Flush with federal dollars, new and robust offerings have been open to a wide swath of students starting in the summer of 2021 and will continue in many districts this year. But the trend could stop as that pandemic relief money runs out.

Some districts, including , have summer programs, inviting only those students identified as struggling, while others can’t even reach all the children on that list — at least not during the summer. 

Baltimore City Public Schools saw some of the most staggering losses in mathematics at the fourth-grade level — on the 2022 NAEP exams compared to those in 2019 — tying it with Cleveland for worst-in-the-nation.

Baltimore’s and Cleveland’s decline in fourth-grade math scores was nearly double the average eight-point drop among the 26 big city districts that took the tests and dwarfed the average five-point drop of fourth graders nationally. 

Eighth graders in both cities also saw their math test scores plummet: They dropped nine points in Baltimore and eight points in Cleveland. These losses are on par with the rest of the nation: The major cities’ average and the national average for eighth grade math both declined by eight points. 

The 76,000-student Baltimore district has been working for years to remediate those who have fallen behind. It offers extensive summer programming for children at every grade level — more than 22,000 seats from pre-K through 12th grade for summer 2023 programming, up by 2,000 from the year before, district administrators said. But only 15,000 children participated last year, meaning thousands of seats were left open. 

And even with the additional slots, the number might not match the need as it relates to this subject: Just on recent state exams. At 23 Baltimore schools, not a single student tested proficient in math.

Administrators said their district’s summer program was developed, in part, in response to recent NAEP scores. But they know some children who might have benefited from the program will be left out because of budgetary restrictions. 

“Of course, we would love to be able to offer every student an opportunity to engage in learning during the summer,” said Laurie-Lynn Sutton-Platt, director of summer and extended learning.

The upcoming program can’t be a catch-all, but it can help, district administrators said. 

“It’s a start,” said Kerry Steinbrenner, Baltimore’s director of mathematics. “Summer is an ideal opportunity for students to continue to develop their math skills and we don’t want to miss that … We want to try to impact as many kids as we can during that time.” 

Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which serves , is also working to undo damage done by the pandemic. Some 4,200 students are enrolled in its five-week summer learning program with more added to the list every day. The district hopes the figure will reach the height it did last year at 6,500. 

But it can’t guarantee participation. 

“We are working to reach all of the students we can during the summer, but it is dependent upon students and families electing to enroll,” said chief communications officer Roseann Canfora. “We cannot require them to do so.”

Although driven by poor reading, not math scores, some third graders in Tennessee are summer programming this year if they performed poorly on that portion of the state exam and are at risk of being held back.

In the long term, average for fourth and eighth graders on the NAEP between the early 1970s and 2012. Between 2012 and 2020, just before the pandemic struck, they largely flattened while achievement gaps between high and low scorers — a persistent equity issue with NAEP — widened. And then the unprecedented drop in the 2022 scores brought COVID’s impact into full relief. 

How long it will take children to recover from that — or what it will take for more students to reach grade-level proficiency in math — are big questions, but recent research has shown the sharp decline in math proficiency could have lifelong negative consequences. 

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, executive director and founder of Beyond100K, a national network focused on preparing and retaining 150,000 excellent STEM teachers in 10 years, believes wealthier children have long made up what was lost. 

But others will never reach that goal, she said. 

“What’s different isn’t the kids: It’s their experience during the pandemic and the support they’ve received since,” she said. “We could have corralled all our resources to accelerate the mental, emotional and academic recovery of all kids — and if we would have, we’d likely have created the next great generation — but we haven’t. At least not yet.”

The federal government gave schools $190 billion in COVID aid with $3 billion available for summer learning. Experts say the type and quality of the summer programming counts, while some researchers assert that even that unprecedented overall sum is not enough to reverse the level of learning loss. 

Melodie Baker, national policy director at , an organization that promotes math policies that support equity in college readiness and success, said students need engaging and meaningful content that helps them make sense of the material and retain what they’ve learned. This is true whether it’s delivered during the school year or the summer, she said. 

“It’s also important to recognize the role of teacher diversity as a long-term strategy for improving student engagement and learning outcomes,” Baker said. “A diverse teaching staff can provide students with a range of perspectives and experiences that can enhance their understanding of the material and make it more relevant to their lives.”

Some 110,000 of New York City’s roughly 1 million students will participate in summer learning this year, a spokeswoman told �鶹��Ʒ. NYC students slid nine points on the fourth-grade NAEP mathematics tests and four points on the eighth-grade exams. 

One program, , will focus on grade-level instructional priorities for grades K-8, helping students build math foundations, fluency and conceptual understanding to support learning recovery, acceleration and enrichment, she said. It includes assessments meant to identify weaknesses and help teachers narrow learning gaps ahead of the upcoming school year. Other programs include project-based learning and financial literacy.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where fourth graders saw their math scores drop 13 points and eighth graders 11 on the 2022 NAEP exams, plans to grow its summertime math offerings for middle schoolers heading into ninth grade.

Mark Bosco, the district’s senior administrator for expanded learning and partnerships, said the four week-long program is expected to swell from 400 to 1,000 participants this summer. 

“This is designed for students who find math abstract,” Bosco said. 

Pre- and post-assessments reveal improvement: Children who stayed for the 16-day duration who could not answer a single pre-algebra question correctly at the start of the program could successfully answer five or six questions out of 20 at the end, Bosco said. 

He described the summer program as hands-on and project-based. In one instance, he said, reflecting on last year’s program, students were made to go through the steps of finding and financing a car, learning about credit applications, compounding interest and loans. 

“It really got them thinking about how math can be so important in everyday life,” he said. “The kids are applying concepts in pretty advanced ways.”

Chicago Public Schools is encouraging schools to implement math camps this summer for rising third and fourth graders in addition to programs for students in middle and high school, a spokesman said. Fourth graders in the district saw a 10-point decrease on math NAEP scores. The loss was worse for eighth graders, who suffered a 12-point decline. 

More than 73,000 of Chicago Public Schools’ engaged in at least one summer program last year. Math enrichment at the district includes the Summer of Algebra and Math Camp programs. A group of elementary schools also will host a Computer Science/Engineering Camp for students in kindergarten through fifth grade. 

Despite the success of some programs, funding remains a concern: Canfora, of the Cleveland schools, said federal COVID relief funds likely will not be available for summer 2024. Her district is building next summer into this fiscal year’s general fund budget, which will be submitted to the school board this month. 

Aaron Philip Dworkin, chief executive officer of the , said districts should always work to establish and strengthen relationships with outside partners to build better programs and to secure funding so they are not as reliant on federal dollars. 

“What do you do when the money runs out?” he asked. “We will figure it out. Everyone will contribute what they can and we will make it work.” 

Some campuses could see those numbers rise further still: In May, a , which kept millions of people from seeking in the United States, is set to expire — a development that comes amid a crippling teacher shortage in parts of the nation. 

Newcomers’ impact on social services, including schools, has long been a talking point for politicians. It’s also been posited as by New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, who began upon their request: His administration cited their rising numbers as a key factor in this month’s , including to the . 

The White House has taken note of the educational imperative. President Joe Biden, in his March 9 budget address, proposed devoting in fiscal year 2024 to help these students gain English proficiency — a over the current amount. He’s also pushing for an additional $90 million to build multilingual teacher pipelines through Grow-Your-Own initiatives and $10 million for post-secondary fellowships to further bolster the educator pool.

But it’s unclear if this new round of funding will meet the needs of one of the fastest-growing student groups in the country. English learners made up 10.4% of total U.S. enrollment in 2019, according to the most recent available , up from 8% in 2000.

To gauge how these students are being served, �鶹��Ʒ reached out to 13 school districts across the country representing hundreds of thousands of English learners requesting information about their numbers and their teachers’.  

ESL Student to Teacher Ratio

Responses received over the past several months show dramatic differences in student-teacher ratios ranging from roughly 4:1 in San Diego, 9:1 in the Houston Independent School District and 11:1 in both Chicago and Cypress Fairbanks, which also serves Houston. It’s approximately 23:1 in Los Angeles and Las Vegas’s Clark County schools, and 30:1 in Baltimore City, though school officials there say it’s usually closer to 40:1. 

“Most teachers are begging for there to be a cap on classes, but there usually isn’t,” said Pamela Broussard, a long-time educator who serves new arrivals just outside Houston. The magic number for her, she said, is 15, but the U.S. Department of Education does not regulate this figure, a spokesman said: It’s a state and local issue. 

A manageable class size, experts and educators say, depends on students’ age, English proficiency, level of trauma and the instructional model used to help them, among other factors, including the teacher’s own training.

In the classroom 

When queried about their experiences by �鶹��Ʒ on a Facebook group for English language instructors, dozens of educators replied, describing a vast array of conditions in the classroom.

Those with caseloads hovering around 20 or 30 generally found their workload manageable while those responsible for 75 or more multilingual learners found it untenable.  

Some say they have supportive administrators, make great use of related technology, employ top-notch curriculum and work alongside highly trained peers in a single building — with the help of paraprofessionals. 

Others say they are the only such teacher in their district, work across several campuses and struggle with scheduling, plus administrative duties and paperwork. Among the most exasperated are those who have little assistance and serve students of varying age, need and ability. 

“No limit for me,” wrote one Oklahoma teacher. “I’m personally responsible for around 80 and do paperwork and supervise over an additional 30 to 40.”

Jody Nolf, a literacy engagement specialist based in Palm Beach County, Florida, said the appropriate class size depends on whether, for example, students missed years of schooling or were unable to read in their home language — all of which can slow their progress.  

“Some teachers do well with 20 to 25,” said Nolf, who works with East Coast school districts. Others, she said, barely manage 10 to 15 when students’ needs are great.   

“Few of us, however, teach in ideal circumstances,” she said. 

If the primary purpose of English language instruction is for children to make gains in reading, writing, speaking and listening, Houston’s Broussard said, students need time to tackle all four tasks. 

“Smaller class sizes give children time to talk,” said the teacher, whose charges, many of whom hail from Cuba and Venezuela, have lived in the United States for less than six months. 

By the numbers 

New York City Public Schools reported roughly 150,000 multilingual learners among some in the 2021-22 school year. The figure excludes charters — and the who’ve enrolled in the past year. 

Some 77,000 of these children were identified as newcomers, meaning they had three or fewer years of English language learner status. Roughly 9,500 of the city’s teachers had either a bilingual and/or English-as-a-Second-Language credential. 

Teachers in bilingual education classes instruct students in two languages while ESL teachers focus on English — as do those labeled . 

Georgia’s Cobb County serves more than 12,000 multilingual learners — more than 1,300 are newcomers — with 274 ESOL teachers. More than 1,800 other educators have some certification in this area, the district said, but it’s not clear how many teach English exclusively to these students.

Baltimore also serves a substantial number of newcomers, defined by that district as those who have been in U.S. schools for less than a year and are at the lowest English proficiency level. More than 1,500 of the district’s nearly 9,000 multilingual learners fit this category.  

Brevard Public Schools in Florida has 723 such students out of 3,181 multilingual learners. It has 27 English to Speakers of Other Languages teachers to serve them. Seven positions remain vacant. The district also has 55 bilingual assistants — 16 spots remain open. 

Students assigned to Clark County’s Global Community High School, designed to serve newcomers, enjoy a 10:1 student-teacher ratio: It has just 165 students and 16 teachers. Another 3,792 newcomers are elsewhere in the Las Vegas school district. 

While many school systems across the country employ specially designated staff to help immigrant students build their initial inroads to learning, other districts, including Brevard, provide none. Houston ISD has 4,125 newcomer students and no specifically assigned staff to serve their unique needs.

Teacher training 

As with class size, there’s little agreement regarding what constitutes teacher preparedness, a fact evidenced by vastly different state standards. Some educators who responded to �鶹��Ʒ’s Facebook queries said they earned their credentials after passing a single test — many sought additional training afterward — while others had to complete numerous courses and spend many hours in the classroom working with multilingual learners. 

No matter how they win the designation, said Diane Staehr Fenner, founder and president of SupportEd, which aims to provide educators with the skills and resources they need to serve these children, these instructors must understand how language works, use culturally relevant and responsive materials and have expertise in crafting and implementing effective lesson plans. 

They must also collaborate effectively with other teachers, design appropriate classroom assessments and know how to interpret the scores their students earn on the state-wide English language proficiency exams that determine whether they are eligible for services. 

Staehr Fenner credits the Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages International Association’s P-12 for the criteria. She said these educators must also protect students’ legal rights; they should “really empower multilingual learners and all of the teachers who work with them.”

Schools are legally obligated to enroll all children who live within their district boundaries, , according to the 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe. Almost a decade earlier in 1974, the high court ruled in that schools must provide appropriate services to students who do not yet speak English. 

But multilingual learners face ongoing discrimination: Districts across the country have been sued for failing to and these children. 

Boston Public Schools has been under court order since 1994 to direct a more equitable share of its federal funding toward this group, but last month a longtime legal monitor said Boston school leaders recently for the records documenting how it spent the money. 

Learning a new language   

The goal of providing appropriate services is to move newly arrived and non-English speaking students to the place where they are proficient and can learn in English without additional support.

Tim Boals, founder and director of WIDA at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, said studies show it takes either four to seven or five to seven years for a child to exit ESL services. But there are variations: Some children graduate from such programs in three years, he said. For others, it takes longer. 

“Being younger is assumed to be a big advantage, but that’s not always the case,” he said. “If kids don’t come with basic reading skills in their home language, that can slow things down. Arriving in high school can also be hard since kids have only four to five years typically to ‘catch up’ and accrue credits.”

Added time is unlikely in many classrooms as teacher shortages persist: While the English learner population is growing, staff are . 

Officials from Baltimore City Schools, who said they travel all over the country looking for staff and also recruit from overseas, hope to hire at least 25 more teachers in the coming months to serve this student group. 

The need was so drastic last fall that administrators and other leadership staff went back into the classroom to teach, with some staying on for months. 

“Every year has been hard trying to find teachers,” said Lara Ohanian, the district’s outgoing director of differentiated learning. “After the pandemic, with this national teacher shortage, we have seen even more challenges.”

Ohanian said the student teacher ratio varies throughout the year and is more typically 35 or 40:1. 

It can be difficult for schools to plan or predict class size as many children arrive long after the academic year begins, said Ferlazzo, of Sacramento, a city that has become from all over the world.

“Schools didn’t know a Russian invasion of Ukraine would cause an influx of refugees late in the school year,” he said. “Or know the Afghan government was going to collapse.”

Florida’s Duval County Public Schools has 9,597 multilingual learners and 2,747 teachers to support them: 329 held an English to Speakers of Other Languages K-12 certificate, which requires passing an ESOL K-12 Area test, and much of the remainder had an ESOL endorsement, which demands 300 hours of specialized courses. 

The district had 3,199 newcomer students and 77 teachers to support them. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, has 6,786 in grades 9 through 12 alone — and 19 dedicated staffers at three high schools to help them.

The Paradise Valley School District, which serves students in the Phoenix area, has 2,024 multilingual learners this school year and 69 properly endorsed teachers who teach targeted English language development. 

McAllen Independent School District, located on the Texas-Mexico border and long accustomed to serving newcomers, is home to 7,338 English learners and has more than 550 teachers to serve them. 

A trio of reactions to new arrivals 

The resources allotted to these students might depend on their reception by their school district: In some cases, Sacramento’s Ferlazzo said, immigrant students are considered an inconvenience. 

“Their needs are not prioritized,” he said. “That might result in putting (English learners) into classes with English proficient students with no extra support at all.”

Ted Hamann, professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, has long studied children who were educated in both America and Mexico as their families traversed the border. 

He said schools and communities faced with a significant uptick in new arrivals react in three ways: through a spirit of welcome, disquiet or xenophobia. 

In the first instance, people regard the influx as a positive development, a reflection of their town’s attractiveness to newcomers. In the second case, locals note the change with curiosity or uncertainty, but general neutrality. 

The last reaction is hostile, in which newcomers are cast as a threat or contaminant. 

“What is striking,” Hamann said, “is that in most of the communities we work in, we see all three.”

On campus, it’s up to school leaders to determine which reaction is dominant, he said, adding our duty to educate multilingual learners in this country should hinge on a belief that all children deserve investment, no matter where they come from — or where they are headed. 

“We owe in the present to these kids a future that may or may not be geographically local,” Hamann said. “What kind of world do we want to live in — where we have reciprocity to each other, or we don’t? Can we be generous to each other or is it this desperate struggle for survival?” 

The decision comes with a contentious cap on the number of students in the classroom — topping out at 25 at the high school level — with the final goal to be reached by 2027. 

The agreement also increases the size of the panel that votes on education policy, partly an effort to curb the mayor’s power while including more parent voices. But many say the changes are not enough, that the current system cannot account for the needs of such a wildly diverse group of students.

Tajh Sutton, twice elected to the Community Education Council in District 14, which covers large swaths of Brooklyn, said she would love to abandon mayoral control in favor of a system that would allow communities to develop programs that suit their specific needs.

“The mayor is not deeply invested in the majority of our kids,” she said, adding the current system makes it difficult for residents to get his attention. “We need more student, parent and staff voices. We have some really good ideas about how to improve public education as a whole and we really want to see citywide systematic change.”

Paullette Healy, of Bay Ridge, said Adams is too focused on improving the gifted and talented program, neglecting others that impact a far greater number of students, including her son, who has autism. The mayor’s four parent appointees to the expanded Panel for Education Policy must include at least one, like Healy, whose child attends a District 75 school, which serve students with the most significant disabilities. Parents of children with any kind of disability and those in bilingual or English as a second language programs must also be newly represented.

“There are a barrage of special ed concerns,” said Healy, who sits on the Citywide Council on Special Education. “Gifted and talented is not mandated. Special ed is.” 

And while the cap is popular with teachers and the union for making classrooms more manageable and for requiring a sizable staffing increase, skepticism remains about its funding — and whether the shift will bring about major educational gains. 

Adams initially denounced the idea, saying before the vote that, “unless there is guaranteed funding attached to those mandates we will see cuts elsewhere in the system that would harm our most vulnerable students in our highest need communities — including the loss of counselor positions, social workers, art programs, school trips, after-school tutoring, dyslexia screenings, and paraprofessionals.” 

New York City Schools Chancellor David C. Banks agreed, worried class size will become too high a priority in a district facing other pressing challenges, including a 40 percent absenteeism rate.

“Make no mistake, it will lead to large cuts in these critical programs,” he said. “This should not be a choice that school leaders have to make.”

But the mayor softened his stance Friday. 

“We are optimistic that there is a way forward on key elements, including ensuring we achieve the shared goal of smaller class sizes without forcing the city into a fiscal crisis and impacting programs for our most vulnerable students,” he said in a statement.

State Sen. John C. Liu, chairman of the Senate’s New York City Education Committee, said the cap will, in fact, be funded by $1.6 billion in additional money NYC schools will receive as part of long-awaited action on . Liu called the move, “a huge victory for NYC school kids that will finally fulfill the long-overdue constitutional duty of providing students with a sound, basic education.”

Adams may have made peace with the legislature’s plans, but Mona Davids, president of the New York City Parents Union, has not. She chided lawmakers for putting too many constraints — and demands — on the mayor, undermining his authority and making him responsible for a costly directive. 

“The only people who benefit from this bill are the United Federation of Teachers,” she told the . 

Farah Despeignes, president of the Community Education Council in the Bronx’s District 8, warned the class size reduction alone won’t translate to improved results. 

“If you have a mediocre teacher, they won’t be any more innovative with a smaller class,” said the former educator. “But if you have a well-trained teacher, you get more out of it: This teacher is already doing good work and will have more time with the students. I don’t want people to think outcomes will automatically be great with a smaller size class. That’s not the only issue.”

In addition to the specific parent representatives, the mostly appointed Panel for Education Policy, or PEP, will grow from 15 to 23 members. Also, the mayor and borough presidents will no longer be permitted to remove those members who don’t support their initiatives as has . And PEP members will serve one-year terms and can be renewed. 

While some embraced the change as a check on Adams’s power, Jonathan Greenberg, president of the Community Education Council in District 30 in Queens, said many parents would like to see a new model, a break from mayoral control — and from the 32 community school boards that preceded it. 

“There is an urgent need for a task force to study and recommend a new alternative,” he said. “I would like to see a more democratic system where those responsible for the system are chosen for that purpose.” 

The state has been granting mayoral control over the city’s schools since 2002 when it first went to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. This year’s decision was delayed as lawmakers considered additional parental involvement, a core feature of the previous, more decentralized but .

Sutton, of Brooklyn, remembers clearly the school board misconduct that rocked her community when she was a student. Even so, she believes mayoral control is far too centralized. 

Each of the three mayors given this privilege, she argued, have used children as political pawns to further their own ambition. She faulted Bloomberg for pushing for privatization with public and charter schools occupying the same buildings and said while Bill de Blasio campaigned on student equity, he couldn’t close the opportunity or achievement gap. Adams may be only months into his first term but Sutton sees the mayor and his chancellor as already showing an affinity for charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run.

But no matter who is in office, parents remain sidelined, Sutton said, frustrated about the removal of mask mandates, the lack of reliable transportation for special needs children, unaddressed language barriers and a host of other concerns. 

“A lot of parents have come to see mayoral control as a huge hoop we have to jump through,” she said, adding that parents must not only advocate at the school level, but at the district and city level, hoping to catch the mayor’s attention on social media. “It shouldn’t be this one politician who is completely inaccessible.”

Despite a steep pandemic-related decrease in the student body, in the NYC school system in 2020-21. Of those, 13.3 percent were English language learners, 20.8 percent were students with disabilities and 73 percent were economically disadvantaged. 

More than 40 percent of students were Hispanic, 24.7 percent were Black, 16.5 percent were Asian and 14.8 percent were white: More than 138,000 were in charter schools. 

The four-year graduation rate was 81.2 percent in August 2021 with a 4.8 percent dropout rate that year. 

The schools are run on a $38 billion budget.