LAS VEGAS and RENO, Nev. — They exist in places like an airport, a resort, and a distribution center, tucked away from the public eye but close enough for easy access. They often emit laughter – and the sound of tumbling blocks, bouncing balls, and meandering tricycles.

They’re child care centers based at workplaces. And in the increasingly fraught American child care landscape, they are popping up more frequently.

Skyrocketing child care costs and staffing shortages have complicated arrangements for working parents. Some have left their jobs after struggling to find quality care. Employers, in turn, view their entry into the child care realm as both a competitive advantage and a workplace morale-booster.

“In the absence of government intervention and investment, a lot of businesses have been stepping up to make sure that their employees can access affordable child care,” said Samantha Melvin, an assistant research professor at the Erikson Institute, an independent graduate school for early childhood education.

Parents benefiting from child care at their work sites praise the model, given its convenience, affordability, and peace of mind. They can stop by to breastfeed or eat lunch with their little ones. And it doesn’t add time to their morning commutes.

Frances Ortiz, who works in accounting at The Venetian Resort Las Vegas, can’t imagine a better option. She says her 3-year-old daughter has gained independence and language skills – with Mom not far away – at the property’s on-site child care center for employees.

“She runs in here,” Ms. Ortiz said. “She grabs my badge. She has to open the door for herself.”

In September, the Pittsburgh International Airport added its own on-site child care. The center, which is run by a child care operator, serves children of Allegheny County Airport Authority employees as well as those of select airport workers, such as food and beverage workers, ground handlers, and wheelchair attendants.

Airport officials say the idea stemmed from wanting to bring more women and people of color into the aviation workforce. Plus, the airport sits 17 miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh, making child care logistics challenging for employees. So far, it’s operating at about half capacity, with more enrollments expected over the next few months.

“It’s certainly an important proof point to our team that we mean it when we say that we’re invested in them and in what they need,” said Christina Cassotis, CEO of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, which operates the Pittsburgh airport.

An added bonus for the children: windows with views of planes taking off and landing.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

The average American family spends nearly a quarter (24 percent) of its household income on child care, according to a survey this year from Care.com. The cost can eclipse rent or mortgages, if parents can access care in the first place. Many find themselves on waitlists.

As employers contemplate entering the child care realm, Ms. Melvin encourages them to find out what their workers want. What hours do they most need care? Are they looking for center- or home-based care?

The Care.com survey suggested that 30 percent of parents would like to see their employers provide on-site day care, while others identified child care subsidies (28 percent), flexible spending accounts (22 percent), and backup care (21 percent) as desirable workplace benefits.

More public and private employers appear to be heeding the call, though how they assist runs the gamut. Some fully run their own centers. Others outsource the operations and management to providers.

The financial arrangements also differ. Many companies and organizations don’t disclose the exact discounts offered to employees, but they tend to be more affordable than or at least competitive with local rates.

Walmart, for instance, recently opened an on-site child care center at its massive Bentonville, Arkansas, campus. The Little Squiggles Children’s Enrichment Center chargesa monthly rate of $1,117 to $1,258, based on the child’s age, which company officials tell the Monitor in an email is “at market rate or below regional levels for comparable care.”

Related: ‘I can be mom and teacher’: Schools tackle child care needs to keep staff in classrooms

Another method gaining steam: employers providing subsidies for families to use toward child care options within their own communities.

KinderCare, a large child care operator with locations nationally, partners with more than 600 businesses and organizations to provide employee-sponsored child care, up from 400 in 2019, says Dan Figurski, president of KinderCare for Employers and Champions. Those employers represent the technology, medical, banking, academic, and public service industries, among others.

The amount of financial assistance they’re extending to employees varies, he says, with some covering up to 90% of child care costs.

Mr. Figurski expects more companies to view child care as a benefit for their employees, not unlike health care.

“I do think the future is some blended model of government-subsidized and employer-subsidized child care moving forward so that every child has access,” he says.

Experts who study child care, however, caution against an overreliance on businesses filling the void. Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, says doing so could undercut efforts to recognize child care as a public good.

“There’s a lot of well-intentioned people who are thinking this is a really good idea, and for those who would benefit from it, it could be,” he says. “Again, there are lots of downsides even in the short term.”

One of those potential pitfalls, he says, is instability if a parent suddenly loses their job and then has to find new child care and a new job.

Related: What convinces voters to raise taxes: child care

In Nevada, The Venetian Resort’s child care center, run by KinderCare, sits in a back-of-house hallway steps away from the famous Las Vegas Boulevard.

All employees can enroll their children, as long as space allows, at a cost that’s generally 35% to 40% lower than KinderCare’s normal rate, says Matt Krystofiak, the Venetian’s chief human resources officer. The company also offers subsidies for employees who want to enroll their children in an off-site KinderCare closer to their homes.

“We’re doing this because this is what our team members want,” he says. “This is what our team members need.”

Businesses such as Patagonia, another longtime leader in the space, also view child care as a reflection of their company culture.

The clothing retailer’s foray into child care began organically in 1983 when some of the company’s original employees started having children. As Patagonia grew, so did its child care footprint. Nowadays, the clothing company operates three child care centers – two in Southern California and one in Reno, Nevada – serving roughly 200 children.

The company conducts research annually to determine the cost to employees in each location, which leaders describe as an “average market rate.” Subsidies are available based on household income, says Sheryl Shushan, Patagonia’s director of global family services. The child care teachers are employed by Patagonia, so they receive corporate benefits as well.

On a recent morning, a 16-month-old boy toddled up a small embankment to touch wind chimes hanging from trees. His teachers watched from a short distance away in the outdoor classroom at Patagonia’s distribution center in Reno.

“We believe that risk-taking builds character,” says Terry Randolph, program manager for the site. In this play-based environment, children spend hours outside, digging in sand, riding bikes, playing with water, or climbing natural and human-made objects.

Patagonia leaders say the benefits on their end are stronger employee retention, a can-do spirit in the workplace, and a greater sense of community.

“There’s an opportunity to see co-workers as parents instead of just employees,” she says. “It just creates connection and purpose beyond the project you’re working on.”

For Alyssa Oldham, a classroom manager in Reno, the job and child care benefit meant rethinking her family size. She and her husband originally envisioned being a one-child family, given child care costs.

Now she comes to work holding two tiny hands belonging to her 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

“Working here, I was like, ‘We could have another child,’” she says.

Jackie Valley is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

© 2024 The Christian Science Monitor

The post More companies open on-site child care to help employees juggle parenting and jobs appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

WASHINGTON – Inside a high school classroom, Bryan Martinez jots down several purchases that would require a short-term savings plan: shoes, phone, headphones, clothes, and food.

His medium-term financial goals take a little more thought, but he settles on a car — he doesn’t have one yet — and vacations. Peering way into his future, the 18-year-old also imagines saving money to buy a house, start his own business, retire, and perhaps provide any children with a college fund. 

Martinez’s friend next to him writes a different long-term goal: Buy a private jet.

“You have to be a millionaire to save up for that,” Martinez said with a chuckle.

Call it a reality check or an introduction to a critical life skill, this exercise occurred in a course called Advanced Algebra with Financial Applications. The elective math class has been a mainstay in Capital City Public Charter School’s offerings for more than a decade, giving students a foundation in money management while they hone math skills. Conversations about credit, investments, and loans, for instance, intersect with lessons on compound interest, matrices, and exponential equations.

The Washington, D.C., charter school may be a front-runner in providing financial education, but in recent years, many others have followed suit. Since 2020, nine U.S. states have adopted laws or policies requiring personal finance education before students graduate from high school, bringing the total number to 30 states, according to the Council for Economic Education.

The surge comes as educators are scrambling to bolster students’ math skills, which plummeted during the pandemic and haven’t fully recovered. At the same time, a general dislike for math remains an obstacle among young people.

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety 

But do topics like high interest rates translate to higher interest among students? Tonica Tatum-Gormes, who teaches the course, says yes. She attributes better student engagement to them seeing the connection between math and their future financial well-being.

Students begin to understand that “yes, I need to learn decimals, and I need to learn fractions, and I need to learn percentages because I have to manage my money and I have to take out a loan,” Tatum-Gormes said.

Advocates say personal finance courses could pay dividends if students learn how to make wiser money decisions and avoid financial hazards. In the process, they may also develop an interest in math because of its practical applications. 

The K-12 standards for personal finance education, as recommended by the Council for Economic Education, include topics such as earning income, budgeting, saving, investing, and managing credit and financial risk. Experts say it’s a course that doesn’t necessarily have to be taught by a traditional math teacher.

Since 2020, nine U.S. states have adopted laws or policies requiring personal finance education before students graduate from high school, bringing the total number to 30 states, according to the Council for Economic Education. 

“The more math you add to financial literacy, frankly, the better it is,” said Annamaria Lusardi, founder and academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. “In many cases, to make a decision, you have to do calculations, so I think math is a very powerful tool. … Having said that, financial literacy is more than math.”

Idaho is one of the states where a new financial literacy curriculum is hitting classrooms. The state legislature this year approved the course as a graduation requirement.

The new course will give students the chance to apply skills from their algebra, calculus, and economics classes to their real lives — computing their future student loans, rent payments, and income requirements.

“This was such a priority out of the gate because I heard from so many people during the campaign last year that our young people weren’t prepared with the basic financial skills they need to succeed in life,” said Debbie Critchfield, Idaho’s state superintendent of public instruction, who spearheaded the effort.

Related: College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic  

Experts say the subprime mortgage crisis that helped spark the Great Recession in 2007, followed by pandemic economic uncertainty and today’s inflationary period, may have heightened Americans’ desire for a solid financial understanding. Less than a quarter, or 24 percent, of millennials demonstrate basic financial literacy, according to the Council for Economic Education.

Advocates say that left untaught, teens and young adults may turn to questionable sources, such as TikTok or YouTube videos. Plus, children whose parents aren’t financially savvy can’t rely on learning at home, making it an equity issue.

In 2020, the NAACP issued a resolution calling for more financial literacy programs in K-12 schools.

In schools with predominantly Black and Hispanic student populations, where there are no state-mandated requirements, only 7 percent of students have guaranteed access to at least a semester-long personal finance course, according to an analysis by Next Gen Personal Finance, a nonprofit that advocates for financial literacy education. That figure rises to 14.2 percent for schools with less than a quarter of students identifying as Black or Hispanic.

In 2020, the NAACP issued a resolution calling for more financial literacy programs in K-12 schools. 

The equity consideration has been a driving force behind the financial literacy course at Capital City Public Charter School, which serves a student body that is 64 percent Latino and 25 percent Black.

“It’s an empowering course,” said Laina Cox, head of the school. “I think it gives our young people the language that they need and the voice when they’re in certain rooms and at certain tables.”

In Tatum-Gormes’ classroom, the conversation about savings goals turns into a math problem on the whiteboard. She’s asking students to calculate how much someone would need to save to create an emergency fund covering three months’ worth of expenses. 

At her nudging, students piece together an equation, which she scrawls on the board. It’s early in the school year, but for students, the value of the dollar is already becoming apparent.

Martinez, who’s one of nine children, says he signed up for the course because he watched his parents struggle to make ends meet. He hopes that he walks away with knowledge about when to spend — and not spend — money.

“I just want to prepare myself for the things that are coming toward me,” he said.

Sadie Dittenber from Idaho Education News contributed to this report. 

This piece on financial literacy education is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series documenting challenges and highlighting progress, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms: AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. To read more of the collaborative’s work, visit its website.  

© 2023 The Christian Science Monitor     

The post Dollars and sense: Can financial literacy help students learn math?  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

On a breezy July morning in South Seattle, a dozen elementary-aged students ran math relays behind Dearborn Park International School.

One by one, they raced to a table where a tutor watched them scribble down the answers to multiplication questions before sprinting back to high-five their teammate. These students are part of a summer program run by nonprofit School Connect WA, designed to help them catch up on math and literacy skills they lost during the pandemic. There are 25 students in the program hosted at the elementary school, and all of them are one to three grades behind.

James, 11, couldn’t do two-digit subtraction last week. Thanks to the program and his mother, who has helped him each night, he’s caught up.

“I don’t really like math but I kind of do,” James said. “It’s challenging but I like it.”

Across the country, schools are scrambling to get students caught up in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of kids’ missing skills. On average students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.

Children lost ground on reading tests, too, but the math declines were particularly striking. Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in their problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.

The result: Students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance that existed before the pandemic. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare as they enter high school and college-level math courses that rely on strong foundational knowledge.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the ‘Nation’s Report Card,’ showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to levels not seen in about 20 years. 

Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years.

“Another way to put it is that it’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” said Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Related: How can we improve math education in America? Help us count the ways

At Moultrie Middle School in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jennifer Matthews has seen the pandemic fallout in her eighth grade classes.

Some days this past academic year, for example, only half of her students in a given class did their homework.

Matthews, who is entering her 34th year of teaching, said in the last few years, students seem indifferent to understanding her pre-Algebra and Algebra I lessons.

“They don’t allow themselves to process the material. They don’t allow themselves to think, ‘This might take a day to understand or learn,’” she said. “They’re much more instantaneous.”

And recently students have been coming to her classes with gaps in their understanding of math concepts. Working with basic fractions, for instance, continues to stump many of them, she said.

Because math builds on itself more than other subjects each year, students have struggled to catch up, said Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. For example, if students had a hard time mastering fractions in third grade, they will likely find it hard to learn percentages in fourth grade.

Math teachers will play a crucial role in helping students catch up, but finding those teachers in this tight labor market is a challenge for many districts.

“We’re struggling to find highly qualified people to put in the classrooms,” Dykema said.

Like other districts across the country, Jefferson County Schools in Birmingham, Alabama, saw students’ math skills take a nosedive from 2019 to 2021, when students not only dealt with the pandemic and its fallout, but also a new, tougher math test. Math scores plunged 20 percentage points or more across 11 schools that serve middle school students.

The district’s International Baccalaureate school had higher scores — about 30 percent of students were proficient — but that was a far cry from having 90 percent of students proficient in 2019.

It raised the inevitable question: What now?

Using federal pandemic relief money, some schools have added tutors, offered extended learning programs, made staffing changes or piloted new curriculum approaches in the name of academic recovery. But that money has a looming expiration date: The September 2024 deadline for allocating funds will arrive before many children have caught up.

Progress is possible in upper grades, said Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose research focuses on teaching math. But she said it’s easy for students to feel frustrated and lean into the idea that they’re not a “math person.”

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle,” she said. “And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Jefferson County educators took that approach and, leveraging pandemic funds, placed math coaches in all of their middle schools starting in the 2021-2022 school year.

The math coaches work with teachers to help them learn new and better ways to teach students, while math specialists oversee those coaches. About 1 in 5 public schools in the United States have a math coach, according to federal data.

Jefferson County math specialist Jessica Silas — who oversees middle school math coaches — said she and her colleagues weren’t sure what to expect. But efforts appear to be paying off: State testing shows math scores have started to inch back up for most of the district’s middle schools.

Silas is confident they’re headed in the right direction in boosting middle school math achievement, which was a challenge even before the pandemic. “It exacerbated a problem that already existed,” she said.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization.”

Kevin Dykema, president of the National Council for the Teachers of Mathematics

Ebonie Lamb, a special education teacher in Pittsburgh Public Schools, said it’s “emotionally exhausting” to see the inequities between student groups and try to close those academic gaps. Her district, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, serves a student population that is 53 percent African American and 33 percent white.

But she believes those gaps can be closed through culturally relevant and differentiated teaching. Lamb said she typically asks students to do a “walk a mile in my shoes” project in which they design shoes and describe their lives. It’s a way she can learn more about them as individuals.

“We have to continue that throughout the school year — not just the first week or the second week,” she said.

Ultimately, Lamb said those personal connections help on the academic front. Last year, she and a co-teacher taught math in a small group format that allowed students to master skills at their own pace. By February, Lamb said she observed an increase in math self-esteem among her students who have individualized education plans. They were participating and asking questions more often.

“All students in the class cannot follow the same, scripted curriculum and be on the same problem all the time,” she said.

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

Adding to the complexity of the math catch-up challenge is debate over how the subject should be taught. Over the years, experts say, the pendulum has swung between procedural learning, such as teaching kids to memorize how to solve problems step-by-step, and conceptual understanding, in which students grasp underlying math relationships, sometimes making these discoveries on their own.

“Stereotypically, math is that class that people don’t like. And I believe part of the reason is because for so many adults, math was taught just as memorization. You had to memorize exactly what to do, and there wasn’t as much focus on understanding the material,” said Dykema, of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “And I believe that when people start to understand what’s going on, in whatever you’re learning but especially in math, you develop a new appreciation for it.”

Powell, the University of Texas professor, said teaching math should not be an either-or situation. A shift too far in the conceptual direction, she said, risks alienating students who haven’t mastered the foundational skills.

“We actually do have to teach, and it is less sexy and it’s not as interesting,” she said.

“As the math gets harder, more students struggle. And so we need to provide earlier intervention for students, or we also need to think in middle school and high school, how are we supporting students?”

Sarah Powell, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin 

Diane Manahan, a mother from Summit, New Jersey, said she watched the pandemic chip away at her daughter’s math confidence and abilities. Her daughter, a rising sophomore, has dyscalculia, a math learning disability characterized by difficulties understanding number concepts and logic.

For years, Manahan paid tutors to work with her daughter, a privilege she acknowledges many families could not afford. But, Manahan said, the problems in math instruction are not limited to students with learning disabilities. She often hears parents complain that their children lack basic math skills, or are unable to calculate time or money exchanges.

Manahan wants to see school districts overhaul their curriculum and approach to emphasize those foundational skills.

“If you do not have math fluency, it will affect you all the way through school,” she said.

Related: Proof points: How a debate over the science of math could ignite the math wars

Halfway across the country in Spring, Texas, parent Aggie Gambino has often found herself searching YouTube for math videos. Giada, one of her twin 10-year-old daughters, has dyslexia and also struggles with math, especially the word problems. Gambino says she has strong math skills, but helping her daughter has proved challenging, given instructional approaches that differ from the way she was taught.

She wishes her daughter’s school would send home information to walk parents through how students are being taught to solve problems.

“The more parents understand how they’re being taught, the better participant they can be in their child’s learning,” she said.

It doesn’t take high-level calculations to realize that schools could run out of time and pandemic aid before math skills recover. With schools typically operating on nine-month calendars, some districts are adding learning hours elsewhere.

Lance Barasch recently looked out at two dozen incoming freshmen and knew he had some explaining to do. The students were part of a summer camp designed to help acclimate them to high school.

The math teacher works at the Townview School of Science and Engineering, a Dallas magnet school. It’s a nationally recognized school with selective entrance criteria, but even here, the lingering impact of Covid on students’ math skills is apparent.

“There’s just been more gaps,” Barasch said.

When he tried to lead students through an exercise in factoring polynomials — something he’s used to being able to do with freshmen — he found that his current group of teenagers had misconceptions about basic math terminology.

He had to stop to teach a vocabulary lesson, leading the class through the meaning of words like “term” and “coefficient.”

“Then you can go back to what you’re really trying to teach,” he said.

Barasch wasn’t surprised that the teens were missing some skills after their chaotic middle school years. His expectations have shifted since the pandemic: He knows he has to do more direct teaching so that he can rebuild a solid math foundation for his students.

Filling those gaps won’t happen overnight. For teachers, moving on from the pandemic will require a lot of rewinding and repeating. But the hope is that by taking a step back, students can begin to move forward.

This story on math scores is the first in a series, The Math Problem, produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. The series will explore the challenges schools face in helping kids make progress in math, a pre-pandemic problem that has snowballed into an education crisis, and highlight examples of success.

The post How can schools dig out from a generation’s worth of lost math progress? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

ELKO, Nev. — After years leading school districts on the East Coast, Michele Robinson wanted to come home.

In May of 2020, the Las Vegas native accepted an offer to become superintendent of the Elko County School District, which serves roughly 10,000 students in northeastern Nevada. Her tenure began just a few months into the pandemic when coronavirus cases were surging across the nation and education officials were grappling with whether and how to reopen schools.

As hard as those first months were, the gradual return to in-person learning in fall 2020 was harder. Parents and community members — angry about mask requirements and bristling at potential Covid vaccine mandates — pressured Elko County School Board members and district officials to flout state directives and exert local control over those decisions. At some point last school year, board meetings devolved into people shouting at district leaders to watch their backs. Security at meetings was increased.

“I loved the community, and I really loved the work that I did,” Robinson said. “It’s just you get to a point where you have to weigh whether or not the threats to your safety are worth the continuation.”

Robinson concluded they weren’t and resigned in June 2021.

Nationally, about 25 percent of superintendents have made a similar decision in the past year, compared to a typical turnover rate of 14 to 16 percent, according to the American Association of School Administrators.

Superintendents’ reasons for leaving vary. As many as 1,500 to 2,000  superintendents have stepped away after delaying their retirement during the first year of the pandemic, estimated Michael Collins, president of Ray and Associates, a national search firm that consults with school boards to find new leaders.

“Superintendents stood by their districts when they thought this would be a couple of months,” said Molly Schwarzhoff, executive vice president and a lead recruiter for Ray and Associates. “It’s a whole different ball game now. Once we saw what we were up against … a lot of people just said, ‘I don’t want to play anymore.’ ”

Altogether, the ongoing impact of Covid-19, coupled with political turmoil at the local level, has likely added as many as 3,000 vacancies beyond normal attrition during the last and current school years in the approximately 13,500 public school districts in the U.S., Collins said.

25 percent — superintendent turnover last year, up from about 15 percent in a typical year

Depending on how long pandemic conditions persist, he added, “the first five years of this decade could produce a staggering rate of turnover, rearranging the average turnover rate for the entire decade.”

The job of a superintendent — managing multimillion-dollar budgets, supervising school principals and central staff, fielding matters of public concern and negotiating school board priorities — has never been easy. And now, as thousands of school boards across the country compete to hire new district leaders, it’s not entirely clear who actually wants and will be qualified to do these jobs.

The collective scramble for new leadership comes at a tense time for school boards. Although they typically hire and technically supervise superintendents, in recent months school boards have been at the center of public fights over mask mandates, Covid-19 vaccines and teaching about race. The recent surge of vitriol at public meetings, meanwhile, has made it difficult to recruit top talent when a new superintendent is needed.

Related: Do fraught school board meetings offer a view of the future?

Social distancing has prompted many school boards to host their public meetings online, if they weren’t already. And that’s made it easier for potential applicants for superintendencies to observe what their life would be like in those districts.

“Candidates are doing more homework than ever,” Schwarzhoff said. “You may be setting up interviews in two to three months,” she advises school boards, “but you’re being interviewed right now. Candidates are seeing the good, the bad and the ugly right now.”

In Alaska, the state’s school administrators association estimated that superintendent turnover is nearing 30 percent. Lon Garrison, who heads the Association of Alaska School Boards, has urged members to try to act more respectfully to each other and to administrators. He said that he recently worked with a school district that had cycled through six different superintendents in just four years.

“In today’s world, anybody can see how you behave,” Garrison said. “And with boards where there’s been a lot of controversy or board members who create some havoc, they have a harder time recruiting those top candidates.”

Like other school systems nationwide, Elko County School District’s hunt for a new superintendent may be complicated by its neighbors doing the same thing. Two other school districts in northern Nevada — Washoe County and Carson City, including Reno and the state capital — have also launched searches preceding their superintendents’ impending retirements.

Collectively, the Washoe County, Carson City and Elko County school districts serve roughly 84,300 students, or 19 percent of children attending Nevada’s public school districts.

But the superintendent shortage was almost much worse: The school board overseeing the roughly 320,000-student Clark County School District in the Las Vegas area terminated Superintendent Jesus Jara in October before undoing that action several weeks later. The tumultuous fall highlighted the split nature of the seven-member school board and the ongoing tensions between the superintendent and a few trustees over governance policies, management styles and issues plaguing the district, such as low morale and severe staffing shortages.

“Every district has its challenges, and I don’t think you do anybody any good by pretending like you don’t have a challenge.”

Angie Taylor, Washoe County School Board president

Despite a fraught relationship with his bosses and a host of pandemic-era challenges, Jara decided to continue leading the nation’s fifth-largest school district. In a statement announcing an agreement with the school board, Jara framed his decision as rooted in not wanting to desert the community’s most vulnerable children.

“There are too many children in this community that have been left behind,” he wrote. “I won’t walk away from them.”

His decision to stay came as a relief to Clark County trustee Lola Brooks, who worried about the board’s prospects of finding a new leader given what she described as its “reputation for dysfunction and for micromanagement.” More superintendent vacancies across the country, she said, mean more options for those seeking top-level positions.

“There are communities that are way more supportive of education in general,” she said. “They actually pay more, and they have fewer students, and they have less drama.”

That sentiment isn’t shared by Brooks’ Clark County colleague Linda Cavazos, one of three trustees who sought to terminate Jara. She said districts should not be so reliant on hiring national search firms that produce the same stable of candidates. Instead, Cavazos suggested that districts look for new leaders who have demonstrated success with similar student demographics, even if they hail from smaller cities and don’t fit the “cookie-cutter image” of a veteran superintendent.

Despite Clark County being out of the competition, Washoe County School Board president Angie Taylor wants to make sure the governing body is on its “best behavior” while they look for a new superintendent.

“Every district has its challenges, and I don’t think you do anybody any good by pretending like you don’t have a challenge,” Taylor said. “Because then you’re bringing somebody in under false circumstances.”

Related: A year in the life of a small-town superintendent shows the federal bailout won’t be enough

Outgoing Washoe County superintendent Kristen McNeill, who has worked for the district since 1996, said her husband retired last year and it was time to join him. After a stint as interim superintendent beginning in 2019, she was appointed the district’s leader by the Washoe County School Board in April of 2020. Her reign as superintendent unfolded during the pandemic, but she said the difficulty of working in schools at this time was not unique to her. Bus drivers, teachers, central office staff and other employees have also been pulling double duty to plug holes caused by vacancies.

She said she’s just “one of many people that continue to feel exhausted and burned out.”

The Washoe County School District’s deputy superintendent and chief operations officer are also retiring at the end of the school year.

Leadership changes like these can create a ripple effect throughout districts. New superintendents bring new visions, new curricula, new administrative practices and sometimes even new staff. A change can lead to a yo-yo effect for those at the school level who have grown accustomed to one way of doing things, only to be thrust in a different direction.

Calen Evans, a STEM coordinator in the Washoe County School District and president of an advocacy group called Empower Nevada Teachers, is bracing himself for that change yet again. He has worked under four superintendents since he started with the district as a substitute teacher in 2012. The new hire will be his fifth.

Evans said he is remaining optimistic, hoping the shift in leadership forces the district to rethink how it educates students. But pros come with cons, he said.

“Let’s relearn the wheel again. Let’s reinvest the resources we don’t have into new programs,” Evans said, explaining the downsides.

Before any of that happens though, district leaders have to find people willing to take on the role, and they anticipate that search will be a tough one.

The Carson City School District, which is about 30 miles south of Reno, hired the Nevada Association of School Boards (NASB) to help with its search for its new leader. Longtime Carson City superintendent Richard Stokes is retiring at the end of the school year.

Debb Oliver, executive director of NASB, said superintendent positions that may have drawn 20 applicants pre-pandemic are only seeing five or six right now. The smaller pools limit districts’ choices and perhaps the quality of candidates, she said.

At the same time, superintendent salaries will likely rise. Carson City School Board president Joe Cacioppo said trustees increased the salary range for the next superintendent, knowing that rising housing prices and the other superintendent openings could make it difficult to attract the right person. The new salary range is $170,000 to $210,000, depending on experience, he said. The outgoing superintendent’s annual base salary was $178,000.

“If we find out that the best person for the position is somebody internally, that’s a positive for us,” Cacioppo said. “If we find out the best person is somebody who comes in from outside the district, we’re excited about that, too.”

In Valdez, Alaska — a remote district that enrolls about 700 students at four schools — Kathy Todd isn’t sure how to approach her city’s next superintendent search.

She’s served on the school board in Valdez for 15 years and helped select the last superintendent, who started in July. But after a few months on the job — and following protests at his home about mask mandates — he quit. The school board pulled a former employee out of retirement to fill the post, but it’s not a permanent solution.

“Frankly, being a superintendent in this kind of politicized pandemic is extremely difficult,” Todd said. “We have lots of competition from other Alaska school districts trying to hire, and the pool [of candidates] is shallow.”

In Alaska — where superintendents’ salaries are lower than those in a majority of other states — it’s also a struggle to find leaders willing to work in isolated settings. There’s long been a teacher shortage, making schools dependent on hiring from out of state and sometimes lowering the bar for required experience. School boards in remote areas use the same techniques to find superintendents. Now, even those imperfect solutions may not work as well as they once did.

“We have just voted to appoint you as our interim superintendent. So, congratulations and condolences all at the same time.”

Teresa Dastrup, Elko School Board president

“You’re not seeing that comparable education and experience and training,” said Lisa Parady, executive director of the Alaska Council of School Administrators. “We’re so reliant on the lower 48 [states] to produce those candidates … and the pipeline has just dried up.”

As for superintendents on their way out, “they’re next-level exhausted,” Parady said.

Karen Gaborik stepped away from the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District in June, deciding to take at least a year to travel and spend time with her mother in the warmer Arizona climate. Gaborik declined to cite specific quarrels with the school board, but said “lightning rod” debates over Covid and masking overtook conversations about instruction. Gaborik, who graduated from high school and started her teaching career in Fairbanks, is sad that her seven years as superintendent — a bit longer than the average national tenure rate — have come to an end.

“I reached the age that I could retire, and would have stayed if the dynamic with the school board stayed productive,” Gaborik said. “I could see things change before my eyes. It was time to step out.”

Related: An Appalachian county kept school Covid cases down with strong community partnerships

Robinson, the former Elko County superintendent, also left town, and doesn’t feel safe disclosing her current location.

After she left last summer, more Elko County education leaders stepped down as well. Five trustees quit in the wake of a board attempt to make mask-wearing optional for students and teachers. The superintendent search stalled. Several candidates withdrew, and the two remaining trustees delayed making any decision about whom to hire.

But a reconstituted Elko County School Board recently took a step toward temporary stability. In mid-December, trustees selected C. J. Anderson, a district employee, as the district’s third interim superintendent. The board hasn’t ruled out conducting another search for an official superintendent, but it may ask Anderson to assume the role.

Elko School Board president Teresa Dastrup said she was grateful that two candidates had even applied for the interim position after such a rough summer and fall.

“We have just voted to appoint you as our interim superintendent,” Dastrup told Anderson at the Dec. 14 board meeting. “So, congratulations and condolences all at the same time.”

This story about the superintendent search was produced by The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit newsroom based in Las Vegas, and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Who wants to lead America’s school districts? Anyone? Anyone? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

LAS VEGAS — Sal Khan made a radical decision last summer. It was time, thought the ed tech pioneer, to bring his nonprofit online education empire to brick-and-mortar schools — lots of them.

To that end, his company built a new software tool designed for classroom use and piloted it in five school districts — including the massive Clark County School District serving Las Vegas and its suburbs — in the 2019-20 school year. Although Khan Academy was one of the first online learning organizations to promote the idea that kids could learn at home at their own pace, Khan denied the suggestion that working with traditional schools was a significant change in direction, instead calling it “a natural evolution of our work.”

If it went well, Khan Academy would prove, on a large scale, that teachers are critical to the successful use of technology in learning. And it would provide a key to ensuring more children become proficient in math, a stubborn problem in education nationally. But those goals will have to wait. The experiment has now been largely put on hold by the pandemic, but the questions it raises, both for technologists and for schools, illuminate some of the ongoing obstacles to technological innovation in schools.

“It’s not like you can just drop the tool in and the flowers will bloom and the birds will chirp.”

Sal Khan, founder of the nonprofit Khan Academy

Khan’s theory is that a big part of the reason kids fall behind in math is because they’ve missed a key skill at some point.

“Let’s say you’re learning negative numbers, but it has a decimal or fraction in it,” Khan said. If you don’t understand fractions, you’ll be too confused to grasp negative numbers, so you’ll tune out, he argued. “But,” he said, “if you give students opportunities to work at their true learning edge and fill in gaps without any shame, any stigma, that encourages them.”

The idea for the new program was to organize Khan Academy’s online library of learning videos and problem sets into a game-like software program to help kids practice skills they need to master. To ensure they’re fed the right practice problems, the tool pulls in their results from a test known as Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, which measures discrete academic skills. (The developers of MAP, a nonprofit called Northwest Evaluation Association, or NWEA, worked with Khan to align their practice material with the skills measured by the test.) The version of the tool launched this fall focused on late elementary and middle school math, with new topics planned for the future.

In January, before any test results had come in, Khan was cautious about overstating the likely success of the new program.

“It’s not like you can just drop the tool in and the flowers will bloom and the birds will chirp,” he said.

But based on initial data from a much smaller pilot in Long Beach, California, in 2017-18 and another in 33 tiny Idaho districts in 2013-14, he was optimistic. Studies of those efforts found that students who spent just 30 minutes per week on Khan Academy under the supervision of teachers significantly improved their performance on statewide standardized tests. Still, the nonprofit had never attempted anything on the scale of this school year’s five-district pilot.

Clark County, with more than 320,000 students, was the biggest district, with many times more students than Khan’s previous school-based efforts.

30 minutes per week — recommended time students spend on classroom-based Khan Academy tool

Khan provided the first year of teacher training, tech support and use of the new tool for grades 3 through 8 at no charge. The MAP tests, however, weren’t free: Clark County paid about $1.9 million to NWEA in 2019-20 for students in kindergarten through eighth grade to take the assessments. The original plan called for the district to pay Khan Academy for training and tech support next year.

In January, Clark County Superintendent Jesús Jara said he saw the tool as a potential game changer for his sprawling school district, which battles large class sizes, a chronic teacher shortage, student transiency, a 70 percent poverty rate and dismal math achievement scores (just 24 percent of Clark County eighth graders were proficient in math in 2019, according to a national assessment).

Given all the hurdles, it seemed that if the tool could help students and teachers here, it could help them anywhere. Tara Powell, the principal of B. Mahlon Brown Academy of International Studies, a Clark County middle school, embraced the digital program from the beginning but knew its success hinged on teachers.

“You could pop a kid on a computer and then get nothing out of it,” Powell said. Teachers are the key to the successful introduction of a new technology, she said. “It’s that relationship. It’s that prompting. It’s that coaching that the teacher has to put in and is willing to put in.”

Related: The overlooked power of Zuckerberg-backed learning program lies offline

In early February, things appeared to be going well. Across the five pilot districts, 70 percent of participating students had created an account and 30 percent were using the program, according to Khan’s data for that month.

“This has amplified the inequities in our community for our children.”

Jesús Jara, superintendent of Clark County School District, on the school closures ordered to combat the novel coronavirus

Then the pandemic struck. On March 16, students went from attending schools with marked disparities to staying in homes with even more dramatic resource gaps. During the last week of April, more than 257,000 students had engaged in digital distance learning and had two-way communication with their teachers. Another 8,000 had a documented exemption, such as no internet access or an inability to leave home to pick up academic paper packets. By the time the school year ended, 4,370 students had not been reached at all during the coronavirus-related closure. District officials said they don’t know exactly how many children lack internet access.

“This has amplified the inequities in our community for our children,” Jara said of the closures shortly after they began. But the district is trying to address the problem: It distributed nearly 111,500 Chromebooks to students for home use during the closure and deployed special Wi-Fi-equipped buses to various neighborhoods.

While using the Khan tool, which remains accessible online, could help some students keep up, it’s hardly assured that most will do so. Roughly 38,000 students logged on during the week before Nevada schools shut down. A month into the closure, the number of students logging into MAP Accelerator dropped to 21,423.

Students with teachers who used the program regularly in class could be more likely to use the tool at home. That has been true at Brown, one of the two middle schools The Nevada Independent and The Hechinger Report have followed since the pilot program started last fall.

Melinda Smith, a sixth grade math teacher at Brown, had been using the software as a warm-up activity at the beginning of each of her 80-minute math classes. She especially appreciated the data the tool provided which showed how well students understood various math skills. She said it helped her realize when a concept needed to be taught again, either to the whole class or to small groups.

“At a quick glance, I can see that he’s better in number sense and number systems,” Smith said, browsing one student’s data set. She said she used the information to encourage kids to keep working on trickier skills.

“They’re putting the fun into math.”

Gregg Whitney, sixth grade student in Clark County schools

Smith liked tracking student progress in real time. On her computer, she could watch students advance through skill sets as they worked during class time, and, if they were zoned out, she could see that, too. The software only counts active usage, not idle minutes.

One morning in early January, Brown sixth grader Gregg Whitney, 12, sat at a computer station in his school’s library steadily solving math problems with the help of Khan’s video tutorials. Correct answers yielded virtual confetti. As he accumulated points and “leveled up,” he also earned increasingly complex avatars. That morning, his screen featured an aquatic dragon avatar. Math has not always been Gregg’s best subject, but this was different.

“They’re putting the fun into math,” he said.

Ideally, the platform can motivate students in a way traditional letter grades cannot. Like runners vying for that personal record, students can aim to outperform their past selves. The hope is that as students master a new skill and go on to the next level, they will learn that hard work can lead to measurable success, knowledge that could both help lift struggling students and push high-achieving students.

But not all teachers were as enthusiastic about the program as those at Brown. And student interest has appeared to follow that of their teachers. Interviews with more than a dozen teachers revealed mixed levels of support. Some were excited to use the tool in their classrooms, while others expressed skepticism or mild interest.

The day after Gregg pointed out the detailed awesomeness of his aquatic dragon, Jahein Flanagan, 13, sat in a classroom at Ed Von Tobel Middle School with a school-issued laptop open before him.

His teacher, Leila Cryer, a long-term substitute, had asked him and his classmates, all of whom struggled to keep up in math, to practice fractions on the Khan tool while using the previous day’s class notes as a guide. (Teachers can assign specific topics if they prefer the whole class practice the same skill.)

Jahein considered the question Khan had fed him: “What does the 6 in 2/6 represent?” He picked an answer at random, which, he said, was how he usually approached the program.

He didn’t use the digital scratch pad to think through an answer and he said he hadn’t previously noticed the link to the video tutorial included with every question. When he clicked on it, the video on the parts of a fraction played without sound and he had no headphones. He closed it out, appearing unimpressed, and read the question once more. Again, he picked the wrong answer. His third pick was correct, but he said it was still a guess.

Related: How to reach students without internet access at home? Schools get creative

One reason for the big difference in how the two schools used the tool is that while some training efforts were districtwide, individual schools had to request much of the offered support. By early March, 1,000 school district staff members, including principals, teachers and math specialists,  had signed up for training sessions offered by Khan. And 55 schools had requested some form of support, which could include anything from a webinar to a site visit.

After the shutdown, Brown students still spent an average of 14 minutes per week using Khan, while Von Tobel students averaged one minute per week, according to district data from the last week of April.

Teachers’ backgrounds and professional training could also affect how the tool is used. Roughly 750 licensed positions remained unfilled when students entered classrooms in August and many schools in the district had to hire long-term substitutes who had less training (if any) in teaching math. Von Tobel was short two full-time math teachers in its four-person seventh grade math department in January, while Brown had a full slate of qualified math teachers.

Brown, located in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, also has fewer students living in poverty, though not by a wide margin. Three quarters of Brown’s students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch, a federal measure of student poverty. At Von Tobel, in northeast Las Vegas, 100 percent of students qualify for meal assistance.

Related: Schools on a screen: One tech-savvy school district has lessons for others going online

But it’s not clear whether these issues make a difference. As of January, 56 percent of students at Brown demonstrated typical growth during the six months between their fall and winter MAP assessments. A very similar 53 percent of students at Von Tobel did the same.

For now, with the pandemic still keeping school closed and spring assessments cancelled, it is impossible to answer the original question of whether integrating Khan Academy into public schools will improve learning.

Initially, Khan Academy intended to add a language arts tool in fall 2020 and begin to charge for training and tech support. Khan said only that was still being worked out. And Jara said paying for the tutoring tool remains a priority, but with the normally bustling and neon-lit Las Vegas Strip a ghost town of padlocked casinos for more than two months, the state lost its main economic engine. And with all state agencies, including the Nevada Department of Education, put on notice for cuts, it’s unclear where the money for an experimental math improvement tool will come from.

But Jara wasn’t ready to quit.

“We have to look at ways to find the resources,” he said in mid-May when asked if he would pay for Khan Academy’s tool in the 2020-21 school year. “We have to do much better for our students.”

That’s going to be difficult, under the circumstances. But assuming the effort continues, The Nevada Independent and The Hechinger Report will continue to follow the story.

This story was produced by The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit news organization covering politics and public policy in Nevada, and  The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for theHechinger newsletter.

The post Khan Academy plunged into classrooms, then classrooms went online appeared first on The Hechinger Report.