Most U.S. public elementary and secondary schools faced hiring challenges

 

for the start of the 2024–25 academic year

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) releases today the latest round of findings from the School Pulse Panel (SPP). These SPP data examine the hiring cycle of summer 2024 and community collaborations during the 2024-25 school year, as reported by school leaders in U.S. public schools. All data can be found on the SPP interactive dashboard. Below is a summary of some key findings from this release. Key Findings Staffing for the 2024-25 School Year On average, public schools reported have six teaching vacancies and filling 79 percent of those vacancies with fully certified teachers before the start of the 2024-25 school year. Compared to the national estimate (filling 79 percent of vacancies with fully certified teachers), public schools with the following characteristics reported filling a higher percentage of vacancies with fully certified teachers: with a student body made up of less than 25 percent students of color (83 percent) Compared to the national estimate (filling 79 percent of vacancies with fully certified teachers), public schools with the following characteristics reported filling a lower percentage of vacancies with fully certified teachers: with a student body made up of more than 75 percent students of color (75 percent) in high-poverty neighborhoods (72 percent) The list below shows the percentages of public school teaching vacancies filled with fully certified teachers before the start of the 2024-25 school year, by position: Social studies, 89 percent filled General elementary, 88 percent filled English or language arts, 85 percent filled Physical education or health, 84 percent filled Mathematics, 83 percent filled Biology or life sciences, 81 percent filled Music or arts, 81 percent filled Computer science, 78 percent filled Career or technical education, 77 percent filled Physical sciences, 77 percent filled Special education, 77 percent filled ESL or bilingual education, 75 percent filled Foreign languages, 71 percent filled Other teaching positions not listed, 66 percent filled Seventy-four percent of public schools reported that they had difficulty filling one or more vacant positions with a fully certified teacher before the start of the school year, a decrease from 79 percent that reported having difficulty at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. The top two challenges public schools reported experiencing in trying to fill vacancies with a fully certified teacher entering the 2024-25 school year were: an overall lack of qualified candidates (64 percent) too few candidates applying (62 percent), a decrease from 70 percent in 2023-24. Among public schools having one or more teaching vacancies to fill in specific subject areas, some commonly reported subject areas with teaching positions reported as difficult to fill for the 2024-25 academic year, by school level, were: elementary: special education (74 percent of public schools), ESL or bilingual education (59 percent), and foreign languages (59 percent); middle/combined: special education (74 percent of public schools), physical sciences (71 percent), and foreign languages (69 percent); and high/secondary: ESL or bilingual education (69 percent of public schools), physical sciences (66 percent), and special education (66 percent). On average, public schools reported having five non-teaching vacancies and filling 73 percent of such positions before the start of the 2024–25 school year. The list below shows the percentages of public school non-teaching vacancies filled before the start of the 2024–25 school year, by position: Administrative staff, 92 percent filled Instructional coach, 88 percent filled Academic counselor, 84 percent filled Academic interventionist, 83 percent filled Technology specialist, 83 percent filled Medical professional, 82 percent filled Nutrition staff, 78 percent filled Mental health professional, 77 percent filled Classroom aide, 74 percent filled Custodial staff, 74 percent filled Tutor, 65 percent filled Other non-teaching staff, 64 percent filled Transportation staff, 60 percent filled Sixty-nine percent of public schools reported they had difficulty filling one or more vacant non-teaching positions before the start of the school year, a decrease from the 80 percent that reported having difficulty at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. Among public schools, the top non-teaching position reported as very difficult to fill before the start of the 2024-25 academic year was transportation staff (90 percent of public schools). Community Collaboration Forty-eight percent of public schools reported using a community school or wraparound services model in which a school partners with other government agencies and/or local nonprofits to support and engage with the local community (e.g., providing mental and physical health care, nutrition, housing assistance), a decrease from the 60 percent that used one of these models during the 2023–24 school year. Eighty-nine percent of public schools reported that services are available to their community through an existing partnership to provide community services, a decrease from the 94 percent that reported services were available during the 2023–24 school year. Sixty-one percent of public schools reported that mental health care services are available to the community through their school’s existing partnerships, a decrease from the 2023–24 school year (66 percent). Forty-six percent of public schools reported that nutrition/food assistance services are available to the community through their school’s existing partnerships, a decrease from the 2023–24 school year (55 percent).

Virtual reality game used to help students in science classes

Multilingual students face unique challenges that can hurt their performance in school. New methods of teaching may help close this gap, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

In the United States, English is the main language used in classrooms. Schools also tend to rely on spoken communication to teach and written exams to assess learning.

That can make it difficult for multilingual students to express themselves. This is especially true in science classes, with their specific terms and complex sentence structures.

So a UGA researcher developed an immersive virtual reality game to communicate scientific concepts to students in new ways.

Students were tested before and after they played the game either on a desktop or through immersive virtual reality, with researchers comparing their scores to see whether the game helped the students better grasp the material.

All the students’ scores improved after playing the game, and multilingual students performed as well as their English-speaking peers.

Visual cues, body movements provide alternate ways to learn concepts

The virtual reality game used visual, audio and body movements to give students multiple ways to learn and express their knowledge on a subject. Researchers referred to this as multimodal meaning-making, or using several ways of communicating to process and convey information.

The study suggests that being able to construct meaning from multiple methods is critical for multilingual students.

“Virtual reality offers meaning-making processes or meaning-making opportunities that go beyond just verbal communications,” said Ai-Chu Elisha Ding, lead author of the study and an assistant professor in UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education.

“Multilingual learners performed pretty well because they got the support they needed, and they had different ways to express their understanding beyond the typical ways that they did in the science classroom.”

Multilingual students could benefit from multiple ways of communicating

Outside of the classroom, people use more than their words to communicate. Hand gestures, facial expressions and body language all impart their own meaning in interactions.

These nonverbal cues are often overlooked in schools.

“In the U.S. education system, students mainly communicate their ideas through English,” said Ding. “Classroom interactions are also very verbal, meaning that students and teachers express themselves through written language or orally. That creates a lot of barriers for multilingual learners.”

Virtual reality can help overcome those barriers by helping to communicate ideas visually rather than just through words.

Virtual reality can add nonverbal cues to lessons

The lead researcher and her colleagues worked with a middle school science teacher and English as New Language teacher to develop a virtual reality game featuring content taught in the science classes. The game and the lessons are designed to help students learn science and develop their language skills at the same time. The study included 97 seventh grade students in an urban middle school in Indiana.

The researchers developed the game into two modes: one on a virtual reality headset and one on a desktop computer.

The game with the headset focused on visual and audio cues to give feedback and allowed students to interact with the virtual environment around them. The desktop game relied more on text to convey information and was designed to be less immersive.

"One of the key takeaways of the study is that teachers should pay close attention to using visuals and hand gestures to help students process information.” —Ai-Chu Elisha Ding, College of Education

Students were then tested on their knowledge of the material covered in the games, how they made connections between the concepts introduced and how they translated their thoughts into writing.

All students saw an improvement in their test scores. Multilingual students also performed just as well as students who only spoke English. Additionally, students who played the immersive VR game improved their test scores significantly more than the students who played the desktop game.

Observation is critical in science, and the virtual reality game put the students in an environment where they could study a topic in an immersive way, according to the researchers. The desktop mode couldn’t provide the same kind of experience, explaining why those students didn’t perform as well.

While virtual reality games aren’t available in every classroom, Ding emphasized that students can still benefit from teachers branching out into new teaching methods.

“Teachers can do a lot of different things to make this kind of nonverbal-based communications happen more in the classrooms,” Ding said. “One of the key takeaways of the study is that teachers should pay close attention to using visuals and hand gestures to help students process information.”

This study was published in Learning and Instruction and co-authored by Eunkyoung Elaine Cha, a doctoral student of UGA’s Department of Workforce Education and Instructional Technology. The study was funded by Ball State University through the Creative Teaching Grant.

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Journal

Learning and Instruction

DOI

10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.101999

Children’s participation in various early childhood care and education arrangements

A new NCES report, Early Childhood Program Participation: 2023, examines children’s participation in various early childhood care and education arrangements. Approximately 55 percent of children age 5 and under and not enrolled in kindergarten were in at least one weekly nonparental care arrangement, as reported by their parents. Among children with at least one weekly nonparental care arrangement, 66 percent were reported to attend day care centers, Head Start Programs, preschools, or prekindergartens, and other early childhood programs, 34 percent were cared for by a relative (relative care), and 18 percent were cared for in a private home by someone not related to them (nonrelative care).   Additionally, the average out-of-pocket child care expenses reported for children in relative care in 2023 was about $10.94, $16.16 for nonrelative care, and $21.32 for center-based care. In 2019, the average out-of-pocket child care expenses (adjusted to 2023 dollars) were $7.21 for relative care in 2019, $9.23 for nonrelative care, and $9.80 for center-based care. This report uses data from the Early Childhood Program Participation Survey of the 2023 National Household Education Surveys Program (ECPP-NHES: 2023), the first administration of the NHES since the COVID-19 pandemic. Download, view and print the report summary as a pdf file.  (412KB)

 

Students who feel more university connection may be more likely to binge drink

 

 Students who feel a sense of belonging at their university are more likely to binge drink than those who do not feel the same connection, according to a new study by researchers at Penn State, the University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Oregon.

In the study, published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, scientists — including researchers in the Penn State College of Health and Human Development — found that college students with “good” mental health who felt connected to their university were more likely to binge drink than those who did not feel as connected to their university.

Stephane Lanza, professor of biobehavioral health and Edna P. Bennett Faculty Fellow in Prevention Research, studied the topic with Danny Rahal and Kristin Perry when both were postdoctoral trainees in the Penn State Prevention and Methodology Training Program. The researchers examined the ways that both positive and negative aspects of mental health can contribute to the risk of binge drinking, cannabis use and nicotine use.

“In 2021, students at many universities were returning to campus after the COVID-19 shutdown — and some students were attending in-person college classes for the first time,” said Rahal, lead author of this research and assistant professor of psychology at University of California Santa Cruz. “Data from that time indicated that many students felt disconnected from their school. Universities wanted to foster a sense of connectedness among their students for many good reasons, but we wanted to know if there was something positive — specifically a sense of belonging — that is related to substance use. Our study showed that feeling connected to one’s university is associated with higher rates of substance use.”

The researchers examined data from 4,018 university students collected during the 2022-23 school year. Participants answered questions about substance use, their sense of belonging at their school and their mental health — specifically about anxiety, depressive symptoms, perceived stress, flourishing in life and confidence in their academic success.

A statistical modeling technique called latent profile analysis allowed the researchers to simultaneously account for all these measures by combining them to identify five profiles of student mental health. In this study, a student was considered to have good mental health if they had lower levels of stress, depressive symptoms and anxiety, as well as higher flourishing and academic confidence than their peers.

The researchers found that students with average or good mental health were more likely to have engaged in binge drinking in the past month if they felt connected to their university than if they did not feel that connection.

The researchers said this does not mean that connectedness is bad for students to experience; rather, the results are nuanced.

“We want to cultivate connectedness among students,” said Perry, assistant professor of family and human services at University of Oregon. “Connectedness gets them involved. It can be a really powerful protective factor against negative mental health outcomes and can help keep students in school. But connectedness at school can go hand in hand with binge drinking if there is a culture of drinking at the school.”

Though the researchers said they expected these results about drinking, they were surprised to learn that students with poor mental health who felt connected to their university were more likely to use non-vaped tobacco products than students with poor mental health who did not feel connected to their university. The results around cannabis were less conclusive, but the researchers said the trend was clear.

“Generally, students who felt connected to their university were more likely to use substances than disconnected students with the same level of mental health,” Rahal said.

While a sense of belonging was related to substance use, it could also be part of the solution, according to the researchers.

“Cultivating belonging for all students is an important way that universities can embrace diversity and help all students thrive,” Lanza said.

Though drinking is common on university campuses, many students believe that it is far more common than it is, the researchers explained. In this dataset, slightly fewer than one-third of students reported binge drinking in the last month. Despite the fact that two-thirds of students had not engaged in binge drinking, the researchers also found that students believed a typical student consumed three to five drinks multiple times each week. The researchers said this disconnect between perception and reality points to an opportunity to change the culture — by creating ample opportunities for all students to socially engage and participate in alcohol-free environments — so that alcohol feels less central to student life.

Minoritized college students, in particular, often face messages that make them feel unwelcome based on their race, gender, socioeconomic status or other factors, according to the researchers.

“We cannot expect students to stay enrolled unless they are engaged with the campus community,” Lanza continued. “If universities lose students from a specific group, the campus becomes less diverse, and the entire university community becomes less rich. Additionally, when members of those groups leave school, they miss educational opportunities and the earning potential that comes with a college degree. By providing all students with diverse opportunities to build a real sense of belonging at their universities, we can improve campus life while putting people on the path to a healthier life.”

The National Institute on Drug Abuse and Penn State funded this research.

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Journal

Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs

DOI

10.15288/jsad.23-00382 

Rise in English learner students in “new destination” states helps academic outcomes for existing students

English learner (EL) students represent the fastest growing student group in the United States over the past two decades, with numbers of EL students in public schools soaring in “new destination” states across the South and Midwest. Some commentators have expressed concerns about the possible adverse effect of immigrant students on current students if they require additional resources that are diverted from their peers.

However, a new study finds significant positive spillover effects of new EL students in these states on existing students’ test scores, especially in reading. The study was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. It was conducted by Sy Doan, Samuel Enrique Morales, Umut Ozek, and Heather Schwartz, all from RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy and research institute.

Looking at the impact of new EL students on the academic achievement of their peers in their first year in a new destination state, the authors found that the benefits are mainly concentrated among former or current ELs. They found no adverse effects on non-ELs.

“Our findings contradict the narrative that the arrival of EL students lowers student performance overall,” said study co-author Umut Ozek, a senior economist at RAND. “While new ELs may require additional educational resources initially, they do not harm the academic achievement of existing students.”

“In fact, our research suggests that incoming ELs could even improve the academic achievement of the existing current and former ELs in the first year, which might help close the gaps between ELs and non-ELs,” Ozek said.

The study is the first to examine the spillover effects of the large influx of EL students in new destination states over the past two decades. States that were below the national average in 2000 in the percentage of enrolled EL students account for 90 percent of the increase in EL students across the U.S. since then.

The authors analyzed student-level administrative data from Delaware covering all students in grades 4 through 8 enrolled in the state’s public schools between the 2015–16 and 2018–19 school years. The number of EL students in Delaware has increased seven-fold over the past 20 years.

Ozek noted that traditional destination states, such as California and New York, benefit from pre-existing infrastructure to accommodate newly arriving students that is unavailable or newly built in new destination states. EL policies and practices also vary greatly across states and school districts, and the composition of immigrants and refugees examined in prior research is likely different from that of the newly arriving EL students in new destination states.

“To be certain, a large influx of any population into a school system places strain on districts, as they have to grow to accommodate incoming students,” Ozek said. “And the specific needs of incoming students can trigger a host of necessary social and academic supports. But our study should assuage concerns by state and federal policy makers that large inflows of recent immigrants may be overwhelming school districts and harming classroom achievement.”

Study citation: Doan, S., Morales, S. E., Ozek, U., & Schwartz, H. (2024). Educational spillover effects of new English learners in a new destination state. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Prepublished October 9, 2024. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737241282412

Parenting programs help kids, but provide insufficient support for parents

Parenting programs that address both mental health and parenting skills can improve children’s development, but often fall short when it comes to offering effective mental-health support for parents, new research suggests.

“It’s a surprising contradiction,” said the study’s lead author, Marilyn Ahun, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University. “Our findings show the potential of multi-component programs, while revealing gaps that need to be addressed.”

The research team reviewed and analysed 25 studies from around the world, in collaboration with colleagues from Harvard, Kuwait and Emory universities.

The researchers, who published their study in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, found that children under three whose parents joined integrated programs developed better emotional and cognitive skills, compared to those who received no supports. However, mothers saw little to no relief from their depression symptoms. The authors noted that there are not enough studies assessing depression in fathers to know how programs impact their symptoms.

The insights could help inform the design of programs that better support parents and their young children during a period when children’s brains are most sensitive to experiences, said the researchers. They noted that even if children still benefitted when their parents received support on child-rearing, parental mental health has a strong influence on parenting practices and the outcomes for children.

Gap in mental health support for parents

Programs for parents of young children often address either child-rearing skills or mental health support. In integrated programs that cover both, the primary emphasis is on child-rearing skills, said the authors.

“Many of these programs only dedicate one or two sessions to mental health, which isn’t enough to help parents who are struggling,” said Ahun, who is also a Junior Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre.

“This is particularly concerning, as about one-in-four mothers and one-in-10 fathers experience depression during the perinatal period, making it difficult for them to provide the nurturing support their children need,” she added.

With more than 250 million children worldwide falling short of their developmental potential, the researchers say their findings offer insights into how best to improve family support during a critical phase of early-childhood development. 

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Journal

The Lancet

DOI

10.1016/S2352-4642(24)00134-2 

English-language textbooks: persistent pattern of stereotypical gender roles

 

Review of over 1200 English-language textbooks from 34 countries reveals persistent pattern of stereotypical gender roles and under-representation of female characters across countries

 

image: 

Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world.

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Credit: Jessica Ruscello, Unsplash, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

Gender biases around male and female roles and under-representation of female characters appeared in textbooks from around the world, with male-coded words appearing twice as often as female-coded words on average, according to a study published October 9, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lee Crawfurd from the Center for Global Development, United Kingdom, and colleagues.

School textbooks play an important role in shaping norms and attitudes in students—one reason why controversy over textbook content is high in many countries today. In this study, Crawfurd and colleagues investigated how gender norms are depicted in textbooks around the world.

The authors used a particularly large corpus of textbooks to conduct their analysis: 1,255 publicly available online English-language school textbooks spanning subjects and grade levels from grades 4-13 from 34 countries downloaded over 2020-2022. They compared textbook content with predefined lists of gendered nouns and pronouns (e.g. “Auntie/she/her/woman”) and investigated how often these gendered words were associated with key words used in previous studies relating to achievement, appearance, family, home, and work (e.g. “powerful/gorgeous/household/executive”) within the textbook. Finally, the authors compared their text analysis results with other measures of gender equality at the country level.

They found that on average across the full sample of textbooks, there were more than twice as many occurrences of male words (178,142) as female words (82,113), though there was considerable variation between countries. After adjusting for book length, grade, and subject, the countries with the lowest representation of women and girls were Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan, where fewer than 1 in 3 gendered words were female.

Across all countries, the adjectives most likely to describe only female and not male characters included “married”, “beautiful”, “aged”, and “quiet”. Verbs for only female characters included “bake”, “cook,” and “sang”. The adjectives most likely to describe male and not female characters included “powerful”, “rich”, “wise”, “certain”, and “unable”. Verbs for only male characters included “rule”, “guide”, “sign”, and “order”. Almost all of the individual achievement- and work-themed words showed a stronger association with male words than female words, and the individual appearance- and home-themed words showed a stronger association with female words than male words. The authors note that countries with textbooks containing a greater number of female characters also had stronger GDPs and more legal rights for women compared to countries with less female representation, though this is only correlation and cannot speak to causation.

The authors also note there are several limitations to this work—their tool was not able to assess non-text items (such as images) and was not always correct at parsing names (though the authors used manual validation where possible), and the analysis reflects a binary view of gender illustrated in the textbooks. Furthermore, this analysis is restricted to English language literature and therefore may not be generalizable to languages beyond English. However, the results suggest that combating gender biases in textbooks could potentially lead to real-world effects.

The authors add: “Our findings reveal a troubling reality: school books are perpetuating outdated gender stereotypes. Schools should broaden horizons not limit children's potential. It's crucial for policymakers and educators to address these disparities.”

The freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0310366

Citation: Crawfurd L, Saintis-Miller C, Todd R (2024) Sexist textbooks: Automated analysis of gender bias in 1,255 books from 34 countries. PLoS ONE 19(10): e0310366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0310366