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In this month’s Lead the Change interview, Jordon Corson shares his research on how education systems can be transformed to reflect the experiences of students with diverse backgrounds and work towards goals of liberation. Many of his reflections are captured in his latest book, Reconceptualizing Education for Newcomer Students (Teachers College Press, 2023). Corson is an assistant professor of education and affiliated faculty member of the M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University. He is also a co-author with Thomas Hatch and Sarah Gerth van den Berg of The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021). The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change: The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.”  This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?

Jordon Corson: I think the field of educational change needs to fundamentally shift understandings of, and approaches to, research, reform, and much else. In one sense, stepping back and rethinking what is meant by educational change and who is enacting change gets at how things are carved up and structured in schools and research. Even after many years of critiquing this isolated, hierarchical way of doing things, it’s still a common setup to find a teacher who knows a thing at the front of a classroom and students who have to learn that thing lined up in rows. Then, there’s a researcher sitting in the back to make sense of what’s happening. Historians and educational change folks have beautifully explored the persistence of this architecture in schools (though I would love to read more about how educational researchers also become stuck within their own structures, a “grammar of educational research”). Additionally, and I’m far from the first person to suggest this, the division of teacher from learner or researcher from practitioner is part of a racist, colonial system where marginalized youth are framed only as the subjects of research or teaching (I’m thinking of Leigh Patel’s 2015 book, for instance). That division also ignores and suppresses what is already happening in classrooms, where teachers and students engage in research all the time. They produce complex knowledge that challenges common approaches to educational change. All of this organizing and theorizing is pushed to the side when change only means researchers or policymakers finding ways to “fix” or “improve.” So, in terms of confronting racial injustice, I think teachers, students, and researchers might come to see the work of liberation as a collective project that emerges from below.

Jordan Corson

Shifting understandings of change would thus also ask researchers and policymakers to become more critical of the kinds of work in which we engage. Looking through the literature on educational change there are so many papers that evaluate the efficacy of a certain reform or policy. They ask questions like, “Did this work?” “What other reform might be more effective?” Instead, I think one task of scholars is to question these reforms themselves. I’m a bit late to the party, but I’ve just started Bettina Love’s (2023) new book, Punished for Dreaming, which looks at the impact of decades of certain kinds of educational change efforts on Black children. The language of improvement and change often blurs the radical possibilities of listening to dreams and studying with other possibilities for structuring education work.

On the other hand, in shifting understandings of educational change, I think there is a lot of political work to be done around contesting change efforts. When I think of impactful educational change, I think of the successful work to impose anti-Black, transphobic, and xenophobic curriculum in schools. Every week, my student teachers and I are forced to grapple with relentless efforts to change public schools into things that are whiter, more private, and defunded. It’s here that I come to the question about how I’m heeding the call to look with hope and radicalism. As a teacher educator and scholar, I think my core responsibility is to think with teachers as they join the powerful work that communities and schools are already doing to reimagine and work toward more liberatory worlds.

I think my core responsibility is to think with teachers as they join the powerful work that communities and schools are already doing to reimagine and work towards more liberatory worlds.

LtC: In much of your work, you use ethnography to examine spaces outside of schools that provide education and offer vital lessons for those working in and studying schools. What are some of the major lessons practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?

JC: This is a bit of a contradictory answer, but I think it’s both that school and everyday life need to speak to each other more and that school needs to leave everyday life alone. For the first one, there are so many beautiful projects that connect educational life in formal spaces to other kinds of education. Whether connected learning (Ito et al., 2013), which looks at broadening access to learning opportunities while strengthening social supports for learning, or the many thoughtful, creative, and critical ways that scholars have taken up funds of knowledge, where Moll et al. (1992) show the vibrant life of households and communities, school and nonformal education can and should be connected. On the other side of things, though, I hold deep concerns about how school can consume other ways of thinking and being. Two things I have found in my research are how a “schooled” way of thinking and acting wash over everyday life and how everyday educational practices that challenge the logics and formations of schooling quickly become precarious, even in culturally affirmative educational spaces. When youth and I walked around New York City, I still found them doing things like raising their hands to prove that they knew an answer, even when they were just chatting with friends. In school, the second educational practices didn’t fit into the broader function of schooling, it became a problem. Students’ funds of knowledge needed to fit into schooling structures that demand rigid outcomes and measurable results.

My point here is that something like funds of knowledge shouldn’t only be about improving student achievement. If cultural life that moves outside of school is so important, it should be about radically changing what schools look like and what purposes they serve rather than simply incorporating students into existing structures. I’m thinking here of ethnic studies programs. I teach a class called Education, Genocide, Liberation, which looks at the different roles schools have played across time and place. For their final project, students take on a case study that shows how education acts as a force for genocide, liberation, social reproduction, and much else. Groups this semester studied a number of radical educational projects, including the Young Lords, Black Panthers, and the Chicano Movement. They also looked at some of the ethnic studies programs that have taken shape within and from these movements. As we studied these histories, students were just blown away. Students kept saying things like, “Wait, school can be like this?” These weren’t programs about better including students in schools. It wasn’t just that students saw themselves represented in the curriculum. They were the curriculum.

It wasn’t just that students saw themselves represented in the curriculum. They were the curriculum.

Learning like that which comes from ethnic studies also shows how school and everyday life don’t exist in some kind of binary. It’s not like school is some oppressive monster and other kinds of education are inherently liberatory. This idea may seem obvious, but I think it’s also really important to protect schools as places of possibility. The youth with whom I have worked often found school to be a refuge, even when they struggled there. I’m not a fan of borders, but I think all of this is to say that there are lessons here of creating schools from the bottom up and making schools with fluid boundaries that also limit their reach into everyday life. 

LtC: In your new book, Reconceptualizing Education for Newcomer Students, you call for educational systems to leverage the experiences of immigrant students to foster more inclusive educational practices. What might practitioners and scholars take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?

JC: I don’t necessarily have specific steps so much as a question of how scholars and practitioners might rethink who and what counts in education. A major lesson I took away from this project is that the machinery of schooling is not very good at slowing down. I started the project during the Trump presidency. I wrote the book during the uprisings of 2020 and the first two years of COVID. Of course, some things changed. Schools are always changing. But, the big structures stayed the same. For me, this gets back to a question of what change means and where it comes from. Especially working in New York City, there is just this ongoing piling of reform atop reform, creating an ever-growing heap of policies without really listening to the radical change work that’s already happening. Change has so often come from communities in New York City. Bilingual education, for example, emerged from ongoing fights for educational rights. But, these changes so often come about through struggles against a system that wants only to trudge along a linear path.

The school in which I conducted research is designed to educate immigrant-origin students through culturally and linguistically affirmative approaches. I describe in the book all kinds of radical practices that youth took up and that might contribute to remaking schools rather than continuing along this same path. They engaged in educational practices not bound to specific learning outcomes or measurable objectives. They studied with joy and presence. Of course, teachers and students also pushed for different material conditions. Yet they weren’t just sitting around waiting for new inclusion policies. I wonder what might happen if researchers and practitioners thought of intellectual educational life not as something that they work toward but something already present. What if teachers could listen to and join in on the playful, speculative, education work that leaves behind the confines of achievement?

There are major issues here of responsibility. At this school, as with so many others, there were some tricky visits from an administrator followed by a shift in the curriculum to a certain kind of academic rigor. To this question of a better school system, I think about how teachers and students might be responsible for collectively caring for each other and their community rather than meeting the demands of an administrator. Ultimately, I don’t see it as a leveraging of immigrant-origin students’ knowledge to better include them in this machinery of schooling but rather a rethinking of what schools do, how, and for whom.

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?

JC: Most of my knowledge about this field comes from my work with Professor Tom Hatch and Sarah van den Berg. In our book, The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict, we looked at what we call “spandrels of opportunity” and micro-innovations happening in schools and nonformal spaces around the world. These concepts explore how change occurs on different scales, with different conditions, and for different purposes. It’s often about what’s happening in niches.

Like my previous answer, these kinds of changes are already happening all around us. I think the best way to support those engaged in this kind of work is to promote their work and support the kinds of conditions that will allow their efforts to flourish. It’s hard to choose just one out of all of the organizations we wrote about in the book, but it was thrilling to visit the Beam Center in Brooklyn. They have this massive studio where kids can tinker and build things. It’s a laboratory for kids to play and learn by doing. Beam also sustains great school partnerships where they facilitate arts, science, and all kinds of project-based learning work.

From another perspective, I think researchers are positioned to support long struggles of educational change. I’m thinking here of this current moment in U.S. public schools. Like many areas, New Jersey, which is where my university is located, is dealing with the newest iteration of a teacher “crisis.” As people keep pointing out, though, it’s really an issue of support, investment, and care for teachers and schools, one that is connected to histories of unions and communities fighting for public schools. The situation has led the state of New Jersey to finally listen to ongoing efforts from unions and abandon the edTPA. Now, they’re even peeling back the Praxis. And paying student teachers! As much as my students and I have celebrated these hard-fought wins for teachers, changes have not come with structural support. A $3,000 stipend means a great deal when you’re a working-class student asked to be full time student teacher. But then you have decades of trying to be a teacher while underpaid, overworked, and constantly blamed. All of that is just to say that researchers studying educational change can do a lot in moments like this one. We can situate terms like “crisis” and show how it’s been repeatedly used in the history of U.S. schools. We can use our work to subvert and oppose standardized barriers like Praxis exams. And, we can participate in political organizing efforts. It’s all about where we locate ourselves, how we commit to these kinds of change efforts, and how we remain answerable to the communities with whom we work.

It’s all about where we locate ourselves, how we commit to these kinds of change efforts, and how we remain answerable to the communities with whom we work.

LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?

JC: That’s such a great question and, as someone more situated in the fields of anthropology of education and curriculum theory, I have perhaps a different perspective. It seems like Educational Change is a big field that is constantly moving in many directions. Having said that, it’s exciting to see scholars pushing beyond the boundaries of schooling and thinking about education in new ways. As I just mentioned, educational change is happening at different scales. It’s happening in different spaces. And, it’s happening with different understandings of change that go beyond academic achievement. As a quick example, in preparing for this interview, I was reading some recent work in The Journal of Educational Change. There’s one article by Wortham, Shim, Kim, and Shirley (2023) that explores a progressive education approach in South Korea called the Hyukshin school. The piece grapples with tensions between pushing toward achievement and student well-being. I think we as scholars will have to be careful with how we approach these topics lest they simply become incorporated into dominant logics. But, it’s wonderful to see educational change taken up as something not just bound to academic outcomes.

I’m also excited to think about the ways the field might intersect with social movements. I love seeing schooling and education’s role in revolutionary projects. This idea really comes out in a course I teach called Schools of the Future. We spend the first few weeks asking how schools came to look the way they do and exploring the constraints on change. But then, we move around the world and look at all these radically different school models. Students love to look at Forest Schools in Denmark or Summerhill/Free Schools and their anti-hierarchical democratic project. Beyond changes within larger systems, a lot of my students gravitate toward educational projects that change entire societal structures like the Rojava Revolution, a Kurdish liberation movement. Education has been a key aspect of this revolutionary political movement that centers radical democracy, feminism, and ecology. While I don’t think what’s happening in Rojava can or should be translated to the northeast U.S., studying this project opens up new ways of thinking about the possibilities of change and, once more, what we even mean when we talk about educational change.

References

Corson, J. (2023). Reconceptualizing education for newcomer students: Valuing learning experiences inside and outside of school. Teachers College Press.

Hatch, T., Corson, J., & van den Berg, S. G. (2021). The education we need for a future we can′ t predict. Corwin.

Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., … & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Love, B. L. (2023). Punished for dreaming: How school reform harms Black children and how we heal. St. Martin’s Press.

Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (2006). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. In Funds of knowledge (pp. 71-87). Routledge.

Patel, L. (2015). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. Routledge.

Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1997). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.

Wortham, S., Shim, C., Kim, D., & Shirley, D. (2023). Can Korea have academic achievement plus well-being? The case of Hyukshin schools. Journal of Educational Change, 1-23.

This week, IEN continues its scan of news and research on tutoring as a “learning loss” recovery strategy. The second part of this three-part series focuses specifically on what’s being written about the challenges and opportunities for carrying out tutoring strategies effectively on a large scale. Part 1 of this series described some of the funding initiatives contributing to the emphasis on “high-dosage” tutoring as a “recovery” strategy, as well as some of the initiatives to expand access to tutoring being pursued in the US in particular. Part 3 will survey some of the specific new developments and “micro-innovations” that could make tutoring more effective in the future. This series is part of IEN’s ongoing coverage of what is and is not changing in schools and education following the school closures of the pandemic. For more from the series, see “What can change in schools after the pandemic?” and “We will now resume our regular programming.” For IEN’s previous coverage of news and research on tutoring, see Scanning the News on High Dosage Tutoring, Part 1: A Solution to Pandemic Learning Recovery, and Part 2: Initiatives and Implementation So Far. This post was written by Jonathan Beltran Alvarado and Thomas Hatch.

Although it will take years to judge the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students, it’s already possible to track – and in some cases predict – the challenges that large-scale “recovery” initiatives like expanding access to tutoring are likely to encounter. Those analyses depend on the answers to several critical questions, including: 

• To what extent do the goals of the initiative meet the needs of the people involved? 
• To what extent do the capacity demands for funds, personnel, time, and other resources match the existing capabilities? 
• To what extent do the values reflected in the initiatives mesh with the values of the people, organizations, and communities where those initiatives are supposed to take off?

Both the goals and values of many tutoring initiatives match what many policymakers, funders, educators, and families perceive as an urgent need for strategies that focus directly on improving students’ learning, particularly as measured by test scores (as detailed in the first post in this series “Tutoring takes off – Scanning the news on the emergence of tutoring programs as a strategy to combat “learning loss (Part 1).” However, even with a fit between goals, needs, and values, the extent to which different schools, districts, and communities have the capacity to pursue effective tutoring interventions on a large scale remains in question. In order to get a better sense of the capacity challenges that schools may be facing in pursuing tutoring initiatives, three issues are particularly relevant:

• What kind of tutoring are students getting?
• Who is actually getting tutoring support? 
• What are the challenges of scaling up tutoring interventions?

What kind of tutoring are students getting?

Research, including eight different meta-analyses, make clear that tutoring can have a significant positive effect on student learning. For example, a systematic review of 89 tutoring programs and related field experiments shows that “tutoring programs yield consistently substantial positive impacts on learning.” There is even evidence that, under some circumstances, online tutoring programs can be effective.

“Eight meta-analyses including over 150 studies consistently find that tutoring results in substantial additional learning for students,” High-Impact Tutoring: An Equitable, Proven Approach to Address Pandemic Learning Loss and Accelerate Learning, National Student Support Accelerator

However, tutoring interventions vary in key programmatic components, such as the type of tutor, their curriculum characteristics, their mode of delivery, and their frequency and duration, and a number of studies show that not all these variations are equally effective. As Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn put it, “There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom, and anybody can tutor.”

“There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom, and anybody can tutor.” – Penny Schwinn, quoted in Despite Urgency, New National Tutoring Effort Could Take 6 Months to Ramp Up

Among the many options, high-impact or high-dosage tutoring is regarded as the most effective form of student support. As the US Department of Education sums it up, the key features of high-dosage tutoring include:

1. Duration of at least 30 minutes
2. Frequency of three or more times per week 
3. One-on-one or small group instruction
4. Alignment with an evidence-based curriculum or program 
5. Providers who are educators or well-trained tutors

Consistent with this definition, research suggest that the most effective tutors are teachers and paraprofessionals who are invested in relationship-building and well-informed in the content rather than volunteers; tutors benefit from having high-quality materials aligned with the state’s standards, which should be easy to use by tutors and students; and the best results occur when high-impact tutoring is embedded in schools, preferably taking place during school or immediately before or after the school day, making it easier for students to attend. 

Who is actually getting tutored?

Despite the considerable agreement about the impact of high-dosage tutoring, many students are not participating in it. For example, a survey by the EdWeek Research Center in 2021 found that 97% of US district leaders surveyed said they were or would be offering tutoring to about one-third of their students (equal to about 17 million of the 51 million K-12 students in the US). However, data from the Department of Education for the 2022-2023 school year shows that while 83% of schools reported offering some form of tutoring only 37% of schools provided high-dosage tutoring, and only 30% of their students received it. 

Evidence also suggests that many students are not even taking advantage of the “on-demand” tutoring programs that are supposed to be easier for them to access. For example, a study of an “on-demand” tutoring system implemented in a network of charter schools in the spring of 2021 showed that only 19% of students ever accessed the program, and struggling students were even less likely to opt in than their higher-achieving peers, with a take-up rate of 12% against 23% respectively. An intervention involving extensive communication via mail, email, and text messages with students and families increased participation substantially, but only about one-quarter of students ever logged on to the tutoring platform.

The good and bad of virtual on-demand tutoring, Brookings

As a result, the study’s authors concluded: “The availability of tutoring rarely translated into the use of tutoring. This open-access program is unlikely to have reduced—and may, in fact, have increased—inequalities in students’ academic experiences and outcomes.” 

“The availability of tutoring rarely translated into the use of tutoring. This open-access program is unlikely to have reduced—and may, in fact, have increased—inequalities in students’ academic experiences and outcomes.” — Susanna Loeb & Carly D. Robinson, “The good and bad of virtual on-demand tutoring”

Evidence of fast-growing remote tutoring approaches developed by companies like Paper and Varsity Tutors are also having trouble getting students to opt-in to their services. Varsity Tutors, for example, markets its services as a newer, more scalable tutoring model in which schools pay a subscription fee for each student. That subscription gives students access to an online platform where they can post a problem and get connected to an available tutor. Without using the camera or the microphone, a designated tutor can solve the problem by sharing the screen, uploading photos and documents, or typing in a text box. 

Despite the ease of use, the persistent low take-up rates have disappointed many school districts and altered the demand for opt-in remote tutoring. Santa Ana Unified, California, invested over $1.1 million to provide access to 41,000 students, but just 1,000 logged from December 2021 to May. In Columbus, Ohio, district data confirmed that only 7% of students received opt-in tutoring through Paper’s platform, which dissuaded them from renewing the $913,000 contract signed in 2022. Fairfax County, Virginia, recorded an even less impressive take-up rate of only 1.6 percent of students accessing the platform Tutor.com. What is worse, recent testimonies and investigations are shedding light on the frantic business dynamics of companies like Paper, which has a monetary incentive to make a tutor responsible for more students than it can meaningfully manage or teach subjects they don’t know well. 

School leaders are facing this situation by changing the contract incentives and demanding more accountability from remote tutoring companies. In an interview with the Hechinger Report, Terry Grier, former superintendent of Houston, said it was “immoral” for schools to sign “blank contracts” without strings attached. He said he tried online tutoring, but it didn’t work well. “Kids wouldn’t use it,” Grier said.

“It is ‘immoral’ for schools to sign ‘blank contracts’ without strings attached.” — Terry Grier quoted in “Proof Points: Many schools are buying on-demand tutoring but a study finds that few students are using it”

To address these issues, some school districts have designed contracts that promote vendor accountability. Ector County, Texas, developed a pilot of outcomes-based tutoring contracts in 2020 before the pandemic. The school leaders scaled up the model over the summer of 2020, recognizing that academic recovery would require a significant investment. Their goal was to provide intensive virtual tutoring to 6,000 students under a contract, tying the vendor’s revenue to the rate of learning growth on the NWEA MAP assessment administered three times during the school year. 

Still, districts are paying significant sums to on-demand tutoring programs that may not be as cost-effective as they look. A Hechinger Report article explains that Varsity Tutors charges a flat fee of $40 to $80 per student (depending on school district size). This price may look attractive compared to resource-intensive high-dosage tutoring programs that cost roughly $4,000 per student yearly. However, if a 10,000-student district buys a remote tutoring program for $800,000, an average take-up rate of 20% elevates the cost per student from $80 to $400. Furthermore, the students who participate in these programs tend to be high achieving students rather than the low achieving students for whom the program was intended.

What barriers to providing effective tutoring need to be addressed?

Along with the challenges of engaging students, high dosage tutoring is a resource-intensive strategy and costs and scalability remain big concerns. As a recent meta-analysis concluded, optimizing quality without increasing costs serves as a key challenge for policymakers. Furthermore, school districts across the US have been scrambling to find effective teachers – much less tutors – because of the difficult conditions and burnout endured by educators post-pandemic. The shortage of teachers means that some tutoring plans have had to scale back significantly, with one study of mid- to large-sized school districts across 10 states in 2021 showing that some  districts that had planned to offer 90 tutoring sessions ended up offering 13 sessions throughout the year. The tight labor markets may also prevent some districts, particularly those with fewer resources available, from providing tutoring from the teachers who could be most effective. Not surprisingly, some districts have turned to cheaper substitutes, which partly explains the popularity of remote opt-in tutoring platforms. 

Discrepancies in how the schools provide tutoring, low student and parental engagement, and lack of technological resources have also diminished the impact of online tutoring. Thus, when remote tutoring options are available, the youngest students face a steeper learning curve as they spend additional time learning how to navigate the interactive platform that connects tutors and students. On top of that, the need for high-speed internet means that students living in rural areas with low parental support or lacking Wi-Fi have additional barriers to receiving academic assistance. Consequently, even the most easily scalable remote tutoring options may not reach many of the students and districts who need the most support, reinforcing existing inequalities.

Next steps? 

Tutoring alone cannot address the many issues that make it difficult to improve learning at scale for all students, and an overreliance on tutoring can take time and attention away from needed investments in support for student wellbeing and other aspects of their development. But, taken together, the latest news and research on high-dosage tutoring in the US both confirms that it is one of the most promising strategies for improving students’ academic performance in areas like reading and math and demonstrates that it is also very difficult to put into practice at scale.

[T]he latest news and research on high-dosage tutoring in the US both confirms that it is one of the most promising strategies for improving students’ academic performance in areas like reading and math and demonstrates that it is also very difficult to put into practice at scale.

As an Aspen Institute report puts it, tutoring may be one of the best ways “to teach anyone anything,” but scaling tutoring programs will continue to be challenging given limited money and a limited labor supply of tutors on top of the difficulties of modifying school’s “standard operating procedures” to find time in school schedules to  incorporate tutoring and to get students to participate on a regular basis. Adding to the challenges, as federal COVID relief funding ends, many states, like Tennessee, Connecticut, and Texas, are scrambling to find new ways of financing their tutoring efforts. Under these conditions, it is easy to predict that the surge in popularity of tutoring programs will subside without some progress in addressing the high costs, significant demands and capacity problems that come along with high-dosage tutoring. 

Still to come: “Promising innovations? Scanning the news on the emergence of tutoring programs after the school closures”.

In this week’s post, Jordan Corson shares some of the experiences and research with “youth on the move” that are captured in his latest book, Reconceptualizing Education for Newcomer Students (Teachers College Press, 2023). Corson is an assistant professor of education and affiliated faculty member of the M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University. He is also a co-author with Thomas Hatch and Sarah Gerth van den Berg of The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict (Corwin, 2021). Corson’s previous posts include: Who and What Counts in Education? A Conversation with Jordan Corson. A previous version of this post appeared on the Teachers College Press Blog.

As schools tell it, the history of immigration and schooling in the U.S. is a story of two paths: exclusion or assimilation. From the 19^th century and early 20^th century  to present day, schools have commonly operated as places of oppression for immigrant students. Success—or perhaps educational survival—here depends on a capacity to conform to inherently oppressive structures. In beautiful instances, though, schools can realize the dream of making public, democratic places that serve communities. That cherish students’ voices. That nurture and care, making schools a welcoming refuge. That provoke intellectual curiosity bound up in dynamic linguistic and cultural practices. Such places center students’ identities. Joy bursts from their walls. Here, language is not something to acquire but something to do. Even as students struggle, these schools find ways of better including youth and helping them succeed.

Schools can realize the dream of making public, democratic places that serve communities. That cherish students’ voices. That nurture and care, making schools a welcoming refuge. That provoke intellectual curiosity bound up in dynamic linguistic and cultural practices.

For youth “on the move” – a term that highlights the importance of rethinking migration, nationality, and the borders we researchers and policymakers place on immigrant youth — this kind of educational structure can be found in newcomer schools. Newcomer schools are a model of public school specifically designed to affirm the linguistic and cultural identities of youth on the move who have recently arrived to a new place. In recent years, researchers and educators have attended to and championed this school model as one of educational possibility.

This kind of cherished educational environment sits at the center of my book, Reconceptualizing Education for Newcomer Students: Valuing Learning Experiences Inside and Outside of School.  Building on the work of scholars and educators like Monish Bajaj, Daniel Walsh, Lesley Bartlett, and Gabriela Martínez aims to champion affirmative forms of schooling and to show the powerful educational possibilities born of supporting youth on the move. At the same time, though, the questions I pose, wander from asking how schools might improve or how school systems might better include youth on the move to ask: Why are youth on the move considered educational “problems” in the first place? Why have policymakers and researchers historically framed kids, especially those from marginalized communities, as “problems” for schools to solve? Why has the solution been to make of school a rigidly bordered place where students “access” education? Along with these questions about youth on the move in schools, I also explore educational life beyond the boundaries of schooling.

Why are youth on the move considered educational “problems” in the first place? Why have policymakers and researchers historically framed kids, especially those from marginalized communities, as “problems” for schools to solve?

To explore these questions, I look at the history of immigration and schooling in New York City. Beyond the mountainous history of oppressive education, a history of including and “solving the problem” of educating youth on the move shows the way education systems have made sense of youth on the move and created different systems to include them with the “melting pot” or “kaleidoscope” of the United States. This history is also bundled up in critiquing how school has both come to be a place of borders and have a monopoly on education. I explore these histories from an institutional perspective, but histories of communities building schools, demanding policy changes, and challenging oppressive orders puncture a smooth, institutional narrative.

Along with this historical inquiry, I veer from school entirely by presenting an ethnographic study of education in everyday life with nine youth from a newcomer school in New York City. Even in culturally and linguistically affirmative schools, youth still become marginalized, labeled “at-risk” of dropping out, and their educational lives become defined by what happens in school. Of course, education is always happening. Learning, creating, and figuring out the world happen outside of school and often without school as a reference point. Therefore, I asked: What might happen if we moved with youth into everyday life, leaving behind the language and logics of school? Instead of thinking about something like academic outcomes, what if we studied within everyday educational practices themselves? What if the only understanding of learning was the pleasure experienced in the learning process?

What might happen if we moved with youth into everyday life, leaving behind the language and logics of school? Instead of thinking about something like academic outcomes, what if we studied within everyday educational practices themselves?

To that end, I spent a year with the youth who participated in this project, hanging out in school, clubs, and museums. We wandered New York City, riding subways, exploring parks, checking out summer basketball games, or chatting in cafes. Whether inside of school or outside of school, youth and I explored wondrous educations that were not concerned with school or dominant systems. They lost themselves in memory as they described learning photography in the Dominican Republic. Or, they navigated their own form of language education while creating plurilingual rap lyrics. Youth participants asked themselves and each other what kind of people they wanted to become and what they owed each other. Education is not, as they regularly demonstrated, something concerned with access or outcomes, but about living and changing the world.

I started research for this book in the middle of the Trump presidency. Even in the “sanctuary” of New York City, danger permeated every corner of everyday educational life. As much as this project was filled with laughter and play, the carceral systems that define the U.S. made it dangerous for youth participants to simply learn or express themselves in public places. A few years later, U.S. policy and xenophobic action entwine and continue along an infuriatingly predictable trajectory. The current “migrant crisis” is only the latest moment in a long history of a country that chooses to impose violent borders, think of people on the move as “problems,” and considers education through this same bordering logic.

Understanding these relentless issues, I hope to contribute to the kinds of work that center youth voices and challenge deficit narratives that overwhelm conversations about immigration and immigration. Moreover, I hope to does so in a way that does not bolster educational research or school systems but  disrupts them at their very roots. Youth on the move should not have to prove that they deserve to belong to schools or any other institution in the U.S. As one participant told me, “I should get these things because I’m a human.” Instead, researchers and policymakers should question the borders we have made in schools and elsewhere.

In the second part of this two-part interview, Melanie Ehren talks with Thomas Hatch about the five “waves of funding” designed to help the Dutch education system respond to the learning challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. The first part of this interview focused on the initial school closures and the suspension of exams in the Netherlands. Ehren is Professor and Director of Research of LEARN! at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This interview is one in a series exploring what can change in schools after the pandemic? Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Vietnam. Other blog posts from Melanie Ehren include A view from the Netherlands: Melanie Ehren on school closures and the pandemic; Lead the Change Interview with Melanie Ehren; A call to action in the Netherlands: Addressing rising inequality in a decentralized system.

Thomas Hatch (TH): You and your colleagues spent a considerable amount of time studying how the Dutch government has used a series of funding initiatives to help schools and students in the Netherlands recover from the pandemic. Can you give a sense of these “waves” of funding and how schools and school networks used them?

Melanie Ehren (ME): The Dutch government provided funding to help schools respond to COVID pandemic in five different “waves,” with the first wave in July, 2020, after the initial school closures. At first, consistent with the decentralized Dutch system, schools and local school boards could decide on the type of “catch-up” approach to pursue and which pupils were eligible for the additional support. However, after the first round of funding there was considerable negative press about the unfocused nature of the approaches and the fact that some of them had little, if anything, to do with instruction. For example, in one meeting, I heard some people complaining about a school that used the funds to take their students on a trip to an amusement park (like Disney-land), with the rationale that children had experienced such socio-emotional suffering that they needed a break and a chance to re-establish their relationships with peers and their teachers.

After the initial round, the requirements for the funding were tightened and schools had to use student achievement results to target students with “learning loss” and to choose from a ‘menu of effective interventions’ to help them catch-up.  This menu was modelled directly on a “Toolkit” developed in England to ensure that schools used “catch up” approaches that had some “evidence of effectiveness.” The first version of this was what the Dutch called a “menu card,” which was essentially the English toolkit translated into Dutch.

The “Toolkit” created by the Education Endowment Foundation used in England and the Dutch version based on the English model

I think this move was made because the government felt that schools were not very evidence informed in their thinking about what interventions and programs to implement in the first wave. In fact, when we interviewed schools that had applied for funding about why they picked a particular intervention – asking things like “why are you thinking that this program might lead to improved outcomes for this particular groups?” – many of them had a hard time answering. In some cases, the decisions appeared to be based on professional expertise and their previous experiences of what had worked or didn’t work well for their students. But some schools also told us they were choosing these programs out of convenience or building on partnerships with external agencies that were already in place. For example, they might say “this is a tutoring agency we’ve worked with before; we’ve had good results with them, so we thought that that might be a good way to use the funding” or “this is something that we know we can organize for our school.”

For this second wave of funding, we studied the applications of schools and found that the schools planned to focus mainly on three types of outcomes:

1. School performance (primary education: language and arithmetic; secondary education: core subjects)
2. Well-being/social-emotional development of pupils
3. Learning skills

Despite these plans, we found that many schools actually ended up using the funding quite differently. For example, a school might have planned to spend the funds on after school tutoring; on providing additional remedial instruction at the start of the school day; or on having additional teachers in the classroom.  But then when it came time for implementation, another issue or need might have emerged or  they might have found they couldn’t secure additional teachers. Overall, schools were really struggling to organize these programs as planned because of the constant disruptions to in-person teaching and then there was a second lockdown so they were constantly changing and revising. I also had many conversations with school leaders who said “we did not apply for this funding, because we need more time to actually think about what makes sense for our kids.” We detailed some of this at the time in a blog post “Catch-up and support programmes in primary and secondary education.”

Overall, schools were really struggling to organize these programs as planned because of the constant disruptions to in-person teaching and then there was a second lockdown so they were constantly changing and revising.

Over time, the government did add more background information and context to the menu to help schools to use the information to make choices. For example, the new version produced by the Ministry of Education, Culture & Science (which they referred to as an “Intervention card improving basic skills“) included links to guidance and support for choosing and using the guidance and urged the schools to consider the demands of their own context, stating: “it is important how your school implements a chosen intervention. For a concrete step-by-step plan, you place each approach in the context of your school: does this approach suit the education you provide, your students and the issues you face? The professionalism and autonomy of the teacher are paramount here.” All of this has led to much more emphasis on evidence-based and evidence-informed work in schools, and particularly how the government can support that. That’s another consequence of the pandemic in the Netherlands, I think: A belief that we need to build more capacity in schools for using research evidence to improve education.

TH: What’s happening now and what’s likely to happen in the future? 

ME: Building on the catch-up schemes, the national government has developed a broader funding scheme – the National Program for Education – that is continuing to help schools, particularly schools with a high level of deprivation, to improve reading, writing, and literacy. This program provides an additional investment of 8.5 billion for 2.5 years for the entire education system. This National Program offers funding to improve education in these basic areas, and schools are expected to use the same approach as under the catch-up funding: the schools have to identify children who need additional support and use the menu card to decide on what kind of interventions are effective. But the national program of education has a much wider infrastructure to improve basic skills, including support teams that are initiated by the Ministry of Education to work with schools, but all around this idea of evidence-informed interventions.

“Get started with the NP Education” [translated] a graphic depicting how Dutch schools should select, implement and monitor “catch-up” programs.

Despite the huge amount of funding there have been a lot of critiques of the national government, given the short time span in which the money has to be spent, which doesn’t allow schools to implement more sustainable solutions to improve education and learning outcomes. The funding for example doesn’t allow schools to hire additional staff as these would have to be offered permanent employment which cannot be guaranteed with temporary funding.

Given that the most pressing problems in our education system are teacher shortages, high inequality and a decline in student outcomes in literacy and numeracy, there is an understanding that a long-term investment and program of reform is required to improve education. The short-term catch-up programs seem to have done relatively well in getting students back on track, but they have not been able to buck the wider trends in declining outcomes and increasing shortages of teachers.

In some ways, all of this a natural consequence of problems coming out of the school closures, but it’s reinforced by the fact that the Netherlands’ performance has been declining in international surveys like PISA at the same time that inequality has been increasing. That’s also something that the Dutch Inspector of Education has reported on in their annual reports. All of these reports have been alerting people to the facts that children are not reading at home and that reading scores are declining, and that’s having an effect on other outcomes. All of these things come together in the drive towards trying to improve basic skills.

TH: Can you talk a little about how the response in NL compares to those in other systems you’re familiar with, particularly the UK? 

ME: During the pandemic, the Netherlands had a decentralized approach to allow schools to choose a contextually appropriate response to school closures within a centralized funding framework. This is different from other countries such as the UK that saw a highly centralized roll-out of a tutoring programme. Now, however, we are seeing a much more centralized approach to improving education. Recently an ‘interdepartmental investigation into education (IBO Koersen op kwaliteit en kansengelijkheid) was published with a range of proposals for stronger governmental coordination/control over education to reduce inequality and enhance learning outcomes, including more centralized coordination of the curriculum, compulsory assessments, more inspection, enhancing evidence-informed work in schools (including through an application for funding to hire a school support team to work with a school). Given the Netherlands’ tradition of high autonomy and freedom of education, this is being described as ‘a committed and responsible government’, but it is essentially a move towards greater centralized control.

Now, however, we are seeing a much more centralized approach to improving education... Given the Netherlands’ tradition of high autonomy and freedom of education, this is being described as ‘a committed and responsible government.’

TH: Have you seen any particularly innovative or promising new practices or policies that have grown out of the COVID response? 

ME: Schools are much better equipped to move to online learning when needed. With the train strikes we had in some regions last year, schools closed again but they have been able to take advantage of the new infrastructure and teachers’ skills to teach online. In Higher Education there is some discussion of having a COVID-generation of students (who also talk about themselves in these words) who sometimes find it difficult to engage in on-campus education and feel they should have more support.

Teacher shortages are also increasing and this is partially attributed to the high levels of stress and workload during the pandemic and reduction of the status of teachers in society and the cost of living in relation to teachers’ salaries. Our most recent research also suggests that there may be an increase in the number of teachers working on private contracts (through recruitment agencies). The amount of temporary funding for catch-up programmes and the National Education Program may also lead to an increase in private agencies and what some are calling “edubusinesses,” but I have not yet seen the evidence on this.

Related Resources & Articles:

Subsidie en basisteams voor scholen om basisvaardigheden te verbeteren [English: Subsidies and basic teams for schools to improve basic skills], Rijksoverheid

Eerste inzichten over inhaalprogramma`s in het po en vo [English: Catch-up and support programmes in primary and secondary education], LEARN!

Informatie voor onderwijsprofessionals [English: Information for Professionals], LEARN!

Rapport De Staat van het Onderwijs 2021 [English: Report on The State of Education 2021], Inspectie van het Onderwijs

Rapport De Staat van het Onderwijs 2022 [English: Report on The State of Education 2022], Inspectie van het Onderwijs