"A Trojan Horse for the Affluent: House Bill 3041 and the Resegregation of College Admissions in Texas," by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Friends,

I will always remember that today is the anniversary of the horrific killings in Uvalde, Texas, because it is also mine and my husband's wedding anniversary.

As I contemplate violence against children in our schools, I urge us to also think about the symbolic, institutional violence that H.B. 3041 represents.

I often wonder what bills are getting passed while the advocacy community is focused on other critical fronts—like fighting SB 37, SB 12, and the ongoing battle against vouchers. H.B. 3041 is one of these, and it is VERY consequential to the future of children and youth in Texas.

What concerns me even more is the noticeable absence of critical perspectives or in-depth analysis of this bill in major news outlets or academic circles. Outside of endorsements by pro-homeschooling groups and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, there has been virtually no public scrutiny of its impact on equity, public education, or financial aid. That silence is itself telling—and dangerous.

Thank you for reading,

–Angela

A Trojan Horse for the Affluent: House Bill 3041 and the Resegregation of College Admissions in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 24, 2025

The University of Texas at Austin tower on July 16, 2020. Credit: Allie Goulding/

The Texas Tribune

Well on its way to becoming state law, H.B. 3041 —authored by Reps. Dennis Paul and Terry Wilson—masquerades as a measure to expand college access. In truth, it codifies a deeply inequitable double standard in admissions and financial aid. The bill creates a separate pathway for students from “nontraditional secondary education” backgrounds—such as homeschoolers and those from unaccredited private schools—allowing them to bypass class-rank requirements and qualify for automatic admission based on standardized test scores set by each institution. 

It goes further by amending the Texas Education Code, meaning statute, to make these students eligible for state-funded financial aid programs like the TEXAS Grant—resources already stretched thin. This carveout, cloaked in the language of fairness, opens a back door for students who are disproportionately white, affluent, and well-resourced, while further narrowing the front door for historically underserved students in Texas public schools (Knox, 2024).

This isn’t just unfair—it’s a form of institutional violence. At a time when children of color in Texas schools are already being targeted by book bans, curriculum restrictions, racial surveillance, and chronic underfunding, H.B. 3041 inflicts yet another wound. The violence may not be physical, but its effects are just as real. When the state systematically redirects opportunity away from the vulnerable and toward the already privileged, it signals that some lives—and futures—matter more than others. That, too, is a kind of assault: quiet, calculated, and devastating.

The bill attempts to simulate class-rank-based admissions for students without one by substituting standardized test scores. Although the benchmarks must be recalibrated annually using institutional data, this approach is fundamentally flawed. Standardized tests are not neutral indicators of merit—they mirror access to wealth, tutoring, and stable learning environments. Consequently, H.B. 3041 disproportionately benefits students from nontraditional, affluent backgrounds—many of whom also stand to gain from newly passed school voucher legislation. Together, these measures constitute a systematic redirection of public support toward those already advantaged.

Meanwhile, students in public schools must compete through class rank in an increasingly narrow funnel (Dey, 2024). At UT Austin, for example, automatic admission once applied to students in the top 10 percent of their graduating class; by Fall 2026, only those in the top 5 percent will qualify—due to legislative provisions that cap automatic admissions at 75 percent of the freshman class. The rest are admitted through holistic review. In this context, H.B. 3041 is not just inequitable—it’s egregious. While public school students, disproportionately Black, Latino, and low-income, face rising barriers, nontraditional students gain a separate route designed around their strengths.

As McNeil (2005) and Valencia, Valenzuela, Sloan, & Foley (2001) have shown, so-called “color-blind” policies often obscure structural racism, reinforcing systems that reward those already equipped with social and economic capital. Berliner and Glass (2014) add that standardized test scores track family income more reliably than academic ability. H.B. 3041 reflects what Valenzuela (1999) calls subtractive schooling—policies that devalue the knowledge and experiences of marginalized students while privileging dominant norms. It rewards those in individualized, resource-rich settings while burdening public school students with mounting obstacles. This is not equity; it is privilege masquerading as reform.

The bill’s provision for “equal access” to dual credit courses is equally deceptive. While it requires institutions to treat all students the same in admissions to dual credit, it ignores the reality that many public schools—especially in rural and low-income areas—lack the infrastructure, staffing, and partnerships to offer these courses in the first place. Texas is a deeply rural state, yet rural schools remain underrecognized in policy. This formal equality masks material inequality. As Berliner and Glass (2014) warn, when laws ignore structural disparities, they don’t close gaps—they widen them.

Finally, by expanding financial aid eligibility without increasing funding, H.B. 3041 threatens to dilute resources for those who need them most. This is not an expansion of access—it’s a redistribution of opportunity upward: from public to private, from the underserved to the already advantaged.

In sum, H.B. 3041 is not a policy of inclusion—it is a Trojan horse. It offers the appearance of equity while reinforcing race, class, and geographic privilege. With UT Austin and other public institutions narrowing their admissions thresholds, this bill ensures that the gate remains open to the few and closed to the many. Texans must see H.B. 3041 for what it is: a backdoor policy that elevates the already elevated—at the cost of justice, access, and the democratic promise of public education.

References

Berliner, D. C., & Glass, G. V. (2014). 50 Myths and Lies That Threaten America's Public Schools. Teachers College Press

Dey, S. (2024, Sept. 16). UT-Austin tightens automatic admission threshold to 5% of Texas’ top high schoolers: The current threshold is 6%, Texas Tribune, https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/16/ut-austin-top-five-percent-threshold/

Knox, L. (2024, Dec. 16), The longhorn long shot, Inside Higher Education

McNeil, L. (2005). Faking equity: High-stakes testing and the education of Latino youth. In A. Valenzuela (Ed.), Leaving children behind: How “Texas style” accountability fails Latino youth (pp. 57–111). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Valencia, R., Valenzuela, A., Sloan, K., & Foley, D. (2001). Let’s treat the cause, not the symptoms: Equity and accountability in Texas revisited. Phi Delta Kappan, 83(4), 318–321, 326. 

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press.

© Angela Valenzuela, May 24, 2024

I love the quotes in this piece by Jes Adams, a Tyler resident and mother of two children attending Tyler middle-schools because it captures the absolute truth behind Gov. Abbott's pro-voucher agenda:

“It’s interesting that he [Abbott] keeps saying ‘indoctrination,’ but he’s saying it at a private Christian school,” said Jes Adams, a 37-year-old mother who has two middle-school-aged children in Tyler. Adams was among the parents who protested Abbott’s event at Grace Community School. “It feels very much like he’s saying that Christianity is the way you’re supposed to go, and that anything that deviates from it is indoctrination.”

Yep, that's what he's saying in a nutshell. I guess that's what it means to prepare a run against Ron DeSantis.

Should SB 8 become law, East Texas public schools in the long run will, like other public schools statewide, be seriously harmed by this privatization agenda.

-Angela Valenzuela

In East Texas, skepticism over private school tuition assistance persists despite push from conservative leaders

Gov. Greg Abbott and other conservatives say families need options to escape “woke” education in public schools. East Texas parents and school leaders say the national talking points are off base.

BY POOJA SALHOTRA APRIL 7, 20235 AM CENTRAL

The Grace Community campus in Tyler on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. -Emil T. Lippe for TxTribune.

TYLER — On a Thursday evening in March, parents and community leaders inside Grace Community School erupted into applause as Gov. Greg Abbott demanded the Texas Legislature protect parents’ rights.

Outside the school — one of the largest private Christian schools in East Texas — Abbott’s visit elicited jeers. More than a dozen public school advocates and parents held signs in protest and offered a pro-public-school message to any passersby who would listen.

“We’re out here protesting Gov. Abbott because he’s trying to take away money from our public schools and give them to these private Christian schools, and I don’t think that’s right,” Cody Grace, a public school parent and former Democratic nominee for the Texas House, said in a video posted to Twitter during the protest he helped organize.

That night in Tyler is emblematic of the debate taking place inside the Texas Legislature this year. Abbott has thrown his support behind parents’ rights and “school choice,” a catchall term for policies that allow parents to send their kids to a school different from their assigned public school.

Many rural lawmakers remain wary of such policies — even as supporters dangle additional money for their schools.

The governor’s push for education savings accounts is part of his efforts to give parents more rights and to fight what he calls a “woke” agenda in public schools. Smith County, where Tyler sits, is home to 64 public schools, and Tyler has one of the largest concentrations of private religious schools outside of the state’s major metropolitan areas, according to data analyzed by The Dallas Morning News.

School leaders — already wary that such a dramatic expansion of school choice would drain their limited financial resources — and some parents in Tyler and the surrounding communities say Abbott is driving a false narrative. There is no indication of a “woke” agenda in the region’s public schools, they say.

At least one rural school leader is going as far as saying that if an education savings account policy becomes law, taxpayer dollars could be used for true indoctrination at religious schools.

“Their job is to spread Christianity,” Stan Surratt, superintendent of Lindale Independent School District said about Christian schools like Grace Community School. “That’s not the problem. The problem is, you shouldn’t use state funding for that.”

Senate Bill 8 is the leading school-choice policy proposal this legislative session. It would give parents who opt out of public schools the option to receive up to $8,000 of taxpayer money per student. Students who are currently enrolled in a public school or who are entering prekindergarten or kindergarten for the first time would be eligible for the program. The dollars could be used for private school tuition at an accredited private school, tutoring or other education-related expenses such as textbooks.

The legislation also includes restrictions on classroom lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity and lays out a parental bill of rights.

The bill passed the Senate on Thursday and faces a tough road to final passage in the state House, which approved a largely symbolic amendment to the state budget Thursday that limits state money from going to "school vouchers or other similar programs."

Escuela Nueva Has Transformed Rural Education in Colombia and Now Founder Vicky Colbert Is Expanding Her Methodology Across the Globe

This is a great story about "Escuela Nueva" ("New School"), an award-winning model of schooling in rural Colombia founded by Vicky Colbert who has become an international rock star in education. I read this very closely to get a sense of what makes her model tick such that even urban contexts are adopting it. From what I can tell, it's partnership-based, learner-centered, sensory-rich, asset- and values-based, centered around such core values as expressed herein:

"At its best, Escuela Nueva aims to instill values — responsibility, tolerance, discipline, community — as much as academics. Due to the small class sizes and multi-grade classrooms (known as 'multigrados' in Colombia) common in rural areas, there are always a few students who finish their lessons first and a few that lag behind."

In a conversational and dialogical manner, Escuela Nueva cultivates such values of citizenship as leadership and autonomy that in turn occur through a strong focus on student government, as well as student “'work committees' that can include categories like sports and recreation, the environment, and even cleaning. Each group consists of a few representatives who plan events and activities."

With the help of Escuela Nueva's signature workbooks, I would guess, the teachers' role is primarily that of coach with teachers mentoring each other and meetings consisting more about "mentorship and open discussion" than detailed course planning. Though the schools appear to do well on standardized tests, test-prep is not their focus.

Rural education is a challenge everywhere and Vicky Colbert is making a huge difference. My main question is the role of culturally relevant, perhaps Indigenous or rural education. Are they educating children to ultimately leave the rural areas or to strengthen the local economies so that at least some students will remain in them and develop them. What specifically does the curriculum consist of?

Colbert's influences that have found their way into Escuela Nueva's teaching an curriculum, specifically, Montessori, John Dewey, and Vygotsky, certainly suggest learner-centered, experience-based, and socioculturally focused theoretical elements that appear to be making a difference.

Do read this in its entirety as it definitely has elements like teamwork and multiage grading, personalized learning, and student autonomy and leadership that we can apply here in the Texas and the U.S.

Thanks to my colleague, Tony Baez, for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela


Escuela Nueva Has Transformed Rural Education in Colombia and Now Founder Vicky Colbert Is Expanding Her Methodology Across the Globe

Posted On December 1, 2017
By : Jared Wade


Vicky Colbert has spent more than 40 years building an acclaimed model for rural education in Colombia. Now, she has another $3.9 Million USD in funding from the Yidan Prize to support even more global growth for Escuela Nueva as the revolutionary learning methodology pushes into Africa and Asia.

For more than four decades, Vicky Colbert has dedicated herself to improving rural education. Her work began in the 1970s, when the situation in her native Colombia was grim. Guerrilla conflict and disorder had already become the prevailing reality in many areas and, combined with scarce resources and under-development, millions of children were entering adulthood without the knowledge and skills to make a decent living.

Vicky Colbert, founder of Fundación Escuela Nueva, was the first recipient of the Yidan Prize for Educational Development. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Colbert was young and idealistic. Blond and fair-skinned, the Bogotá-born sociologist wanted to make a difference. She studied at top schools and worked to find solutions. As things progressed, she started to see a new path forward.

But back then, even on her most ambitious days, Colbert never envisioned just how much impact she would eventually make.

While she has had many successes, the latest came in the form of the Yidan Prize for Educational Development. This educational honor was awarded for the first time this year and is already among the world’s most lucrative education awards, giving Colbert and her Escuela Nueva Foundation roughly $3.9 million USD in funding — a massive windfall in a realm where the budgets and grant money are never enough.

This is far from the first award for Colbert or Escuela Nueva (“New School”), which has become an internationally acclaimed teaching model whose principles have been adopted in more than a dozen countries since it has proven its worth in Colombia.

In 2005, she earned the first-ever Clinton Global Citizen Award, a prestigious honor now given out annually by the foundation of former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton. She later won the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) Prize in 2009 — the first time that the Qatar Foundation handed out its global education prize.

It seems that whenever a new prominent global recognition is created, Colbert’s name tops the list. And so it was this year for the new Yidan Prize created by Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist Charles Chen Yidan.

Yidan has said that one reason education is close to his heart is because his grandmother never learned to read. It took just two generations of studious learning, however, for the family to watch Chen not only earn degrees in applied chemistry and economic law but use his knowledge to help develop one of the globe’s biggest companies. With no need to work any longer, the billionaire co-founder of conglomerate Tencent wanted to use his money to help fund education.

Colbert was the perfect recipients for the inaugural award. On top of the work her foundation has done in Colombia, Dorothy Gordon, head of the Yidan Prize judging panel, praised Escuela Nueva for continuing to expand to other areas of the world. Gordon was impress with how “this model has spread, making small, under-resourced rural schools effective in many Latin American nations.”

A typical Escuela Nueva classroom, featuring students of two grade levels sitting in group desks and actively working through their lessons. (Credit: Jared Wade)

The Escuela Nueva Methodology

Escuela Nueva is a learning methodology. In scholarly circles, it would be referred to as a pedagogy, and the method is based upon several core principles that have elevated it into a global standard of excellence.

At its best, Escuela Nueva aims to instill values — responsibility, tolerance, discipline, community — as much as academics. Due to the small class sizes and multi-grade classrooms (known as “multigrados” in Colombia) common in rural areas, there are always a few students who finish their lessons first and a few that lag behind.

This is common the world over, and Escuela Nueva confronts this fact with a collaborative approach. It promotes teamwork through ongoing open dialogue and hexagonal worktables that force children to face one another. The design encourages the quick-finishers to assist their peers. In this way, normal human social dynamics allow for leaders to develop and students to view collective problem solving as the default way to complete a task.

Vicky Colbert, during a recent interview in her humble Bogotá office, said she believes the benefits of this approach are even more pronounced in the modern era. Almost all professions require people to work together on projects with people from different backgrounds, different intelligence levels, and different disciplines. The Escuela Nueva style sets children up to operate this way from a very early age. And she says these are the skills useful in the workplaces of today — not being able to retain information dictated in long lectures, memorize book facts, and prove yourself once every two months on an end-all-be-all test that will define success or failure.

Tests are of course a part of the Escuela Nueva methodology. It is not some new-age alternative learning experience. And the curriculum is not revolutionary. The signature workbooks contain the same information and exercises expected in any elementary school lesson plan. Perhaps more than almost anything, these simple workbooks are critical to Escuela Nueva’s success.


The Escuela Nueva workbooks have been essential for helping the program scale to 20,000 rural schools and promoting student-centered learning in the classroom. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Colbert initially created the workbooks as a rudimentary how-to guide for teachers but they have changed over the years — with the help of government planners — to serve as a functional roadmap that can walk children through their entire academic year. “She has transformed conventional, teacher-centered schooling practices to a new learner-centered model,” said Gordon of the Yidan Prize judging panel.

Teachers don’t just sit back and watch the students fill in the books, however. They explore the materials together and discuss the themes in a way that resembles a conversation more than a series of instructions. “I think the real role of a teacher,” said Colbert, “is to be a good coach, to stimulate your students, to know their strengths, to know their weaknesses. It’s not to spend so much time giving information. Information comes packaged in so many other ways now.”

From her office in Bogotá, which is cluttered with medals, international prizes, and photos of Colbert alongside the likes of Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, she continued to stress the essential importance of this concept. “We’re going from the transmission of knowledge to the social construction of knowledge,” she said. “So it’s promoting more child-centered learning, personalized learning. Not everybody learns the same thing at the same time. There are different learning rhythms. You construct knowledge together through dialogue and interaction, but you have to have instruments and strategies to do it right. So, if you do child-centered education without having materials or mechanisms, it’s just theory.”

For all its good ideas — and even despite its name — Colbert admits that Escuela Nueva is nothing new. When it comes to theory, it is mostly still just a means of teaching young people the same type of knowledge that kids have been learning for the past century all over the world.

“I’m not an inventor starting an idea,” she said, citing the pioneering efforts of Dr. Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotsky. “I had to build on what already existed…We know the theory — but the theory only comes to the elite schools in our regions, not the poorest of the poor schools.”

At her core, Colbert is a pragmatist. She is enthusiastic about the high-minded values and community-based aspects of Escuela Nueva, but ultimately describes it simply as a “proven solution to improve quality education.”

Since the beginning, Colbert had her eye on creating something that would remain viable in three ways: technically, politically, and financially. Technically meant that it must be easy to implement and teach. Financially meant it couldn’t be too expensive. And politically meant navigating labor union issues and surviving the whims of the election cycle.

“Anything we did, we could do in the 34,000 rural schools in Colombia,” said Colbert. More than even the methods themselves, impact and scale were the foundation of Escuela Nueva. “From the outset, we wanted to influence national policy — not to have just a nice little project.”

Beryl Levinger, who says elements of the educational principles she helped craft decades ago in Colombia alongside Colbert are still in use at Middlebury College in the United States, credits the Fundacion Escuela Nueva fonder for always remaining focused on this vision. “We created a pedagogy,” Levinger said in an interview with Middlebury. “But it was Vicky who became a vocal advocate for this methodology and transformed it into a worldwide movement.”


Two young students enjoy some recess time during their school day at Sede Barragán, a rural school in Quindio where four teachers lead Escuela Nueva lessons for around 80 kids across six grade levels. (Credit: Jared Wade)

A Good Idea Becomes National Policy

As someone who started out as a sociologist, and earned a master’s degree from Stanford University, Vicky Colbert has always seen the educational journey as more than just a personal achievement. To her, it underpins everything. “Without quality, basic education, you cannot achieve anything,” said Colbert. “You cannot achieve social, economic, or cultural development — nor peace nor democracy. So we need quality, basic education. I’m totally convinced of that. Without quality, basic education it would be very difficult for a country to reach other goals.” 5

In the 1970s, public education in even the largest cities in Colombia was lacking. But she was more concerned about the rural areas that in many cases barely had functional classrooms. There was no guarantee of universal basic education from the government, and in the schools that were managing to operate, one teacher was likely overseeing dozens of children ranging from five to 13 years old. Nobody was doing anything about this deficiency. “There were many schools that were invisible to educational planners,” she said.

Fixing these issues was the genesis of Escuela Nueva, and something she realized she could do better outside of government than in the first role she held for a short time in the Colombian Ministry of Education. Colbert began developing the core principles along with a Colombian teacher named Óscar Mogollón and Beryl Levinger, who initially came to Colombia as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer and development worker before later becoming an international studies professor at Middlebury College.

Together, they started building on what already existed and trying to forge a consensus among different stakeholders in the country. “It wasn’t easy,’ said Colbert, but they eventually found funding for a pilot project in the three Andean regions of Cundinamarca, Boyacá, and Norte de Santander.

The results started to impress the decision-makers in Bogotá. In addition to performance score improvement, dropout rates fell and fewer kids were being held back to repeat grades. In time, the progress was undeniable, and the Escuela Nueva method became the national policy for rural education in all of Colombia. It was instituted into some 20,000 schools, and this monumental achievement created the momentum that took Escuela Nueva beyond the country’s borders.

It gained international acclaim after the World Bank, which had earlier provided a loan to help the program flourish in Colombia, in 1989 named Escuela Nueva as a global standard of successful educational innovation. The early indicators highlighted great potential and only looked better as time went on. One fact Colbert recites proudly is that, according to a 1998 study from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Colombia had risen to rank second, behind Cuba, in Latin America in terms of providing the best primary education to rural students. The study also showed that Colombia was a global outlier by having the bulk of its rural schools outperforming its urban schools.

As the word got out, countries from throughout the region — Brazil, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, and more — started sending representatives to Colombia to see what everyone was raving about. More than a dozen nations would eventually adopt the methods to some degree. International organizations kept arriving as well, including more World Bank agencies, UNESCO, UNICEF, and USAID.

Colbert would become vice minister of education of Colombia in the early 1980s, which helped to further embed Escuela Nueva into the fabric of the nation. She would also work in a high-level leadership role in the region for UNESCO. But eventually she wanted to be home overseeing her life’s work because the climate of the country was changing.

Even more than the previous decade, the 1980s were a chaotic time in Colombia. Just as the rapid rise of the drug trade hit, there was also an increased push for decentralized government. With the nation becoming torn apart and local politics beginning to assert more influence, the nascent Foundation Escuela Nueva needed to retain the confidence of federal bureaucrats in Bogotá but also launch efforts to win over thousands of local mayors and officials. “It started becoming debilitated in some regions,” she said, “and stronger in others…I wanted to get back into the picture in Colombia, and not let Escuela Nueva fade.”

There was so much to be done and she believed her program was on the cusp of making even greater impact — just when war-torn Colombia needed it most. “We wanted to continue innovating,” she said. “We want to adapt it to new contexts and populations. We want to adapt it to the urban areas also. We want to adapt it for displaced children caused by our conflict.”


Isabela Blandon Bravo, the 11-year-old class president of Sede Barragán. Here, as at all Escuela Nueva schools, student government is considered fundamental to instilling leadership and autonomy in young students. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Escuela Nueva in the Real World

This focus on scalability — led by one individual’s tenacity — is what allowed Escuela Nueva to develop into a global model of success. The classroom style and underlying educational principles, however, are what most kids adore. Test scores and student retention rates in a spreadsheet can impress bureaucrats. But nothing that can match the smile on a proud child’s face.

There are plenty of teeth showing in an Escuela Nueva classroom, where accountability means students are in charge of keeping attendance. Rather than the teacher calling out names, the kids personally mark the calendar each morning when they arrive. If they miss a day, they get a note from their parents explaining the absence and put it in the “excuse” box.

A large priority is placed on student government. The children elect a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. Kids from the lower grades are encouraged to begin participating early and enthusiastically. The schools also set up “work committees” that can include categories like sports and recreation, the environment, and even cleaning. Each group consists of a few representatives who plan events and activities. From “peace week” and kite festivals to science fairs and tree-planting days, organizing the committee agenda aims to instill values and give more students a leadership role in the classroom community.

Ethics and respect for the community become more than platitudes. The children embrace these core values. The classroom aims to instill citizenship — not merely scholarship.

All of this is on display at a small school in Quindio, the nation’s smallest department (which is the equivalent of a state or province). Quindio has become an iconic symbol of Colombian coffee country, a gorgeous green and slope-filled Andean mountain region that has managed to largely sidestep the worst damage of the armed conflict. Though tourists now flock to the working coffee town of Salento to see how beans are harvested, Quindio remains sparsely developed apart from one modern highway that runs through the region. The bulk of the families living here are poor and subsist as campesinos, working land they don’t own to carve out a meager living.

According to the local government, 208 schools in Quindio employ the Escuela Nueva method, and the Yidan Prize organizers arranged a press visit there to show reporters two of these locations. One is called Sede Barragán, a school of around 80 kids located about 40 minutes outside the departmental capital of Armenia. Sitting among towering mountain peaks, multiple rivers, and tropical fruit farms, the building itself is modest, but colorful and designed in the style of the vibrant red, blue, and yellow structures typical in Salento.




Sede Barragán is small and, like many rural Colombian schools, lacks resources. But the students take great pride in their school, which features the colors and design typical of buildings throughout coffee country. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Isabela Blandon Bravo, an 11-year-old, is the class president of Sede Barrangán. She formerly went to school in Medellín and misses some things about the urban setting but has adjusted to rural life. She has become a leader who her classmates look up to, and Isabela’s dream is to become a doctor. She thinks she might like to practice medicine in another country one day. France currently stands as her top pick.

While she may never make it to Paris, she will soon be moving on. This school ends at sixth grade, so she will be transferring to a different location, probably one of the larger schools in Armenia that doesn’t use the same teaching methods. But even though Isabela will have to adapt, Alva Lucia Orozco, the school’s head teacher, expects her to thrive in any environment.

Orozco has seen the difference first hand. While she is now among Escuela Nueva’s biggest evangelists, she has been teaching at the same location for four decades — long before the methodology came to Sede Barragán. “I am a part of the furniture,” said Orozco. In her view, the kids who leave this building now are much better prepared for the real world than those who she taught in traditional ways.

Vicky Colbert explains it plainly. “The most important part is people working in teams,” said Colbert. “I think that’s one of the most outstanding 21st Century skills. So what we started 40 years ago, now it’s the type of education everybody wants.”

Orozco’s first job is teaching students, but she also instructs the school’s other teachers on how to adapt to the Escuela Nueva style. “We’ve learned that teachers learn better from other teachers,” she said. Going over educational philosophy is key, and she has watched her colleagues, including Gloria Morena Zuluaga, grow more comfortable over time. Monthly meetings focus more on mentorship and open discussion more than detailed course planning.

There is always some situation that needs to be fixed, and they work together, often with help from the students, to overcome obstacles. “Colombians are inventors,” said Zuluaga. “We have so many problems that we have to look for new solutions. Every time we see a problem, we see an answer.”

Zuluaga has worked at the school, teaching all subjects to the second and third graders, for four and a half years. Though she now loves the learning style, at the beginning she was thrilled to start working at Sede Barragán for one reason: because it was a seven-minute drive from her house as opposed to the 45-minute motorbike ride she formerly endured to her previous school.

Many of the students also live in the nearby small town of Caicedonia. Though close, it lies across the departmental line in Valle de Cauca, a department in western Colombia that is much more plagued by drug-trade violence and conflict. But whether their home life is wonderful or trying, Zuluaga says that the attitudes she sees from students in her Escuela Nueva classroom stand apart from what she typically witnessed at her old school. “The kids are autonomous, and they are happy,” she said.

While Zuluaga had some experience in Escuela Nueva before transferring into Sede Barragán, many teachers who arrive in a new location know nothing about it. Most adjust. Some struggle. This is why in-the-field teacher training is such a core principle of a method that above all else relies on the instructor buy-in.

If the average teacher cannot understand the methodology and work within a student-centric guidebook environment, the kids will suffer. Because there are few options in a rural community. “We have to work with the teachers that are there,” said Colbert. “We cannot have a Ph.D. in the middle of the jungle.” 9

The nearby Escuela Nueva school Sede Cabaña is so small that kids from first through sixth grade all share a single classroom. (Credit: Jared Wade)


Escuela Nueva Embraces Urban Planning

Since the early days of Escuela Nueva, the rural population of Colombia has shrunk in terms of percentage of people living outside the cities. Decades of guerrilla conflict, paramilitary violence, and drug trafficking pushed so many people out of their villages and farming communities. Some found better lives in cities. Many others now live in slums and impoverished communities on the outskirts of Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali.

Along with the more than 260,000 people killed during Colombia’s half-century of conflict, at least 7.7 million have been displaced, according to the UN Refugee Agency. This is the second largest figure in the world, behind Syria (with 12.2 million). By comparison, there are 4.7 million displaced Afghans and 4.2 million displaced Iraqis.

Demographic restructuring hasn’t diminished rural need, however. In many ways, Colbert sees serving the students of Quindio — and areas with even lower population density, like the Amazon and Pacific jungle department of Chocó — as more important than ever. “Colombia has become urbanized, so there are not so many children [in rural areas],” she said. “But, still, these schools require special treatment.”

But Escuela Nueva has been expanding and evolving. Colbert has pushed to adapt the methodology for the city environment with Escuela Activa Urbana, which looks to bring similar change to the millions of students packed into Colombia’s sprawling urban metropolises. This has been part of the foundation’s work for decades but it is now taking on increasing importance.

Otoniel Morales Benjumea now works with the local education ministry but formerly served as the principal of Escuela Normal Superior del Quindio, a secondary school that has employed Escuela Nueva techniques in Armenia. Home to around 300,000 people, the Quindio capital is a small city by Colombian standards, but Morales said it brought positive changes to his former school, particularly among the most troubled kids.

He recalls one period when Normal Superior took in six students who had been kicked out of other educational institutions. Some of these “street kids” took to the program and began to excel. These type of adolescents may lack formal education and classroom discipline, but the group structure of Escuela Nueva can be comforting. They are accustomed to a fast-paced, sensory-rich environment.

Lectures and memorization challenges bore them and add to the inferiority they feel in a formal academic world. But interactive, communal learning lets them display their interpersonal smarts and mental dexterity — to the teacher and, more importantly, to themselves. This fosters curiosity, said Morales, and a willingness to explore potentially uncomfortable workbook lessons.

Such experience taught him to stop looking at the arrival of a troubled kid as a new problem to manage. Instead, he began to view it as an opportunity to reach someone who had fallen through the traditional system. “We want to change the world with this project,” said Morales.


Vicky Colbert believes that Escuela Nueva never could have become such a success without great teachers like Gloria Morena Zuluaga of Sede Barragán. (Credit: Jared Wade)

Escuela Nueva’s Global Future

The experiences of Quindio highlight why educators throughout the world are looking to adopt Nueva Escuela principles. Vicky Colbert lights up when recalling how her philosophy spread to locations like Guatemala and Brazil in its early days. More recently, she has traveled to Mexico, and talked extensively with the governments of Vietnam, Chile, and Zambia, where technical assistance has been offered to set up a program.

These high-level discussions are the backbone of kickstarting programs in new countries due to the same impact and scalability dynamics she encountered in Colombia in the 1970s. But Colbert now also focuses on partnering with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) when moving into new areas.

There are multiple reasons that this has been a better approach than setting up a local Escuela Nueva outpost. First, it simply cuts down on overhead and resources. While it would be great to have the foundation’s boots on the ground across the globe, funding can be better spent elsewhere.

Second comes political risk. Ultimately, partnering with federal governments is the way to have the biggest impact. They are the only ones in a country that can install a nationwide rollout. But the downside is much greater — a lesson Colbert learned in Brazil after the public officials who championed the program left office. 

Brazil’s administration turnover, mass corruption scandals, and budgetary nightmares in recent years haven’t fully curtailed the foundation’s efforts in the country. At least 10,000 schools in the Portuguese-speaking country, under the name “Escola Ativa,” have used Escuela Nueva methods. But collaborating with established local NGOs and other private sectors stakeholders gives Colbert more confidence. They have staying power. And this helps ensure that the hard work spent laying the foundation for new programs won’t stall out with the changing winds of the next election.

In Mexico, Escuela Nueva now works with Fundación Azteca. In Zambia, it works with the Campaign for Female Education (Camfed). “In the case of Brazil, I should have had an organization from the private sector to work with, because innovations are very vulnerable to political and administrative changes,” said Colbert.

Despite such concerns, these days, the work is now more about expanding intelligently than fighting to break down roadblocks. After more than four decades of development, the challenge is no longer about convincing people that Escuela Nueva works. It’s about keeping up with demand.

This is why Colbert was overjoyed when she got the call about winning the Yidan Prize and the $3.9 million USD in funding that comes along with it. She hopes this can serve as something of a seed-round investment that attracts even more resources and partnerships — including more public support within Colombia — to kickstart a new, even-grander era for Fundación Escuela Nueva.

The interest is certainly there. Even the biggest country on earth wants to get involved. “There has been so much interest in China. So much interest,” she said. “I’ve been invited almost every year to go to China because they’re very interested in the Escuela Nueva model, especially for the rural areas.”

Though she has other priorities, Colbert says she has been flattered that even U.S. states, including California and New Mexico, have come calling to partner with the organization. “We want to work with the poorest of the poor children in developing countries,” said Colbert.

At an age when most are looking forward to retirement, Colbert shows no signs of slowing down. Even though the long journey has taken Escuela Nueva beyond the wildest dreams of the wide-eyed young woman who set off for Stanford University in the 1970s, there is still has so much work to be done.

Colbert is eager to continue the mission. And best of all, she is no longer alone. There is a growing group of supporters and educators, in Colombia and throughout the world, working toward the same goal. “This is my life project — and not only mine,” said Colbert. “But it’s a collective life project of many wonderful teachers that have been with me for so many, many years.”

Related

Vicky Colbert Wins Prestigious Yidan Prize for Lifelong Educational Work in Colombia, December 14, 2017

Share your thoughts: About the Author

Jared Wade is editor in chief of Finance Colombia. He is a Bogotá-based journalist with 15 years of experience covering topics including business, financial services, Latin America, and sports. Email him at jared.wade(at) financecolombia.com or follow him on Twitter at @Jared_Wade.

Continue reading here.

Small school superintendents must be creative to fill all teaching positions

By Mark Coddington
The Grand Island Independent
Posted Aug 23, 2008 @ 10:29 PM
GRAND ISLAND —

When Superintendent Amy Malander advertised for an art teacher at Cedar Rapids public school in 2006, she didn't exactly get overrun with applications.

Actually, she didn't get any.

Not that it was much of a surprise -- it had happened a few years before with a family and consumer science opening. She advertised for a science teacher the same year as the art job and got a single applicant. This year, she got two applications for a math position.

So Malander improvised. She persuaded an elementary teacher certified to teach K-8 art to tack on high school art, too.

The lack of a certification certainly wasn't desirable to Malander or the state, but in a district with about 135 K-12 students and no other options, it would have to do.

Superintendents of small schools across Central Nebraska can rattle off survival stories like Malander's. It has always been difficult to recruit teachers for specialized positions such as music and industrial arts, they said, but never more difficult than it is today.

And the shortage of qualified applicants is hitting small districts, with their rural settings and lower salaries, the hardest.

"You used to have a job open in social studies, and you'd get 15, 16, 17 applicants," said Mike McCabe, superintendent of Ansley and Arcadia school districts, with 195 and 118 students, respectively. "Now you'd be lucky to get four or five."

At Hampton public schools, Superintendent Holly Herzberg considers herself largely insulated from a teacher shortage. Her 147-student district is close to Grand Island, Aurora and York, giving teachers several options of places to live and employers for their spouses.

She was excited about the number of applications she got recently for a vocational ag position: four.

To a man, the superintendents said they were still able to find high-quality teachers despite the shallow pool of applicants.

But they also described themselves as lucky for just that reason.

"We got some darn good people. We kind of came out of this (year) in excellent shape," said Bob Brown, superintendent of Sargent and Arnold districts in Custer County. "That's not always going to happen."

Social lives and salaries

One explanation for the shortage is simple: a generation of young people who have embraced higher salaries and big-city life in Lincoln, Omaha or outside the state.

It's essentially Nebraska's long-lamented "Brain Drain," played out in teaching.

McCabe said he has seen that older applicants with a spouse and family tend to find small towns appealing as a place to raise children. But recent college graduates tend to dismiss small schools out of hand, because as singles in their early 20s, they see rural areas as a social dead-end.

"I don't think they're looking at the school so much as they're looking at the town's environment and atmosphere," McCabe said.

John Poppert, superintendent of Giltner public schools, said he can understand that concern.

"They're 23, 24 years old," Poppert said. "There's not much to do in Giltner compared to Grand Island or Hastings."

The state's teacher's union, the Nebraska State Education Association, agrees that teachers are leaving the state for what seem to be greener pastures.

NSEA officials cite statistics from the state Department of Education that revealed that only about half of the people of who received teaching certificates from the state in 2005 were teaching here two years later.

But their explanation is different: Teachers are leaving the state not necessarily for more populated areas, but for higher pay, said Jess Wolf, NSEA's president and a former teacher and principal in Arlington.

Wolf noted that the state ranks 45th in the country in teacher pay and cited several examples of colleagues who left for higher pay in Iowa, Kansas or Wyoming.

Several superintendents acknowledged that their districts couldn't pay as much as larger districts -- let alone other fields.

"If you're graduating in math and the sciences, you're going into engineering and not into education because of the low salary," Malander said. "The business world is just outpaying us."

Wolf acknowledged, too, that fluctuation in small schools' state aid limits the amount districts, particularly small ones, could spend on their teachers' salaries.

Still, he said raising salaries significantly could be feasible.

"It takes some gut decisions on the part of school districts to decide where they're going to spend their money," Wolf said.

A proactive approach

This staffing shortage doesn't mean, though, that superintendents are relegated to advertising a position, then praying for applicants.

Many are diligent in building relationships with education departments in the state's colleges, then relentless in pursuing the graduating students in those departments.

Dan Bird, superintendent of Burwell public schools, said it's not unusual for him and his colleagues to call coveted students directly with a sales pitch for their district.

That's a significant change from years past, when the onus was more on candidates to make themselves stand out to districts.

"Instead of waiting for them to come to you, you're making the call, asking them to come," Bird said.

He said he also tries to determine early in the school year which of his teachers aren't planning on returning, so he can advertise earlier and get a better crop of candidates.

"Early" used to mean April, Bird said. Now, it usually means before Jan. 1.

Bird also partners with Burwell Economic Development to give out a recruiting CD highlighting the community's assets to potential candidates.

Others try to include incentives outside their salary limitations.

The Giltner district owns five homes in town that it rents out to young teachers for a low cost.

McCabe said he has reached an agreement with the local teachers' union to allow him to count years of experience that a new teacher doesn't have toward the state's pay scale.

Wolf noted that such arrangements are only legal if the local union representatives sign off on them. He said the NSEA generally disapproves of them, as they leave less funds for other teachers in future negotiations.

Other districts try a more homegrown approach. Malander said she's working to help a Cedar Rapids woman get a foreign language teacher's certificate through a University of Nebraska at Kearney program, and the brightest Cedar Rapids students are told about the opportunities to come back and teach in their hometown.

"You have to start doing your own recruiting," Malander said.

College challenge for rural kids

By Rick Dalton and John Mills • Special to The Courier-Journal
August 1, 2008

Every summer, thousands of Americans enjoy vacation getaways to rural communities with little thought about the challenges facing those who live there year round: persistent poverty, a lack of major employers and skilled workers, and a large population of underachieving high school students whose futures will be stunted because they won't go to college.

In fact, only 27 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds from rural areas enroll in college -- a number far lower than those from both urban and suburban communities. These problems will only become more significant if current trends continue. National enrollment in rural schools was up 15 percent in recent years and continues to increase, with minority and low-income students -- those who are among the lowest achieving and least likely to attend college -- fast becoming the largest demographics of students in these schools. In fact, half of all students classified as English language learners now live in rural areas.

As a rural college president and a representative of an organization that has spent the past decade striving to address challenges facing economically disadvantaged students, we believe rural educators, policymakers and families must do much more to boost college-going aspirations and prepare students for college success. Many rural communities mirror those of the inner cities -- only 21 percent of young people between the age of six and 18 have parents who have earned bachelors or graduate degrees.

As a result, many students have few adults in their lives who can speak from their own experience when encouraging young people to pursue a college education. Efforts by schools, churches and community organizations to help students prepare for college should therefore involve the students' families, so that aspirations are reinforced at home.

Many rural students who hope to attend college also need a clearer road map for getting there. The admissions and financial aid process can be an obstacle course for even the best informed students and their families, but the can't-miss deadlines and detours are even more vexing for those who don't have a personal guide.

Face-to-face conversations with college representatives are key -- yet like urban schools most rural schools lack a sufficient number of counselors to foster a college-going culture among their students. Boards of education in rural areas can address this by employing counselors who travel from school to school, and by creating partnerships that bring more college representatives to schools.

Rural students also need to become better prepared for college. Currently, only 52 percent of rural schools offer AP courses, ranking them dead last compared to urban and suburban schools. Rural pre-K-12 educators must make more of these courses available to ensure students are prepared to succeed at competitive colleges -- and to send the message that college is a worthwhile destination.

Those educators will achieve even more success in boosting aspirations by partnering with students themselves -- specifically older teens and young men and women in their early twenties who have made it to college. Through a 17-year partnership that has involved 480 pre-K-12 schools and 280 colleges, thousands of elementary, middle and secondary school students have received direct mentoring from older students who are succeeding in college. Students spend time on college campuses, learn about the importance of challenging high school courses and receive individual assistance in navigating the applications process from peers who are promoting the value of college firsthand. The process has proven to be effective. To date 96 percent of the secondary school participants who have participated in the program have gone on to college -- nearly three times the rate for rural students overall.

We can also support those students by improving the economic prospects of their communities. Rural enterprise zones, expanded broadband Internet access and secondary school curriculums that promote entrepreneurial learning will all attract investments and jobs to rural America. They will also give college graduates from rural communities an opportunity to inspire future generations by bringing their skills, knowledge and aspirations back home.

Rick Dalton is president of College for Every Student and John Mills is president of Paul Smiths College, Paul Smiths, N.Y..

Attitude Determines Student Success In Rural Schools

To check out the full report: "What Determines Student Success in Rural Schools?"

-Patricia

ScienceDaily (June 19, 2008) — While most of the country focuses on ACT scores, student-teacher ratio and rigorous curriculum to increase student success, it may be the commitment to excellence that determines student achievement in rural schools. This is an overlooked, yet critical, factor when considering nearly half of American school districts are in rural areas, educating nearly 21 percent of all students.

Perri Applegate, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma K20 Center, recently investigated the qualities that differentiate a high-achieving school and low-achieving rural high school, focusing on high-poverty high schools with at least 51 percent of the population eligible for free or reduced lunch.

Applegate compared the scores on Oklahoma's Academic Performance Index, the state's annual school report of 367 Oklahoma high schools ranging from large, urban to small rural schools. She found no significant difference in achievement of rural schools and those in other settings.

Surprisingly, the top factors that did impact student achievement in urban high schools, ACT scores and dropout rates, did not determine student success in rural schools. Community involvement and the school's commitment to student excellence were the determining factors in whether a rural school was high- or low-achieving.

"In small-town America, the school and the community are dependent upon each other for success," said Applegate. In rural areas, schools tend to be the center of the community, acting as a gathering place and often social services. In larger towns, students have access to resources and support outside of their schools.

"Rural schools in the study listed the same factors as impacting student achievement: poverty, parental support, community, extracurricular activities and a caring school culture," said Applegate. "The difference between a high- or low-achieving rural school was how they -- both the school and the community -- met those challenges."

High-achieving schools had educators that embraced the role of being a rural teacher, which typically means wearing many hats and being creative with necessary resources. The schools had shared and supportive leadership, empowered stakeholders to take leadership roles and did not accept the idea that students were destined to fail based on their address. As one rural teacher pointed out, "Intelligence isn't geographically based."

Other factors included parents and community members who support the teachers, or if necessary, the school enacted programs to increase support. Another key factor was high-achieving schools gave students many opportunities to connect their learning to the well-being of the community, reinforcing the school-community bond.

While affected by the same variables, low-achieving schools felt that being a rural school was a handicap for student achievement and the lack of resources was a burden to school administration and the community. This attitude reflected in the educational approach of the school and in the student's probability to go to college.

According to Applegate, these finding have serious implications beyond education. Research shows that schools can save communities. The success of one can determine the success or failure of the other.

"We can't assume that student success in all schools, large and small, is impacted by the same issues," said Applegate. "So the question becomes how do we help schools in their environment become successful?"

For rural schools, Applegate suggests preparation programs need to provide specialized training for those who will serve in this setting. Policymakers need to acknowledge that rural schools have particular strengths and weaknesses. Finally, reform programs aimed at improving rural schools need to be tailored to meet their unique needs.

Rural schools left behind federal mandate

Check out the entire report: "Some Perspectives from Rural School Districts on The No Child Left Behind Act" -Patricia

Federal mandate impossible to meet

Scott Stephens | Plain Dealer Reporter
June 11, 2008

Fresh air. Wide-open spaces. Inexpensive housing. Little crime.

The bucolic lures of teaching in a rural school district are considerable.

But there can be a down side: low salaries, larger class sizes and a greater likelihood of teaching a subject other than the one you were trained to teach.

The six-year-old federal No Child Left Behind law, which requires reading and math proficiency for all students by 2012 and a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, has had scant influence on the nation's rural schools, according to a report released today.

The report is significant in developing policy in states such as Ohio, which has the fifth-largest rural student population in the nation. It's also significant because enrollment in rural schools nationally is up 15 percent, including a 55 percent increase in rural minority students.

Even so, rural schools seem to get less attention than urban schools, which are in big media centers, and affluent suburban districts, which have vocal parent support.

And because they tend to be smaller, less racially and ethnically diverse, and generally post better test scores than urban districts, they are less influenced by the federal law.

"Rural districts do have problems," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy, the public school advocacy group that issued the report. "But the problems are quieter."

Among the report's findings:

Federal highly qualified requirements have little impact on teacher recruitment and retention in rural districts. Often because their salaries are not competitive, rural districts have trouble keeping good teachers, especially in hard-to-fill areas such as math and science.

Rural schools are struggling with academic achievement gaps between students from low-income households - as well as disabled students - and their peers.

Rural school leaders rated their own policies and programs more significant than No Child Left Behind regulations in raising student achievement. One exception: Reading First, the federally funded program designed to get children reading well by the end of third grade.

Not all rural school districts agreed with the report's findings. Maxwell Shoff, superintendent of the Firelands Local School District, said teachers in his district are highly qualified and often spend their entire careers in the southern Lorain County system.

"I don't agree with the notion that rural schools can't attract good teachers," Shoff said. "We're not losing them - they stay."

Others have struggled. George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio, said rural schools are often unable to pay the competitive salaries needed to retain the good teachers the federal law requires.

Wood's own district, in the tax-depleted Appalachian hills of southeast Ohio, is on the state's fiscal emergency list. The starting salary in the district is $26,000, and the top salary is $53,000 - even for teachers who have been there 30 years.

Wood said he lost one of his best, young science teachers last year because the teacher's debt from student loans was twice what he was making.

"The problem with No Child Left Behind is that it suddenly demanded highly qualified teachers, but didn't put any support in place to make that happen," Wood said.

Still, every senior at Federal Hocking who graduated this spring and who wanted to go to college was accepted. And the graduating class grossed about $900,000 in scholarships.

"Nothing in No Child Left Behind has helped us with the success of our students," Wood said.

Education a challenge in small Mexican community with strong ties to Dallas

Monday, June 9, 2008
by MACARENA HERNÁNDEZ and GARY JACOBSON | The Dallas Morning News

LOMA ALTA, Mexico – Just down the dirt road from several small adobe houses, past a cat keeping silent watch under a street lamp, past two lounging dogs, 16 students line up outside their one-room concrete school.

The tiniest kid holds the Mexican flag. It's early March, and during a weekly patriotic ceremony the teacher tells her students about Mexico's beloved former president, Benito Juarez, whose birthday is later in the month.

"He was an Indian from Oaxaca and a sheepherder just like you," Maria Gloria Martínez says. "Imagine that, one of you could be president."

As she speaks, nine kids watch from the yard of a nearby house. Mexico requires that children attend school through junior high, but there is often little enforcement. Many of those watching are old enough to be in Ms. Martínez's elementary school, but their parents don't send them.

Ms. Martínez, 69, wears glasses, has short gray hair and does needlework to earn extra money. She also has the voice of a drill sergeant. Earning the equivalent of $170 a month, she lives at the school during the week, sleeping on a cot by the door. Village families bring her food.

In this arid region of Mexico's central highlands, nearly 1,000 miles from Dallas and 7,000 feet above sea level, the elementary and middle schools are, in effect, feeder schools for Adamson High School in Oak Cliff.

Adamson principal Rawly Sanchez has never met Ms. Martínez. But the success of his job is partly linked to her. Many of his students come from rural areas in Mexico such as this, pushed north by powerful economic forces that sometimes hinder schooling.

One of the Loma Alta students who now attends Adamson is Juan, a teen who saved enough money after coming to America to buy a house a short walk from the rural school. He moved to Dallas with his family in 2006 to work construction after dropping out of junior high in Mexico.

"If my children get an education, maybe they won't have to leave because they'll be able to find work," says Juan's aunt, Carmela, who lives in Loma Alta with her 10 kids. "But without an education what can you do? Maybe herd animals, but even those jobs are almost gone."

Loma Alta is one of the smallest of a dozen rural settlements surrounding the town of Ocampo in the state of Guanajuato. Ocampo is the largest community in the municipality (similar to a county in the U.S.) of the same name. The town has 6,000 residents, the municipality 21,000.

Stop anyone in Ocampo and chances are they have a relative in Dallas. If not, that's usually because the relative lives in Chicago, the second most popular destination.

Casa Guanajuato, an organization that helps new immigrants in Dallas, estimates that more people from Ocampo live in Dallas than in the municipality. Personal connections provide a built-in support network, adding to the job allure of Dallas. For a century, Guanajuato has supplied a steady flow of immigrants to the U.S., working on railroads, farms and in well-paying construction jobs.

The connections go both ways. During a 10-day period in Ocampo, two reporters and a photographer from The Dallas Morning News saw many signs of North Texas: a minivan with a Southlake Dragons bumper sticker in front of an elementary school, a first-grader wearing a Trinity Christian Academy jacket, a junior high student wearing a Boswell High School shirt, a woman in a Molina Jaguars T-shirt, and a young boy wearing a "Kahn Elementary Field Day 2002" shirt. Kahn, in Oak Cliff, feeds into Sunset High School. Molina is a Dallas high school.

On Friday and Saturday nights on Ocampo's main square, dreams of El Norte loom large. At the Ciber Cafe, teenage boys pay 10 pesos, about $1, an hour to cruise the Internet. Wearing Dallas Cowboys jerseys and Nikes, they slouch in their chairs as they click through MySpace and watch rap videos on YouTube. It takes only a few minutes of questioning to find someone who has either worked in Dallas, or wants to. For many, earning money is more important than school.

The culture shock of moving north is great. The education shock can be greater.

There was no elementary school in Loma Alta when Juan's mother grew up there. "I was 12 years old when they opened the school," says Maria, 38. "My mother says that before that a lady, on her own, would teach kids at her home."

The average schooling level for municipality residents is fourth grade, according to government statistics. Fifteen percent don't read or write; only 12 percent have finished high school. The municipality didn't have a high school until 1993.

"When we built the high school, the thinking was that people would stop leaving for the U.S.," says Francisco "Pancho" Pedroza, president of the municipality. They didn't.

José Juan Salazar, an Ocampo education official who works with Mr. Pedroza, believes the U.S. educational system is better at encouraging entrepreneurial spirit in kids. "In Mexico," he says, "they educate you as if you are always going to work for someone else."

Before moving to Dallas, Mr. Pedroza's niece, Gabby, and nephew, Luis Adrian, both attended Ocampo's only private school, Instituto Mexico, long the choice of better-off residents. Now, they attend Adamson with Juan.

In the United States, Mr. Pedroza would be called "mayor." Born in 1945, he completed the sixth grade at Instituto Mexico and started working. There were no junior highs in Ocampo then.

He moved to Dallas in 1966, unloading produce for a year at the Farmers Market. Immigration officials caught up with him, he says, so he moved to Chicago and worked at a meatpacking plant. He returned to Ocampo in 1985.

Mr. Pedroza, who has a full head of gray hair and a ready smile, says he is trying to expand the area's agribusiness opportunities and attract a shoe factory. Eventually, he hopes a branch of a university will open in town. Mainly, he wants to give residents an economic reason to stay home and kids a better chance at an education.

"We know we can't stop them from leaving," he says. "But if they're going to leave at least they'll have more education."

Next to agriculture, brick making is Ocampo's top industry, employing about 100 workers, Mr. Pedroza says. One of those workers is a sweat-and-dirt streaked 14-year-old named Luis Cortés. He wears a red "Tommy" cap and a Chevrolet T-shirt that says "The Heartbeat of America." He explains how he quit going to school in the fourth grade to help shovel and mix the mud that becomes bricks and tiles.

"Why should he sit in school bored, not learning anything, when he can be making $10 a day?" says his uncle, José Zuñiga, also a brick maker. The uncle, in his mid-20s, says he did not finish primary school, either. The average worker in Ocampo earns about $70 a week, municipality officials say.

Classroom challenges

The quality of education in Mexico ranges widely, from big urban centers to remote rural areas, like Loma Alta. Those from urban areas tend to be better prepared academically.

Educators in Guanajuato say there has been progress in the last 15 years. Even rural schools are now equipped with computers. There is a standard interactive curriculum for fifth- and sixth-graders that former President Vicente Fox supported.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for Mexico is improving opportunities for students in rural areas, where economic pressures often force families to choose work over school. For decades, Mexico has experimented with ways to reach these students. Some Adamson students attended telesecundarias, junior highs that offer the same televised lesson at the same time nationwide. Between broadcasts, classroom teachers supplement the on-screen instruction with discussions and workbook assignments.

"I see so many kids with so much potential here, but we need to change the culture, and we need more government support," says Carlos Rosales, a regional high school director.

As families move back and forth across the border, more kids from Dallas schools are showing up in Ocampo schools. There is some evidence, municipality officials say, that students from the U.S. are helping improve achievement scores in primary grades.

That's not true for older students coming from America. Complaints of Mexican educators sound much the same as complaints of Dallas teachers talking about students from Mexico. The kids don't know the language well enough, and their math skills are weak.

Students from the United States bring with them some American attitude.

That was evident in an advanced English class at Instituto Mexico. Located behind double metal doors at the rear of a Catholic church a few blocks from the town square, the Instituto offers classes from preschool through ninth grade, charging the equivalent of $35 a month in tuition. Its resources are limited, but its community tradition strong.

That tradition doesn't mean much to Jorge Rangel, who was born and raised in Dallas and moved to Ocampo with his family just before the start of school last summer.

"Oh, man, I want to go back," he says. "This school is a waste."

The big 16-year-old bulges out of his small one-piece desk and chair. The laces on his white athletic shoes are untied. He pronounces his name George. His mom calls him Jorge.

In a class of 13, he is one of three students who attended Dallas schools. Jorge and one friend decided they didn't need to buy the class textbook. They act as if they already know more English than the teacher.

María Guadalupe López, the teacher, was born in Mexico and has lived in Chicago and Dallas. She says the kids who have been in American schools don't like being told what to do and are behind in math. She wonders if those who go back and forth between the countries will ever master one language to an academic level. That echoes concerns Adamson teachers have about Mexican immigrant students mastering enough English to pass the state TAKS exams.

"That's not what I wanted," Ms. Lopez tells Jorge about a class assignment, handing it back. "I said write what you saw, what you learned." The class had taken a field trip to the pyramids of Teotihuacan near Mexico City.

"It was cool but boring at the same time," Jorge had written in English.

Before moving to Ocampo, Jorge attended St. Cecilia Catholic School in Oak Cliff and then Greiner Middle School, where he played football. His father and uncle run a bus company that transports people and cargo to and from the U.S. His mother, Norma Rangel, a U.S. citizen and graduate of Sunset High School, admits some of Jorge's teachers think he is "sassy." Mrs. Rangel thinks he is having trouble adjusting to his new life. "As time goes by, I think he'll like it here," she says.

The next school stop for Jorge, his mother says, is Ocampo's high school, a modern two-story campus near two junior highs and the agricultural experiment station. Municipality officials say that of the nearly 600 students who graduate from Ocampo's junior highs every year, about 150 go on to high school. That includes students at two small high schools in other towns.

The decision to attend high school often depends upon economics. Does a kid have to work to help support the family?

Looking at enrollment figures for the 2006-07 school year, high school principal César Rangel (no relation to Jorge), says 332 students started the year in the school's three grades, and 272 were enrolled at the end of the year. Most who left went to the U.S., Dr. Rangel says.

Is it a brain drain for Mexico?

"Absolutely," Dr. Rangel says. "It's a shame for us that we're not able to retain our people. But it's because at the national level, we're not giving them employment opportunities."

The high school offers specialties in three technical careers: industrial maintenance (repairing machines, electrical, plumbing), information systems (software) and administration (office work). At the same time, some students take college prep classes.

Dr. Rangel says the school has 20 teachers, counting part-timers. They earn the equivalent of about $8 an hour and average about 32 hours a week. Each student pays an enrollment fee equal to about $45 a semester. Many have scholarships.

Dr. Rangel has some advice for the American teachers of Mexican immigrants.

"Really understand that these kids don't know English and they are going into a new culture," he says. "It's going to be little by little that they learn the language." The primary predictor of academic success is the same on both sides of the border, he says: the educational level of the parents.

In an industrial arts class at the high school where the students are wiring lights, instructor Sergio González says he worked construction in Atlanta but returned to Mexico about three years ago, just before he turned 30.

"I love being a teacher," he says. "You become a father to these kids. ...When they fail, I fail, too." Based upon his experience, he gives his students three rules for attaining success in the United States: 1. Learn English. 2. Work every day. 3. Don't get in trouble with the law.

Dreams of America

Back at Loma Alta, Ms. Martínez says this is the most difficult assignment she has had. Two teachers had already come and gone from the school this year before she arrived. The kids were not used to doing schoolwork and were out of control.

The preschool didn't open this term because enrollment was just two students short of qualifying for a teacher through CONAFE, the federal agency that places teachers such as Ms. Martínez in hard-to-fill jobs in poor rural areas. If all the families in town had enrolled their kids, there would have been enough students to unlock the preschool.

Some CONAFE teachers have completed only ninth grade, but they get government assistance to continue their studies. Ms. Martínez says her schooling would be equivalent in the U.S. to two years of college.

Her small classroom building has modern touches: a satellite dish, an IBM computer, an interactive "smart board" and a Lexmark printer. Yet, outside, the common restroom is an adobe wall around a hole in the ground. Students wash their hands from a spigot at the water tank. Ms. Martínez bathes near the front door of the classroom and throws the used water outside.

One day during class, the conversation turns to what her students expect to do in the future. Ms. Martínez listens to their dreams of making money in America. One girl says she's going to work in a restaurant. Another boy says he's going to slaughter pigs. The oldest of the class says he's going to work construction.

"Ay, what crazy dreams we sometimes have," Ms. Martínez says. "You know what? I am so happy here in my homeland."