Phi Delta Kappan

To enable more students, especially minorities and those from low-income homes — to reach and achieve in college, schools must lay a solid foundation earlier. That means going beyond sloganeering and applying the cosmetics of a college-going culture to a school: naming classrooms after the college attended by the teacher or having students wear the sweatshirts of their favorite colleges on a given day. Nice gestures, but they hardly replace a rigorous curriculum from kindergarten on up that will prepare graduates with the math and writing skills they’ll need to be successful.

Children born into poverty are unlikely to escape it, even if they have better opportunities through education, according to a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University; a group of nine of the biggest California school districts has used its waiver from NCLB requirements to design its own school quality improvement system.

There is growing evidence of successful strategies to help keep students from disadvantaged backgrounds motivated to persist in school and succeed in college. These strategies draw from scientifically validated theory and research and they typically involve simple, yet careful, implementation techniques and so educators can expect them to be more precise and specific, saving educator’s time and effort in the trial and error of applying less useful techniques in their classrooms.

Promise programs are place-based scholarships, generally tied to a city or school district, offering near-universal access to all living in the “place.” While Promise programs share some characteristics with other scholarship programs, they’re unique because they seek to change communities and schools. Underlying such promise programs is the belief that having access to a guaranteed college scholarship will encourage students to remain in schools, encourage families to remain in a community, and change how educators work with students. This article focuses on the El Dorado Promise in El Dorado, Ark., which began in 2007. From analyzing student data and interviewing educators, the authors learned that the Promise did lead to several changes in the district: enrollment increased; student learning improved; discussions of college permeated the district from kindergarten onward; expectations for all students rose; and enrollment in advanced coursework increased for all students.

Four New Jersey school districts worked together to increase student achievement by applying a number of strategies focused on getting traditionally underrepresented students to take more AP courses. The districts are members of the New Jersey Network of Superintendents (NJNS), comprising 15 superintendents who work together to develop systemwide approaches to educational equity. Contrary to some parents’ expectations, placing more students into AP courses did not result in their being watered down nor in test score declines overall. All four districts reported success in increasing access without significantly affecting average scores. Nonetheless, challenges persist, including ensuring access to AP classes is and continues to be equitable.

This article is a cross-section of stories of three young men navigating the expectations of a school with a 100% college admissions goal. Similar to their classmates, none of these male teens had a parent who had attended college. In addition, each of them had at one point in their high school lives declared that they would be dropping out of high school. Their stories bring to light privileged assumptions and hidden struggles about what it takes for seniors in a low-income district to be college-bound and, in doing so, prove themselves worthy of public recognition.

Early college high school models are designed to encourage and assist traditionally underrepresented groups of students — low income, Latino, and African-American — to persist in and graduate from high school while earning college credit. Some of the models target high school dropouts, with the aim of helping them acquire the education and training that could lead to better outcomes. The authors review and discuss several such early college designs. By locating in or near a college campus, early colleges first introduce, gradually expose, and then immerse students in the college experience. These models have garnered support from the philanthropic community, which has helped the early college models spread and grow.

Early colleges are intended to serve students from populations typically underrepresented in college and to prepare those students with the academic skills and dispositions to succeed in college. Another important attribute of early colleges is that they help students earn college credit during their high school years. Many such early colleges are located on college campuses. The author uses the story of a once wayward youth to illustrate that early colleges can work.

The challenges for increasing opportunities and college access for black students typically focus on the traditional barriers related to academic preparation, the racial gap in standardized test scores, and dropping out of high school. While these challenges remain, new and emerging challenges to college access are also important to discuss. They involve taking a closer look at the diversity and heterogeneity within the black population as well as closely examining the push to make state schools more elite.

This study finds that schools are poorly prepared to counsel students about community college certificate or associate degree programs. Instead the mantra of college for all continues to encourage youth to spend time and money on bachelor’s degrees, for which many students are not prepared to do well. Teachers desire more information on college and career options for their low-performing and disengaged students, and the authors show that community colleges offer many college and career opportunities that can serve these students.

The 50th anniversary of the creation of Foxfire magazine and the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center merits the question of how that innovative program of teaching and learning influences education today. Despite its troubled history, the program continues to exist and won the 2015 Georgia Governor’s Awards for the Arts and Humanities for its sustained contributions to the welfare of schools and communities. The author maintains that Foxfire has benefited its local community, which was part of its original intention, and that its influence is also visible in many of today’s current activity-centered programs even if many of today’s educators don’t credit it or even know its name.

The Common Core State Standards for mathematics promote ideals about learning mathematics by providing specific standards focused on conceptual understanding and incorporating practices in which students must participate to develop conceptual understanding. Thus, how we define learning is pivotal because our current definition isn’t aligned with how we teach and assess. But how do we reconcile the two? What does this look like? And what does this imply about how we assess learning?

In many primary classrooms, the prospect of addressing standards threatens to rob young children of the joy of learning. Teachers who feel pressed to move students of all backgrounds toward mastery of increasingly complex standards may abandon rich curriculum and move toward isolated “skill drills.” This may be counterproductive. The authors chronicle how several teachers found that by raising the authenticity of curriculum and responsiveness of instruction they were better positioned to meet the needs of their diverse learners, addressing multiple standards in an integrative fashion in the process.

Many teachers are turning to online professional development to meet their learning needs, but the vast array of available opportunities may be overwhelming. This article provides a framework for making sense of common online teacher learning opportunities. It also suggests situations where online professional development may be most useful and presents a challenge for educators to consider when engaging in online learning.

While in the process of designing a graduate course on education policy the author learns that so many students once were classroom teachers, felt called to it, but were disillusioned by what they found in schools and thus sought refuge in education policy. Schools are driving out millennials or discouraging them from entering in the first place. We should help remedy that by providing teachers with more support through giving them time and an apparatus to help them improve if we find their performance lacking. We also should stop putting them at the epicenter of the nation’s education woes.

Educators are not required to be certain that abuse or neglect is occurring before reporting their concerns. Within the professional setting, if you reasonably suspect or have good reason to believe a child is being abused or neglected, you have an obligation to report it to officials. Reports should be made to local child protective service, law enforcement, and school administrators. Most school policies provide specific information on how to file a report with local child protective services.

The PDK Book Club selection for March is Coherence: The Right Drivers in Action for Schools, Districts, and Systems by Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn (Corwin, 2015). PDK members are eligible for discounted access to JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

The author, a mother of children in the St. Paul (Minn.) Public Schools says teachers aren’t fair in their assessment of the behavior of black children in the district’s schools.