Churned Out

There are times when students sit in class, taking notes as they learn from the professor and their classmates. There are also times when students learn by going out into the world and partnering with clients to tackle real-world issues, like this past fall in Professor Fernando Reimers’ project-based course, Education Policy Analysis and Research in Comparative Perspective. Working in teams, students met with an education client, identified a challenge that client was grappling with, dug into related research, and then offered practical suggestions for what could make a difference.

One team included Ed School students Ashley Lai, Lala Aliyeva, and Nina Nedrebo, and Kennedy School student Mitsuhiro Iwakura. All former teachers, the team decided to focus fairly local: in Holyoke, a city of about 40,000 in Western Massachusetts, where the school district has been in receivership since 2015 and 83.6% of students are low income.

The issue they looked at was one the district has been struggling with — a high absenteeism rate for students considered transient, meaning they enrolled in the district late or left before the school year ended because of migration or homelessness. These are students, the Ed School team noted in their final report, who “have been historically underserved and politically marginalized due to limited school resources.”

For 2023, Holyoke’s “churn rate,” the term the Massachusetts Department of Secondary Education (DESE) uses to track these students, was 14.1% — twice the statewide churn rate.

The Ed School team wanted to figure out why Holyoke’s rate was higher than the state average, and what the district could do to change course. For several on the team, an interest in digging into this issue was partly personal.

“The topic was important to me because I used to work as a teacher in Holyoke for a couple of years with Teach For America, and I taught fifth grade math in a part of Holyoke that was probably among the most economically depressed,” Nedrebo says. “Attendance was a really big deal for the school that I worked in and it was a really high priority to emphasize every kind of incentive that we could around attendance.”

She says that after working with students from diverse backgrounds, and especially a largely Puerto Rican population facing socioeconomic challenges, and with the district being in receivership, she wanted to better understand why some students were less motivated to come to school on a consistent basis.

“Why is it that some students face more challenges than others? The students in Holyoke were so bright and so capable, so why is it much more challenging for them,” she wondered. “It didn’t seem just that students here should be disproportionately affected by pressures that other districts were also facing.”

What was happening in Holyoke schools was also personal for Lai.

“Immigrants’ stories and struggles are often ignored in the school system despite education being a right for all students, disregarding documentation status,” she says. “As an immigrant myself, I remember the difficulty my family had handling the transition between schools as we learned to navigate the U.S. school system. My family leaned on school staff and family friends to help us understand the necessary timeframes and documents needed to apply to public schools. Having gone through this, I wanted to focus on immigrant students.”

As a former world history teacher in Massachusetts, Lai says she also struggled when students came and went throughout the school year and remembers how difficult it was to not have a full understanding of a transient student’s previous assignments, learning needs, or abilities.

“This was especially true if the student came from another county,” she says, or if their IEP or 504 plans or past report cards were unavailable. “Language barriers made introducing transient students into the class even more difficult.”

Hands On in the Field

Initially, the Ed School students dug into research to learn more about issues facing transient students and the schools they attend, and then they went to Holyoke to talk with key educators and city leaders. They interviewed the district’s family engagement coordinator, the mayor, the superintendent, and the district’s data person. At DESE, they worked with a member of the board who has ties to Holyoke and had been on the city’s school board

What they found was that low attendance for transient students in Holyoke was rooted in three main areas: students from families struggling financially often moved because of homelessness or natural disaster, making it difficult for schools to stay in touch or for students to have consistent learning; there were limited transportation options, especially when students missed the school bus; and students who had difficulty adjusting to a new school or language felt isolated and unmotivated.

The team brainstormed several options for addressing these issues. Ideas included providing free public transportation passes to transient high school students, giving them another option when they missed the school bus; expanding social emotional learning (SEL) for teachers and for students; adding a state-funded transient student information coordinator who would help families and students with wraparound services, especially around mental, behavioral, and emotional health; and building an information-sharing platform accessible to all schools and organizations that work with transient students in the city.

What the HGSE students concluded is that no one policy alternative would be able to fully solve the problem of high transient student absenteeism. Instead, says Nedrebo, “The policy alternative we ended up recommending was meant to address what we considered the systemic root of the problem, which in the end, we considered to be lack of coordination.” What might work, they shared with their client in Holyoke, including in a report, was “a bundled approach that combines SEL programs, wraparound services, and an information-sharing platform. This comprehensive recommendation addresses family- and school-based antecedents.” 

Looking back, the students discovered surprises while working in the field.

Aliyeva was surprised to find that the work expanded beyond the educational sphere. “It began to address broader public, social, and economic challenges to develop effective solutions. This reinforced my understanding that policymaking is a multidimensional process, requiring the collaboration of diverse stakeholders from various fields to propose comprehensive policy recommendations,” she says.

For Iwakura, working in a U.S. city helped him see how different the issue is in his home country, where he taught high school before becoming a student at Harvard.

“The biggest surprise I experienced is that the main root cause of absenteeism is so different between the United States and Japan,” he says. “In Japan, the main root cause of absenteeism is not the transiency of the student, but the mental health issues students face because of the highly competitive situation of the entrance examination for high school or college.”

Lai says she was constantly surprised by how much compromise was needed to figure out solutions, especially when they talked about what remedies were feasible given the district’s financial constraints.

“As a teacher, my first instinct was always to try to include all initiatives that would be beneficial to the student,” she says. “Yet, as a consultant, I had to worry about all stakeholders’ viewpoints as well as school leaders’ priorities. While the school system is meant to serve students, it was the first time I had to consider how students were just one stakeholder group.”

Nedrebo learned how important it is for anyone making decisions to think about the unknowns and hidden obstacles that students face in their lives that can spill over into issues like going to school on a regular basis.

“If you look at Holyoke as a municipality, I think what really affects students who have been displaced or who have moved is psychosocial adjustment challenges, but also challenges like a lack of housing,” she says, citing shelter shortages. “We also know that transient students are affected by the fear of ICE” agents out in the community and outside schools. “That’s also a really compounding challenge for Holyoke.”

The students say that tackling these challenges and working in the field with an actual client has made them better educators. (It also made them published authors: each team wrote a chapter about their work that was published in Global Challenges, Local Solutions: Advancing Equity, Innovation, and Sustainability in Education, which was co-edited by Reimers.)

Aliyeva says that after graduation, she will work on policy for the Ministry of Education and Science in Azerbaijan, armed with better negotiation skills. “The invaluable knowledge, experience, and motivation I have gained from Professor Fernando Reimers has inspired me to actively participate in shaping policies that will improve educational equity and create greater opportunities for students in my home country.”

For Iwakura, the opportunity also translates into a possible new focus once he graduates this spring. 

“Currently I’m a high school teacher in Japan, but I’m thinking about shifting my career from teacher to a policymaker to address the absenteeism and truancy of students in Japanese high schools,” he says. “This study about Holyoke has been so transformative and informative for me.”