Education Week - April 14, 2021 - 3

Add a drop in college enrollment, especially among poor students,
to all the other woes the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought.
The annual " High School Benchmarks " report from the National
Student Clearinghouse found that, as of Nov. 16, college enrollment
dropped by 6.8 percent-more than quadrupling the prepandemic
rate of decline. Overall, 56.5 percent of the class of 2020 enrolled in
postsecondary school immediately after graduating, compared with
60.5 percent for the class of 2019.
Notably, schools with high populations of poor students of color
experienced a much greater decline in enrollment, compared with
those from whiter and wealthier schools, a reversal of prepandemic
trends. High-poverty high schools sent 46 percent of 2020 graduates to college this past fall, compared with 70 percent of graduates
from low-poverty schools. In 2019, high-poverty high schools sent
51.5 percent of graduates to college, compared with 72.6 percent of
low-poverty schools.
" If you're a low-income kid, a kid of color, a first-generation college-going kid, the actual process necessary for you to get from
high school to college is incredibly fragile, even in the best of circumstances, " said Derrell Bradford, the executive vice president of
50CAN, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable schools.
The research from the clearinghouse is drawn from about 3,500
public high schools that pay for its StudentTracker for High Schools
service, a group that represents 14 percent of U.S. high schools. Lowincome high schools are slightly overrepresented in the data.
Experts cite two factors that likely contributed to the uneven decline in college enrollment: Virtual instruction made learning less
accessible and engaging, especially for low-income students who
may not have broadband access and other resources, and the economic and health fallout of COVID-19 has hit Black and Latino students and their families the hardest.

Violence-Prone Students
Share Common Traits
The warning signs are all there.
Students who planned to attack schools showed the same types
of troubled histories as those who carried them out. They were
badly bullied, often suffered from depression with stress at home,
and exhibited behavior that worried others, concludes a U.S. Secret Service study that examined 67 thwarted school plots nationwide.
The study by the National Threat Assessment Center is a twist on
the study of school shootings. The group analyzed 100 students responsible for plotting 67 attacks nationwide from 2006 to 2018 in
K-12 schools.
All the plots studied were serious planned attacks, and the plotters
took at least some steps toward carrying them out or schools had
faced a substantial level of risk.
" The study found expelling students doesn't eliminate the risk, "
said Steven Driscoll, one of the authors. Instead, the key is to address
bullying, provide mental-health support, and assess the impact of
stressors in the home.
Many were planned for April, when the shootings at Colorado's
Columbine High School occurred in 1999. Most targeted schools
were public high schools, with 37 percent in suburban areas and 14
percent in cities.
Only five of the plotters were female. The youngest plotter was 11,
the oldest 19.
In 75 percent of the attacks, the plotters had access to weapons,
mostly from inside their own homes. More than half documented
their plans through some kind of written justification for their
actions.
One-third conducted research into previous school shootings.
Most important, the researchers said, about 94 percent talked
about their attacks and what they intended to do in some way,
whether orally or electronically, and 75 percent were detected because the plotters talked about them.

4 How COVID-19 Will Make Fixing America's

OPINION

Worst-Performing Schools Even Harder

18 Ed. Leaders: Discuss Race,

Call Out White Supremacy

7 Savings Are Running Dry Amid COVID-19
10 Anti-Asian Violence: What Schools

19 We Need a Better

Should Start Doing About It

School Accountability Metric
Than Absenteeism

12 Teachers Are Watching Students' Screens

During Remote Learning. Is That Invasion
Of Privacy?

24 The Year of Scourges: How I Survived

Illness and Racism to Find My 'Tribe'

14 'You Can't Follow CDC Guidelines':

What Schools Really Look Like
During COVID-19

DEPARTMENTS
2 Briefly Stated

16 How a Cheerleader's Snapchat Profanity

20 Letters to the Editor

Could Shape the Limits of Students'
Free Speech

22 EdWeek Top School Jobs

17 Student School Board Members

Flex Their Civic Muscle in
Supreme Court Free-Speech Case

DATA

School Shootings Over Time: Incidents,
Injuries, and Deaths
Two weeks before the mass school shooting in Parkland, Fla., on
Feb. 14, 2018, Education Week began tracking incidents of gunfire
in schools that result in death or injury. In this special collection,
explore big-picture data on school shootings since 2018.

edw.link/ShootingData

DATA

GALLERY

The Schools Named After
Confederate Figures

Educators We've Lost to
The Coronavirus

Approximately 190 schools in 19 states
currently bear the names of men with ties to
the Confederacy, according to Education
Week's research.

In this memorial, we remember some of the
dedicated educators lost to their communities
and to the field. Updated regularly.

Getty

Pandemic Drags Down Rate
Of College-Bound Students

Vol. 40 * Issue 29 * April 14, 2021

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TECHNOLOGY COUNTS

How Pandemic Tech Use Is Shaping K-12 Education
Gerry Melendez for Education Week

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Education Week - April 14, 2021

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