoing challenges even prior to the pandemic, which caused a massive drop in enrollment among newly arrived students.

Veronica Garcia-Montejano, principal at Oakland International High School, a campus designed for newcomers, said her concerns for her students expand well beyond academic goals to their fundamental needs, including food and housing. Many are transient, moving between family, friends or the foster care system.

“They have a huge hurdle to overcome in developing that relationship with the person who is caring for them,” she said. “And if you are not an unaccompanied minor but haven’t seen your parent in years, you are in the same situation.”

Many newcomers are pulled into the workforce to manage financial obligations: Some have to pay back the smugglers who brought them to America, send remittances home, support themselves and contribute to their household, Garcia-Montejano said.

Her current students include two brothers, ages 16 and 18, living on their own. They have to balance their studies with earning enough money to pay rent.

“They are all they have,” she said.

During COVID-19, some students have qualified for rent relief but others have less formal agreements and are unable to seek official help, Garcia-Montejano said.

“We all have to assume the students are coming to the classroom with complex trauma, which presents itself in many ways, from overstimulation to withdrawal,” she said. “The most important thing for the adults in the building to do is to begin developing positive relationships with these students.”

Deborah Dantin, principal of Alice Birney Elementary School in Metairie, Louisiana, part of Jefferson Parish Schools, said one of her biggest struggles is in communicating with parents who do not speak English. Roughly 90 percent of her newcomer students and their families speak Spanish.

“We have lots of people on campus who speak Spanish, but it’s not the same as a direct call with a teacher or principal,” Dantin said. “We have someone translating, but it’s complicated, confusing and long.”

The communication barrier extends to the students themselves. Dantin would love to have a Spanish-speaking educator inside every classroom but until then, her school must employ other means to serve these children: Teachers sometimes use supplemental materials in Spanish to give students the support they need to make the leap to English.

And her school also offers dual-language classes for native English speakers and newcomers in younger grades. The offering helps Spanish-speakers read and write in their native tongue, a skill that will help them learn English because literacy is a transferable skill.

‘Don’t think of us as aliens’

Sua Ramos, a 17-year-old senior at Oakland International High School, remembers those early days trying to adapt to a new culture. Ramos, who identifies as non-binary, fled Honduras with their family after sixth grade rather than risk injury or death because of gang-related shootouts, common in their community. It was a difficult transition: they left friends and family behind and could barely utter a word in English.

“It was like I was on a different planet,” Sua said. “I didn’t know what the teacher was teaching. I was so confused. But as I got to know people, they helped me. I learned English little by little.”

RAND, in an extensive, expensive wish list, recommends the federal government improve the tracking of these students and create a records-sharing agreement with the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras similar to the one already in place with Mexico.

It says schools should work closely with local resettlement groups, federal and state agencies to help families access social, medical and legal services — and that the federal government should provide schools with additional funding for these students on a rolling basis as the money often lags their arrival.

RAND’s estimate includes those children who immigrated to the United States between Oct. 1, 2016 and Sept. 30, 2019 and was derived using data from spring 2020, just prior to the pandemic-related school closures that began in mid-March.

It combined three sources of data to formulate an “informed estimate” of where these children live. The first came from the , which had already examined where earlier groups of immigrants settled throughout the country. The second was the , which kept records on where unaccompanied children were placed with sponsors at the state and county level and the third was which gathers data on immigration proceedings throughout the country, collecting records from the departments of Justice and Homeland Security.

RAND found more than three-quarters of children who arrived with their families were under the age of 12 while 74 percent who came without a parent were between 15 and 17 years old.

Excluded from their study are the thousands of new immigrants who have crossed the border in the years since. Though the flow slowed during the pandemic, it skyrocketed upon news of Biden’s election. Persistent crime, political chaos and ongoing economic catastrophe, sometimes made worse by natural disasters, also played a role.

Some who were part of a massive encampment in Del Rio, Texas, have been admitted to the United States in recent weeks. Their arrival came around the same time that America welcomed thousands of newcomers from the Middle East, a trend that is expected to continue: Biden seeks to bring to the country through 2022.

The president just introduced new rules to for undocumented people brought to the United States as children and plans to admit next year, a figure that will no doubt include a sizable number of school-aged newcomers.

Ramos, the 17-year-old student from Oakland, hopes native-born Americans will reconsider old prejudices about the new arrivals.

“I’d ask them to be patient with us,” they said. “It’s not like we are dumb or something. It’s just there’s a language barrier. Give us a chance. Don’t think of us as aliens. We are people just like them who want a better life.”

A lawsuit charging that California has failed to offer equal education to low-income students of color during the pandemic will get its first hearing in state Superior Court on Friday.

The hearing comes roughly five months after a coalition of students, parents and community organizations , claiming these students still lack computers, adequate internet connections and sufficient mental health care 14 months after the pandemic started.

“It’s really surprising to us how little has been done” since the pandemic forced schools into distance learning, said Jesselyn Friley, a staff attorney at Public Counsel, one of the firms that filed the lawsuit. With more than half of the state’s students still in some form of remote learning, she added, California has offered no guidance to districts on how to improve instruction and no method for monitoring students’ progress — or lack thereof.

“We’re essentially holding the state accountable, especially during the COVID crisis. There’s been a lack of responsiveness [more than] a year in,” said Lakisha Young, the co-founder and CEO of Oakland REACH, a parent-led nonprofit that offers enrichment programs to area youth. Oakland REACH is one of the suit’s plaintiffs.

“Plaintiffs … bring this lawsuit on behalf of California students and their families, as well as community organizations that have diverted resources to educate students during the pandemic, in order to hold the State accountable for its refusal to fulfill its constitutional obligation. Plaintiffs seek to ensure that all of the State’s schools be equipped to provide students with the remote tools, connectivity and programming to provide the basic education that is their fundamental right under the California Constitution,” the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction for immediate relief as well as long-term changes to avoid a return to the system that was in place pre-pandemic.

“We know that even prior to COVID, there were gaps in education,” said Marianna Hernandez, prevention manager at Community Coalition, another plaintiff. The South Los Angeles-based nonprofit trains leaders to help improve racial and economic justice in the city. Karen Bass, who is now a U.S. representative in the state’s 37th district, formed the group.

“We’ve talked about how the state has failed low-income students of color for a long time,” Friley said. “People are fed up.”

The lawsuit lists 15 students as plaintiffs, including a kindergartner, a high school senior taking AP classes and several children with disabilities. Named as defendants are the state, its Board of Education, its Department of Education and state Superintendent Tony Thurmond.

The state did not respond to numerous requests by The 74 for comment. But in a quoted by the , Thurmond said: “There is no question that this pandemic has disproportionately impacted those who have been made vulnerable by historic and systemic inequities. That is why, from Day One of this public health crisis, I have charged my team to maintain an ongoing and urgent focus on addressing the numerous access and opportunity gaps that impact student learning.”

Friley said Friday’s session in Alameda Superior Court will be the first time a judge will hear arguments in the case.

Since remote learning started, some low-income students have been without computers and reliable internet connectivity, Friley said. Many have faced shortened school days that don’t compare to the instruction offered to students in wealthier districts, she added. There have also been growing mental health issues, higher dropout rates and a decline in students seeking a postsecondary education.

As of December, 11 of the state’s top 25 school districts were still distributing devices to families, the lawsuit charges. In the suit, one of the parents, referred to as Kelly R., said that when the Los Angeles Unified School District went remote, “Both of my children’s teachers did not have reliable internet, so my children were only receiving 30-40 minutes of instruction a couple of times each week.”

In October, Thurmond estimated that were still without adequate computers or internet connectivity to successfully participate in distance learning.

Beyond the immediate demands of the lawsuit, the coalition is asking the state to basically retool its education system to try new methods that will better serve low-income students of color. Both Oakland REACH and Community Coalition point to programs they started in the past year, with hopes that these efforts can be incorporated into school districts statewide.

Oakland REACH offered online enrichment for students, created a preschool literacy program and hired 19 liaisons to work with local families. “We’ve seen kids increase reading levels and reading scores,” said Young. “Parents are more supportive and engaged. It’s become a real model that is responsive to the needs of families.”

The program, called the , now serves 200 families and is expected to reach 1,000 this summer. It will be expanded to six Oakland schools this fall thanks to a $1 million grant from the Oakland district, Young said.

The Community Coalition hired tutors and, with a local YMCA, created in-person learning pods with 100 laptops on site. The effort accommodated students’ English language proficiency, special education needs and the technology requirements, Hernandez said.

On May 24, The L.A. district announced that it would continue to offer a remote learning option for students next year. Friley said the suit is neutral on whether virtual instruction is necessary, but “if you are offering remote, offer something comparable.”

The lawsuit was filed well before the state decided to allocate to schools, so Friley said that money wasn’t a factor in the request for the injunction. But Young said state attorneys mentioned the funding in a letter they sent to the plaintiffs asking them to withdraw the suit. The plaintiffs refused.

“It’s great to have money and resources, but money doesn’t change a mindset. It won’t work without a plan,” Young said.

Ana Carpio, a mom of three, lost her restaurant job last year as Oakland and the Bay Area went into lockdown, forcing restaurants to close or drastically reduce their hours. Carpio was the primary income-earner in her household, which at the time included her 18-year-old son, 10-year-old daughter and newborn granddaughter. Carpio’s older daughter, who normally would have been able to help out financially, wasn’t able to work because she had just given birth.

Not knowing where to turn, Carpio got help from a place she hadn’t expected: her younger daughter’s elementary school, Bridges Academy at Melrose. She received $500 from the school last April and an additional $250 payment in June, which she put toward rent and groceries.

“It’s like it fell from heaven,” said Carpio, who was unemployed for five months. “It happened during a really critical time when I wasn’t working, so it was very helpful.”

Over the past year, some schools in Oakland have stepped into a role that most didn’t have before the pandemic: fund-raising and providing cash payments to struggling families. What began as emergency relief for mainly newcomer and immigrant families who weren’t eligible for federal stimulus payments has continued for more than a year. Schools are helping to pay rent, housing deposits, phone bills and more for families in Oakland that are still recovering from the economic and health impacts of COVID-19.

“If the family is in distress, the student cannot learn,” said Anita Iverson-Comelo, the principal of Bridges Academy at Melrose, located in East Oakland. “It’s hard for us to turn our backs when families are on the phone crying.”

When school buildings shuttered a year ago, teachers and school staff knew it would impact far more than just their students’ education, and started conducting wellness checks — making phone calls to students’ homes to ask what families needed: Did they have food at home? Was their housing situation stable? Has there been a loss of income? How about internet access? Was everyone healthy?

Alyssa Baldocchi, who teaches humanities to newcomer students — immigrants who have been in the country for fewer than three years — at Elmhurst United Middle School, would often connect with students and their families over Instagram because they didn’t have phone service. Baldocchi, along with fellow teacher Marisa Mills, to collect donations to help support their immigrant students and families.

Around the same time, Iverson-Comelo decided to donate her stimulus check to one of her students whose father had just died. She suggested to some of her colleagues that they do the same with their stimulus funds, and soon it became a larger campaign when Iverson-Comelo’s husband created a website, , to receive donations from the public.

To date, in Oakland, including Elmhurst and Bridges Academy, have raised and distributed more than $250,000 to families during the pandemic.

By the end of this school year, Elmhurst Principal Kilian Betlach expects that his school alone will have given away $25,000 to at least 50 families, in $400 grants. He is anticipating making another round of $400 payments in May.

The pandemic, said Betlach, has brought into focus how critical schools are for students and their communities, beyond education: Schools provide meals, a safe place for youth to be during the day and child care in the early mornings and late afternoons. Some schools in Oakland have campus health clinics, dental vans that visit periodically, food pantries and clothes closets.

“If we want to serve kids, we need to wrap around all the needs that they and their families come with,” Betlach said. “That shouldn’t be perceived as something that’s extra, but being in service of a community.”

Iverson-Comelo estimates that Bridges Academy has distributed $65,000 to its families this year. The school keeps a spreadsheet of families who need money, and when donations come in, they provide checks in varying amounts, depending on the family’s expenses and income. Some families get $500 a month for several months to help pay their bills, while others may need a one-time payment of $1,500 to put down a rental deposit.

Mirian Obando Rojas, whose third-grader attends Bridges Academy, used to clean houses with a friend before everything shut down. At the same time, her husband, a roofer, had his hours reduced to two or three days a week, Rojas said.

The family received money from the school last April, June, December and February, and will get $500 a month from March through May of this year.

“I was able to pay my bills, rent, the telephone bill, and buy diapers for my little ones as well,” said Rojas, who also has 2-year-old twins.

Iverson-Comelo said it makes sense for schools with large newcomer populations to take on this role. Some recent immigrants may not qualify for federal stimulus payments, and language barriers may make it more difficult for them to access services. Even if government aid forms are available in Spanish or other languages, she said, “people still need literacy skills to navigate the form.”

Bridges Academy serves about 430 students, and 80 percent are learning English. About 20 percent of the students are newcomers, one of the highest percentages in OUSD elementary schools, Iverson-Comelo said.

Teachers and other school workers, added Baldocchi, are often the first point of government contact for families and have a responsibility to connect them with help.

“Families that are still struggling the most are the ones we’ve seen hit really hard with COVID,” Baldocchi said. “Those families tend to have been out of work for a while, and a lot of their jobs don’t allow for paid sick leave or anything like that.”

Bridges Academy partners with the Oakland Public Education Fund and Community Check Cashing, a Fruitvale nonprofit organization. The funds that Bridges Academy raises go to the Oakland Public Education Fund, which then writes a check for the full amount to Community Check Cashing, which disperses individual checks to families from a list that the school provides. Parents like Carpio can then receive the funds by going to Community Check Cashing and showing an ID.

Oakland Unified schools began to reopen for in-person learning on March 30, but Principal Betlach of Elmhurst United said that as long as the school community is able to raise money and be supported by the Oakland Public Education Fund, they’ll continue to help families with cash. Many families were struggling before last March, he noted, and the pandemic just exacerbated that.

“The need for huge portions of our community has gone away. But that doesn’t mean that some of the economic opportunities that were lost to the pandemic are magically back, or that folks are going to be able to access them again,” he said. “These needs are going to remain for a long time, and they pre-dated COVID.”

Members of the Oakland Education Association authorized a strike by a vote of 2,206 to 105, the union announced last week. A fact-finding report was not due to be issued until Friday, so a potential strike probably could not be launched until after Presidents Day.

Coming so soon on the heels of the Los Angeles teacher strike, comparisons are inevitable. Similarities in bargaining issues and messaging will be obvious. But there are important differences, too.

When you have 32,000 teachers on strike in the nation’s second-largest school district — and a media capital, at that — it will draw massive attention. Oakland will also draw attention, but much of it as a by-product of the Los Angeles teacher strike and the red state walkouts of 2018.

With 3,000 active members, the Oakland teachers union is , and it’s not even the largest in the Bay Area. We can expect a greatly diminished media presence relative to L.A.

We will see familiar tactics. The Oakland union to members, just as the L.A. union did. Its statewide parent union, the California Teachers Association, will support solidarity actions Friday across the state to draw attention to Oakland. There are also plans to stage informational picketing in other school districts on the second day of a strike.

Among the ranks of the union leadership are officers who are even more militant than those in L.A. There will be lots of messaging about privatizers and corporations in one of the most politically liberal areas of the nation. However, Oakland lacks a convenient individual target for that messaging.

Whereas the L.A. Unified School District is led by Austin Beutner, a white, male public education neophyte with a corporate background, Oakland Unified is led by , an African-American female who attended Oakland public schools and has spent her entire career working for the district, first as a teacher. She has a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of California, Berkeley. She will not get the Beutner treatment from the union.

As negotiations developed in Los Angeles, class size reduction emerged as the primary issue and salary increases diminished in importance. Teacher pay lost during the strike amounted to , which the district offered well before the strike was called.

In Oakland, these two issues are reversed. The union always wants to reduce class sizes, but the major sticking point is pay. The union says it wants , while the district has offered 5 percent. That’s a tremendous gap to bridge. The district’s ability to do so is another bone of contention.

As in L.A., Oakland Unified is because of a structural deficit. And as in L.A., the union claims the district is mismanaging funds and hoarding reserves.

The difference is that Oakland Unified is suffering a hangover from a previous state takeover, which occurred in 2003 and lasted until 2009. The district is still repaying a $100 million loan from that period.

Despite the differences, the end of an Oakland teacher strike will look substantially the same as the end of the L.A. teacher strike. Whatever compromises are made will be paid for with “” — a phrase used by L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti to describe putting obligations in the contract for which there are no funds currently available.

A strong economy may keep such commitments from biting us in the future, but it is always good advice to look before you leap.