PHOENIX – Arizona Republican lawmakers announced a plan to increase pay for teachers in K-12 public schools – they’re calling it the “Teacher Pay Fund.”

“This session the Republican-led Legislature will be introducing legislation to increase teacher pay by 7% or about $4,000,” said Senate President Warren Petersen at a news conference Monday. “The average teacher in Arizona makes $56,000 a year. Our plan will increase the average teacher pay to over $60,000 per year.”

Petersen said the land trust endowment, which is a long-term savings account that helps fund education, would pay for the plan.

He said Arizona teachers will be making above the national average, and starting teachers would be paid well above the national average if the plan is implemented.

According to the , Arizona’s average teacher salary ranks 32nd in the nation, and per student spending ranks 49th in the nation.

The Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association said its  of more than 130 school districts and charter schools this fall showed that of the 7,518.3 open teacher positions at the beginning of the school year, 2,229.7 were still unfilled as of September, or 29.7%. Advocates blame the vacancies, in part, on Arizona teacher salaries.

“Arizona has had a significant teacher shortage for many years,” said Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona. “It’s worsening primarily because of two factors: One of them is teacher pay, which is abysmally low, and the other is really poor working conditions. What I mean by that is a lack of resources and lack of other employee support.”

Julie Garcia, who has been teaching kindergarten for 12 years, supports the proposal.

“The teacher pay has been my biggest struggle in recent months, especially during this inflation. There are more times than I would like to admit that my family has had to wait a few days to get groceries or gas or have to use the dreaded credit card,” Garcia said at the Monday news conference. “This is alarming for me and my family. Many teachers have second or third jobs and pick up many odd jobs to get by.”

According to the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, 15.8% of public school teachers had other jobs outside the system during the 2020-2021 school year. The average amount earned from other jobs was $6,100. The Teacher Pay Fund proposal will help bridge that gap, Republicans say.

“What I really like about this proposal is it puts 100% of every dollar into the classroom. Arizonans want teachers to be paid more. Arizonans want more dollars to go into the classroom,” said Rep. Matt Gress, R-Phoenix. “It’s time to do the right thing to bypass administration and the education unions and get our teachers the pay raise they deserve.”

House Democratic Whip Nancy Gutierrez, who is also a public school teacher, said the Democrats are ready to discuss any realistic proposal to raise teacher pay, but the devil is always in the details.

“It was a nice change to see Republicans speaking respectfully of public school teachers, but the reality is it would be much easier to raise educator pay if their universal voucher scheme to subsidize private schools hadn’t put our budget  before we even start our next session,” Gutierrez said in a statement.

A  released in October indicated the projected shortfall is due in part to a drop in individual income tax collections. Democrats highlight universal school vouchers and a flat tax as causes of the shortfall.

The Arizona Education Association is a professional association and a labor union advocating on behalf of students, staff and teachers in Arizona. The association supports pay raises for teachers but says the proposal doesn’t go far enough.

“Just like classroom teachers, our education support professionals are seriously underpaid, leading to shortages that impact our students every day,” Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia said in a statement. “The people who open our schools in the morning, and who close our schools each night, deserve to be included in any proposed raise.”

Lewis of Save our Schools Arizona emphasized a lot of schools don’t have sufficient numbers of counselors, librarians or nurses, and all of that work falls on the classroom teacher.

“If we raise just teacher pay and not the pay of other professionals and not more resources for kids and we are not taking care of school facilities … everything else will crumble around us,” Lewis said.

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Simultaneously, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie hoped to kick-start the expansion of higher education by donating $10 million to bankroll pensions for college professors. This posed a parallel dilemma: How to decide whether a scholar had put in enough time to earn the annuity?

Thus was born the wonky educational anachronism known as the Carnegie Unit, brainchild of the trustees of the . A certain number of hours spent in a high school classroom added up to a credit, the trustees decided in 1906. A set number of credits earned a diploma. So quantified, the diploma could be used as the entrance ticket to a college or university, where Carnegie Units would add up to a degree — or the right to retire.

Carnegie Units went on to become the central currency of a dizzying number of aspects of education, ranging from what subjects students are exposed to to how states allocate school funds. But it was quickly understood that while the units were good for, say, establishing whether a public school had delivered its pupils enough hours of teaching to earn its taxpayer dollars, it was not particularly helpful at signaling what a student had learned during those hours in class — now, 117 years later, better known as seat time.

Some innovators, like the leaders of the Phoenix Union High School District, are experimenting with ways to leave the Carnegie Unit in the past. Students at PXU City, a Phoenix high school without a building, can create their own personalized educational experience from a menu of 500 options, including classes at any number of high schools, college courses and job training programs throughout the city. 

The experiment came to the attention of Carnegie’s present-day leaders, who are engaged in their own effort to replace their turn-of-the-century units. The person tasked with figuring out how better to quantify what students have learned, and how the schools of the future can help them realize the historical promise of social and economic mobility, is Tim Knowles, the foundation’s president and former director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. 

Knowles recently talked to Beth Hawkins about a pilot project to reimagine seat time that includes the Phoenix district, the possible benefits of freeing teachers from unit-driven bell schedules and how to transform entire school systems. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell us about the Carnegie Unit, what it is, how it wove itself into education’s very DNA and why it’s time to step away from it. 

In 1906, when the Carnegie Foundation created the Carnegie Unit, it suggested that a college degree should be 120 credits. Today, it’s 120 credits. It’s become the bedrock currency of the educational economy. It’s infiltrated everything. It’s how we organize high schools and universities, how we think about assessment, it’s instrumental to accreditation, to who gets financial aid and who doesn’t. It defines the daily work of teachers and professors. It is the system.

What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning. The problem is, that it basically ignores everything we’ve learned in the last 100 years about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. We’ve had neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists and psychologists and learning scientists come along and say, “People learn through solving real problems, they learn from peers, they learn from mentors, they learn in apprenticeship, they learn from experience.”

In its time, the Carnegie Unit was an incredibly important reform because it standardized an utterly nonstandardized educational sector. But it crept into the core DNA of educational practice and didn’t evolve or adapt in the face of a significant amount of empirical knowledge about how human beings actually learn. That’s problem No. 1. 

No. 2 is that it inhibits educational innovation. Competency- or mastery-based education has existed, arguably, since and . But it’s existed at the edges. It’s never been central. We can all point to schools that are breaking the boundaries of what learning should look like, how it’s organized, how it’s structured. While those examples exist, they’re often led by extraordinary teachers and school leaders. We haven’t figured out how to take it from the margins to the mainstream. That’s a problem.

The third thing is perhaps more existential, and that is the absence of social and economic mobility in our nation. This is not to suggest that education isn’t an essential solution to addressing social and economic mobility, it’s just that it’s not nearly powerful enough an engine for doing so. The Carnegie Unit is, in my view, partly responsible for that. In the 1950s, over 90% of young people would [end up] better off than their parents. That number is basically cut in half now. We’re going in precisely the opposite direction, and underlying that are some really fundamental inequities, which are exacerbated by race and by class. 

If we want to radically increase economic and social mobility, we need to reimagine what learning is, and really take into consideration what we know about the context in which people learn. Young people need to be engaged in much more experiential, hands-on solving of real problems and applied work. 

Why is the Carnegie Foundation the organization to take this on?

It’s been a narrative in the organization and beyond for decades. One of the questions was, what are you going to do about assessment, because if you are going to take on the future of learning, then you have to be thinking about the future of assessment. That led us in the last year to a deep partnership with ETS, which is the largest assessment company on Earth. It’s very good at determining reliability and validity. 

If we believe that learning, wherever it takes place, is important, then in order for that to take root at scale, we need to persuade parents first that the learning their young people are experiencing outside the schoolhouse is valuable. And is legible to the postsecondary sector if you’re applying to college. And legible to employers if you’re going more directly into the workforce. Everybody intuitively knows there’s enormous amounts of learning there. We need tools that can validate that learning. 

We’re going to build assessments to assess the skills, not the disciplinary knowledge, that we know are predictive of success. Things like your ability to collaborate, to communicate, how hard you work, are you persistent, your creative thinking, your critical thinking. The aim with ETS would be to get to the point where every young person in America doesn’t just graduate from high school with a transcript that has grades and attendance and test scores, but a skills transcript as well.

The wonderful thing about Carnegie, it’s got this incredible responsibility to be a place that looks around the corner. It did that in 1906, for really important reasons. It created Pell grants for really important reasons. It established standards for medical schools, engineering, law schools. It’s done these things at certain times in its history that really needed to happen, because there were gaps. And it’s positioned in a way that it can take a slightly longer-term view about where we need to get.

In Phoenix, a driving factor behind the district’s decision to move away from the Carnegie Unit more quickly and widely than it had planned before the pandemic was teenagers. Students who weren’t in high school when COVID hit had no expectation of a bell schedule. 

At the heart of accelerating learning is ensuring young people are leaning in, are engaged, are inspired and are working on problems that they think are actually useful — whether it’s useful for their own trajectories, pursuing a track that is orienting them to a particular profession or sector, or more here and now. One can learn a great deal about democracy by actually practicing it, or identifying an issue that you care about and learning how civically to engage in a way that can draw attention and potentially movement regarding that issue. 

So, yes, engagement is an instrumental variable in all this, and, as you are pointing out, teenagers have already spoken. We know they’re not engaged. There have been some systems around the country that have made marked improvements in high school completion, but there are many where 50, 60 or 70% of students are biding their time. Getting through. If we’re losing 30 or 40% of our young people before they’ve even had a shot, then we’ve got to take a step back and ask what might work better, what we need to do differently. And that’s not a small incremental step, like providing double blocks in math or high-dosage tutoring. There’s something much more fundamental involved in reconsidering how we think about time and learning. 

The other thing about teenagers is that when you create opportunities which are highly engaging, and you enlist their agency in learning, you really just have to get out of the way. Versus in a set of circumstances that may feel to them far more compliance-oriented, where they’re doing seven periods for 40 minutes or 42 minutes between bells with a two-minute passing period, with seven different teachers every day who may have so many students that they can’t even learn their names until the end of October. If you turn that on its head, young people are going to rise and surprise us. 

There was a survey of high school students nationally during the pandemic, and almost to a person they said they wanted to come back to school — not surprisingly. But not all of the time. I don’t think that was a statement about not being interested in learning. I think that was a statement about not wanting only that form of learning all the time. Valuing the community that school creates, valuing the fact that there are some domains of expertise and disciplinary areas where they need to be in classrooms with amazing teachers, but also recognizing that, “Wait, I’ve been learning independently. I’ve been pursuing things I’m passionate about.”

If we could scaffold that systematically with opportunities for apprenticeships, for internships, for community embedded work, I think it’s safe to say not only would we be hewing much more closely to what empirical evidence says is the best way to learn, but we would be in a situation where the young people were much, much more interested and excited about what they were learning.

Let’s talk for a second about the obstacle that is adult time. I’ve talked to so many people in education who say, Yeah, that’s great. But we’d have to fundamentally reorganize how the adults use their time.

We would. By saying we’re taking on the Carnegie Unit, we are not saying we’re going to have eight periods a day in 10th grade and then we’re going to layer on a whole other set of things. So how we organize teacher time, and the role of the teacher, has to fundamentally shift. 

But teacher pipeline issues are real. Schools are struggling to find really exceptional people who want to spend their career teaching. Embedded in rethinking the use of adult time is the opportunity to rethink the role of teachers. There are few people who want to have the same responsibilities on the first day of their professional career as they do on the last day of their 35th year. 

If we could turn the teaching profession into something where you’re teaching in teams, for example, or where you may be teaching in the morning and then advising groups of students through the afternoon as they engage in activities in their communities and with postsecondary institutions, the job could become much more attractive and interesting to a much wider range of young people over time. Adult time is a predicament, but it’s also an opportunity.

You mentioned a skills transcript. That got me thinking about how many people you’re dangerous to if you’re successful. So many things are proxies for whether a person has a skill set. The college degree is a proxy: We assume that because you made it through this filter — which might be meaningless — you are going to be valuable to this endeavor, this institution, this company. But we don’t actually know whether you come with the requisite skills.

Right. We’ve had a very fragmented K-12-to-postsecondary-to-employment path, replete with assumptions. If you go to an elite private or highly selective public college, whether by virtue of where it is geographically or by nature of how you get in, there all kinds of assumptions that you’re going to come with these other things that we care about, in addition to whatever’s on your transcript, like your grades and your test scores. But that’s a pretty crude measure of whether you do. So there is a threat to the established pathways. 

We could credibly determine whether a young person has a set of skills wherever those skills were developed. If I’m living on the south side of Chicago, and I take my two siblings to school every morning, and then I get to my high school on time at 7:30, I do my homework, I perform well in the traditional ways, I participate in afterschool activities and I work, those are skills that that are invisible, or less visible than the proxies you were suggesting. Or whether I was lucky enough to be born in a situation where my parents were taking me to rarefied places every summer, or putting me in rarefied summer camps.

Part of the agenda is to make the education sector a more vital engine for individuals, no matter their backgrounds, to be able to succeed in a post-affirmative action world. A skills transcript would provide elite schools with a different kind of visibility on every kid. It wouldn’t have to have anything to do with race per se, but I would hope it would help make visible the skills and dispositions young people bring, even if they’re growing up in really underresourced places. 

Devil’s advocate. When the pandemic forced schools away from seat time, lots of people said, ‘Hey, wait — maybe we could just have asynchronous learning. I wouldn’t have to report to a building anymore.’ Or the variation we’re hearing a lot about now, the four-day week. In blowing up seat time, temporarily or permanently, did states just leave the barn door open?

The conditions under which they blew up seat time during the pandemic are slightly anomalous. I wouldn’t compare what we’re trying to do to that, because we’re certainly not of the view that people should be socialized in front of a laptop. But I’m sympathetic to the accountability side. Whether we have the existing system or a fundamentally transformed one, it’s going to demand that we know how young people are performing.

None of what I’ve been talking about should suggest we no longer believe in algebra or reading. There’s things that we really do think young people benefit from learning. How they learn those things is an open question. If we are in a period where people are questioning the power of our educational system and asking questions about how we might empower it further, it has to be undergirded by accountability systems that are credible. And fair. Otherwise, you’re right. It could be a slippery slope. 

What are you learning so far?

Our agenda, which we’re working in partnership with XQ on, is in short: establish proofs, create places where this is happening, build evidence for improvement. Develop policy and national discussion about transformative learning opportunities. And then think hard about the postsecondary piece. Unless the work we do in high school is relevant, legible and understandable to postsecondary, it could falter. 

There are learnings from the people who’ve been doing this for a long time, sometimes in quiet opposition to the systems in which they sit, sometimes with some support from the state within which they sit. They are there, and it’s important to recognize and acknowledge that there are educators across the country who’ve been doing this with young people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

One of the [trends] in the educational system at the moment are these things called portraits of a graduate or portraits of learners. They’re everywhere. One of the things we did with ETS was look carefully at all the ones that we could. They’re interesting, because they represent an American consensus about what the purpose of schooling is. They are really focused on skills. Often, they’ve been developed with lots of parent voice and teacher voice and student voice. Red and blue, left and right, communities, in spite of all our polarized hype, are saying there are a set of things that we want for young people. That should make us optimistic, if we can leverage that. 

The other things that that you will hear is, A) they haven’t really made a big difference, and B) we have no way of measuring the things in them. The problem is the Carnegie Unit problem. They haven’t cracked the Carnegie Unit, they haven’t cracked this architecture of learning that we’ve established. We have to do that. We want our young people to be able to think critically, and we don’t really know how to measure that. How do we measure that they’re civically involved? 

Disclosure: The XQ Institute, which has partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to explore alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, provides financial support to The 74.

Yaritza Dominguez glanced at her car’s odometer, which was showing one of those numbers that sticks in a person’s memory: 123,456. A month later, she’d added 3,300 miles. 

Dominguez’s 2013 Camaro serves as a kind of rolling office, the linchpin of her academic plan. A complicated tangle of chargers sprawls across the console between the front seats, which are stacked with files. Rosaries hang from the rear-view mirror.

“Since I’m on the road all day, I cannot let my phone die,” says Dominguez, 16, a rising senior at one of the country’s most innovative high schools. PXU City HS has no physical site — its 83 students create custom programs, choosing from a menu of some 500 options from Phoenix Union High School District’s bricks-and-mortar schools; its online-only program, internships; jobs; college classes; and career training programs.

The Camaro enables Dominguez to navigate this dizzying array of choices. When school starts up next week, every morning she will drive five miles to a high school in the city’s redeveloped Midtown district for two hours of classes. By 10:30, she’ll head home for lunch and log on to the few courses she needs to graduate. By 3, Dominguez will be on the road to Surprise, a far northwestern suburb about 30 miles away, where she is enrolled in a dental assistant training program. If she’s lucky and traffic has died down, she will be home again on the west side of downtown Phoenix by 7:10.

A decade ago, Phoenix Union was a plain-vanilla district of high schools facing the same problems as many large, impoverished school systems. With open enrollment and more than 20% of students attending public charter schools, Phoenix offers families lots of options, and the district didn’t have much that was attractive enough to make it competitive. 

Enter Chad Gestson, who recently ended an eight-year run as . In 2015, he announced a plan to operate 25 schools by 2025, with a goal of offering distinctive options throughout the district. In addition to comprehensive high schools with their array of athletics and extracurriculars, there would be medium-sized schools with attractive career and academic focuses and small, personalized microschools to choose from. Many of the new programs would be located in poor neighborhoods in the sprawling city, with free transportation for all students.

Phoenix Union was in the midst of a wholesale redesign when COVID-19 forced schools to close. Fortuitously, a fully online school was in the works, so the district was able to adjust to virtual classes relatively quickly.

But in the process, it became clear just how many high school-aged students were working, caring for siblings, filling in for their parents or significantly behind — or ahead and bored — academically.

As Gestson took it all in, he concluded the original redesign plan didn’t go far enough. PXU, as the district had restyled itself, needed to give up the idea of high school as a building where students spend a certain number of hours a day, for a set number of years, until they graduate.

For 60 years, experts had bemoaned the concept — central to the very DNA of the American high school — that being physically present in a prescribed set of classes for a defined amount of time adds up to a quality education. A few individual schools, particularly charter and private schools, have broken the mold. But most large-scale efforts to get rid of seat time and the bell schedule — the system where everyone moves in lockstep through a standardized sequence of in-person classes, regardless of their interests — run into a thicket of red tape. 

Gestson’s decision to go bolder got a boost from the Arizona legislature, which freed school systems to innovate. But even more important, he says, was the realization that lots of COVID-era teenagers were no longer interested in a traditional high school.

So far, it seems to be working. Last fall, PXU surpassed its highest single-day enrollment in over a half-century. On state report cards, the district has more A- and B-rated schools than ever before and, for the first time, none rated D or F.

“The pandemic gave us an entree,” says Gestson. “It enabled us to go to a system with no limits.” 

If PXU City works as well for all its students as it does for Dominguez, he adds, every high school in the district ought to throw away the bell schedule and offer a truly personalized education.

‘Lots of light and pure water’

The Phoenix Union district itself was born 125 years ago as a different kind of bold experiment.

Completed in 1910, Phoenix Union High School’s Domestic Arts and Sciences building was intended to make a grand statement. Not yet a state, Arizona was then dotted with tiny schoolhouses serving young children, most of them destined for jobs farming or performing physical labor. Previously, the territory’s entire high school student body had been wedged into four classrooms in an elementary school. 

In contrast, of the new, modern secondary school reflected the nation’s burgeoning love affair with public high schools. Designed by Norman Foote Marsh — the architect who replicated Renaissance-era Venice in Southern California — its grand entrance was framed by neoclassical columns supporting a soaring cornice. The structure was supposed to anchor a multi-building complex — “a well-ventilated campus with lots of light and pure water,” as Arizona State University .

Inside, classrooms were appointed to facilitate the study of everything from literature to skilled trades, the menu of offerings that would come to characterize comprehensive high schools throughout America for the next century.

The grandeur sent a signal. At the turn of the 20^th century, schooling for most U.S. children ended in eighth grade. But rapid changes in technology sparked demand for literate workers. Recognizing the prosperity that higher-skilled jobs could bring, employers and families alike clamored for more public secondary schools. 

Leaders rushed to open schools to prepare young people for this new economy, igniting the era historians call the . In 1910, just 19% of American teens were enrolled in what was a small number of high schools. By 1940, 71% of Americans ages 14 to 18 were attending.

As the numbers of high school buildings and students rose, so did the desire among employers and colleges for a uniform definition of what a diploma signified. The trustees of industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s newly created Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching proposed a set of standards: 120 hours of exposure to a subject should equal one credit. To graduate, a student should earn at least 14 credits in four years. Thus was born the Carnegie Unit, now better known as seat time, used to calculate everything from the length of an academic year to the amount schools would be reimbursed for their services.  

For several years, Phoenix Union High School was the only secondary school in the area — and the largest school, enrollment-wise, west of the Mississippi. When more high schools were eventually built in other parts of the fast-growing city, what had begun as a single school became the Phoenix Union High School District. 

The school system today would be unrecognizable to the architects of the original domestic arts building. In the 2022-23 academic year, Phoenix Union served almost 29,000 students spread across the city’s 500 square miles. Some 90% are low-income and nearly as many are Latino. Students speak more than 100 languages and represent 50 tribal communities. 

Phoenix Union does not face many of the same problems as other large, urban districts. Enrollment has not declined — partly because of the city’s boomtown status. Despite Arizona’s low per-pupil funding, the school system is fiscally sound. It attracts veteran teachers and pays them well above the state average. The community repeatedly votes for bonds that enable the district to build, renovate and equip modern facilities.

At the same time, Phoenix Union is confronted with numerous challenges. Arizona’s wide array of school choice options makes it compete for students with wealthier neighboring districts, tax credit scholarships for private schools and one of the nation’s largest charter school sectors.

As recently as a decade ago, Phoenix Union’s graduates were attending college in low numbers and earning degrees at even lower rates. Students were not leaving high school equipped for middle-skills jobs — well-paid positions in growing fields that don’t require a four-year degree. 

A fervent believer that it was time to reimagine high schools, Gestson had been a principal himself. While head of his district’s Camelback High, he had started some specialized academic programs. As a result, he knew redesign efforts were fraught with contradictions.

Worried their kids will slip through the cracks in a large student body, many families want small schools. But they also want the clubs, sports and other opportunities a big high school can offer. Some want career training programs that will lead to a good job immediately after graduation, while others want college prep. Phoenix Union, he believed, needed to become all things to all families.

“There is still magic in large, comprehensive campuses,” says Gestson. “Lots of kids in this country go to school not for math but for theater or the chance to go to MEChA [El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a national Mexican-American club] or the Black student union.

“The challenge was to take large schools and make them feel small.” 

When he took over as superintendent, the district had 11 high schools and three schools serving students with disabilities or who were significantly behind academically. When he stepped down last spring to start an education innovation research organization at Northern Arizona University, the district was operating 24 schools: the 11 comprehensive high schools, six small specialty schools, three microschools, the three alternative programs and an online-only school.  

Phoenix Union now includes four small high schools with specific themes: law enforcement and firefighting; coding and cybersecurity; the college-preparation program AVID, which stands for Advancement Via Individual Determination; and a bioscience school. In the fall, Phoenix Educator Preparatory will welcome its first students.

Uniquely, the district also operates microschools, standalone programs housed in wings of existing high schools. There is one of the country’s only Montessori high schools, a microschool geared for students working toward admission to highly selective colleges and a gifted and talented academy. 

The existing big high schools have been reconfigured. Metro Tech, for example, now is a career-technical education magnet offering 19 workforce training programs. South Mountain is home to distinct programs focused on media arts and design; science, technology and aerospace; and public and social services. At North High School, students work with an adviser to choose their own classes instead of following an established sequence.  

Each high school also has a freshman academy, intended to accomplish several things. To help them take advantage of the district’s specialty programs, ninth-graders are exposed to a variety of career and higher ed options and given the skills to navigate an individualized path. Because they come from 13 K-8 school districts within Phoenix and dozens of public charter schools, it helps them acclimate to PXU. Once students have an idea of what interests them, they can switch schools.

When creating the menu of options, district leaders ignored the temptation to locate popular programs in the city center — a tactic used by many school systems in the name of efficiency that typically excludes the students with the fewest resources. 

For example, Phoenix Union’s gifted and talented program is located on the city’s west side, home to a number of disadvantaged neighborhoods. Transportation anywhere is free for district students, with some able to count on yellow school buses or passes for public transit. 

District leaders were at work creating a fully online school, Phoenix Digital, when the pandemic hit, and when schools closed to in-person learning, having a system for remote schooling was a godsend. As face-to-face classes resumed, however, it became clear that a digital option would be key to Phoenix Union’s ability to offer every student a truly personalized high school experience. 

A just-right school 

When Dominguez started high school in fall 2020, COVID was raging and Phoenix Union classes were online. She flew through the material, but she was lonely. 

“I was like in a bubble,” she says. “I was alone in my room. I had a dance class, and I had to dance in my room in front of my camera.”

She enrolled at North High School when in-person instruction resumed. There were clubs and activities, but the classes were too slow for her. 

Like the rest of her family, Dominguez has a work ethic on steroids. Her grandparents immigrated from Chihuahua, Mexico, supporting their daughter when she became a single mother at 15 in the hope that their grandchild could continue her education past high school. 

Focused and ambitious, Dominguez knew at an early age that she wanted both to work in the dental field and have a creative side hustle. Until recently, she earned extra money by setting up dessert tables at parties on weekends and selling candy at events. 

Headed into her junior year, she was leaning toward transferring to Phoenix Union’s then-new full-time digital school in hopes of also attending a two-year dental assistant program. That way, she could get the prerequisites for her degree out of the way while she was in high school and finish a four-year training program in two years. 

Then, Dominguez’s mother heard about PXU City. She plunked down $1,500 for the girl’s first semester of dental assistant school, bought the Camaro and ordered her to stop working at weddings and ��ܾ��Գ���ñ�������.

“My family is like, ‘Your job is not a necessity. If you’re not going to do well in school, you’re going to quit that job,’ ” Dominguez says, adding — with an almost imperceptible eye roll, “My mom also needs me to be a teenager.” 

Sitting through hundreds of hours of classes that, for her, moved at a crawl would waste Dominguez’s time. But it would also not give a future employer so much as a glimmer of information about her focus and drive. 

For decades, researchers had known that the Carnegie Unit was a poor proxy for quality of education and a student’s skills and aptitudes. But despite general agreement that the credit hour had outlived its usefulness, getting rid of it seemed all but impossible.

COVID’s arrival upended seat time overnight, forcing states and school systems to rethink, at least temporarily, everything from what counts as attendance online to how to ensure that homebound seniors had enough credits to graduate.

Like many states, Arizona had allowed school districts to tweak their approaches to seat time even before the pandemic. But securing permission to truly experiment — to replace conventional lessons with hands-on projects, give students credit for independent study or internships, let them demonstrate mastery of a subject instead of logging time in class, blend remote and in-person instruction, create individualized schedules — was still cumbersome.

Because schools got state funding for documenting Carnegie Units, innovation was disincentivized. To count for credit, for example, a high school class had to meet for at least 123 hours a year, regardless how long it took to cover the material. Students had to take four such classes, even if a larger number of shorter courses would better suit their needs. And because many laws governing online schools were aimed at regulating troubled, low-quality education companies, few policies encouraged expansion of remote learning. Similar inflexibility stymied innovation in transportation, food service and technology.

Then, in 2020 and 2021, Arizona legislators allowed districts to adopt local policies but ensuring that the freedom to design different kinds of learning did not mean students received less instruction. 

Until her recent appointment as Virginia’s deputy secretary of education, Emily Anne Gullickson was head of , a nonprofit focused on school quality. Once the pandemic forced the state to build flexibility into its seat-time laws, she says, districts “were able to come back and say, ‘Don’t take it away.’ ”

Lawmakers also created a $55 million fund for schools wishing to explore alternatives to yellow buses and, for the first time anywhere, allowed for public microschools, which Gullickson envisions as appealing to families and teachers alike. “Arizona is no different than other places in having a mental health crisis,” she says, “and having those very small, safe environments will definitely allow us to keep some very high-quality educators.” 

During the pandemic’s school closures, Gestson asked every district employee to check in with 10 families every day. After surmounting their first big challenge — not knowing how to reach many students — educators started using these newly strengthened relationships to understand the difficulties kids and families faced.

Now, students at PXU City, which opened last fall, are encouraged to attend daily morning advisory groups online. Staff meet weekly to review each student’s progress. This, for example, was how a counselor realized Dominguez was not speeding along independently in math the way she does in other subjects. To help, she got regular coaching. 

In its first year, the school was a very lean operation, says Principal Leah McKiernan: two licensed educators and three support staff brainstorming transportation, troubleshooting schedules and making sure students had the kind of solid relationships with PXU adults that would keep their autonomy from devolving into disarray. Next year, with the addition of two new staffers, PXU City adults will visit students at their job, college and internship sites.  

In many ways, the challenges PXU City’s staff are thinking through mirror the issues that the district’s other schools are grappling with as they move away from bell schedules. A good example is Bioscience High School, located a block south of the original Phoenix Union High School building. 

With capacity for 400 students, Bioscience is the oldest of the district’s small, themed specialty schools. Instead of sitting at desks for a prescribed number of hours, students are required to spend time at nearby engineering and biomedical facilities — including an adjacent research campus where the 1910 Domestic Arts and Sciences building still stands. 

To make time for these outside experiences, students typically complete most of their graduation requirements before their senior year. Teachers set each grade level’s schedule according to what they want students to focus on during a year or a term, says Principal Neda Boyce. But they can put the calendar aside if, for example, students need extra time for projects. 

Starting in their freshman year, all students work on annual, year-long projects where they research a real-world problem, create an intervention and evaluate its effectiveness. One engineering group turned a plot of sunflowers growing behind the school into biofuel and then built a car that ran on it.

Camelback Montessori is a 150-student microschool located in an airy, self-contained wing of a 2,200-student high school. Teachers work in teams to make sure students are engaged in interrelated lessons as they move between subject-specific classes. Dictated by the instructors’ personalities, some classrooms are hushed while others buzz with motion.  

Kids work with the same teachers for all four years, fostering close relationships. The school sees the pillars of the Montessori philosophy — hands, heart and head — as highly effective in guiding students’ self-discovery.

“Hands” includes experiences such as an all-school kayaking trip to learn about the ecosystem. To satisfy the “head” component, all classes are honors-level. The work of the “heart” includes Socratic seminars and close attention to mental health.

“You don’t recognize all of the possibilities until you see what the kids figure out about themselves,” says Principal Danchi Nguyen. “We always say we want you to see what your role is.”    

Coming online this fall, Phoenix Educator Prep may be the district’s most audacious effort to integrate a specialty school with the larger community. It will train future teachers, school counselors and psychologists, as well as encourage students to have not just the vocation of working in a school, but to study something else — like art, music or botany — that they are passionate about. 

After a freshman year dedicated to a smooth transition to high school, Principal Alaina Adams says, students will begin earning an associate degree in their chosen educator track. Upperclassmen will use a version of PXU City’s flexible model to get as far as they can in higher ed, in partnership with one of five Arizona colleges.

Graduates will be encouraged to complete teaching residencies — year-long, hands-on training — at Educator Prep, where they will have financial and logistical help with housing, transportation and other issues that challenge new teachers with low starting pay.   

Later, Adams hopes to position Educator Prep grads to earn two BAs in three years so the would-be teachers can explore their own passions, too. She says she hears over and over that having a “side hustle” is energizing to the current generation of students and educators alike.

“You have to do a lot of listening,” says Adams. “You have to accept that they want more. They want options. They want to change the world.

“It’s turned into a really fun dreamfest for us.”  

‘The best of both worlds’

In April, PXU City held a rare all-school assembly. Dominguez was one of 32 students who showed up to spend the day in a glass-walled conference room in the basement of the district’s administration building, participating in leadership and team-building workshops put on by civic and district leaders. 

Like Dominguez, some kids drove, while some used public transit. McKiernan and PXU City’s other four staffers picked up others using vans the district had purchased to help move students around the community during the school day. 

The aroma of lunch — Cane’s chicken fingers — lingered as students shifted their attention to an exercise in decision-making and how one’s perceptions can sometimes make it hard to see all options. It was being led by the district’s chief talent officer. Other speakers of the day included Gestson, the vice mayor and an executive from the Mayo Clinic. 

The different sessions focused on the so-called soft skills — cooperation, negotiation, self-advocacy, etc. — that students need to navigate learning opportunities outside a conventional school setting. But they also gave PXU staff a chance to cement the personal relationships that are the glue that makes sure whatever students are doing in place of earning Carnegie Units is purposeful.

Indeed, the Carnegie foundation is tracking a handful of school systems trying to devise meaningful replacements for seat time. One goal is to find ways to evaluate mastery that go beyond measuring how much classroom instruction students retain. With its portfolio of schools offering opportunities to learn on college campuses, at research organizations, by working on projects and at job sites, the Phoenix district — and especially PXU City — is closely watched.

The confab had started to wind down when Dominguez got a text from her mother asking if she could pick up her baby brother. As luck would have it, her dental instructors were doing professional development that day, so she had a rare opportunity to take the boy home and play with him. 

Though Dominguez has zero interest in going back to a conventional high school, she was pleased by the assembly. She got to see several friends — including a girl she bonded with virtually during her online dance class — and spent time with the counselor who is helping her with math.

And she got a little encouragement to start thinking about the fall, when, as a senior, she’ll have less than two hours a day following a conventional class schedule. 

“I like a fast-paced life,” she says the next morning, parking the Camaro for a brief moment to grab a latte. “This school, it’s the best of both worlds.”   

Disclosure: The XQ Institute, which has partnered with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to explore alternatives to the Carnegie Unit, provides financial support to The 74.

]]> /article/as-covid-closed-arizonas-classrooms-black-mothers-launched-their-own-microschools-with-focus-on-personalized-learning-ending-school-to-prison-pipeline/ Wed, 26 Jan 2022 12:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=583847 In the Arizona desert, a new school model has Black parents driving across city lines to drop their children off each morning.

Frustrated with what they say is their public schools’ failure to provide quality education and nurturing environments for Black children and fearing the persistent , a group of mothers, many public school teachers, have created a network of their own schools.

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Launched mid-pandemic just one year ago, the mothers’ goal is to grow the seven into 50.

“We could be advocating 24/7, and still not make the impact that we wanted to see. So, what do you do, do you go charter? Do you try to keep working in the public school system? Nope, nope, not us. We said, well, ,” said Debora Colbert, executive director of the Black Mothers Forum, a Phoenix-based parent advocacy group. 

In mixed-grade classes, students learn at their own pace and are guided by two teachers. Restorative discipline techniques, not punitive strategies, are the norm.

The Forum’s approach to learning has in a state where high school graduation rates hover about 8 percent below national averages and . 

With little to keep them there, students who do go onto higher education often leave the state and don’t look back, Colbert said.

In Phoenix-area churches, nonprofits and shared school buildings, 42 students comprise the first microschools launched last January with preliminary guidance from national microschool giant Prenda. The Forum’s sites have since made the transition to public charter schools within local network EdKey Sequoia Choice. (Arizona’s attorney general with a separate, online EdKey school. Prenda lawyers say the investigation has since closed. The Attorney General’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Many of the Forum’s teachers, dubbed “learning guides” per the Prenda model, are religious leaders and parents from the community — many of whom left their placements in traditional schools for the opportunity. 

Founders of the schools hope to change perceptions of the community they’ve so often heard from young people: “There’s nothing to keep me in Arizona, or Phoenix, to realize my dreams and my goals,” said Colbert.

“That’s not okay. We’re on a mission to kind of track where our children are, where they’re going, whether they are successful, and how to keep them connected to their communities,” she said.

Gov. Ducey has committed nearly $4 million in the last year .

The forum has advocated for school reform since 2016, after nationwide violence against Black children and a series of high-profile police brutality cases involving Black Americans. Their mission became eliminating low for Black children and school discipline policies that often end with Black children funneled into prison. 

While the learning pod movement swept across the country’s white, affluent areas during the pandemic, outrage grew as the pandemic and academic gaps grew along racial lines.

The moment became an opportunity for the Black Mothers Forum to formally launch and recruit for their own schools in January 2021.

Forum teacher and mother Tiffany Dudley believes having teachers who “looked like” her children at the microschools have made all the difference for her sons, Xavier, 7, and Jeremiah, 10.

“I kind of underestimated how much of a difference my child, being in an environment where he had people with the same skin color… how much of an impact mentally that had on him,” said Dudley.

Dudley often got calls from Xavier’s previous schools’ teachers about the “little things,” like how he played with his shoe laces instead of participating in a group activity. Mornings used to bring protests because he hated going to school. 

After four months of microschooling, Xavier calls his out-of-state grandparents to recap school projects.  

“Just literally being there in that environment changed how he perceived learning, and changed how he saw himself,” Dudley said. 

Now a learning guide for a third through eighth grade cohort, Dudley said the student to teacher ratio, 10:2, is critical to help students transition from traditional schools. 

There’s no hiding behind a dozen other peers who may be more vocal in the classroom, for example. Instead students are asked to problem solve, with support from teachers like Dudley:  

“‘Okay, did you try this? How about we ask a friend?’ We’re just giving them strategies to teach them how to think critically to be able to solve problems because they are very used to being spoon fed answers,” she said.

The smaller classes allow their “connect, redirect” model, a complete departure from the many other charters adopted, to be the norm. When a student disrupts class or has trouble with an assignment, one guide talks with the child to uncover what might be affecting them. They then connect them to time, space, a venting session, food, counseling. 

“They’re not going to be punished — this is an opportunity to figure out what’s going on … giving them that sense of ownership in that redirection, they are part of this process, that takes time,” Black Mother’s Forum Founder Janelle Wood said. “That’s why we need two learning guides in the space. If one child is having a problem, all of them may not be having the same problem. They can continue on with what they’re doing, but this one child may need some extra attention.”

In crafting schools with Black families at its center, the Forum also reimagined their physical locations. Instead of operating out of a family living room or garage, schools and community organizations were more realistic because their families didn’t have the extra space to host classes.

Renting church and nonprofit space provides added benefits, too: kids stay connected to Phoenix, and community groups that lost revenue during the pandemic are supported financially.

And since last school year, they’ve added an hour of instruction to each school day. The extra time preserved their morning wellness circles — students start each day by talking through their emotions — and independent reading, with which many struggle.

In perhaps the starkest intentional departure from traditional schools, students learn via the mastery approach in blended classrooms of students of different ages and grades, separated into K-2 and 3-8.

Through online learning tools like Zearn and , some work grade levels ahead, others spend necessary time with foundational concepts like multiplication, as guides check in one-on-one. 

Wood recognized their efforts had “to start at the school level, because that’s where our children, Black and brown children, are being negatively impacted at the highest level.”

Raina Chamblee, now a third grader at one of the microschools, recalled how her former Wisconsin public school was a particularly negative experience. 

Diagnosed with ADHD, a new medication she was trying made her drowsy. She’d fall asleep in class, taunted and teased by classmates — behavior left unchecked by the teachers. 

Once, a teacher lashed out at her directly.

“I colored a pink polar bear and then one of my teachers crumbled it up and threw it in the garbage,” Raina said. 

Dudley said some of the difficulties Black children experience in school stems from the assumption that “‘this is a behavior problem’ […] instead of looking deeper to see, really see, the child.”

It’s why, she said, the miscoschools’ personal approach and connect-redirect models are necessary. 

Detailing the last few months in Phoenix, Raina said her new school has made a difference in her learning. New teachers “push” and “help,” she said. 

Her mother, Kylie Chamblee, noticed a difference in her ability to teach, too. She’s making deeper connections with her students. 

When a student needs extra time with reading comprehension and is ahead in geometry, she can work with them more freely.

“That’s what I really like about our model for kids,” said Chamblee. “Because it can be challenging but then it can also be rewarding, because they’re getting what they need.”

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Lead Image: Black Mothers Forums

]]> /article/is-the-delta-variant-going-to-devastate-us-again-what-this-weeks-reopening-of-3-big-districts-that-played-it-safe-last-year-might-tell-us-about-the-fall/ Wed, 04 Aug 2021 21:01:05 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=575839 Updated, Aug. 5

Parents and community members know Kimberly Robel, principal of San Bernardino’s North Verdemont Elementary School, as an unshakably enthusiastic leader. The administrator gives off “a cheerleader energy because she’s just so gung-ho, rah-rah,” said district spokesperson Maria Garcia.

But last week, Robel was anxious.

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She was planning for her school’s Aug. 2 reopening, when the full 516-student body would return in person to classrooms. For the entirety of the past school year, the 47,000-student San Bernardino City Unified School District had remained fully virtual with no face-to-face instruction. Aside from a cohort of young people who participated in a three-week summer program at Robel’s elementary school in July, none of her learners had stepped foot inside the building since March 2020.

Fears replayed in her head like a song she couldn’t quite get out.

“We worry about our kids getting sick, worry about adults getting sick,” Robel told The 74, wondering, “Is the Delta variant going to devastate us again? Are we going to have to shut down again?”

Yet come Monday, the school was again filled with the long-awaited buzz of students, and to the great relief of many, the day went off without a hitch, according to Garcia. Across the district, some and North Verdemont reported no COVID cases.

“It’s something that we have missed so much,” said Robel. “The little faces and eyes smiling over the mask … it just makes your heart kind of explode.”

After a summer that brought renewed pandemic worries amid a surge in Delta variant infections, and with children under 12 not yet eligible for coronavirus vaccines, the return to full-time, in-person learning that appeared all but inevitable this spring as schools embraced reopening is now shadowed by doubt.

Hallways across the country are beginning to once again echo with excited conversations and the squeak of new sneakers. Among the first to go back are districts like San Bernardino and some others that took a conservative approach to COVID mitigation by remaining fully remote or hybrid last year. Their first-out-of-the-gate experiences may prove a bellwether for what’s to come this fall.

“They’re the ones to watch whether they open traditional (in person, five days a week), because they haven’t been traditional in over a year,” Dennis Roche, who has tracked school reopenings through the pandemic as co-founder of the website Burbio, told The 74.

Schools that reopened fully last spring, “they’ve already rode this train,” Robel admits. But as her district marches forward with the return to classrooms, the principal is confident that they will rise to any challenges that may unfold.

“The people here are resilient,” she said of her community, which weathered a mass terrorist shooting in 2015 that claimed the lives of 14 individuals and seriously injured another 22.

Clayton County Public Schools, a suburban district just south of downtown Atlanta, also returned to the closest it’s been to normal schooling since March 2020 when it reopened Monday. After the majority of its students remained remote through the last school year, about 95 percent of the district’s 52,000 students returned to in-person learning this week.

“We are ready,” Teffany Bedford, a third-grade teacher at Fountain Elementary School, told The 74. “We feel safe. I think it’s going to be great getting back to those face-to-face interactions, which is what we’re used to.”

At her school, only about half of families came back to school last spring, Principal Jamilah Hud-Kirk told The 74, while this August, all but eight families have chosen to attend in person.

“We’re excited to welcome them,” said Hud-Kirk. “We missed our scholars and they missed us.”

With the Delta variant , masks are required in her building and across Clayton County schools, as they are in San Bernardino. The California district has also installed air filters and updated ventilation systems in each of its schools.

But additionally, the administrators at both Fountain and North Verdemont have put a premium on communicating their reopening plans clearly with families. Both held virtual information sessions for community members to learn about their school’s reopening plan and ask any questions. Last week, teachers at Fountain directly called the households of every student in their classes. Ms. Bedford, as her students call her, was able to connect with the families of every single youngster on her list.

“You have to meet your community where they are,” said Hud-Kirk.

Not all school systems, however, were able to respond as readily to parent concerns. Tucson Unified School District, which ended last year in a hybrid learning scheme and returns students to classrooms Aug. 5, had planned to begin the year without requiring face coverings due to an Arizona state law banning mask mandates. That edict stands even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their school guidance with a recommendation for universal teacher and student masking in late July, and despite State Superintendent Kathy Hoffman calling on the governor’s office to . Gov. Doug Ducey doubled down instead, calling the CDC’s new guidelines “.”

At a school board meeting in late July, a steady stream of public comments prompted Tucson Superintendent Gabriel Trujillo to remind viewers that “the decision of whether or not to mandate masks in any Arizona school or school district is no longer in the hands of any school governing board, superintendent or principal.”

Despite that, at an emergency meeting called the morning before school opened, the Tucson Unified board did just that, . By doing so, the district joined — two of which are in Phoenix — in defiance of the ban.

“They really do have their hands tied,” Clare Robinson, parent of a 7-year-old in the district, lamented before the board voted to disregard state law. The young mother was already planning on sending her child to school clad with a face covering and, at that point, just hoping other parents would do the same.

But without a universal masking policy, Robinson told The 74 she was worried kids would increasingly skip out on wearing face coverings. At her son’s summer camp, for instance, fewer and fewer kids kept their masks on as the weeks went by, building a social pressure against masking.

Perhaps out of concerns for kids’ safety, slots in the district’s virtual learning program were filling rapidly. On July 20, enrollment had spiked from 700 to 1,200 in just a week. “We are projecting that the numbers will keep going up,” Trujillo said at the time.

Still, the vast majority of the district’s 47,000 students will be attending school in person. As of Aug. 3, only 2,045 students were enrolled in the district’s virtual academy, according to spokesperson Veronica Castro-Vega — that’s slightly below the 5 percent opt-out rates in San Bernardino or Clayton County.

Robinson says many Tucson parents who were uncomfortable with their school’s previous masking policy faced a tough choice, especially if their child struggled with remote learning. On balance, most students tuning in online fared worse than their in-person peers, copious research shows.

“I don’t see [virtual school] as the answer that’s best for the greater good,” said Robinson. For her own family, Robinson had been considering a temporary move to her parents’ home in Berkeley, California, where masks in schools were never in doubt.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona seconds Robinson’s stance, advocating for schools to return students to face-to-face learning this fall — .

“We know that mask wearing and mitigation strategies allow [schools] to reopen safely,” the education secretary told National Public Radio Monday. If increased spread of the virus shutters schools, he said “to me, that’s a failure of adults.”

As the new school year unfolds in San Bernardino, where masking is a non-negotiable, Principal Robel has navigated some unforeseen hurdles: staffing is a bit short, and she wishes her school had held a welcome session for first-graders and their families who, while learning virtually last year, never became familiar with the ins and outs of the building. But the bumps are smoothing out and the principal believes her community can face whatever COVID’s next curve may be for the 2021-22 school year.

“I think they’re feeling cautiously optimistic,” she said.

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