Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. It’s well known that good jobs often require a strong understanding of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Yet K-12 performance in STEM lags in Indiana, driven in large part by substantial disparities across race and income. In 2017, only 51 percent of Indiana students passed the math portion of the ISTEP+ in grades 3-8. The pass rate for students with free- and reduced-price lunches was just 36 percent. And the pass rate for black students was 25 percent—less than half the rate for white students. Raising STEM achievement, particularly for low-income and minority […]

Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. The most recent round of ISTEP+ results, released last month, continue to show students in Marion County public schools performing well below state averages. At Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, fewer than 25% of elementary and middle school students passed both English and math ISTEP+ tests. These numbers should serve as a call to action to support struggling students and schools. Unfortunately, they’ve also raised a common refrain used to push back against efforts to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. In Marion County, 31% of children under 18 live in poverty, and 66% of […]