MIT has an endowment of $27 BILLION — that’s billion, with a ‘B’. They should not be exploiting teachers who are interacting with thousands of their students and help make MIT the great university that it is.
I stand in solidarity with the MIT Graduate Student Union working to form a union.
President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, officially making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history.
The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) adopted a detracking initiative in the 2014–15 school year, eliminating accelerated middle and high school math classes, including the option for advanced students to take Algebra I in eighth grade. The policy stands today. High schools feature a common math sequence of heterogeneously-grouped classes studying Algebra I in ninth grade and Geometry in tenth grade. After tenth grade, students are allowed to take math courses reflecting different abilities and interests.
Implementing the Common Core was provided as the impetus for the change. When first proposed, district officials summed up the reform as, “There would no longer be honors or gifted mathematics classes, and there would no longer be Algebra I in eighth grade due to the Common Core State Standards in 8th grade.” Parents received a flyer from the district reinforcing this message, explaining, “The Common Core State Standards in Math (CCSS-M) require a change in the course sequence for mathematics in grades 6–12.” Phi Daro, one of Common Core’s coauthors, served as a consultant to the district on both the design and political strategy of the detracking plan.
The policy was controversial from the start. Parents showed up in community meetings to voice opposition, and a petition urging the district to reverse the change began circulating. District officials launched a public relations campaign to justify the policy. Focused on the goal of greater equity, that campaign continues today. SFUSD declared detracking a great success, claiming that the graduating class of 2018–19, the first graduating class affected by the policy when in eighth grade, saw a drop in Algebra 1 repeat rates from 40 percent to 8 percent and that, compared to the previous year, about 10 percent more students in the class took math courses beyond Algebra II. Moreover, the district reported enrollment gains by Black and Hispanic students in advanced courses.
Important publications applauded SFUSD and congratulated the district on the early evidence of success. Education Week ran a story in 2018, “A Bold Effort to End Tracking in Algebra Shows Promise,” that described the reforms with these words: “Part of an ambitious project to end the relentless assignment of underserved students into lower-level math, the city now requires all students to take math courses of equal rigor through geometry, in classrooms that are no longer segregated by ability.” The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) issued a policy brief portraying the detracking effort as a model for the country. Omitted from these reviews was the fact that the “lower-level math” to which non-algebra eighth-graders were assigned was Common Core Eighth Grade Math, which SFUSD and NCTM had spent a decade depicting as a rigorous math course, as they do currently.
Jo Boaler, noted math reformer, professor at Stanford, and critic of tracking, teamed up with Alan Schoenfeld, Phil Daro and others to write “How One City Got Math Right” for The Hechinger Report, and Boaler and Schoenfeld published an op-ed, “New Math Pays Dividends for SF Schools” in the San Francisco Chronicle.
In this public relations campaign, there was no mention of math achievement or test scores. Course enrollments and passing grades were presented as meaningful measures by which to measure the success of detracking.
They are bad measures. Course enrollments are a means to an end—student learning—not an end unto themselves. If a district enrolls students in courses that fail to teach important content, nothing has been accomplished. Boosting enrollment in advanced courses, therefore, is of limited value.[1] It’s also a statistic, along with grades, that is easily manipulated. No matter the school district, if word spreads that the superintendent would like to see more kids enrolled in higher math classes and fewer D and F grades in those classes, enrollments will go up and the number of D’s and F’s will go down.
Families for San Francisco
Families for San Francisco, a parent advocacy group, acquired data from the district under the California Public Records Act (the state’s version of the Freedom of Information Act). The group’s analysis calls into question the district’s assertions. As mentioned previously, repeat rates for Algebra I dropped sharply after the elimination of Algebra I in eighth grade, but whether the reform had anything to do with that is questionable. The falling repeat rate occurred after the district changed the rules for passing the course, eliminating a requirement that students pass a state-designed end of course exam in Algebra I before gaining placement in Geometry. In a presentation prepared by the district, speaker notes to the relevant slide admit, “The drop from 40 percent of students repeating Algebra 1 to 8 percent of students repeating Algebra 1, we saw as a one-time major drop due to both the change in course sequence and the change in placement policy.”
The claim that more students were taking “advanced math” classes (defined here as beyond Algebra II) also deserves scrutiny. Enrollment in calculus courses declined post-reform. The claim rests on a “compression” course the district offers, combining Algebra II and precalculus into a single-year course. The Families for San Francisco analysis shows that once the enrollment figures for the compression course are excluded, the enrollment gains evaporate. Why should they be excluded? The University of California rejected the district’s classification of the compression course as “advanced math,” primarily because the course topics fall short of content specifications for precalculus.
Smarter Balanced scores
The conventional way to measure achievement gaps—and progress towards closing them—is with scores on achievement tests. California students take the Smarter Balanced assessments in grades three through eight and in grade eleven. Following SFUSD’s analytical strategy, let’s compare scores from 2015, the last cohort of eleventh-graders under the previous policy, and 2019, the last cohort with pre-pandemic test scores.[2] Please be alerted, however, that both analyses, SFUSD’s and the one presented here, fall far short of supporting causal claims. The purpose of the current analysis is to illustrate that SFUSD’s public relations campaign omitted crucial information to determine what’s going on.
As displayed in Table 1, SFUSD’s scores for eleventh-grade mathematics remained flat from 2015 (scale score of 2611) to 2019 (scale score of 2610), moving only a single point. Table 1 shows the breakdown by racial and ethnic groups. Black students made a small gain (+2), Hispanic scores declined (-14), White students gained (+17), and Asian students registered the largest gains (+22).
Table 1. San Francisco Unified School District Smarter Balanced Scores, grade 11, 2015–19
Table 2 offers some context for interpreting the scores. Smarter Balanced is vertically scaled so that scores can be compared across grades. On Smarter Balanced results from twelve states, the mean fifth-grade math score was 2498, well above the 2479 score for eleventh-grade Black students in SFUSD and the same as the 2498 score registered by eleventh-grade Hispanics students.[3] The mean Smarter Balanced sixth-grade score was 2515, well above the scores of both groups of eleventh graders in SFUSD.
Summing up: Black and Hispanic eleventh-graders in San Francisco score about the same as or lower than the typical fifth-grader who took the same math test. Black eleventh-graders fall just short of the threshold for being considered proficient in fourth-grade math and well below the cut point for demonstrating fifth-grade proficiency. The situation is appalling.
Are test score gaps narrowing?
Contrary to the district’s spin, the trend towards greater equity is not headed in the right direction. Gaps are widening. Perhaps this trend is statewide and not just a SFUSD phenomenon.
Table 3 supplies the gap calculations from the data above in Table 1, along with a comparison to statewide trends. For example, at the state level, the eleventh-grade Black-White gap grew by 11 points—from 94 to 105—while in SFUSD, the gap expanded by 15 points (from 143 to 158). The Hispanic-White gap provides a more dramatic contrast. The state level gap grew by only 5 points, but in San Francisco, it expanded by a whopping 31 points. Glancing back at Table 2 again will provide context. The 31-point expansion is larger than the 20-point difference in mean scores for Smarter Balanced’s eighth-grade and high school assessments. That’s a big change.
With both gaps, SFUSD evidenced greater inequities than state averages in 2015, and that relative underperformance worsened by 2019. The district’s anti-tracking public relations campaign, by focusing on metrics such as grades and course enrollments, diverts attention from the harsh reality that SFUSD is headed in the wrong direction on equity.
Table 3. Black-White and Hispanic-White gap, grades 11, California and San Francisco, 2015–19, by Smarter Balanced scale scores, mathematics
Could the situation be even worse?
Finally, as bad as the preceding data look, the reality of the district’s poor math achievement is probably worse. SFUSD has exceptionally low rates of test participation on the state test, especially among Black and Hispanic students. Don’t forget: This is the test that state and district officials use for accountability purposes. Participation is mandated by both federal and state law. If the students who don’t take the test tend to be low achievers—usually a fair assumption—the district’s test score performance could fall even lower once those students are included.
Table 4. 11th-grade students tested as a percentage of students enrolled
Conclusion
San Francisco Unified School District embarked on a detracking initiative in 2015, followed by an extensive public relations campaign to portray the policy as having successfully narrowed achievement gaps. The campaign omitted assessment data indicating that the Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps have widened, not narrowed, the exact opposite of the district’s intention and of the story the district was selling to the public. Only SFUSD possesses the data needed to conduct a formal evaluation that would credibly identify the causal factors producing such dismal results.
Whether detracking can assist in the quest for greater equity is an open question. It could, in fact, exacerbate inequities by favoring high achieving children from upper-income families—who can afford private sector workarounds—or with parents savvy enough to negotiate the bureaucratic hurdles SFUSD has erected to impede acceleration. As I have written elsewhere, the voluminous literature on tracking is better at describing problems than in solving them. The evidence that detracking promotes equity is sparse, mostly drawing on case studies that are restricted in terms of generalizability of findings to other settings and with research designs that do not support causal inferences.
If SFUSD would now approach tracking with an open mind, officials need not look far to discover equitable possibilities. Across the bay, David Card, a scholar at University of California, Berkeley, won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics for his research applying innovative econometrics to thorny public policy problems. Card’s recent studies, conducted with colleague Laura Giuliano, investigate tracking. In 2014, Card and Giuliano published a paper evaluating an urban district’s tracking program based on prior achievement. In particular, disadvantaged students and students of color benefitted from an accelerated curriculum, with no negative spillover effects for students pursuing the regular course of study. Card and Giuliano concluded, “Our findings suggest that a comprehensive tracking program that establishes a separate classroom in every school for the top‐performing students could significantly boost the performance of the most talented students in even the poorest neighborhoods, at little or no cost to other students or the District’s budget.”
Card and Giuliano’s current project studies two large urban districts in Florida, predominantly Black and Hispanic, that provide mathematically talented students with the opportunity to accelerate through middle school math courses. When these students enter high school, they will have already completed Algebra I and Geometry. They begin high school two years ahead of students in San Francisco, opening up greater opportunities to take Advanced Placement (AP) courses in later years.
Which system is more equitable?
Notes:
1. An analysis that I conducted in 2013 showed a steadily increasing percentage of students who had taken Algebra II; however, NAEP scores for students who had taken Algebra II also steadily declined concurrent with the increased enrollments.
2. California employs “Black or African American” and “Hispanic or Latino” as reporting categories. After Table 1, for the sake of clarity, the terms are shortened to “Black” and “Hispanic” in both tables and the narrative.
3. Using 2018 scores, the cohort of eleventh-graders first affected by detracked eighth-grade courses in 2015, would not change the analysis significantly except for one aspect: The achievement gaps associated with race and ethnicity were larger in 2018 because of higher scores for White students. 2018 scores were Asian (2682), Black or African American (2479), Hispanic or Latino (2497), White (2650).
Tom Loveless, a former sixth-grade teacher and Harvard public policy professor, is an expert on student achievement, education policy, and reform in K-12 schools. He also is a member of the National Math Advisory Panel.
President Joe Biden’s budget reflects three critical values: fiscal responsibility, safety and security at home and abroad, and a commitment to building a better America.
It will be paid for—and reduce the deficit—by asking billionaires and the top 0.01% of Americans to pay their fair share.
I wanted to take a moment to tell you why now is the time to move toward Medicare for All. This will, no doubt, be a difficult struggle. But it is a struggle we will win.
A Professor of Military Theory and Strategy at the US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, Kevin Weddle, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Weddle’s new book, The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution, and how the battle of Saratoga parallels Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
There must be no ambiguity in acknowledging that what the whole world is seeing from Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is nothing less than a blatant violation of international law and human decency.
I suspect you haven’t heard much about the Competitiveness bill that’s in the Senate right now. Here’s what you need to know: the taxpayers of this country should not be giving $53 billion to profitable microchip companies and $10 billion to Jeff Bezos to go to space. Period.
The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be
by Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner MIT Press, 2022, $34.95; 408 pages.
As reviewed by Frederick M. Hess
In The Real World of College, Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner make the case that colleges should aim to deliver a rigorous liberal arts education and a transformative experience for students. It is a welcome argument at a time when colleges are struggling to adjust to a changing world and wrestling with concerns about cost and quality. There’s a crying need for serious examination of what really happens in college and what that means going forward.
The authors, both affiliated with the Harvard Graduate School of Education, raise important questions about academic culture and student engagement, stress, and well-being. The volume is chock full of revealing quotes about what’s on the minds of students, faculty, and other campus players. If the authors had made all that the primary focus of the book, they’d have performed a signal service.
Unfortunately, Fischman and Gardner aspire to something more sweeping and “scientific.” They want colleges to shrug off or deemphasize many existing activities—including athletics, extracurriculars, and some research centers—to embrace a more transformative academic vision. And they try to ground this counsel in a study that, however informative, can’t justify their normative claims. In the end, the research suffers for the attempt, and their argument emerges the poorer.
Wendy Fischman
The shame of it is that the sheer effort on display is truly impressive. Backed by several major foundations, the authors and their team interviewed 2,000 people across 10 colleges between 2013 and 2018, recording 265,000 discrete responses and 11 million words. They painstakingly analyzed all this information and can report that the most common words in the interviews included “class,” “friends,” “health,” “help,” “time,” and “job”; that individual faculty members, parents, and alumni talked about college differently, while students talked about it in similar ways; and that students everywhere showed an “egocentric focus” in using “I” and “me” much more than “we” or “us.”
At the heart of the analysis lies Fischman and Gardner’s notion of “higher education capital,” or “HEDCAP” for short. Each student interviewee was given a HEDCAP score of 1 to 3 based on how robustly the researchers thought they responded to seven questions about college (regarding the importance of college, how they would change the academic program, and so forth) as well as a “holistic” analysis of their interview. The authors explain that HEDCAP “denotes the ability to attend, analyze, reflect, connect, and communicate on issues of importance and interest,” as determined by a one-hour interview about the individual’s college experience. In short, the measure of how well colleges are serving their purpose is how well students are judged to do when talking about college.
While the authors reference “HEDCAP” time and again, they acknowledge that readers may reasonably wonder whether what “we are seeking to capture” is “useful” in “the ‘real world.’” Their response isn’t especially reassuring: They assert their “firm belief” that HEDCAP is useful as a “promissory note” and move on.
The authors write that students and adults view college through four “mental models”: “inertial,” “transactional,” “exploratory,” and “transformational.” While these descriptors provide interesting ways to think about the college experience, it’s soon evident that the authors have much more in mind. Indeed, they eventually make it clear that the correct approach to “the college experience” is the “transformational” one in which students seek to “reflect about, and question, one’s own values and beliefs, with the expectation . . . that one may change in fundamental ways.”
Howard Gardner
While the authors report that they’d originally intended to focus intently on these “mental models,” the interviews they conducted taught them that “the biggest problems on campus are issues of mental health and belonging,” and they felt compelled to address these. As evidence of the crisis, they note that, when asked what kept them up at night, more than half of students talked about things like workload, time management, and pressure around success and performance—and this finding held across every kind of campus.
One student says, “I’m always worried I’m forgetting an assignment,” while another says, “I have a 4.0 GPA and I got a B-minus on my English paper. . . . Things like that keep me up.” There’s the first-year student who reports being kept up at night “dealing with tests, readings, and stuff. And sometimes you get pressure, if you’re studying very late at night, it’s even harder to fall asleep. . . . You’re anxious, you’re nervous.” While Fischman and Gardner regard these “anxiety-provoking conditions” as evidence of “pervasive problems of mental health,” readers may wonder whether such complaints are as novel or self-evidently worrisome as the authors suggest.
Indeed, the authors write, “The extreme skeptic might counter that these conditions always existed, but that students either denied them, coped with them when they arose, or outgrew them over time. But here we are not extremely skeptical. We believe that these trends and statistics are irrefutable.” The irony is that the book presents no trends at all, and the only statistics are those produced by analyzing the interview responses. This is a volume for those willing to treat the authors’ coded interviews as the last word on the student experience.
In summing up their analysis, Fischman and Gardner argue, “Our data show that students with exploratory and transformational mental models . . . are more likely to benefit from the overall college experience—as manifested by their demonstration of significantly higher scores of Higher Education Capital.” This is offered as an empirical truth, despite the dearth of evidence that the students in question have learned more, studied more, reflected more, enjoyed their time more, or done more to advance their post-college prospects. The authors’ conclusion that the students they judged exploratory or transformational “benefit” more from college is based solely on the fact that these students were more likely to talk about college in ways that the researchers scored with a 3 rather than a 1.
Instead of sharing description, informed opinion, and honest speculation, the scholars opt for a rickety but impressive-sounding construct that clothes their musings in the garb of science and certitude. In this way, a provocative examination becomes an exercise in pedantic authority.
The authors close with a bevy of suggestions for improving college, including better onboarding of students, reducing programmatic sprawl, improving mental-health offerings, adopting more-tailored mission statements, and emulating campus-specific programs the authors admire, such as the First-Year La Verne Experience or the Minnesota Innovative Scholars Program. The discussion is personal, and, for the most part, the authors abandon the pretense that they have actual evidence that any of this works. And you know what? The advice is often sensible and deserving of discussion.
Stripped of its scientific pretensions, the authors’ enthusiasm for the liberal arts is compelling and charming. In the end, though, their attempt to “prove” their case winds up illuminating some of the problems dogging higher education today.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
By: Frederick Hess Title: A Research-Based Case For Transforming College Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/a-research-based-case-for-transforming-college-book-review-real-world-of-college-fischman-gardner/ Published Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2022 09:00:53 +0000
In a New York Timesop-ed, Jennifer C. Berkshire and Jack Schneider argue that Democrats should give up on the idea of public education as a solution to inequality.
The core of their argument is here: “schools can’t level a playing field marred by racial inequality and increasingly sharp class distinctions; to pretend otherwise is both bad policy and bad politics. Moreover, the idea that schools alone can foster equal opportunity is a dangerous form of magical thinking that not only justifies existing inequality but also exacerbates our political differences by pitting the winners in our economy against the losers.”
Further: “Schools may not be able to solve inequality. But they can give young people a common set of social and civic values.”
This is fascinating stuff, but it’s also a bit of a straw man. Hardly anyone claims “schools alone can foster equal opportunity.” But good schools do help accelerate upward mobility and expand opportunity. That’s valuable even if it falls short of enabling the egalitarian utopia of sky-high tax rates combined with redistribution and racial reparations that is often the non-education-based solution offered up by levellers.
Jennifer C. Berkshire
I don’t often agree with Berkshire and Schneider, who, as you may have figured out by now, are far to my left. I don’t share their concern for the Democratic Party’s win-loss ratio or their apparent worry that too much success on the education front would somehow take pressure off the rest of their economic justice agenda. I do, though, think they are onto something when they caution against the claim that education can “solve inequality.” Berkshire, a frequent contributor to the Nation, and Schneider, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, are writing for an intended audience of liberal Democrats. But conservative-leaning education reformers might also benefit from this insight. Conservatives and centrists, too, are quick to offer up school vouchers, charter schools, or merit pay and test-based accountability as a prescription to address inequality.
What’s wrong with that approach? It buys into the left-wing assumption that inequality is a big problem to be solved, rather than just the way things are.
Jack Schneider
This is tricky stuff, because it goes to basic American ideas—“all men are created equal” is there in the Declaration of Independence under self-evident truths. But the sense in which the founders meant equality was God-given equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That is not the same as equal bank account balances, annual earnings, or standardized test scores. Differences in such outcomes are the inevitable consequence of variation in individual talents, choices, and luck. Aiming to eliminate such differences is a fool’s errand—impossible, and also self-defeating because of the unintended consequences and the corrosive effects on incentives.
Conservatives would be smart to talk about education as a way to combat poverty, expand opportunity, increase prosperity, and improve upward mobility. But “inequality” is a trap.
Injustice is worth talking about. It’s unjust, scandalous even, that some urban public schools are unsafe and pass along children who are illiterate and innumerate, while schools serving wealthier or more white families in the suburbs offer safer learning environments and produce better educational results. But the scandal is not that some kids are in better schools; the scandal is that some schools are terrible.
It’s not the “gap” that’s the problem, it’s the absolute conditions in the bad schools. Unless conservatives are clear about that, the temptation will be precisely as Berkshire and Schneider predict, to worsen “our political differences by pitting the winners in our economy against the losers.” It’s easy, in other words, to solve the “gap” by destroying the better public schools so everything is equally bad. The dreaded “inequality” is eliminated, but no one’s education has been improved. So when Berkshire and Schneider warn Democrats against pitching education as a solution to inequality, it’s a message on which conservatives might profitably eavesdrop.
By: Ira Stoll Title: Surprise Advice from Two Left-Liberals: Give Up on Schools as Solution to Inequality Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/surprise-advice-from-two-left-liberals-give-up-on-schools-as-solution-to-inequality/ Published Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 13:09:01 +0000
Bard College President Leon Botstein, pictured here in his office on Bard’s main campus, first wrote about reimagining “what the education of adolescents ought to be” in Jefferson’s Children, a book published in 1997.
Hopscotch through classrooms in this Newark, New Jersey, school and you’ll hear students debate their interpretations of Marx’s theory of alienated labor, puzzle over how to create airtight proofs, and ponder how Islam transitioned from a cult to a religion.
If you guessed that each of these scenes happened at a college, you’re right. And if you guessed that this activity took place in an urban high school, you’d be right, too. That’s because these three scenes played out at Bard High School Early College, a selective public school where students spend four years earning a high school diploma, up to 60 Bard College credits, and an associate degree.
The students summarizing Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts are 12th graders, or college sophomores, in Seth Halvorson’s seminar. They earn both high school and college credits for this class as they write summaries of Marx’s thoughts on estranged labor and then gather in groups to combine their work into the most distilled recap they can craft.
Those puzzling over proofs are 10th graders in Straubel Cetoute’s math class. They debate the statement, “If water is heated, then it boils.” While some students argue that this claim is correct, the ones who point out that water can get hot and not boil end up convincing classmates. And the class debating Islam learns which groups initially opposed the religion and what happened to the movement when Muhammad died.
Scenes such as these are exactly what Bard College’s longtime president Leon Botstein imagined more than 20 years ago when he put into motion an idea that high school students needed a more rigorous educational challenge. All it took to get from his idea to a series of schools around the country was an unlikely run of coincidence, tragedy, one phone call, and Oprah Winfrey.
Students at the Bard High School Early College in Manhattan study a section of the Odyssey about the feud between the sons of Atreus. Teacher Julie Mirwis stands between them.
Bridge to Higher Education
The early-college high-school model is timely today, when fewer students are choosing college right after high school. From 2010 to 2019, about two of every three high school graduates enrolled at either a four-year or a two-year college, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The share slipped to 62.7 percent in October 2020, in part because of rising college costs and Covid’s effect on school closures and the economy. For some groups, including men and Black students, the percentages of students going to college have been decreasing for up to four years.
Early colleges can play a key role in bridging the gap between high school and higher education. In addition to allowing students to earn transferrable college credits for free, these schools boost students’ chances of applying to and earning a college degree. This pertains especially to students who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education, such as students of color, low-income students, and first-generation college goers.
More than 45 percent of early-college students received a college degree within six years of graduating from high school, compared to just one in three non-early-college students, according to a study from the American Institutes for Research. This randomized controlled trial examined students from 10 (non-Bard) early-college high schools against students who had applied to these schools but weren’t chosen, said senior researcher Kristina Zeiser. (Admission to these schools was by lottery.)
Similar studies have shown the same benefits for Bard early-college students. Comparing students from both the Manhattan and Queens Bard High School Early Colleges with other students from selective or specialized New York City high schools, 69 percent of Bard students earned a college degree within four years compared to 56 percent of non-Bard students, according to research by Metis Associates. Among Black students, the difference was slightly larger; 71 percent of Bard students completed a degree while 54 percent of non-Bard students did. In Newark, just more than half of Bard students (51 percent) enrolled at a four-year college, while just 30 percent of non-Bard students in the city did the same. Students also saw a “significant financial benefit” from transferring their free college credits toward a four-year degree.
Bard currently operates seven early-college high schools in cities from New Orleans to Cleveland, enrolling about 3,000 students. And the school model has caught on beyond Bard. More than 300 schools in at least 28 states now follow the early-college concept. While standards at these schools vary, the models are “more alike than different” from each other, said Zeiser.
Students play in the school yard of Manhattan’s Bard High School Early College during recess. The mural behind them was painted by Elroy Gay and his team. Students chose the eight words at the mural’s center, which represent important ideas and their core values.
From Idea to Reality
Botstein’s idea to “reimagine what the education of adolescents ought to be,” began in 1997 when he wrote Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Creation of a Hopeful Culture. In this book of essays, he proposed eliminating high schools by pushing students at age 16 to pursue college, vocational training, or national service.
Botstein said the book and his ideas were largely ignored until two years later, in 1999, when the Columbine High School mass shooting caused many to wonder if the traditional high school model was broken. Suddenly reporters were interviewing Botstein about how to reinvent high school, and editors were asking him to write op-eds. This attention put his idea on the radar of Oprah’s staff. When she put together a show in February 2001 to reexamine the role of high schools, Botstein was invited to expound on his philosophy.
The publicity from the Oprah visit piqued the interest of the outgoing New York City Schools Chancellor Harold Levy. He offered Botstein a chance to create the type of school he had been discussing, with one important caveat. The school had to open in less than six months, so it could happen before Levy’s tenure was up later that year.
To help fund the school, Botstein reached out to the newly formed Gates Foundation. Tom Vander Ark, the nonprofit’s first education executive director, remembers the February 2001 phone call fondly.
“He was so persistent and persuasive. He painted a picture of possibilities that I don’t think I ever contemplated,” Vander Ark said. Botstein told Vander Ark that he wouldn’t hang up until the foundation promised him $1 million for the new school. The gambit worked, and today Vander Ark marvels at how quickly an idea could be greenlit in the foundation’s early days.
In fall 2001, the Manhattan Bard High School Early College opened. This new school, working loosely off the model that was designed at Simon’s Rock, a residential early college in western Massachusetts, developed the template still used for most of today’s early-college high schools, with students learning from college professors all four years and starting college work in 11th grade. (Simon’s Rock, which was established in 1966, was taken over by Bard in 1979. It accepts applicants who have completed the 10th or 11th grade.)
Dumaine Williams, vice president and dean of Bard’s early-college program, notes that cooperation with school districts has been key for the Bard schools’ success.
At Bard High School Early Colleges, students in 9th and 10th grade prepare for the rigorous work that is to come, both by learning under college professors and by making the shift from rote learning to close readings of challenging texts, with in-class analysis and term papers.
The college classes earn students both high school and college credit. The professors, or teachers, have a similar split personality; they are Bard professors but are paid through the school district.
“Sometimes we pay them more, if that’s allowed,” said Dumaine Williams, vice president and dean of Bard’s early-college program. To accommodate for office hours and the other extra help offered to students, professors generally teach four classes a semester rather than five, he added.
Cooperation with a school district is key for the success of these Bard schools, Williams said. Typically, Bard only opens a school when a district approaches the college and can meet its preferred demographics, meaning low-income students and first-generation college goers. Even if these factors match up, negotiations about various school matters—from expenses to class time and curriculum—can be difficult to work through. Bard considered a school in Baltimore for years before finally opening one in 2015.
In Manhattan and Queens, teachers must fit the guidelines of the city’s teacher contract, while also meeting various Bard requirements. “It’s an unusual marriage,” acknowledged Stephen Tremaine, the vice president of Bard’s early colleges.
Vander Ark said this delicate dance prevented the school model from being widely copied early on. He used to joke that the Bard High School Early Colleges “ended up being the most successful, least-scaled program we launched.”
But today, with various early-college high schools popping up around the country, the idea has turned into “an innovation that works remarkably well,” Vander Ark said. Bard’s schools are among the very few early colleges sponsored by a four-year college, Vander Ark said, along with Metro Early College Middle and High School, which is located on the campus of Ohio State University.
“Colleges and universities are usually very stingy with credit granting and typically not accredited to offer two-year degrees. Getting a head start on a four-year degree and not requiring transfer for completing an associate degree is a big deal,” Vander Ark said.
Vander Ark called Bard’s schools “slightly selective,” adding that this is typical of early colleges created within school districts. It’s harder to run an early-college high school with open enrollment, and “that may be one reason there are fewer of them” among charter schools, he said.
Bard retains control of the curriculum at its schools but must work within the existing school schedule of the district. The college pays the New York City Department of Education $2 million a year to help fund the two Bard schools.
Bard’s model does cost more than a typical high school, mostly because of the need for additional staff and support. The extra costs range between $1,000 and $3,000 a year per student for juniors and seniors, Tremaine said.
But these expenses pale in comparison to what it might cost a student for two years of college, Zeiser said. Early colleges typically return about 15 times their extra expenses, she noted, while in almost all cases students pay nothing for their earned college credits.
Rigorous Studies
Unlike some early colleges, Bard schools do not have open enrollment. Entrance requirements vary at different schools; in New York City, officials require a student interview and writing sample, while in Newark there’s an interview and a review of students’ grades and attendance from the previous two years.
Carla Stephens, principal and dean of Bard High School Early College in Newark, New Jersey, says the school interviews potential students to determine their interest.
When Williams helped start Bard’s third high school in Cleveland, he said they began by reviewing student records, “but we weaned ourselves off,” because school officials didn’t think test scores were the best way to gauge students’ potential success.
The two New York City schools typically get 7,000 applicants for 300 seats, Tremaine said. While the schools don’t have final say over who’s admitted, they do set aside about half their seats for students who qualify for free lunch.
Bard officials bristled at the idea that the schools cherry-pick the best students from the admissions pool, with Botstein saying the schools are looking for “intelligent and capable people who haven’t shown themselves to be a superstar.”
In most regions, Bard high schools accept 35 percent to 50 percent of applicants, Tremaine said. “The qualitative, interview-based process is adapted to each region, based on scale and how we are able to access interested students.”
“In each of our schools, the most heavily weighted part of the admission process is a one-on-one interview,” Tremaine said. “We do not review state test scores from middle school. We aim to evaluate applicants based on the depth of their thinking, not the depth of their preparation.”
Tremaine conceded that Bard’s Manhattan school hasn’t always reflected the population of the city, but today half the available seats in both the Manhattan and Queens schools go to students who qualify for free lunch. In 2017, the two schools’ populations were 28 percent Black and Hispanic; this year, the incoming classes at both schools hit 40 percent for these groups. The schools have also boosted their shares of special-education-eligible students from 4.2 percent in 2017 to 14 percent today.
Because the work required of students is difficult, Bard seeks to exclude those who don’t embrace the school’s rigor, Botstein said. “We want to reinforce their tentative connection to learning.” He draws lengthy analogies that compare the school’s admissions to tryouts for a football team or band.
Noting that it can be difficult to ascertain the motivation level of a 13-year-old, Williams says the schools look for “curious and ambitious” students, but “sometimes we get it wrong.”
“Someone said, ‘There must be kids trying to knock down the doors to get into your school,’” said Carla Stephens, principal and dean of Newark’s Bard High School Early College. She laughed and added, “That is not our experience.” Newark’s more traditional, and higher-ranked, schools such as Science Park High School and Technology High School typically attract the city’s brightest students, she added.
Stephens said the school’s interview process tries to zero in on some key areas to gauge both student interest and perseverance. “If you’re bored in 8th grade, we can help you with that. If you want a challenge, I want to know what a challenge looks like for you.”
Newark’s Thalia Rose is a good example of this. “In 8th grade, I felt like I wasn’t being challenged enough,” the second-year college student (or high school senior) said. “I wanted to go to a school that could push me, and I thought Bard could do that.”
Still, even with motivated and smart students, the adjustment period can be arduous, both staff and students said.
“I’ve had students who were top students in weak middle schools,” Stephens said. When they struggle with the work in 9th grade, they have a crisis of confidence. “If we can get them over that hump, I know we can get them over the college experience,” the Newark principal added.
Students “aren’t used to this sort of work in middle school,” said Steven Mazie, who has taught social studies at the Manhattan school since 2002. “It’s not rote busywork. It asks them to think and interact with text.”
“In my first year of English, I couldn’t get higher than a B-plus,” said Eamon Smithsimon, now a senior at the Manhattan campus.
“I was behind in everything coming here,” said Luca Katzen, a senior. “Being OK with not being the best in something was new for me.” He has a competitive family and said his parents didn’t believe him when he told them a lot of teachers don’t give grades higher than a B-plus.
“Students surprise themselves” with their achievements, Tremaine said. One told him, “I hate reading, but I love Gilgamesh.” His response: “‘Maybe you don’t hate reading.’ They have success that hasn’t registered yet.”
“Students are really capable of more than we give them credit for,” said Michael Lerner, Manhattan’s principal. “We think they don’t read and they’re on their phones all the time, but they are interested, motivated, and can accomplish a great deal.”
Even Newark’s principal said she had initially underestimated students’ ability to understand complex concepts. When she was about to teach Descartes in the school’s year-one seminar, Stephens said, “I was dreading it. I thought, ‘These students are not going to be able to understand this.’ They ended up loving it. They were excited about this idea that you can’t describe something you haven’t already experienced.”
Mazie, who taught at the University of Michigan and New York University before joining Bard’s faculty, said at first he wasn’t sure how to adapt his syllabus for younger students. He said he used to lecture for two days and have class discussions during the third class. “I realized quickly this format wasn’t going to work well [here]. Students were anxious to talk about concepts while I was lecturing,” so Mazie ended up shifting to the Socratic-style classes favored by Bard. Students typically sit in circles. During my visits to both Manhattan and Newark, most students took notes by hand, and computers were rarely seen.
One other factor Mazie quickly noticed was the greater class time given to early-college students. While a typical college class meets for 150 minutes a week over a 15-week semester, Bard early-college students might rack up nearly 50 percent more class time because they meet more frequently, said Williams.
“Our school year is longer, and we don’t have the big breaks” colleges do, Stephens said.
Bard cuts back on what early-college students must read by “about 10 percent,” Mazie said.
Summarizing the difference between early college and traditional college, William Hinrichs, the dean of Academic Life at Bard’s Manhattan school, said: “There are more steps [here] but the same endpoint. Every step is more articulated. We ask a lot of our students, but we also give a lot to our students.”
When the Manhattan school opened, principal Lerner said he and the staff were hands-off with students. The thinking was they were college students and should be treated as such. “Let them figure it out,” he said, until staff realized that this method doesn’t work in college either.
Now Bard’s early colleges offer students a wide array of help, from professor office hours to writing centers and guidance counselors.
At office hours, professors “are willing to teach the lesson all over again,” said Manhattan student Briana Previllon.
“Teachers are really helpful,” said Alice Doirin, a junior in Newark. “If I can’t understand how one thing works, they explain it another way.”
Sydney Ekwe, a junior in Newark, shared the raw feelings that can beset students trying to live up to high standards. When asked about a time she got a bad grade and how she dealt with it, Ekwe said she had faced such an experience “literally right now. I had a quiz before I came down here, and I didn’t do well. I went to the bathroom and cried. I talked to my teacher. I doubted myself and changed my answer from right to wrong. . . . I might say, ‘I got it,’ but I don’t get it. I don’t want to ask too many questions.”
Even in the immediate aftermath of this experience, she was crafting her comeback strategy, saying she would go through her past notes to see what she might have missed and learn to trust her instincts during tests.
Students in a 10th-grade English class at Newark’s Bard High School Early College map out the hero’s journey in Gilgamesh, an epic poem. This small group’s theme is “Creating a Legacy.”
Obstacles and Opportunities
As successful as the early colleges have been, officials say they continue to face obstacles. The biggest misconception the schools still fight, Mazie and others said, are that the courses offered aren’t “real” college classes.
“Early on, people doubted that the college part was actually happening. They thought it was glorified high school with AP classes,” said Mazie. “It took some convincing of college admission officers that this is college work.”
For quality control, the school’s curriculum and programs are reviewed each semester by a faculty-led oversight committee at Bard College, Tremaine said.
Once colleges accept that the work at Bard is legitimate, a second hurdle is getting them to accept these credits and apply them to students’ majors, said Emily Schwartz, a program manager at Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit group that wrote a case study about Bard High School Early Colleges in 2019.
“The transfer credits is really a key piece,” she said, “But I don’t think the BHSECs can tackle [this issue] alone.”
The transfer issue is a major one, and Bard officials concede that not every credit earned by students will be accepted by any college in the country. Bard College of course accepts credits from its affiliated high schools, but on average, only 20 to 25—fewer than 5 percent—of students graduating from Bard’s high schools enroll at the college each year. Many other colleges are stingier when it comes to awarding credit, reflecting a general pattern in American higher education. But Stephens noted that she tells students, “Some portion of your credits will transfer.”
Another issue for the early colleges is that growth has been slow, even though collectively the Bard early-college schools now have many more students than the college’s Annandale campus with its 1,800 undergrads. Bard has opened three new campuses in the last seven years. In contrast, P-Tech—a six-year school that combines high school and the first two years of college and engages the business community—has opened 300 public schools nationwide in the past decade.
Botstein added that Bard hopes to open another school with the Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. “We’d like to grow more rapidly,” he said, acknowledging that other forms of dual-enrollment schools are effective, too. “I’m not a believer that we have the unique solution.”
“It’s fair to say this is not a model that works for every student,” Vander Ark added. “It’s a progressive, accelerated pathway where freshmen do really demanding work.”
A former Manhattan Bard high school student, Albert Rosario Pichardo, 20, now studying at Bard College, remembers “a huge culture shock” when he first attended the early college. He had been used to going to school with Black and Hispanic students, and the mostly white Manhattan school made him retreat socially.
But the schoolwork was “an intellectual explosion,” he said, and now, just two years later, he’s a peer counselor and the captain of the college’s ultimate Frisbee team.
“I’ve had academic success I don’t know if I would have found in any other school. I transcended the limits I imposed on myself,” he said. “I know I’m in the right place.”
Wayne D’Orio is an award-winning education editor and writer.
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