The March 2020 shift from face-to-face classes to what many call “Zoom University” was triage for faculty and administrators accustomed to being in the same room as their students. The cobbled-together approach could be compared to building an airplane while it’s flying.

The pivot to emergency remote learning differed greatly from what is considered high-quality online education, said Deb Adair, executive director of Quality Matters, a nonprofit that seeks to measure and guarantee quality in online courses. Top-notch online education requires planning the entire course before it runs; laying out materials and defining learning objectives; and ensuring accessibility for all students, she said.

“That is a lot of work that’s done before the class even starts; there was no way that institutions could get that done in the week or two weeks that they had before they had to move everything online,” Adair said.

Though the pandemic forced colleges to make adaptations on the fly, those moves almost certainly provided a “sneak preview of higher education’s future,” according to a new report from the progressive think tank New America.

The report, “Back to Basics: Quality in Digital Learning,” highlights successes and failures of the past 17 months and makes policy recommendations for how to make high-quality online education more accessible in the future, even as many students return to physical classrooms.

Read more.

Wealthy private colleges: Large endowments, few low-income students. It’s a rare instance of a stereotype matching available data. Generally, despite their prosperity, rich colleges don’t give many students of lesser means a shot at an elite, private education.

But there are private institutions that buck this trend. At Williams College, a highly selective liberal arts college in rural Massachusetts, 19 percent of its roughly 2,000 students last academic year received Pell Grants — federal aid typically for students from families earning less than $40,000 a year. And Williams reported that its most recent six-year graduation rate for Pell students was 90 percent — nearly 40 points above the national average.

Williams is rare. Nearly half of the nation’s wealthy private colleges and universities enroll so few Pell recipients that they would rank in the bottom five percent of schools enrolling such students. At many such institutions, the low-income students who do enroll graduate at far lower rates than their wealthier peers.

The Hechinger Report examined four high-flying colleges with large endowments (together totaling more than $9 billion) that have high Pell-recipient enrollment rates and high completion rates. The colleges — Denison University in central Ohio, Grinnell College in rural Iowa, the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Williams — can provide a blueprint for well-heeled institutions that currently enroll low percentages of low-income students.

http://hechingerreport.org/wealthy-private-colleges-found-ways-serve-many-needy-students-without-jeopardizing-financial-health/

The nation’s most selective colleges and universities should give special preference in the admissions process to qualified students from low-income families, who are vastly less likely to attend those schools than wealthier Americans with similar academic ability, according to a new report.

The report, by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, proposes ways to ensure that low-income students have access to top colleges and universities, where they are now underrepresented thanks to policies it said stacks the deck against them. (The foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)

These include preferences for athletes, children of alumni, and applicants whose families have the greatest ability to pay, who often receive financial aid based not on need but on what the universities call merit.

http://hechingerreport.org/report-proposes-new-definition-of-merit-to-help-low-income-college-applicants/

The Common Core was rolled out with promises of closing learning and achievement gaps, but in the short term, gaps will almost certainly grow wider, writes Tara García Mathewson for The Hechinger Report. The gap in scores between disadvantaged students and peers has already ballooned in Illinois, New York, and Kentucky, all of which launched early versions of aligned exams. In Illinois, the achievement gap increased 94 percent the first year. In Kentucky, a 16-point proficiency gap among third-graders increased to 21 points. These early tests weren’t taken on computers, so schools across the country are scrambling to prepare disadvantaged students who have less experience with online formats. Test-makers argue that in the long run, Common Core tests will help level the playing field, since their computer-based format incorporates new tools. For non-native English speakers and those with special needs, new features can help them display knowledge they’ve always had but were unable to demonstrate. Still, skeptics remain. Harvard’s Daniel Koretz has studied the introduction of new tests in various states and found score gaps shrink on tests used for high-stakes purposes much more than on other exams. Because aligned tests will eventually factor into staffing decisions in many states, and in some cases, graduation requirements, they’ll be just as susceptible to score inflation.

http://hechingerreport.org/common-core-tests-will-widen-achievement-gap-at-first/

Why are graduation rates at community colleges so low?

Teachers College Professor Tom Bailey answers our questions, explaining what “cafeteria colleges” are, why they’re bad and weighing in on Obama’s plan to make community college free

The statistics from many community colleges are grim. Only about 39 percent of students who enter the country’s most accessible postsecondary institutions graduate within six years. A quarter of those who enroll in the fall don’t come back in the spring.

To boost the number of Americans with degrees, President Barack Obama has proposed making community colleges free. Tom Bailey, professor of economics and education and director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, supports the idea, but says it will have limited results if it’s not coupled with significant changes to the colleges themselves.

http://hechingerreport.org/new-book-addresses-low-community-college-graduation-rates/

A large and complex issue is present in many early childhood centers that serve children impacted by violence and poverty, writes Margaret Ramirez for The Hechinger Report. According to a nationally representative survey, 13 percent of infants a year old and younger, and 44 percent of all two-to-five-year-olds, were assault victims in the prior year. Eight percent of infants and 14 percent of two-to-five-year-olds had also witnessed violence. Other studies confirm these findings; still, few preschools have mental health professionals on staff, though early investment would save both expense and heartache later on: “If we put money at the front end, we will spend less on special education classes for behavior disorder, we will spend less on adolescent substance abuse, we will spend less on gang violence, we will spend less on the juvenile criminal justice system,” said Margret Nickels of Chicago’s Erikson Institute. Nickels still encounters ignorance from childcare workers, preschool teachers, and even principals who wrongly believe that young children don’t understand what’s happening when violence occurs and are unaffected. One model that could work elsewhere is that of the Erie Community Center in Chicago, whose preschool spends $160,000 annually for a full-time psychologist and a social worker, and heavily supplements support through unpaid graduate students.

http://hechingerreport.org/content/youngest-learners-need-mental-health-treatment_17871/