Since 2013, thirty states have passed legislation or implemented new policies related to the “science of reading.” Their collective effort to change how early reading is taught in America’s classrooms is the focus of an excellent new project by Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz. There are, however, questions about the sustainability of these massive efforts.
Since 2013, thirty states have passed legislation or implemented new policies related to the “science of reading.” Their collective effort to change how early reading is taught in America’s classrooms is the focus of an excellent new project by Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz titled, “Science of Reading: Where Rhetoric Meets Reality.” Her series homes in on the complex and often messy work of systems change required to shift hearts, minds, and practices among teachers, administrators, and policymakers in order to bring reading instruction in line with the research consensus. As part of this, Schwartz—building upon the groundbreaking reporting of Emily Hanford—examines how North Carolina’s version of the law, enacted in the middle of the pandemic and dubbed the “Excellent Public Schools Act,” is playing out
The centerpiece of Schwartz’s package of articles looks at the Tar Heel State’s rollout of literacy reform, principally through the eyes of Raul Olivares Jr., a kindergarten teacher in Washington, North Carolina. Like many of his colleagues, Olivares went through an educator preparation program (EPP) that emphasized three-cueing, a misbegotten yet pervasive reading strategy that encourages children to make educated guesses when confronted with an unfamiliar word. Teaching students to rely on pictures and other clues has been shown to be deleterious to children in developing the foundational skills needed to read well. Part of the challenge, then, was for Olivares to unlearn what he was taught as a pre-service teacher.
The most sweeping provision of North Carolina’s statute is a requirement that every K–5 teacher undergo the same intensive, two-year professional development program on the science of reading. The training—Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling or LETRS—is costing the state $50 million to implement over two years and takes about 160 hours to complete. Often described as a graduate-level course, LETRS was used by Mississippi as part of its now-famous rise out of the reading cellar. The key question is whether LETRS, a hugely popular program, albeit with ambiguous results, will translate into better classroom practice. Olivares himself seems torn on the matter. On the one hand, the training helped him reflect on his teaching practice: “I almost feel like I need to say ‘I’m sorry’ to some of the kids I taught before.” But the lengthy coursework was taxing:
[Olivares] feels drained from this past school year. He spent extra time on the weekends doing his assignments for LETRS training, sacrificing precious time with his wife and three kids... And he doesn’t anticipate things slowing down anytime soon... Stress and anxiety are starting to bubble up when Olivares thinks about the next few months… He wants to move beyond the same question that he feels like he’s been asking himself since the beginning of the year.
“You can read all about [the science of reading], but how do you truly apply it?” For right now, at least, [Olivares] feels like he has no choice but to figure that out by himself.
Olivares’s plight raises important questions about the sustainability of this massive effort. Who will help educators change and refine their practice? How do schools create a culture that supports these changes even as staff come and go? (There are already reports that some aren’t taking the training seriously.) Shaping teaching at the scale North Carolina is asking of its schools and districts will require political will, but above all requires patience—which is often at odds with political timelines—as academic improvements may take years to materialize. Indeed, the state is implementing its law in phases, with full implementation not expected before 2024–25.
To get at this question of implementation and sustainability, I helped to kick off a conversation in Raleigh last month as part of a related project led by The Hunt Institute. If North Carolina’s experience thus far is any indication, there’s reason for guarded optimism. It’s early days, but for the first time in the state’s history, the K–12 system and higher ed appear to be singing from the same hymnal in believing that what schools do in the early grades must be evidence-based—and agreeing, more or less, on said evidence. Starting this fall, the UNC System will be following a unified literacy framework across its fifteen EPPs. Bringing these two worlds—K–12 and higher ed—into alignment on reading instruction is a necessary step.
At the same time, the state’s department of education will be hiring and deploying literacy coaches in every district. Notably, this represents a significant deviation from Mississippi’s playbook, which assigned its coaches to individual schools. Although less expensive, it remains to be seen how effectual this approach will be, as coaching often depends upon a more direct link with the classroom—especially given the huge size of many of North Carolina’s 115 county-wide districts. To its credit, the state has been working diligently to manage expectations, underscoring how transforming pedagogy requires playing the long game. But the risk remains.
According to state officials, about 70 percent of first graders in North Carolina were proficient in reading in 2019. Following the pandemic, that dropped to just 38 percent. Although America’s lackluster performance in reading long predates Covid, today’s renewed interest—among North Carolinians and many others—in solving the problems of poor reading instruction makes sense if for no other reason than early literacy being the one topic within education policy where there’s something close to a settled science. If states can stick with it for the long haul, and if teachers like Olivares receive the guidance and support they’re seeking, they might finally make some headway in establishing a coherent literacy policy that is serious about every child learning how to read.
Susie Miller Carello may not be a household name in education, but she’s a household name among those who are. For twelve years ending earlier this month, she led the Charter Schools Institute at the State University of New York—the largest university-based charter school authorizer in the nation, and arguably the most successful. SUNY authorizes some of the most recognized and formidable names in the charter school world. Its A-list includes Success Academy, KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and many others, as well as dozens of smaller and innovative community-based schools, such as Family Life Academy Charter Schools, Amber Charter School, City Arts, Capital Prep, and Brooklyn Emerging Leaders Academy, one of only two all-girls International Baccalaureate programs in the country.
By the end of Susie’s term, SUNY had authorized well over half of New York’s charter schools, serving a combined 120,000 students—80 percent low-income, and the vast majority of whom outperformed their peers in reading and math in the districts where they would have matriculated if there were no charter schools in the state. The head of the National Charter Schools Institute, James Goenner, has called her “America’s authorizer.” Carello announced earlier this summer that she was stepping down; she has been named a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
I’ve heard you say more than once that you’re a good “venture bureaucrat.” Can you explain what that means?
Knowing what makes a good school as well as what it takes to run a strong organization is the key to creating an authorizing environment where great schools can take root and thrive. Authorizers have to know both of those things, and be able to analyze new charter proposals to identify what works for an education program, as well as what it takes to run a great organization. That’s the venture part. We’ve made some pretty good bets. We’ve figured out over the years how to analyze a strong business proposal for a charter school, how to determine whether an organization has the capacity, and the commitment of its board and the founders to actually get it done.
How about the bureaucrat part?
The bureaucrat part is holding schools accountable for actually delivering on the promises they make when they get a charter. If you look across the country, the biggest reason that charter schools fail is financial. We haven’t had schools that have failed financially, not any. We have a really good set of protocols and processes to work with a school when it hits a financial glitch. We also make sure we’re working closely with their boards, help them in doing their budgeting, or when there might be a governance glitch in the school. And when it doesn’t work, if you don’t provide results for kids, evidence of success and achieving the mission you were chartered to achieve, then you don’t get your school renewed. We’ve closed twenty-six schools in twenty-one years.
Education politics has gone sideways in so many cities that were ed reform hot spots, especially in New York. The charter sector is among the highest-performing in the nation, particularly for low-income kids of color. It should be a point of civic pride, but there’s been a charter school cap for years with no end in sight. That has to be frustrating.
There are no incentives for traditional school districts absent the kind of visionary district leadership you had in New York City under [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and [schools chancellor Joel] Klein to support what’s actually working. But, yeah, one of the things I don’t understand is—especially now, post pandemic—when you have parents who are asking for schools, asking for high-quality choices, and we can point to those schools, why you don’t expand that? The politics of New York after twelve years in this gig still elude me.
Is that why you’re leaving?
Well, it has been twelve years. And I’m a sixty-year-old white woman who turned six fifteen days after Martin Luther King was murdered. Who remembers watching Bobby Kennedy climb on the back of a truck forty-five minutes from my home to tell the people of Indianapolis about King’s assassination. And two months later? Kennedy was also murdered. These two men and the loss of their love and leadership to all of us as a people? They formed my commitment to kiddos and parents, and I think the results for New York’s charter kids show some pretty darn good results. Others disagree. My biggest wish is that the next Institute leader can help New York understand that more great schools for parents and kids to choose is the love and leadership we owe every child.
What’s changed over the last twelve years?
There are many more complications, starting with, as you said, there are no more charters available in New York City. And there are shifting priorities from the [New York State Board of] Regents in terms of what we are going to use to determine the quality of a school. I feel like we’ve done an awful lot. We know how to scale good schools. But now is the right time for the sector to have some new leadership. The organization deserves a leader that can actually dive in to some of those challenges.
I worry about shifting priorities within charter schools themselves. We oversold “college for all” and test scores, but that’s taken a back seat to “equity” concerns.
One of the reasons we’ve been successful is that we’ve very assiduously implemented all components of [New York’s] Charter Schools Act, including making really tough decisions about schools that don’t do well. Lots of great adults worked really hard—blood, sweat, and tears—to put schools in place but failed to create good ones. So SUNY has made some hard, high-stakes decisions [to close schools]. I worry about continued dilution of what we expect schools to teach students. I know this makes me a broken record, but the education sector and, quite frankly, the public’s refusal to agree on a defined set of reading, writing, math, and science knowledge students need at each stage of schooling gives schools free rein to teach nothing of worth. If this continues, it seems impossible to know how authorizers will be able to close failing schools in the future, as no one will be able to define a high-quality school.
Has that been your biggest frustration?
There are two. The first one is the fabrication that we didn’t authorize community-based charter schools. The numbers show again and again that we replicated strong charters that partnered with community organizations every time they applied. The narrative that we only authorized huge networks is false. But it seems truth is elusive these days. The second frustration is that we worked very hard to diversify the teacher pipeline, making a pathway to certification to teach in charters we authorized by partnering with our community organizations. Because the state demands that teachers be certified and because we know how important it is to have teachers and leaders of color for our students. And very, very wise minds disagree about the effectiveness of certification...
Let the record show you’re smirking.
No, seriously, people that I really admire argue for the value of a master’s degree on the way to teacher certification. So we worked really hard with the deans of the colleges of education at the State University of New York to put together an acceptable process whereby some of our schools could certify their own teachers. SUNY has, like, eighteen of the top twenty performing elementary schools in the state of New York. They know something about supporting their teachers, and how to organize for instruction, how to put coaches in the classroom that build those teacher muscles in a way that I wish to God I would’ve had when I was a teacher.
The best professional development I’ve ever seen was at Success Academy.
It’s not just the big networks. It’s our community-based organizations, some of which have schools that beat the big networks from time to time. They would tell me, “Oh my gosh, we have so many people in our community that have a bachelor’s degree, and they’re ten years into a career. They would be great teachers but they are not going to go back to college and spend all that money.” SUNY worked with us get a really streamlined process for getting your master’s degree so you could be certified and teach. But we got sued [by the New York State Department of Education] and we lost.
Was that the biggest “L” of your twelve years?
Yes, I think so. Interestingly, before I left, the folks at the State Education Department called and asked for all the things that we use to create our process. So, fingers crossed, maybe in the future, we can figure out a way and talk to the leaders of communities of color in New York that contain people who would be great teachers but aren’t going to stop mid-career and go back and get a master’s while raising a family. I’d still love to create that pipeline.
What was your biggest win?
I don’t know of anyone in the last twelve years that quadrupled the number of students or tripled the number of charter schools, over 80 percent of those students economically disadvantaged and exceeding their districts of location in English language arts. SUNY charters are frequently outperforming the highest-income districts in the state, Westchester, Shenendehowa, etc.
Given the state cap, slower growth, and changing priorities, I’m worried that New York charter schools’ best days are behind us. Should I be?
It depends on how you define “best days.” If it means there are plenty of charters and every parent gets a choice and that choice is high quality, that’s on pause, to put it nicely. It’s being thwarted by adults who are making decisions that seem adult-oriented and not focused on giving every kid and every parent a choice of a high-quality seat. But there are still between 18,000 and 22,000 seats yet to be filled in New York City charters because not every school that we have authorized has grown to serve all the grades it is already approved to serve. That’s not new charters, not new grade levels, just what they’re currently authorized to do.
What’s been the hardest part of this job?
You’re always “the state” in any interaction with any school or any school leader. If you asked my staff over the years, we’ve had lots of conversations about power. You are the entity that controls whether someone continues to operate a school. When you walk in the room, when your name appears on their phone, there is a power dynamic. I am aware of that in every interaction, or I try to be, when I walk into a school. I know that every interaction is one that includes a power dynamic so I try to make it a positive one.
I’ve been to enough New York charter schools to see that they view you not just as the authorizer, but as support. Even an advocate.
The politicians won’t like to hear that. We give charters to schools because we want them to be super successful for kids. And so we do everything we can to focus the schools on doing that and not focusing on us. Listen, over the years, do we ask for more information as compliance and regulations have grown? Yes, that has happened. But—and I hope this continues—at every renewal we ask for a lot of information, and we’ve always said to ourselves, “Can we get this somewhere else? Have they already reported it to state ed? Have they already reported it to the New York City DOE? Can we get it from them so that we don’t have schools having to feed three different state agencies the same information that takes time away from focus on kids?” A good authorizer becomes the least bureaucratic it can possibly be, so that as much attention as possible goes to kids, families, and staff.
Could you please stay a little longer?
Twelve years at the helm and sixty years of life add up to a point in a career where you look for what you’ve done well. And you can more soberly face what you have not accomplished. I am so proud of the schools and leaders and what they have built. That little girl from Indianapolis? She feels so lucky to have worked with New York’s charters through a period of insanely strong growth in schools that deliver brilliant outcomes for children. She is still grabbed by the belly and pulled out of bed in the morning because she believes there is still much work to do for children who can’t choose a great school because elected officials won’t vote for what parents want. It’s the right time for new leadership to take on that challenge, and I stand ready to cheer for their success.
Parents are often given dubious advice about their children’s reading: Let them read whatever they enjoy, as we must encourage literacy. This is a strangely laissez-faire attitude to take towards such a fundamentally formative activity. No decent school counsels parents to let their children watch or listen to whatever they want, so why is reading different? I suppose that educators recognize that reading is more intellectually active and challenging than other pursuits, so they want to encourage it in any form. But the advice rests on an underlying view of reading (that it is primarily a technical skill) that misses the profound importance of literature in a child’s social, emotional, and moral development.
Great literature—including, of course, great children’s literature—aims to bring us to a deeper understanding of the meaning of human experience. It helps us to learn to see the difference between good and evil and to respond appropriately. Whether we are young or old, reading stories changes us. And for children especially, reading stories helps to form their character—in particular, the development of their emotions and pleasures so that they respond to what is good and evil appropriately. The experience of great literature is an indispensable part of education.
The key to understanding the transformative power of literature is to focus on how it shapes a child’s moral imagination. Reading or hearing stories is not a didactic lesson that conveys rules and principles to live by, but an absorbing experience that children undergo and that can leave long-lasting impressions on them. In great literature, characters make choices between right and wrong, they face dangers, threats, and other harms, as well as opportunities, choices, and temptations. They sometimes find themselves in extraordinary circumstances that call forth heroic virtues in them or that may bring out the worst in them. These stories often contain highly symbolic and even fantastical elements that stir wonder and awe in the child, drawing him or her deeply into another world where they can observe the action of others and learn from the drama that unfolds. Reading great fiction and literary nonfiction (such as biography) helps children to see reality in a deeper way, to see that vanity makes people ugly, that greediness leads to miserable loneliness, and that true love demands sacrifices.
It is critically important, then, not only that we teach literature, but that we teach better literature. While your child might enjoy reading the Captain Underpants series, that sort of reading is not feeding your child’s mind and imagination well. It is the educational equivalent of junk food (which, yes, kids enjoy, and is fine is small doses). Classic children’s literature, by contrast, consists of books and stories that have stood the test of time and have appealed to children (and their parents!) for generations, and in many cases, even across the centuries and millennia. The Tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, Arabian Nights, the folklore of the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson, and even epic poems like the “Odyssey” and “Beowulf” (there are wonderful children’s versions of these) should be read alongside The Hobbit, The Princess and the Goblin, The Wind in the Willows, Charlotte’s Web, Number the Stars, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Wonder and other, more contemporary children’s classics.
Good lists of classical literature for children aren’t hard to find. For example, Sarah Bond, an associate professor of History at the University of Iowa, compiled one for the Society for Classical Studies. Simply Charlotte Mason also has one. The Jubilee Centre at the University of Birmingham published a great report on teaching classical literature with an eye to virtue, and Hillsdale College offers an informative (and free) online course on classic children’s literature.
Sometimes parents say things like: My children don’t like classical literature, what is the point in forcing it on them? While this is not my experience, I would ask what sort of advice we would give to parents of children who dislike fruits and vegetables. After all, minds and hearts need to be trained up in the proper pleasures just as much as palates do. No responsible parent would just give in to a child who never wanted to eat fruits and vegetables; rather, they would work hard to figure out how to prepare them in ways their children can enjoy, and they would keep trying different fruits and vegetables until they found some their children do enjoy, then gradually introduce them to others.
The same should be true for literature: Parents and schools need to find ways to make these stories palatable and appealing to those children who are not naturally drawn to them. Our hearts and imaginations need to be well fed just as much as our bodies do. If your child isn’t interested in one story—try a different one! I also encourage parents to read the stories with their children, especially younger children, and to talk about them with them. Classical children’s literature is just as delightful to adults (and older siblings!), and your children will pick up on your own excitement and interest. Your children want to spend this time with you, I promise!
Regardless of contemporary advice, children should not be left to read whatever they want, either inside or outside of school. They need guidance in choosing great books, and they need parents, teachers, and schools that recognize the fundamental role that literature plays in their moral, social, and emotional development. Children must be taught not simply to read, but to read
Efforts to diversify the roster of students classified as gifted often focus on race and ethnicity. Many such efforts seek a single fix for what’s seen as the problem of under-identification. But a recent study examining gifted identification processes among rural elementary schools finds that relying too much on one screening measure may not adequately identify those students capable of high academic performance.
The study is part of a larger project evaluating an elementary-level English language arts curriculum designed for gifted students, and focuses both on how those students get identified, and their subsequent performance on assessments. Twelve low-income rural districts participated—including farming, mining, and fishing communities. Eleven were in Virginia and one in the Appalachian area of Kentucky, with the total sample comprising more than 4,500 second-graders.
Students were first identified via established practices (a.k.a. the “district-identified sample”). Those practices varied a great deal and included the use of universal screening in some districts. Mostly, however, districts used cutoffs based on national norms for identification, such as on the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT), which is intended to assess cognitive ability independently of linguistic and cultural background (such as looking at patterns of shapes and colors). But none used local norms, nor did any provide training in the use of teacher ratings to identify gifted learners (which is where the alternative identification below comes in).
After the districts had completed their usual process, analysts worked with them to enroll a second group of students known as the “project-identified sample.” This time they administered two universal screeners to all second-graders in the sample. One was a well-known three-part subscale that separately assessed motivation, creativity, and reading. Teachers were trained on how to use the scales, given six months to observe students, and then rated all of their students on those three components. The second universal screener was the Cog-AT Verbal test, which again all students took. After all rounds of screening were completed, districts were provided data on all students performing above the 75th percentile on both national and local district norms for the Cog-AT and performing one or more standard deviations above the respective norms on the three teacher-rated scales.
In the end, about 760 students were identified using either method—roughly 60 percent through the project’s method and 40 percent through the district’s customary method. The former identified 15 percent of minority groups (Black/Hispanic), while the latter identified 8 percent of minority groups.
Not all of the identified students ended up receiving gifted services (just about 500). The districts weren’t told about the measure or cutoffs used for placement on the data listing, so leaders presumably made the final decision about the number of additional students based on both the identification data and their available resources.
The analysts used multilevel regression models with district fixed effects to determine how, if at all, students in the two identified groups differed prior to receiving gifted services. After controlling for gender, they found that the project-identified students on average scored 2.6 points higher on the Cog-AT than did the district-identified kids. There was no difference between the two groups when it came to the motivation, creativity, and reading scale ratings. And whether a district was also using universal screening was not statistically significant when it came to the ratings. Nor did the two groups differ on their scores on the Iowa tests of achievement, which were administered as pretests.
In terms of post-test measures, students identified through the project process outperformed students identified through the district process by a modest 0.16 of a standard deviation on both the Written Expression part of the Iowa subtest and the total Iowa assessment score (used as post-tests, too). There were no statistical differences between the groups when it came to the Reading and Vocabulary Iowa subtests, the two writing tasks they gave the students, and the four unit assessments based on the ELA curriculum that teachers taught.
The analysts conclude that wide use of national norms on the nonverbal test may limit the gifted pool (that’s a point of contention), while performance identified via multiple routes—in this case, teacher rating scales, two universal screeners, and judgements based on performance on both—demonstrates that students can do just as well or better when identified through local norms. That said, the specific focus of this study on ELA in rural areas limits its generalizability. Still, the outcomes of the study—finding a larger and more diverse pool of students and equal or slightly better academic performance among differently-identified students—are promising enough to warrant greater investigation in other settings.
SOURCE: Carolyn M. Callahan et al., “Consequences of Implementing Curricular-Aligned Strategies for Identifying Rural Gifted Students,” Gifted Child Quarterly (2022).
Efforts to diversify the pipeline of students, graduates, and workers in in-demand STEM fields often start in middle and high schools. Data indicate some promising momentum there, but higher education can also be part of the solution. A recent working paper looks at the wide-ranging impact of one university’s work to bring promising students across the gap from high school to college.
An anonymous “elite technical university in the Northeast”—dubbed Host Institution (HI)—annually runs a number of summer STEM programs for rising high school seniors from across the country. The analysts used applicant data from 2014 to 2016 for three of these programs to study whether participation in them increased students’ likelihood of attending college and completing a degree in a STEM field.
All applicants were highly motivated (the application materials were voluminous and the process lengthy and detailed) and high achieving (submissions included course grades and test scores), so this is not a typical population. The most-intensive program is also pricey, although HI paid for everything but student transportation. The university’s goal was to induce promising candidates—specifically, young people who might fail to matriculate due to non-academic considerations—to make the leap to college and to choose HI. More than 2,000 students applied to the summer programs each year, far more than could be accommodated. Officials gave priority to eligible applicants who would be the first in their family to attend college, who hailed from families without science and engineering backgrounds, who attended high schools that historically sent less than 50 percent of their graduates to four-year colleges, who attended high schools that “presented challenges for success” at elite universities (rural, low-income, etc.), or who were members of a group underrepresented in STEM (Black, Hispanic, or Native American). Priority was also given to students from certain regions of the country typically underrepresented at HI. Gender balance in each program was imposed, as well.
All this effort produced a group of 600 to 750 underrepresented students in each of the three years, still more than the slots available. The top-ranked students were guaranteed a slot but randomly assigned to either a six-week on-campus residential experience, a one-week residential camp, or a six-month online program concluding with a single-day campus visit in the summer. The lower-ranking students were randomly assigned to either the remaining slots in the online program or to the control group (i.e., those not receiving a slot). Both treatment and control students were observed for five years following the summer session.
In terms of college enrollment, almost all applicants enrolled in a four-year college within one year of high school graduation. That includes 87 percent of the control group—those who were not offered a slot in HI’s summer programs—likely reflecting the high-achieving, highly-motivated nature of the students applying. The treatment group upped that percentage by approximately 3 points. While 8 percent of the control group ultimately enrolled in HI, attendance in any of the three summer programs increased that percentage—an additional 17 percentage points for the six-week program, 5 points for the one-week program, and 4 points for the online program. The summer programs also induced a shift in enrollment toward higher quality colleges. Enrollment at any of Barron’s most competitive institutions (including HI) was boosted by a statistically significant gain of 17 percentage points for those offered a slot in the six-week program, by 14 points for the one-week program, and by 10 points for the online program.
As for degree completion, 53 percent of control group students graduated from college within four years of high school graduation, 8 percentage points higher than the national average in that period but lower than might have been expected for such a motivated population. Meanwhile, between 56 and 61 percent of students offered summer program slots all those years earlier did the same. The highest completion rates were for those offered slots in the two residential programs, mainly driven by graduates from HI. Around 80 percent of the degrees earned within four years by the treatment group were in STEM fields, more than 12 percentage points higher than in the control group, with most of the increase driven by degrees earned from HI itself.
While the pre-program motivation of students in the study cannot be discounted, the analysts conclude that being offered a spot in the university’s summer programs boosted the college-related human capital of these high school students, most of whom came from families and/or schools with little such capital of their own. This made it easier for them not only to apply to HI, but also to similarly competitive institutions and to complete STEM degrees. The structure of the six-week summer program especially—designed to mimic a compressed freshman year at HI—was seen as important to turn motivation into access and academic success. There is a brief discussion of costs at the end, noting that HI pays all expenses except for transportation to and from the university, which range from a hefty $15,000 per student in the six-week program to less than $2,000 per student for the online program. The analysts stop short of a full-blown cost-benefit analysis, however, leaving that to future research. The results are promising, but scalability and generalizability are still hard questions that need answers.
SOURCE: Sarah R. Cohodes, Helen Ho, and Silvia C. Robles, “STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Increase STEM Degrees,” NBER Working Papers (July 2022).
Cheers
Jeers
