Erica L. Green

Jaylon would cycle through two schools, receive 30 suspensions and rack up 70 unexcused absences. In one of Wakes’ clashes with Flint Community Schools, she delivered administrators a warning: “You can’t keep suspending him because soon, you’re going to have to suspend the whole school system.”

Five years after Michigan switched Flint’s water supply to the lead-saturated Flint River from Lake Huron, the city’s lead crisis has migrated from its homes to its schools, where neurological and behavioral problems — real or feared — among students are threatening to overwhelm the education system.

The contamination of this long-struggling city’s water exposed nearly 30,000 schoolchildren to a neurotoxin known to have detrimental effects on children’s developing brains and nervous systems. Requests for special education or behavioral interventions began rising four years ago, when the water contamination became public, bolstering a class-action lawsuit that demanded more resources for Flint’s children.

That lawsuit forced the state to establish the $3 million Neurodevelopmental Center of Excellence, which began screening students. The screenings then confirmed a range of disabilities, which have prompted still more requests for intervention.

The percentage of the city’s students who qualify for special education services has nearly doubled, to 28%, from 15% the year the lead crisis began, and the city’s screening center has received more than 1,300 referrals since December 2018. The results: About 70% of the students evaluated have required school accommodations for issues like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, also known as ADHD; dyslexia; or mild intellectual impairment, said Katherine Burrell, the associate director of the center.

“We have a school district where all that’s left are damaged kids who are being exposed to other damaged kids, and it’s causing more damage,” said Stephanie Pascal, who has taught in Flint for 23 years.

Medical experts say there is no way to prove that the lead has caused new disabilities. Pediatricians here caution against overdiagnosing children as irreparably brain damaged, if only to avoid stigmatizing an entire city. The State Department of Education, in battling the class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the New Jersey-based Education Law Center, enlisted an expert who testified that the real public health crisis was not the lead-contaminated water but the paranoia of parents, students and teachers exposed to it.

But Burrell said that proving the cause of the students’ problems was not the point. Many of the problems uncovered by the lead testing could certainly have existed before.

“We’re not here to prove causation,” she said. “We’re here to provide answers.”

And school officials said the problems would almost certainly get worse because there was no safe level of lead exposure.

“What the research says is that as they get older, and the cognitive demands get harder, we will start to see the demands get higher, and the resources aren’t going to be there,” said Lisa A. Hagel, the superintendent of the Genesee Intermediate School District, the county that includes Flint.

A school system begins falling further behind.

Long before Flint’s water system was contaminated, its schools exemplified the struggles of urban districts — as its tax base shrunk, its student population drifted to charter schools and its core public schools were left with a small but troubled and impoverished student body.

In the 1960s, the city enrolled nearly 50,000 students in more than 50 buildings. Today, it educates 4,500 students on 11 campuses. A 2017 report found that 55% of Flint’s students attended charter schools — the second highest charter enrollment in the country.

When the lead crisis began unfolding in 2014, the tiny school district had a $21 million budget deficit that required it to cut more than 200 staff members, including special education teachers. It was transferring millions of dollars from its operating budget to pay for special education, and in violation of federal law, it was segregating special education students from their peers for most of the school day. Flint’s teachers were and are among the lowest paid in Genesee County, though a new contract has pushed starting salaries to $35,339 a year, from $32,000 in 2014.

In the 2013-2014 school year, 15.5% of the district’s special education students dropped out of high school, compared with 8.63% statewide. In 2014-2015, 13% of special education students in the school system were suspended or expelled for more than 10 days — more than five times the statewide rate.

Then came the lead crisis. The class-action lawsuit, filed in 2016, accused the city, the county and the Michigan Department of Education of ignoring dismal outcomes that have worsened after Flint’s children were exposed to lead.

The partial settlement that established the neurodevelopmental center was a “critical first step,” said Kristin Totten, a lawyer with the ACLU, but the lawsuit is demanding that every Flint student be assessed and get needed intervention.

“This was an unprecedented crisis that warrants an unprecedented response,” she said.

The suit accuses the school systems of violating federal and state laws, including the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, by failing to identify students who could qualify for special education services, by failing to provide the mandated instructional services to those who do qualify and by punishing children for disability-related behavior.

Students were denied assessments for education plans or behavioral intervention plans, and then were segregated from their peers, secluded and restrained, repeatedly sent home from school, expelled or arrested, the lawsuit said.

“The blame for this crisis lies on the state, and instead what we’ve seen is that the children are shouldering the blame,” said Lindsay Heck, a lawyer at White &amp; Case, a New York-based law firm that has worked on the case pro bono.

Flint Community Schools said in a statement that it was “deeply committed to the well-being and success of all students, and continues to add staff and enhance special education services, and to work with the Michigan Department of Education to seek ways to improve the district’s finances long term.”

The Michigan Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

The Genesee school district maintains it has done all it can to help identify and serve students affected by the crisis in Flint. Under the state’s education system, that district acts as an intermediary between the state and the 21 school districts in the county, including Flint, providing administrative services and dispensing special education funding from the federal government. It also operates early childhood centers and schools attended by Flint students.

School officials say that funding is disbursed equitably, but they acknowledge it is not enough. Congress promised to cover 40% of the cost of special education, but Washington funds only 14 to 17%.

“It’d be safe to say there’s not enough allocation, much less when you have a situation like this,” said Steven Tunnicliff, the associate superintendent of Genesee Intermediate School District, referring to the lead crisis.

Wakes believes she lost four babies — she miscarried two sets of twins, in 2015 and in 2017 — to the water crisis, and said she is determined not to lose another. She pulled her son out of Flint Community Schools in 2017 after she said the district ignored her pleas to accommodate his ADHD, which his pediatrician said was exacerbated by elevated lead levels.

Now 10, he attends the Michigan Virtual Charter Academy, an online school, in his living room. On a recent day, he fired up his computer and made a few clicks before the screen flashed a celebratory “Assignment Complete,” then shut down abruptly. The assignments meet the requirements of a 10-year-old boy who is repeating fourth grade: They contain three- or four-letter words that he can read and they pose no more than eight questions, and then he can take a break to run outside or play the video game Fortnite.

“I’m just keeping him online until we can move the hell out of Flint,” his mother said.

Flint’s teachers struggle to cope.

In 2016, months after the water contamination was made public, the Flint superintendent at the time, Bilal Tawwab, told Congress that schools were bracing for an “evolving, educational emergency.”

“We need resources to measure the intellectual and emotional damage done to each and possibly every child,” he said.

Instead, as the district’s special education rate rose by a third, and the Michigan Education Department demanded more budget cuts and a salary freeze. Last school year, when one in five students qualified for special education services, one in every four special education teaching positions was unfilled.

Bethany Dumanois, who has taught in Flint for 25 years, works two jobs to keep teaching because she said she cannot abandon children whose discolored, rash-covered skin and chunks of exposed scalp haunt her. In the earlier days of the crisis, she spent class time addressing questions from her students about whether they would die from the water like their class lizard, a bearded dragon, did.

“There was very minimal training in dealing with the signs and symptoms of lead poisoning,” she said. “They gave us a couple of brochures and called it a day.”

Teachers refer students for special education assessments, knowing the schools lack psychologists to conduct them. In small acts of defiance, they withhold their signatures from bureaucratic documents rejecting students from special education services.

Dumanois said her first graders were having “extreme” reactions to insignificant issues, knocking over desks and throwing chairs. Recently, she said, three-quarters of her class could not recall five words they had gone over every day for two weeks.

Instead of investing in more teachers, social workers and special education aides, she said the district had pushed laptop computers and iPads, “just jumping on any bandwagon, trying to sugarcoat what’s happening with these kids.”

On a recent night at a local restaurant, Pascal, the 23-year Flint teaching veteran, vented over the “injustices everywhere.” The district adopted a new reading program with no money to buy the instructional materials. She had been asked to identify a handful of her students for a new behavior support program, but wants to include all 21.

She thinks about quitting, but said she refuses to leave another vacancy for the district to fill.

“If you were driving down the road and saw a kid walking from a car injured and bloody, do you ignore it?” she said. “That’s what I’m seeing.”

The district’s new superintendent, Derrick Lopez, said in a recent interview with a local television station that the district was in desperate need of help, pointing out that the 28% of students who have special education plans was double the state average. He also expressed the need to “actually pay our teachers a living wage.”

The Michigan Legislature’s recently passed budget provides a modest increase in education spending, but lawmakers rejected a proposal by the state’s new Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, to give additional funding to schools with high concentrations of special education students, like Flint.

State Rep. Sheldon Neeley, D-Flint, said the one-time infusion of extra money would be spread across schools in Genesee County.

“Instead of being delivered to us,” he said, “it’s going to be delivered around us.”

As families flee Flint’s schools, money drains away.

Flint’s schools are now in a downward spiral. The district is funded on a per-pupil basis, but it is hemorrhaging students, about 1,000 since 2014, when the crisis began. Two-thirds of children living in Flint are in charter schools or schools run by the Genesee Intermediate School District.

Angy Keelin wanted to stay in Flint Community Schools, where her blind son, Averey, was progressing in a program for visually impaired students, but then it ended abruptly. She said she was forced to follow the program 10 miles from her home to a Genesee County school.

It has not gone smoothly. Last year, she requested an aide after watching her son walk into buildings and almost fall down a flight of stairs. This year, Averey, now in third grade, has been taught by a long-term substitute who cannot teach him to read Braille, as required by his federal education plan, Keelin said.

The year after Averey was exposed to lead, he had to repeat kindergarten, and Keelin fears a Michigan law that calls for students to repeat third grade if they are more than one grade level behind in reading. “I don’t want him to be continuously held back,” she said.

Jeree Brown left the Flint district in 2017, but said she still sees the effect of her son Jabari’s time at Eisenhower Elementary School. She learned Jabari had autism six months after Flint’s lead-tainted water began to flow.

His exposure was confirmed, along with his autism, but the school denied him an individualized education program, or IEP, three times, then told her that such a plan would require him to be placed in an “autism room” apart from his peers, Brown said. The plan called for him to receive speech and occupational therapy services three or four times a week, but he got them once or twice a month.

Now 8, Jabari has transferred to a charter school and receives a wealth of autism services. He said his favorite teacher “takes me for breaks to see if you’re happy or sad.”

Some families see no way out. In Michigan, students are granted broad access to school choice, but schools can reject a student for being suspended.

Heather Reynolds’ 12-year-old son, Ethan, had a mood disorder and ADHD that required him to have an aide, but his short-staffed school did not supply one last spring on a day that Ethan encountered a bully in a bathroom and agreed to trade his dinosaur for the other boy’s pocketknife. The other student then reported Ethan for having the knife, and he was nearly expelled.

Ethan, who had also tested positive for lead, told his mother he made the exchange because he “didn’t want to be punched again,” she said. This summer, after an evaluation by the neurodevelopmental center, he was given a diagnosis of autism.

The expulsion was reversed, but the suspension went on his record.

“Once they get a suspension, the good schools don’t want them,” Reynolds said. “Then there’s only one school choice, which is the worst school.”

‘The science of trauma and resilience’

Tucked away in one of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the lead crisis is a 36,000-square-foot early childhood center that many look to for hope.

Educare Flint, funded largely by private money in response to the crisis, opened in December 2017 to serve 220 students ages 0 to 5 with lead exposures among the highest detected. The school is part of a national network that uses research into early childhood education, brain development and the achievement gap between rich and poor to shape its approach. The $15 million facility includes mindfulness rooms and a generous playground.

For parents, the opportunity to send their children to Educare is some consolation for the outrages in their lives — like paying $100 to $200 a month for water they do not believe is safe.

Lydia Willis said her 9-month-old son was “getting so much here, including filtered water, that may not be possible at home.”

These children keep pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha optimistic. Though her research discovered the lead in their blood in 2015, she is looking on the bright side. The crisis has forced a hard conversation about Flint — “toxicity” existed here long before the water crisis, she said.

Since the crisis, partnerships have drawn in millions of dollars to expand early childhood education and health care services, and the fallout has created a road map for other cities — like Newark, New Jersey — that are on the brink of a similar crises.

“We’re leaning on the science of trauma and resilience,” she said, “because kids across this country are waking up to the same nightmare.”

This article originally appeared in

In Flint, Lead Crisis Moves From Homes to Schools

FLINT, Mich. — Nakiya Wakes could not understand how her wiry, toothy-grinned 6-year-old had gone from hyperactive one school year to what teachers described as hysterical the next. Then, in 2015, the state of Michigan delivered a diagnosis of sorts: Wakes’ neighborhood’s water — which her son, Jaylon, had been drinking and bathing in for more than a year — was saturated with lead, at some of the highest levels in the city.

In a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content, the department asserted that the universities’ Middle East program violated the standards of a federal program that awards funding to international studies and foreign language programs. The inquiry was part of a far-reaching investigation into the program by the department, which under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has become increasingly aggressive in going after perceived anti-Israel bias in higher education.

That focus appears to reflect the views of an agency leadership that includes a civil rights chief, Kenneth L. Marcus, who has made a career of pro-Israel advocacy and has waged a yearslong campaign to delegitimize and defund Middle East studies programs that he has criticized as rife with anti-Israel bias.

In this case, the department homed in on what officials saw as a program that focused on the region’s Muslim population at the expense of its religious minorities. In the North Carolina program’s outreach to elementary and secondary school students, the department said, there was “a considerable emphasis placed on the understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East.”

Too few of the Duke-UNC programs focused on “the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yazidis, Kurds, Druze and others,” the department said.

With its actions, the department entered the debate over Israel and Palestinians that has roiled campuses around the country.

The department’s action “should be a wake-up call,” said Miriam Elman, an associate professor at Syracuse University and executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes the boycott-Israel movement that has animated campus activism across the country. She added, “What they’re saying is, ‘If you want to be biased and show an unbalanced view of the Middle East, you can do that, but you’re not going to get federal and taxpayer money.’ ”

Palestinian rights groups accused the Education Department of intimidation and infringing on academic freedom.

“They really want to send the message that if you want to criticize Israel, then the federal government is going to look very closely at your entire program and micromanage it to death,” said Zoha Khalili, a staff lawyer at Palestine Legal, one such group. The department’s intervention, she added, “sends a message to Middle Eastern studies programs that their continued existence depends on their willingness to toe the government line on Israel.”

In a letter to university officials, the assistant secretary for postsecondary education, Robert King, wrote that programs run by the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies appeared to be misaligned with the federal grant they had received. Title VI of the Higher Education Act awards funding to colleges “establishing, strengthening and operating a diverse network of undergraduate foreign language and area or international studies centers and programs.”

The Education Department “believes” the Middle Eastern studies consortium “has failed to carefully distinguish between activities lawfully funded under Title VI and other activities” that are “plainly unqualified for taxpayer support,” King wrote.

The letter, published this week in the Federal Register, said that the consortium’s records on the number of students it had enrolled in foreign language studies — a cornerstone of the federal grant program — were unclear and that “it seems clear foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities.”

King wrote that the department believed other offerings, such as a conference focused on “love and desire in modern Iran” and another focused on Middle East film criticism, “have little or no relevance to Title VI.” The department wrote the consortium’s programming also “appears to lack balance.”

The department also criticized the consortium’s teacher training programs for focusing on issues like “unconscious bias, serving LGBTIQ youth in schools, culture and the media, diverse books for the classroom and more.” They said that it had a “startling lack of focus on geography, geopolitical issues, history, and language.”

The administration ordered the consortium to submit a revised schedule of events it planned to support and a full list of the courses it offers and the professors working in its Middle East studies program. The department also directed the consortium to demonstrate that it had “effective institutional controls” to stay compliant with the administration’s interpretation of the Higher Education Act. The universities were given until Sept. 22, only days before the department is scheduled to approve funding Sept. 30.

A spokesman for Duke declined to comment, referring questions to the University of North Carolina. A spokeswoman for UNC acknowledged receipt of the letter.

“The consortium deeply values its partnership with the Department of Education and has always been strongly committed to complying with the purposes and requirements of the Title VI program,” the university said in a statement. “In keeping with the spirit of this partnership, the consortium is committed to working with the department to provide more information about its programs.”

To advocacy groups enmeshed in academic battles over Israel, the new investigation was not surprising.

Last year, the department reopened a case into anti-Jewish bias at Rutgers University that the Obama administration had closed with no finding of wrongdoing. In reconsidering the case, Marcus said the Education Department would be using a State Department definition of anti-Semitism that, among other things, labels “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” anti-Jewish bigotry, suggesting that it had been adopted by his office. The Education Department has not adopted that definition.

In June, DeVos said she had ordered an investigation into whether the Duke-UNC consortium had misused any of the $235,000 it received in Title VI grants, including to sponsor an event in March called “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities.” Rep. George Holding, R-N.C., had requested that DeVos investigate whether federal funding was used to host the conference, which constituents had said was rife with “radical anti-Israel bias.”

Holding said the conference featured active members of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel — known as BDS — and featured panelists who “distorted facts and misrepresented the complex situation in Gaza.” He said a video shown at the conference featured a performer who sang a “brazenly anti-Semitic song.”

But some groups came to the defense of the Middle East studies consortium. Tallie Ben Daniel, research and education manager at Jewish Voice for Peace, a liberal group that advocates Palestinian rights, said the investigation was the latest attempt by the Trump administration “to enforce a neoconservative agenda onto spaces of academic inquiry and exploration.” She called the consortium’s curriculum “ rich and diverse.”

To critics like Daniel, the targeting of the UNC-Duke program appeared to be a continuation of efforts that predated the Trump administration. A group founded by Marcus, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, has pressed Education Department and Congress for years to crack down on Middle East studies programs that the center claimed promoted an anti-Israel bias.

Elman, the professor at Syracuse, said the department’s scrutiny of the programs was long overdue.

“To get Title VI, you really have to strive for viewpoint diversity,” she said. “This is what our students want. They don’t want to be indoctrinated. They want both sides. It’s possible to do that and still make people uncomfortable.”

Before joining the Education Department, Marcus had aggressively lobbied for the Higher Education Act to crack down on Middle East studies programs and criticized both the Education Department and Congress for failing to hold institutions accountable for violating the law’s “diverse perspectives” requirement.

In 2014, he wrote an opinion article that assailed the Title VI program for “being used to support biased and academically worthless programming on college campuses,” leaving students and faculty with opposing views “ostracized and threatened.”

“Aside from their intellectual vapidity,” Marcus wrote, “many of these programs poison the atmosphere on campus.”

He called on the department to establish a complaint process that would prompt extensive reviews of entire programs like the one being undertaken into UNC and Duke.

U.S. Orders 2 Universities to Recast Tone on Israel

WASHINGTON — The Education Department has ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and Christianity in the region.

The students who lost their aid are the unlikely victims of an effort by the union, the National Education Association, to stop DeVos from delaying a rule written by the Obama administration to bolster consumer protections for students taking online courses at schools not based in their states.

DeVos had warned that states were not ready to enforce the rules, and that the teachers union was refusing to listen to those legitimate concerns. A judge sided with the union, leaving the students without aid.

“We tried to delay the implementation of the 2016 rule because of its many flaws — including this consequence for California students,” said Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for the department. “Unfortunately, the NEA filed a lawsuit, and a judge ruled that we have to implement the rule.”

The union accused the department of a vindictive maneuver to punish its members, regardless of the costs to students.

“The Department of Education’s determination to harm students, either through its incompetence or vindictiveness, is unacceptable,” Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, said in a statement. “We remain willing to help the department implement the protections in a way that does not jeopardize critical loans and Pell grants for students.”

The 2016 regulations, issued in the waning hours of the Obama administration, sought to ensure that students taking such courses would not be left saddled with debt but gave no assurance that the courses would provide employment in the states in which they reside. The rules, part of a series of measures to challenge predatory for-profit colleges, also required schools to disclose whether their online programs were under investigation by the state attorney general or a college accreditor, and to set up a complaint system for students enrolled in out-of-state institutions.

DeVos, acting on the concerns of higher education institutions, sought the delay, citing “widespread concern and confusion in the higher education community.” The groups who had appealed to her for more time specifically warned of California’s vulnerability.

But the teachers unions did not buy it. They feared a delay would leave California teachers seeking online educational credits vulnerable to predatory attacks with no guarantee that their online programs would meet state standards for teacher certification. In August 2018, the National Education Association and the California Teachers Association sued DeVos, saying the department had not followed the proper administrative procedures in delaying the rules.

They won. In April, a federal district court judge in California ordered that the Obama rule go into effect.

On Monday, the Education Department published a notification announcing that California was out of compliance with the rule and suspended financial aid to about 80,000 students in the state who were enrolled in “distance learning” classes.

And while the Obama-era rule was aimed at for-profit colleges that specialize in online offerings, the California students affected attend private and public nonprofit institutions that are widely regarded as high-quality leaders in online learning, such as Arizona State and Western Governors universities. California students enrolled in online courses at for-profit colleges are covered by a state law.

The American Council on Education, an association representing more than 1,700 college presidents, sent a letter to the department on Thursday pressing for emergency action.

Noting the imminent start of the academic school year, the organization said that its members were scrambling to help students who were already enrolled in classes, and had suddenly lost access to Pell grants and federal student loans.

“In short, the likely outcome will be that thousands of students are either forced to drop out of, or never begin, postsecondary education,” the group wrote. “We have already heard from several institutions that will do whatever they can to address any gaps in student funding that occur as a result, but this is at best a temporary solution.”

The American Council on Education was among those that first wrote to the department in early 2018 warning that the Obama-era rule could affect states, including California, that were not in full compliance.

In anticipation of the rule’s 2018 start date, every other state moved to create a complaint process or enter into multistate reciprocity agreements that would bring them into compliance with the rule. California did not.

“This is a debate about obscure regulations, but one with immediate, real world consequences,” said Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the council. “The irony is that a lawsuit that was intended to protect students has had the unanticipated effect of taking money away from 80,000 students without any warning.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/us/politics/california-financial-aid.html" id="c4d923e7-9d23-3751-ab2d-367a7c11ce93">The New York Times</a>.

Thousands of California Students Lose Financial Aid in Regulatory Fight

WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of students in California enrolled in online classes at out-of-state colleges abruptly lost federal financial aid this week after they found themselves in the crossfire of a regulatory fight between Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the nation’s largest teachers union.

The scene might be expected on a special occasion at any other public school. At LeBron James’ I Promise School, it was just Monday.

Every day, they are celebrated for walking through the door. This time last year, the students at the school — James’ biggest foray into educational philanthropy — were identified as the worst performers in the Akron public schools and branded with behavioral problems. Some as young as 8 were considered at risk of not graduating.

Now, they are helping close the achievement gap in Akron.

The academic results are early, and at 240, the sample size of students is small, but the inaugural classes of third and fourth graders at I Promise posted extraordinary results in their first set of district assessments. Ninety percent met or exceeded individual growth goals in reading and math, outpacing their peers across the district.

“These kids are doing an unbelievable job, better than we all expected,” James said in a telephone interview hours before a game in Los Angeles for the Lakers. “When we first started, people knew I was opening a school for kids. Now people are going to really understand the lack of education they had before they came to our school. People are going to finally understand what goes on behind our doors.”

The school opened with some skepticism — not only for its high-profile founder, considered by some to be the best basketball player ever, but also for an academic model aimed at students who were, by many accounts, considered unredeemable.

“We are reigniting dreams that were extinguished — already in third and fourth grade,” said Brandi Davis, the school’s principal. “We want to change the face of urban education.”

The scores reflect students’ performance on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment, a nationally recognized test administered by NWEA, an evaluation association. In reading, where both classes had scored in the lowest, or first, percentile, third graders moved to the ninth percentile, and fourth graders to the 16th. In math, third graders jumped from the lowest percentile to the 18th, while fourth graders moved from the second percentile to the 30th.

The 90 percent of I Promise students who met their goals exceeded the 70 percent of students districtwide, and scored in the 99th growth percentile of the evaluation association’s school norms, which the district said showed that students’ test scores increased at a higher rate than 99 out of 100 schools nationally.

The students have a long way to go to even join the middle of the pack. And time will tell whether the gains are sustainable and how they stack up against rigorous state standardized tests at the end of the year. To some extent, the excitement surrounding the students’ progress illustrates a somber reality in urban education, where big hopes hinge on small victories.

“It’s encouraging to see growth, but by no means are we out of the woods,” said Keith Liechty, a coordinator in Akron public school system’s Office of School Improvement. “The goal is for these students to be at grade level, and we’re not there yet. This just tells us we’re going in the right direction.”

But Liechty, who has been with the district for 20 years, said that the students’ leaps would not be expected in an entire school year, let alone half of one. “For the average student,” he said, “your percentile doesn’t move that much unless something extraordinary is happening.”

On a tour of the school Monday, Michele Campbell, the executive director of the LeBron James Family Foundation, pointed out what she called I Promise’s “secret sauce.” In one room, staff members were busy organizing a room filled with bins of clothing and shelves of peanut butter, jelly and Cheerios. At any time, parents can grab a shopping bin and take what they need.

Down the hallway, parents honed their math skills for their coming General Educational Development exams as their students learned upstairs.

Campbell arrived to a classroom where a student and teacher were facing off.

“You’re being too aggressive!” the student snapped at Angel Whorton, an intervention specialist.

There was a pause, and the two burst into giggles, breaking character in a role-playing assignment.

“Good; that’s how I need you to use your words,” Whorton said to the boy, who is awaiting a disciplinary hearing.

Campbell smiled, “There’s magic happening in that room.”

Unlike other schools connected to celebrities, I Promise is not a charter school run by a private operator but a public school operated by the district. Its population is 60 percent black, 15 percent English-language learners and 29 percent special education students. Three-quarters of its families meet the low-income threshold to receive services from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

I Promise students were among those identified by the district as performing in the 10th to 25th percentile on their second-grade assessments. They were then admitted through a lottery.

“These were the children where you went and talked with their old teachers, and they said, ‘This will never work,’” Campbell said. “We said, give them to us.”

They are called the “Chosen Ones,” an ode to the headline that donned James’ first Sports Illustrated cover when he was a junior in high school, and which he later had tattooed across his shoulder blades.

Students here are aware that they are part of something special. “We get to have fun, and have opportunities that other kids don’t have,” said Kamari Dennis, a fourth grader.

The school is an extension of James’ work in his hometown, Akron, where his family’s foundation has been active for seven years. The I Promise program supports about 1,100 other students in third through 10th grade across the Akron public school district, with mentoring, college and career preparation and other resources estimated at $2.6 million for this school year. All of the students in the program and the school that meet certain academic criteria will receive a full college scholarship to the University of Akron.

But the I Promise School was a recognition that the foundation’s community services were not enough. They needed to reach students earlier. They secured an old district office building that served as a holding place for schools in transition, poured in $2 million and counting for improvements and reopened it in seven weeks. The school opened in July 2018 and is expected to serve 720 students in third through eighth grade by 2022.

The school’s $2 million budget is funded by the district, roughly the same amount per pupil that it spends in other schools. James’ foundation has provided about $600,000 in financial support for additional teaching staff to help reduce class sizes, and an additional hour of after-school programming and tutors. It also covers the cost of all expenses in the school’s family resource center, which provides parents with GED preparation, work advice, health and legal services, and even a quarterly barbershop.

The foundation’s support affords I Promise more resources than the average school, but Davis, a veteran principal in the district, said the school values things that no money could buy.

“It doesn’t take money to build relationships,” she said. “It doesn’t take money for you to teach students how to love.”

The school negotiated with the Akron Education Association for an extra hour a day and an extended year to put into place programs intended to address students’ social and emotional needs.

Pat Shipe, the president of the association, said the union was proud of the collaboration and “cautiously optimistic” about its outcomes.

“While this school is in its infancy, we look forward to an extended review of the many indicators, which will confirm any growth, understanding that one or two tests do not tell the whole story,” she said.

On a recent morning, students spent the first hour getting ready for the day in a gathering that is called an “I Promise Circle.” By the end of the circle, a girl who was upset about a run-in with her bus driver and another girl who had dozed off were squealing happily at the end of the game Down by the Banks.

“Everything is strategic to transform the way our day goes,” said Nicole Hassan, a liaison from Akron Public Schools who oversees I Promise’s trauma-informed curriculum.

The school’s culture is built on “Habits of Promise” — perseverance, perpetual learning, problem solving, partnering and perspective — that every student commits to memory. The slogan “We Are Family” is emblazoned on walls and T-shirts.

Nickole Wyatt, whose son Ti’Jay Wyatt is in fourth grade, said she had felt unsupported ever since she became a teenage mother. “It took me coming here to realize what family even is,” she said.

Wyatt, who is taking classes at the school to get her high school equivalency diploma, said I Promise saved not only her son’s education but her own life.

“I was skeptical even of my own life, wondering, ‘Am I even worth fighting for?” she said. “When I come here every day, I know it’s going to be OK.”

Vikki McGee, who runs the school’s family resource center, said the center’s existence conveyed that the school was about something much bigger than a basketball star: “This is about fighting for generations.”

James has visited twice since the school year started, but he is everywhere — on murals, on wallpaper, on video messages. He comes up often when students reflect on their educational experience.

“One time, LeBron wrote us a letter, and I knew it was real because I saw the paper was signed in pen,” said Vikyah Powe, a fourth grader. “That encouraged me.”

While James called the school “the coolest thing that I’ve done in my life thus far,” he said he could take credit for only a small part of what was happening.

“I had the vision of wanting to give back to my community. The people around every day are helping that vision come to life,” he said. “Half the battle is trying to engage them and show that there’s always going to be somebody looking out for them.”

Lining the walls of the school’s vast lobby are 114 shoes, including those worn during the 2016 season when James led the Cleveland Cavaliers to the NBA championship, a reminder that he once walked a path similar to these students. James was also considered at risk; in fourth grade, he missed 83 days of school.

Nataylia Henry, a fourth grader, missed more than 50 days of school last year because she said she would rather sleep than face bullies at school. This year, her overall attendance rate is 80 percent.

“LeBron made this school,” she said. “It’s an important school. It means that you can always depend on someone.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/12/education/lebron-james-school-ohio.html" id="9349bafb-5cb2-302d-a7a9-af893ddea8e0">The New York Times</a>.

LeBron James Opened a School That Was Considered an Experiment. It's Showing Promise.

AKRON, Ohio — The students paraded through hugs and high-fives from staff, who danced as Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” blared through the hallways. They were showered with compliments as they walked through a buffet of breakfast foods.

LeBron James Opened a School That Was Considered an Experiment. It's Showing Promise

DeVos will join Republican lawmakers in championing legislation that would allow states to opt into a program that provides individual and corporate donors dollar-for-dollar tax credits for contributing to scholarship programs that help families pay private-school tuition and other educational expenses. The federal program mirrors those already operating in more than a dozen states, like Arizona and Florida, where money flows to nonprofit organizations that fund private-school vouchers for low-income students. But the program would also allow states the flexibility to fund other programs, like apprenticeship, dual enrollment, after-school and remedial programs.

In an announcement Thursday, DeVos called it a “bold” proposal that gives “hundreds of thousands of students across the country the power to find the right fit for their education.”

“The biggest winners will be America’s forgotten children, who will finally have choices previously available only for the rich, the powerful and the well-connected,” she said.

While the program is meant to offer a more politically palatable alternative to budgetary proposals by the Trump administration to create a national voucher program by diverting federal funding from public schools, public school advocates denounced it as a backdoor way to generate voucher dollars if states choose to primarily use the program for private school tuition scholarships.

JoAnn Bartoletti, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, called the proposal “particularly tone deaf” as school leaders across the country struggle to retain teachers who are fed up with low pay and declining work conditions.

“Mobilizing behind a scheme to further starve public schools and 9 in 10 American students of the resources they need is not only unresponsive but insulting, and it reflects this administration’s persistent disdain for public education,” she said.

The proposal also worried conservatives and DeVos’ school choice allies, who believed it amounted to federal overreach.

The Heritage Foundation, which has advocated several voucher policy initiatives, said the program could invite further regulations, impede further tax overhauls and was out of the federal government’s jurisdiction.

Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the proposal sought to “skirt the control problem” by making it optional and swapping vouchers for tax credits, but still invited federal encroachment.

“The credit would spur people to demand their states participate, and as more schools benefited from federally connected scholarships, all schools would be financially pressured to use them,” he said in a statement.

Under the program, individuals would be allowed to contribute up to 10 percent of their adjusted gross income, and they would be able to give to any program in the country. Businesses would be allowed to give up to 5 percent of their net taxable income. States would have full discretion to determine the programs and students eligible for the scholarships.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the sponsors of the legislation, the Education Freedom Scholarship and Opportunity Act, said the program respected both federalism and public education. He also said he believed that the program would help public schools because their programs would be eligible for the funds. Competition, he said, helps them improve.

“This legislation doesn’t take one penny from any public school in America,” he said. “What it does is add $100 billion worth of new pennies to create scholarships and expand opportunities.”

Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., will sponsor the legislation in the House, and said it answered President Donald Trump’s call in his State of the Union address to “pass school choice for America’s children.”

“This is the way Washington should get involved in education matters,” he said.

Congressional Democrats swiftly rejected the legislation as a nonstarter.

Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va., who is chairman of the House Education Committee, said Democrats were spending their energy on issues like reversing what he called the chronic underfunding of public schools.

“House Democrats will not waste time on proposals that undermine public education,” he said.

In a statement, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the senior Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, called the proposal “dead on arrival.”

“Secretary DeVos keeps pushing her anti-public school agenda despite a clear lack of support from parents, students, teachers and even within her own party,” Murray said. “Congress has repeatedly rejected her privatization efforts, and she should expect nothing less here.”

On hand at the announcement Thursday were students who flourished in schools they attended with vouchers or tax credit scholarships.

“While education freedom changed my life, there are many, including some of my friends and family members, who are continually denied that right,” said Walter Banks, who participated in the Ohio scholarship program and is now enrolled in college. “I still go and visit some of the people that I grew up with, in prison, and we talk about some of the things we used to do, but because of a proper education I was able to escape that fate.”

Sam Myers, who has Down syndrome and also graduated from a private school thorough Ohio’s program, said, “School choice helped my dreams come true.”

“I have a job, I do things with my friends and family because of the skills I learned,” Myers said.

Cruz said he anticipated a political fight. He said he hoped to tap Democratic constituencies like blue-collar unions that are invested in issues like workforce development with an additional $5 billion in the bill that would fund similar scholarships for adult programs. He also promoted a last-minute amendment he proposed to the federal tax law passed by Congress in 2017 that expanded 529 college savings plans to cover expenses for private primary and secondary education. The amendment required a late-night, tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence.

Carl Davis, research director for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, noted that the new tax credit would be extremely generous in providing a 100 percent tax break, especially because the new tax law eliminated some incentives for charitable giving. “Now they want to put a supersized one back into the code,” he said, “but only if you donate to the cause they’ve cherry-picked for you: private K-12 schools.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/us/politics/devos-tax-credit-school-choice.html" id="58e69666-80f7-38b4-af4b-1f68ab9306e5">The New York Times</a>.

DeVos Backs $5 Billion in Tax Credits for School Choice

WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday pitched a $5 billion federal tax credit that would fund scholarships to private schools and other educational programs, throwing her weight behind what will be a difficult legislative undertaking to fund the Trump administration’s signature education initiative.

DeVos, long a proponent of school choice, has made little progress in pushing a signature initiative. Her budget proposals, which have sought to fund private school vouchers and public charter schools, have failed to garner support among Democrats or Republicans in Congress.

WASHINGTON — Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday plans to back a proposal for a $5 billion federal tax credit for donations to scholarships for private schools and other educational programs, according to a senior Education Department official.

Erica L. Green

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