Good for U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos for working on proposals to Congress urging flexibility to implement the primary federal special education law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), during school closures caused by this pandemic. The CARES Act requires her to propose, within thirty days, IDEA provisions that should be waived, if any. Notably, and perhaps overlooked, is the fact that this effort is of great importance to many stakeholders, including the wider school community beyond special education. All general and special education students, teachers, administrators, and parents want schools to function as well as possible during this crisis. Secretary DeVos represents them all. But schools cannot “flex” without congressional action.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has issued guidance, acknowledging that there may be a need for flexibility in how special education is provided, consistent with the need for health and safety, adding “[W]here we can offer flexibility, we will.” This guidance does not have the force of law, nor does it inoculate schools from the threat of litigation.

In normal times, many IDEA regulations and requirements are burdensome, with compliance issues often leading to litigation and the fear of litigation. That’s far from ideal, but now is obviously not normal. As schools struggle to provide even minimal education for all students, including students with disabilities, they need freedom to function as best as they can.

In this unprecedented crisis, schools need targeted, specific, and temporary flexibility around IDEA requirements related to timelines, meeting attendance, assessments, eligibility findings, specific services delivery, report writing, and due process for claims generated during and by the current crisis. Without such flexibility, the fear of lawsuits remains and diverts the focus from education for all students. Of course, schools and parents are encouraged to work collaboratively and constructively—and many do. Yet even “good faith” efforts are subject to interpretation, which can lead to litigation.

Everyone knows that we’re in a national crisis that has turned the education of more than 50 million students—86 percent of whom are general education students—upside down. Many schools are closed with no learning or far less learning through online or other means going on, approaches that themselves raise equity challenges for children without internet access. Parents are encouraged to “home school” their children. We know that many students will lose skills and regress, and may develop other challenges, as well. Schools are in a most complicated, challenging, and endlessly exacerbating reality.

Congress should act to ease the quandary schools face without delay. Ironically, if Congress does not act now, when given the opportunity to do so, attorneys arguing cases after schools reopen can easily assert that Congress intended all regulations and requirements to be enforced—even during the pandemic! It’s time to get serious.

IDEA—now forty-five years old—provides students with disabilities with an individual entitlement to a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) to access and learn what the law calls “the general curriculum.” Among other rights, they are entitled to specialized instruction and individualized services that their parents can enforce through due process. The general curriculum is supposed to help all students gain academic, social, behavioral, and emotional knowledge and skills. Eighty to 90 percent of students with disabilities have mild or moderate needs and are mostly educated in general education classrooms. The other 10–20 percent of disabled students have severe or profound needs.

Special education, the only entitlement in our public schools, ensures that a government program provides eligible recipients (here, disabled students and their parents) with rights and other benefits—no matter the circumstances. Right now, my attorney colleagues who represent public schools are spending inordinate amounts of time and effort on the complexities that follow from that reality.

It should be understood that, in addition to the educational services that can be provided to special education students while schools are closed, many will require compensatory services after schools reopen. Well and good. Yet let’s keep in mind that almost no students will make as much progress while schools are closed as they would when attending school. (Else why have schools?) However, as stated above, special education students have due process rights to assert those claims. Others don’t.

Claims such as these highlight the need for Congress to mandate temporary flexibility so long as the general curriculum remains upended for all students. IDEA, the special education statute that provides students with disabilities with individualized services for learning and accessing the general curriculum—as the general curriculum is provided to all students—was built to ensure fairness and equity, not their absence.

Secretary Devos should urge Congress to protect schools and students, including students with disabilities, with sensible and temporary flexibility. Congress should enact them as a necessary bridge as quickly as possible. When schools reopen, we’ll have plenty of time to rethink next steps, including possible reform of this system. We may even learn something about how a suspension of procedures and other rights actually impacts students. But for now, extraordinary circumstances require an out-of-the-box approach. Congressional flexibility is a good first step.

Many stakeholders await the ED’s proposals—may they come swiftly!—and Congress’s prompt and sensible response.

No sooner had Michigan closed its public schools than the state Department of Education announced that no distance learning time would count toward the required 180 days of instruction. When met with a storm of criticism from district and school leaders, parents, students, and the governor, the department blamed state law.

Meanwhile Pennsylvania’s Department of Education encouraged public schools to provide some “continuity of learning” but warned that “schools must work to meet the needs of all students, with particular attention to free appropriate public education (FAPE) for students with disabilities and English as a second language (ESL) services for English Learners (EL).” Spooked, many districts decided they were better off not even trying remote learning.

Seattle Public Schools decided that if it could not assure every student had access to online learning, it would offer it to none. Besides, the superintendent told Time magazine, “There’s just no way a district this large can do that.”

Even in the midst of crisis, bureaucracy reared its ugly head. Many districts have gone to heroic lengths to ensure their students keep learning, but overall, the crisis has illustrated a fundamental truth about public education: our hierarchical, standardized, rule-driven bureaucracies struggle to adapt when things change.

Traditional school districts were created more than a century ago, after all, and they were built to be stable, not adaptable. They control their vast budgets and armies of personnel by nesting them in thousands of rules to prevent abuses. They adopt budgets that hem schools into spending patterns that may have made sense at one time but not anymore—and they make it almost impossible for schools to change how they spend the money.

They negotiate collective bargaining agreements that set hours and duties in stone, making it impossible to make up for lost time by extending school into the summer months, for instance—something probably needed this year.

In a crisis, our bureaucracies are often at their best—waiving rules, soliciting extra efforts from employees, trying their hardest to do what is necessary. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, quickly promised to buy 150,000 laptops or tablets for every student who doesn’t have one, contracted with Verizon to offer free internet access through new hotspots, used its own television network plus two public broadcasting channels to broadcast school lessons, and handed out 260,000 free meals a day.

Superintendent Austin Beutner asked the state legislature for emergency funding to pay for all this. “We face the largest adaptive challenge for large urban public education systems in a generation,” he said. “Pick your metaphor: This is the moonshot, the Manhattan Project, the Normandy landing, and the Marshall Plan, and the clock is ticking.”

Other districts with entrepreneurial superintendents, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools and District of Columbia Public Schools, have also turned on a dime, launching distance learning and free meals. Some have even put WiFi hotspots on school buses and parked them in low-income neighborhoods.

But they are the exceptions, not the norm. A survey of eighty-two large districts by the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that, as of March 30, “Most districts are still not providing any instruction. The majority provide links to general online resources but no direction on how to use them.”

And when the crisis is over, that bureaucratic norm will reassert itself. (It already has in Los Angeles, where the teachers union refused to require teachers to work more than four hours a day while school buildings are closed.) The unions will demand extra pay for extra work. Principals whose roofs start leaking will wait months or years for central headquarters to repair them. Centralized school bus systems will dictate school start and end times, regardless of what the children and their parents need.

Personnel rules that give teachers with more seniority more control over where they teach will send the most senior, best paid teachers to the middle-class schools and the rookies to the schools full of poor children—guaranteeing that districts actually spend more on their well-off students than on their low-income students.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In today’s world, where change is the norm, we need flexible, nimble public schools.

That’s one reason public charter schools were invented three decades ago. These schools, operated mostly by nonprofit organizations outside the control of school districts and free of most bureaucratic rules, find it much easier to innovate. In return for this luxury, they are held accountable for their performance—often closed or replaced if their students are not learning enough.

In this crisis, the education media has been full of stories of charter schools shifting rapidly to remote learning. You can read inspiring examples here, here, here, and here.

A few school districts, in Denver and Indianapolis and San Antonio, have embraced chartering as part of district strategy. They have learned that effective information-age organizations are decentralized, mission-driven rather than rule-driven, results-oriented, customer-driven, and competitive. These principles, outlined in a book I wrote with Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government, capture the essence of why charter schools usually perform better than district-operated schools.

One large urban district embodies all of these principles: New Orleans Public Schools, where every public school is chartered. Central headquarters is small because it doesn’t operate schools. Its job is to steer the system, not to row every boat.

When Mardi Gras celebrations spread the coronavirus throughout New Orleans, the school district quickly bought 10,000 Chromebook laptops and 5,000 wireless hotspots and launched forty-five sites for “grab-and-go” meals and eleven sites for hot dinners.

Free of constraining rules and union contracts, the schools quickly pivoted to remote learning. “Traditional districts are like luxury cruise ships: If they want to change direction, it’s going to take a long time,” explains Patrick Dobard, who led the state’s Recovery School District, which spearheaded the transition to an all-charter system. “New Orleans is like a bunch of swift boats: When we need to change directions, we’re able to change nimbly, and quickly.”

The new virus has once again shown us how badly we need swift boats, not ocean liners. It is high time we reinvented our public school systems.

Editor’s note: This essay was first published by the Progressive Policy Institute.

Even before the recent coronavirus pandemic, nearly all educators reported going online to obtain instructional materials. Such resources promise to make our instruction better and lives easier. But now that K–12 schools in almost all states have shuttered their doors for the foreseeable future, teachers are relying on online resources more than ever. Yet up until recently, very little was known about the quality of materials available on popular supplemental resource websites.

Last December, the Fordham Institute published The Supplemental-Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online any Good?, which shed much-needed light on what’s available in the supplemental-curriculum marketplace—and how teachers can best mine and use these resources. We examined over three hundred of the most downloaded high-school-level English language arts materials across three of the most popular supplemental websites: Teachers Pay Teachers, Share My Lesson, and ReadWriteThink. (We restricted our analysis to materials for high school ELA, as this is an area where teachers are especially likely to supplement their core curriculum materials.)

So what did we find?

Given the wide range of topics and resources available on these websites, we unsurprisingly found a correspondingly wide range in quality and depth. On the positive side, we were pleased to see that many of the resources available online are well-designed and visually appealing, which can help keep students engaged. They were also generally free from errors and referenced high-quality texts. 

Unfortunately, in many cases, a material’s surface appeal often masked a lack of instructional value. Many materials were poorly aligned to the standards to which they claim alignment, were not cognitively demanding, and rarely provided teachers with good supports and assessments for scoring student work. Many of the materials also didn’t adequately address the needs of low or high achieving students or English language learners, so they would require significant adaptation and modification. And while teachers might gravitate towards using the most frequently downloaded and/or highly rated materials available on these sites, we unfortunately found that many of these too disappointingly missed the mark.

So what are time-strapped teachers now scrambling to teach students remotely to do?

One solution is to partner with colleagues to choose one promising unit and refine it together before using it, so that it might be suitably integrated into the existing curricula that needs such improvement. In short, teachers can efficiently build an effective unit without having to start from scratch and can adapt it so that it’s appropriate for their students (and an online environment).

Online materials can also be used to glean lessons and activities for students who need instruction at more basic levels or at lower levels of cognitive complexity. As indicated, however, there is virtually no “built-in” assistance relative to struggling learners or for students with “unfinished learning,” so this approach requires thoughtful evaluation, and again, modification.

Instructional leads can also be of great support to teachers. For example, instructional leads in Jefferson County Public Schools (where one of us works) are currently curating supplemental sources for teachers and identifying high-quality resources (i.e., that align well to standards and strategically scaffold and progress student learning) to support teachers in various content areas. They’re also taking advantage of the generosity of many companies that are providing high-quality resources free of charge at this time. In addition to getting strong supplemental resources into teachers’ hands quickly, they’re also working to help teachers identify what qualifies as “high-quality” supplemental resources in the future.

When schools are able to resume more normal operations down the line, school districts and states could also provide professional development by curricular staff to show teachers how to use promising materials as fodder to develop their own high-quality instructional units for online lessons. They might also help teachers utilize these resources more effectively by developing a review process or an evaluation rubric that schools can use on their own to appraise materials (perhaps drawing from, or building upon, existing high-quality evaluation rubrics, such as those used by EdReports).

Given the many challenges educators are currently facing as they quickly adjust to teaching to an online format, being able to rely on online supplemental websites is more important than ever. When those materials are created by expert teachers and are high-quality—as some of them surely are—they can result in better instruction. Our challenge now is to make sure that many more materials fall into that category.

“Build back better” has become the mantra of post-disaster reconstruction, since the United Nations’ 2006 report, “Key Propositions for Building Back Better.” It points out that disasters can be leveraged as opportunities for change and improvement.

Education has been turned upside down in recent weeks, and I hope we never go back to the way things were before. Let’s look at this as a helpful interruption to inadequate policies and practices that have been largely unchallenged. Policies that have been harmful to disadvantaged students and their families. We have had needed changes in education for a long time, and leaders must address them while there is a genuine sense of urgency. Let’s build back better with these six important steps.

1. Broaden access to technology to eliminate inequities. This crisis has exposed the extreme inequity in our school system. The most obvious is the digital divide that plagues low income households. Basic laptops now cost below $200 (less than a semester of high school text books), so there is no excuse not to ensure a laptop for every student starting in kindergarten, loaded with the software and communications tools needed to compete with affluent peers and spark their imagination about the world. The FCC needs to make basic internet service free to all households or homeless shelters with children of any age. Let’s build back better.


2. Leverage data to serve students. School districts must invest in online professional development for teachers and staff. We’ve demonstrated that we can learn and collaborate electronically. Let’s never go back to boring afternoons of administrators drilling staff with canned PowerPoint presentations. Technology enables us to have real-time and asynchronous training whenever it works for the workers. Let’s build back better.


3. Create more individualized instruction. Students should progress from grade to grade based on their competency in the subject matter, not how much time they sit in a classroom. Some students learn best in small groups, others with one-on-one tutoring or through experimentation. Others thrive in a classroom model or independently. Older students may not need to be on campus all day every day, preferring a university-like model. Let’s build back better.


4. Trauma-informed practices must become the standard. Many students and teachers are feeling the stress and grief from COVID-19. Even before this pandemic, schools primarily treated the behaviors associated with grief as discipline cases. When youth and adults act out in grief, with short tempers or by becoming withdrawn, we need leaders and counselors to recognize grief and respond through trauma-informed practices. In this crisis, we are seeing a warming of empathy and compassion in our communities. Let’s build back better.


5. School safety will also mean cleanliness. People need to feel safe in our schools. Building maintenance and cleanliness often has been given short shrift in our urban public schools. The elementary school my daughter attended was the best science magnet in Los Angeles, but the halls always smelled of urine, and there was a school nurse only once a week. Without a greater investment in sanitizing and physical safety, our families will be reluctant to send their children back and our schools and staff won’t want to teach there. Let’s build back better.


6. Revise the financial structures of our school systems. Many of our schools were facing financial strains before this crisis. With the nation slipping into economic depression, by necessity we will need to rethink and revise the financial structures of our school systems that have long been calcified into laws, regulations, and union contracts. We may need more money—and we will need to spend it differently based on new priorities that put students first and treat our educators as the professionals they are. Let’s build back better.

I am heartened by the humor of parents’ online posts becoming profoundly thankful for the important work our teachers do. The wellspring of academic creativity and sharing of resources inspire all of us that education really can become exciting and engaging again. Let’s make potions in the kitchen, learn executive functioning skills with Legos, and see that special education can highlight the strength in different ways of knowing. Let’s build back better.

We will get through this together. It’s a foundational belief that’s helping Americans—and those all around the world—cope with the significant challenges, losses, and traumas caused by the novel coronavirus. Healthcare workers and first responders are risking their lives to save others. Essential workers are ensuring we have more of the products and services we need. Teachers are finding creative ways to educate our children outside of the classroom. Families everywhere are taking care of and making sacrifices to protect their loved ones. And countless people of all ages are volunteering in a wide variety of wonderful ways to help their communities.

When your state and federal governments tell you to stay at home and practice social distancing, however, knowing how to do community service safely can be a challenge. What’s permitted? What’s needed? How do you give responsibly? How old do you have to be? The virus changed the answers to all of these questions, and continues to on an almost daily basis. So we at Fordham thought it’d be helpful to collect and present a list of some community needs and ways in which people across the country can help fulfill them.

Personal protective equipment

In many of the areas hardest hit by COVID-19, healthcare workers are running out of protective equipment like masks, gloves, face shields, gowns, and disinfectant. The federal government and many states have also recommended that all people wear non-medical face masks when out in public—but these too are in short supply and, often, prohibitively expensive.

If you have medical-grade personal protective equipment in your possession, hospitals and healthcare systems across the country are accepting donations. And everyone—be they grandparents, parents, or children—can help make homemade masks out of common fabrics like cotton and donate them. These will usually be for others to use in non-healthcare settings, like the grocery store. But there are some places that are struggling with high numbers of infections or are tragically low on protective equipment that are also rationing non-medical-grade supplies to their healthcare workers. These materials save lives.

Blood donations

COVID-19 has caused many blood drives to be cancelled, critically reducing the blood products that are necessary components of a wide variety of life-saving medical procedures. As the University of Michigan Health System explained it last month:

Car crashes, ruptured aneurysms, newly diagnosed cases of leukemia and liver transplants can’t be planned or predicted. Worse yet, a particular treatment that could help save the lives of people with the worst cases of COVID-19 needs a lot of blood... It takes blood products from 10 donors just to start a patient on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, a life support system that takes over for the heart and lungs. And it takes blood from two to three more donors every day just to keep that one patient on ECMO until their organs can recover.

Fortunately, the Red Cross is working hard to host more blood drives, and has relaxed certain restrictions on who can donate to facilitate more participation. They have all the information about drive locations, eligibility requirements, and more on their website.

You can also help in other ways if you aren’t able to give blood, such as if you’re under the age of seventeen, have certain medical conditions, or have traveled recently to some locations. The Red Cross has put out an urgent call for volunteers to help at blood drives and assist in delivering disaster services to communities. And it even has a separate website called Red Cross Youth that details how young people can volunteer and otherwise support its efforts.

Food services

Even before the pandemic, tens of millions of American families struggled to feed their families without assistance. Thirty million children, for example, are provided free or reduced-price lunch at school, and 15 million also receive breakfast. Now things are much worse. More than 17 million Americans have lost their job because of the virus and its impact on the economy, and many more have seen their incomes reduced.

Thankfully, there are many organizations and efforts, both national and local, working to mitigate this harm and help families have enough to eat. Feeding America, for example, is the country’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization. They accept donations, of course, but they’re also looking for volunteers to help, such as assisting at food banks and food pantries. “Fifty-one percent of all food programs rely entirely on volunteers,” notes its website. Plus it encourages volunteering as a family, noting, among other things, the life-long effect it can have on kids and teenagers.

There are also organizations like Meals on Wheels that are geared towards America’s senior population, which is especially vulnerable to severe complications caused by COVID-19. Meals on Wheels provides nutritious food, does quick safety checks, and in some places, even delivers pet food and helps with home repairs and transportation. In addition to donations, the organization relies on volunteers to deliver the meals that its 2.4 million clients rely on. Some programs desperately need new volunteers right now because of the crisis. And like Feeding America, it supports whole families helping together. “You can do it with your kids!” says its website. “In fact, we encourage volunteer drivers to bring their children or grandchildren along.”

General community help and more ways to give

There are also resources that aggregate chartable options on national and local levels. The Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that leads service and volunteering in U.S., offers a plethora of opportunities and information for people of all ages, such as this list of “10 ways to safely help your community during COVID-19.” Youth Service America offers something similar specifically for young people.

There are also organizations that help match people with opportunities, many of which can be done by whole families. VOMO, for example, helps businesses, churches, non-profits, and schools find volunteers, usually for a fee. But in response to the pandemic, it has launched its Be A Neighbor campaign, under which it will provide matching services for free. Prospective volunteers can sign up on its website. Similarly, Volunteer Match is a nonprofit that helps people find ways to give, and allows those who are interested to filter remote and on-site opportunities by city or zip code. 

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This crisis has led to countless acts of charity and selflessness. Every minute of every day, Americans are making sacrifices to help their neighbors, protect the most vulnerable, and save lives. Any one of the opportunities above has the potential to do that, too.

Be safe and be well, everyone.

Three separate analyses were published last week on how the coronavirus might affect children’s learning. Echoing a piece I recently wrote, they all conclude that the current school closures could have a devastating impact on student achievement. Specifically, we’re going to see big declines in math, and modest ones in reading, unless schools and districts act swiftly and decisively.

The first analysis is by NWEA. Researchers Beth Tarasawa and Megan Kuhfeld used data from NWEA’s MAP Growth assessments to project achievement trajectories of a national sample of over five million students in grades three through eight. The crux of their study was a comparison of a typical school year sans learning disruptions with a forecast based on student learning loss patterns during a typical summer. Notably, the researchers did not include the potential effects of distance learning as part of their modeling, but it’s unlikely that would have made much of a difference in their gloomy projections.

To wit, NWEA estimates that students may return in the fall with less than half of typical learning gains in math and, in some grades, nearly a full year behind what would be expected during normal conditions. And this dour outlook doesn’t take into account the impact of joblessness, food insecurity, and other life circumstances that disproportionately afflict our most vulnerable families. Taken together, they paint an alarming picture of what could be in store.

The second analysis is by Paul von Hippel, writing for Education Next. An associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, von Hippel also believes the prognosis for student achievement is dire. However, he thinks summer learning loss is a poor analogy for the present predicament facing schools because, among other reasons, the research on how students spend their summers is limited, and results from recent studies on the topic run counter to the prevailing wisdom that the summer slide is a material drag on performance. Moreover, von Hippel notes that students now are not on vacation, further rendering the comparison to summer learning loss inaccurate.

Another inequity that will be laid bare is the digital divide. According to von Hippel, students will probably learn more, on average, during the coronavirus closures than they did in previous school stoppages. From email and text messages to websites and videoconferencing software, online learning has never been easier to facilitate. However, students from low-income households are less likely to have reliable internet access, further exacerbating the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

The third analysis is by Josh Boots. The executive director of D.C. based EmpowerK12, Boots used NWEA MAP and PARCC data in grades three through eight to construct a predictive model, which included research of summer learning loss, natural disasters like Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina, and student growth by attendance rate. Comparing these outcomes with data specific to the nation’s capital, Boots expects overall PARCC proficiency to decline one percentage point for every week of lost instruction—with economically disadvantaged students and students with disabilities facing even bleaker prospects. However, unlike NWEA’s analysis, Boots’s study suggests students will take a harder hit in reading, perhaps because PARCC includes writing as part of ELA. His analysis also includes a calculator tool to help policymakers delve into the academic impact of school closure upon PARCC proficiency rates.

The upshot from all of this is that schools and districts need to get cracking. NWEA CEO Chris Minnich said, “The main message from this research is we’re in a moment. This won’t be back to school as normal. Figure out what you want school to look like in the fall now.” My colleague Robert Pondiscio agrees, and believes that the current attention to online learning, while understandable, has been a distraction. Rather than putting all of our energy into standing up a new education delivery system overnight, Pondiscio makes a compelling argument that our students would be better served if we focus mostly on what will be required of teachers this fall, and then do everything we can to make their herculean job as easy as possible. This could include extending the school year into the summer, starting earlier in the fall, or mandating summer school, though doing the latter in-person might not be feasible.

This presumes that the anticipated learning loss from COVID-19 turns out to be as bad as predicted because as unnerving as these analyses are, they are ultimately educated guesses. As it stands, schools won’t know which students need retention or remediation because teachers won’t have spring testing to inform their work, and they likely will not have seen students in person for half a year by the time we return to some semblance of normalcy. With state revenues heading into a tailspin, the appetite for administering standardized tests in the fall will be anemic, but it would make sense for states to direct the money originally earmarked for spring testing to some form of no- or low-stakes diagnostic assessment—perhaps administered virtually—in the fall.

In the meantime, schools and districts have an education recovery to prepare for. Policymakers need to take a step back to help prioritize what really matters, and educators would do well to continue focusing on their kids while steeling themselves for the unprecedented, large-scale remediation ahead. While many are doing their darnedest to keep student learning going, others are using the global pandemic to push their self-interested agendas. Let’s hope there isn’t too much of the latter as the loss of learning brought on by months of missed schooling carry real consequences that we have only just begun to grasp.

Work-based learning (WBL) refers to career preparation and training that occurs within a job setting, connects to classroom and academic experiences, and involves supervision and mentoring. Recent federal efforts like the Community College Apprenticeships initiative and state-driven programs like Pathways in Delaware have increased awareness of WBL and solidified it as a critical method for preparing students for high-wage, high-demand jobs. In general, there are four main models: apprenticeships, internships, cooperative education (co-ops), and practica and clinical experiences.

Despite recent expansion efforts, WBL programs in most places still lack clear frameworks for measuring student participation and outcomes. A new report from the Urban Institute sheds some much needed light on the WBL landscape and on-the-ground implementation efforts. The analysis focuses on community colleges, as they enroll millions of students in credit-bearing courses and noncredit workforce programs, have diverse student populations, and provide career-focused degree and certificate programs that require close collaboration with employers.

To understand the broader WBL picture, the authors examined existing research and national data sources such as the Adult Training and Education Survey and the Registered Apprenticeship Partners Information System. They also conducted interviews with national experts and state agencies. Overall, the data indicate that WBL opportunities are growing in number. Unfortunately, data also indicate that disparities in access, participation, and outcomes exist across WBL models for traditionally underrepresented groups such as women and people of color.

At the community college level, there are very few nationally representative data sources that focus on WBL. Research on outcomes—such as persistence toward degrees and certifications, post-WBL employment outcomes, retention rates, and wages—is limited. Registered apprenticeships have a stronger evidence base because they are tracked by the federal government. Results show that enrollees have higher earnings. In the ninth year after program enrollment, they earned on average almost $6,000 more a year than they would have if they hadn’t participated in an apprenticeship. Results for co-op programs, which alternate classroom learning with learning on the job, are varied. Some studies show they lead to impacts such as reduced time to finding employment and higher starting salaries, while others suggest these impacts fade over time. Internships, meanwhile, have very little research associated with their impact despite being extremely popular. One study found that longer-term, paid internship programs were associated with better outcomes than short-term, unpaid programs.

To better understand how WBL works on the ground, the authors interviewed representatives from six community colleges about their experiences implementing and measuring it. By and large, these schools offer WBL on a continuum that ranges from low-involvement career awareness activities to more intensive programs aimed at career preparation and training. Opportunities are usually linked to college credit and academic or instructional components. For example, one college offers an online WBL course that requires students to submit writing assignments throughout their experience. Several colleges have dedicated staff, such as a WBL coordinator, who is responsible for managing relationships with employers.

In terms of implementation, a persistent concern for all respondents was the structure of WBL for students who have full- and part-time jobs. If a student’s job is related to their program of study, colleges reported that they attempted to make accommodations to align the job with WBL recognized by the college. When that wasn’t possible, they attempted to be flexible in other ways, such as allowing students to complete their WBL experience over a longer period of time.

Unfortunately, gathering employment and outcome data seems to be mostly aspirational for these colleges. Some are able to access state wage records, but others are limited by privacy laws and other roadblocks. They typically rely on course codes to track how many students participate in WBL each semester. Tracking WBL outside of course credits is far more difficult, though many colleges are actively working to improve their data collection efforts. Colleges also rely on student and employer feedback surveys to gauge program quality and outcomes. Low response rates and survey fatigue among both students and employers was cited as a challenge to obtaining consistent data from these efforts. Nearly all respondents mentioned that limited funding is a serious barrier to robust data collection.

The report closes with recommendations. Both federal and state governments should develop a common definition of WBL and identify data elements that should be tracked. States would be wise to incorporate WBL into their longitudinal data systems. Community colleges should consider incentivizing employers and students to complete surveys to get consistent and reliable data. And philanthropies should provide funding that can build capacity among government agencies, colleges, and employers to help track outcomes. Overall, identifying strategies to assess participation, progress toward diversity and equity goals, and outcomes is vitally important.

Source: Shayne Spaulding, Ian Hecker, Emily Bramhall, “Expanding and Improving Work-Based Learning in Community Colleges,” Urban Institute (March 2020).

1. Actual schooling seems like a nebulous afterthought in the pandemic response plans of the Mason and Cincinnati school districts, as shared voluntarily with the Enquirer. But it is enough for the reporter to declare that those two districts “prepped”. Cool. (Cincinnati Enquirer, 4/12/20) The bar seems a lot higher for charter and private schools in Cleveland for some reason, where we discuss the actual schooling—and only the actual schooling—offered to students in several Catholic schools and charter networks during mandated building closures. If only they too could have their efforts graded primarily on creating plans for handwashing jingles and posters. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4/10/20) You would think that students in Ohio’s career tech centers would be particularly hard hit by the extended closure of their school buildings. While there are some hiccups and unanswered questions vexing the students interviewed for this piece, nearly all of them seem to be able to continue their “previously-hands-on” learning virtually. I’m sure it’s much harder for the construction folks, not interviewed here, because we all know that virtual bricklaying is just Minecraft. And no one’s getting a diploma for that. Or are they…? (Columbus Dispatch, 4/12/20) Meanwhile, the editorial board of the Blade is giving kudos to Toledo City Schools for deploying its WiFi-enabled school buses around the community to help students reach the internet to do work. Or Minecraft. Or whatever. (Toledo Blade, 4/13/20)
   
   

2. Many of these “how are the children faring?” stories are focused on high school seniors. Especially their ability to graduate in the face of school building closures and inconsistent education provision therefollowing. Across the river from Ohio, editors at the Intelligencer have the same topic on their minds…and are looking over the border and envying our decision on the matter. (Wheeling Intelligencer, 4/11/20) Is this what they’re envying, do you think? Youngstown City Schools CEO Justin Jennings, with absolutely no explanation or support other than the flexibility granted to him by the state, told Vindy.com that he expects all of the district’s seniors to graduate this year. Suburban schools in the Mahoning Valley are slightly less “hundo p!” about the topic. Wonder why? (Vindy.com, 4/13/20)
    
3. The folks at the Say Yes for Education scholarship program in Cleveland are concerned about this year’s college freshmen as well as this year’s high school seniors. Members of both groups are vulnerable to derailing from their course, say officials, due to the massive disruption of closed campuses. And that would be bad for the kids and the fledgling Say Yes CLE brand. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 4/11/20)
    
4. Let’s end the day talking about our very favorite subject here at the Bites: money. While the treasurers at Trotwood-Madison and Springboro City Schools are expecting some budget savings due to enforced building closures (to wit: “material and supply costs, contracted services, plus staff training and conferences”; “substitute teacher costs, field trip costs, utility costs…and fuel costs for buses.”), many other Miami Valley school districts report spending as much or more than usual. And they’ll be looking for more. (Dayton Daily News, 4/13/20) Count Akron City Schools among the “as much or more” spenders, per this report on the most recent school board meeting there. Although the supe thinks that this level of spending is somehow not sustainable. (Akron Beacon Journal, 4/10/20)
   

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