Santa Fe/ State Sen. Howie Morales: A-F School Grades Still a Puzzle
By Milan Simonich [Santa Fe Bureau for the Texas-New Mexico Newspapers Partnership]
Farmington Daily Times
November 14, 2012
State Sen. Howie Morales is the leading critic of New Mexico's A-F grading system for public schools.
Morales says the system is arbitrary and often demoralizing to students and school staffs.
He provided his latest example of failings in the grading system when staff members of New Futures School appeared Wednesday before a legislative education committee.
New Futures, an alternative school in the Albuquerque district, is open to all pregnant students and students who are parents.
Amid questions about how young mothers are faring in class work, Morales had a question about bonus points that New Futures received as part of its school grade.
Does New Futures offer sports programs? asked Morales, D-Silver City.
No sports, the school staff said.
Yet the state Public Education Department, in grading New Futures, credited it for having athletic programs.
"This school received bonus points for sports and activities," the PED stated in its rating.
Morales for nearly a year has said the PED's school ratings are confusing and flawed.
The bonus for New Futures demonstrates how perplexing the grading system is, Morales said.
Overall, with bonus points included, New Futures received a C from the state.
The education committee on Thursday afternoon will receive an update on school grading from Hanna Skandera, secretary-designate of public education.
Like her boss, Gov. Susana Martinez, Skandera is a champion of the grading system. Both say A-F grades provide a clear means of identifying which schools are doing well and which need extra help.
Morales said the grading system is anything but clear.
One lingering issue for him is the volatility of the ratings. Various schools lost two letter grades in six months, between a practice round and the first official rankings last summer. The ups and downs are jarring, especially because years of data are supposed to figure into a school's grade, Morales said.
He said he has no problem with the concept of grading schools in straightforward fashion. But, Morales said, the methods of the PED in arriving at grades are almost impossible for school staff to understand.
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Taos/ 3 Taos Schools Lose Free Lunches
By Matthew van Buren
Taos News
November 15, 2012
After more than a decade of free student meals district-wide, students at Taos High School, Chrysalis Alternative School and the Taos Cyber Magnet School will soon be required to pay.
Eligible students will continue to receive free and reduced-price meals, but free breakfasts and lunches will no longer be provided to the entire student populations of the three schools as of Nov. 26.
Full-price breakfasts will cost $1.25, and reduced-price breakfasts 30 cents; full-priced lunches will cost $2.50, and reduced-price lunches 40 cents.
An announcement from Student Nutrition Coordinator Mary Ann McCann states that the district is taking the action "with dismay" after providing free meals to students for the past 12 years.
- "This program, referred to as 'Provision 2' under the National School Lunch regulations required the district to establish a base year of income eligibility that has been used since 2001," the announcement states.
- "This year the district was required to re-establish a new base year."
Multi-family applications for free and reduced-price meals were distributed to all families with children in the district; McCann said district staff encountered a lot of resistance in trying to get the applications returned, and many came back incomplete.
Letters went out last week to parents and guardians, informing many that their application for free or reduced-price meals were denied either because their income exceeds limits or their application was incomplete.
Superintendent Rod Weston said demographics in the district have also changed, with a lower percentage of students living in poverty now than a dozen years ago.
To be eligible for school-wide free meals, 75 percent or more of a student population must be living in poverty; McCann told the school board Tuesday (Nov. 13) that returned applications from Taos High put that number at 64 percent this year.
Weston said he suspects many families that were struggling when the last "base year" was established may have had to leave Taos when jobs became even more scarce due to the recession.
"That's the only explanation we can come up with," he said.
McCann said she is disappointed with the action, saying "we've got a huge percentage" of families that are eligible for reduced-price lunches. She added that she believes the rules under which the district must operate its nutrition program are too rigid and that feeding students should be a higher priority.
"It's very frustrating to me," she said. "I just have a real broken heart over it."
The district is warning that the applications may negatively affect other sources of school funding, as well.
- "The information provided by the Multi-Family Applications for Free and Reduced-Price Meals is the 'backbone' for federal dollars for the district," McCann's announcement states.
- "In most cases, state and private grants use aggregate information from the applications as a mechanism to fund many scholarships, grants and programs."
Weston said the applications have an impact on the federal Titles funding the district receives.
"We'll get less federal money for academics and less federal money for technology, possibly," he said.
McCann told the board district staff members are still looking at how to fill the resulting funding gaps.
"We're talking millions of dollars," she said. "I've lost a lot of sleep over this."
McCann said she's not ready to give up on free lunches at Taos High yet.
"We're going to do it again next year to build up a base year for the high school," she said.
Families and community members with questions may contact McCann at (575) 758-5214.
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ABQ/ Ray Nance: NM Coalition of Charter Schools 2012 Teacher of the Year
By Elaine D. Briseņo
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
November 15, 2012
Ray Nance always found himself teaching, whether it was about rock formations nearby, something he had read or to colleagues within his field of engineering.
But almost three decades ago when he entered college, he had no intention of becoming a teacher. His plan was to become an engineer and to work his way up into a management position. He was well on his way but realized he wasn't at all satisfied with his work. He decided it was time to switch careers.
"No matter what I did," he said. "I ended up teaching it to other people. That's what I do."
A good friend of his even nicknamed him "the professor."
"No matter where we go, I'm talking about something," he said. "Like how those rocks formed."
Nance decided to turn his natural talent into a career, and he became a high school teacher. He is now at the ASK Academy charter school in Rio Rancho, where he teaches an introductory engineering class and robotics. His dedication has earned him the honor of being designated the New Mexico Coalition of Charter Schools 2012 Teacher of the Year.
Nance was nominated by Paul Stephenson, a co-founder of the charter school, who is also a teacher. In his nomination letter, Stephenson praised Nance for including in the curriculum people who are working in the field. Recently, 12 engineers from Intel brought real problems they were experiencing at their workplace and asked students to help come up with solutions. Nance also has ties to local colleges and other organizations.
Nance was a teacher in Carlsbad when he decided to take the job at ASK Academy. He said the switch has allowed him much more academic freedom, which allows him to teach in a more collaborative fashion.
- "I rarely lecture anymore," he said. "I spend a lot of time discussing things with them and giving them projects to work on." He said this style of teaching, which the school supports, provides more one-on-one time with students, allowing him to target those who may need more help.
- "The best types of managers when I worked in the field, were those who left me alone and let me do my job," he said. "But they were available when I didn't know or understand something. They offered guidance, and that's what I try to do with my students."
Bruce Hegwer, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition of Charter Schools, said Nance was one of about eight nominees, and he stood out because of his ability to bring outside resources to his classroom.
"He was very creative," he said. "He had a lot of neat things going on in his classroom."
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Washington DC/ Charters' District Enrollment Shares Rising
By Andrew Ujifusa
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 13 [Edweek.org]
November 14, 2012
School districts in Las Vegas, Tampa, Fla., and Dallas oversaw some of the biggest growth rates in charter school enrollment over the past year, although nationwide, New Orleans public schools still have the highest "market share" of student enrollment in charters, according to a recent report from a national charter school advocacy group.
In the 2012 report from the Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, A Growing Movement: America's Largest Charter School Communities, the group also reported that, for the first time, more than 100 districts-it lists 110-have at least 10 percent of their students enrolled in charters.
Nationwide, according to the report, over 2 million students, or nearly 5 percent of total public school enrollment, are in charter schools. The report, published Nov. 14, is the seventh time NAPCS has studied charter school enrollment in districts on a nationwide basis.
There was a lot of turnover among the districts with the highest growth rate of charter students, compared with the NAPCS report from 2011 report on charter growth. Only three of the highest-charter-growth districts (Los Angeles Unified, New York City, and Memphis, Tenn.) made the list for both the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years. Both lists drew from the 50 districts with the most charter students enrolled.
The district with the biggest growth by percentage in charter enrollment in 2010-11, Orange County Public Schools in Florida, which serves Orlando, does not even appear among the top 10 districts for charter growth for 2011-12. Neither do districts in Baltimore, New Orleans, San Antonio, or Philadelphia.
Among the report's findings:
- Clark County School District, serving Las Vegas, topped the most recent growth list with a 64 percent increase, growing from 4,400 students enrolled in the 2010-11 school year to 7,271 students in the 2011-12 year, when the district had a total enrollment of 308,000.
- In second place was Hillsborough County schools, serving Tampa, with a 52 percent growth rate up to 3,200 students, out of a total enrollment of 197,000 in 2011-12.
- The Dallas Independent School District, which had a total enrollment of 177,700 in the 2011-12 school year, came in third with a 33 percent growth rate, up to 5,200 students. The Phoenix Union High School District had the same growth rate as Dallas, but had a smaller total population of charter students, about 1,900, out of a total enrollment of 33,400 in 2011-12.
- New York City and L.A. Unified, the nation's two largest school districts with total enrollments of 1.1 million and 661,000, respectively, both had a 24 percent growth rate, increasing to 48,100 in New York's case and 98,600 charter students in Los Angeles.
Tipping Point
Nina Rees, the president of NACPS, said a 20 percent charter school enrollment rate in a district has traditionally been the threshold for when a district starts reacting by changing its own traditional public schools. Right now, 25 school districts have at least 20 percent of their students in charters, the report said.
"The growth is a good sign, and hopefully over time it will continue to grow," said Ms. Rees. "We would like to see a far greater sense of urgency and a greater pace."
She cited the existence of caps on the number of charter schools as one impediment to growth in some states.
Although charter schools are typically associated with large urban environments, Ms. Rees said, the fact that high charter enrollment rates also exist in places like Duluth, Minn., (where 13 percent of students were enrolled in charters out of a total enrollment of 10,500) and Youngstown, Ohio, (25 percent of an enrollment of 10,200) shows that charters can succeed in different types of environments.
A major part of the reason for charter school growth is that each school's enrollment now mirrors what is typical in non-charter public schools, said Gary Miron, a policy fellow at the Boulder, Colo.-based National Education Policy Center, which has been skeptical of charters. He also said the increasing involvement of outside charter management organizations has also boosted enrollment over time.
"Charters used to be small, locally run, and innovative. Now they tend to look more like traditional public schools," Mr. Miron said.
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Washington DC/ 'Soft Skills' Seen As Key Element for Higher Education
By Caralee J. Adams
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 13 [Edweek.org]
November 14, 2012
To make it in college, students need to be up for the academic rigor. But that's not all. They also must be able to manage their own time, get along with roommates, and deal with setbacks. Resiliency and grit, along with the ability to communicate and advocate, are all crucial life skills. Yet, experts say, many teenagers lack them, and that's hurting college-completion rates.
- "Millennials have had helicopter parents who have protected them," said Dan Jones, the president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors and the director of counseling and psychological services at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.
- "They haven't had the opportunity to struggle. When they come to college and bad things happen, they haven't developed resiliency and self-soothing skills."
College enrollment is growing, but graduation rates remain flat. Among industrialized nations, the United States ranks ninth in the world in enrollment but last in completion rates, according to an analysis of 18 countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As educators look for ways to turn that showing around, many schools are incorporating the softer, noncognitive skills into college-readiness efforts.
- The ability to solve problems and be resourceful are viewed by some experts as being as important as mastering mathematics and reading.
- Helping teenagers develop those skills is being addressed in high schools, college-freshman orientation, youth-development organizations, and parenting programs.
Infusing Responsibility
"I see parents and teachers jumping through hoops for kids, but I wonder if the kids are working as hard," said Susan Strickland, a counselor at Harrison High School in Kennesaw, Ga.
After a particularly rough fall about three years ago, in which seniors were asking for teacher-recommendation letters the day before college applications were due, Ms. Strickland decided it was time to step up efforts to teach responsibility. "It's not irritation. I'm worried about these kids," she said. "How to build capacity in students is vital."
- At the 9th grade orientation meeting at Harrison High, students now learn about school rules through funny, interactive skits, and parents get the message to be supportive without overdoing it.
- Counselors conduct classroom lessons about goal-setting, self-advocacy, and the behavior of successful students.
- Teachers blog daily so students who miss class can go online to catch up on their missed assignments and be resourceful.
College-readiness efforts have often focused on getting more students into honors courses, helping with applications, and providing career counseling. But Mandy Savitz-Romer, a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggests that the emphasis needs to be simultaneously on access and success. "We need to pay attention to development," she said.
That means a shift in mind-set in the college-application process, as Ms. Savitz-Romer outlines in her book Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success, out this year and co-written by Harvard colleague Suzanne Bouffard. If students can have "agency" over the process, it enhances self-efficacy, Ms. Savitz-Romer said.
For example, instead of scolding students who fail to turn in financial-aid forms, counselors can get them to set up a system of reminders so it won't happen again. Teachers, too, can hold students accountable for missed work or poor behavior to emphasize responsibility and self-regulation.
For students to stick it out, the motivation for college should be about more than getting a degree to earn more money, Ms. Savitz-Romer said. "If they are there for the wrong reason, when things get tough, it's easy to step out."
'Proxy Parent'
At Aspire Lionel Wilson Preparatory Academy in Oakland, Calif., students are assigned to advisory groups in 6th grade (15 students to one teacher) and meet regularly through graduation to set goals and hold each other accountable. "The college dream is made up of ability, and it's absolutely tied to hopes, aspiration, and purpose," said Principal Michelle Cortez. "In advisory groups, we link those things."
For many of Wilson's students, who are from low-income, first-generation college-going families, the group becomes a "proxy parent" and support system, she said.
To develop communication skills, students lead conferences about their progress. They prepare presentations and discuss grades with their parents and advisory group. Teachers are trained to be quiet and focus on asking questions such as, "Why do you think this is happening?" The idea is for students to become problem solvers.
- "They need to be advocating for themselves their entire career. If they don't practice, they won't learn how," said Ms. Cortez.
Moving from high school to college or work is a major life transition, said David Conley, a professor of education policy and leadership at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. And schools have largely ignored the social and psychological aspects in favor of knowledge, in part because it's easier to measure academic performance, he said.
Grades and SAT scores reflect other skills, such as study habits, focus, and time management, but they are all wrapped together, Mr. Conley said. He suggests schools provide two sets of grades-one that reflects mastery of content and the other behavior, as many elementary schools do.
- "Given that we want students to be more successful, why not give actionable information needed to change behavior?" he said.
Teachers should also give students longer, more complex assignments for which they need to do research, work in groups, and develop a broader set of strategies, Mr. Conley added.
Leadership Skills
Some nonprofits, such as the Chicago-based OneGoal, are stepping in with a broader approach to college readiness. That organization, which operates in 20 nonselective public high schools in Chicago and six in Houston, hires teachers to work with underperforming juniors and seniors during the day in a credit-bearing class.
Along with boosting ACT scores and managing rigorous courses, the curriculum focuses on five principles of leadership: resilience, ambition, resourcefulness, integrity, and professionalism.
- "If you ask me which makes a bigger impact on persistence, I'd say the noncognitive skills-unequivocally," said Jeff Nelson, a co-founder and the chief executive officer of OneGoal, which focuses on college completion.
The OneGoal teacher continues to monitor graduates-about 25 in a cohort-during their first year of college, talking with them about everything from grades to roommates to money issues.
Denee Taylor, now a freshman at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb, said he was motivated to stay on track because he didn't want to let down his group and, particularly, his teacher.
"She worked so hard to help us all," the 19-year-old said of his teacher, Jen Koszyk, at Prosser Career Academy in Chicago. "It was a sense of admiration. ... It'd be wrong of me to slack off."
Mr. Taylor said the program helped him grow up, learn how to balance college life, and make his transition smooth.
"A 4.0 student could come to college and get a 2.0. There are a lot of distractions here," he said. "It's not the academics. It's being too social that is going to mess you up."
The YMCA is using Ms. Savitz-Romer's book to be more intentional about working with students on issues of motivation, self-regulation, and self-efficacy, said Jarrett Royster, the Chicago-based organization's national director of urban and educational development.
- "We help more kids go to college by helping them build resilience and character," he said. "We have an emphasis on the whole child. Sometimes, academics can be too narrowly focused versus recognizing the variety of factors that lead to academic outcomes."
Pam Mintz, a parenting education coordinator for YMCA Youth and Family Services, in Montgomery County, Md., lectures to parents about having their children, including teenagers, learn to manage money with an allowance and contribute to the household by doing chores. "As much as humanly possible, never do for a child what they can do for themselves," she said.
Too often, students underestimate how complicated the college experience will be to navigate. Just11 percent believe college will be "difficult," according to a survey by IQS Research, based in Louisville, Ky., this past summer. Fewer than one in five students were concerned about how to begin the college experience, it found.
"The expectations are not in alignment with reality," said Harlan Cohen, the author of The Naked Roommate and 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into In College, published last year. "Students do not have the communication skills to navigate through adversity that is part of the normal transition to college."
Colleges sell the best moments in brochures. "The uncomfortable parts aren't illustrated. You don't see people crying, struggling, vomiting, dealing with roommate conflict or heartache," Mr. Cohen said.
To emotionally prepare students for campus life, he has helped craft a curriculum for high school seniors. "High schools are starting to realize that we desperately need to be responding, not just getting them into college, but getting them through," he said.
'They Won't Starve'
Parents and teachers can help students with the so-called soft skills in the way they communicate and force them to cope, experts say.
"This is the most coddled generation," said Robyn Lady, the director of student services at Chantilly High School in Chantilly, Va. "If they forget their lunch, don't bring it to them. They won't starve." Praise children for their efforts, not just their achievements, she added.
The work of promoting life skills is bigger than high school counselors can handle alone, especially since many have caseloads far into the hundreds. College counselors try to help incoming freshmen, but their resources are stretched and their priority is serving the most-troubled students. And many experts believe those soft skills need to be taught before students get to campus.
A holistic approach to college readiness that integrates academic content, college knowledge, and psychology may be what's needed to help more students complete college, said Andrea Venezia, a project director at WestEd, a research organization based in San Francisco. Rather than compartmentalization of college-readiness efforts, she advocates early training that includes noncognitive strategies and habits of mind that give students internal strength to persist.
"This is the critical nut to crack," she said, "if our country is really going to support success for all learners."
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Denver CO/ Peter Senge: Educators, Businesses Must Partner to Create Innovation in Schools
By Steve McMillan [Editor Public Policy/Online Projects]
Denver Post
November 14, 2012
Hundreds of business people and educators on Wednesday heard one of the world's top management gurus talk about what it takes to build a partnership between the two groups to create an environment that will sustain innovation in education.
- "Innovation is a process by which we create new sources of value," said Peter Senge, the founding chair of the Society of Organizational Learning, a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of the critically acclaimed book, "The Fifth Discipline:The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization."
Senge noted that innovation and schools are two words that are not often put together - at least in the eyes of business people.
Privately, business people express profound frustration with public education in the United States, he said. But he said in many cases business people don't understand the complexity of the education system in their demands for measurement, accountability and reform.
- "How many of you would like to be reformed?" he asked of the private sector attendees, saying there is a language connotation issue at work in the dynamic. "Schools reform. Businesses innovate."
Senge is working with members of the Adams 12 school district north of Denver on developing positive educational system change. He spent time with teachers there on Tuesday and Wednesday and will present a workshop Thursday and Friday involving metro area educators and business people.
The Denver Metro Chamber Leadership Foundation and the Public Education & Business Coalition sponsored Wednesday's forum during which Senge spoke for 45 minutes and then led a panel discussion among
- Joe Petrone, superintendent of Moffat County School District;
- Nicole Veltze, the principal of Denver's North High School;
- Lori Conrad, a fifth-grade teacher in Douglas County;
- Ulcca Hansen, vice president of PEBC; and
- Kelly Brough, CEO of the Denver chamber.
After the talk and panel discussion, the audience the educators and business people were encouraged to spend some time with each other.
"It's very important for us to say 'even when we disagree, there are so many areas where we do agree,' " said Brough. "Together we absolutely think we can get where we both want to go."
During his presentation, Senge said it is important for communities to have a clear mission for their schools.
- "It's really hard to find schools that have a multi-stakeholder process to come to some workable sense of what our aims are," he said.
One district that has achieved that is the Tahoma School District, about 30 miles south of Seattle, Senge said.
- It's a district of about 7,400 students and its mission includes six district goals for students.
- Tahoma wants its graduates to be self-directed learners, collaborative workers, effective communicators, community contributors, quality producers and complex thinkers.
- Parents must be key stakeholders in the process, he said. School districts also need continuity in senior leadership.
Relentless assessment and correction are necessary for innovation.
But to create an effective capability to continually assess and correct, Senge said there must be trust and a safe environment. In order to have trust and honest feedback there must be relationships between all the participants, including students.
Teachers can't feel the environment is more about punishing them than about innovating, he said.
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Washington DC/ Q&A with Rob Zdrojewski: Students Teaching Their Teachers How to Use Technology
By Sarah Butrymowicz
Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]
November 14, 2012
Billions of dollars are spent annually for on-the-job teacher training.
- Often, schools hire outside contractors to run workshops on teaching strategies, new policies like the Common Core State Standards, and-increasingly-how to use technology in the classroom.
But one Buffalo technology teacher has found a much cheaper way to train his colleagues in all things digital.
- Rob Zdrojewski, a teacher at Amherst Middle School, has transformed his students into teachers.
- They create video mini-lessons, which help train the school's teachers on how to use computers and other devices and software in the classroom.
The Hechinger Report talked with Zdrojewski to find out more about how he's capitalizing on the knowledge of "digital natives" to transform professional development.
- How did the idea to involve students in professional development come about?
The basic premise is teachers are very busy people. They don't have a lot of time to meet all together in one room. We learn best when we have access to things on our own time-daytime, evenings, weekends, whenever we can get to it. The theory is let's break down topics like how do we use Google Docs, how do we use Google Calendar in videos that are 60 seconds or less.
I started out mentioning this to our faculty and they gathered up the most needed topics. Since I teach my seventh and eighth graders these skills and how to use these tools, I thought, why not have them, after they learn it, create a screen-cast where they're going to wear a headset, their voice will be recorded, their mouse movements recorded. The student would do the task in 10 to 20 seconds and maybe give some rationale about why it's a good tool to use. What we want to do is show the teachers not just how you would do it but why you would do it.
We did it on a small scale with one class of kids last year just to see how things would work. The real benefit here is the kids are creating these things for the teachers, but teachers don't have to feel intimidated and admit that they don't know how to do something that is seemingly basic to a kid.
It's kind of odd for teachers to learn from their students, but this way they can do it in a nonthreatening, non-intimidating way on their own schedule. It's on-demand, available-anytime professional development as opposed to the traditional model where it's sit-and-get, whether you're ready for it or not.
- Do you have any sort of technology professional development now? Is this replacing something?
It's brand new. There's only about four to five full-day staff development days in the school year. Increasingly those have now been blocked up with the [new] teacher evaluation system, with the new Common Core [State] Standards, with common assessments. In the past we could afford to have an hour or a half-day of technology-based training.
Now that all seems to be pushed by the wayside because of these other priories we're focusing on. The need developed itself, because we don't want to just push it away and pretend it doesn't exist. Teachers are asking to be trained on things. Let's make ourselves available digitally so that when they're ready to learn, they know where to go, watch the videos and then they can ask questions at that point if something doesn't make sense.
There is free software out there but we're choosing a paid solution because it has some advantages. The cost roughly is $29 per [computer]. Once we have that software in my classroom - I have 23 computers - now we have the ability to create and unlimited number of videos. Since I already have my students with me and one of our learning goals is learning how to screen-cast, it's kind of like two birds with one stone. A student learns how to use this digital tool and now to prove that they've learned it, they're going to become the teacher.
- What's the reaction been from students and teachers?
I didn't think the kids would be as excited as they are to make them. I thought they're going to say, "Oh Mr. Z is having me do some work for somebody else to benefit." But it's really not been the case. The kids are excited because they know that their teachers, potentially a lot of them, are going to watch and learn from them and hear their voices. So the kids will act it up a little bit and say, "Hi everybody out there in the world, I'm going to have a fun time today showing you how to make a new Google Doc." It becomes an exciting thing for them to be a teacher to an unknown audience.
The teachers thought it was great. Some of them are saying, "I was able to check it out on a Saturday afternoon. I was able to check it out during my planning period. I was able to look at it with a student in my class."
It's truly anytime, anywhere learning and from any device. Teachers have pulled out [their iPhones] and said, "I was able to check this out while I was waiting in line with the supermarket. I would have never thought standing in a supermarket line I could learn something that would benefit me and my job." But having the right tools and the right place, it's now possible.
This interview was edited for length and clarity by Hechinger Report editors.
