Jaleel is attending his first day of classes this month at a middle school opening its doors for the first time that specializes in air traffic control, commercial drones and engineering.

His parents decided not to send him to the majority-Black, F-rated campus closer to their home in Fort Bend ISD. Still, they fear their sixth grader may lose out on the community and support that come with receiving an education alongside kids in his neighborhood.

“This is a very difficult thing,” Mikole Montgomery, Jaleel’s mother, said of the choice to bypass . “I don’t take the decision lightly.”

Black children attend schools labeled as failing by the Texas Education Agency at a far higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group. Majority-Black schools are the least likely to achieve the state’s highest academic rating.

Of the roughly 300 such campuses last year, 20 received an A. By contrast, 105 scored a D or an F.

On Aug. 14, Texas releases the next round of school accountability ratings, largely based on how well students perform on the STAAR exam. Those ratings, promoted as a tool to identify and hold underperforming schools accountable, also serve as an annual reminder of Texas’ struggles to provide Black students a high-quality education, parents say.

That leaves families like Montgomery’s weighing whether to enroll their children in schools where they may benefit from rigorous academic opportunities but see fewer kids and teachers from their communities — or keep them on high-need campuses lacking in resources but abundant in love and understanding.

About 60% of majority-Black schools scored a C or better last year, which Texas defines as acceptable performance. By comparison, nearly all majority-Asian schools met that threshold, as did 91% of majority-white schools and 79% of majority-Hispanic schools.

Texas public schools educate north of 700,000 Black children — more than any other state in the country. And negative outcomes among a disproportionate share of majority-Black schools means thousands of kids could leave without the knowledge they need to thrive, even as state leaders often say that and have restricting the consideration of race in education policy.

Education Commissioner Mike Morath acknowledges that academic gaps between Black children and their peers have long existed in the state. However, he points to the preeminent showing Black students in Texas scoring higher than those in most of the country.

“That being said,” he added, “the results are still unacceptable.”

Texas must improve the quality of schools and support for all children — not just some children, Morath said.

“This is where the A-F indicators are important,” he said. “The state’s investment in this is to make sure that our local school districts are changing practices as rapidly as possible to improve these learning outcomes.”

Meredith Anderson, a native Texan who researches K-12 education for the United Negro College Fund, sees the racial disparities in the state’s accountability ratings as “alarming.”

Majority-Black schools tend to suffer from inadequate local and state funding, as well as from limited access to rigorous courses that help raise student expectations and learning, Anderson said. Schools broadly also do not employ enough , which can improve learning for all children, she added.

“We often think about it as more so academic gaps when we just look at the accountability ratings, without looking at some of the underlying causes that contribute to them and widen those gaps,” Anderson said. “Even if we have these bright spots, overwhelmingly the state isn’t serving our Black students well.”

When Black parents choose not to enroll their kids in neighborhood campuses as a result, that could also mean the students who remain end up worse off.

Texas funds schools based on attendance, which means they lose money to pay for academic supports as families leave. That also often means the loss of involved parents and students who otherwise could help usher in improvements. Meanwhile, negative perceptions of majority-Black schools can contribute to a broader narrative that students at such campuses do not deserve positive attention or investment, parents and advocates say.

“I certainly recognize the value in these kids,” Montgomery said. “I recognize me sending my son to the other side, it says something about how I feel about the kids as well — whether it’s intentional or not.”

Pressure to improve

The Texas Education Agency evaluated more than 9,000 campuses last year, with roughly 15% of schools receiving the lowest grades.

Of the 302 majority-Black schools in Texas, 35% scored a D or an F, by far the largest share of any racial or ethnic group. No majority-Asian schools received such ratings, while 8% of majority-white schools and 19% of majority-Hispanic schools did.

Texas grades schools based on three primary measures, including how well the campuses perform compared to those with similar percentages of low-income students. Schools typically receive a D or an F if only about a third of students or worse meet grade level on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, or STAAR.

Alongside the reality that Black students in Texas are those most likely to and and the least likely to , many parents see the ratings as further evidence that the education system is failing their children.

“I don’t think it takes rocket science for folks to figure out,” said Tyrone Howard, a UCLA professor who studies race and education. “It’s the fact that the original sin of this country has always been around race — structural racism — and all its remnants still remain in place.”

When a school receives five consecutive F ratings, Texas’ education commissioner must either replace the school district’s elected trustees and superintendent or close the campus. Schools that predominantly educate trigger takeovers most often.

Morath, the state’s education chief, believes that schools consistently receiving unacceptable ratings reflects a failure by local district leaders to sufficiently focus on student learning. The A-F rating system allows his agency to identify those districts and initiate reforms where necessary, he said.

Morath views Houston ISD as evidence that it matters who runs local schools, as Black students have posted large test score gains since he intervened in 2023. Critics of the takeover often accuse HISD’s commissioner-appointed superintendent of overemphasizing test scores. The critics question the sustainability of the gains given unusually high numbers of teachers and students leaving the district, especially Black children.

Eight of Texas’ A-rated, majority-Black campuses serve children in the state’s largest district.

Morath sees the academic gains as signals that state intervention works.

“In many cases, our schools are doing very well,” he said of Texas public education. “But our schools need to get better, and they need to get better as fast as possible.”

The Texas Tribune interviewed two Black former principals of D- and F-rated schools who shared details of their challenges on the job. The administrators asked to remain anonymous because they still work in Texas education and feared retaliation for speaking candidly.

The leaders acknowledge they sometimes failed to focus enough on student instruction and helping teachers improve. But that’s because they often had to extinguish other fires, such as abrupt staff departures, funding cuts and depleted morale.

Compared with predominantly white, Asian and more affluent campuses, the Black school leaders felt they lacked autonomy to make decisions that would improve learning. They say they missed out on community business partnerships, wealthy parent-teacher groups and instructional materials that reflected their students’ interests. They also dealt with students enrolling and leaving at high rates throughout the school year, making it difficult to maintain consistent standards.

There’s also pressure to improve ratings, not necessarily to ensure learning growth but to avoid state penalties, they assert. The Black campus leaders say their schools focused heavily on students most likely to improve their test scores, which meant little time to prioritize the academic growth of children who came to school hungry or without a jacket when it was cold.

“Externally, it looks like you’re a poor leader,” said the former principal of an F-rated, majority-Black elementary school. “All you’re trying to do is serve your kids.”

School officials can make a difference by listening to their local communities and, more importantly, fostering spaces where Black parents feel they can engage, education researchers say. That includes scheduling events at times when most families can participate.

Still, even the best school systems cannot overcome unsupported teachers or a lack of money to fund the initiatives students need, the experts note. Texas leaders must also recognize that addressing racial inequality cannot happen without honest conversations about race, the researchers say.

Legislators recently targeting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in education. Republicans approved such measures out of a belief that schools focused more on gender and race than merit and instruction.

But some who study education contend that the unwillingness to address historical racism hurts Black students the most. Research repeatedly shows they benefit from having , while many Black families place high importance on their children reflected in the books they read.

“That’s where I think the frustration is for a lot of parents, like, ‘OK, how can I not name what I might believe to be the primary factor in why some kids don’t get opportunity?’” said Howard, the UCLA professor. “It’s just, to me, outright tragic that that’s where we are.”

More than ratings

Having raised three children and volunteered in the community for more than two decades, Stephanie Brown considers Missouri City Middle School “the best-kept secret” in Fort Bend ISD.

What it lacks in resources, it makes up for in dedicated teachers and administrators, she said. Brown believes that if district leaders granted students access to benefits such as commercial drone classes or before- and after-school programs that other children in the district receive, Missouri City Middle School would see similar results.

Brown wants students to know that they are more than standardized tests and accountability ratings.

For the last two years, she has helped organize summer trips to a free engineering camp at Prairie View A&M University, where high school students and middle schoolers stay in dorms and learn about robotics and computer science. She wants to show Black families that they do not need to leave to find a quality education. And the community needs to realize that sometimes, it is not “better on the other side,” Brown added.

“Whatever the data is showing that we’re lacking, it needs to be on our campuses,” Brown said. “We should not have to seek outside resources in order to get it if this data has been showing this all over the country. Because think about it: God didn’t make one race smarter than the other. So what is really going on here? Where does it start?”

In a statement to the Tribune, Fort Bend ISD officials said students at all of their campuses deserve access to a high-quality education, as well as the opportunities and support necessary to succeed, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or ZIP code.

“The district continually evaluates student needs, academic performance and campus resources to identify where additional support and intervention may be needed,” district officials said. “Fort Bend ISD remains committed to providing equitable educational opportunities for all students and will continue working alongside our educators, families and community to strengthen student achievement across the district.”

, located southwest of Houston, educates about 78,000 students — 28% of whom are Black. In 2025, Fort Bend ISD moved up one letter grade to a B and had than in the previous year. Missouri City Middle School was 1 point shy of a D.

When state lawmakers more than a decade ago, Sen. worried that it would disproportionately penalize schools that lacked sufficient resources to achieve an acceptable rating. That aspect of the system continues to bother him, West said.

Given that Texas has fewer than two dozen A-rated, majority-Black campuses, the Dallas Democrat agrees with families who say the education system is failing Black children. But he disagrees with those who say Black parents should keep their children in schools that do not serve them.

“If they believe the best thing is to take them across the street, then fine. Let them take them across the street,” West said. “Unfortunately, the downside is that a lot of kids’ parents can’t take their kid across the street, and they’re left in a desperate situation.”

Local school leaders and teachers must do everything they can to provide a quality education for those kids, West added.

As for the failures of Texas public education, Montgomery said, “I think the goal is to keep our kids uneducated.”

That belief fueled her family’s decision for Jaleel to attend the new Amy Coleman Middle School farther away from their home. She believes Missouri City Middle School employs passionate educators who care about children, but she is concerned about how Fort Bend ISD officials distribute resources.

For example, Coleman has an aviation and aerospace program while Missouri City has one focused on first responders. Those are admirable professions, Montgomery notes, but kids already interact with police officers and firefighters. The disparity in offerings communicates to Black kids at Missouri City that they should not dream bigger, she said.

Montgomery witnessed a fight and misbehaving children while volunteering at the F-rated middle school last year, which she admits factored into her decision to enroll Jaleel elsewhere. But she also recognizes that Jaleel benefits from tutoring, summer programs and field trips that his parents can afford and have time to provide. Not all children in the community experience the same privileges, she noted.

And while Jaleel leaving his neighborhood causes her significant concern, her decision centered on providing him what she is convinced state leaders do not want him to have.

“When we think about our son’s education, we think about moving out of Texas,” Montgomery said. “I don’t think that these people have my son’s best interests.”

Disclosure: Prairie View A&M University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This first appeared on .

This is the crux of the curriculum implementation gap. It’s not a teacher problem. It’s not a curriculum problem. It’s a leadership problem, and it’s one most districts don’t see until they’ve already spent millions and fallen behind.

As a former middle school principal who has spent my career developing the leaders schools and districts need, I have seen how critical it is that principals are an integral part of instructional improvements. They are the connective tissue between curriculum intent and classroom reality. They as much influence, if not more, on student learning as teachers do. Without including them, districts navigating will never get their money’s worth out of new research-based literacy or math curriculums, or curriculum-focused professional learning for teachers.

There is much that can be done at the state and local , from improving principal preparation programs to increasing funding for school leader professional development. In the meantime, districts can make a few immediate changes to better position principals to lead their schools in getting the most out of their investment in high-quality curriculum.

First, meaningfully involve school leaders in choosing the right curriculum for their district. In most cases, district leaders drive the curriculum selection process, according to . Principals have a unique perspective on students’ learning needs and the kinds of professional development teachers have already received, making them an essential part of the conversations about which instructional materials are right for the school. They should be included in meetings with curriculum developers, so they can ask the hard questions about how those particular instructional materials will suit their teachers and their students, and given a say in deciding what will work for their schools. 

Second, give principals real time to learn the materials themselves. While teachers increasingly get learning opportunities grounded in their new curriculum, principals rarely have the chance to meaningfully grapple with the instructional materials, such as by studying and annotating complex texts and co-planning lessons. But they need to become experts in the materials so they can help their teachers get better at using and adapting the curriculum to meet the students’ needs. My organization has seen a real difference in schools when principals regularly participate in professional learning communities, coaching conversations and discussions with educators about what is and isn’t working, and why.

District leaders can ensure principals have dedicated time for this deep, hands-on work by reducing their administrative burdens, such as by having central office staff handle compliance tasks that don’t require the principal’s attention, and establishing predictable and consistent communications with school leaders, such as a weekly email. They should set clear expectations that principals spend significant time in classrooms working alongside teachers to strengthen instruction. And rather than holding district-led meetings where system leaders provide updates, they should use those times together to refine classroom observation and feedback practices and examine how principals are using data to monitor how changes to instruction affect student learning.

Third, shift the focus of classroom observation from compliance to quality. Teachers make real changes to their practice when they get meaningful, real time feedback. As principals develop a deep understanding of the instructional materials, they must also shift from using classroom observations as a compliance exercise — making the minimum required number of visits during the year with a checklist of basic expectations — to regularly stopping into classrooms to examine the quality of instruction. That means assessing how students are using the materials sitting on their desks and whether they are pushing real learning. How is the teacher tailoring the content to provide multiple ways for kids with different learning styles to engage? Are students discussing the material and challenging one anothers’ thinking? Whether through classroom walkthroughs and coaching with district instructional leaders or professional learning communities, principals must build the skills to truly understand surface level versus impactful use of curriculum. It’s one of the most important, and least expensive, investments a district can make.  

Fourth: make feedback specific and anchored to student learning. Classroom observations are only as useful as the feedback that follows. By knowing the curriculum intimately, principals can clearly and directly connect what they saw in the classroom — from the questions teachers asked students to the classwork they engaged in and their discussions — to the relevant pieces of the instructional materials. This kind of feedback can happen in one-on-one coaching conversations as well as in meetings to which teachers bring student work. The discussion should focus on where instruction broke down. What did and didn’t work? Where and how should the curriculum be adjusted? 

Fifth, get everyone speaking the same language. To ensure there is exceptional teaching in every classroom, everyone in the district and the school — from operations and instructional teams to schedule developers and recess aides — need to understand how student learning intersects with their work. How can business managers keep instructional goals top of mind when making budgetary decisions? Do schedulers understand instructional priorities well enough to use them to inform their efforts? The principal is central to ensuring that all the adults in the building knows how student learning goals can shape their work.

As districts prepare for the next school year with lingering questions about funding, it’s critical that they get their money’s worth from the investments they’ve made. Putting principals at the center of efforts to adopt new and better curriculum is an essential step toward getting the most out of the millions already spent. Principals are key to marrying vision with reality on the ground. They should be treated as such.

Three years ago, a handful of Maine school districts struggling with student mental health needs applied for a federal grant to help them hire school counselors and social workers. The grant applications included a commitment to hiring staff that represented their particular community and understood its needs. 

The grant — part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that Congress passed in 2022 in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas — provided about $1.7 million annually that the Maine Department of Education distributed among nine districts, most of them rural and small. 

Thanks to the grant, Skowhegan schools, which had seen a string of student suicides, was now able to offer students clinical counseling. The number of students who said they had seriously considered suicide within the district dropped from 19.5% in 2023 to 11% in 2025, according to Assistant Superintendent Mark Hatch. 

In Lewiston, schools hired mental health professionals to help both students and staff cope with the aftermath of the 2023 mass shooting, said Assistant Superintendent Karen Paquette. 

And Somerville area-schools no longer had to rely on a single social worker to shuttle between five schools across three counties, said Deborah Taylor, Regional School Unit 12 director of curriculum and technology.

But last year, the grant — known as Expanding Access in School Environments, or EASE Maine —was inexplicably cut by the administration of President Donald Trump, which said in an April 2025 letter to the Maine DOE that it was among the “programs that reflect the prior Administration’s priorities and policy preferences and conflict with those of the current Administration.” 

“We complied with all of the grant requirements, and felt like we had a good faith agreement with the federal government, and so to have that not be able to be counted on was frustrating to us,” Taylor said. “I don’t understand fundamentally the federal government’s qualms with this grant when the need is so obvious to us.”

Maine joined several other states in a lawsuit against those federal cuts last year, and in December a district court ordered the administration to release the mental health funding. Despite that order, Maine only received just over $688,000, which was less than half the annual allocation. It wasn’t until court proceedings in June that the Maine DOE found out that the Trump administration’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion programs was the reason behind the grant’s termination; it was never put in any official notice, said Bethany Cunningham, EASE grant manager for the Maine DOE.

“We’re really in a holding pattern, not knowing whether or not we will get additional funding, not knowing where the grant stands,” Cunningham said.

“So now schools are kind of being forced to adjust their budgets — if they can to include these positions or not — and we have providers who, some of them are not sure if they will be coming back in the fall.”

A question of DEI

One of Trump’s first actions in office was signing executive orders revoking diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs, which promote fair treatment and representation of people of all backgrounds, in the federal government. That stance had led to  impacting every sector, including health, environment and education. 

Despite the district court order, in early July, the U.S. Department of Education let the Maine DOE know it would pursue legal action to terminate the grant by the end of the month. Within a few days, 15 states including Maine responded with a  against the federal government, explicitly opposing the Trump administration’s decision to end the funding due to its anti-DEI policies.

“This legislation came at a critical time when our youth were experiencing a mental health crisis, a crisis that continues today. The [grants] tackled several aspects of this problem,” the lawsuit states. 

“Although this crisis continues, the Department has been on a mission for over a year to end funding for a subset of … grants within Plaintiff States based on its belief that the grants do not effectuate Defendants’ new priorities because they support diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

That appears to be the first time in this case that the states connected the grant’s cancellation with the DEI-related question on the grant application. The Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.

“That’s frustrating, to be awarded a grant because you did something and then the grant be taken away because you did what they asked you to do in the first place,” said Hatch of Skowhegan schools.

By singling out the grant because the Trump administration believes it contains statements about DEI, the administration went against Congress’s directive to ensure equitable access when the grant was first established, the states argued. And by relying on internal memos to terminate DEI-related grants without allowing states the opportunity to work with the federal government, the administration also violated procedural protections that Congress had put in place.

On July 27, U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson sided with the states, writing that the department’s decision to terminate grants “reflects an unexplained change in Department policy, and that the the department’s plan fails to comply with its own regulations by basing terminations on ‘factors Congress did not intend the Department to consider.’”

Her order prevents the federal government from canceling the grant until August 24.

Chloe Teboe, spokesperson for the Maine DOE, said the states “continue to seek a more permanent solution. At this point, it is unclear how this or any future decision may impact additional funding.”

Meanwhile, Maine district leaders described the cancellation of the grant based on a “buzzword” to be frustrating. 

“I quite honestly don’t even know what DEI means,” said RSU 12 Superintendent Howie Tuttle. “So I don’t believe that that is a reason to not provide mental health services.” 

Mental health improvements

Maine has a history of not providing adequate youth mental health support. In 2024, the state settled  for failing to provide support for behavioral and mental health. Gov. Janet Mills said at the time her administration and the Legislature will continue to invest in mental and behavioral health resources. In 2025, $100,000 to help districts contract with mental health service providers. 

More than 18% of Maine children have been diagnosed with anxiety, which is the highest rate in the country,  from the John T. Gorman Foundation. Further, 22% of Maine children have experienced two or more Adverse Childhood Experiences — higher than the national average of 17%. ACEs include experiences like violence or abuse, and research shows that the stress and trauma that accompanies them can have a lasting negative impact on a child’s well-being.

But there is evidence that increased awareness and investments in school mental health are improving outcomes. The biannual Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey that the Maine health and education departments collaborate on has shown fewer students experiencing depression, suicidal ideation or attempts, and more students seeking help from adults. 

Three of the nine districts that had the EASE grant reported progress that has impacted the whole district. 

Approximately 31% of all Lewiston Public Schools students, or 1,785 students, have received direct counseling services from grant-funded mental health providers during the final two years of the grant, according to Paquette. 

Particularly in the aftermath of the Lewiston shooting, in which 18 people were killed and 13 injured, having four staff members dedicated to helping students and staff process that trauma was essential, she said.

“With any tragedy you have this flood of resources and supports, and then life goes on for others, and a lot of that sort of fades away,” she said.

“So the biggest benefit was that we had additional staff that could continue to support, not just students, but staff as well.”

In Skowhegan, the EASE grant helped expand on COVID-era investments by hiring three clinical counselors, Hatch said. The need for youth mental health support was already there, but until then it had to be met outside of school.

“That was a huge positive impact for students being able to get their needs met,” he said. “And it really helped out the community from the standpoint of parents who couldn’t really afford for whatever reason to be able to take time off from work to get their kids to appointments.”

Districts adjust

Upon receiving notice that the grant may not be continued, Skowhegan schools decided to switch to billing MaineCare to get student mental health needs reimbursed. According to the July lawsuit, many districts nationwide will have to rely on Medicaid, the federal healthcare program low-income families rely on, which is also facing federal cuts.

“Even supposing that state Medicaid programs could step in immediately to provide care in the event of a termination, which they could not, it would disrupt the provision of effective therapeutic care for students,” the states wrote in the filing, noting that students may have to change providers or leave school to receive services.

Lewiston Public Schools was able to keep funding its mental health staff positions through the school budget, but that means other positions may have to be eliminated, Paquette said.

“Our school committee had to make some tough decisions, but we’re grateful that they saw the value in those grant-funded positions and the people in those positions in terms of the impact that they were making,” she said.

“We were able to maintain those four positions for this coming school year. I hate to say this, but it’s at the cost of losing some other positions.”

However, because of the grant, Lewiston schools had previously paid for 10 staff members to pursue certification and graduate level courses in school-based mental health, which won’t continue.

RSU 12 has five schools spread across Lincoln, Kennebec and Waldo counties, which has made meeting student mental health needs challenging. The EASE grant funding allowed the district to hire an additional social worker, whose employment is still not guaranteed for the upcoming school year. 

Tuttle, the superintendent, said the district has so far received a quarter of the expected funding, which means the grant-funded position does not have to be eliminated at the beginning of the school year, but the school committee will decide in October or November whether it can keep funding that role when the federal grant money runs out.

“We assumed we would lose our social worker because of this back and forth. We still may lose her,” he said. “It’s already difficult with staffing shortages and then to have funding promised and then taken away makes it even harder.”

This story was originally published by , part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

As assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education under George W. Bush, I had the privilege of helping to translate that research into policy. It was an optimistic time. We believed that if we could align classroom practice with what decades of research had taught us about reading development, we could dramatically improve children’s lives. 

Looking back, we were right about the science. But we were strikingly naïve about its implementation. 

Last week, New York released its latest state reading assessment results. The were discouraging. Reading proficiency had declined, particularly in grades 3 through 5, leading many to question whether — the evidence-based literacy program introduced in 2023 — was working at all.��

It’s a fair question. If all we have is a single set of state test scores, that conclusion is understandable. But state assessments capture only one moment in a much longer process of instructional change. To understand whether NYC Reads is making a difference, we have to look beyond a single test.

To answer that question, my team of researchers at New York University has spent the past three years in dozens of New York City classrooms, many in schools where reading achievement had remained stubbornly low for years. We weren’t looking for dramatic transformations. We wanted to understand whether the daily work of teaching and learning was beginning to change.  

At first, the changes revealed themselves in small ways. Children no longer looked immediately to the teacher when they came to an unfamiliar word. Instead, they looked back at the print. You could see them quietly sounding out the word, stretching the phonemes with their fingers, and trying again. During dictation, children held up their whiteboards proudly after spelling words they would not have attempted only months earlier. Teachers were no longer carrying the cognitive burden of every lesson; children were beginning to carry more of it themselves. 

The conversations had changed as well. Rather than asking children simply to recall a fact or identify a character, teachers pressed them to explain their thinking, justify an answer with evidence from the text, or connect a new idea to something they had learned the week before. Just as striking, children began asking their own questions — about insects, weather, communities or whatever topic they happened to be studying. 

Vocabulary was no longer treated as a list of words to memorize but as a way of making sense of increasingly complex ideas. Reading instruction felt less like a performance by the teacher and more like an intellectual partnership between teachers and children. 

But observations can be deceptive. Good researchers learn to distrust first impressions, no matter how encouraging they may seem. Were these classrooms simply more engaging? Were teachers becoming more skillful without children learning substantially more? Or were the changes we observed beginning to alter children’s reading trajectories in measurable ways?

We began looking beyond classroom observations to the children’s assessments. The first school we examined had struggled with reading achievement for years. Judging only by its reputation, few people would have expected dramatic progress. Yet the end-of-year assessments told a different story. Children who had entered kindergarten with little or no measurable word reading were now reading at levels that placed them well above national norms. One child finished the year at the 98th percentile in sight-word reading. Others reached the 90th and 86th percentiles. These were not isolated successes; they were signs that something within the school had begun to change. 

A second school served predominantly multilingual learners. Here the picture was equally revealing. Many children still required intensive support by the end of kindergarten, reminding us how much work remained. But alongside them were classmates reading comfortably within the core range, some reaching the mid-90th percentiles on foundational reading measures. The averages alone could never capture that story because they concealed what mattered most: the distribution itself was beginning to shift.  

The school-level findings were encouraging, but they raised an even larger question. Were these schools exceptional, or were they revealing a broader pattern? Three schools, no matter how compelling their stories, cannot answer that question. To find out, we widened the lens.

We analyzed districtwide reading data collected before the initiative began and compared it with data gathered during the first years of implementation, following the progress of nearly 4,000 students. Unlike an annual state assessment, which provides a snapshot of performance at a single point in time, these nationally normed screeners were designed to measure growth. They allowed us to ask a different question: Were children making meaningful progress as readers?

The results closely mirrored what we had been seeing in classrooms. Across successive cohorts, children continued to make steady gains in reading, with growth evident across grades and among most student groups. The progress was neither dramatic nor complete. Too many children were still struggling to read proficiently, and important differences remained among schools. But the pattern itself was remarkably consistent. 

Classroom observations, school-level assessments, and districtwide screening data were all pointing in the same direction. Independently, each offered only a partial picture. Together, they suggested that meaningful instructional change was beginning to take hold.

So, when I look at the state assessment, I don’t see a contradiction. I see a different measure answering a different question. It reminds us that New York still has a great deal of work to do, particularly in the upper elementary grades where reading becomes increasingly demanding. 

But I do not believe those results tell us we are on the wrong path. Rather, classroom observations, school-level assessments, districtwide growth data and state results lead me to a different conclusion: meaningful instructional change has begun.

Looking back, I think this is another lesson we failed to appreciate when the National Reading Panel was first released. We assumed that once the science was clear, progress would reveal itself quickly. We now know better. Educational change takes time. The important question is not whether the work is finished. The important question is whether it is moving in the right direction.

I believe that it is. Educational change appears first in classrooms, then in children, then in schools, and only later in statewide results. This is not the moment to abandon course. It is the moment not to blink.

“They’re overstaffed significantly,” said Michel Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team of the Los Angeles school district. “Our argument with them would be, ‘you should have started … a few years ago. Then attrition would have just taken care of the problem. Every time someone leaves, you shouldn’t be going out and replacing them. You should think through that.’ ”

After authorizing layoffs for 3,200 non-teaching employees in February — including administrators and central office workers — just 657 were actually let go. And the $150 million savings from those cuts didn’t make much of a dent in overall spending. 

By delaying deep cuts, the district now faces even more job reductions. Its solvency plan includes a total 5,000 layoffs between 2027 and 2029 along with furlough days and changes to employee health benefit options, all of which must be negotiated with the district’s powerful labor unions. It’s unclear which employees could be laid off in the future.

Fine’s agency will help determine whether the nation’s second largest school district can independently carry out deep budget cuts, or face bankruptcy, county takeover or both.

In a seven-page July , the Los Angeles County Office of Education appointed a fiscal expert to work with the district and scolded officials for signing $1.2 billion in collective bargaining agreements earlier this year and drawing down from a fund for retiree health benefits, against the advice of its own fiscal advisor.

“The Board’s decision to override its own staff’s fiscal advice raises serious concern about the District’s willingness and ability to execute its financial stabilization plan with fidelity,” the county wrote. 

Fine said he is optimistic that the district will be able to “fix this problem and do it promptly,” but not without significant staff cuts.

LAUSD school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, who represents Watts and parts of South Los Angeles, said the board should never have used one-time pandemic relief money to hire 6,000 new employees in 2021. Those funds expired in 2024.

But just two years after those hires the district issued a hiring freeze. In 2023, then-Superintendent Alerto Carvalho said that were also on the table to make up for lapsed relief funds.

“We ballooned our staffing when we had the resources to do so and we didn’t take the parallel process to close all of those positions,” said Franklin, a former middle school teacher who was laid off during 2010 budget cuts. 

Now the number of proposed layoffs has grown. In June the board approved a plan to issue 5,000 pink slips in 2027 and 2028, Franklin said. “It will be a challenge but necessary for us to actually issue all of those layoffs.”

Staffing cuts will go a long way to correct the budget problems, Fine said. The district has a “robust” attrition rate, he said. With focused reductions the district should be able to “solve the problem and move on.”

“The board has to have the will to do it,” he said.

Furlough days proposed in the district’s must be implemented by the Thanksgiving break in late November, according to the county’s letter, and layoffs must be formalized by January and in March. If fully executed, the plan would reduce spending by $3.6 billion.

The plan also includes school closures or reconfigurations for the 2027 and 2028 school years. Compared to cutting staff, which makes up 90% of the district’s budget, the savings from consolidating campuses is minimal — about $60 million over two years — but as the the district simply doesn’t need as many facilities, Franklin said.

The district serves more than 370,000 students from seven different cities across Los Angeles County — about half as many as were enrolled in 2018. The greater Los Angeles area is than other areas of California. Overall, state enrollment dropped 8% between 2015 and 2025, but the decrease in Los Angeles was more than 17%. 

“It’s a small piece of the bigger picture,” she said, “but in my perspective, it is one that we need to take on because our physical campuses are too vast for the number of students.”

School consolidations could take several forms, she said. The Diego Rivera Learning Complex in South Los Angeles, for instance, currently houses four small high schools with a total enrollment of about 2,000 students, each with its own administrative staff. Complexes like this one, she said, could be consolidated under one administration while other staff are laid off.

Schools with low enrollments could also be combined, Franklin said. In her district a number of elementary schools have less than 200 students — including Avalon Gardens, with 152 students, and Leapwood Elementary, with 179 — and others that hover around 200.

“Instead of having three or four elementary schools, maybe we figure out as a community how to bring those campuses together,” she said.

Another possibility would be to combine grades, either elementary and middle or middle and high school. This model, Franklin said, has the benefit of potentially staunching the flow of sixth graders who are leaving the district by building connections between middle school and other grades.

But none of these changes will be easy, she said, and all will require comprehensive coordination with the community.

“Historically we haven’t done a good job of doing school closures or consolidations,” said Franklin. “It’ll come down to the eleventh hour and there is an outcry of emotions. I don’t want to get to that state this year.” 

WASHINGTON (AP) —  on Monday signed an executive order calling for revamped  that promote his long-held but discredited theory that childhood shots should be spaced out into separate medical visits.

The order advocates separating the  into three different single-disease shots and administering all childhood immunizations at separate appointments whenever possible. It also directs the nation’s health department to improve research on vaccines, which are already , and present a plan to offer separate measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines for children, since that is not currently an option in the United States.

The renewed focus on vaccines marks a departure from the Trump administration’s recent efforts to emphasize  related to healthy eating, drug price negotiations and medical fraud crackdowns ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Public health experts have raised concerns that spacing out shots as Trump suggests can lead to an increased risk that children become infected with a vaccine-preventable disease before returning for another visit. Childhood vaccines — and how and when to give them in combination — go through rigorous studies, and safety tracking continues for years as the shots are used.

Trump called the announcement a “major victory for parents rights, religious and constitutional rights, and for the gold standard science.”

Speaking about the order at the Oval Office on Monday, Trump repeatedly suggested the number or timing of vaccines could play a role in rising rates of autism spectrum disorder, even as scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded . The order also includes several changes to the childhood vaccine schedule that his health department has already attempted, but that have been blocked by a federal judge. A White House official who insisted on anonymity to brief reporters said Trump was within his right to provide his own recommendation through the executive order and said the lawsuit blocking the health department’s schedule was a separate issue.

Dr. Andrew Racine, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the announcement spreads uncertainty, fear and confusion where “there doesn’t need to be any of that.” He disputed Trump’s recommendations and said previous ones should stand.

“Science about vaccines and their efficacy has not changed,” he said. “The distribution of viruses and other pathogens in our environment has not changed. Children in this country have not changed in the last 48 hours.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Senate health committee, slammed the executive order in a social media post, saying vaccines are safe and do not cause autism.

“I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong,” the Louisiana senator wrote. “The President does not have the expertise to make these changes.”

Who is in charge of vaccine policy?

Even as the order calls for revised vaccine recommendations, states, not the federal government, have the authority to require vaccinations for schoolchildren. The order advises states with school vaccine mandates to consider updating their laws to reflect the administration’s preferred schedule, according to a White House fact sheet.

Last December, Trump ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to review how peer nations approach vaccine recommendations and consider revising U.S. guidance accordingly. The department responded by cutting the number of  it recommends for every child, a move that has since been blocked in court.

Changes to federal childhood vaccine recommendations customarily require approval from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The newly Senate-confirmed CDC director, Dr. Erica Schwartz, oversaw policies promoting vaccination of service members while in a leadership position at the U.S. Coast Guard.

However, public health law expert Lawrence Gostin at Georgetown University said the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Trump’s power may allow him to supersede Schwartz if she does not agree to new recommendations.

“This is clearly the first test for Dr. Erica Schwartz,” Gostin said in an email. “The President is placing her in an untenable position.”

Asked on a call with reporters why the president was advocating splitting MMR into three single-disease vaccines, the White House official did not provide any studies supporting the decision. They said that was Trump’s long-held view and that some countries provide individual measles vaccines in certain circumstances.

Kush Desai, a Trump spokesperson, told The Associated Press that the president is “one of countless parents who have voiced questions and concerns about the combined MMR vaccine” and said the plan to develop single-disease vaccines would “give parents more options on timing and frequency for their children,” ultimately increasing vaccine uptake.

Studies of babies and toddlers in the U.S. have shown that the use of combination shots for childhood vaccines, rather than single ones, increased the likelihood of completing all recommended vaccinations by the age of 2.

Announcement follows other Trump administration vaccine actions

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist before he entered politics, set out to overhaul immunization guidance at HHS in the first year of Trump’s term. He fired an entire 17-member , installing replacements who made  that have since been halted by a federal judge. He also personally directed the CDC to abandon its position that vaccines do not cause autism, without supplying any new evidence to support the change.

Throughout his second term, Trump has been fixated on connecting autism to vaccines. He has recently ramped up pressure on Kennedy to identify the cause of autism, something Kennedy had pledged to do with new research unveiled last year. Trump publicly prodded the health secretary for an update on autism research in a Cabinet meeting last month.

“How are you doing on the autism research?” Trump asked.

“We will have an answer for you,” Kennedy said.

Scientific consensus and decades of studies have firmly concluded there is no link between childhood vaccines and autism. Racine reiterated that point on Monday, noting that the potential link had been studied in “over 40 methodologically well-designed studies in over seven countries involving over 5 million children.”

“I’m not sure that there is anything that has been as thoroughly looked at as this question,” he said. “And the answer is unequivocally no.”

In the Oval Office, Kennedy repeated his assertion that he believes an unknown environmental factor is to blame for rising autism diagnoses and said that his department will deliver research findings “as soon as they are ready.”

Monday’s order comes as students are returning to classrooms around the country and the nation contends with a measles outbreak that experts say could result in the U.S. losing its .

Doctors have raised concerns that Trump’s falsehoods on vaccines could stoke vaccine hesitancy. Federal data shows U.S.  have been dropping, with the share of children with exemptions rising to an all-time high in the 2024-25 school year.

Associated Press writers Laura Ungar and Mike Stobbe contributed to this report. Swenson reported from New York.

One topic will predictably return to the center of those debates: sex education.

Too often, the conversation begins and ends with one question: How do we prevent teenagers from becoming pregnant or acquiring sexually transmitted infections?

Young people are asking something different.

They want to know how to build healthy relationships, communicate boundaries, recognize misinformation, make decisions they feel good about, and imagine futures where their sexuality is a source of confidence rather than fear.

That disconnect matters.

While adults continue designing policies and programs around what we hope adolescents avoid, many young people are focused on who they hope to become.

For decades, our public conversation about adolescent sexual health has been dominated by prevention. Success is typically measured by declining pregnancy rates or lower rates of sexually transmitted infections. Those outcomes matter. They always will.

But they tell only part of the story.

If preventing harm is our only goal, we overlook the very capacities that help young people make healthy decisions in the first place: confidence, communication, agency, access to trustworthy information, supportive relationships and the ability to envision futures they value.

consistently shows that adolescents far more broadly than . They talk about respect, trust, communication, emotional readiness and feeling informed.

My own with Black adolescents supports this. Young people are eager for conversations about sexual health that extend beyond avoiding pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. They want space to talk about relationships, pleasure, communication, consent, identity and how to navigate conflicting messages from peers, social media, families, and schools. 

For Black adolescents, this narrow focus is especially consequential. Their sexuality is too often approached through risk, control and surveillance rather than possibility, agency and support.

They are not simply asking for more information. They are asking for guidance that helps them make sense of that information, align decisions with their values and build healthy relationships. Those insights suggest that preparing young people for sexual well-being requires more than delivering facts. It requires equipping them with the skills, confidence and support to navigate the complexities of adolescence.

Yet these priorities rarely shape how we design programs, evaluate success or decide what belongs in the classroom.

examining three decades of school-based sex education shows that comprehensive programs can help young people develop healthy relationship skills, recognize misinformation, respect sexual diversity and strengthen their ability to recognize and respond to dating violence and sexual abuse. The most promising approaches are not one-time lessons focused only on risk. They are age-appropriate, inclusive and designed to build knowledge and skills over time.

But access to that kind of education still depends heavily on where a young person lives. In its , SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change gave only seven states grades an A, while more than one-quarter received an F. Oregon and Washington earned A grades. The scores reflect whether state policies support medically accurate information, contraception, healthy relationships and LGBTQIA+-inclusive instruction, among other measures.

State policies do not tell us exactly what happens in every classroom. Still, some school districts are showing what a broader approach can look like. uses a curriculum and supplemental lessons that address consent, communication and healthy relationships alongside pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection prevention. Families can preview the lessons and access resources to support conversations at home.

To be clear, preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections remains critically important. No one is arguing otherwise.

But prevention should not be mistaken for the ultimate goal.

Back-to-school season reminds us what we expect education to accomplish. We don’t judge schools solely by whether students avoid dropping out. We also ask whether they are learning, growing, thinking critically and developing the skills they need to thrive.

Adolescent sexual health deserves the same standard.

Yet we continue to evaluate success largely by what young people don’t do. Did they avoid pregnancy? Did they avoid infection?

Those are important outcomes, but they are not the only ones that matter.

What if we also asked whether young people left school feeling more prepared? More confident communicating with a partner? Better able to recognize misinformation online? More equipped to make decisions that reflect their own values? More capable of building relationships grounded in mutual respect?

Schools and districts should evaluate whether students leave sex education better able to communicate, assess information, establish boundaries and make decisions consistent with their values, not only whether pregnancy and infection rates decline.

These are not “soft” outcomes. They are foundational skills that support lifelong sexual health and well-being.

Ironically, they are also some of the strongest tools for preventing the very outcomes our policies are designed to reduce.

The choice is not between prevention and well-being.

Well-being is one pathway to prevention. 

Expanding what schools teach and measure will require meaningful engagement with families. Parents should receive clear information about what will be taught, how lessons differ by grade level and how they can review the materials. Schools should make space for questions, communicate in the languages families use and be clear that sex education is not intended to replace conversations at home.

Schools and families have different but complementary roles. Schools can provide medically sound information and practical skills. Families can help young people understand that information in the context of their beliefs and values.

Schools should take parental concerns seriously without treating the loudest opposition as representative of all families. In a of Minnesota parents, approximately 90% said comprehensive sexuality education should be taught in schools. Where families have a legal right to opt their children out, schools can respect that right without allowing individual objections to narrow what is available to every student.

If we truly want healthier futures for young people, especially Black adolescents who too often encounter systems built around surveillance instead of support, then we have to stop asking only how to prevent harm.

We also need to ask how to prepare young people to flourish.

As students return to school this year, we should expect more from sex education than the absence of negative outcomes. Like every other part of education, it should give young people with the knowledge, skills, confidence, and agency they need to navigate the world they live in.

According to the latest jobs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, K-12 schools lost 50,000 workers from June to July. The numbers for May were also revised down by another 47,000.

These are seasonally adjusted numbers. Each year, public schools “lose” about 1 million employees who come off the payrolls in the summer months, only to add those workers back in the fall. But the latest numbers suggest that the 2026 decline is a bit larger than normal.

Because of these summer patterns, I like to look at the non-seasonally adjusted numbers. The graph below shows that trend over the last few years. Each line represents one calendar year. The 2020 line is in red. You can see the big drop-off in March when schools shut down for COVID. They no longer needed as many bus drivers and lunch staff, etc. But each year since then payrolls have grown (follow the gray lines upwards).

Now look at the 2026 line, in green. It was trending slightly above 2025 in the spring, but it now sits below the 2025 line. As of July, with no seasonal adjustment, public schools employed about 29,000 fewer workers than they did at this time last year.

Now, these are preliminary figures subject to revisions. But they represent the first year-over-year declines that we’ve seen since the pandemic.

The decline so far is not large in percentage terms. We’re talking about a decline of 0.4%, and this represents total workers, not full-time equivalents. School districts typically adjust around the margins first, reducing part-time positions or cutting hours before eliminating full-time jobs. These also don’t represent increases in layoffs—those remain stable. Instead, this is mostly about a slowdown in hiring.

This shouldn’t be entirely surprising. School districts have spent the last two years warning about the end of federal pandemic aid and slower state revenue growth. For a while, many districts have been able to avoid workforce reductions. These latest employment numbers suggest that budget pressures may finally be showing up in the national data.

The other education sectors did not have as big of a change. As I’ve written , the number of state education employees (public higher education) peaked more than a year ago. As a sector, it is down about 25,000 employees from a year ago, a decline of 1.1%.

The private childcare sector is down about 5,000 workers from a year ago, a decline of 0.4%.

Whether the latest numbers mark the beginning of a sustained decline or just a temporary pause will become clearer over time. But the years of uninterrupted staffing growth may be ending.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

Reading scores sank in New York City last school year, with a nearly 14 percentage point decline among third graders, according to preliminary data released Friday.

Among students in grades 3-8, about half were proficient in reading, a decline of 6 percentage points. That nearly erases a the year before. Math scores were flat, with 57% of students considered proficient.

The declines in reading proficiency were most pronounced in grades 3-5. In addition to the dramatic decline in third grade, fourth grade scores fell nearly 6 percentage points, and fifth grade scores fell by 13 points. (You can find your school’s test results at the bottom of this story.)

The unusually steep drop in reading proficiency comes as the city is heading into its . All elementary schools are required to use approved curriculums that officials contend line up with the science of reading, a longstanding body of evidence about how children learn to read. A growing number of middle schools are in the process of adopting new reading curriculums, too.

City officials vowed to conduct an analysis of the sharp fluctuations in reading scores.

“School leaders across New York City are seeing dramatic swings in literacy proficiency reflected in this year’s state assessment results,” schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement. “These results raise important questions and deserve careful, rigorous analysis so we can ensure we’re measuring what students are learning.”

City officials noted that the state test scores diverged from the city’s own periodic assessments, which generally showed improvements in reading.

The city’s teachers union has supported the elementary reading curriculum changes, but criticized the Education Department’s approach in response to the latest scores.

“We have to refocus on what we know works in literacy — a clear plan, a tailored science of reading curriculum, and meaningful professional development for educators,” Mary Vaccaro, the union’s vice president for education, said in a statement.

She said the Education Department “abandoned that approach” last year and “piled on additional programs, assessments, consultant’s recommendations and curriculum in the hopes that ‘more’ would equal better, and we lost ground.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vowed to double down on the literacy and math curriculum overhauls launched by his predecessor. In May, he announced plans to , a move the union also criticized.

Test scores alone can’t prove whether a policy is working because many factors influence them. But city officials pointed to the dramatic 7 percentage point spike last year as .

The reading proficiency declines mirror a similar . Some testing experts told Chalkbeat this week that whipsawing scores are unusual and raise questions about whether there are irregularities in the exams.

Andrew Ho, a Harvard professor who serves on a panel of experts who are paid to advise New York on its state assessment system, said the state exams are carefully constructed.

“It’s uncommon but not unprecedented” to see test scores significantly shift up and down, Ho said.

Observers should consider them in the context of other data, including the city’s own assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely considered the gold standard assessment. A new round of results on that federal exam, including for New York City, are expected next year.

Others worried that there was an unidentified problem with the tests. Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University who has studied patterns in state assessment results, said the swings were reminiscent of COVID-era disruptions but without an obvious cause.

“It’s just so implausible that there would be these kind of swings, and that they would be concentrated in some grades and some subjects and not others,” she said. “It just feels like there’s a mistake.”

EdTrust-New York, an advocacy group, called for an independent audit of the last three years of state testing data. “NYSED never adequately investigated or explained last year’s dramatic gains, making this year’s reversal difficult to interpret,” the group said in a statement earlier this week.

A spokesperson for the state’s Education Department said that the state conducts two independent audits of its assessments each year and those reviews have not flagged any problems.

As in prior years, the test results show deep disparities between student groups.

Asian American students saw the largest declines in reading scores last year among racial groups, with proficiency rates dropping to about 67%, down nearly 8 percentage points. A similar share of white students were considered proficient in reading.

Meanwhile, nearly 42% of Black students were proficient, a decline of 5 percentage points. About 37% of Latino students were marked proficient, 6 percentage points lower than the prior year. Just under 22% of students with disabilities were proficient readers.

Students who are currently learning English, or were in the past, saw the largest reading dips. Their proficiency rates dipped nearly 10 percentage points to 62.1%.

Math scores were more stable. Almost 44% of Black and Latino students were proficient in the subject, up less than 1 percentage point respectively. White and Asian American students’ scores dipped by about a percentage point each, to 74% and nearly 80%, respectively.

Curious about school-level test results? Here is a searchable breakdown of math and English scores across all of the city’s public schools (charters are not included).

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Sign up for to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox.

A.J. Johnson’s oldest son was born in 2019, the year residents of his home state of Washington could receive benefits from its newly passed paid family leave program. Johnson, a full-time firefighter, had to save up accrued sick leave to take time off around his son’s birth. He took six weeks off to bond with his son and said he was grateful for the time, though he felt he had to fend off his “grizzly, old, mustachioed” co-workers who bragged about taking just two hours to be in the hospital for their children’s births before returning to work. 

But it was very difficult on him and his wife. “It was certainly shorter than I wanted,” he said. His wife, a middle school counselor, was able to take a lengthy leave of absence from work and then had the summer off. But his son still wasn’t even sleeping through the night when Johnson had to return to work. “It was really hard,” he recalled. He worked 24-hour shifts and was anxious about leaving his wife and newborn at home alone for such long periods of time. 

Things were completely different when his second son was born in late 2021 and Washington’s paid family leave program was fully established. He was able to take about five months of paid leave total, including 12 weeks through the paid family leave program and an additional eight weeks of sick leave. He also added accrued vacation time on top to ensure he received his full pay beyond the state’s benefit cap and kept his benefits. “It was like nothing changed financially for us, but we got to have that almost six months of time together,” he said. “Having the ability to be there for my 3-year-old and my wife, but also being able to bond with my newborn, was the most amazing [few months] of my life.” He felt much more bonded to his younger son than his first after spending uninterrupted time together instead of “rushing off to go back to work and being gone for an entire day,” he said. “I was able to more quickly become a more confident parent.”

It was also particularly useful at a time when children still couldn’t get COVID-19 vaccinations. Johnson and his wife were able to figure out how to entertain and protect their children together. It allowed them to “just spend time together and navigate what it’s like to be a family of four, not having to worry about not going to work or one of us not being there when we’re trying to put a baby to sleep or bathe the kids,” he said.

By the time he took time off for his second son, the workplace culture around him had changed, too — which he chalks up to his state’s implementation of paid family leave. The men he works with now almost uniformly take the full amount of paternity leave available to them. They think, he said, “I have this opportunity to spend an extended period away from work and with my family and I’m going to take it.”

Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., now have paid family leave. In most of those programs, fathers are now taking nearly equal shares of bonding leave to spend time away from work with their new children as mothers, according to a from Paid Leave For All, an advocacy organization. In two states, Colorado and Washington, men are actually taking a greater share of bonding leaves. And in states where men aren’t yet taking equal shares of bonding leave, they increased their share last year compared to the year before. 

“Dads really want to be able to take leave to bond with their children, and when presented with the opportunity through this public investment, dads are showing up, stepping up and taking advantage of this opportunity,” said Molly Weston Williamson, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of the Paid Leave for All report.

The findings track a trend in the rest of the country in which more and more men have been taking paid leave to bond with their new children in recent years. But in the that don’t yet have paid family leave programs, fathers still aren’t on par with mothers, according to by the Center for Economic and Policy Research. As of 2018, only of Americans worked at a job that offers paid paternity leave to all workers. Indeed, it is in the states with paid family leave where gender parity in bonding leave has advanced the most. “State paid leave programs are providing the opportunity for dads to do the thing they have wanted to do all along, but don’t necessarily have the ability to do elsewhere,” Williamson said. 

Men in states with paid family leave programs are also much less likely to forgo taking leave at all. Before any of the programs started up, three-quarters of fathers took no leave to spend time with their newborns, compared to less than 18% of mothers, according to the CEPR report. “There’s been a total explosion in the number of claims from men,” Williamson said. “Virtually all of the growth in bonding leave claims has come from this massive, massive increase in claims from men.”

That trend looks set to continue, Williamson said. Comparing numbers from this year to last, the share of dads just keeps growing. “That is really suggesting this is a lasting trend — we’re not seeing a blip,” she said. 

The Paid Leave for All report could only examine full data for programs that have been in operation for a year or more, which include nine states and Washington, D.C. But preliminary data from those that launched in 2026 is also promising, according to Paid Leave For All’s report. In Delaware, fathers took 46% of bonding leaves, compared to 54% for mothers, and in Maine it was 44% for fathers and 56% for mothers. The gap was wider in Minnesota — 36% of bonding leaves for fathers compared to 64% for mothers — but it was still off to a better start than California, the first state with a paid family leave program, where men took just 15% of bonding leaves in 2004, the program’s first year. 

Things have also changed greatly in California and many of the other early states to get to such equal numbers. California and New Jersey, for example, have increased how much money employees can receive while on paid family leave and added job protection so they can return to their positions when leave is over, Williamson said. That’s helped fathers take more advantage of the programs: In New Jersey, men accounted for 11% of bonding leave claims in the program’s first year, and 33% last year, according to the Paid Leave For All report. Last year, California fathers accounted for 50% of bonding leaves.

Research has revealed that there are a multitude of benefits when fathers take paternity leave. It can . The confidence fathers gain from caring for and bonding with their newborns has been found to when their children are older and help them with their children. Paternity leave also how heterosexual couples share childcare and paid work, with fathers more likely to at home. Research shows the benefit can and can . When fathers take leave, it benefits mothers too: it , improves their and increases . 

“Dads taking leave is good for everybody,” Williamson said. 

James Liu, who works for a small technology company in San Francisco, took his 12 weeks of leave in two batches a year ago when his daughter was born. For him, living in a state that has had a paid family leave program for over 20 years, the culture of men taking leave was already solidified. “Most families I know, both parents took leave,” he said. “I almost took it for granted: ‘Oh yeah, if we have a child, I’ll take leave.’” 

Liu’s employer topped off California’s program, giving him a bit more time than the state’s mandated eight weeks and covering his full pay while he was out. The first month he took off was mostly spent surviving the chaos of the early infant days, but he took the rest of his time when his daughter was 5 months old and his wife went back to work, and it was far more meaningful. “It really helped me grow in confidence as a dad,” he said. “Having that one-on-one time, I really felt like I’m a primary parent, too.”

Had he not been able to get paid while on leave, Liu thinks he would still have taken time off, but he said it would definitely have been for a shorter amount of time — possibly only for a week or two at the start of his daughter’s life. He’s grateful not just for the time with his daughter, but for the peace of mind bonding leave brought him. He was glad to have her cared for at home for so long before she started going to a childcare program and relieved that he didn’t have to worry about job security while he and his wife were on leave.

Liu and his wife started looking at childcare options when their daughter was just a few months old and realized that many Americans don’t get paid family leave and send their children to childcare just weeks after birth. “We felt really, really grateful for the time,” he said, while “almost mourning that this is not the default for many folks.”

As Iowa’s Education Savings Account program continues to expand to include all K-12 families, rural public school districts are still trying to determine how the scholarships will affect their classrooms, budgets and enrollment.

Supporters argue ESAs give families more educational choices, while critics say the program diverts money away from public schools that remain the center of many rural communities.

Gov. Kim Reynolds , allowing eligible families to use public funds toward private school tuition and other expenses. Eligibility for the program has expanded each year. For the 2026-27 school year, all Iowa K-12 families are eligible to receive ESAs.

Joshua Brown, president of Iowa State Education Association, said many public schools have had to make difficult financial decisions that include cutting elective programs or cutting core curriculum teachers.

“You have situations like what was happening in Boone, where they’re eliminating their 100‑year orchestra program to ensure that they can still offer the core curriculum,” Brown said. “Other schools are eliminating a second-grade classroom teacher and just combining classes, which is going to increase class size.”

Brown said in the most drastic cases, rural schools have had to merge with other districts to streamline resources and reduce costs, or choose to only have an elementary school and then their secondary programs go to another district.

Creston

Creston, a town of more than 7,500 people, has two private schools along with its public school district.

Deron Stender, superintendent of Creston Community Schools, said Creston schools only lose a handful of students to private schools each year, but small changes still have a major financial and structural impact.

“Each year we see maybe three to five more kids go than in previous years,” Stender said. “In a district of my size, three to five kids is still a significant number. $8,000 is roughly what a student is worth when they go someplace else.”

Stender said the implementation and expansion of the ESA program has created new challenges for retaining staff and stabilizing the district’s finances.

“We’ve always been challenged with finding and retaining qualified employees, especially in rural communities,” Stender said. “Having two private schools in my community has increased that challenge for us. We lose some of our best teachers because they’re able to pay them the same or more.”

Southeast Valley

Brian Johnson, superintendent of Southeast Valley School District in Webster County, said the “narrative” surrounding public school educators, and laws regarding public schools have led to staff losses for the district.

“The negative narrative that I believe is being spread really affects a lot of these people that have dedicated their lives to educating kids, and it just seems like some of the storylines or some of the laws that are being passed are tough for people to swallow,” Johnson said.

Johnson said most of the students that leave Southeast Valley end up being homeschooled, as there are no private schools in the Southeast Valley District.

Johnson said Iowa public and private schools “play by different rules,” despite both receiving public funding, and that’s “unfair.”

“I know there’s a lot of frustration every spring or winter when the legislative session meets because I get asked like, ‘What now? What did we do wrong now,’” Johnson said. “Why do private schools and public schools, if they’re getting the same amount of funding, not have to follow the same rules or laws or guidelines?”

Market-based competition

Shane Vander Hart, communications director for Iowa Alliance for Choice in Education, said the ESA program allows for competition between public and private schools, which encourages both to be better.

“Ultimately, I think school choice will help improve public schools because it’s forcing them to be competitive,” Vander Hart said. “The majority of Iowans will still send their kids to the public school, but public schools might have to rethink their approach and the legislators might have to rethink the approach to school finance. School districts and school boards, in particular, will have to look at how many, for instance, non-teaching staff they employ.”

Brown argued that the idea of market-based competition does not match what families are seeing in much of rural Iowa, saying there is no accountability for how private schools are using ESA funds.

“The issue with that logic is that we’re not playing by the same rules,” Brown said. “Private schools receiving ESAs have no accountability for how they’re using these funds, and no oversight to ensure that they are following all of the state laws.”

Brown added that in many rural school districts, parents have to make difficult decisions, saying public schools are not properly funded by the state.

“The only choice a parent has is to go to their public school that’s underfunded, or go to an online private school where their student doesn’t have the opportunity to connect with other students,” Brown said.

Vander Hart argued concerns about public school districts losing funding are overstated, saying public schools still receive approximately $1,600 in per pupil funding for ESA recipients who leave public schools.

“They’re still getting money for students they’re not even educating,” Vander Hart said. “This idea that public schools should get money for students that aren’t attending there anymore is something you could argue, but I’m not very sympathetic toward that view.”

Stender said Creston receives nearly $1,200 in per pupil funding for students who leave for private schools, but state laws lock that money into specific categorical funds, such as money for “gifted and talented” or supplemental teacher salaries.

“We could use those $200,000 to hire two or three people to help with our behavioral or mental health issues,” Stender said. “Right now, the way it’s categorical, we can’t do that.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com.

When Jen Hanson, a veteran multilingual educator, first arrived at Denver’s Cherry Creek School District in June 2025, she said she quickly suspected the district was creating its own rules for moving students out of its English learner program, leaving her to question whether it was holding on to kids — and the state and federal funding they brought in — for far too long.

The evaluated children’s English proficiency based on how they scored on a nationally used test called  and on two other measures, as required by the state. 

Within days of taking the post, Hanson said she found more than 5,700 students between the 2021-22 and 2025-26 school year who had hit the WIDA scoring benchmark, but many were not evaluated on their language skills, the first step in ultimately moving kids out of the program. If they were deemed English proficient, they would be placed in general education classes under a two-year monitoring phase.

And as for the two other objective measures, Hanson said Cherry Creek’s were not up to state standards. 

“Sometimes it was a writing sample and sometimes it was a reading test,” she said. “They also had a random point system that gave different things various ‘points’ in order to exit. That was always arbitrary and inconsistent.”

It was also a big secret, she said: There were people in her own department who didn’t know what those metrics were — or how kids stacked up.

The district denies Hanson’s allegations and says it has always been in compliance with state guidelines. 

Hanson, the former director of language supports and services, said she dug into the student testing data and applied more standardized measures for the other criteria.

In September 2025, she said she moved nearly 2,000 English learners — roughly 1,200 from that year and 800 from the year before — into the monitoring phase, the greatest number of kids to reach that next step in years.

But what was initially lauded by the district as a major leap forward — “We made certificates so schools could celebrate the kids,” she said — worked against her: Hanson was informed eight months later by Cherry Creek leadership in an email that her contract was not being renewed.

The news came at a time when the district was embroiled in multiple controversies: its former superintendent resigned that January amid complaints that he and his wife, the human resources director, had created a where employees felt they could not speak out about professional concerns. The HR chief was fired in May after an investigation showed the couple likely billed the district for travel that was not business related and may have .��

And the U.S. Department of Education announced in June it was , alleging student clubs were excluding members based on race and teachers improperly used race as a consideration when making class assignments or deciding on academic supports. The Trump administration has across the country, prioritizing those that charge antisemitism, discrimination against white students and protections for LGBTQ kids. Cherry Creek has denied that it discriminated against students based on race.

Hanson believes she lost her job for calling attention to troubling issues within the English Language Acquisition program. In July, she filed a complaint with the alleging retaliation.

“I want the district to be held accountable and stop doing this to kids,” she told 91ɬ��.

When a cut score isn’t a cut score

There are about accounting for roughly 11% of all U.S. students. In Cherry Creek, Colorado’s fourth-largest district, that figure is slightly higher at 15%, officials there said. 

School districts across the country receive millions in state and federal funding to support these children, with the dollars flowing based on the number of students they classify as English — or multilingual — learners.

Over the past five years, Cherry Creek, which served 8,480 English learners in the 2025-26 school year, according to state records, received $3 million in federal Title III money and $10.25 million in to bolster its English language acquisition instruction, spokesperson Abbe Smith told 91ɬ��.

“We are in compliance and we have been in compliance,” Smith said of how they designate English learners. “Our top priority is always to meet the needs of our students and help them be successful at the next level.”

The district denies Hanson’s allegations that it wrongly kept some English learners in place — and disputed some of the data she provided to 91ɬ��, including the number of students moved out of the program in fall 2025. School officials put that figure at 874.

The biggest point of contention between Cherry Creek and its former director is over the WIDA test score used to judge students’ English proficiency.

These scores, determined by the state, vary widely. And many were adjusted in recent years. by the Northwestern School of Education and Social Policy of 35 states showed that 15 had recently lowered their so-called cut score — test results range from 1 to 6 — and only two, Michigan and Tennessee, raised them. 

Colorado’s, at 4.0, stayed the same and ranks among the lowest of the group.

But Hanson, who worked for Denver Public Schools for nine years, said Cherry Creek set a higher standard: It would only assess English learners’ proficiency when they reached a 4.5 or above on the WIDA ACCESS test. 

Hanson rolled that back, she said.

“I reviewed district databases and asked a lot of questions of my team and my supervisor,” she said. “I called colleagues in the field and double-checked state requirements. After discussing with my boss, my team, the superintendent and executive directors, who supervise schools, my team changed the criteria back to the state (4.0) cut points.”

Cherry Creek officials said that until this school year, when the state issued new, more explicit guidance, they had discretion over that 4.0 cut score. They said they never exercised it — sticking to the state cutoff — but also viewed 4.5 as the more accurate standard. 

“We have, I can see, historically, discussed the reality that a 4.5 is generally when students show they are actually proficient on state assessments,” said Remy Rummel, Cherry Creek’s new language supports and services director, adding, “in prior years, districts were allowed to make some decisions and have some flexibility around those minimum cut points.”

91ɬ�� quizzed the Colorado Department of Education on this point several times. In a July 31 email, department spokesman Jeremy Meyer wrote that districts “are not permitted to raise the statewide exit criteria for multilingual learners” beyond the state standards.

In an Aug. 4 email, he was even more emphatic, saying “our guidance has always been that a WIDA ACCESS Assessment criteria for English language proficiency (of) 4.0 Overall AND 4.0 Literacy triggers eligibility for redesignation.” 

The state then went silent, not returning calls or emails on the matter for several days. On Aug. 7, it retracted its earlier statements. Despite having said that 4.0 has always been the standard, the state education department now said districts did have leeway in past years.

Through the 2021-22 school year, it said, the state’s guidance was that districts “should” use the 4.0 cut score. And then, starting in the 2022-23 school year, “should” was changed to “must consider” 4.0 as the trigger for possible redesignation. 

Still, some districts didn’t get the message, the department said.

“When school systems have many thousands of employees, our distribution lists certainly do not reach them all,” Meyer, the department spokesman, said. “We are working to redouble our efforts to make sure this shift is effectively communicated to the field.” 

For the upcoming 2026-27 school year, it changed the guidance once again to say districts were prohibited from using a higher standard.

The department apologized for the delay in correcting its earlier statement, saying “we do appreciate that your work helped elevate this issue around the clarity of the guidance.”

More than 2,800 Cherry Creek students hit the 4.5 benchmark between the 2022-23 and 2025-26 school years, Hanson said. Data provided to 91ɬ�� by the district put that same number at 1,876. 

But even students who met this higher standard did not appear to be moved into general education classes, Hanson said: She identified 283 kids who had earned 4.5 on both critical parts of the WIDA test and were still in the ELA program years later.

‘Kids know you don’t believe in them’

Advocates told 91ɬ�� that retaining English learners longer than needed raises financial concerns over the related state and federal funding while creating academic and emotional anxieties for students. It could limit their ability to attend school alongside more English-speaking peers — from whom they learn much linguistically — and place them in a less challenging setting, they said.

It also denies them a chance to celebrate a significant milestone and point of pride for participants, multilingual educators say.

Hanson said many Cherry Creek English learners lost eligibility for career and technical education, college-level Advanced Placement courses and other postsecondary classes.

“Kids know when you don’t believe in them,” she added. “We are systematically saying that the students are not valued, that we don’t think they can succeed and that they don’t matter.”

District officials disputed that students in their English learner program missed out on high-quality instruction and said some took advanced courses where they earned both college and graduation credit.

When asked about their rate of participation, officials said it was roughly 5%, well below the 15% of all Cherry Creek students who are English learners.

“If we are looking at proportionality, yes, ideally, that would be proportional and that is part of our strategic plan and the work ahead,” said Rummel, the ELA director since June 2026. “We acknowledge we are not proportionate in that representation — however, it is not zero representation.”

Jorge Garcia, executive director of The Colorado Association for Bilingual Education, a nonprofit professional development and civil rights organization, said he was outraged by Hanson’s claims about students’ delayed reclassification. 

“When you hold (students) back too long, you are killing their spirit to achieve and to try,” he said. “This is a civil rights issue — a human rights issue. I hope we can do something to effect some change.”

‘The data was near impossible to pull’

Hanson said the district superintendent, assistant superintendent, other administrators and executive directors were generally supportive of her efforts to reclassify students last fall. They told her they didn’t know English learners were being kept in the program for too long, she said, and had no knowledge about the funding their inclusion triggered.

But a leadership shakeup in early 2026 meant several top Cherry Creek administrators left their posts. Suddenly, management didn’t appreciate her findings, she said. 

Hanson detailed her concerns about the program in a March 11, 2026, email to her new supervisor, Michelle Weinraub. She shared the missive with 91ɬ��. 

A few months later, Hanson said she was called into human resources and was told she was not doing her job, that she had too many absences and that she needed to stop complaining about the school system. 

The district informed her in a May 29 email, when she was out on medical leave, that her contract would not be renewed. Hanson said she was given no further explanation. 

She filed her EEOC complaint on July 20 and also shared a copy with 91ɬ��.

Smith, the district spokesperson, said the number of students Hanson moved out of the ELA program might be unusually high because she lowered expectations for kids on those two other measures, leaving administrators concerned that some of the students might not have been ready. 

Hanson denies this, saying there was no mechanism to allow for an easier standard. The district appears to only be raising that concern now, almost a year after Hanson acted. 

Hanson said no student moved into the monitoring phase during her time at the district expressed any problem with their reclassification or was flagged as needing to move back into the English learner program. 

Before her arrival, Hanson said there was a sense of secrecy and closely held decision-making around the other two measures needed to evaluate kids. She said her predecessor, Holly Porter, and Porter’s sister, a department program lead, kept a tight grip on that information when it should have been widely shared.

Hanson said she and other staff worked to standardize the process by which kids were exited from the program, fixing the internal reporting tool that generated students’ classifications and sharing the corrected rules with teachers.  

Reached by email, Porter said she complied with state regulations. 

“I categorically deny the allegations that I improperly administered Cherry Creek School District’s multilingual learner redesignation process or engaged in misconduct related to that process,” she wrote in a seven-page email addressing Hanson’s claims. 

Porter said the redesignation process was documented, standardized and implemented district-wide, dismissing any possibility that Cherry Creek received state or federal dollars for English learners who were no longer eligible. 

She said the district was regularly audited by the state education department and had to provide information on their redesignation process and the criteria they used both to move students out of the program — and to keep them in.

“If the required documentation was not present, those students were not eligible to be included for funding through the audit process, and the associated funding was removed,” Porter said.

Current district administrators also cited the audits as evidence that nothing was amiss with Smith saying, “Our audits from (the state education department) are clear. It has not been flagged at any point that Cherry Creek is a concern or massively out of compliance.”

The state department of education said late Monday afternoon that its 2024-25 audit of Cherry Creek looked at 17 students and found five — or nearly 30% — did not meet the requirements to receive funding based on the documentation provided by the district. The audit of Cherry Creek, one of 31 districts for which the state reviewed English learner documentation, is not yet finalized, Meyer, the department spokesman, said.

A former Cherry Creek staffer, who said she worked as a professional learning partner both inside the district office and onsite at 25 schools, told 91ɬ�� she believed Porter’s ideas about how multilingual learners learned were not backed by current research or best practices.

The woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said she worked for many years at a neighboring district where Cherry Creek students would sometimes transfer. She said that the other school system was often stunned to learn they were still receiving English language services when they scored so high on proficiency exams.

“There are kids who get put in these classes who never get the chance to leave,” she said of Cherry Creek, adding that while she was there, she had no access to individual English learners’ test scores, valuable information that could help instruction. “The data was near impossible to pull.”

When she asked to see kids’ marks, she was denied, she said — and scolded by her superiors.

“It was, ‘How dare you ask that. That is not your business,’” she said.

Porter retired in June 2025 and her sister resigned shortly after Hanson joined the staff. 

Earlier in her career, Hanson was principal of Denver South High School, an international school where 67% of the students were economically disadvantaged. In 2017, the campus won a , partly for moving hundreds of English learners into advanced classes, pushing their numbers from 73 in 2015 to over 620 in 2018. 

“And they passed with a B average,” Hanson said. “There is absolutely no reason why kids should be given gates and barriers to access and opportunity.”

But numbers can only tell part of the story. They never capture the child behind the score — the effort behind mastering a difficult concept, the pride of discovering their passion for history through a hands-on project, or the confidence that grows with every hard-earned breakthrough. We risk devaluing individual learning every time we celebrate a rise in collective scores.

While standardized assessments remain a traditional foundational measure of progress, achievement can no longer be dictated by these metrics alone. Over and over, research shows that high-stakes testing students and teachers and down to math and reading scores.

But we hold on to them because familiar systems are easier to defend than reinvent.

Thankfully, the tide is turning. As the framework gains momentum across the U.S., schools are primed to completely reimagine how we measure learning in a way that is authentic to the human experience and to select tools that support, rather than complicate, the work of capturing future-ready skills. 

One of the most harmful effects of schools’ over-reliance on standardized testing is that students leave unprepared for life after graduation. 

Instead of empowering students with the skills to navigate a complex world, educators are forced to “teach to the test,” prioritizing performance on a single test over deep learning to satisfy accountability measures for policymakers and legislators.

Our students’ future success depends on more than reversing in reading and math. According to America Succeeds, most requested skills by employers are durable skills, such as effective communication, creativity and critical thinking developed through real-world, authentic learning experiences. 

However, the found that 84% of hiring managers say most high school graduates are not prepared for the workforce, and 80% believe they are less prepared than previous generations.

As educators, we have a moral obligation to ensure we are preparing students for the future. That means looking beyond a single standardized score as proof of readiness, toward multiple measures that capture the whole child. Traditional measures still have a place, but they can’t be the only way to assess a student. 

Districts that implement a Portrait of a Graduate initiative define the competencies they value and want every student to leave with — qualities like emotional intelligence, adaptability, collaboration and resilience. However, many struggle to put operations in place that turn aspirations from a poster on the wall into a fully functional system that monitors student progress and success. 

The result is predictable: 160 schools deliver 160 different experiences. This lack of systemic cohesion ensures that access to transformative opportunities remains uneven, directly impacting student outcomes.

When its accountability framework this past spring, districts gained the structural flexibility to look beyond rigid standardized ratings. By introducing local indicators of quality alongside state metrics, the state is empowering schools to demonstrate student growth through capstone projects, performance-based defenses and real-world learning aligned with the Portrait of a Learner framework adopted in 2022.

into this opportunity early through a simple, yet transformative shift: engaging community stakeholders from day one to co-create implementation playbooks, establish shared guidelines, define common rubrics, and run pilot programs that validate these authentic assessments of learning.

This collaborative approach helped school leaders ensure consistent experiences in all classrooms while still empowering teachers with the freedom to tailor instruction to students’ needs. Most importantly, the values became embedded in each district’s culture, from the district office down to each and every student.

For districts leading the work, technology that supports tracking and reporting on student skills is critical. They can no longer adopt one-size-fits-all tools when the goal is communicating highly personalized progress that reveals a student’s true capabilities. It’s more important than ever to evaluate every tool line by line against district initiatives and ensure a match.

The most effective empower teachers and students to collect and showcase meaningful artifacts of learning through the educational journey, including capstone projects, student reflections, work samples and project portfolios. At the same time, they must offer robust rubric assessments so that teachers can clearly identify when a student falls short of a benchmark — and where extra support may be needed to help strengthen durable skills needed for the real world. 

With these insights, schools no longer hold students accountable to a single, high-stakes measure of learning. Instead, they create multiple opportunities for growth. 

Society champions second chances as stepping stones: Drivers-to-be can retake their driving test, law school graduates can sit for the bar exam multiple times. Yet, we often tell a 15-year-old that their years of learning can be distilled into one test score. Students should be given opportunities to learn from their setbacks, to revise and resubmit work and to re-demonstrate mastery of content without judgement.

When we finally shift our focus from proving learning to nurturing it, we create spaces where every child has the chance to thrive.

As educators, we know when learning happens — we don’t need numbers to tell us. We know it when the shy student steps confidently in front of the class to deliver a presentation. We know it when a group of students tackle a complex, real-world problem together. But too often, these moments of learning are invisible to accountability systems that prioritize hard numbers over growth.

By measuring student progress through multiple forms of evidence — capturing not only academic achievement but also future-ready competencies — we honor students not just for what they know but for who they are becoming.

Dr. Terra Greenwell is an Educational Leadership and Systems Advisor, and former Chief Academic Officer for Jefferson County Public Schools.

In a last week, Chuck Cohn, CEO of Nerdy, Varsity’s parent company, wrote that leaders would “wind down” the online service they launched during the pandemic as districts nationwide spent billions in federal relief funds to help students recover lost learning.

Instead, Missouri-based Nerdy will focus on its original Varsity Tutors model, which targets services directly to parents and college students, rather than schools. That, Cohn wrote, is “our core business, where the opportunity is significantly larger and where our resources and management bandwidth earn better returns.”

In a Friday note to Accelerate, a nonprofit that funded Varsity last year as part of a research study, a representative from the company wrote: “Today we are communicating to our school customers that we will be discontinuing services effective today.” 

The end of Varsity Tutors for Schools follows the abrupt termination of another large provider, FEV Tutor, in early 2025 as relief funds dried up. But tutoring experts say this shutdown is not just another example of districts running out of extra federal money. In fact, multiple states, , now provide ongoing funding for high-impact tutoring, including virtual models. With districts increasingly demanding strong results, Varsity Tutors for Schools, they say, wasn’t able to deliver proof that their services increased student performance.

For-profit providers, like Nerdy, have to answer to investors and shareholders. But regardless of the business model, those “that adhere closely to the research are going to be the ones that are more likely to have stronger outcomes,” said Kathy Bendheim, strategic advising director at the National Student Support Accelerator, a tutoring research center at Stanford University. 

A forthcoming paper from the center on state policies says that the 2024 results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress provide ample evidence that the need for high-impact tutoring “remains urgent.” Reading and math scores have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. 

Research supports models in which students meet at least three times a week, one-on-one or in small groups, with the same tutor over several weeks. In addition to following that structure, districts, Bendheim said, want tutors who “work closely with them to make sure their program meets the needs and the context on the ground.”

‘Paying the piper’

Matt Montaño, superintendent of the Bernalillo Public Schools in New Mexico, said Varsity Tutors for Schools didn’t live up to his expectations.��

“We actually stopped working with them after one year,” he said. “They were not able to meet the promises of the service.”

The district opted for Varsity in 2024 when the New Mexico Department of Education struggled to roll out a statewide program. Varsity pledged to “immediately” connect students with a tutor day or night if they needed help. But the company, Montaño said, was unable to provide support “in a timely fashion.”

The company did not return calls requesting comments, and Cohn did not respond to email or a message on LinkedIn. 91ɬ��’s attempts to reach Jason Pello, who was as chief financial officer in April, were also unsuccessful. According to with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pello still serves as a consultant to the company.

In a , Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, wrote that both FEV and Nerdy didn’t prioritize evidence of student gains.

“Other programs — nonprofits and for-profits — have pushed for strong external evaluations including randomized control trials,” he wrote. “The tutoring companies that pushed (or were pushed by funders) into rapid growth ahead of evidence-building are now paying the piper.” 

Some providers entered into “outcomes-based” contracts with districts that reward tutors with higher fees if students show enough improvement. shows it’s a promising approach, but there’s no evidence that Varsity was involved in such a contract. 

��������’s website includes some that point to success in raising student achievement. One from 2022 describes a small study in the Garden Grove district in California in which fourth graders who were at or below grade level in math were randomly chosen for afterschool sessions with a Varsity tutor.

According to of the study, i-Ready scores increased by 9.82 points for students in the treatment group, compared with an average of 4.52 points for those who didn’t receive the intervention. The researchers ruled out students’ prior math performance and background characteristics as possible explanations for the results. 

But the description doesn’t cite the names of the University of California Irvine researchers who conducted the study, and Bendheim at Stanford said there wasn’t enough information to “understand how the study was designed and implemented to know whether it is rigorous enough to rely on the findings.”

Accelerate was trying to help them establish that research base. A year ago, the nonprofit listed Varsity Tutors for Schools as in a study aimed at learning more about high-impact tutoring using “AI-enabled” tools. 

Working with Mathematica, a research organization, the project gathered data in three districts using Varsity during the 2025-26 school year. At least two had planned to stick with the provider this fall, said Nakia Towns, Accelerate’s president. While the study is not yet complete, her initial impressions weren’t positive.

“Only 15% of students were hitting their recommended dosage,” she said. Educators and policymakers are getting “more savvy” about where to spend funds for tutoring, “and unfortunately, I think Varsity Tutors was just late in their market positioning to understand that’s where folks were moving.” 

‘Random tutoring’

As one of the nation’s largest providers, Varsity Tutors benefits from significant brand recognition among parents. But it struggled to translate that success into a structure that satisfied districts, said a former employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. 

“A parent is thrilled that there’s somebody there to help them with their child,” he said. “When there’s no structure in place, and it’s just random tutoring, that doesn’t meet school districts’ needs.” 

Cohn in 2007 while he was a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Under the new name Nerdy, he took the company public in . While Varsity Tutors, the original service, phased out in-person sessions , the American Rescue Plan, which sent $122 billion to schools for recovery efforts, offered an to scale up quickly.

At the time, Cohn said school administrators needed personalized learning “implemented immediately at a school-wide, or even district-wide level, without requiring each student to register individually.”

According to , Varsity Tutors for Schools provided services to over 1,000 districts and schools. Other materials say they were , including like Broward County in Florida, Montgomery County in Maryland and Gwinnett County in Georgia. 

“We had great momentum, even from last school year,” said the former employee. “We had great results in a lot of cases.” 

Last October, Frederick Heid, superintendent of Florida’s Polk County Public Schools, in support of Varsity’s Live+AI feature, which the company said can “speed up proficiency gains.”

The combination of live tutoring and AI support for students, he said, ensures “that every student has the tools they need to succeed while offering teachers an unparalleled support system.”

But because of the expiration of federal funds, Polk was among those no longer planning to use the program this fall, said Jason Geary, a district spokesman.

A review of GovSpend, a data company tracking government purchases, shows that districts’ business with Varsity Tutors for Schools saw a steep decline following a peak of more than $28 million in 2023.

In his report to shareholders, Cohn estimated that ��������’s revenue for this year would drop by $12 million to $15 million because of the shutdown of its district work. The company expects “exit-related costs” of $2 million to $4 million due to canceling contracts early.

��������’s , which reached over $12 , fell to 74 cents on Monday. 

It’s unclear how many districts planned to use the service this fall, but according to GovSpend, the Winton Woods City School District, near Cincinnati, made two payments totaling $56,350 to the provider on July 13 for the 2026-27 school year.

The 3,900-student in January 2025 that it had chosen to contract with Varsity Tutors for Schools. District officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Varsity Tutors for Schools is also on a list of approved providers for a Missouri literacy tutoring grant. Bendheim at Stanford said she personally doesn’t know districts that have used the service, but added, “We just hope that they were able to work with their districts closely enough so that students don’t miss out on tutoring they were supposed to get.” 

But on July 22, the Miami-Dade County School Board voted to , reversing a policy that had given free meals to all children, regardless of their household income. The policy will take effect for the .

Most conversations among parents and the public will center on hunger — a critical focus, because each child needs adequate nourishment to learn and thrive. But it’s not just families in need who will be affected by this change.

Universal lunch is a policy that helps all students feel like they belong and develop a cohesive civic identity. It’s a simple part of a powerful set of beliefs that are becoming increasingly rare in American public life: that shared experiences and basic rights matter, and that education is a public good, in which all children — no matter their background — have equal dignity because they are human.

For now, at least, many U.S. locales agree. Nine states offer to every public school student, and large school districts — or 77% — report offering free meals to all students in at least some of their schools, regardless of their family’s income.

As a sociologist and professor of educational policy at Florida International University in Miami, I study how environments shape opportunity. I was extremely proud of Miami-Dade’s universal free lunch policy as a uniting force that promoted cohesive school cultures across our diverse city. Through my research and my visits to school districts around the country, I have seen how much money matters. Many students carry the invisible burdens of their families — including socioeconomic stresses and insecurities around food — into their schools. Sometimes, they even sneak food home.

When these children attend schools where every student can eat for free, these burdens lighten. This makes an immense difference: Universal free lunch is with improved academic performance, attendance, health and nutrition. This policy helps create the kind of environment where students more naturally develop qualities like grit, resilience and agency, because young people feel like their schools are invested in their well-being as well as their academic success.

Ahead of the vote, the Miami district argued that it can no longer sustain universal lunch because the percentage of students who are automatically eligible through federal assistance programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, has fallen below the federal reimbursement threshold that makes free lunch financially viable.

Much of this is due to the federal government , which kicked off of these benefits. Because programs like SNAP identify students for school meal benefits, it will become increasingly harder for districts, like Miami, to offer universal free meals in the future, without prioritizing this issue and funding it from other sources.

But families do not suddenly become financially secure because they cross an imaginary income line. There is an enormous difference between not qualifying for assistance and not needing it.

Miami is already one of the most expensive cities in the U.S., with costs consistently rising. Even my wife and I, who are fortunate to both have jobs, will feel the impact of this change as our monthly expenses increase. So many others will experience this as an additional bill they cannot afford on top of an already-unforgiving cost of living.

It isn’t clear yet how many families will be affected. But regardless of the final number, the underlying principle remains the same. It’s not a matter of what a family can afford; when everyone receives something, it stops being charity and becomes infrastructure. In the public schools, universal lunch lowers the stigma of being poor. It is one way that schools cure divisiveness, which seems especially necessary now, given America’s historic and rising levels of economic and political polarization.

Walking into the school cafeteria is one of the most important invisible moments telling all kids they have worth, regardless of what neighborhood they live in or what resources and opportunities their families do or don’t have. 

Getting lunch wasn’t a benefit. It was simply part of school.

In a city as economically and geographically segregated as Miami, such ordinary moments are invaluable. They stitch together a sense of commonality among the next generation before divisions of adulthood fully take hold.

The question isn’t simply about who will pay for lunch. It’s whether the U.S. still believe every child matters equally.

It’s 2026. Satellites connect to devices in our pockets, artificial intelligence algorithms can drive cars and scan X-rays, and Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem is the basis for the summer’s hottest movie.

But there’s always a but. And right now, in a time when public school absences remain stubbornly high since Covid closures five years ago, it seems amazing not that educators can’t fix this problem, because it is complicated and occurs for many reasons, but that they can’t even agree on how to count whether a student is absent or not.

That’s not an exaggeration. While the number of chronically absent students nearly doubled after schools returned to in-person schooling in 2022, there is no universal consensus on how to determine the extent of this problem.

In fact, when Iowa put together comprehensive legislation in 2024 to address the state’s attendance problem, it became clear that different counting methods made it impossible to compare attendance statewide. Starting with the 2025-26 school year, the state mandated that all districts use the same method to count attendance. 

For the most part, school attendance policies fall into three buckets:

• If you are present for any part of the school day, you are counted as attending.
• If you are present for at least half of the day, you are counted as attending.
• Your attendance is tracked at the period or even the minute level.

While Iowa has chosen the minute-level attendance as its state standard, there is no universal agreement or any research about which method is the best. Sixteen states leave that decision to local discretion. In fact, two experts, Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, the CEO and president of Attendance Works, and Justine Oliva, the director of Policy & Research for the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, stay away from endorsing any one method. But both call for standardizing how attendance is counted within each state.

“The lack of a common definition of a day of attendance continues to make it difficult to interpret and compare data within and across states,” reads a 2025 report from Attendance Works.

Attendance throughout history

While the first school law in the country is the, passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it is not known when schools first started taking attendance. But there’s a good record of the initial attendance complaint. Near the end of Horace Mann’s in 1838, Mann wrote about the state’s inability to collect even basic “information respecting the number of scholars attending the public schools, and the regularity of that attendance.”

By 1918, all states had laws mandating school attendance, but truancy did not become a federal focus until 2001’s bill made it mandatory for all states to report truancy data to the federal government. Fourteen years later, the pushed attendance further into the spotlight, when many states recognized chronic absenteeism’s importance in student outcomes. Unlike truancy, this indicator reflects both excused and unexcused absences. As part of ESSA, 36 states and the District of Columbia included chronic absenteeism as one of the markers of educational progress in their states.

The first thing to understand about attendance is how schools use their data. In six states, is used to determine state funding; the rest of the states use enrollment counts assessed once or twice a year to decide how much money districts receive. But even within a school there can be different uses for attendance. For instance, at Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy in Norwalk, Connecticut, principal Damon Lewis said the middle school reports its homeroom attendance to the district and state, but uses its period-by-period attendance to keep a closer eye on each student.

Before the pandemic, about were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year or about 18 days. When schools reopened after Covid shutdowns, student behavior had changed, with nearly twice as many learners chronically absent, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Research proves the link between attendance and achievement, Malkus said; for every day a student is absent, the average achievement for that student decreases. “It’s not just kids who are chronically absent,” he said, the effect of attendance on achievement “is pretty much linear. Every day matters.”

A new report from NWEA last month backed up those findings, showing that chronic absenteeism played a major role in students failing to reach pre-pandemic academic levels. “Improving attendance should be part of the academic recovery strategy in most districts rather than seen as a distinct issue,” the report concluded.

While chronic absenteeism is a big issue for many state education leaders, Malkus warned that it can be an arbitrary distinction. “One of the shocking things [about attendance] is that 7% of kids miss over 20% of the school year,” he said, adding that these absences can affect an entire school’s achievement.

Best ways to count

While there is no research that measures one method of counting attendance versus another, it’s also difficult to know even how most schools measure attendance. In an Attendance Works 2026 , only eight states require districts to use a per-minute attendance calculation, while 24 states require attendance for a half day or more to count a student as present. But there are some signs that a growing number of schools are opting to get granular and track student attendance per minute. Arkansas and Oklahoma moved to period-based attendance in the 2025-26 school year, and both Ohio and Iowa will make that move in this year.

Jesse Roy, the senior director of education value for PowerSchool, said his customers are trending toward wanting more information. “We see states going from daily to half-daily to per-minute. More data is kind of what you’re after.” PowerSchool is a student information software company used in 90 of the country’s largest 100 school districts.

Oliva of Rhode Island mentioned that counting attendance so closely could have some pitfalls. “More granular methods (like per hour) may better capture instructional time if the data are accurate but may be more difficult to implement consistently at the local level,” she said.

When Rhode Island tried to pass a comprehensive attendance bill in 2024, it was using “at least half the day” method of counting a student present, she said, adding that this method is the more widely used benchmark in education. Even though that bill never became law, the state did implement several components of the proposal and has had success improving its attendance rates. Rhode Island’s chronic absenteeism rate posted the fifth largest decline in the country from 2021-22 to 2023-24, according to a from the state’s Public Expenditure Council.

Iowa’s push to improve attendance originally focused on how schools must take specific steps to notify parents as students’ absences piled up, as well as a major publicity push to inform the public about the importance of good attendance. But the next year, the state’s legislators passed some smaller changes that specified not only how schools must count attendance, but also what could count as an excused absence.

“They are sweating the details on this, and that is what state leadership looks like,” Malkus said.

Des Moines has been tracking per-minute attendance for years, well before Iowa’s new requirement. “The per-minute calculation really matters,” said Jennifer Stalder, who oversees the case managers who track attendance in district schools. “It allows us to home in on what’s happening and have more meaningful conversations with parents.”

Even though Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had not yet gone to per-minute attendance last school year, Jennifer Van Fleet, the district’s executive director of student services, said she imagined the extra information might help each school discern which student has an aversion to math or highlight a student who is late everyday. “We can match the support and intervention to be specific,” she added.

Ohio is another state that uses the per-minute method as part of its statewide goal to reduce chronic absenteeism in half by the end of the 2028-29 school year. The state has shifted to trying to predict and prevent students from becoming chronically absent, instead of only intervening after they have missed 10% of school. Part of this effort is not only collecting more information about student attendance, but sharing that data quickly and accurately.

The state’s , shows weekly updates statewide, including the number and percentage of students in each district who are both chronically absent and at-risk of becoming chronically absent.

Even though PowerSchool’s Roy wondered if data overload could reach a point of diminishing returns for school officials, he did express wonder at how specific schools can be now when tracking student attendance. “Fifteen years ago,” when he worked in a school district, “I would have to walk around with binders and do two hours of work per student” to find out all this information, he said.

An earlier version of this story misstated the school district where Jennifer Van Fleet works. It is Cedar Rapids Community School District.

In 2012, after child advocates spent years trying to reduce punitive suspensions in schools, Massachusetts passed sweeping education reforms under , kickstarting a longstanding policy shift away from exclusionary discipline methods.

The law came as the nation moved away from the of the 1990s and toward efforts to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Chapter 222 established new due process and data reporting requirements for school districts regarding the discipline and exclusion of students. The underlying principle was to make exclusionary methods like suspension a last resort and require those who are removed from the classroom to continue receiving access to learning materials.

Around the time the law was passed, many out-of-school suspensions were for non-criminal, non-violent, non-drug-related offenses, and that broad, discretionary, catch-all category was where some of the greatest existed. Students of color were removed from school for minor offenses at disproportionately higher rates than white students, as were students with disabilities compared to their peers.

In 2022, the state took it a step further by passing , requiring school districts to attempt alternative methods like restorative justice, counseling, and mediation before resorting to exclusionary discipline.

Nearly 15 years after that initial policy shift, out-of-school suspensions are falling. From 2018 to 2025, they dropped from nearly 28,500 statewide to less than 22,000, according to data reported by school districts and collected by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). In that same timeframe, the number of students receiving any form of disciplinary action in Massachusetts schools decreased by nearly 24 percent. In-school suspensions declined as well.

Yet, while only impacting a small percentage of students, emergency removals — a mechanism allowing school administrators to immediately remove a student from school due to severe behavior for up to two days before the child receives a legally-mandated hearing — have substantially increased, from nearly 1,500 in 2018 to more than 3,900 in 2025. The number of emergency removals dipped during the 2020-2021 school year but has increased every year since 2022.

The state’s 26 Gateway City school districts — which are responsible for educating some of the most disadvantaged student populations in Massachusetts — reported more than half of all emergency removals in 2025, despite making up just 28 percent of the state’s total public school population. In those districts alone, emergency removals collectively grew by 78 percent while suspensions decreased by 23 percent.

What’s behind the increase? The answer isn’t simple.

The trend has racial justice and education advocates sounding the alarm, suggesting that school districts may be circumventing suspensions (and the alternative discipline methods they are legally required to employ) and instead opting for emergency removals as a quick fix to behavioral issues. Those removals are amounting to lost learning that advocates say is ultimately contributing to the state’s staggering racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

“We’ve had all of these changes, but there’s not a lot of teeth,” said Jenny Chou, executive director of the Children’s Law Center of Massachusetts, a legal services and advocacy group representing families and children. “The more you’re not in school, the worse off you are, and now we have this whole system where it’s seemingly justified to put you out.”

Teacher advocates and school officials say they haven’t been provided with the necessary level of resources or training to deploy alternative discipline methods, calling Chapter 177 an “unfunded mandate” amid a of special education professionals. Others say the increase can be at least partly attributed to an uptick in more violent, volatile classroom behavior due to youth mental health struggles brought about by the pandemic.

“The sad outcome of that is that schools are overusing emergency removals so they don’t have to comply with our harder out-of-school suspension laws, and also so they don’t have to use the alternatives that our state isn’t providing them funding or training for,” said Matthew Cregor, an education attorney at the Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee, which offers legal representation to people with mental health challenges.

Research has long shown that exclusion from school is linked to , , and . A found that suspended youth were 40 percent more likely to be arrested within five years and 94 percent more likely to have been arrested as a minor. More recent studies have shown that these disciplinary practices negatively affect young people’s .

The modest decline in out-of-school suspensions in Massachusetts has been celebrated by education advocates on all sides. But even though suspension rates have decreased for students of color and students with disabilities, both groups continue to be suspended at higher rates than their peers. In 2025, those with disabilities were suspended out of school at 2.5 times the rate of those without disabilities, according to data collected by DESE. Hispanic students were suspended 2.5 times as often as white students, while Black students were suspended nearly three times as much as white students.

The disparities persist when it comes to the use of emergency removals. Those with disabilities were removed at more than three times the rate of those without disabilities in 2025. Hispanic students experienced emergency removals nearly three times as much as white students, while Black students were removed more than four times as much as white students.

“If districts were meaningfully deploying approaches like restorative justice, mediation, and conflict resolution, they’d be able to act in a proactive manner to address student conflict and student misbehavior,” said Leon Smith, executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “They’d be able to get to the root of some of these behaviors, and they’d be able to de-escalate conflicts before they result in fights and things of that nature. In the absence of that, you have continuing behavior that, unfortunately, is still falling into exclusion.”

Jay Blitzman, a former juvenile court judge and former director of Massachusetts Advocates for Children (MAC), said any kind of disciplinary exclusion contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline.

“This adversely affects public safety, quite candidly,” he said. “Educational continuity is essential. Doing everything we can to keep youth in school is obviously good for them, but it’s also part of being smart on crime.”

“It’s easy to react and blame kids, but we as adults have to assume some systemic accountability,” he added. “These problems are historic, and they aren’t going away.”

Chapter 222 required districts to provide students and families with notice and a hearing prior to an out-of-school suspension, except during emergency circumstances, in which the child can receive their hearing after being removed.

Emergency removals were established as an official disciplinary category in 2014. Districts may finally be reporting them with some accuracy, Cregor said, which could help explain the spike in removals.

But some advocates, including Jennifer White, an education attorney at MAC, suspect that school officials are utilizing informal removals that are not being officially reported as emergency removals to the state.

She told CommonWealth Beacon she has worked with parents that have received mid-day calls from school officials requesting that their child be picked up after one or more behavioral incidents. Yet some are allowed to return to school the next day without ever receiving the mandated hearing that is supposed to accompany an emergency removal.

Chou said she has seen similar cases. “As if that’s some time-out that they’re allowed to do,” she said.

Beccah Griffith, president of the Malden Education Association and a special education teacher, said many districts are reluctant to use formal discipline measures for students on Individualized Education Program (IEP) plans out of fear of invoking a manifestation determination — a legal meeting required by the ⁠Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to decide if a student’s misbehavior was caused by their disability or a failure to follow their education plan. It is triggered when a school plans to suspend a student with a disability. This could account for the uptick in the use of emergency removals, as well as the disproportionate use of removals against students with disabilities, Griffith said.

A published by a journal of the American Educational Research Association found evidence that schools in California, after being sanctioned for disproportionately suspending Black students, began using informal ways to remove students from learning, such as sending children home early or isolating them in hallways, often without recording the action as a form of discipline. Researchers found more broadly that these practices occur when mandates to reduce formal suspensions “are not paired with adequate resources for alternative restorative behavior management approaches.”

Because of the budget crunches around hiring ancillary service providers like social workers, behavior analysts, and speech therapists, many districts have only been able to hire staff for legally mandated services, like math and science teachers, rather than additional supports, Griffith said.

“There is resentment and dislike towards these alternative discipline strategies because they’re not being resourced properly,” she added “If we have the requisite, expertly trained staff and the time, space, and resources, it works. But I don’t know any educator in Massachusetts that has all of those things.”

In addition to staff and funding, advocates say implementing alternative discipline practices requires long-term training, programming, oversight, and technical assistance. DESE’s , for example, coaches school districts on data reporting and assists in the reduction of disparate rates of suspension for students with disabilities and students of color.

“The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education continues to work with districts to develop the supports and practices that educators need to reduce the inappropriate or excessive use of emergency removal and other types of suspension,” a DESE spokesperson said in a statement provided to CommonWealth Beacon.

In 2025, there were 3,915 reported emergency removals in Massachusetts schools. Much like suspensions, 42 percent of those removals were for offenses labeled as non-drug, non-violent, and non-criminal — something advocates say is inherently contradictory.

Some say the problem lies in the language of the law, which allows an emergency removal when a student’s continued presence poses a danger to other people or property, “or materially and substantially disrupts the order of the school.” A principal may immediately remove a student if “there is no alternative available to alleviate the danger or disruption,” according to .

Advocates have questioned what constitutes a “disruption,” and whether there are circumstances in which a disruption warrants an emergency removal rather than a formal suspension process or another type of discipline. Since 2022, districts have increasingly cited the non-drug, non-violent, non-criminal offense category for emergency removals, rising from 37 percent of all emergency removals in 2022 to 42 percent in 2025. Because the behavior in this category is undefined, it is difficult to determine what students are doing to be removed from school on this basis.

“The pandemic and the tremendous toll it took on student mental health resulted in more disruption and dysregulation in schools, and as a result, we are seeing a swing back toward removing students from school,” Cregor said. “But I think there’s some reasonable fear that districts are calling things emergency removals that are not emergencies.”

Since the pandemic, teachers and administrators in Massachusetts and beyond have about an uptick in violent, explosive behavior in the classroom. Gerald Koocher, former president of the American Psychological Association, said this behavior can be linked to feelings of loneliness and disconnectedness that arose during the pandemic, which did not go away when students returned to school.

“It put them in social isolation, it put them under stress, and it weakened their connection with school,” Dr. Koocher said of the pandemic. “There has been a broader pattern of youth violence, which includes firearms, especially among teenagers, and particularly in urban areas.”

But the state’s disciplinary data shows that some of the most common violent offenses occurring in schools, including physical attack (battery), threat of physical attack, and physical fights, have either returned to their pre-covid levels or slightly decreased. But, when it comes to emergency removals, these categories have been increasingly cited as the offense type.

For instance, the number of reported emergency removals administered for offenses labeled “physical attack” increased from 387 instances in 2018 to 1,133 instances in 2025. Yet, the total number of reported physical attacks in schools across the state decreased slightly from 8,136 in 2018 to 7,991 in 2025.

Chelsea Public Schools superintendent Almi Abeyta said six years after the pandemic hit, educators and administrators are still grappling with students’ social and emotional issues.

“At the end of the day, we don’t want children to be out of school,” she said. “But we’re seeing more dysregulation with our younger children — pre-K through grade 5 — than what we’ve noticed in the past. We have little kids that will just destroy an entire classroom.”

In 2024, that would have prohibited the use of suspensions and expulsions on pre-K through Grade 3 students advanced out of the education committee. While the move was celebrated by child and student advocates, the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents opposed the bill, arguing that school administrators require flexibility when making disciplinary decisions. The bill ultimately died in the House, though there is a that is again awaiting legislative action after passing out of the Joint Committee on Education.

Abeyta said school staff do everything they can to intervene before suspending or removing a child. She said educators recognize the critical role that counselors, clinicians, and other behavioral support staff play. Yet budget cuts last year forced the district to reduce staff by more than 50 full-time employees.

“I left it up to the principals to decide, and none of them cut social workers or counselors,” Abeyta said.

Abeyta said emergency removals are mostly reserved for safety issues, though in 2025, nearly 44 percent of Chelsea’s emergency removals were for non-drug, non-violent, non-criminal offenses. In 2025, the district had the third highest emergency removal rate of the 26 Gateway City school districts, after Fitchburg and Holyoke. The number of removals in Chelsea grew from 20 in 2022 to 151 in 2025.

Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) president Matt Bach said the trend in emergency removals is a symptom of “deeper issues” regarding districts’ ability to provide the best services to students, adding that schools are facing both a funding and staffing crisis.

“Is [the trend] paralleling the reduction in education professionals across the board? Is it paralleling a reduction in public education investment? Is it paralleling substandard curriculum products, which are choking school budgets and intensifying student disengagement?” Bach said. “The ratio between professionals and students in these districts is what’s going to matter most for student outcomes and behaviors.”

He said the MTA has encouraged restorative practices like increased recess time and reduced screen time, which have been to benefit dysregulated students. The association has also pushed for Gov. Maura Healey’s to direct an additional $100 million to public school districts across the state. The funding would help communities manage growing financial challenges ahead of the new school year. The proposal, which must be approved by the Legislature, would add to the more than $7 billion already appropriated for K-12 education in the fiscal 2027 state budget.

The hope, Bach said, is that some of that funding could be used by districts to rehire staff that might have been laid off in the spring due to budget shortfalls around the state. Educators like Griffith say that without an adequate number of behavioral support staff, districts won’t be able to reduce their exclusionary discipline rates.

“When there is one social worker for 75 to 100 students with complex emotional needs, you’re not able to be proactive in supporting them,” she said. “Educators want to be proactive to try to prevent a crisis that could result in emergency removal. That’s the way we’re trained, but it’s often not what we’re able to do.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

In school lunchrooms around Lake Tahoe, students line up for a red, hairy fruit called a rambutan. On pozole day, they shout, “We want more!” And when the salad bar runs dry, they ask the staff to refill it — over and over.

This brings joy to the cafeteria crew, but Gage Gautheier recently bestowed the highest possible praise from a middle-schooler: “I have literally never heard anyone complain about the food.”

Tahoe-Truckee Unified is among 500 California school districts that get their food through the state’s Farm to School program, which pairs local farmers, ranchers and other food producers with school districts to provide fresh meals to students. The program has been since it started in 2021 that this month the state and made it a permanent part of the Department of Food and Agriculture.

“I’m so relieved the state decided to step it up and make this program permanent,” said Christina Lawson, director of nutrition services at Western Placer Unified in Lincoln, a Sacramento suburb. “That’s been my abiding fear – that our funding would dry up after all this work we’ve done.”

The Farm to School program is part of a broader state effort to improve school meals, which for decades consisted mostly of soggy hot dogs and frozen pizzas. Through the program, schools get grant money to obtain fresh, local food; send students on field trips to farms; and send cafeteria workers to culinary academies so they can learn to cook things like braised short ribs and roasted root vegetables.

Another grant program helps schools upgrade their kitchens. And during the pandemic, the state started offering universal school meals to all students. In all, the state has invested well over $1 billion in healthy school meals since 2021.

“Our goal is not only to ensure every California child has access to nutritious, locally grown, regenerative organic meals that fuel their full potential, but to continue setting the national standard for what school food can and should be,” said First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a longtime champion of the state’s overhaul of school meals. “When we invest in healthy, thriving kids, everyone benefits.”

One of the most helpful parts of the Farm to School Program, according to school nutrition directors, is that it pays for food hubs to act as intermediaries between schools and farms. The food hubs place orders with farmers, deliver produce to schools and handle much of the logistical paperwork — tasks that can be overwhelming for harried cafeteria workers.

Spork is a food hub based in Davis that works with more than 100 small farms and 40 school districts from Crescent City to Los Angeles Unified. Crews deliver up to 120 tons — or 720 truckloads — of produce a week to school kitchens. 

Deliveries include items like vine-ripened cherry tomatoes, purple daikon radishes, Hakurei turnips, and something called a painted serpent cucumber – a snake-like, striped vegetable with a thin skin and a sweet, mild flavor.

“What we’re trying to do is change kids’ eating habits at a young age by showing them how great fruits and vegetables can be,” said Jacob Weiss, general manager of Spork. “People think kids don’t like vegetables, but we found that if you give them fresh, delicious vegetables, they love it.”

A boost to local farms

Another goal of Farm to School is to give a boost to small farmers, who often struggle with fluctuating markets and customers’ fickle tastes. A farmer might plant a field of a specialty item like heirloom tomatoes, for example, but only sell half of them. Contracting with schools can provide a stable, predictable market, allowing farmers to plan crops more efficiently. Overall, the program works with nearly 600 small farmers in California.

Patrick Bollinger co-owns Foothill Roots Farm in Meadow Vista in Placer County. On 20 rolling acres in the Sierra foothills, he and his crew grow 50 different crops, much of it for the Tahoe Food Hub, which distributes to Tahoe-Truckee Unified and other sources. 

“If we get an order for watermelon radishes, I know we’ll be able to sell them before we even get the seeds in the ground,” Bollinger said. “And when we sell to the food hub, we don’t have to do the deliveries or marketing. … It’s been incredibly advantageous for us.”

The state that every dollar spent through Farm to School results in $2.10 in local economic growth. Bollinger said he’s saved enough money to retain more employees year-round and lease an additional 8 acres since he started working with the Farm to School program. It’s also allowed him to plan more strategically, growing more salad greens, carrots and winter squash while still saving room for things like beets, herbs and chard.

At Tahoe-Truckee Unified, Kat Soltanmorad has never been happier in her 25 years as a school nutrition worker. 

“We now have access to the richness of California agriculture,” said Soltanmorad, director of the district’s food services department. “It’s good for the economy, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for student wellness.”

She and her crew come up with menu items like barbecue ribs with whole grain garlic bread, organic mashed potatoes and kale caesar salad; mango lassis; and potstickers with oven-baked pancit and cilantro lime brown rice.

They taste-test new menu items with students and offer a wide variety of options at the salad bar so everyone can find something they like.

“I have become a radish expert,” Soltanmorad said, noting that the district offers radish varieties such as baby French breakfast and Easter egg from small farms near her district. “We dress them up with Tajin and lime juice or cilantro, and the students love it.”

Gauthier, who just finished eighth grade, transferred to Tahoe-Truckee two years ago from Reno, where he said the school food was unimpressive. 

“In Reno they’d give us little sandwiches in plastic bags. Not cooked or anything, just a cold sandwich,” he said. “Here, they actually make an effort. They try.” 

Back in Lincoln, Lawson choked up when describing the changes to her district’s lunch program thanks to Farm to School. The 8,200-student district now offers things like homemade muffins made from locally milled flour, low-sugar Greek yogurt from Sierra Nevada Creamery, local homemade tortillas and pupusas, and fresh produce ranging from kumquats to canary melons to finger limes. 

The staff, too, has benefitted. Because there’s more work for them, they’re getting more hours and bigger paychecks, plus greater job satisfaction, she said.

“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to school food service,” Lawson said. “The staff is happier, the farmers are benefitting. And the kids are actually eating the food.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

Screen time limits for Los Angeles Unified School District’s youngest students begin in August.

“My hope and expectation is that most families will see a dramatic reduction in screen time during the school day, but also in the evenings, as mandated by school,” said Nick Melvoin, who represents the Westside’s Board District 4.

While LAUSD was the , the policy, along with , is part of a nationwide trend toward limiting young people’s exposure to tech during the school day.

Many parents have embraced — and advocated for— less technology in the classroom, but questions remain about how LAUSD will enforce the screen time limits and the potential for unintended consequences for students who have less access to devices outside of school.

What part of the screen time limits start in August?

The  eliminates digital device usage for students in early education (preschool), transitional kindergarten (TK), kindergarten and first grade.

There are several exceptions, including:

Students will not be automatically issued devices to take home. However, there is still a process for families to request one.

The policy also requires the district to block all students from accessing YouTube, social media and streaming platforms without teacher approval.

The type of work students bring home may change, too. The policy encourages educators to provide off-screen assignments.

“Homework should prioritize reading, writing, problem-solving, hands-on activities, observation, and other learning experiences that can be completed without the use of a device,” .

Andrés Chait, the district’s superintendent, said at a July 21 news conference that implementing the new policy will take time.

“On Aug. 12, you may not necessarily see in the immediate all of the changes that the policy calls for, but they will be implemented methodically and transparently,” Chait said.

Where did the screen time policy come from?

A group of Los Angeles parents organized a group called  in 2025 and started , collecting petition signatures and .

Melvoin brought forward the resolution that ultimately led to the new policy .

“We had not recalibrated or reset our relationship with technology post-COVID,” said Melvoin, at the time. “Six years ago, we sent every kid in L.A. home with a device, which was a lifeline. … But when they came back, I’m still seeing kids as young as preschool on devices all day.”

The board adopted the policy  after staff conducted research and outreach to parents, educators and community members.

How much does it cost to limit screen time?

District staff  up to $4 million in one-time funds to purchase carts to store laptops in elementary school classrooms and an annual $1 million to pay for software to track screen time and block content.

The district has yet to spend this money, according to a statement from a Los Angeles Unified spokesperson.

“Conversations with schools will take place in the early part of the upcoming school year to assess needs on a school-by-school basis,” the statement read.

Was there any pushback to the new policy?

The board voted unanimously to adopt the screen time policy with the exception of Board President Scott Schmerelson, who recused himself from the vote.

However, there was some discussion about whether the limitations would have unintended consequences for teachers and students.

Board Vice President Rocío Rivas cautioned that the minute limits may discourage teachers from assigning multimedia projects, and adds the burden of monitoring student technology use.

“Schools may end up focusing on counting minutes, documenting usage, auditing classrooms instead of evaluating learning outcomes,” Rivas said.

LAUSD staff’s  noted a “risk of slowing access to technology and its advancement for students to compete with the world.”

During public comment in June, Mireya Garcia, a mother and grandmother, told the board that her family shares a single computer at home.

“I don’t want them to lose access to tools that can help them read, to learn and to be successful,” Garcia said.

How are teachers preparing for the changes?

LAUSD adopted the screen time policy when most teachers and students were off-campus for the summer.

A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson wrote in a statement that training has started with “dedicated sessions” for principals and administrators and that more resources will be available to educators before Aug.12 and throughout the school year.

“This approach allows us to be respectful of educators’ time while ensuring schools are prepared and supported for a successful rollout,” the spokesperson wrote.

The first opportunity for most teachers to return to their classroom is on Monday, Aug. 10, two days before school starts.

Stephanie Levinson, who’s taught at San Fernando Elementary for 28 years, said she has not received any additional guidance from the district since the policy was passed this summer.

This year, she’ll teach a combined first- and second-grade class. Under the new policy, first graders do not have access to digital devices and second graders can use them for up to 20 minutes per day this year.

“It’s stressful because we don’t know,” Levinson said. “It’s hard to plan a school day when we’re not sure what’s gonna be mandated, how things are gonna work.”

Levinson said that, in the past, she’d assign students to use interactive learning programs like ABCmouse while she worked with their peers in small groups. She also fundraised to bring laptops and tablets to her classroom, where most students come from low-income families, before the devices were widespread in the district.

“If a kid hasn’t learned how to even use a computer or type, how are they going to…not be disadvantaged against kids that have computers?” Levinson said.

How can families get access to a digital device?

Parents and guardians can request a take-home device  or through the district’s .

The Los Angeles Public Library has a for adults.

What’s next for screen time in LAUSD?

The policy requires the board to review the screen time rules at least once a year during a public meeting.

“One of the reasons we crafted this policy is because we didn’t see a policy that we could just adopt nationally,” Melvoin said. “But that also means that it’ll be iterative and that we’re working out the kinks.”

The district has also created an ad hoc committee to provide recommendations on how the district is using AI.

• District- and state-mandated assessments.��
• Students enrolled in the LAUSD Virtual Academy program.��
• To help students with disabilities learn, as mandated by their Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 Plan.��

This was originally published by .

On June 26, Children’s Aid was preparing to continue summer sexual health and youth development programming in schools, foster care settings and community organizations across New York City.

By the end of the day, the federal funding behind that work was gone.

The Trump administration terminated Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants nationwide with immediate effect, stripping Children’s Aid of $936,700 a year with two years still remaining on its grant. 

Children’s Aid has worked in under-resourced New York communities for more than 170 years. Its health and wellness division operates two community clinics and six school-based health centers and provides medical, dental, behavioral health, nutrition, family planning and health care management services.

Children’s Aid also provided programming at the Administration for Children’s Services Children’s Center, where children may stay while waiting for placement in the foster care system.

The organization had no time to prepare its staff, community partners or the approximately 1,200 young people it served annually.

Several nonprofit groups and local governments have filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s termination of Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants and its changes to the program’s evidence-based framework. Separately, 79 members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus and the broader House Democratic Caucus sent HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a letter demanding that the canceled grants be restored.

In the meantime, Children’s Aid is grappling with what comes next.

The funding cut reaches across the predominantly Black and Latino communities in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn, as well as Staten Island, where Children’s Aid brought medically accurate information and trusted adults directly to young people. Nine staff members were affected, including six full-time and three part-time employees.

“We received notification on June 26 that effective June 26 our funding would be terminated,” said Rhonda Braxton, vice president for health and wellness at Children’s Aid. “There was no advance notification, and there was no runway to really end the program.”

Across New York City, the administration’s decision eliminated $4.3 million in annual funding from three grantee organizations and disrupted services reaching more than 19,000 young people.

At Children’s Aid, the loss extends beyond one program. 

It threatens work in schools and community spaces, specialized programming for foster youth and the organization’s Just Ask Me peer education initiative. The grant supported a network of adults and youth leaders who taught consent, healthy relationships, communication, medical advocacy and informed decision-making.

The government did not simply remove money from a budget. It cut through years of relationships built in communities where young people already face the greatest barriers to care. The administration canceled 53 grants nationwide as part of a broader overhaul of the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Its new funding criteria direct organizations to teach abstinence as the only certain method of preventing pregnancy and place increased emphasis on marriage, fertility and preparing young people for parenthood.

The standards make little reference to preventing sexually transmitted infections and offer virtually no recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender young people.

The administration has defended the new direction as an effort to steer federal dollars toward abstinence-focused education. That approach reflects a broader conservative argument that comprehensive sexual health programs treat teen sexual activity as unavoidable and diminish parents’ role in guiding their children.  

When 19th News requested comment, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to the initial query.

But leaders at Children’s Aid do not describe their work as encouraging teenagers to have sex.

They described teaching young people how to recognize an unhealthy relationship. How to communicate. How to give or withhold consent. How to talk to a doctor. How to resist pressure from a friend or partner. How to make decisions that protect the future they want.

The organization had received federal teen pregnancy prevention funding since 2015. Through the grant, staff delivered evidence-based sexual health and youth development programs during the school day, after school and through community organizations.

Pascale Saintonge Austin, director of family planning and pregnancy prevention programs at Children’s Aid, said foster youth face distinct challenges that cannot be addressed by distributing generic health information. 

“We won’t be able to provide such a specific curriculum to them anymore that was tailored and made for them,” Saintonge Austin said.

The organization’s Just Ask Me peer health education program is also at risk. Known as JAM, the initiative trains high school students to co-facilitate programs, organize events, advocate for adolescent health and dispel misinformation among their peers.

The young people applied for the positions and were hired based on federal funding that the government withdrew without notice. Children’s Aid must now determine whether it can retain all of them beyond the end of summer.

“They love this work. They’re involved in this work,” Saintonge Austin said. “We will have to make some decisions toward the end of August or beginning of September about whether or not we can even keep all of the peers without some kind of intervention.”

Programs like the ones run by Children’s Aid have made a difference, federal lawmakers say, and Democratic members of Congress are demanding that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explain the terminations and restore the funding.

Rep. Judy Chu of California said in a statement to The 19th that the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program has provided medically accurate, evidence-based information for more than 15 years and has helped young people prevent sexually transmitted infections, unintended pregnancies and unhealthy relationships.

“There is simply no justification for abruptly terminating $68 million from programs with a proven record of improving young people’s health,” Chu said. “The Trump administration’s decision is reckless, indefensible and directly undermines the purpose for which Congress provided these funds. That’s why my Democratic Women’s Caucus colleagues and I are demanding answers from Secretary Kennedy about why these grants were terminated and calling for this critical funding to be restored.”

Another lawmaker, Rep. Kelly Morrison of Minnesota, an OBGYN, described the decision as both a physician and lawmaker.

“The administration has unilaterally taken away helpful and potentially life-saving resources from the young people that need them,” Morrison said in a statement to The 19th. “Canceling research-backed, evidence-based programs that prevent STIs, decrease teen pregnancy and save lives is a dangerous policy decision.”

The administration’s criteria place marriage and future parenthood at the center of adolescent sexual health.

But for Saintonge Austin, that framing fails to account for the actual questions young people bring into Children’s Aid classrooms.

Those questions are often about loneliness, acceptance, pressure, confidence and the struggle to establish boundaries. They come from teenagers trying to understand how to care for themselves while growing up in a world that does not always provide them with safe or reliable guidance.

Federal policy may define the program by the pregnancies it seeks to prevent. The young people inside it experience something broader: a place where they can speak honestly, learn whom to trust and develop the skills to enter adulthood with greater control over their lives.

“A lot of times people equate teen pregnancy prevention with sex,” Saintonge Austin said. “I always say it’s never that. It’s about, ‘I want my friend to like me. I want to know how to have a healthy relationship. I don’t know how to say no, or I don’t know how to negotiate.’ It goes beyond the physical act. It’s really about how to navigate a world, become a healthy adult and make decisions in a way where you can reach the goals that you want.”

The need for that work feels urgent in New York City, where the birthrate for teenagers not only remains above the national average, but has begun inching back up after a long decline.

“Congress specifically funded TPPP because evidence-based prevention programs work, and the Administration owes Congress and the American people an explanation for disregarding that clear directive,” said Chu. “We should be strengthening these proven programs, not jeopardizing young people’s access to the accurate health information and resources they need to thrive.”

Nationwide, the birthrate has fallen over the past 15 years, to 11.7 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 last year, according to federal data. That’s a drop of more than 65 percent since 2010, when the rate was 34.3 births per 1,000 teenage girls.

have attributed the long decline to several factors, including fewer teenagers having sex and increased contraception use among those who are sexually active. Federal prevention programs have also been credited with helping young people delay sexual activity and make informed health decisions.

New York City was part of that trend for a long time. However, it has begun moving in the opposite direction.

In , three out of every four pregnancies among New York City teenagers were unintended, according to the city health department.

Those pregnancies were also concentrated in communities with the fewest resources. The teen pregnancy rate in neighborhoods with very high poverty was 3.6 times the rate in the city’s lowest-poverty communities, according to New York City’s Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity, and many of these teenagers are Black and Latinx. They continue to face the effects of systemic racism, historic disinvestment and reduced access to health care and other resources that support healthy lives.

Saintonge Austin said the recent rise demonstrates what can happen when young people lose consistent access to sexual health education.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, much of Children’s Aid’s school-based programming was interrupted. New York City high school students did not broadly return to buildings until spring 2021, and schools facing enormous academic losses had to make difficult choices about which subjects and services to prioritize.

At the same time, teenagers were spending more time online, where accurate information competed with rumors and misinformation spreading across social media.

“It shows what happens when there’s this sort of disruption in mass education around comprehensive sexual health education,” Saintonge Austin said. “We were really getting back into the flow of it being integrated into their education and their spaces again, and now the funding was pulled.”

The disruption is occurring again, this time by federal design.

Braxton said Children’s Aid has tried to place affected employees in other vacant positions within the organization when possible. It has contacted school and community partners, notified elected officials and begun searching for other funding.

But replacing nearly $1 million each year is not a realistic short-term solution.

“We have very generous donors,” Braxton said. “We have not been able to fill that huge gap as of yet.”

The organization is also trying to preserve relationships built over years with young people who learned they could approach Children’s Aid staff members without judgment and receive medically accurate answers.

“Our concern is the loss of trusted relationships for our young people,” Braxton said, “and our inability to provide these much-needed, evidence-based, medically accurate services in an era where there’s a lot of disinformation and mistrust.”

was originally published by .

A different approach

Since I’ve learned that at least a third of students in my college classrooms are struggling with mental health, I’ve I teach. I have altered my courses to seek out pockets of wonder, simultaneously supporting learning and well-being.

In my 300-person course with pre-med students, I no longer only teach through lecturing. Instead, I emphasize our humanity and curiosity, while also teaching very difficult content. I provide a solid structure, emphasize that everyone belongs and ask them to teach each other. I use real-world situations and games, give students choice within their assignments and offer opportunities for reflection.

And yes, I use a traditional grading system.

Learning can require persistence and struggle, and no one benefits from a classroom without challenge. But struggle and dread aren’t the same thing.

Does stress belong in learning? Maybe, maybe not.

The first step is recognizing that the U.S. built an education system that runs on stress — not because we meant to, but because most people did not notice.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

New Mexico First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid at the end of the day Thursday in the , ordering the company to pay $567 million for an abatement fund to address the harms it has done to the state’s youth.

The case, which ended with written closing arguments in mid-June centered on the New Mexico Department of Justice’s allegations that Meta’s platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — constitute a “public nuisance” to teen health within the state. Among its list of demands, NMDOJ requested the court order the company to operate differently for its youth users; issue monetary relief; and appoint an independent monitor.

The jury-less bench trial followed a finding Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and misled the public on the risks of its sites for underage users’ mental health and risk of sexual exploitation. The verdict, which Meta said it would appeal, ordered the company to pay $375 million in damages.

In his decision, Biedscheid said Meta’s obligations to the abatement fund would last for five years, and include written reports on a semiannual basis as to the status and progress of its compliance with each of the abatement measures the court ordered.

In a news release Thursday evening, the New Mexico Department of Justice said the court’s order “requires real, structural changes, not just promises, and provides the resources New Mexico needs to begin repairing the damage caused by Meta’s conduct.”

The case, Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement, “has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world’s largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence. Today’s decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves to grow up safer online.”

In a statement provided to Source NM by a Meta spokesperson, the company says it disagrees with the ruling and intends to appeal. “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content,” the statement said. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Julia Goldberg for questions: info@sourcenm.com.

For nearly two years, teacher Isabelle Ouyang and her colleagues have dealt with the presence of construction workers, shuffling between classrooms, stress over schedules, and a host of disruptive renovations.

Ouyang has, essentially, pardoned all that dust, because Philadelphia’s Kensington High School now has air conditioning. With a $17 million estimated price tag, it hasn’t come cheap. And she’s still worried about disruptions continuing into the next school year.

“Having AC in our school, I feel really lucky,” said Ouyang, a special education teacher. “But it felt a little bit like things were being figured out on the fly.”

As climate change leads to more extreme weather and , ensuring students can remain safe and comfortable in Philadelphia’s old schools has become a perennial challenge. Research shows that high temperatures take a toll on student learning, attendance, and behavior.

Around 50 Philadelphia schools — or nearly one quarter of district schools — still won’t have what the district considers to be adequate cooling when the school year begins later this month. That number has shrunk over the past few years after the district spent COVID relief dollars on upgrading HVAC systems and received a.

In the last four years, the number of Philly schools without air conditioning has fallen from 118 to 52. Still, the district seems unlikely to meet . The complicated and expensive process of adding cooling to old buildings like Kensington High, which was built over a century ago, illustrates why getting there can be so challenging.

The Philadelphia district has an official plan for extreme heat that includes sending students at schools without adequate cooling to learn remotely at home when outside temperatures are forecast to reach 85 degrees or above before 9 a.m. At the end of last school year, the district used that protocol twice, moving students to remote learning for approximately 50 schools without adequate air conditioning.

Superintendent Tony Watlington has said the district’s 10-year facilities plan is key to ensuring students go to school in buildings that have air conditioning and similar upgrades. It includes closing 17 schools, colocating several, and modernizing nearly 170 buildings.

“We want to get to a point where we don’t have to send kids home early” when it gets too hot out, he said during a tour of John M. Patterson Elementary School in Southwest Philadelphia earlier this summer.

Patterson doesn’t have adequate cooling, but is supposed to get a $45 million upgrade under the facilities plan to increase its capacity and add air conditioning to key parts of the buildings.

District spokesperson Naima DeBrest said in a statement that the district is “shifting from separate, immediate renovations to integrating cooling upgrades into the broader, long-term modernization projects planned over the next 10 years.”

The district, however, slated for renovations under its 10-year plan.

Adding AC to old schools can take years

included replacing aging heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, along with updating ductwork.

Separately, the building also got new windows to replace ones that had become opaque with wear.

At other schools, the process of upgrading cooling systems has also become costly and drawn out.

John F. McCloskey Elementary School in Cedarbrook was one of the dozens of schools that had to send students home to learn remotely at the end of last school year due to high temperatures, because it does not have adequate cooling.

The local utility Philadelphia Gas Works has been studying whether installing a geothermal system, which would serve the school as well as a neighboring community center, could be a solution for the school. Geothermal systems don’t require burning fossil fuels, making them favored by climate advocates.

A PGW spokesperson said the utility expects that study to be released in the coming weeks, a. It estimates installing the system would cost around $19 million, without tax incentives, . Though that could save the district money on gas in the long run, there is no budget or timeline yet to install it.

That means for the upcoming school year, McCloskey still won’t have adequate cooling, and kids will once again learn remotely if temperatures get too hot.

Linnea Bond, environment and health education director at the advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania, has been following PGW’s work on its geothermal study for years. She said she’s glad it’s made progress, but that’s only one step.

“I don’t want them to leave these kids hanging,” she said.

High temperatures take a toll on students, staff

When temperatures climb, students and can have , research shows. Attendance , studies have found.

School districts need robust heat plans to prepare for those challenges, said Allison Poulos, an associate professor in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University. That can mean everything from ensuring staff and students have access to water to redoing schedules so school isn’t in session during the hottest times of the year.

It’s important that schools have “really thought through what resources they have, what they don’t have, and what decisions they will make,” said Poulos, who helps run the university’s HeatReady Schools initiative. “Because I think these are going to continue to persist and probably get more problematic as time goes on.”

One Philadelphia math teacher who asked not to be named because she was not authorized to speak by the district said the lack of air conditioning in her building frequently derails learning during the hottest months of the school year.

She’s rarely able to make significant curriculum progress on days when school goes remote due to heat, she said, because it happens with little warning. On days that are hot but don’t meet the district’s temperature threshold for closure, she notices absences spike in her classroom.

For students who do attend, the classroom heat is like an unavoidable, uncomfortable distraction.

“Nobody feels good,” she said. “Nobody’s learning.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at

Sign up for to keep up with the city’s public school system.

At the same time, about 200 miles away, in Shinnston, West Virginia, I was an elementary student studying the weekly school lunch menu with my mom to decide which days I would rather bring food from home. Rarely did I select the school-provided meals, preferring a sandwich from Mom over the cardboard pizza, soggy tater tots and slimy fruit cocktail that defined school meals for many students of my generation. 

School lunches have long been the subject of jokes in cafeterias across the country. But in West Virginia and elsewhere, there’s an emerging commitment among leaders of both political parties to improving the quality of food schools serve their students. This trend has major implications for children’s health, academic success and long-term well-being — especially for the many low-income students who lack access to healthy, affordable food and for whom school cafeterias are the most dependable source of meals.

consistently shows that students perform better when they are well nourished. Unhealthy or unappetizing school meals can contribute to obesity, diabetes, fatigue and other chronic health issues that affect students’ energy, attention and ability to engage in the classroom. But children who have reliable access to healthy meals concentrate harder, behave better, fall sick less often, have and earn higher grades.  

Policymakers on both sides of the political aisle have long recognized that connection. The , administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has provided federally supported school meals since 1946. The of 2010, championed by then-First Lady Michelle Obama, strengthened nutrition standards by requiring schools to serve more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat milk while reducing starch, sodium and trans fats.

While well-intentioned, the Obama initiative didn’t seem to change much in my West Virginia school cafeteria. I still remember the jokes students made at lunch during that era — usually some variation of “thanks, Michelle Obama” while staring at the stale nachos and watery green beans that technically met the updated standards. For many students, there was little perceptible difference in how the food tasted and made them feel. 

Now, the Trump administration’s movement, spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is putting school nutrition back on the national agenda, with bipartisan backing. Calls to reduce ultra-processed foods and artificial additives and to strengthen farm-to-school programs have in both Republican- and Democratic-led states. West Virginia is in the vanguard of the renewed national movement to improve school nutrition. 

In 2025, Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed banning several artificial dyes from school meals, making West Virginia one of the first states to impose such restrictions statewide. Earlier this year, the West Virginia legislature the Healthy Lifestyles Program, which includes a farm-to-school initiative that helps cafeterias serve locally grown produce. And other initiatives are on the legislative drawing board, including proposals to bolster and establish around sugar, sodium, fiber and foods. 

But my experiences in school cafeterias suggests that whether the momentum in West Virginia and elsewhere translates into meaningful improvements in student nutrition ultimately rests on state and local leaders’ ability to put on local lunch trays healthy food that students want to eat. West Virginia points to the magnitude of that task. More than 15 years after Oliver attempted to “revolutionize” Huntington’s school cafeterias, West Virginia near the bottom nationally in child well-being, educational outcomes and economic mobility. It also struggles with high rates of food insecurity and poverty — all conditions deeply intertwined with how students learn and develop. 

Still, after decades of school lunches serving as cultural punchlines, the renewed focus on student nutrition is encouraging. Children cannot learn effectively if they are hungry, fatigued or experiencing preventable health issues tied to poor nutrition. What is happening in West Virginia reflects a growing recognition that supporting students academically also requires supporting them physically — that improving educational outcomes begins, in part, with ensuring that students are properly nourished.

Joe Biden that he will soon release a memoir of his time in office. That volume follows on the heels of Jill Biden’s , which triggered controversy when some Democrats was attempting to gloss her husband’s delayed decision to not to seek reelection. And recent polls have toward the former president, with voters favorably comparing his economic record to his successor’s.

So far, however, only one published retrospective has provided deep insight into the education legacy of the Biden White House. Written by New School Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the account appears as a chapter in , an essay collection featuring contributions from over a dozen historians. 

The author of , Petrzela examines President Biden’s K–12 efforts within the longer context of a political life stretching back to the 1970s. At the outset of that half-century career, the 30-something senator was billed as a different kind of Democrat, and doubtful about the benefits of directing more money to schools. 

That early record stood in contrast with the first few years of his presidency. In early 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a gargantuan spending bill, while also backing off from the education reform goals of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Neither that local schools move away from virtual learning as the COVID pandemic wound down. Perhaps the boldest executive move on education came in the form of a failed bid to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt. 

After four years, the result was a muddle, Petrzela concludes. The increasingly embattled president advanced some ambitious K–12 priorities, from massive ESSER expenditures to a revision of Title IX around LGBT rights in schools. But his education initiatives largely unfolded far from public attention, and the absence of assertive messaging allowed .

In an interview with 91ɬ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Petrzela spoke about the recurrence of cultural conflicts in schools, the public’s COVID-era frustrations with Biden’s party, and why the president seemed to dart left on education and other issues.

“During Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader,” she said. “He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

91ɬ��: You do a great job examining the Biden administration’s education priorities in the light of Joe Biden’s early political career, which began during the busing controversies of the 1970s. Was there anything about that period that surprised you during your research?

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: I knew something of Joe Biden’s political evolution. But when I went back to the primary sources, I was actually surprised at about Great Society programs, and about this abiding faith — which others in his party had — that Big Government could fix really thorny social issues. 

When you already know that his presidential administration oversaw this huge outlay of money called the American Rescue Plan, and that his whole career was really about expanding federal spending in education, it was really something else to read . I’m paraphrasing, but he was essentially saying that America can’t spend its way out of its problems, and that Democrats shouldn’t see government spending through rose-colored lenses.

Biden’s reputation for being a new kind of Democrat — implicitly contrasted with the Great Society consensus, as you say — is ironic because, once he became president, the predecessor he was most often compared with . So he seems to finally end up in the same place he departed from.

If you think about what happened in both parties across the intervening decades, you really see the lines harden in terms of who’s onboard with expanding government spending and who comes down against it as the root of all evil. 

But early in the 1970s, the jury was still out on how this would fall. You had hardcore right-wingers in the John Birch Society, who thought that the New Deal was one step away from socialism. But it still wasn’t totally clear that the Great Society would establish the political architecture of the Democratic Party until today, or that the Republicans would define themselves against it. For that reason, it would be increasingly untenable for Democrats in the mainstream of the party to resist it in the way that Biden raised those questions early on.

So in the scope of that long political history, his trajectory makes perfect sense. But it’s still jarring to look at the primary sources and see how that shift happened.

Conservatives seemed to acculturate themselves to the New Deal in ways they never did to the liberalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The movement has usually pushed to shrink the government, even if Medicare was here to stay.

And we thought the Department of Education was here to stay! One of the things we teach in the history of education is how Ronald Reagan vowed to get rid of the department, and instead, under his administration, it was expanded. That’s a moment that is often used by political historians to show the enduring power of these agencies, and how they have a kind of permanence to them. But under Trump II, we’re seeing that they’re not so permanent.

But that move isn’t just a Trump-era relic. The era of big Washington-led initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the commitment to education reform that they embodied, petered out during President Obama’s second term. In retrospect, the Biden administration seems like the first glimpse of a post-reform Democratic Party. 

I agree with that. But the big turning point we’ve got to think about, especially in terms of what my chapter was responding to, was COVID. More than the end of NCLB, COVID redraws the lines of politics and discourse around education. 

Prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t say education was off to the side — because we’re always fighting about education — but there was a lot of stuff that came into being, largely through Democrats during the Great Society and its aftermath, that people were not fundamentally questioning. Everyone wants their kids to read and write at school, and they want special education to be available at their kids’ schools. 

I’m a cultural historian, so I’m not trying to underplay the conflict that existed, but in 2020 and beyond, you have a series of converging circumstances that really put schools at the center of lots of people’s concerns about what’s going wrong in society. And it’s very easy to point at the Democrats as the villains who created those circumstances.

You point to a handful of major education pillars of the Biden education agenda, all grouped under the general theme of equity: Close to $200 billion in federal funding to states and districts to cope with the pandemic, and an overhaul of Title IX, but no real action on NCLB-style accountability and no immediate pressure on schools to reopen for in-person learning. Would you agree that these pillars largely reflected the growing influence and importance of teachers’ unions in Democratic politics?

That’s very accurate. You see the disappearance of the accountability agenda, which, to be clear, had some major problems. But there was a combination of a long-term push to loosen accountability, often led by the heads of unions, with the move to keep schools closed. And added to that was an emphasis on social justice content that a lot of people would say is both politically biased and irrelevant to fundamental academic skills.��

At the same time, due to the school closures, a lot of parents had a much closer perspective on what their children were learning or not learning. That made it a complete powder keg, and one that seemed to have been created by Democrats — particularly because of the role of unions at the heart of things.

During the 2020 primaries, you might have predicted that a Biden education platform would resemble that of President Obama, to whom he closely tied himself. But right after becoming the nominee, he’s naming an education task force with two teachers’ union heads and no notable figures from the party’s reform wing. I’m wondering whether a decision like that reflects coalitional politics, Biden’s authentic beliefs, or some combination of the two.

Early in his career, Biden really cared about education and made it a big part of his politics. Jill Biden is obviously an educator, which may have contributed to that. So it’s kind of a surprise that he turned away from it in some ways, to the extent that I don’t think there really was a coherent educational agenda under the Biden administration. Democrats, in general, were really struggling with the issue, so who’s going to step in to create a unified agenda? It’s going to be the teachers’ unions, and they make it their agenda. 

In the article, I give the unions credit for some things. In other places, I think they’re totally off-base. There are a lot of different interest groups that find a way into policy conversations through union advocacy, and not all of those union priorities are working to improve education or to make Democrats look particularly good on education. 

And all of this is part of why you saw the Biden administration not really saying much about schools. You could say they were actually doing a lot, especially with the American Rescue Plan, but they’re not saying much. It’s a passive or surreptitious cession of power, and not a lot of control over messaging. If you think about it through the left-right perspective, it did allow the parts of the left that were aligned with unions to have a ton of latitude. But it also allowed the right to paint the Bidens as the vanguard of this radical leftist takeover of America. That’s totally unfair and over the top, but the administration didn’t do much to resist that characterization.

How much do you think these developments were accelerated by the first Trump term? Following the deep resistance to the views and policies of Betsy DeVos, it would have been really hard for President Biden to enter office in 2021 as an unreconstructed advocate for high-quality charter schools, for example.

Just think of how the discourse moved around education policy during that time. It really accelerated throughout the Biden administration because they didn’t do anything to change course. There was such a push-back against standardized tests, accountability, and charter schools, and a determination to attack “white supremacy culture” — with that term used to encapsulate all of these ideas that had been central to the education reform movement, from hard work to punctuality. There was no way Biden could come back and align himself with that agenda.

I think this gets at why Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate after she’d been so critical of his views on school busing. I’m not saying he was insincere in making that selection, but it was an important political move to show, in a very efficient way, how he’d changed his tune on education and race.

The exchange between those two during the Democratic primary debate, on an issue that was last relevant to national politics in the 1970s, seems even more significant in retrospect than it was at the time. Are there themes from that era of liberal politics that dovetail with similar debates today? 

Yeah, it’s bizarre in some ways that policies from 50 years ago can play such a central role in politics today. But and its aftermath — both the boldness of that idea and its unfulfilled legacy — kind of remains the central fulcrum point of educational politics, especially as it relates to race. 

When the LBJ was in office, there was an ongoing debate on the left about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. The Great Society, I would say, still came from the opportunity side of that spectrum. It’s shifting through the ’60s, but you had a lot of mainstream Democrats talking explicitly about opening the doors to opportunity. 

On the other hand, you’re just starting to see commitments to differential funding to achieve equal outcomes. Even though Title I exists by that point, it’s not as much a part of the discourse as today, when there’s so much talk about equity — and not just that, but lots of arguments that equality of opportunity, or meritocracy, or a level playing field, are just fantasies. That’s not how people were talking about these issues at the beginning of Biden’s career, even as they were creating the infrastructure for equity-centric policies.

I’m reminded that, in his Senate career, Biden was a kind of bellwether of the Democratic mainstream, always managing to . Maybe the simplest explanation for his migration on schools is that, rather than any kind of personal conviction, he moved with the party away from what had become an uncomfortable position in the 2010s.

I think so. 

I’m going to sound pretty critical saying this, but during Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader. He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit. Particularly on education, which was at the center of the intense political discord of that moment, he wasn’t really staking a claim to move the discourse in a new direction. 

And that was in spite of the fact that these were big policies: the American Rescue Plan, which was a very big piece of spending, the equity agenda, the focus on racial justice, the willingness to put union leaders front and center. In the article, I highlight the moment when Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle [presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, respectively] were brought as kids were still learning from home. As a parent, I remember that felt like a huge slap in the face.

You also write a little about the “,” which has seen college-educated voters move left and non-college-educated voters trend rightward. I wonder if that phenomenon has seen both sides polarize against the kind of liberalism Biden represented.

Biden found himself in a difficult position during his presidency. It was the culmination of his political career, but it came at a very awkward moment for someone of his age and background and beliefs. The last 10–15 years have just been a very strange moment in thinking about the Democratic Party’s positions on all these things. Particularly for a lifer like Biden, who cares about party, it’s very hard to navigate all of that.

I’m critical of Biden in this article because I wish he’d done some things quite differently. But I also think he was in a very hard position, and playing it safe on education might have been an understandable move politically. 

Another objection that many parents raised during the COVID period was that schools were slipping political content into classroom lessons, particularly around “culture war” issues. Where did that come from?

Issues like sexuality, morality, and race are not necessarily about schools. But they are often framed through curricular or educational sites, with the school — I use that term generally, but it could be teachers, administrators, or whatever — being the promoter of radical, leftwing, elitist values. Schools and educators are very often characterized as out of touch with everyday people.

That is a remarkable thing. Public schools are a bedrock, free institution that most American kids go through, and it takes a lot of skill to present them as being in the thrall of an elitist project. But Democrats, and the cultural left more broadly, have sometimes made it too easy to paint that picture, and a lot of that has to do with the effect of education schools. There’s a lot of good work that comes out of ed schools, but it’s another institution that is way too easy to caricature as peddling wild, progressive thought about children that is immoral, probably un-American, and taking over U.S. schools. 

This distrust of schools has been a long-running divide in U.S. politics. And sometimes, some of these critics are right! I wrote my first book about culture wars in America, focusing a lot on sex education. And if you’re asking me, I think rightwing people who believe you should never talk about sexuality in school are wrong. It’s actually important to educate kids about these things. 

But they were making pretty good points sometimes, like when they pointed out that a lot of teachers of this newfangled sex education curriculum had no training themselves. It was true; there was no training at that time. People wanted to know what their kids were being taught, and they thought it was inappropriate for a teacher to be able to go off-script about these intimate things. Those are all legitimate questions to raise.

But it was easy to take those legitimate concerns and spin them into much larger, unfounded claims, like the idea that sex education was a Communist plot to turn children into sex slaves. That was something that got national coverage, and it’s not so different today from the “groomer” discourse that we hear about all the time: Radical, leftwing indoctrinators are grooming your kids.

And of course, some of this stuff does exist because the teaching force is massive, and we have a media environment that spreads all this stuff. But the idea that most teachers are like this, or that you should pull your kids out of public school, is crazy.

Does it surprise you that this suspicion of public schools has been such a consistent narrative for President Trump? As you mentioned, there’s nothing necessarily new about this distrust in the history of American politics, but it seems odd that a populist movement would position itself against the schools that 90 percent of American kids attend.

You’re right that it’s not a new thing, but there is something different about this moment of right-left polarization around education.

You could point to a lot of parallels with today’s education politics in the ’60s and ’70s. But what’s different about that time is that both right and left were fighting over public schools. They both want to control this institution that they acknowledge is really important for American society. So there’s a question of who will win and take over.

That’s basically gone right now. You have people on the right — Trump, but also lots of bloggers and podcasters and various other folks in rightwing media — saying that “government schools,” as they call them, are completely ideologically unsound and a systemic overreach of government power. Their view is that you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for these things, and you shouldn’t have to send your kids somewhere where government appointees will have control over them eight hours a day.

The solution that a lot of those folks offer is, yes, under the banner of privatization. But it’s not in the Mitt Romney way, or even the broadly understood way of advocating for private schools. There’s also been a big boom in homeschooling, and there’s a growing sense that education is a family responsibility for people to educate their own kids.

The way that is presented by Trump and other followers, is not to say, “Let’s find a way to get your kids an elite private school education.” It’s more like, “This is a time for the family to take control of raising their kids again, not outsourcing it to government bureaucrats, who are either lazy or scheming and nefarious.”