Before Students Miss the Opportunity, Adults Miss the Signal

By: AJ Gutierrez

Since 2021, U.S. public schools have lost about 1.18 million students. Projections indicate that enrollment will further decline by 2.7 million students by 2031.  To better serve students, schools have an opportunity to better understand their aspirations, interests, and relationships and use those insights to connect them with the opportunities and supports that can help them thrive. Advanced coursework offers a particularly clear example of what becomes possible when schools recognize these signals and act on them.  

When it comes to advanced coursework, the access gap is serious, inequitable, and impossible to ignore, but it’s not the only problem. From what I’ve seen in my work with districts across the country, there’s another barrier that too often goes unaddressed: the communication gap. Time and again, I’ve seen a persistent disconnect between what educators think students want and need and what students actually aspire to. In fact, a recent survey of 270,000 students and 16,500 teachers and counselors nationwide found that 89 percent of students wanted to attend college, while educators estimated that only 73 percent of students did. 

That disconnect points to a larger issue. Schools collect enormous amounts of information about students, including grades, attendance records, assessment results, course enrollment, disciplinary actions, and more. That data can tell us what is happening but not why. The why comes from understanding students’ goals, senses of belonging, relationships with adults, interests, and perceived barriers that keep them from pursuing certain paths. 

Advanced coursework may not seem like an option for many students, for example, even if their school has  an “open enrollment” policy that allows them to register without a teacher recommendation. While open enrollment removes formal barriers, it does not necessarily eliminate informational or psychological ones. I believe that schools have a responsibility to make the pathway visible to students. Schools need repeatable structures for listening to students, assigning trusted adults to follow up, and monitoring whether those conversations result in course requests and enrollment. In EOS’s yearlong cycle, schools move from gathering student and staff perspectives, to reviewing opportunity and capacity data, to planning outreach, engaging trusted adults, monitoring progress, and examining enrollment outcomes. That kind of structure helps ensure that the student voice does not simply become another data point. It becomes the basis for action. 

How to Make Advanced Coursework More Accessible

The first phase is a planning stage that happens well before course registration deadlines. Once leadership has an idea of what students want for themselves, and which students might be good candidates for receiving outreach about advanced coursework, they have to think through capacity. While this kind of project is a natural fit for guidance staff, it’s not always possible for counselors to do outreach in addition to their other advising responsibilities. This is where trusted adults, like teachers, coaches, and other staff, come in. They can lead meetings, connect with students, and move the agenda forward by becoming advocates. 

After schools have developed their outreach list, a large group meeting is an effective way to keep the momentum going. The meeting should feel celebratory, and hopefully students will start to get excited about new possibilities.  In the words of Jodeci Tuiletufuga, a student at Federal Way High school, “Faculty supported and pushed me by letting me know I was capable of so much more.” This is why having a lot of lead time before registration deadlines is important.

Students might need to have more than one individual conversation with their advocate before they feel confident enough to enroll. In these conversations, advocates should try to address any lingering concerns that students might have. As Christian Esplana, an 11th grade student, said, “It felt good knowing that I’m at a level that AP students are. I have doubted myself before, but now I feel confident.” Students need to know that the adults in their lives think they are capable. 

Along the way, schools should monitor the progress of their outreach efforts. Did all invited students show up to the first meeting? Have advocates had individual conversations with students and, if so, how many? And, most importantly, how many students on the outreach list actually ended up enrolling in advanced coursework? And, once enrolled, how did students perform, and what kind of support did they need? It is only through tracking these data points that schools can consistently improve and grow the number of students in their advanced courses.

There is No Silver Bullet

But turning insight into action also means recognizing that the same response will not work for every student. A student who hesitates to enroll in an advanced course because they question whether they belong there needs something different from a student who simply did not know the course was available. The better schools understand the reasons behind a student’s decision, the more precisely they can respond. 

Students who appear similar across traditional data metrics may actually need different things depending on context.  There is significant variation in the barriers students face, so there is unlikely to be one response that works equally well for everyone. During my years helping build Saga Education and advancing, high impact tutoring, I learned that consistency does not have to mean sameness. High impact tutoring relies on a consistent structure, but within that structure, tutors use data, relationships, and individualized instruction to respond to what a particular student needs.

 Students miss opportunities for different reasons, so our responses  should be different, too. The path to more consistent outcomes may not be finding a single strategy that works for every student. We may need to build stronger systems that can help adults truly understand what individual students need. Strong schoolwide strategies and systems remain necessary. But within those systems, we can do a better job of seeing students as individuals and giving adults the insight they need to respond. Better data alone will not change a student’s trajectory. What matters is putting the right information in the hands of the right adult at the right time. 

AJ Gutierrez is the CEO of Equal Opportunity Schools. Gutierrez brings over 14 years of leadership in education nonprofits, including 10 as Cofounder and Chief Policy and Public Affairs Officer at Saga Education. Gutierrez has over a decade of experience leading education reform and scaling mission-driven organizations. Known for translating research into practice, he has advanced evidence-based policies that have driven federal and state investment in high-impact tutoring and accelerated learning strategies.