Pastor Joshua Robertson didn't set out to become a leader in the educational freedom movement, but when his community called, he answered.

It was several calls, in fact. In spring 2020, Robertson's phone wouldn't stop ringing. "I was receiving 40–50 calls from parents every single day," says Robertson, the senior pastor of The Rock Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

These were the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The move to remote learning gave parents a closer look at their children's schooling—and they didn't like what they saw.

"All these parents were venting about the school system," Robertson recalls. "They would say to me, 'My kid is smart. I can't understand why they're not doing well academically.' Then throw in the violence in our schools. You're talking about kids who are in fistfights every other day." 

Feeling hopeless, the parents turned to a different kind of teacher.

Turning Point

Our education system has significant problems, and Robertson knows it is especially tough on children in under-resourced communities like the one he serves. He had experienced the system's failures firsthand: Robertson graduated from high school without knowing how to read properly.

Robertson went to college to play football but flunked out his freshman year.

Before failing out, Robertson befriended a bishop while playing organ at a local church. But without school or sports to occupy him, he fell into a dangerous lifestyle, surrounding himself with unsavory characters and illicit behavior. As if he sensed the need to intervene from hundreds of miles away, the bishop called Robertson in the middle of one such indiscretion.

"You're about to ruin your life, aren't you?" the bishop asked. He pleaded with Robertson to come to see him. Robertson went, and the bishop enrolled them both in the local community college. The two sat side by side doing schoolwork together. 

"In less than a week, he saw that I couldn't read," Robertson says. "It's amazing—you can attend twelve years of school, and no one notices that you can't read. But, because the bishop took the time to sit with me, he saw it right away. And over the next year, he sat with me day after day and taught me to read."

The man who flunked out of college because he couldn't read went on to earn both a bachelor's and a master's degree.

When the System Fails Children

"I was failed by a system, not just by a teacher," Robertson explains. "I had a few teachers who cared. But every system has gaps. And I fell into a gap."

Many educators assumed he had behavioral issues. "I was kicked out of every elementary school I ever went to," Robertson says. "What people didn't realize was that my behavior covered up my reading problems. In fifth grade, I got in trouble for hitting a kid in class. I hit him to create a diversion. The teacher was having students read aloud, and I had a feeling she was about to call on me to read."

This behavior is common among students who are left behind by the system. "They'll do something mischievous because they'd rather take the disciplinary consequence than be embarrassed in front of the whole class." Robertson says students who aren't learning well enough at school often lack any support at home, which leads to them getting into worse situations. 

"They have an industry right outside their door where they can make money—the drug industry," says Robertson. "It's right on their block. I knew where people were cooking crack when I was 10 or 11 years old."

Robertson says this is where the school-to-prison pipeline begins. So he has given himself a mission: "We're trying to cut off that pipeline."

From Failure to Flourishing

Parent after parent asked him the same question: "Can my kids come to the church?" 

The pastor's first thought was, "Come here for what?" Then Robertson remembered what the bishop had done for him years earlier.

"He inconvenienced his entire life in order to help me," Robertson says.

One church member had lost her job because of the pandemic, and Robertson realized she could help students with homework and provide other programming. "We took a risk and hired her," he says. "We had the facilities already with our Sunday school classrooms."

Six students from the local school district began coming to the church to do their online learning. The newly hired learning guide helped them with their homework and ensured the students sat at their computers with the cameras on when they had live lessons.

Word spread in the community. Demand continued to grow, even after schools returned to in-person classes. And so, in 2021, the Rock City Learning Center (RCLC) was born. 

During the 2021–22 school year, the RCLC served 30 students—29 of whom were failing academically. By the end of the school year, 10 students finished with an average of 90 or higher across all subjects, 12 achieved an average of 80 or higher, and six finished at 70 or higher.

The following year, RCLC students saw even more significant gains. About 90 percent of the students finished with an average of at least 70, and more than half scored 90 or better.

The learning center filled in the gaps left by the system, and students who were failing are now flourishing.

A Model for Others

"These kids need an intervention—a disruption to the aspects of our schools that limit their ability to offer effective education for all students," says Robertson.

The RCLC prioritizes the student. Students receive their instruction and curriculum from an accredited public cyber charter school. They work in small pods and receive coaching from trained learning guides.

Robertson believes that the RCLC's real innovation lies in the "convergence of the academic community and the community at large." The learning guides are not educators; they are "members of the community who love our children." They provide support that extends beyond academics, customizing the experience for for each student.

When students get the support they need, they thrive. "It's incredible the confidence you see in a kid when they're loved, supported, and disciplined," Robertson says. "They understand…they're in a place that cares about them and their specific needs, challenges, and talents."

Robertson founded Black Pastors United for Education (BPUE) to help others replicate the RCLC model. Harrisburg now has three learning centers, and another opened in nearby York. BPUE was a Yass Prize finalist—a prize that honors organizations delivering "Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless education"—and received a $500,000 grant to continue advancing its work.

Fighting for Educational Freedom

In June, Pennsylvania's Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that would cut funding to charter schools. Robertson is fighting against this effort and notes that Pennsylvania's charter schools "serve a higher percentage of low-income and nonwhite students than traditional school districts." If the bill becomes law, the hardest-hit schools would be the cyber charter schools where the RCLC students enroll.

Another goal of Roberston's political fight is a proposal for Lifeline Scholarships. This program would award restricted-use scholarship accounts to students attending Pennsylvania's lowest-performing schools. In 2023, Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro backed out of a budget deal that would have provided $100 million for Lifeline Scholarships.

On June 10, Robertson and nearly 60 other pastors and educators signed an open letter to Shapiro and the state's legislative leadership. The letter called on the leaders to oppose cuts to cyber charter schools and enact Lifeline Scholarships.

The next day, Roberston led a rally for educational freedom in the state Capitol. He also published an op-ed pleading with Shapiro to invest in educational freedom. "Today, a child's zip code determines whether she can read or perform basic math," wrote Robertson. "And this is simply unacceptable."

It has been a long journey for the pastor—from flunking out of college to leading this fight for educational freedom. Looking back on his experience, he says, "The bishop started with one person: me. And that one person he made an investment in is now making this investment in others. That's how it's supposed to work, right?"

The post A Pennsylvania Pastor Leads His Community's Fight for Educational Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.

One of the most persistent myths in K-12 education is the idea that high-poverty schools are near-universally, significantly underfunded. However, the truth is much more complicated. As it turns out, poor districts get more money in almost every state—and school spending has an incredibly weak relationship with school quality in the first place.

This week, USA Today published another example of fearmongering, giving a Thursday article the inexplicable headline, "Enrichment only for the rich? How school segregation continues to divide students by income." However, the research the article presents doesn't exactly show the apocalyptic outcomes implied by the headline. In fact, the research it cites concluded that "poverty rates do not have a clear relationship" with local and state funding.

Reporter Alia Wong's article is filled with heartwrenching stories of schools with "regular lockdowns and the sound of gunfire in the lobby," where "classrooms lacked basic supplies and teachers didn't notice how often [a student] skipped class. Desks tended to be broken and textbooks decades old."

While these situations are tragic, the reality is a bit more complex. Not only is the funding gap between wealthier and poorer schools found by the researchers smaller than you might think—it disappeared when dividing schools based on their poverty rates. Further, other research shows that school funding, and thus the chaotic, neglectful state of many failing schools, has basically no relationship with school quality. 

The study, from education think tank Bellwether, examined schools in 123 metropolitan areas and classified districts into lower, middle, and wealthy based on how much local income and property values differed from the average in their metro area. The researchers did this in order to study funding differences between schools in the same area—meaning that some districts in the lowest category (what they called Opportunity Outsiders) are not actually high-poverty schools.

In all, researchers found that wealthy districts received the most total funding in their metro area just 39 percent of the time. However, they did find a modest, but significant funding gap between wealthier and poorer schools. The median Opportunity Outsider school spent $14,287 per pupil, while the median wealthy school (called Economic Elite) spent $16,702. 

However, this gap all but vanished when the researchers reclassified schools not based on relative wealth but on their actual poverty rates. The study concluded that "poverty rates do not have a clear relationship with the amount of state and local revenue that districts receive."

So do the schools poor kids actually go to receive less funding? Not according to this study. Only the schools that are among the poorest in their metro area—which includes plenty of schools in wealthy areas, where the relatively poorest school has only average poverty—that face a funding gap. 

And that's only accounting for local and state funding. When you include federal funding, the situation becomes even better for high-poverty schools. According to research from the Urban Institute, when considering "federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids." Just three states, Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois have a "weakly" regressive funding structure. 

If so many states allocate more money to poor districts, why do low-income schools have worse results? As it turns out, per-pupil spending doesn't seem to impact school quality all that much. One 2012 report by Harvard and Stanford researchers, found that, on average, an extra "$1000 in per-pupil spending is associated with an annual gain in achievement of one-tenth of 1 percent of a standard deviation," an increase the researchers say is "of no statistical or substantive significance."

This isn't to say that funding doesn't matter at all. Rather, low-income school districts tend to spend their funding less responsibly. 

"More money can help schools succeed, but not if they fritter those extra resources in unproductive ways," Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Reason last year. "There are many common ways that schools blow resources. Wasteful schools tend to hire more non-instructional staff while raising the pay and benefit costs for all staff regardless of their contribution to student outcomes."

Despite the headlines pointing to the contrary, high-poverty school districts aren't generally underfunded and funding gaps aren't responsible for lackluster academic performance. That's not to say we shouldn't be concerned when poorer schools receive lower funding, but rather that the issues in underperforming schools almost certainly won't be fixed by throwing more cash at the problem.

The post Are Poor Schools Underfunded? It's More Complex Than You'd Think. appeared first on Reason.com.

Running a makerspace can be challenging and expensive, but schools that do so often see rewards in increased student engagement, collaboration, and enthusiasm for problem solving.

The post Making Makers: Building Makerspaces in K–12 Parochial Schools appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Running a makerspace can be challenging and expensive, but schools that do so often see rewards in increased student engagement, collaboration, and enthusiasm for problem solving.

The post Making Makers: Building Makerspaces in K–12 Parochial Schools appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Public schools have a mental health crisis and only thousands of new support staff can save them. That's the narrative being pushed nationwide at a time when enrollment has crashed by nearly 1.3 million students and $190 billion in federal K-12 COVID-19 relief aid is set to expire later this year.

"It would take 77,000 more school counselors, 63,000 more school psychologists and probably tens of thousands of school social workers to reach levels recommended by professional groups before the pandemic hit," reports The Washington Post.

Now legislators in states such as Minnesota, New York, and Virginia are introducing bills aimed at getting schools closer to meeting the 250-to-1 student-to-counselor ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). "We want our children to live in a state where they know they'll be able to access the mental health services they need," says Minnesota State Rep. Kaela Berg (D–Burnsville). According to ASCA, school counselor duties range from helping students manage emotions to planning for postsecondary options, but they don't help with long-term psychological disorders.

Public schools were slow to open during the pandemic and students' mental health deteriorated as a result. But even before COVID-19, schools were staffed at record levels, and policymakers have good reason to be skeptical of ASCA's guidance.

Between 2002 and 2020, public school staff grew by 13.2 percent nationwide while student enrollment increased by just 6.6%, according to a new report published by Reason Foundation. In many states—including New Hampshire, Illinois, and New York—public schools maintained or increased staffing levels despite large enrollment losses. For example, Connecticut lost 8.2 percent of its students but public school staff shot up by 14.1 percent.

But the bulk of new hires weren't teachers, which saw a 6.6-percent increase nationwide. Instead, non-teachers fueled the growth, increasing by 20 percent. For every five new students, about one non-teacher was added to public school payrolls. While a rise in central-office bureaucrats contributed to this trend, school-level personnel such as guidance counselors (up 19.5 percent), instructional aides (up 30.9 percent), and student support staff such as health and social services personnel (up 113.5 percent) were a significant driver.

One reason is that groups such as ASCA, National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), and National Association of Social Workers (NASW) all recommend staffing ratios that are used to sound alarm bells to state legislators about public school resources. While it's unclear how NASP (500-to-1) and NASW (250-to-1 or 50-to-1 for high-need schools) derived their ratios, ASCA's figure (250-to-1) doesn't hold up to the slightest amount of scrutiny.

According to ASCA, it stems from 1955 when researcher Kenneth B. Hoyt "concluded that school counselors should have no more than 400 pupils in their caseload." They adjusted Hoyt's ratio down to its current level in 1965 "as the role of the school counselor became clarified further."

But this figure was called out by a Harvard graduate student for having no empirical basis at all, despite being cited "in almost every piece that you read about school counselors." It turns out, Hoyt's original number was just a back-of-the-envelope calculation he did in a short column, which walks through some basic assumptions about what counseling might look like. At the end, Hoyt even warned against using his example to set policy:

This article has presented one person's point of view regarding the counseling load of the high school counselor. It is not represented as the answer for any particular school system nor as a generalized answer for any combination of the school system. We would not expect to find total agreement on the part of either experts or non-experts on all of the assumptions involved in the point of view presented here.

Notice that Hoyt's article was aimed at high school counselors specifically. This is important because ASCA's ratio lumps together school counselors at all levels (elementary, middle school, and high school). The national average reported by ASCA (385-to-1) exceeds its recommendation, but only because it's inflated by schools serving lower grade levels. When high schools are isolated, the national average falls to an estimated 232-to-1 ratio—well below ASCA's recommendation.

The real problem isn't that there aren't enough school counselors, but that many states already have laws on the books advancing ASCA's flawed recommendation. Then there's the question of mission creep and whether public schools should be delivering mental health services at all. Regardless, public schools have more staff than ever and with enrollment projected to continue declining for years to come, the last thing they need is 77,000 more counselors. Using a baseless metric to further this aim only undermines ASCA's credibility and those pushing their narrative.

The post Do U.S. Public Schools Really Need 77,000 More Counselors? appeared first on Reason.com.