The Washington Post - USA (2021-11-22)

B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2021

education

classroom as they are... not part of the climate-building process the students and teachers enjoy. “Most of the families that I work with do not want other parents in the classroom because they do not want the disruption,” he said. “I am not wanting to try this experiment because in a school like mine, once the gate is open to the classrooms we would have 1,000 requests.” I think he is wrong about that. I said in this newspaper in 2011 that Arlington County, a district similar to Highland Park, allowed parents to observe for an hour or so. That did not spark a rush of parents to apply for the opportunity. Gilbert and I agree on what may be a significant barrier to parents visiting classrooms. Their children, fearing embarrassment, are likely to forbid it. “I threaten my own high-school-aged son that I am going to visit his class when he starts acting up,” Gilbert said. Perhaps only the bravest parents would ask to sit quietly near the back and learn from what they see and hear. So why not give at least them a chance to do that? [email protected]

classrooms, staying and even participating in early-morning activities.” He said he also thinks one reason parents rely so much on standardized test scores is because so many schools make it difficult “to go inside schools and see what and how children are learning.” Some of the people angry at schools these days may find classroom observations neither helpful nor relevant to their complaints. Some educators say such visits are intrusive. Jeremy Gilbert is principal of Highland Park High School near Dallas. His well-regarded school is known to Dodgers fans like me because it produced Clayton Kershaw and Kershaw’s high school buddy Matthew Stafford, now quarterback of the L.A. Rams. Gilbert’s district limits observations to 15 minutes. He said he has yet to receive a parental visit request as a high school principal. “The school classroom is a sacred community that a teacher spends countless hours nurturing and cultivating” to “create a safe and risk-free learning environment for all students,” Gilbert told me. “Students will surely act differently if a parent is in the

took a tour at a popular private preschool, they also asked if they could observe a class for an hour. During the tour they had seen one child hitting another without any staff intervening. They wanted to make sure that was just an anomaly. The school director not only denied their request but also said she was so troubled by their attitude that she was tearing up their application. Joost Sluis, a retired electronics technician in Mokena, Ill., said recently in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that “it was the video of remote learning that stimulated parents to object to school abuses. For many years our schools have worked to keep parents out of the classroom.” He told me that his wife observed the classes of one of their children and that that helped her become close to the teachers and staff. Thomas Hatch, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, said, “I’ve seen schools, usually elementary schools, employ a variety of strategies to encourage parents to visit their classrooms, in some cases inviting parents to drop their children off in their

year. He got past the no- observations rule because he was respected, and maybe feared, for being an attorney who helped the Parent Teacher Student Association deal with money issues. He didn’t think his presence distracted anybody. The few students who knew him smiled or waved but then ignored him. He was fascinated by the contrast between what he had heard about certain teachers and what he saw in class. “In some cases, teachers with wildly positive reps were, in my opinion, barely competent, albeit entertaining, and teachers with drab or mildly negative reps were, in my opinion, doing an excellent job,” he said. Getting permission to observe classes is even harder for mothers and fathers who want a firsthand look at how children are taught before selecting a school. A couple I know took the standard tour at a public school famous for having everyone reading by the end of kindergarten. They asked to sit quietly in a class for an hour or so to get a better sense of the place. Absolutely not, the school said. When another couple I know

just 15 minutes or so. The nonpartisan Education Commission of the States, a policy organization headquartered in Denver, said it could locate only three states — California, Washington and Michigan — that explicitly gave parents the right to observe classroom activities. Some states allow parents to observe children with disabilities or disciplinary problems, but that’s it. My eldest child once attended a school where the innovative principal allowed observations. I watched my 10th-grader grill a math teacher on several fine points of a lesson. I was grateful for the chance to see he didn’t need any help from me in his studies. When parents complain about being denied a chance to see what’s going on in class, I wonder about the fairness of letting a stranger like me, by virtue of being an education writer, spend time in hundreds of schools taking notes about what other people’s kids, and their teachers, are doing. I once interviewed a parent who persuaded the Fairfax County school district to let him sit in the back of his children’s classrooms for one full day each

Many of us have
blamed the
pandemic and
politics for the
outbreak of
parent anger
toward schools.
Guiding their
children through
online lessons and seeing
teachers struggle has been
frustrating, and in some cases
enraging, for many mothers and
fathers.
But for some of them,
watching education firsthand
has been a rare and welcome
learning experience. Until
teachers went on Zoom,
classroom observations by
parents were mostly banned or
discouraged in the several
decades I have been attending
and writing about schools.
Some parents would still like
to see what their kids do in class,
or even observe the daily routine
before enrolling them in a new
school. Such requests are usually
rejected. Parents are told in-class
observations are too distracting,
too cumbersome, or violate
student or teacher privacy —
even though few schools ever try
them.
Individual school districts
may allow observations but often

Parents want to know more about schools. Why can’t they observe classes?

Jay
Mathews

BY JON MARCUS

portland, maine — The ergo-
nomic chairs, glass-walled confer-
ence rooms, ubiquitous technol-
ogy, and smell of new carpets and
fresh paint scream well-funded
start-up.
And that’s what the Roux Insti-
tute is: a brand-new university
campus backed by $200 million of
donated money.
The institute, which opened
last year in borrowed space in
Portland’s East End, is offering
master’s degrees, certificates and
professional training in computer
science, data analytics, artificial
intelligence, biotechnology, cy-
bersecurity and other subjects.
These are hot fields in a state
with a growing tech sector that
employs 12,140 people but whose
existing colleges and universities
collectively produced only 103
computer science graduates with
bachelor’s degrees or higher in
2017 — the last year for which the
figures are available — including
just 10 with master’s degrees.
“Nobody was servicing the
need,” said Chris Mallett, the chief
administrative officer.
At a time when other
h igher-education institutions are
closing or merging because of a
decline in the supply of high
school graduates, the Roux is
among a small but largely unno-
ticed number of new colleges that
are opening.
Some are focusing on high-
demand disciplines such as tech-
nology and alternative energy.
Others are serving the huge num-
ber of Americans who never went
to college or completed a degree.
Still others are trying to remake
higher education with new mod-
els that forgo top-heavy bureau-
cracies and expensive campuses
— models that in some cases don’t
look like conventional colleges at
all.
All three strategies are in large
part a reproach to traditional
higher education, which has often
failed to provide the right pro-
grams to the people who increas-
ingly need them.
It seems a bad time to start a
university or college. Postsecond-
ary enrollment has been falling
since 2011, with particularly big
dips the past two years, according
to the National Student Clearing-
house Research Center. In the
past five years, more than 60
conventional colleges have
closed, merged or announced that
they will close.
“You get the combination of
‘That’s so brave of you,’ ‘It’s admi-
rable’ and ‘You’re crazy,’ ” Michelle
Jones said of people who hear that
she founded a new associate-
degree-granting college — Way-
finding A cademy in Portland, Ore.
But several postsecondary in-
stitutions have opened or are
about to debut.
The Roux, for instance, was

started after Maine native David Roux, chairman of the private investment company BayPine and co-founder of the technology- focused private-equity firm Silver Lake, offered $100 million to create a technology-focused university in his home state. A Maine- based foundation kicked in an additional $100 million. Roux and his wife, Barbara, ultimately teamed up with North- eastern University to run the proj- ect, which was given temporary space in a tech company building on the Portland waterfront and reports enrolling 313 students this semester. Also in Maine, Unity College plans to launch the Technical In- stitute for Environmental Profes- sions in the spring at a new campus that will award certificates and associate degrees to people who want to work in fields such as solar power. Demand for workers in solar is expected to nearly double by 2030, according to an industry census. Bristol Community College in Massachusetts is converting a for- mer seafood packaging plant into an offshore wind institute sched- uled to open next spring. The number of workers needed in the offshore wind energy industry will also nearly double by 2025, to 589,000, and increase to 868,000 by 2030, the consulting firm Rys-

tad Energy estimates. Others of these new efforts are dramatically different from traditional higher-education experi- ences, and their focus is almost entirely on nontraditional students.

The Rivet School, with Califor- nia cam puses in Richmond, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, provides personal coaching, financial aid, group study sessions and career counseling to 164 adult students — a large proportion of them working and more than half of them parents or caregivers, the founders say — who take courses on their own schedules from two accredited nonprofit online universities. Students graduate with a cer- tificate of completion from the Rivet School. To them, it’s a college — the conduit through which

they get degrees, even though the degrees are in the name of one of those two universities. A program with intensive ad- vising similar to the Rivet School’s, called Duet, in Boston, resulted in graduation rates that were double the state average, while cutting the cost of college in half, a Harvard study found. “There’s a huge opportunity to rethink what the college experience looks like,” said Jeff Manas- sero, the Rivet School’s executive director. Many of his adult students complain that conventional colleges failed to help them balance school with families and jobs. “It was very much like a facto- ry,” said Chris Clausen, who started college after high school but never finished and now, at 29, has returned to take courses at the Rivet School toward a degree in business management. In a knit cap and long-sleeve raglan T-shirt, Clausen was hover- ing over his laptop in Rivet’s Rich- mond outpost, not far from the shipyard where women were re- cruited into service during World War II by a poster featuring the fictitious Rosie the Riveter, from whom the school took its name. “There’s just a lot of hurdles in traditional colleges — financial aid and choosing classes and pick- ing majors,” said Chardonnay

Hightower-Collins, a coach at Rivet. “That’s why we exist. We’re filling the gaps.” Back east, in Pennsylvania, college and university enrollment has declined by 22 percent in 10 years — so much that the public university system is combining six of its campuses into two re- gional institutions. Yet one Penn- sylvania county opened its own new community college in Sep- tember. Erie County Community Col- lege, or EC3PA, has used federal pandemic funding to make tu- ition free and is offering courses and services virtually and in per- son at a vocational high school, branches of the county library system and an education center run by nuns. “We’re never going to build some 800-acre campus,” said Chris Gray, the founding presi- dent. EC3PA, too, focuses on students who its advocates say are not well served by existing universities — working adults with children, for example. “What made me pack up my family and move and take a risk at a time enrollment’s been horrible is that we have to rebuild this system from the ground up and tear down those things that keep traditional higher education so elite,” Gray said.

Jones, the Wayfinding c o- founder, previously taught orga- nizational behavior and leader- ship at Concordia University in Portland, Ore., which closed last year because of growing debt and declining enrollment. Even before Concordia shut down, she and others raised $200, 000 to open Wayfinding, which offers one major, called self and society, meant to help students decide on what they want to do in life. Wayfinding has 25 students — 70 percent of whom started but never finished at traditional universities, Jones said — making it part of a micro-college movement that rejects huge, impersonal universities, even at a time when small colleges are struggling because of poor economies of scale. Flagstaff College in Arizona, for example, also has only one major, sustainability and social change, and operates out of space on a community college campus. Oth- er micro-colleges in various s tages of development include Outer Coast in Sitka, Alaska, housed on the campus of a conventional college that closed in 2007 , and Thoreau College in Vir- oqua, Wis. Those schools also have smaller staffs and lower overheads, with administrators often taking on several roles. These kinds of places are “for folks who for whatever reason, and there are a lot of them, wouldn’t thrive in the traditional college model but still want college,” said Jones. “Everybody agrees that our higher education system is bro- ken,” she said. “They might dis- agree about what needs fixing first. But everyone is aware of the brokenness.” Conservative founders and supporters of another just- announced institution, the Uni- versity of Austin in Texas, say they will open next summer as a coun- terbalance to “illiberalism.” It isn’t easy to start a college. Unity’s new campus was sched- uled for a September opening, which has been pushed back to the spring. A performing arts college planned by the nonprofit Norwalk Conservatory of the Arts in Connecticut announced plans to open in August 2022, but that has been moved to 2023. Nonetheless, the Rivet School’s Hightower-Collins thinks the mo- mentum will continue. “That’s just the nature of the world at this moment,” she said. “We’re finding all kinds of gaps in society, and you see so many start- ups popping up to address those problems.” [email protected]

This article about new colleges opening was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

As enrollment falls and colleges close, new efforts emerge

MOLLY HALEY/HECHINGER REPORT The Roux Institute in Portland, Maine, is one of several largely unnoticed new higher-education institutions popping up around the country that cater to certain needs. The Portland facility is still under construction, with furniture waiting to be unpacked.

“There’s a huge

opportunity to rethink

what the college

experience looks like.” Jeff Manassero, Rivet School executive director

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The Washington Post - USA (2021-11-22)

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