College decisions used to depend mostly on an institution’s academic reputation and its social life. Today, many other factors influence a prospective student’s thinking. We’ve gathered those into this interactive College Welcome Guide, to help you assess how receptive colleges are to students from a variety of backgrounds, and to map state laws that affect college students.

If you have a question about the information here, or would like to share your perspective with us, email us at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

The table above has data for more than 4,000 colleges and universities. You can explore this data by clicking the buttons at the top of the table. After selecting a  category, enter the name of a college or university in the search bar. The table resets when the data type is changed, so if you change the category, you need to enter the college name again. If you search for a college that shares its name with other colleges, only one of them will show up in the table. You can view the data for each of them by clicking on the page arrows in the bottom center of the table.

Colored dots under some college names indicate whether the institution is religiously affiliated and/or serves a significant portion of particular types of students, including those who are Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Indigenous. We also mark institutions that are in rural places or serve students from those areas. A key at the bottom of the table describes what each colored dot represents.

The map below shows laws and policies that affect students, across nine categories in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. 

You can explore categories by clicking on the buttons. (By default, the map shows which states restrict the teaching of critical race theory, or CRT, in higher education.) Click on any state to see additional information for particular categories. The sources of information for each category are noted at the bottom of the map, and linked so you can learn more.

Among other things, these maps show whether states offer resident tuition or free tuition to veterans even if they aren’t using GI Bill benefits. (The federal government requires that veterans qualify for in-state tuition if they’re on the GI Bill, regardless of where they live.)

In addition to constraining or banning the use of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, some states have ordered that public universities disclose how much they spend on DEI efforts — a step that has historically served as a precursor for legislatures to cut public institutions’ budgets by those amounts.

Anti-trans laws shown here are those passed since 2022 and include measures restricting trans athletes or medical procedures for people including those of college age.

State laws allowing or restricting the use of student IDs to vote can also affect students. In Georgia, for example, students at public universities can use a student ID to vote, but those at private universities – including several historically Black institutions – cannot. 

LGBTQ+ Profile scores from the Movement Advancement Project reflect the proportion of adults in a state who are LGBTQ+ and state policies and laws around LGBTQ+ issues.

In addition to the reproductive rights laws listed in our maps, total or near-total abortion bans have been signed into law but are so far enjoined by courts in these states: Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Prospective students might also care about how likely they are to succeed at a given college. The graphic below shows graduation rates, both for the entire student body and broken out by race or ethnicity, and you can compare up to five colleges on any of these measures. 

Choose a category from the dropdown at the top of the graphic and then enter a college or university in the search bar; institution names will appear as you begin to type.

You can learn more about all our data sources here or download the data here.

Design and development by Fazil Khan

Additional reporting by Meredith Kolodner, Jon Marcus, Olivia Sanchez, Amanda Chen and Sarah Butrymowicz

Illustration by Camilla Forte

The post Beyond the Rankings: The College Welcome Guide appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Since the onset of the pandemic three years ago, college enrollment has fallen by more than 1 million students. Fewer high school graduates are now going straight to college, and there is growing skepticism across the country about the long-term value of a college education.

As well-founded as concerns about the rising cost of college might be, however, the evidence suggests that a college degree is just as valuable as ever. Higher education remains a gateway to economic opportunity, creating pathways to first jobs, promotions, raises and careers.

To continue to be engines of social mobility for generations to come, colleges must find ways to attract an increasingly diverse population of learners and provide them with the resources they need to pursue their educations.

Those who attend college are significantly more likely to experience upward mobility than those who do not attend. With median earnings of $2.3 million over a lifetime, bachelor’s degree-holders earn 74 percent more than those with only a high school diploma. They account for 36 percent of total employment.

But a college degree doesn’t just change the life of the graduate. When a first-generation college student earns a degree, it’s the beginning of a sprawling domino effect that can transform entire communities. Ensuring that individuals have the support they need to make their way to and through higher education has an impact that spans generations.

Higher education remains a gateway to economic opportunity, creating pathways to first jobs, promotions, raises and careers.

In many ways, my own story is proof of the multigenerational benefits of a college education. When my father’s parents agreed to buy him a one-way plane ticket to the United States from India, they did so with the understanding that he would attend college. When he returned to India three years later to enter an arranged marriage with my mother, he was well on his way to a degree.

My mother had a very different experience with higher education. She already had a college degree from India, but she soon discovered that the credentials she had worked so hard to attain there were not as valuable in the U.S. labor market. So she went back to school, this time to an American community college, where she earned a degree in information technology.

Related: A boost for Chicago’s neediest students

That degree got her an entry-level job at a local company, where she worked for nearly 30 years.

My parents’ college journeys shaped my own in important ways. Knowing the sacrifices they made by leaving their families behind and navigating an unfamiliar system of education and employment instilled in me a deep appreciation of the promises and perils of higher education.

Their hard work also meant that I had access to even greater opportunities than they had.

My sister and I are both examples of the ripple effect of a college education on later generations. Research shows that children of college-educated parents are far more likely to pursue and complete an undergraduate degree than learners whose parents never attended college.

The same goes for older siblings, with a 2019 study finding that when an older brother or sister goes to college, it substantially increases the enrollment rate of their younger siblings. The study described an older sibling’s college journey as a “high-touch intervention” that provides inspiration and guidance.

Of course, being the first in a family to go to college is a daunting task. First-generation students face far too many barriers to their success. The transition can be a lonely and overwhelming experience. They lack institutional knowledge that students whose parents went to college rely on to guide them to and through school.

Not surprisingly, the graduation rate for first-generation students at open-admission schools, where the vast majority of these learners enroll, is just 21 percent. In contrast, the graduation rate for students who have at least one parent with a college degree is 44.1 percent.

Today, one-third of undergraduates — about five million students — are first-generation, and that number is going to increase in the coming years, meaning that the need to better serve these learners will only become more urgent.

The good news is that it is no longer a mystery which resources and interventions have the most impact on helping first-generation students and other nontraditional learners enroll in and graduate from college.

Related: STUDENT VOICES: ‘Dreamers’ like us need our own resource centers on college campuses

Supporting first-generation students requires a holistic approach that combines financial, academic and personal support to guide students to make the right decisions about their educations and ensure they have the resources to reach their goals.

These students often need academic advising, personalized student coaching, mentorship programs, intensive tutoring, career planning and financial assistance.

To combat rising income, housing and food insecurity, a growing number of institutions are providing “one-stop” services to connect students to community and public resources such as transportation assistance, child care centers, legal aid services and housing and other basic needs support.

In an environment where degree skepticism is on the rise and the value of a college education has become a politically polarizing question, it can become all too easy for us to focus on reasons why college might not be worth it. But the data — and our own lived experiences — tell us that college success translates into a positive impact not only in the short term but for generations yet to come.

Aneesh Sohoni is CEO of One Million Degrees in Chicago, a leading provider of wraparound services to community college students

This story about the benefits of a college education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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In Nevada, just 4 percent of students who took a career-oriented science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) course in the 2019-20 school year — 88 students total — were Black, even though Black students make up more than 11 percent of the state’s public school enrollment.

Only 16 Hispanic students in Alabama took more than one information technology class — less than 1 percent of all those who did so. Meanwhile, Hispanic students accounted for 9 percent of the state’s K-12 students.

Those statistics, released for the first time as part of new federal data on student enrollment in career and technical programs, help paint a picture of a school system in which Black and Hispanic students benefit less often from classes connected to higher-paying careers and college degrees than their white peers. Despite years of work by some educators and advocates to increase equity in career and technical education, deep disparities remain. White students are more likely than Black and Hispanic students to take classes in fields such as manufacturing, information technology and STEM, while Black students are more likely to take courses in hospitality and tourism.

The findings provide further evidence of a trend identified last year by a Hechinger Report/Associated Press analysis of data gathered from 40 states that revealed a racial divide in career and technical education, or CTE.

“It shows that we have a lot of work to do,” said Alisha Hyslop, senior director of public policy for the nonprofit Association for Career and Technical Education. “There are a lot of historical challenges to overcome in how Black students, in particular, interface with CTE dating back decades to when there was segregation in programs.”

Related: How career and technical education shuts out Black and Latino students from high-paying professions

In recent years, career and technical education has worked to shed its reputation as a dumping ground for students — too often those of color — who are not seen as college material. Once limited primarily to classes such as auto shop and construction, the programs have broadened to include courses designed to prepare students for higher education and jobs in fields like engineering and health care, and have become more attractive to white and wealthy students. Yet CTE advocates have long had concerns — but little proof — about inequities that lie beneath the surface.

Previously, the Department of Education only reported enrollment in CTE career areas by gender. The 2018 reauthorization of the federal law that governs career and technical education mandated racial data be reported as well.

The newly released data includes information on all secondary students who take a course in a career area, as well as those who concentrate in that field by taking at least two classes in the subject. The numbers suggest that white students reach this advanced level of study more often than their Black and Hispanic peers, with the gaps in attainment being particularly acute in certain fields, including manufacturing and STEM.

Without this information, state and local administrators might not know which programs have problems — or how to start fixing them, Hyslop said. “You don’t know what interventions to offer unless you really dig into the data and then start asking questions about why it looks this way,” she said. “Is it a career guidance issue? Is it entry requirements into these high-level CTE programs that are keeping students out? Or lack of transportation?”

Education officials in Nevada and Alabama say they are trying to eliminate these disparities. Allegra Demerjian, a spokesperson for Nevada’s education department, said that the state has begun to use the new data to provide increased guidance to districts and will require programs that receive federal grant money for career and technical education to report how they are promoting equity.

But expanding access to STEM is particularly difficult, Demerjian noted, as finding qualified teachers can be a challenge and courses sometimes require expensive equipment. Still, she said, Black student participation in STEM classes ticked up slightly, to 5 percent, in the most recent school year.

Alabama officials said they face similar obstacles in expanding access to STEM and information technology. The state tried to address the issue in 2017 with an advisory council to the governor that focused on the problem and a 2019 law that requires all public schools in the state offer computer science classes, said Jimmy Hull, assistant state superintendent.

Related: Revamped and rigorous, technical education is ready to be taken seriously

Even states that have been working for years to improve equity in career and technical education often have a long way to go. In Delaware, for instance, in 2015, state administrators began disaggregating enrollment data by race and started working directly with schools to help analyze their numbers and develop plans for improvement, according to Luke Rhine, the state’s director of career and technical education and STEM initiatives. By now, they’ve worked with most districts in the state.

But white students were still twice as likely to concentrate in STEM as both Black students and Hispanic students according to the federal data. Meanwhile, white students accounted for less than a third of students concentrating in hospitality, while Black students made up 44 percent. Statewide, 43 percent of students were white and 30 percent Black.

“It shows that we have a lot of work to do. There are a lot of historical challenges to overcome in how Black students, in particular, interface with CTE dating back decades to when there was segregation in programs.”

Alisha Hyslop, senior director of public policy for the nonprofit Association for Career and Technical Education

Rhine said that the state has seen improvements, but not universally. “Schools that are committed to elevating student voices and seeking to understand barriers are moving the needle,” he said. “We have not seen the same movement in every school.”

Racial gaps in CTE can be a particularly complex problem to solve, Rhine added, noting there are often multiple explanations for inequities, including limited access to certain courses in some schools and a failure to make all students feel included.

“The hardest part in engaging school districts is just helping them find a place to start,” he said. “Once it starts and they find success, they’re going to continue to build on that.”

Explore the data for course enrollment and concentrators for yourself.

This story about CTE was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post First nationwide look at racial breakdown of career education confirms deep divides appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

When Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani was 13, her mother died before she could ask her about the changes her body would soon be going through. She was introduced to sex education during a required course in high school. To discourage premarital sex, the instructor offered a student a stick of gum. Then she chewed it, and asked whether the student still wanted it.

At the end of the lesson, the instructor offered students a mint to symbolize a “commit-mint” that they would not have sex before marriage.

Eskamani did not take a mint. Instead, at 18, she volunteered for Planned Parenthood. She was eventually hired and became the senior director of public affairs and communications across 22 counties in Florida. 

In 2018, she won a seat in the Florida House of Representatives — on a platform that included improving public education — and has been a vocal supporter of reproductive and sexual health education. During the last Florida legislative session, she was one of the lawmakers who fought to water down a bill that would have required parental consent for students to receive sex education. The version signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis requires school districts to inform parents about the curriculum through links on the district’s homepage and give them  a chance to opt out.

“I voted against [the original bill] because this is an insult to the needs of our young people,” she said. “Not every kid has engaged parents, and the reality is this is essential information for the health and well-being of young people.”

The politics around sex education are heating up in several states.

In 2020, legislators in Washington faced a backlash after approving a bill, without Republican support, that required schools to teach sex education to students at every grade level. A petition forced the issue onto the ballot, where it was approved by voters. In Utah, a bill originally designed to ensure that sex education curriculum included information about sexual consent was revised several times before failing in the House early this year.

In both 2019 and 2020, the Mississippi House of Representatives tried and failed to make sex education more comprehensive in the state’s public schools. A 2019 bill would have required all local school boards to implement education that is medically accurate and age-appropriate, while a 2020 bill would have required the state department of education to update a curriculum list every five years with evidence-based, medically accurate and age-appropriate materials.

At the same time, experts worry some states and districts aren’t paying enough attention to sex education, which could contribute to existing disparities in access. Teen pregnancy rates are down — the CDC says evidence suggests more teens are abstaining from sex or using birth control, although the rates of teen pregnancy vary widely by racial and ethnic group — and the pandemic has sidelined the topic as districts scramble to reopen safely and make up for learning losses.

“School districts who are well-funded and can prioritize sex ed may choose to do it,” said Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at State Innovation Exchange, a group that collaborates with legislators on public policy. “There’s a disparity around the access young people of color, LGBTQ and rural young people have with how their school systems are funded.”

The discussion of LGBTQ individuals in sex education is one of the reasons why it is so highly politicized, and experts say the culture wars have hurt the quality of many sex education programs in public schools.

In Louisiana and Oklahoma, laws passed between 2010 and 2014 that regulate sex education  either prohibit or limit the discussion of homosexuality. In the case of Oklahoma, schools are required to teach that “engaging in homosexual activity, promiscuous sexual activity, intravenous drug use or contact with contaminated blood prod­ucts is now known to be primarily responsible for contact with the AIDS virus.” Of the 39 states that require information on abstinence to be provided, 28 say abstinence must be stressed, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group focused on sexual and reproductive health. 

For over 30 years, Gayle Ruzicka has been part of the Utah Eagle Forum, where she is now a leader. The group, a chapter of the national Eagle Forum, which was created in 1975 to oppose the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, is a vocal supporter of pro-life policies. It backed a recent law  that would ban most abortions in Utah (which would take effect if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade), and regulations restricting what can be taught in sex education curriculums, such as consent and emergency contraception.

“Here in Utah we have always stayed away from comprehensive sex education,” she said. “It’s not just Eagle Forum, it’s a community and state [value] that we pass laws on a legislative level to protect children from comprehensive sex education.”

Ruzicka said when it comes to education, parents should always be in charge and are the only ones who can teach family values. She cites this as the reason why Utah is an abstinence- based, opt-in state.

“If you teach children comprehensive sex ed, you’re basically telling them it’s OK to have sex outside of marriage,” she said. “Just like we teach them to say no to drugs, we teach them to say no to sex.”

Most advocates of accessible, comprehensive sex education argue that sex ed has less to do with sex itself — or politics — than with physical, emotional and social learning. Driver likens sex education to core subjects such as math or science. She said foundational pieces need to be set before moving on to more complex situations. “You wouldn’t start a kindergartner off with trigonometry,” she said. “Where we have failed is we wait [to teach sex education] until very late and then oftentimes make it an elective.”

Related: It’s not about sex — Teaching young children where babies come from (and other stuff)

Driver said when she was teaching college students, some of them had never learned about consent, contraception, how their bodies worked or how to manage relationships. She has taught at institutions in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, and said this situation was not unique to any location.

Advocates for Youth, a group that works to advance  sex education, defines a comprehensive sex education as “a planned, sequential K-12 curriculum that is part of a comprehensive school health education approach which addresses age-appropriate physical, mental, emotional and social dimensions of human sexuality.” The program should be inclusive, medically accurate and culturally responsive, according to Driver.

States that do have comprehensive health education requirements, and that have allocated funding for them, still struggle to implement the standards fully. In Washington, until the passage of the recent bill, how sex education was taught was still largely left to local control. Individual districts could choose to teach comprehensive sex education, teach some, or not teach it at all,  according to Washington state Rep. Monica Stonier.

“I don’t believe this is a funding issue,” she said. “Whether or not a school district wanted to adopt a sex ed curriculum had more to do with the pushback they were going to get back from the community.”

Opponents of Washington’s bill disagreed with the inclusion of LGBTQ information in the curriculum, Stonier said.

“They really struggled with the idea of schools teaching what their parents should be teaching their kids — not something I disagree with,” Stonier said. “I just know from being an educator for so long that many kids don’t have access to a family that would provide them with life-saving health information like this.”

In Florida, district school boards have complete authority over their sex education policies, which range from abstinence-only to comprehensive curricula.

Florida state statutes require abstinence and consequences of teenage pregnancy to be stressed in all sex education programs. But Broward County’s curriculum is comprehensive, which it defines as providing students with “knowledge about abstinence, human development, contraception, [sexually transmitted infection] and HIV/AIDS prevention, healthy relationships and responsible decision-making.” The curriculum is also required to be medically accurate and nondiscriminatory against individuals based on sexual orientation.

Next door, in Miami-Dade County, sex education policies are not as clear. In 2018, the Board of County Commissioners adopted a resolution in support of the Getting 2 Zero initiative. The main goal was to reduce HIV and AIDS cases in Miami-Dade County. The changes included ensuring sex education is age-appropriate and stresses information on HIV and STDs.

Jennifer Lara, 26, a former student at Miami-Dade public schools, remembers students being divided by gender so the girls could learn about menstruation. Female students also pretended to be pregnant, using a balloon stuffed under their clothes, then raised flour-sack babies.

“They don’t teach you how to have a connection to your body,” she said. “Thankfully we have the internet — a lot of [my sex education] was self-taught.”

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen moms in school

Leslie Gomez-Gonzalez, 22, another former student at Miami-Dade public schools, said during a reproductive health lesson in elementary school, the teacher stopped teaching altogether when a male student asked what semen is.

“I feel like I was educated by the media more than anything,” she said. “It is so heavily saturated with sexual [images], and we’re not guided through them and what they mean.”

Erika Moen is a cartoonist and comic book creator whose content focuses on sex and sex positivity. In college, she said, she was asked frequently how her relationship with a same-sex partner worked. She realized people genuinely had no idea how two women could have sex, and she saw comics as a powerful tool for education.

Moen spent her childhood and early adolescence terrified of men because of what her mother told her. “I was taught that sex is something that will be done to you whether you want to or not, and men cannot help themselves,” she said. In high school she saw sexually active friends in healthy relationships, and began educating herself about it.

“When I started to learn otherwise, that’s when I became a sex nerd,” she said.

“Without sex education and only fear-based, abstinence-only education, it puts you in a position where you make choices out of ignorance, and that can be dangerous and traumatic,” she said. “Sex ed is fundamental for people to make the right decisions for themselves about what kind of experiences they want to have, and give them a vocabulary so if they’re not OK with something, they can say something about it and change what’s happening.”

This story about sex education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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In July the Board of Regents at the University of Wisconsin convened to finalize the budget for the 2021-22 academic year. The Covid-19 pandemic had walloped the system, leading to a net loss of nearly $170 million as of spring 2021. Weeks before, a new state budget had freed the regents to let tuition rise for the first time in nearly a decade. State experts thought the system risked falling further behind. The time seemed to be right for a tuition hike.

“It’s a bit of a perfect storm for these institutions,” said Jason Stein, research director of the Wisconsin Policy Forum. “They have state funding that has not kept up with inflation, they have a tuition freeze that has been going for eight years. They have enrollment loss, and then they have Covid-19.”

Instead, the regents approved a budget that left tuition at 2013 levels.

Amid a broken year, colleges have faced pressure to reduce tuition, and dozens, like Wisconsin’s, even extended tuition freezes into the fall of 2021 These include Georgia’s and New York’s state systems, along with a handful of private colleges such as Texas Christian University and Butler University.

But these freezes are misleading, as the actual costs of college can actually increase for some students who may rely on financial aid to attend. Historically, freezing tuition offers marginal relief to low-income families while giving the greatest benefits to full-paying families from more affluent backgrounds, according to analysis by The Hechinger Report, which has been monitoring college prices across different sectors of higher education in its Tuition Tracker project.

“[Lowering] the sticker price is only useful if you’re wealthy enough to be paying it, and most students are not.” 

Phillip Levine, professor of economics, Wellesley College, and founder of MyinTuition, a net-price calculator

Student groups often pushed for tuition freezes, even before the pandemic, as a way to keep college affordable, but the benefits tend to go to those who pay the full “sticker price,” or close to it. Among public universities, 41 schools with available data kept their published tuition from rising more than 5 percent from 2010 and 2018. For students from families making $48,000 per year or less, the net price rose roughly the same amount at those schools as at schools that raised tuition by larger amounts.

A change to “the sticker price is only useful to if you’re wealthy enough to be paying it, and most students are not,” said Phillip Levine, professor of economics at Wellesley College and the founder of MyinTuition, a net-price calculator that compares actual costs across dozens of institutions.

Related: Tuition Tracker: Interactive search tool

Increasingly since the 1970s, college educations have been priced more like hotel rooms or airline tickets, with a different cost for almost every student. Discounts help attract the wealthier, full-paying students while financial aid lowers the cost for others; colleges aim to get the most money from each person, based on their ability or desire to pay.

Within the University of Wisconsin system, net price has in fact risen for many low-income students over the last decade. Only at UW-Madison and the small campus of Parkside in Kenosha have costs dropped for students from families making $48,000 or less. (Part of the drop in Madison may be due to a scholarship launched in 2018 covering tuition and fees for low-income students.)

At private colleges, sticker-price increases actually correlate with lower net prices for the least wealthy students. For low-income students attending colleges where tuition did not increase more than 5 percent, net price has stayed flat since 2010. For those attending colleges where sticker price went up more, net price fell 18 percent. The University of Chicago, which we calculated in 2019 was on the path to being the first school to break six-figure tuition, again hiked its price in 2021-22 after having kept tuition frozen the year before. Despite these increases, low- and middle-income students at Chicago have on average paid less than a tenth of the more-than-$75,000 price tag.

Related: University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year

Schools putting revenue from tuition increases toward financial aid have a “better ability to target assistance to the people who are most in need,” said Stein. “The tuition freeze is simple to do. It’s simple to explain to the public. But it is not targeted.”

Beyond the costs to students, an institution with a long-term tuition freeze has less budgetary flexibility if the state does not compensate for the reduced tuition revenue. Since 2014, a year into the tuition freeze, the University of Wisconsin has seen its faculty ranks shrink, according to a report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. UW-Madison has also had the fourth-slowest increase in research and development investment among the top 30 research universities in the U.S. between 2010 and 2018.

The wish to avoid constraints on budget and recruitment may explain why some universities have already thawed — or never agreed to freeze in the first place. Minnesota State University raised tuition this year by 3.4 percent across the board, as a state appropriations bump, budget cuts and other moves were not sufficient to cover a deficit for the system, where tuition and fees account for nearly 40 percent of annual revenues. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, also increased tuition, but said it will meet 100 percent of need for in-state students. The average costs for students studying on campus at Ann Arbor were lower in 2018-19 than in 2010-11 for families making $75,000 or less per year, according to federal data.

“It’s a bit of a perfect storm for these institutions. They have state funding that has not kept up with inflation, they have a tuition freeze that has been going for eight years. They have enrollment loss, and then they have Covid-19.”

Jason Stein, research director of the Wisconsin Policy Forum

Tuition discounting is not without pitfalls for students. Research has shown that high listed tuitions alone may be enough to stop low-income students from even considering a college, even if financial aid covers most of the cost.

“Institutions lose students because they think it’s too expensive,” said Levine, who believes that some universities want to address that shortcoming. “There are high-level institutions that are underrepresented with lower socioeconomic-status students and are working very hard to improve that. You can’t do that if people think you charge $75,000 or $80,000 a year and can’t get through the barrier of costs.”

It will take some years to understand whether tuition discounting will continue helping low-income students or merely help colleges to hit enrollment targets following the pandemic. Enrollment estimates showed a steep decline in undergraduates in 2020-21, leaving schools fighting hard to enroll students from a smaller pool of applicants. With the number of students completing the FAFSA this fall lagging even last year’s numbers, according to Data Insight Partners, some schools may lean heavily on aid to woo students who otherwise might have paid more.

“Stanford, Duke, Williams, these types of schools, there were no changes. Those guys could survive a pandemic, every year, for a couple of centuries,” said financial aid consultant Matthew Carpenter. “It was these other private schools, of which there are many, that really tended to, right out of the gate, give more money than they typically do. Or, in many cases, come back with bigger offers after the fact. Sometimes without families even going back to negotiate.”

This story about college tuition freezes was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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Though the past year has put a spotlight on the limits and possibilities of using technology for teaching and learning, we began exploring the utility of using virtual reality as a medium for Holocaust education before the pandemic reshaped the educational landscape.  

Virtual reality (VR) has existed for over 30 years, but only recently has it become affordable enough to use widely. It is reasonable to expect that VR will become a mainstream technology in the coming years.  

Over the past decade, researchers, museum professionals and educators have started to explore the use of virtual and augmented reality in relation to Holocaust education and memory. At the same time, the Future Projects team (a group focused on innovations in Holocaust education and memory at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, or USHMM) and a group of faculty and students at the Rowan University Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights (the Rowan Center) have been working on independent, but parallel, virtual reality projects.  

Students revealed that they were eager to spend more time with the experience. One even said she had “never wanted to learn history’’ before.

Both of these projects focus on the Warsaw Ghetto, the well-known ghetto established in German-occupied Poland by the Third Reich during World War II. Teams from the USHMM and the Rowan Center developed and deployed and then gathered feedback about these projects from a number of stakeholders, including scholars, museum professionals, middle and high school teachers, college students and a general audience.  

Both projects use technology that creates an immersive experience, but they are aimed at different audiences. The USHMM experience is being developed with a museum audience in mind, with users ranging from those who have never encountered the Holocaust before to Holocaust scholars from around the world. 

“The Warsaw Project” designed by the Rowan Center is created for classroom use on the portable Oculus Quest system. It’s intended for larger museum, school and community spaces. 

Though the projects are different, the results of the interviews, focus groups and written feedback about them were remarkably similar. Teachers who viewed the recreated spaces from the Warsaw Ghetto were enthusiastic, because many had struggled to engage all learners in their (often brief) units about the Holocaust. A high school teacher who shared feedback on the project said, “The VR brings history to life in a really different way.”  

The teachers believe that the hands-on, independent nature of virtual reality will bring reluctant students to the study of history. Interactive digital and virtual experiences allow students to make choices about materials and people, something the teachers said rarely happens in a traditional unit of study. This is critically important to learning. 

Related: Virtual field trips bring students face-to-face with Earth’s most fragile ecosystems 

Feedback from students revealed that they were eager to spend more time with the experiences. One even said that she had “never wanted to learn history’’ before. 

Perhaps more importantly, students asked questions about what they saw in the virtual environments and sought to learn more through other media after exploring the projects. They found that VR allowed them to learn in new ways, and they considered the experiences engaging, emotional and immersive.  

Standing in a recreated virtual space helps users learn something qualitatively different from simply looking at a photograph, reading primary source material or listening to survivor testimony.  

The immersive nature of virtual reality allows users to gain a deeper understanding of the scope and scale of the Warsaw Ghetto as they manipulate and examine artifacts destroyed during the war. 

Our teams are now identifying best practices for using virtual reality to teach and learn about the Holocaust, as well as other complicated histories. The key to these practices is meeting users where they are.  

Users who are less familiar with virtual reality need instructions about how to use the technology along with an overview of what the tool can — and cannot — do. 

Most young people are already engaged with emerging technologies and bring expectations of what they will experience while in a virtual world. They understand that they will be steered toward certain learning outcomes embedded in these projects, but they expect choices so that they can interact with the experiences in different ways and spend more time in spaces that interest them.  

In addition, we learned: 

• Historical accuracy is essential. End users will assume that the experience is historically accurate and that they do not need to worry about “fake news.” There are different ways to avoid betraying this trust, including captions, digital footnotes and “educational rabbit holes.” 
• Sensitivity is required. Using virtual reality to teach about the Holocaust requires the same — if not more — thought to ethics and sensitivity than other teaching methods and materials require. Due to the immersive nature of the virtual environment, those who create VR learning experiences must ensure that users aren’t thrust into a “gotcha” scenario, made to feel unsafe or asked to play the role of a perpetrator or victim of the Holocaust.  
• Content outside of the virtual world is necessary. In order to contextualize the virtual experience, additional content should be provided before and after the experience. This content might take the shape of a series of digital tools, videos or printed materials.  
• Consider witnessing over empathy. While attention has been given to VR’s potential to facilitate empathetic understanding, in Holocaust education, fostering such empathy risks unintentionally minimizing survivor and victim experiences. A focus on witnessing, and the role of the observer, can provide powerful experiences in virtual spaces while avoiding that risk. 

Even though virtual reality has already been used in educational contexts, teaching and learning about the Holocaust through VR is new. There is bound to be hesitancy from some about using this technology to teach such a traumatic history. It is our hope that these guidelines, while they will no doubt change and grow over time, provide a starting point for creating and selecting virtual experiences that are engaging, accurate and ethical.

Jennifer Rich is an associate professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Rowan University and the executive director of the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.  

Michael Haley Goldman is the director of Future Projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

Sara Pitcairn is the product developer and researcher for Future Projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

This story about virtual reality and education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter. 

The post OPINION: How best do we teach kids about Holocaust horrors? Show them what it was like appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

President Joe Biden, congressional leaders and debt experts continue to argue over student loan debt forgiveness — both how much should be canceled and which branch can offer relief. Biden told a questioner at last week’s CNN town hall he did not think he had the authority to cancel $50,000 for student loan borrowers, and instead would limit relief to $10,000. Earlier, the administration had said it was reviewing its options for forgiveness through executive action. Even the more modest figure of $10,000 per student would represent one of the most ambitious projects under the new administration, erasing an estimated $377 billion in debt.

Student debt forgiveness is popular among voters, but a handful of economists have questioned whether it helps those most in need. They argue that middle-class families will benefit more than poor and marginalized Americans.

There are many ways to look at the types of people loan forgiveness would benefit: Should we consider household income? What about net wealth? How would borrowers of different races be affected? A Hechinger analysis of federal data provides additional dimensions to the picture of student debt. We show more detail about where student debt falls most heavily and how different cancellation plans would affect different groups of Americans.

First, here is the overall picture of student loan debt and its rapid growth.

Americans amassed trillions of dollars in student loan debt in the course of just a few decades. Throughout most of the Department of Education’s life as a guarantor of loans and a direct lender, student borrowing remained below $20 billion per year, according to a 1998 report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy. That shifted with the 1992 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Among several changes, it created an unsubsidized lending program that offered less attractive terms than subsidized loans, but was open to students from all income levels. Borrowing lurched above $30 billion by the 1996-97 academic year.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Is forgiving college debt the best way to solve the student loan crisis?

As of November, total outstanding student loan debt was $1.55 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. New lending remains around $100 billion per year, the biggest share of which is unsubsidized Stafford loans, according to College Board data.

The 1998 report also revealed that middle- and upper-class households drove most of the increase in undergraduate borrowing. The somewhat counterintuitive fact that affluent folks make up a large portion of borrowers — considering that they seem best positioned to attend college without loans — is what worries some economists about forgiveness programs.

Adam Looney of the University of Utah wrote that $50,000 forgiveness plans like that of Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren would give unnecessary relief to “borrowers with the ability to repay,” while Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute called universal cancellation “not a progressive policy” since the relief would go only to those that attended college and leave out many low-income households.

It is true that broad cancellation would forgive more dollars of debt for middle- and high-income families. (In general, higher-income households borrow more than lower-income households across almost every category of credit, according to data from the Federal Reserve.) But this obscures the fact that it is households with the least wealth, not affluent families, that borrow most frequently and at the highest balances. The Federal Reserve tracks households by percentiles based on their net assets, a calculation of wealth that balances assets such as home values against liabilities such as student debt. Households in the bottom quarter of net assets are accumulating student loan debt faster than any other group. The median student loan debt of these households has rocketed above $30,000.

Even if these borrowers go on from college to middle-class jobs, they can still be burdened by debt. “There are some folks who have what is considered a high income who have no wealth to show for it,” said Ashley Harrington, federal advocacy director for the Center for Responsible Lending, which supports a $50,000 student loan forgiveness plan. “They actually are unable to build wealth because of student debt and because of systemic inequities.”

This is especially true among Black borrowers, who are overrepresented among debt-holding U.S. households and who face barriers to building wealth in other areas, such as discrimination in the housing market.

Calculating where dollar amounts of relief would accrue also glosses over the fact that debt is more costly — even ruinous — lower down the income scale. For instance, researchers have found that late payments and delinquencies spike around the $2,000 level in loan balances, likely because many of these borrowers began but did not complete a degree program. Bad marks in a credit report, even for small balances, add more to the cost of other types of credit over an individual’s lifetime, according to Harrington, making the financial impact much larger than the dollar value of the original loan.

Defaults also affect some households more than others. Research by Judith Scott-Clayton of Teachers College, Columbia University found that nearly half of Black borrowers that enrolled in college in the 2003-04 academic year had defaulted within 12 years. (The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization located at Teachers College.)

Some economists propose that instead of issuing widespread student loan debt forgiveness, the government should strengthen existing income-driven repayment plans, which forgive the balance of the debt after a period of up to 25 years. However, some borrowers have difficulty navigating the process of enrolling — if they are aware of these programs at all. Many participants also see their balances balloon at the beginning, when their incomes are low.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that, for those taking out college loans in the 2020s, 21 percent of undergraduate and 56 percent of graduate student loan debt will eventually be erased through forgiveness. But until that point, the debt will remain on their credit scores.

Related: Do income-based repayment plans drive young borrowers of color deeper into debt?

“Even people in good standing are getting hammered,” said A. Wayne Johnson, a former Department of Education official who served as the chief operating officer of the Office of Federal Student Aid under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Johnson supports a $50,000 universal forgiveness package that he says would wipe out the debt of roughly 84 percent of federal student loan borrowers. He would also like to see a policy that removes any associated negative marks from Americans’ credit histories. “Then they’d be able to rent apartments, get jobs and maybe even buy houses,” he said.

Regardless of whether debt forgiveness becomes a reality, changes to student lending, such as capping loan limits or converting some programs to grants, will be necessary to curb the growth in student debt going forward. Advocates on both sides of the cancellation debate see the need for higher education reform in general, from regulations on for-profit schools, whose graduates default at higher rates than those of public colleges, to policies intended to lower the costs of public two- and four-year schools.

“We haven’t allowed the investment to keep up with college,” said Harrington, who pointed out that Pell, the grant program designed to aid low-income college-goers, covers an ever-shrinking portion of costs. “Folks have been forced to rely on debt.”

This story about student debt forgiveness was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

The post Interactive: Explore who gains most from canceling student debt appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

At Ronald D. O’Neal Elementary School, in Elgin, Illinois, none of the third graders could read and write at grade level according to state tests in 2019. Nearly 90 percent of the school population is considered low-income and nearly three-quarters are labeled English learners, meaning that the state language arts test assesses their reading and writing ability in a language they’re still trying to learn.

Just nine miles away sits Centennial Elementary School, where 73 percent of third graders met grade-level standards on that same test. A fifth of Centennial’s student body is considered low-income, and 17 percent get extra supports as they learn English.

The state has celebrated Centennial for “exemplary academic performance.” It designates O’Neal as a school in need of targeted assistance. But despite its low performance and its students’ needs, O’Neal received $9,094 per student in 2019 in state and local funding compared to Centennial’s $10,559. If O’Neal had received Centennial’s per-pupil funding, it would have meant an extra $789,905 in its budget: Money that could have covered more — or more experienced — teachers, social workers or home-school liaisons, or paid for new programs to address students’ academic and nonacademic needs.

While wealthier school districts routinely spend significantly more money to run their public schools, the disparity between Centennial and O’Neal can’t be attributed to the relative wealth in their communities. Both schools are part of a single district, U-46, Illinois’ second largest.

Kids who need more support to overcome barriers to academic achievement are routinely shortchanged. U-46 was one of 53 districts across the United States that spent a statistically significant amount less state and local money on high-poverty schools than on lower-poverty schools, according to a new Hechinger Report analysis of how districts disburse funding. In another 263 districts, the level of spending on each school had little to no connection to the number of students in poverty, despite the higher needs often present in low-income schools. It’s the first time this kind of data has been compiled and analyzed nationally, and some of the spending gaps are extreme.

Until this year, funding disparities between schools in the same district were hard to identify. Most districts didn’t budget in a way that allowed comparisons of school-level spending. They reported only districtwide averages, making disparities across districts the primary fodder for conversations about educational inequities. Now, a federal financial reporting requirement has taken effect, demanding that states report per-student spending by school — just as they report student performance by school — and forcing transparency about disparate spending inside district lines.

“We are inequitable. And we are working on that.”

Tony Sanders, superintendent of Illinois School District U-46

Hechinger’s analysis of state and local spending by school included nearly 700 districts (those with 15 or more schools) from 40 states that made the data available. The data was from the 2018-19 academic year, with the exception of Nevada, which has released only the data from 2017-18. Additionally, five states — Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio and Oregon — reported combined federal, state and local spending. The analysis focused on state and local spending because federal dollars are explicitly intended to supplement district budgets, rather than provide an alternative revenue stream. Districts that use the federal dollars to equalize their spending violate federal policy.

Hechinger’s analysis found multimillion-dollar funding disparities between schools in the same communities. A lot of factors affect school-level spending, but a handful of district practices routinely drive these disparities. Schools with the wealthiest students tend to draw the most experienced teachers, who cost more. And because small schools cost more to operate without economies of scale, districts that happen to have more of these schools in higher-income areas may end up spending more on wealthier kids. Magnet programs that often serve wealthier student populations drive up spending, both because they are generally small schools and because they frequently get extra funding to support specialized programming.

School officials are often surprised by their own spending trends, once they see them. While it is widely known that 80 percent of education budgets go to personnel costs, school leaders don’t always realize the outsize effect teacher placement has on budgets when more experienced teachers cluster at schools serving wealthier kids or the disparate impact of raises that are a percentage of teacher salaries. And the additional costs of small schools and magnet programs can fly under the radar.

Marguerite Roza, an economist at Georgetown University and the director of its Edunomics Lab, has studied how spending choices play out in district budgets.

“Those are very much district choices, but districts would say, ‘What? We never made an intentional decision to give more money to the wealthier schools,’ “ Roza said.

The enrollment and staffing patterns that district leaders allow can have a major impact on children’s outcomes. Magnet schools tend to skim districts’ highest-performing kids and most-engaged families, pulling them from elsewhere in a district where they might contribute to building stronger schools. Teachers with more than five years of experience tend to be more effective and more likely to stay in the field for the long-term, boosting student performance in schools where they dominate the teaching force. And small schools tend to offer more attention to individual students, giving their populations a better school experience, overall.

Ary Amerikaner, vice president for P-12 policy, practice and research at The Education Trust, which fights for more equitable spending in schools, has long sought to draw attention to the variation in per-student spending within school districts. “People are less aware of the inequities within districts and less aware that children attending high-poverty schools in relatively high-poverty districts can get hit twice — first by inequities because their district doesn’t have the revenue and then unfair spending within their district,” Amerikaner said.

Related: “Kids who have less, need more”: The fight over school funding

In Elgin, where Ronald D. O’Neal is located, the median home value is nearly $100,000 less than in Bartlett, where Centennial is. The poverty rate is three times higher. Elgin City Councilman Corey Dixon was born in Elgin and graduated from School District U-46. He had no idea an elementary school his constituents attend was getting so much less in per-pupil funding than a school in a wealthier portion of the same district. But he’s not surprised.

He has long taken issue with the “broken” way our country finances its schools: primarily with local property taxes that unfairly advantage students from wealthy communities, which are often also majority white because of the U.S.’s long history of segregation and racist policies. Sixty-five percent of Centennial’s students are white. Five percent of O’Neal’s are (the vast majority, 85 percent, are Latino). Dixon has three daughters in the district. He is Black and has always known that students who look like his own children are on the losing end of glaring achievement gaps nationwide. Now he sees they’re the victims of school funding disparities within individual districts, too.

“That’s broken,” Dixon said. “That’s a problem. Who could argue that it’s not?”

Besides basic ideas about fairness, spending inequities are a problem because having more money matters when it’s used well. Although researchers — and elected officials — have debated the value of increased educational funding, new evidence suggests that when schools serving low-income students do spend additional money in key ways, they greatly boost student success.

Rucker Johnson, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, studied the connection between school spending and long-term student outcomes, including educational attainment, adult wages and the incidence of adult poverty. He and his colleagues found that children from low-income homes, in particular, benefited from state policies in the 1970s and 1980s that increased school funding – and that the effects were cumulative. The longer students attended schools that got more money, the better they did.

53 U.S. districts spend less state and local money on high-poverty schools than on lower-poverty schools.

More recently, Johnson and his team have also been able to draw a line from per-student spending to better standardized test scores and graduation rates, findings they think bolster the argument that more money makes a difference.

“At every stage, higher spending led to significant increases in student outcomes and narrowing of achievement gaps by race and poverty status,” Johnson said his forthcoming paper will show.

Related: A decade of research on the rich-poor divide in education

Still, even in districts that don’t systematically spend less on high-poverty schools, overall, inequities remain. In Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, the Center for Inquiry School 84 has a lower portion of kids getting free or reduced-price lunch than any other school in the district, at just 8 percent. The school is a magnet school in a wealthier part of the city, and although it is technically open to students across Indianapolis, neighborhood kids get preference, meaning that children whose families can afford to buy a home near the school have a greater chance of getting in. A school of basically the same size, the William McKinley School 39, has a student population in which 76 percent of students get free or reduced-price lunch and many more get services as English learners or students with disabilities. McKinley gets a “C” rating from the state for its below-average student performance while the magnet gets an “A” and far surpasses state averages on standardized test scores.

Yet McKinley gets $9,794 per kid in state and local funding, and the magnet school gets $11,303.

In Algonquin, Illinois, Community Unit School District 300 Superintendent Frederick Heid has prioritized school-level spending as a route to educational equity since he took over the position six years ago. Beyond the needs of kids from low-income homes, Heid said the district allocates extra money to schools serving large populations of students with disabilities and students who are still learning English.  The district also provides more funding to schools with preschool programs and to a pilot program for students with four or more “adverse childhood experiences,” including exposure to abuse, neglect and household dysfunction.

“It does result in different funding amounts going to different schools, but we believe that is the best way to get to equity for our students,” Heid said.

Still, even in a district with such explicit spending priorities, inequities between individual schools remain. Golfview Elementary School, for example, serves about 550 students, 86 percent of whom are considered low-income, 69 percent of whom are English learners and about 13 percent of whom get special education services. Algonquin Lakes Elementary School serves about 425 students, with less than half its students in poverty, less than one-fifth English learners and about the same proportion in special education. Yet Algonquin Lakes gets more than $2,000 more per-pupil than Golfview.

Susan Harkin, District 300’s chief operating officer, said this can largely be attributed to Golfview Elementary School’s early career teaching force and Algonquin Lakes’ shrinking special education population. She said the spending across each school should normalize in the next few years as the teachers at Golfview gain seniority and special education funding drops at Algonquin Lakes. In the meantime, however, Algonquin Lakes students, who are wealthier overall, and most of whom don’t face the challenges of learning English, get to enjoy that extra $2,000 per pupil.

“We saw schools of similar size, similar demographics, but one school got 50 percent more per pupil.”

Jean-Claude Brizard, former superintendent of Rochester City Schools in New York

Similar spending inequities have shocked district leaders around the country. Many have had a reckoning over the last year as they prepared and reported their per-school spending data to the state for the first time because of the new federal requirement. The transparency mandate was tucked into the 2015 update of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act but didn’t require states to report that data until June 30 of this year.

Some districts have defended spending less on higher-poverty schools. Certain special education programs can drive up costs, for example. Yonkers Public Schools in New York said it spends more on wealthier schools because its intensive special education programs are concentrated on those campuses, where there happens to be room for them.

In U-46, in Illinois, Tony Sanders, the superintendent, also pointed to costs associated with special education services as a reason that some schools in higher-income communities end up becoming the most expensive.

The elementary school that receives the most state and local money per student in U-46, Wayne Elementary School, represents a perfect storm of factors driving up per-student spending on a student population that doesn’t seem to need it, when considering only poverty rates. Besides its special education programs, it is a small — and under-enrolled — school, serving just 368 students in a building that can fit twice as many. It has a veteran teaching staff commanding higher salaries. And it is in a wealthy, suburban portion of the district where all children take buses to school, something that is free for them, but costly for the school’s budget. Wayne gets $12,980 per student in state and local funding. If the Ronald D. O’Neal Elementary School got that much, it would add nearly $2.1 million to its budget.

Sanders doesn’t see a way for the district to get around Wayne’s expenses, given its location and enrollment. But over the last year, he and his staff have found ways to address spending equity in the face of the data that made clear the district has room for improvement.

“We are inequitable,” Sanders said. “And we are working on that.”

This past year, with extra money from the state thanks to a revised funding formula, U-46 placed more assistant principals in its high-poverty schools. It also reduced class sizes in the early elementary grades in some of those buildings and bought more mobile devices for schools that didn’t yet have enough for every student. And Sanders said administrators are brainstorming ways to spread out access to the district’s best teachers, perhaps virtually, so that students get more opportunities than the ones available to them in their assigned neighborhood schools.

Nationwide, few districts have made changes to deal with the inequities laid bare by the new data. But Montgomery County Public Schools in Rockville, Maryland, is well on its way — and it’s paying close attention to how spending is tied to student outcomes. For many who advocated for this financial reporting requirement in the first place, making the connection between resources and results is the whole point of teasing out per-student spending by school.

“The end goal is taking this opportunity to leverage our dollars to get the greatest outcome for our students,” said Roza, the economist at Georgetown University.

Montgomery County Public Schools hired an educational consulting firm to do a financial audit in advance of the federal reporting deadline. The firm found that the district spends more on its higher-poverty schools, but also identified troubling inequities: Overall, Montgomery County’s high-poverty schools perform worse, and Black and Latino students from low-income homes perform particularly poorly, whether they are in high-performing schools or not. In exploring what might contribute to these results, the district found, among other things, that it concentrates its novice teachers and principals in higher-needs schools.

“We as Black and Brown folks have always felt it was hard for us to prove our points because we could only speak about our experience and anecdotes, but then suddenly there was the data that was clearly saying what we have been experiencing.”

Diego Uriburu, Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence of Montgomery County

Diego Uriburu, executive director of Identity, a nonprofit in Montgomery County that serves Latino youth and families and has teamed up with the NAACP of Montgomery County to lead the newly formed Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence, said the findings were not necessarily surprising, but that it was striking to see the data so clearly.

“We as Black and Brown folks have always felt it was hard for us to prove our points because we could only speak about our experience and anecdotes, but then suddenly there was the data that was clearly saying what we have been experiencing,” he said.

Jack Smith, the superintendent, came to the district with the explicit goal of improving educational equity. He knew Montgomery County had a long history of high performance for most students, but not all of them. The work he has overseen to root out inequities has caused some angst among families for whom the status quo was working well.

“There’s a belief somehow, always, that if someone gets something, I must be losing something,” Smith said.

He has worked to dispel that notion and win more support for the idea that improving performance for all students is in the best interests of the entire community.

Budgetary uncertainty thanks to the coronavirus pandemic will leave Montgomery County Public Schools with fewer resources to do things like create new incentives to get more experienced teachers into high-needs schools. But Smith said there’s no reason to “sit on our hands and do nothing because there’s less money now than there was six months or a year ago.”

“We’re not in a position to do a major incentive program across all 135 elementary schools, but we can start,” he said. “You can start with the idea that this is scalable.”

Uriburu believes this latest push for equity may truly result in long-term changes for the district and its students. District administrators are committed, as is the school board, and even the county government has embarked on an equity mission for the broader community. And, of course, there is the coalition. Uriburu said this is the first time the Black and Latino communities have teamed up to advocate for better schools, and they are very clear about their right to make demands.

“By bringing the Black and Brown communities together, we make up 54 percent of the student body of Montgomery County Public Schools,” Uriburu said. “It’s a different ballgame.”

While federal law has only recently demanded transparency around school funding disparities for every district in the country, equity battles have played out in a handful of districts and communities over the years. Sometimes they have been spearheaded by district officials, as in Montgomery County, and sometimes by community groups. Longtime advocates of this federal transparency mandate hope the new data will spur more widespread advocacy.

But Rochester, New York, offers a lesson in how hard it can be not only to make major changes, but to make them permanent. Jean-Claude Brizard took over as superintendent of the Rochester City Schools in western New York in January 2008. (He is now a senior advisor and deputy director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) Soon after he started, he hired a consulting firm to follow the dollars in his district and identify inequities, which, it turns out, were striking.

“So many of the problems in school districts with respect to resolving equity issues require some outside third-party intervention. This is not one of them. … It does not require laws changing and getting legislators to understand that schools need more money.”

Traci Ellis, chief equity officer at the Illinois Math and Science Academy

“We saw schools of similar size, similar demographics, but one school got 50 percent more per pupil,” Brizard said.

The budgeting system in Rochester until that point was one in which well-connected principals could advocate for more money for their schools. Brizard wanted to change that. He started out by sharing the data internally and with the school board and then held community meetings where he aimed to spur enough demand for change that the district would be able to justify going against the wishes of the small but vocal populations of the schools that had gotten more than their fair share of district spending.

Brizard orchestrated a three-year transition to a student-based funding formula that clearly laid out how much money schools would get for students with different needs. But when Brizard left the district in 2011, just after the new funding formula was fully in place, he said a group of affluent, mostly white, parents succeeded in lobbying the school board to dismantle the new system.

“The board is often elected by a handful of people, and they will respond to that pressure,” Brizard said. His current work focuses on coalition-building across communities, which he says can help overcome pushback. “When you have a community that is galvanized around these equity issues, it brings the stakes beyond a single protagonist.”

Even without widespread community attention, though, there are cases in which funding decisions have been taken out of the hands of school districts.

In Los Angeles Unified School District, a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Southern California forced the district to revise its methods of allocating spending among schools. California distributes $61 billion through its Local Control Funding Formula, a portion of which is set aside for foster youth, English learners and students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In LAUSD, the formula generates an extra billion dollars per year to serve students from those three groups. The ACLU sued the district, arguing that it wasn’t directing those dollars to the right students, and LAUSD settled, giving $151 million to a group of schools that had been shortchanged and revising its spending patterns moving forward.

Related: California’s new school funding system stumbles into its first year

Victor Leung, deputy litigation director for the ACLU of Southern California, said his team filed similar complaints against the Long Beach and Fresno school districts and threatened a complaint in Pomona but hasn’t had to resort to litigation because the districts have already made changes.

While the equity battles in Montgomery County, Rochester and Los Angeles have all played out differently, they share one common thread: clear data. In Montgomery County and Rochester, district leaders produced their own analyses and shared the data with the public. In California, outside researchers tracked the state dollars to the school level and gave advocacy groups a smoking gun.

There is a chance that clear, public data won’t make a difference, of course, and some supporters of the transparency mandate fear just that.

“Children attending high poverty schools in relatively high-poverty districts can get hit twice — first by inequities because their district doesn’t have the revenue and then unfair spending within their district.”

Ary Amerikaner, vice president for P-12 policy, practice and research at The Education Trust

In Illinois’ West Aurora School District 129, another district that spends a statistically significant amount less on its high-poverty schools, according to the Hechinger analysis, the funding disparities have gone largely unremarked upon. Angie Smith, assistant superintendent for operations, said there are no plans to redistribute funds because district leaders believe the spending differences are justified. She pointed to wealthier suburban schools’ transportation costs, more expensive staffing in smaller schools and the costs of specialized programs as reasons for the district’s spending trend. With no one demanding change, the spending disparities will surely remain.

In School District U-46, the financial data has been tucked into the online state report cards — in a tab labeled District Environment — since last October, but conversations about it have mainly been among school officials.

Traci Ellis is a former U-46 school board member, Elgin native and chief equity officer at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a public magnet school in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. The Ronald D. O’Neal Elementary School is named for her father, a longtime educator in the district. While she no longer lives in Elgin, she has made educational equity her life’s work, and was disappointed to learn of U-46’s spending trend. The district’s slogan is “academic success for all” and a frequent tagline is “all means all.”

“Budgets speak to where priorities lie and if the district is going to have equity as a priority, and it says that it does, then we should be able to see that borne out in how it spends money,” Ellis said.

Disheartening as U-46’s first-year data is, along with the knowledge that similar spending trends exist all over the country, Ellis sees a silver lining: “So many of the problems in school districts with respect to resolving equity issues require some outside third-party intervention,” she said. “This is not one of them. … It does not require laws changing and getting legislators to understand that schools need more money.”

Districts already have the power to reshape their own budgets. They just have to muster the will to do so.

After a flurry of equity-minded initiatives last school year, Sanders had hoped the district’s spending trend would be different in time for the 2020 update to the state report cards. The changes weren’t enough, and according to the latest state data, released Oct. 30, U-46 still spends fewer state and local dollars on its higher poverty schools, overall. Sanders said in a written statement that the district was disappointed its investments last year didn’t change its spending trend. 

“With this second year of data in mind, we will work to be more deliberate about addressing school funding decisions as we develop our Fiscal Year 2022 budget,” he said. Ellis and Dixon, the city councilman, will be among those watching.

This story about school funding disparities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

The post New data: Even within the same district some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story was produced as part of the nine-part series “Are We Ready? How Schools Are Preparing – and Not Preparing – Children for Climate Change,” reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Swollen rivers swamping entire towns in Iowa. People piloting boats through deluged streets in southern Illinois. Surging floodwaters from Hurricane Dorian overtaking North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

Last year was the second wettest on record for the contiguous United States. Climate change is one factor that’s exacerbating flood risks across the country, and the damage is adding up: The 2010s saw twice as many natural disasters causing at least a billion dollars in damage as the previous decade.

As part of our reporting on climate change and America’s education system, we wanted to see how vulnerable schools are to extreme weather. We wondered: Which schools are at risk from worsening floods? In the graphic below, we use hazard maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to allow you to search for your city or town and see if schools in your area have potential exposure to flooding.

Severe weather poses all sorts of challenges for educators and students. It can force schools to shut temporarily and keep kids at home (which, as we’re seeing now with coronavirus-related closures, is very disruptive to learning). It can cause infrastructure damage, which has been happening in coastal Louisiana. There, job losses, coastal erosion and floods caused people to move away, leading to diminishing school enrollment and, in some cases, permanent school closures. Those population changes, sometimes called “climate migration,” starve some schools of resources and lead to overcrowding in others.

When kids return to school after severe flooding, they sometimes struggle with lingering stress and trauma. Because many schools are local hubs, offering meals, counseling and other services beyond academics, damage to them can have a disproportionate impact on their communities. And flooding can lead to health problems, by causing mold that contributes to respiratory issues as well as unearthing toxic chemicals.

“Floodwaters can bring a whole host of issues,” said Perry Sheffield, an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and lead author of a study on the environmental hazards of climate change and schools.

No region of the United States is immune, but this isn’t a problem that hits everyone equally. Schools in low-income communities may be disproportionately affected, since they are more likely to be in low-lying areas and have limited access to adaptive technology, said Joseph Kane, an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution. 

Public awareness of flood risks tends to be low, Sheffield said, which can dampen emergency preparedness efforts. If you find that your school is located within or near FEMA’s 100-year flood zone, contact your school district to ask what it is doing to prepare for potential flooding.

The flood map visualization was produced by Pete D’Amato

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