California is one of — if not the — most culturally, linguistically, racially/ethnically and socio-economically diverse states in the country, and its students reflect that.
Research shows that embracing the unique perspectives students bring to their campuses is vital to the academic achievement of all students, but even local educational agencies trying to strike a balance often struggle to adopt and meaningfully implement academic programs or strategies that meet the needs of such a wide array of young people.
“A school culture of belongingness is one of the most critical things. Allowing students to bring their full selves safely to the stressful, evaluative context of classrooms matters,” explained Thomas Dee, the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Students will roll up to the schoolhouse door with their own set of assets and their own set of barriers and challenges to realizing their potential. So, designing learning opportunities that help students reach their potential, I think is a challenge with which schools struggle.”
Still, he said, “even at a time when there has been incredible disruption and chaos at the federal level, school districts still have incredible agency to serve kids through innovations and initiatives that create an environment where they feel engaged and belongingness, and making sure there’s broad access to appropriately rich academic content.”
Promising practices
According to Dee, curricular and pedagogical innovations are crucial, but LEAs should consider “multiple forms of initiatives that focus on how to engage students, and how to make sure they’re experiencing appropriately academically rich content and effective instruction.” To that end, he provided several examples of promising practices already underway in the Bay Area.
Algebra
In 2014, San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) delayed Algebra 1 courses in eighth grade and eliminated tracking into accelerated math class options in middle and high schools in an effort to, among other goals, improve the representation of Black and Hispanic students in advanced courses and close the achievement gap.
Dee, who has studied the impacts of SFUSD’s 2014 decision and is working with the district as they reintroduce algebra to their middle schools, said a promising policy being piloted is automatic enrollment. Essentially, students who demonstrate through some measure of prior academic achievement (e.g. grade point average, test scores, etc.) will be enrolled in an advanced course for which they are capable based on their prior record rather than teacher or guidance counselor recommendations, what parents advocate for, or other methods that can reproduce inequality, he continued.
“We don’t know if it’s working yet,” Dee said. “We know it’s placing kids in the courses, but we don’t yet know if kids are thriving in those courses. That’s something I’m hoping to study, but I think if you get that level setting right, it’s uniquely appealing because it’s low cost, easy to scale with fidelity, and you’re placing kids in richer academic content. So, I think that’s something that merits more attention, and I’d love to see more school districts in California pilot this and see whether it can be effective in their context.”
This isn’t to imply that all efforts to de-track in math are doomed to fail. Dee noted that Sequoia Union High School District piloted a strategy in which rising ninth graders who were below grade level in a pre-algebra course were placed in algebra, but “they coupled it with teacher training in support of instructional differentiation in those classrooms — really thoughtfully designed pedagogical strategies to manage a more heterogeneous set of students in these algebra classes,” he said.
“We find that it was really quite effective. Lots of those kids were able to move more quickly through algebra, finish geometry by 10th grade, and by the time they sat for the state assessments in 11th grade, had roughly a full additional year of learning in math,” Dee continued. “Again, critically, these were kids placed in a harder course. We also saw their attendance improve even as they were being put in more academically difficult content. So, it suggests to me the idea of feeling engaged, feeling challenged matters to students.”
Mentorship
In terms of explicit strategies that are related to issues around marginalized student groups, Dee said there are some notable programs in California. Among these, the My Brother’s Keeper programs in Oakland have been “really successful in supporting students.”
For instance, Dee was among those who has studied the impacts of the Manhood Development course, launched by Oakland USD in 2010 as a new model for a targeted curriculum offering classes specifically for Black male students during the school day, rather than episodic or extracurricular programming. “The course emphasizes social-emotional learning, African and African American history and academic mentoring, drawing on culturally relevant teaching methods to counter stereotypes and create a stronger sense of community and belonging in school,” according to a press release for a report that showed the program led to increased graduation rates.
Challenges
Teacher training is a vital yet often overlooked aspect of successfully implementing, let alone scaling, any kind of new intervention or program, Dee said. Whether it’s adopting an ethnic studies curriculum at the state level or more broadly embracing early literacy instruction aligned with the science of reading, he said he worries that as California seeks to scale up, “we’re not going to have the same degree of teacher support and training and tailoring to local contexts. I always worry about a rush to scale innovations that have only been proven in small scale contexts. I think a more sensible vision would be to continue to try to nurture and study those innovations in things like networked improvement communities.”
Dee underscored that the pre-service and in-service training provided to teachers has to be aligned with high-quality evidence — something that will take financial support from the state as well.
“Even if California does pass some legislation that kind-of embraces the science of reading, that is only a step towards improving this problem because the real challenge is changing the day-to-day pedagogical practices in the elementary school classrooms where foundational reading skills are being taught, and shifting that away from how most teachers are taught, which isn’t well aligned with what we know is effective,” he said. “There’s obviously incredible enthusiasm around the nation now for the science of reading, but I think not enough recognition about how hard it’s going to be to actually change practices in classrooms, because in many ways, that is the source of the problem.”
Additional insight from Dee as well as LEA leaders regarding meeting the needs of a diverse population will be available in the upcoming summer issue of California Schools.
