Julius Cervantes, a first generation college graduate, didn’t appreciate school’s relevance for his life until senior year of high school.
Prior to that, Cervantes would show up to school tardy, and teachers didn’t seem to mind. It’s not that he thought school was useless. He knew the importance of an education for making money, and he aspired to be an engineer. But school just hadn’t hooked him.
Then, his senior year, Cervantes took a statistics class. The teacher had found that students didn’t connect with the problems in the math books and had rigged up his own lessons, after asking students what they would actually like to learn about.
Cervantes’ interest in the subject swelled, and it had a spillover effect. Cervantes took the stats class first period and he found that he suddenly wanted to show up early, and the momentum trickled down to his other classes, he says.
Cervantes’ father dropped out of high school and his mother didn’t attend college. So he became a first-generation college student. Cervantes graduated last December with a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
For many students, school has become a point of debate. The pandemic shifted families’ relationships with school, raising thorny and fundamental questions about the value and usefulness of education. Some believe that bringing students into the process of curriculum development — or finding other ways to clearly signal value to students — could lend a hand to re-engage them with their education.
Claw-Your-Eyeballs-Out Boring
When the NAEP scores returned, they dashed lingering hopes that students had bounced back from the pandemic. The scores spotlighted gloomily low literacy rates for fourth and eighth graders. The assessment has also been connected to low student motivation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, absenteeism also continues to rack schools, which some see as key to students’ sluggish recovery.
But the problem didn’t emerge during the pandemic. Rather, the crisis only intensified long-standing issues, according to observers.
One of those issues: school just isn’t hooking students.
When Kara Stern was in graduate school, earning a masters’ in education leadership, she shadowed a 10th grade student for a day, shuffling around from class to class. The experience stuck with her. “I was ready to claw my eyeballs out of my head because it was so intensely boring,” Stern recalls, adding that she felt that way as a teenager too. “I can believe they’re not showing up for it,” she says.
Now a director of education and engagement for SchoolStatus, a family communication platform, Stern believes that students have to feel that someone cares about whether they show up for class and also that school has a purpose.
For her, it’s ultimately about whether students can perceive the value in education. Often, teachers try to make materials more relevant for students by writing Beyonce into their word problems, Stern says. But it’s more crucial that they make the material relevant to how students will navigate their lives once they are done with school, she says. That could mean programs that connect students to careers, like cooperative education programs in New York, for example.
At least one teacher argues that bringing students into the curriculum development process could also lend a hand.
At a panel during SXSW EDU last week, Dashiell Young-Saver, an AP Statistics teacher at IDEA South Flores, a public charter school in San Antonio, Texas, suggested that schools can learn from his approach to curriculum development.
Students at Young-Saver’s school come from a largely working class and Hispanic background, and the pass rate for AP Statistics is traditionally around 2 percent, he told EdSurge on a call after the conference.
It dawned on Young-Saver that part of the motivation problem may be the textbooks, which emphasize problems about battery lifetimes and watermelons. These students have real-world responsibilities, such as holding down jobs to lend a hand support their families. The textbook problems were “contrived and infantilizing,” Young-Saver said to EdSurge. So he asked his students what they wanted to learn about. They were interested in problems that directly impacted them, including gerrymandering, social media and food deserts. He bootstrapped some lessons, and engagement and motivation among his students soared. That also lifted student achievement. The pass rate for his class jumped to 42 percent, a sign that his approach was working.
Showing up to class is downstream of motivation, so perhaps boosting engagement and achievement would spill over into attendance, he argues.
The nonprofit he created, Skew the Script, develops curriculum directed by student interests. These days, that includes a complete AP Statistics curriculum and five units for Algebra I. These are used by 20,000 teachers, impacting roughly 400,000 students, according to the nonprofit’s website. This curriculum starts by consulting students as to what problems they want to learn to understand, using that as a guidestar in constructing a curriculum that they claim is rigorous and engaging.
It’s an approach that could help to improve student engagement and possibly also attendance, Young-Saver says. If you really want a student to be engaged and to perceive value in what they’re learning, you need to show that value right here, right now with them, he says. In math, that means showing them how quantitative reasoning applies to topics they already care about.
“If [what students are learning] isn’t relevant — if it doesn’t speak to your soul — then school seems arbitrary,” Young-Saver says.
But wouldn’t that be tougher in math courses that don’t so easily lend themselves to real-world examples? Even in calculus or algebra some units of the standard curriculum can have more relevant context incorporated, Young-Saver argues.
In this way, his approach is reminiscent of other attempts to reform calculus that have tried to make the discipline more relevant to students’ lives. For instance, the life sciences department at the University of California, Los Angeles, has spearheaded an attempt to revamp calculus courses for science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments. It’s based on the belief that the classic approach to calculus is “absolutely worthless” — both unpopular with students and serving effectively as a hurdle for women and minorities looking to enter STEM careers.
‘Productive Struggle’
Students also believe they should take a more vigorous role in determining what they learn.
Kaylin Hernández — a former student of Young-Saver’s and a panelist at the SXSW EDU event in Texas — argued that bringing students into the education decision-making process even lifts civic involvement. That’s because her experiences in class informed Hernández’s own work for the city of Martinsville, Virginia. After classes, students were surveyed on what they wanted to see taught. It made her feel that her opinion mattered in a way that it often didn’t seem to before, she said on the panel.
Giving students a chance to offer their views empowers them to actively make school more meaningful for them, she added.
Nadia Bishop, a student at Brown University who was also on the panel, said that she feels incorporating student feedback into curriculum gives teachers vital cues. When she was in high school, she recalled having a tough time using Jupyter Labs, a software used in math classrooms. It struck her when a teacher admitted to sharing her frustration with the software, and this moment of openness allowed her to give that teacher feedback. That made her feel heard, and it also meant that she could refocus her efforts on absorbing the statistical concepts behind the code.
It’s vital for educators to make sure students are struggling to learn rather than struggling with something that’s irrelevant to their lives, Bishop said.
The Opposite of Boring
Cervantes graduated in 2019.
For him, basketball broke the spell of boredom. His statistics class started investigating areas that interested him, including the “hot hands theory” — the idea that a basketball player can get on a streak, making it more likely that they will make a basket. The class concluded that the numbers don’t bear that theory out, Cervantes reports, though, in his heart, he still believes it. The class also touched on whether Lebron James or Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time. So which was it? Michael Jordan, according to the class. While Lebron might have put up more “raw numbers,” Jordan was more advanced in his time, Cervantes says.
Cervantes later earned a business-intelligence internship with the San Antonio Spurs, and he now works as decision science analyst for a financial services company.
Many communities have a shifting relationship with school in an intensely political climate. Under the Trump administration, schools have been dragged into immigration tangles, particularly after the administration rescinded restrictions on immigration enforcement at schools. That inflames immigrant students’ fears, and threatens to keep them from showing up to school in the first place, advocates say.
“With everything going on in the world today, it becomes increasingly important to make students feel seen and feel valued to build a relationship with the school system,” Cervantes told EdSurge.
