This week, I wanted to highlight our continuing early ed math coverage by talking to Joe Hong, who wrote a story about a Milwaukee school district trying to revive methods it used for math instruction a decade ago. Our conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

A small group of teachers in Milwaukee are trying to return to math strategies the district used from 2004-2014. Teachers in the district call this “the golden years of math instruction.” Could you explain what made math during those years different?

It came down to a two-pronged accountability structure. First, there was a hierarchy of university professors, district administrators, teacher leaders and classroom teachers that bridged the needs of educators in the field and the latest research surrounding math pedagogy. Second, it was the university professors who oversaw the funding — a substantial amount of $20 million — and made sure it was spent just on improving math instruction and not redirected toward competing priorities in the school district.

Part of the glue that seemed to hold this instruction model together was the school district’s partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. When that partnership ended a decade ago, the district went back to using its own in-house math curriculum. My understanding is that partnership is still gone. How are educators in the district trying to keep the “golden years of math instruction” alive?

DeAnn Huinker, the University of Wisconsin professor who oversaw the partnership, is still running teacher trainings. Some of the teachers who were in the classroom in the early 2000s are now holding leadership positions in the district. Having these folks around makes it easier to continue the work, although at a smaller scale.

There’s a moment in your story where a first grade teacher is surprised she’s enjoying math. Do you get the sense proponents of this instruction model see the Milwaukee teachers benefiting as much as the students?

Yes, in fact I think so many teachers struggle with teaching math because they themselves aren’t comfortable with it. Milwaukee’s approach has always been centered around making sure teachers know the math. More than one person involved in Milwaukee’s math instruction told me, “When teachers are learning, students are learning.”

Was there any pushback to teaching math in this way?

There was some resistance. Part of it isn’t unique to math. Principals and teachers are wary of change because it can often mean more work for them, which often means allocating funds and time that they don’t have. And then there are also the ongoing debates in math education. Milwaukee’s approach really emphasizes the concepts behind math over the procedures, and while I don’t know whether the more procedurally-minded educators pushed back against the Milwaukee Mathematics Partnerships in the early 2000s, I’ve already gotten emails since the story published from educators criticizing the conceptual approach.

You touch on a trend in this story that I’ve noticed in my own reporting — early childhood teachers gravitating to younger grades to avoid having to teach difficult math. Do you get the sense the training intentionally targets the district’s early elementary educators to re-teach them how to think about math?

Milwaukee Public Schools has definitely focused on early childhood educators in recent years. Many of these teachers admit that they got into elementary teaching because they weren’t “math people.” But they’re starting to rethink their identities with these trainings and learning how to leverage their own expertises in child development and classroom management to engage with the youngest learners.

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This is an edition of our climate change and education newsletter. Sign up here.

109 on the first day of school?

That was the case this year in Palm Springs, California, where parent Cyd Detiege has been campaigning to delay the start of the school year because of extreme heat.

Palm Springs Unified District officials haven’t budged, but administrators elsewhere in the country are shifting school calendars to keep kids from commuting to school in high heat and learning in sweltering classrooms, according to a new Hechinger story from writer Erin Rode.

The neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District, after studying which weeks are typically hottest, decided to postpone its first day from the third to fourth week of August and push the last day of school further into June.

Other districts that have experimented with delaying the start of school because of heat are Denver, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. At best, though, the schedule shakeups are a stopgap. “Just thinking about the shift in our climate across our planet, shifting the calendar isn’t going to be as helpful as it was three years ago,” said Carrie A. Olson, Denver school board president. The solution for her district, she said, is going to be more air conditioning and heat mitigation strategies in schools.

Climate change has certainly scrambled how I think about seasons. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I used to love July and August. Now it feels like fall is the new summer, the time to finally escape outdoors and enjoy being outside.

Related reads

How extreme heat is threatening education progress worldwide. New UNICEF data demonstrates how hot temperatures are unraveling education gains globally, writes The New York Times’s Somini Sengupta. One in five kids today experiences twice as many extremely hot days as their grandparents did.

Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning. I wrote about kids suffering in school buildings without air conditioning or being sent home early for “heat days,” and how high temperatures deepen racial divides in education.  

As climate change fuels hotter temperatures, kids are learning less. The 19th’s Jessica Kutz covered how policymakers are taking notice of how higher temperatures mean dehydrated, exhausted students. 

The interview

I spoke with Shiva Rajbhandari, 20, who just stepped down at the end of a two-year term this month on the Boise School Board, in Idaho. Rajbhandari ran and won at age 17 on a climate change platform. He’s now a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an organizer for the Sunrise Movement, helping to lead its push for a Green New Deal for Schools. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You ran for school board on comprehensive climate education and energy efficient schools. How much progress were you able to make on those issues?

I’ve been really impressed with the progress in the Boise school district. We have conducted a districtwide, scope one through three carbon audit, using a private contractor, and have identified easy ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money in the process. Now we are putting together a long-term plan on greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and also on water conservation, waste reduction and climate education.

What do you want to see happen in the next two years?

I hope that we can pass a comprehensive climate action plan this school year. A lot of these changes, especially with money coming from the EPA and Inflation Reduction Act, are changes that we can begin implementing immediately. We now have a grant to purchase electric buses. There’s a lot of stuff around energy efficiency and the way we build our new buildings especially, where it’s really easy to, say, install an electric heater instead of a natural gas heater. I’m also looking forward to an upcoming bond in 2028 when I think we’ll put a lot of these climate infrastructure projects on the ballot.

Do you feel like your other school board members took you seriously?

Not at first. I think there was an attitude of, I’m here and I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I think I changed that over the course of my term. And I do think that I’ve expanded student voice. My fellow trustees, many of them didn’t have kids, they are not interacting with kids on a day-to-day basis who are in our school district. I do think people begin to underestimate young people and the students in our schools. And I think I helped to change that.

You had pushed for a permanent student non-voting position on the board but that didn’t happen. Is that something you’ll keep pushing for?

Yes, absolutely. We just saw last week in New York the signing of legislation requiring all school districts to have at least one non-voting student member on their school board. We have other states and districts where that is the case. I think that, fundamentally, students bring a perspective that is needed in the boardroom. They’re on the ground in the classroom every day and they are the ones seeing the implementation of the policies and the budgets that school boards are voting on.

What are the biggest barriers to progress on these climate and education issues?

I think it’s a belief gap. There is kind of this old guard that thinks schools are the place to teach reading, writing and math. And that’s absolutely true. But there’s so much more of a role that schools have to play in modern society. We have schools that are feeding America’s kids, schools are providing child care, they are agents of socialization. It’s really the place where most people in this country interact with government on a day-to-day basis. Schools are keystone entities in our community and they have a lot of power to shape what our communities look like. And I think when it comes to stopping the climate crisis, that’s the ultimate superpower of our schools. When a school has installed solar panels, it shows everyone else in that neighborhood that solar panels work and are saving our district money. When a school in Phoenix, Arizona, can provide heat relief when it is 110 degrees, it shows our communities what climate resilience looks like. But the belief gap exists out there that we don’t have the technology to solve climate change, that it’s really expensive, and it’s not schools’ place.

Help a reporter

My colleagues and I were struck by a recent Guardian story on four high school football players who died in August for what appears to be heat-related causes. The news outlet notes that 77 heat-related athlete deaths have been recorded since 2000, of which 65 percent were teens. At Hechinger, we want to learn what training coaches and teachers need to keep kids safe in a hotter world. What do you think about kids playing sports in extreme heat? Do we need new rules and regulations on outdoor sports? Let us know your thoughts at newsletter@hechingerreport.org

Resources and events

• How districts are spending Inflation Reduction Act dollars to green their schools: Undaunted K12, a nonprofit group that advocates for schools to reduce their climate toll, recently shared an interactive map that shows which school districts use federal tax credits to defray the costs of clean energy projects. Some examples: The Menasha Joint School District in Wisconsin expects to receive $3.8 million in tax credits to help build a new carbon neutral middle school that includes solar panels and energy storage. Hasting Public Schools in Nebraska is using the federal dollars for ground-source heat pumps, while North Carolina’s Clinton City Schools are investing in solar.  

• How to protect vulnerable Americans — including children — from extreme heat: That’s the topic of an event on Sept. 18 hosted by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Speakers include Levar M. Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia; Rev. Terrance McKinley, a vice president with the National Black Child Development Institute; John M. Balbus, director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity for the Department of Health and Human Services; and David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University.

This story about schools and heat was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the climate and education newsletter.

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Imagine engineering students retrofitting campus buildings to make them more energy efficient. Or students in a human behavior class applying what they’ve learned to encourage cafeteria visitors to waste less food.

Efforts like these are part of an instructional approach known as the “campus as a living lab,” in which classroom teaching mixes with on-the-ground efforts to decarbonize campuses. Earlier this year, I visited the State University of New York to see the living lab model in action.

During my trip, I sat in on a business class as students pitched their proposals for greening the New Paltz campus. They’d researched topics including solar energy and composting, acquiring skills in project management and finance as they developed their business plans. Students I spoke with said the fact that the projects had a chance of becoming reality — thanks to money from a university “green revolving fund” — helped the lessons stick.

“A lot of projects are kind of like simulations,” Madeleine Biles, a graduating senior, told me. “This one was real life.”

I was struck by how professors in fields as diverse as theater, economics and architecture were participating in the “living lab” model. Former NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz writes about a related trend in her latest column for Hechinger: Colleges embedding climate-related content into all sorts of classes — sociology, history, English literature, French.

“We want every major to be a climate major,” Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Duke University, told Anya. “Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do — preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators — if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Research take

This is Planet Ed, the Aspen Institute initiative on climate and education, highlighted strategies like these and more in its recent plan for how colleges and universities can respond to the climate crisis. The report talks about higher ed’s role primarily in four areas:

• Educating and supporting students: Higher ed can ensure all students obtain a basic level of climate literacy and also prepare students for jobs in renewable energy and related fields. One example: The Kern Community College system, in California, is attempting to move away from training students for oil jobs to jobs in carbon management.
• Engaging people in communities where colleges are located: Higher ed can convene and support community leaders as they develop climate plans. For example, the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University has worked with predominantly Black communities in the Gulf Coast to mitigate environmental harms.  
• Developing solutions for climate mitigation: Colleges must reduce their own climate footprint and prepare their campuses for climate risks. Some examples: Arizona State University has a “campus metabolism dashboard” that allows students, faculty and staff to track their resource use, while at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, 85 percent of its 41 campus vehicles are electric.  
• Putting equity at the center of their climate work: Colleges can prioritize support for students most affected by climate and educational inequities, and historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and other institutions that serve such individuals must be part of climate planning. The HBCU Climate Change Consortium, for example, strives to diversify the pipeline of environmental leaders.

The interview

I spoke with John B. King Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York and co-chair of This is Planet Ed, about higher ed’s role in fighting climate change and how it’s reshaping childhood. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are you doing at SUNY to combat climate change?

One of the first things I did was name a chief sustainability officer, Carter Strickland. He has convened a task force that is developing a system-wide climate action plan to address campus sustainability practices and educate students around climate issues and for green jobs. He also has worked with our campuses on their clean energy master plans. Each of our state operating campuses has identified what steps they need to take to get to the 2045 net-zero [greenhouse gas emissions] goal. We changed our algorithm for prioritizing capital projects to build in climate, so we are doing a number of projects that involve geothermal.

According to the nonprofit group Second Nature, only about 12 universities are carbon neutral. Why can’t SUNY and other universities move faster to reduce their carbon footprint?

It really comes down to capital. For our state-operating campuses, we project it’s going to take something like $10 billion in capital investment to get to our net zero targets. We also have a substantial critical maintenance backlog of $7 billion or $8 billion dollars. One way we’re trying to reconcile this challenge is as we do renovations of buildings, we are taking steps to make them as energy efficient as possible. We are adding more charging stations, we’re moving our fleets to electric, we’re changing out light fixtures, we are phasing in a ban on single-use plastic. We do think the Inflation Reduction Act may be a help because of the direct pay provision [which provides universities and other nonprofits payment equivalent to the value of tax credits for qualifying clean energy projects].

Could this result in students having to pay more to attend SUNY schools?

No. Our hope is that the governor and legislature will work with us to develop a comprehensive capital plan.

How is climate change already reshaping childhood?

Sadly. We already see school being disrupted regularly by extreme weather events, whether that’s hurricanes or heat waves. There is growing data on the negative impact of high temperatures on student learning. We already are seeing the negative consequences of climate change for the student experience. If you think about being a kid in Phoenix where it’s well over 100 for days, you’re not going to be able to play outside. But I do think increasingly you are seeing K-12 trying to engage students in how they can be a part of the solution — and students are demanding that.

Resources and events

• As this summer — the hottest on record — nears an end, I’m looking forward to several sessions on education happening Sept. 24, 25 and 26 as part of Climate Week NYC. Say hi if you’re going, too.
• EARTHDAY.ORG, a nonprofit that supports environmental action worldwide, recently released a “School Guide to Climate Action.” On Oct. 9, in Washington, D.C., the group will hold a workshop for educators on the guide and climate instruction in schools. Email walker@earthday.org with questions or to sign up.
• A new World Bank report argues that climate action has been slow in part because people don’t have the necessary knowledge and skills. Policy makers need to invest in education as a tool for fighting climate change, it says.
• New research in the journal WIREs Climate Change examines the fossil fuel industry’s extensive involvement in higher education. Oil and gas companies and their affiliated foundations finance climate and energy research, sit on university governance boards and host student-recruitment events on campus, the report notes. 

What I’m reading

The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. This novel tells the story of a family trying to survive in a Florida of the not-so-distant future that’s been ravaged by climate change. There’s an education angle: Storms and floods have driven away most residents of the fictional town of Rudder, including the only friend of 10-year-old Wanda, for whom school has become a hostile place. I found this book absolutely gutting but it also provides a glimpse of how people can persevere and even thrive in a world that looks very different from the one we’ve known.

Thanks for subscribing — and please let me know your thoughts on this newsletter and what you’d like to see me cover!

— Caroline Preston

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At the end of July, McDowell Technical Community College in Marion, North Carolina, hosted a party for something people don’t typically throw parties for: Applying for financial aid.

The campus is often quiet after 5pm, but on this day, it was transformed into a loud and lively space for Latino families from the western part of the state. While they waited for their turn in an upstairs computer lab where bilingual education advocates could help them fill out their FAFSA, they ate from a hodgepodge buffet of donated food while a DJ played pop hits in Spanish and in English and raffled off prizes big and small.

The FAFSA Fiesta at McDowell was one of four that the College Foundation of North Carolina, a nonprofit based in Raleigh, hosted this summer to try to boost Latino college going across the state in an unusually difficult year.

The disastrous launch of a “simplified” FAFSA complicated college plans for students and families across the country, and an estimated 300,000 fewer students applied for federal financial aid this year. In North Carolina, about 50 percent of high schoolers who graduated this spring had filled out the FAFSA, compared to 59 percent in 2023 — a decrease of more than 6,000 students — according to the latest data from the National College Attainment Network. 

Students are typically encouraged to fill out the FAFSA before they graduate from high school (and much sooner for those applying to many four-year colleges and universities), but the application is still open until next June for students who may decide to enroll later, either for the spring semester or at a two- or four-year college that offers rolling admissions. The summer FAFSA Fiestas targeted recent high school graduates who hadn’t applied for aid or made college plans, and those whose family circumstances might make the process challenging to navigate.

“Let’s be totally honest, FAFSA is not the most fun thing in the world to do,” said Bill DeBaun, senior director of data and strategic initiatives at NCAN. “You have to make these events look like something people want to spend their time on — draw them in with a carrot.” 

At these events, Hernandez-Lira and other advocates helped families navigate tech issues, such as forgotten passwords, and more complex issues that are common in immigrant communities. For example, U.S.-citizen students from mixed-status families (meaning at least one parent is undocumented) are eligible for federal and state financial aid, but their FAFSAs can be more complicated to fill out. And their parents often hesitate to go through the process, fearful that disclosing personal immigration information on federal documents is a bad idea. Hernandez-Lira and others working at the events knew how to take the extra steps with the application and were prepared to talk to parents about what protections they might have.

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More than 112 families attended the North Carolina FAFSA Fiesta events, and 43 indicated on a follow-up survey that they had been able to successfully complete the FAFSA, according to Juana Hernandez-Lira, the College Foundation’s associate director of outreach of special populations. (She believes the actual figures are higher, because only about half the attendees filled out the survey afterward.) 

Though the event was focused on FAFSA completion, Hernandez-Lira said the organization also has resources available to help undocumented students who aren’t eligible for federal or state aid. The event was primarily advertised to Spanish speaking North Carolinians via the Spanish-language radio station La Grande, but non-Latinos were welcome, too.

Silvia Martin del Campo, director of LatinX education at McDowell Tech, said that even though these can be challenging situations, “those would be the best cases,” because students and families came to ask for help in the first place. 

“A lot of them decide just to not even come and ask if it’s possible to aim for higher education, because they think that they need to have, like, thousands of dollars in their bank account to be able to go to college,” Martin del Campo said.

Though she works at McDowell Tech, Martin del Campo said the goal was to help these families fill out the new FAFSA and navigate the complicated system so that they can go to any community four-year college. 

 QUICK TAKES

Success and failure in graduate school

We’ve written a lot about low completion rates for undergraduates across the country; now new research from the University of Chicago shows similar issues among graduate students. Economist Lesley Turner found that only 58 percent of graduate students finish their programs within 6 years. She and her co-author used data from grad students at public and nonprofit institutions in Texas, which they said is broadly representative of graduate students nationwide. 

“It is especially important to focus on this population because graduate students hold almost half of all student loan debt,” Lesley Turner said in a press release. Her comments echoed many of the findings that my colleague Jon Marcus wrote about recently, in a story that also appeared in USA Today.  

Direct admission via the College App

The Common App announced an expansion of its direct admissions program, which will allow 116 colleges and universities to reach out directly to first-generation, low- and middle-income students with admissions offers without them having to apply – up from 71 schools that participated last year. Students who have a Common App account but have not yet completed all of their applications can see and act on offers in their application.  Common App, which began the direct-admissions program in 2021, reported that about 400,000 students received offers last year. This year’s list of participating colleges includes schools from 34 states. 

Related Hechinger Reads

Four cities of FAFSA chaos: Students tell how they grappled with the mess, stress

Many undocumented students cannot take high school dual-enrollment courses for college credit

Sick parents? Caring for siblings? Colleges experiment with asking applicants how home life affects them

This story about FAFSA completion 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post Can the FAFSA mean … fun? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

As students make their way back to college and campus demonstrations about the Israel-Hamas war resume, the central conflict isn’t likely to be student to student, but between the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom from hostile environments. Whether it’s possible for both to exist on college campuses this fall remains to be seen.

Many colleges have strengthened their policies on how and when students can protest. Some say their “fear-based” approach has gone too far and will discourage students from exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of punishment. Others say they haven’t gone far enough, and recommend further action be taken both to prevent protest and to discipline students who participate.

The new policies — which have been issued at colleges including the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University and Virginia Commonwealth University— often require students to register and receive prior approval for holding outdoor events or demonstrations; restrict how and when students can display posters and other materials on campus; limit where protests can be held and whether amplified sound is allowed to be used. Many are trying to prevent encampments, like those that proliferated last spring, entirely. 

Both the University of California and the California State University systems issued new policies this week banning encampments and “unauthorized structures,” or anything that blocks walkways or roadways on campuses.

Most of the new policy announcements begin by describing the institution’s dedication to academic freedom and freedom of speech, but Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel at the American Association of University Professors, said the new restrictions fundamentally undermine those freedoms.

Lieberwitz, who is also a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University, worries that these restrictions will discourage students — especially those with minority viewpoints — from exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of surveillance by college leaders. Requiring students to register their protests ahead of time also prevents them from spontaneously assembling in the case of a sudden news event, Lieberwitz said. She said these restrictions will also make it easier for universities to punish students who participate in protests. 

“There comes a point where there’s so many restrictions that they’re no longer reasonable,” said Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE. “They’re really there to discourage protest at all.”  

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Colleges should take this opportunity to help students understand how to exercise their First Amendment rights, Rank said, “so that these debates can continue but without the violence and vandalism and some of the stuff that we saw in the spring.” 

Last spring’s protests often escalated into occupation of campus buildings and dramatic clashes with university officials and police. The Associated Press reported that more than 3,000 people were arrested; many students were suspended, some were expelled and others temporarily lost access to their housing. Still others faced consequences related to their education, such as withholding of a diploma.

All the while, many Jewish and Muslim students have been harassed and have reported other negative experiences on campus since the protests began.

College leaders are under scrutiny for their handling of these protests. They’re receiving pressure from students, faculty, boards of trustees, donors and members of Congress, all of whom have competing interests. Three Ivy League presidents have resigned under pressure, with the third, Columbia’s Nemat Shafik, having stepped down last week.

Related: Across the country, student journalists are covering protests by their own classmates and reactions by their own administrations

Michael B. Poliakoff, the president and chief executive officer of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, is among those who think college leaders haven’t done enough.

“We need courage in these difficult times, not convenience, not passivity,” Poliakoff said.

His group issued a guide to preventing encampments and occupations that says “the difference between peaceful protest and encampment is that the latter seeks to commandeer the public square of campus to the exclusion of all else in the community.”

The guide recommends requiring students to read the college’s code of conduct and sign a form “committing themselves to obey and honor” it, or risk “clear and severe” penalties, including suspension or expulsion without the possibility of having tuition refunded.

Poliakoff said colleges often come down hard on issues such as plagiarism and academic ethics, but are too lenient on others. 

“Disruption is an even greater offense against the spirit of the university, and it seems to be all too common. We need some much clearer focus on the kind of decorum, on the rules that protect everybody’s freedom,” he said. 

Quick Takes

College applicant numbers increased …

In a sign of hope for enrollment, the number of college applicants rose by 7 percent last year, continuing an upward trend of the past few years, according to a new report from the Common App. While applicant numbers don’t necessarily translate into enrollment numbers, and the Common App is used by only about one-third of four-year colleges in the country, the increases show a continued aspiration to earn a bachelor’s degree. (Some of the increase could be attributed to about 50 more colleges using the Common App, making a total of 1,074 colleges.)

Notably, applicants from families living in lower-income zip codes rose by 12 percent over the previous year, compared with 4 percent for their higher-income peers – the largest increase in the eight years the Common App has measured this. And public colleges saw a bigger increase of applicants –16 percent – than private colleges at 5 percent.

Applicants from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups increased by 11 percent from last year, continuing a trend from the past three years. American Indian and Native Alaskan applicants grew the most – 15 percent – followed by Latino and Black applicants at 12 percent and 10 percent respectively. Black applicants are now 14 percent of the total pool, mirroring the country’s population.

Student applicants who would be the first in their families to go to college also increased by 5 percent. Student applicants from rural areas rose by 9 percent, compared with 6 percent from large cities.

… while the number of colleges decreased

Meanwhile, the National Student Clearinghouse reports that the number of federally recognized colleges and universities — meaning institutions whose students are eligible for federal financial aid — fell 2 percent in the last academic year. This follows a long enrollment decline, spiraling institutional debt, falling revenue from tuition and the end of pandemic relief funding that was keeping many of those vulnerable schools alive. 

My colleague Jon Marcus first pointed out that colleges were closing this year at an average rate of one per week, in a story that examined what happens to students in these cases. And our Meredith Kolodner took an in-depth look at the case of Wells College, which closed abruptly, leaving students, faculty members and staffers in the dark until the last moment.

This story about free speech on campus 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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The start of the school year can be stressful, but parents of neurodivergent children are more likely to report feeling overwhelmed, unprepared and scared than other parents, according to a new survey shared with The Hechinger Report.

About 2,100 parents answered the survey this summer from Understood.org, a nonprofit that publishes resources for people with dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and other learning differences. Those with neurodivergent children say they were stressed about their child’s social life, whether the school would meet their child’s needs and whether their child would have access to adequate resources to succeed in school. About 82 percent of those parents said neurodivergent students are often misunderstood by their peers, and 76 percent said they are often misunderstood by teachers.

Elementary-age children who think and learn differently may struggle more with the back-to-school transition because they have a harder time expressing their needs than their older peers, said Andrew Kahn, associate director of behavior change and expertise at Understood.org. “You’re much more likely to see this in behavior, and in avoidance and escape.”

Teachers can help ease the transition to school by looking for those signals and breaking down lessons and tasks early on, Kahn said. Simplifying activities step-by-step early on will benefit all children, he added.

“Some of this is getting teachers and parents to think broadly about how can we provide the smoothest way of instructing kids who are different — and who are neurotypical — in a way that’s going to decrease their sense of feeling different,” Kahn said.

Read more on neurodivergent students:

• Last fall, my colleague Jackie Mader wrote about the experiences of young children with dyscalculia, a learning disability that makes it harder to process numbers, and how a lack of awareness about it results in delayed diagnoses. The earlier a child gets diagnosed, the sooner they can get early interventions to help them succeed, Kahn said.

• But for some parents, the high cost of neuropsych evaluations hinders and delays those special education services, as my colleague Sarah Carr wrote in this story about disability testing.

• For parents of even younger children, finding a child care classroom that can meet their needs can feel almost impossible.

• Understood.org also publishes resources for parents and educators of children who think and learn differently and tips for specific scenarios.

• Earlier this year, Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat wrote about New York City slowly expanding its programs for children with autism, which an estimated 10,000 children in the city could benefit from.

• In 2019, Jackie wrote about preschool programs for children with disabilities and how federal spending on those programs has dropped over the past two decades.

Quick Takes:

Children who spent more time on tablets were more likely to have temper tantrums, according to a study of 315 children from Nova Scotia, Canada, published in JAMA Pediatrics last month. The study also found that children who struggled with anger and frustration at age 4.5 were likely to spend more time on tablets by age 5.5.

Third graders who attended transitional kindergarten programs in Michigan performed better in math and English language arts than children who attended other informal and formal early education programs in the state, researchers found in a study published by the University of Michigan.

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

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NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — At the end of a semester that presaged one of the hottest summers on record, the students in Associate Professor Michael Sheridan’s business class were pitching proposals to cut waste and emissions on their campus and help turn it into a vehicle for fighting climate change.

Flanking a giant whiteboard at the front of the classroom, members of the team campaigning to build a solar canopy on a SUNY New Paltz parking lot delivered their pitch. The sunbaked lot near the athletic center was an ideal spot for a shaded solar panel structure, they said, a conduit for solar energy that could curb the campus’s reliance on natural gas. 

The project would require $43,613 in startup money. It would be profitable within roughly five years, the students said. And over 50 years, it would save the university $787,130 in energy costs.

“Solar canopies have worked for other universities, including other SUNY schools,” said Ian Lominski, a graduating senior who said he hopes to one day work for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “It’s well within the realm of possibility for SUNY New Paltz.” 

Sheridan’s course is an example of an approach known as “campus as a living lab,” which seeks to simultaneously educate students and reduce the carbon footprint of college campuses. Over the past decade, a growing number of professors in fields as diverse as business, English and the performing arts have integrated their teaching with efforts to minimize their campuses’ waste and emissions, at a time when human-created climate change is fueling dangerous weather and making life on Earth increasingly unstable. 

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Engineering students have helped retrofit buildings. Theater students have produced no-waste productions. Ecology students have restored campus wetlands. Architecture students have modeled campus buildings’ airflow and worked to improve their energy efficiency. The efforts are so diverse that it’s difficult to get a complete count of them, but they’ve popped up on hundreds of campuses around the country.

“I think it’s a very, very positive step,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University and author of the book “Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis.” “You’ve got the campus materials, you’ve got the integration of teaching and research, which we claim to value, and it’s also really good for students in a few ways,” including by helping them take action on climate in ways that can improve mental health.

That said, the work faces difficulties, among them that courses typically last only a semester, making it hard to maintain projects. But academics and experts see promising results: Students learn practical skills in a real-world context, and their projects provide vivid examples to help educate entire campuses and communities about solutions to alleviate climate change.

From the food waste students and staff produce, to emissions from commuting to campus and flying to conferences, to the energy needed to power campus buildings, higher education has a significant climate footprint. In New York, buildings are among the single largest sources of carbon emissions — and the State University of New York system owns a whopping 40 percent of the state’s public buildings. 

About 15 years ago, college leaders began adding “sustainability officers” to their payrolls and signing commitments to achieve carbon neutrality. But only a dozen of the 400 institutions that signed on have achieved net-zero emissions to date, according to Bridget Flynn, senior manager of climate programs with the nonprofit Second Nature, which runs the network of universities committed to decarbonizing. (The SUNY system has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, per its chancellor, John B. King Jr.) 

Campus sustainability efforts have faced hurdles including politics and declining enrollment and revenue, say experts. “Higher ed is in crisis and institutions are so concerned about keeping their doors open, and sustainability is seen as nice to have instead of essential,” said Meghan Fay Zahniser, who leads the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. 

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all subjects – even PE 

But there’s change happening on some campuses, she and others noted. At Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, a net-zero campus since 2020, students in statistics classes have run data analyses to assess why certain buildings are less efficient than others. Psychology students studying behavior change helped the campus dining hall adopt a practice of offering half, full and double portions to cut down on food waste. Physics students designed solar thermal boxes to boost renewable biogas production on an organic farm owned by the college. 

Neil Leary, associate provost and director of the college’s Center for Sustainability Education, teaches classes in sustainability. Last fall’s students analyzed climate risks and resilience strategies for the campus and its surrounding county and then ran a workshop for community members. Among the recommendations emerging from the class: that athletic coaches and facilities staff receive training on heat-related health risks. 

Similarly, at SUNY Binghamton, Pamela Mischen, chief sustainability officer and an environmental studies professor, teaches a course called Planning the Sustainable University. Her students, who come from majors including environmental studies, engineering and pre-law, have helped develop campus green purchasing systems, started a student-run community garden and improved reuse rates for classroom furniture. 

And across the country, at Weber State University in Utah, students have joined the campus’s push toward renewable energy. Engineering students, for example, helped build a solar-powered charging station on a picnic table. A professor in the school’s construction and building sciences program led students in designing and building a net-zero house. 

Related: Teaching among the ashes: ‘It’s not just your house that burned, it’s everyone’s

On the leafy SUNY New Paltz campus about 80 miles north of Manhattan, campus sustainability coordinator Lisa Mitten has spent more than a decade working to reduce the university’s environmental toll. Among the projects she runs is a sustainability faculty fellows program that helps professors incorporate climate action into their instruction. 

One day this May, Andrea Varga, an associate professor of theatre design and a sustainability fellow, listened as the students in her honors Ethical Fashion class presented their final projects. Varga’s class covers the environmental harms of the global fashion industry (research suggests it is responsible for at least 4 percent of greenhouse emissions worldwide, or roughly the total emissions of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined). For their presentations, her students had developed ideas for reducing fashion’s toll, on the campus and beyond, by promoting thrifting, starting “clothes repair cafes” and more. 

Jazmyne Daily-Simpson, a student from Long Island scheduled to graduate in 2025, discussed expanding a project started a few years earlier by a former student, Roy Ludwig, to add microplastic filters to more campus washing machines. In a basement laundry room in Daily-Simpson’s dorm, two washers are rigged with the contraptions, which gradually accumulate a goopy film as they trap the microplastic particles and keep them from entering the water supply.

Ludwig, a 2022 graduate who now teaches Earth Science at Arlington High School about 20 miles from New Paltz, took Varga’s class and worked with her on an honors project to research and install the filters. A geology major, he’d been shocked that it took a fashion class to introduce him to the harms of microplastics, which are found in seafood, breast milk, semen and much more. “It’s an invisible problem that not everyone is thinking about,” he said. “You can notice a water bottle floating in a river. You can’t notice microplastics.”

Around campus, there are other signs of the living lab model. Students in an economics class filled the entryway of a library with posters on topics such as the lack of public walking paths and bike lanes in the surrounding county and inadequate waste disposal in New York State. A garden started by sculpture and printmaking professors serves as a space for students to learn about plants used to make natural dyes that don’t pollute the environment. 

In the business school classroom, Sheridan, the associate professor, had kicked off the student presentations by explaining to an audience that included campus facilities managers and local green business leaders how the course, called Introduction to Managing Sustainability, originated when grad students pitched the idea in 2015. The projects are powered by a “green revolving fund,” which accumulates money from cost savings created by past projects, such as reusable to-go containers and LED lightbulbs in campus buildings. Currently the fund has about $30,000. 

“This class has two overarching goals,” said Sheridan, who studied anthropology and sustainable development as an undergraduate before pursuing a doctorate in business. The first is to localize the United Nations global goals for advancing sustainability, he said, and the second is “to prove that sustainability initiatives can be a driver for economic growth.” 

In addition to the solar canopy project, students presented proposals for developing a reusable water bottle program, creating a composter and garden, digitizing dining hall receipts and organizing a bikeshare. They gamely fielded questions from the audience, many of whom had served as mentors on their projects.

Jonathan Garcia, a third-year business management major on the composting team, said later that he’d learned an unexpected skill: how to deal with uncooperative colleagues. “We had an issue with one of our teammates who just never showed up, so I had to manage that, and then people elected me leader of the group,” he said later. “I learned a lot of team-management skills.”

The solar panel team had less drama. Its members interviewed representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and a local company, Lighthouse Solar, along with Mitten and other campus officials. Often, they met three times a week to research and discuss their proposal, participants said.

Lominski, the senior, plans to enroll this fall in a graduate program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse. Before Sheridan’s class, he said, he had little specific knowledge of how solar panels worked. The course also helped him refine his project management and communication skills, he said. 

His solar panel teammate Madeleine Biles, a senior majoring in management, transferred to New Paltz from SUNY Binghamton before her sophomore year because she wanted a school that felt more aligned with her desire to work for a smaller, environmentally minded business. 

An avid rock climber whose parents were outdoor educators, she’d developed some financial skills in past business classes, she said, but the exercises had always felt theoretical. This class made those lessons about return on investment and internal rate of return feel concrete. “Before it was just a bunch of formulas where I didn’t know when or why I would ever use them,” she said. 

This summer, Biles is interning with the Lake George Land Conservancy, and hopes to eventually carve out a career protecting the environment. While she said she feels fortunate that her hometown of Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack region, isn’t as vulnerable as some places to climate change, the crisis weighs on her. 

“I think if I have a career in sustainability, that will be my way of channeling that frustration and sadness and turning it into a positive thing,” she said. 

She recently got a taste of what that might feel like: In an email from Sheridan, she learned that her team’s canopy project was chosen to receive the startup funding. The school’s outgoing campus facilities chief signed off on it, and, pending approval from the department’s new leader, the university will begin the process of constructing it.

“It’s cool to know that something I worked on as a school project is actually going to happen,” said Biles. “A lot of students can’t really say that. A lot of projects are kind of like simulations. This one was real life.” 

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It’s been a busy year for me filling in as co-author of the early education newsletter for Hechinger Report senior reporter Jackie Mader. Jackie returned earlier this month after spending the academic year as a Spencer Education Journalism Fellow at Columbia University (stay tuned for some fantastic stories that she reported during her fellowship year).

Hechinger is a pioneer in prioritizing early childhood coverage in its journalism, with an increasing number of news organizations thankfully starting to establish it a beat in its own right: The Associated Press and the Baltimore Banner are among the outlets adding early childhood beat reporters in recent months. As I wrote in October, it’s my favorite beat, because the inequities are so vast, but so is the potential for positive change.

I will still be reporting and editing for Hechinger in the coming year (including on the early education beat), but I am signing off, for now, by sharing a few of the most personally memorable projects that I’ve worked on since last fall.

How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools

Up to 20 percent of the U.S. population has dyslexia, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to decipher and spell written words. Yet only a fraction of affected students get a dyslexia diagnosis or the specialized assistance that can help them learn to read well. One reason so many diagnoses are missed is that scores of schools continue to use IQ tests to assess children for learning disabilities. Because of biases in those tests, and other reasons, a disproportionate number of those diagnosed — and helped — have been white and wealthier.

How to keep dual-language programs from being gentrified by English speaking families

The critical shortage of therapists who provide essential support for children under age 3 with developmental delays has received little public attention. A half dozen experts shared potential strategies for expanding and diversifying the workforce.

Six ideas to ease the early intervention staffing crisis
The critical shortage of therapists and others who provide critical early intervention therapies for children under age 3 with developmental delays has received comparatively little notice from policy makers, the media or the general public. A half dozen experts shared potential strategies for expanding and diversifying the workforce. 

Fixing the child care crisis
One of my favorite roles is helping manage the eight-newsroom Education Reporting Collaborative, which produces solutions-oriented journalism on many of the most urgent issues of the day. In the spring, six of the partners delved into the impact of the child care crisis on mothers’ ability to stay employed, highlighting a range of solutions at all levels of government, and in the private sphere.

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

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Why do so many young children struggle with word problems in math? Researchers believe one reason is that students often learn to interpret word problems by focusing on key words such as “and” or “total.”

Relying too much on key words can lead students astray, particularly because word problems get more complex as students go through school.

Because these types of math problems require so many skills beyond number manipulation – like reading and executive function, for example – excelling at word problems is a good indicator that a student is doing well in school overall.

To help struggling students, my colleague Sarah Carr wrote about how some teachers are mixing up the types of math word problems they use and zeroing in on the underlying structure of the problem. The takeaway, according to one teacher, is to get students thinking about what the question is asking.

More on early education math

Holly Korbey wrote about how kindergarten math often repeats what students already learned in preschool for The Hechinger Report this spring.

Last fall, I wrote about how early educators can experience anxiety about teaching math because of their own bad past experiences.

Quick Take

Only 1 in 7 children who are eligible for state child care subsidies actually receive one, according to new research from the Center for Law and Social Policy. Access to subsidies varies state to state, but no state had more than 50 percent of eligible children receiving subsidies, the report said.

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What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.

The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.

What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.

“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.

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