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.

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.”

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, Inc, led by former Democratic Congressman Peter Deutsch, the Statewide Charter School Board in March, saying that Oklahoma’s law requiring charter schools to be nonsectarian qualifies as religious discrimination. 

“Many parents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, want the kind of rigorous, faith-based education Ben Gamla would provide,” said Daniel Chen, an attorney with Becket, a nonprofit law firm focusing on religious liberty. 

The earliest the virtual school could open would be the fall of 2027. 

Ben Gamla is the second religious charter school that has tried to open in Oklahoma, where Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and former state Superintendent Ryan Walters encouraged the first online Catholic charter school. Last year, a lawsuit over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a 4-4 tie deadlocked over the question of whether charter schools are private and can, therefore, explicitly teach religion. That leaves the question unanswered, say supporters of religious charter schools. Similar efforts in other states, including Tennessee and California, mean there are many routes for returning the issue to the high court.

In the Ben Gamla case, U.S. District Judge David Russell, for the Western District of Oklahoma, will consider two issues. In addition to asking the court to allow the school to open while the case proceeds, Ben Gamla’s organizers also want the court to block Oklahoma families, now “intervenors” in the case, from accessing information about the school, like proposed admission and student conduct policies.

“Intervenors are going on a fishing expedition, seeking sensitive information about schoolchildren, donors and the like,” Chen said.

But attorneys representing the families, , say any planning documents should be publicly available.

“To what extent will those policies discriminate against students or employees based on religion or sexual orientation or gender identity?” asked Alex Luchenitser, vice president and associate legal director for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “How religiously coercive will school operations be?” 

In June, Russell granted requests from two groups of parents to intervene in the case. They argue that the school would force taxpayers to subsidize religion. Because the charter school board is not opposed to the Ben Gamla school in theory and even welcomed the lawsuit, that leaves the parents, including those whose children attend charter schools, as “the only litigants seeking to defend the constitutionality” of the state law, he wrote.

The judge is expected to rule in a few weeks, but Luchenitser said he could issue a decision on the documents sooner.

Luchenitser is also Americans United’s lead attorney on a federal case in Tennessee in which , a proposed “Christ-centered” charter school in Knoxville, is suing the Knox County Schools because the district wouldn’t allow the organizers to submit a charter application. 

U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr., for the Eastern District of Tennessee, has set a trial date in that case for the week of Jan. 12. As in Oklahoma, the judge allowed a group of community members to intervene in the case when the school board said it wouldn’t take a position on Wilberforce’s legal argument. The organization says that while the state supports families who want a religious education for their children through its education savings account program, it shows “hostility” toward religious charter schools.

‘Not freestanding’

In Colorado, a over a Christian “contract” school, similar to a charter, was another potential test case for faith-based public schools, But the 30-student Riverstone Academy shut down permanently at the end of last school year after health and safety violations as its facility. The state legislature also , making the school ineligible for funding. 

In a fourth case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled earlier this year that a homeschool program in California that operates under the umbrella of the Blue Ridge Academy charter school is still a public school, and, therefore, can’t practice religion. Parents and grandparents sued the state when officials said using public funds to purchase religious curriculum materials would violate state law. 

Liberty Justice Center, the conservative law firm representing the families, has until Aug. 20 to to the Supreme Court. 

But while supporters of religious charter schools plan their legal strategy for getting the issue back before the conservative justices, some advocates are sharpening arguments saying that charters are, without question, public schools.

According to a from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, these schools of choice “are not freestanding private institutions.” They exist only because of state action and operate with public resources.

Kevin Welner, an education and law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, called the paper a “valiant effort,” but one unlikely to sway the court the next time they hear a case over religious charter schools. 

The only reason the St. Isidore case ended in a tie is because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself. While she didn’t give a reason, Barrett is close friends with a law professor who advised the school’s founders. That won’t happen a second time, and given that Barrett typically sides with those wanting on religious expression. Welner said he’s convinced that the Alliance “will lose that argument.”

Along with Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and Preston Green of the University of Connecticut, in a policy paper that if the court ultimately rules that charter schools are private entities, such schools will not only be able to practice religion, but potentially ignore other “basic laws governing public schools,” like open meetings requirements and conflict-of-interest rules.

To prevent that possibility, the three recommend that states should have districts govern charters instead of independent nonprofit boards. This change, they said, would make charters “unambiguously governmental entities” that are “fully subject to constitutional requirements and civil rights laws.”

Watching Florida

Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the Alliance, rejected the idea, saying their proposal “would open the door to more regulation that will basically turn charters into district schools.” The Alliance and other choice advocacy groups, like the , favor charter laws that allow for a variety of authorizers, including nonprofits.  

Meanwhile, in Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued stating that the First Amendment doesn’t prevent states from “encouraging” religion and that excluding religious groups from opening charter schools violates the Constitution. 

So far, the Alliance hasn’t seen any religious groups trying to launch charters based on Uthmeier’s statements, Coleman said.

“But it doesn’t mean we won’t,” she said. 

After all, Deutsch represented Florida in the House from 1993 to 2005 and that’s where he built a successful network of secular charter schools that teach Hebrew language and culture. In 2023, he told 91ɬ�� that if he had known education savings accounts and private school choice programs were about to take off, he would have founded a “Jewish voucher school.”

“We know there are people in Florida who are interested in advancing this issue,” Coleman said. “We are expecting that Florida could be the next state with an active case.”

NEWNAN, Ga. — Arnco-Sargent Elementary sits in a wooded area on a two-lane road about 50 miles south of Atlanta. Across the street is a child care center. A Baptist church is less than a mile away. 

But if developers get their way, the school’s newest neighbor could be a sprawling data center campus housing the networking infrastructure needed to help power Americans’ reliance on the internet, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Families, some who have lived in the area for generations, are opposed, concerned about traffic, noise, water-quality and other adverse effects. In April, the rezoned 832 rural acres to accommodate the industrial development. Project Sail, as it’s called, could be under construction for the next 10 years.  

“I have a first grader. He’ll be in high school by the time it’s even finished,” said Laura Beth, whose tree-lined property backs up to the proposed site. “This will be his whole childhood.” 

She chairs , which is to stop the project, while also leading a petition drive to get a referendum against it on the ballot. The battle is one of several nationwide in which the rapid expansion of these “hyperscale” centers is colliding with the daily lives of public school families and staff. Americans depend on data centers to work, shop and learn. Despite the recent backlash to ed tech, one research firm estimates that the global in education will grow to over $136 billion by 2035. 

As demand surges, tech companies look for land that is relatively close to customers and existing electricity and water sources. 

“The closer data is stored to the people and systems relying on it, the faster it loads — a benefit that touches everything from healthcare to the classroom technology students and teachers use every day,” said Dan Diorio, executive vice president of state policy and government affairs at the Data Center Coalition, a membership organization. 

But with concerns about energy use and environmental impacts, local governments — and — have on new data centers, and opponents say officials should restrict building near schools and residential neighborhoods. 

“I would like to say our situation’s unique,” Beth said. “It hurts me that it’s not.”

Nationally, 1,878 public schools sit within a mile of at least one data center or a future facility that is approved for construction, according to researchers at Brown University. Shared exclusively with 91ɬ��, the analysis of and National Center for Education Statistics data shows that California has by far the largest number of schools close to data centers or buildings-in-progress: 602, representing 32% of the nation’s total.

Ahmed Saeed, an assistant professor in computer science at Georgia Tech, explained that the infrastructure data centers rely on is more widely available near “population centers.” But because dense urban areas don’t have enough affordable land, developers often gravitate to suburban and exurban areas. 

“As the number of data centers continues to grow, it becomes increasingly likely that some will be located near schools and residential neighborhoods,” he said.

The latest , fueled by advancements in AI, is fairly recent, so researchers know little about the long-term effects of attending school near a facility. The Brown team, however, will soon release research showing that math scores are lower among students whose schools are closer to a data center. Companies say they take measures to minimize disruption, like planting trees to absorb sound, and some argue the downsides . 

‘This buzzing noise’

District leaders are among those who say data centers pose too many risks to ignore. 

“AI is not going anywhere,” said Marcia Andrews, a school board member in Palm Beach, Florida. “My biggest concern is that these data centers should be far enough away that it doesn’t harm the community, it doesn’t harm the schools.”

The Palm Beach County commission agreed. In July, members , a 202-acre near the Arden subdivision that would have been “just a football field away,” from Saddle View Elementary School, Andrews said. The vote, however, leaves the door open for the developers to revise and resubmit their plans in the future. Andrews, whose district includes Saddle View, grew curious about the site when she saw crews widening the roads and planting palm trees. 

“People across the country are waking up now saying, ‘My gosh, we never dreamed that we would hear this buzzing noise 24/7,’ ” she said.

One frequent complaint against data centers is the sound coming from cooling systems, fans and generators. In , a resident likened it to a jet engine. Another in , known for having the of data centers in the world, said the inescapable humming makes him “want to curse.”

A from a former NASA safety manager and planning commissioner in Prince William County, Virginia, predicted that classroom noise from data centers near schools would likely exceed recommended levels. A separate in the state found that the sound is “generally quieter than a lawn mower or nearby conversation,” said Diorio, with the Data Center Coalition. But opponents there often share from a mother at Chris Yung Elementary who said her child wouldn’t go outside for recess because of the sound. 

Many data centers use , which would be like “a bunch of semi trucks idling right next to the school,” said Jessica Owens, the director of data at Science for Georgia, a nonprofit. “Would you want your child in a facility next to a place that’s emitting pollutants, especially in the South when we have heat waves that exacerbate those pollutants?”

Noise, she added, would impact a school within a mile, but they also create “heat islands” that can extend up to six miles. 

The closest Project Sail building would be about 1,000 feet from Arnco-Sargent Elementary “with setbacks, tree buffers, berms and other screening incorporated into the design,” said  Mattie Sorrentino, a spokeswoman for Prologis, the company behind the Coweta County project. The site is “well-suited” for the data center because of its close proximity to Plant Yates, a Georgia Power facility. 

The company “will meet or exceed every requirement,” she said. “Our goal is to keep the project out of sight as much as possible.”

‘Impact on achievement’

Even if students can’t see a data center from the playground, their learning may be at risk.

In a forthcoming paper, Brown University researchers will show that students who attend school within a mile of a data center have lower math scores than those who are farther away.

“You can rule out all other factors,” said Samantha Kane, a research associate and part of the university’s Sustainable Education Research Initiative. “It’s actually the proximity to the data center and the potential pollution coming from the data center that is having the impact on achievement and not other things about the region.”

Critics often as one way data centers put a strain on local resources. Early estimates said Project Sail would use 6 to 9 million gallons per day. Now Prologis says it would draw up to roughly 300,000 gallons a day from the Chattahoochee River, and some comparisons from 2023 show data centers use far less water than , like golf courses.

To reduce dependence on the local water supply, Project Sail would use what’s called a “closed-loop” cooling system. But there are . To keep the hardware inside from overheating, those mechanisms are “blowing hot air into the area and increasing the temperature” as much as , Owens said. If there’s already a heat wave, kids might get less recess time outside. The soaring temperatures also on the power grid as residents, businesses and schools crank up the air conditioning to stay comfortable. 

In Virginia this summer, officials in Henrico County, , asked the school system to help cut energy costs that are expected to increase by $5 million. District spokeswoman Eileen Cox said the system, with 81 schools and more than 50,000 students, already takes a “proactive approach” to conserve electricity, like setting thermostats higher and operating a four-day work week during the summer.

The state, however, just enacted a new on data centers to offset some of the decline in revenue from tax breaks. from state and local taxes also make Georgia a preferred site for the industry. At this point, how many data centers are operating or proposed in Georgia, but Arnco-Sargent isn’t the only school in the state near land eyed by developers.

Closer to Atlanta, residents in Lovejoy are petitioning against a facility that would potentially sit between Michelle Obama STEM Academy and Eddie White Middle Academy.  

The site plan envisions about 3.5 million square feet and 15 buildings of data center space on at least 400 acres, said Clayton County , who has scheduled a community meeting for this Saturday. 

The community, she said, “naturally has serious, legitimate questions about the cumulative, long-term impacts.”

Traffic concerns

Schools in the vicinity of these facilities can feel the effects even before sites are operational. An elementary school in northeast Louisiana last year to protect students from the thousands of cement trucks and 18-wheelers traveling every day to what is expected to be . There were at least three truck crashes last year, and one smashed into the school’s gate. 

For Project Sail, Prologis agreed to some road improvements as a condition for the rezoning. Sorrentino said construction trucks would be routed away from the school and that when finished, the project would “generate limited traffic.”

But families are still worried. The intersection that parents and school bus drivers navigate for drop off and pick up every day doesn’t have a traffic light. 

The school has a long history in the community. Now 70 years old, Arnco-Sargent consolidated two older schools that used to serve children from local mill villages. But in 1996, the area’s leading textile company went bankrupt, families moved away and the area, Beth said, has never prospered like other parts of Coweta County. Nearly 60% of the school’s students live in poverty. 

“These people are just trying to make a living,” she said. Compared to those who the Palm Beach project, Arnco-Sargent parents perhaps have been less outspoken. “They don’t have time to go to a meeting at 6:00 on a Tuesday. They’re working and have young kids.” 

But Beth is hopeful. At the first signature-gathering event, as residents waited to sign the petition. The organizers have nearly reached their goal of 14,000 signatures 

“I feel that this is what it took for the county to listen,” she said.

A Senate committee advanced legislation Thursday aimed at undoing the Trump administration’s efforts to split apart the U.S. Department of Education. The bill delivers the plan the biggest rebuke since Education Secretary Linda McMahon began shifting offices to other agencies last year.

The education committee’s would keep oversight of K-12 and services for students with disabilities at the department. It would also keep the Office of Postsecondary Education out of the Department of Labor and the Office of Indian Education from moving to the Department of the Interior.

The legislation leaves “landmark education programs,” like Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “at the Department of Education where Congress specifically put them and where they belong,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, who along with GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee, voted no on the bill, saying that he’s open to moving some programs, but opposes giving the Department of Health and Human Services responsibility for special education. That move treats “students with disabilities as patients to diagnose rather than learners to educate,” he said, adding that he doubts that any Education Department staff transferred there would be “empowered and prioritized” to do their jobs.

Despite the bipartisan support for leaving much of the department intact, nine members, all Republicans, voted against it. “Many of us have long believed that the federal footprint in education is much larger than it needs to be,” said Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Following the vote, McMahon and six other Trump cabinet members saying there are “misconceptions” about the agreements and they just need more time to prove they’ll work. They have already “demonstrated measurable results by driving stronger grant competitions, streamlining government operations and producing better outcomes for Americans,” they wrote.

Political observers have said since the beginning that the administration’s plan to eliminate the department doesn’t stand a chance of passing the Senate, and Thursday was evidence of that. The legislation, however, still needs to pass the full Senate and is a sharp contrast to the package of 10 bills the House education committee moved earlier this month formalizing the movement of most key programs out of the department. While House Republicans call the arrangements “reform,” the actions have prompted Rep. Suzanne Bonamici to launch an impeachment effort against McMahon. The Oregon Democrat says the agreements are illegal and that the Republicans’ bills are an attempt “to cover for the unlawful actions already taken.” 

Even if the House passes those 10 bills, it’s highly unlikely they would ever get votes in the Senate, said David Cleary, a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm and a former Republican education staffer for the Senate.

The Senate bill, he added, might not go any further either. It’s possible, he said, that Collins and Murkowski could attach it as an amendment to the for defense spending that Republicans are trying to pass through a process known as reconciliation. But even then, it might fail, Cleary said.

During that July 15 markup in the House, Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia said that the proposals don’t do anything to fulfill McMahon’s promise to “return education to the states.”

“You’re just moving people around Washington D.C.,” he said.

On Thursday, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington pressed the department to disclose how much the moves are costing taxpayers.

The Senate bill includes her amendment requiring McMahon to provide Congress with quarterly reports on how much the department is spending to implement the agreements. The department, so far, has spent $1 million to move just one relatively small office running to the Department of Labor, and the administration is asking for an to hire more staff to help with the transition.

“If you’re proud of this deal, show us the price tag,” Murray said. “What do you have to hide?”

Murray also offered separate amendments to reverse all of the agreements, including relocating the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, but those didn’t pass the committee. Collins said she’s in favor of letting the Justice Department take over education civil rights investigations because she said OCR has failed to address anti-semitism on college campuses.

But Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, said the move won’t improve conditions for Jewish students because the administration has downsized the civil rights workforce. 

“We are at a 12-year low in terms of the number of cases that are being resolved,” he said. DOJ is “just out of the business of trying to investigate serious instances of civil rights abuse.”

Of all the interagency agreements, placing special education within HHS has received the most attention. One advocacy group supports the change, arguing that the shift would offer families more resources when their children transition out of the K-12 system. Out of the , HHS already runs federally funded programs for adults with disabilities.

“Too many students leave school without a clear path to a meaningful career, education or training path,” Rachel Barkley, director of Able Americans, wrote in . 

But overall, have been highly unpopular. Over 700 organizations have signed saying that moving special education to HHS and civil rights to the Department of Justice undermines a “coordinated and cohesive approach” to addressing discrimination complaints. 

Shifting oversight, some advocates say, not only separates special education from OCR, but also from the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education, which McMahon transferred to the Department of Labor.

“These are education programs,” Bonamici said during the July 15 House markup. “K-12 is education; it is not job training.” 

On a recent call with reporters, led by Murray, one parent explained that when her older son was diagnosed with a disability, she immediately wondered if he would ever go to college. Both of Lanya Elsa’s sons have Usher syndrome, a genetic disease that affects hearing and vision.

Conner, now 26, graduated college and works for Alaska Airlines. Dalton, 18, graduated this year with a 4.0 GPA from Bellevue High School in Washington. She attributed their success to the Department of Education’s “specialized expertise.”

“That future was not guaranteed for them,” said Elsa, also a special education researcher and teacher. “It was made possible by families, educators, specialists, … federally funded deafblind programs and civil rights protections that believed my sons belonged.”

The (S.4689) would strengthen the federal government’s oversight of the science of reading through amendments to the , which currently provides $194 million to aid literacy instruction in 23 states. 

“Capable students are dropping out of high school simply because they were never taught to read,” said U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chairman Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. “This legislation aims to address the national literacy crisis by strengthening evidence-based literacy instruction … and empowering states, local communities and parents with more resources.”

After the bill’s 20-2 passage out of the Senate HELP Committee, it now heads to the floor for a full senate vote. Other bills, including one that would explicitly identify dyslexia as a learning disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also passed Thursday.

The READ Act closely mirrors and expands on a similar bill that unanimously passed the House of Representative’s Education Committee in March, but has not yet been taken up for a full House vote.

Both the Senate and House bill aim to define the science of reading in federal law as instruction that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness and also builds vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, oral language and writing skills. 

A report released earlier this year found nearly a third of teachers still used “discredited” methods to teach kids how to read and aren’t fully committed to the science of reading. Both bills, however, would reject the use of federal funds for other teaching methods, such as three-cueing, where students are asked to figure out unfamiliar words through context clues or pictures.

The READ Act further includes proposals for prioritizing federal support for the bottom 10% of underperforming states and shifting funding of individual literacy projects to more systematic widespread efforts like requirements for early literacy screening.

It also has language that calls for teacher preparation program audits, expands professional development opportunities and creates new requirements for states to provide more detailed annual reports with the number of students receiving intervention, the number of teachers receiving professional development and the number of districts using high-quality learning materials aligned with the science of reading if they’re receiving the grant.

Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the National Parents Union, said the bill’s passage out of committee is the result of years of advocacy from families.

“This is a bill that codifies the fact that the sky is blue,” Rodrigues said. “We’re just very excited that folks are seeing the importance of this, and we’re able to finally get [lawmakers] to show they can prioritize kids, they can be swayed based on evidence, they can actually make good decisions for kids and frankly do the right thing in what is a very difficult political climate.”

Lawmakers on Thursday also considered the (S.3010), another piece of legislation that would affect students who are learning to read.

The 21st Century Dyslexia Act proposed to add and explicitly define dyslexia as a disability covered under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — requiring schools to provide accommodations and other services needed for dyslexic students to be successful in the classroom.

Under IDEA, students with “” are protected, but Cassidy argued that making dyslexia a disability category — similar to what was done with — would “increase screening, identification and the number of students receiving appropriate accommodations.”

“When reading scores haven’t moved and 20% of readers are dyslexic — and therefore learn to read differently — we either choose or choose not to do something positive for these students,” Cassidy said. “If we’re serious about addressing the inexcusably low literacy rates, we must pass this bill.”

More than a dozen organizations, including The Reading League, National Center for Learning Disabilities and International Dyslexia Association , with concerns it would undermine support and confuse states.

In a written statement, the organizations also argued the legislation could be harmful because it used an outdated definition of dyslexia from the early 2000s. A new definition, which removed old IQ-discrepancy requirements, was from the International Dyslexia Association.

Democratic lawmakers, such as Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, brought up the challenges Thursday. 

“There are 27 states, including Indiana, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, that effectively ban the use of this definition. Congress banned the use of this definition in the 2004 version of the IDEA,” Murphy said. “When you define dyslexia as relational between intelligence and reading ability, … many students with dyslexia … are judged to have lower intelligence levels. They don’t get services because you essentially have to show that there is a substantial difference between your reading ability and your assessed level of intelligence.”

Murphy recommended to “convene a national conversation on this issue of the definition,” and for the federal government “to provide a higher level of technical assistance to states as they seek to get services out to people with disabilities,” before the bill ultimately passed 12-10.

By 2030, the Foundation pledges to foster higher levels of math achievement; an increase in the number of first-generation college-goers; significantly improved pass rates for college freshmen; and a 25 percent jump in college credits successfully transferred between institutions. The campaign’s overarching mission is to galvanize 10 million people to earn valuable academic or professional credentials over the next few decades.  

The reset comes a little over a year after the massive philanthropy, a global player in education, development, and public health, announced to its dissolution in 2045. Approximately $200 billion in assets must be dispensed across the organization’s portfolio ahead of that still-distant deadline, which will bring an end to a half-century of giving.

Central to the organization’s vision will be the integration of artificial intelligence into instruction and college advising. A recent flood of AI tools, such as tutoring chatbots, has offered some hope of a leap forward in academic performance. But growing numbers of teachers relying on that technology, and a relative absence of standards of safety or effectiveness, suggest that results could be inconsistent over the next few years.

Allan Golston, president of the Foundation’s U.S. Program, told 91ɬ�� that his aspiration was to bring together educators and innovators to generate guidance on the best uses of AI and move the field closer to something like quality control.

“We’re concerned about the proliferation of tools out there, where teachers and school leaders and district leaders don’t have the information they need to discern which ones to use or not to use,” said Golston.

In the spring of 2024, roughly one-third of teachers said that they’d employed AI in their work at least once. A year later, that proportion had almost doubled. Yet in the same Gallup survey that reported the latter figure, 68 percent of respondents said they’d received no training to proceed, and just 19 percent were employed at schools with a formal AI policy. Last July, the U.S. Department of Education published outlining responsible uses for AI, including the development of tutoring applications.

While much of the public attention around AI has been directed toward products accessed by students — which depend, in most cases, on children’s willingness to actually participate — the Gates announcement specifically mentions teacher-facing functions intended to help individualize instruction to learners at different levels of understanding.

Golston cited as an example the , developed by the company Kiddom and piloted among roughly 180 teachers in New York City. Using short quizzes administered at the end of the school day, Atlas provided regular status reports on each student’s grasp of different math concepts; compared with demographically similar peers learning the same curriculum, middle schoolers using the program on the tests over time.

While the timely data was important, Golston argued that there was additional value in simplifying teachers’ jobs: Instead of having to toggle between their core curricula, supplemental learning materials, and a separate assessment interface, they could access all of it through one source.

“The burden of trying to make meaning out of all those inputs — which are critical to providing a quality education — rests on the teacher right now,” he said. “We think it’s possible to have AI do that behind the scenes and give teachers the information they need to be outstanding teachers for every single student.” 

AI advisors

Boosting math performance has been the centerpiece of the Gates Foundation’s K–12 strategy since its leaders made a $1.1 billion investment in curriculum development and teacher training in 2022. That priority was restated in the organization’s announcement Wednesday, which proposed to substantially increase the number of pupils completing Algebra 1 by the ninth grade.

Algebra has been an object of focus for over a decade in the world of math education, seen as a gateway to the advanced skills needed for a career in STEM fields. Other Gates commitments also focused on what the organization characterized as vital pivot points where students often find themselves at risk of falling behind.

One is the deployment of AI assistance to college advisors — especially those in comparatively low-capacity high schools, where some are charged with advising 400 or more children each year. High schoolers who don’t enjoy access to advisors or guidance counselors may be more likely to struggle with some of the procedural steps necessary to enroll in college.

New AI agents could help keep track of which students have completed applications or filled out FAFSA forms, allowing humans to offer more personal services and perspective, Golston said. That may mean prodding an admitted student to buy their textbooks, or encouraging an academically high-performing applicant to pursue dual-enrollment courses that earn college credit.

Carly Robinson, a Stanford University researcher whose work touches on both AI and the bonds between students and educators, agreed that easing the paperwork burden might allow advisors to focus on “the parts of the job that actually benefits from a human relationship.”

“A huge share of their time goes to red tape rather than actually working with kids,” Robinson wrote in an email. “If AI can absorb that logistical load, you’re not replacing the counselor. You’re directing them to be able to do more of the important work with students.”

The Foundation’s other targets — including a redesign of first-year college classes to reduce the number of freshmen withdrawing from STEM coursework, and steps to facilitate the transfer of college credits — also clearly reflect “high-leverage areas where effective interventions can ripple out to millions of students,” Robinson continued.

In a notable development, the updated blueprint places an institutional emphasis firmly on secondary and post-secondary success, with an ultimate ambition of doubling the rate of growth in 18–34-year-olds who such as a college degree or professional license. While the Foundation has spent widely since the late 1990s, its most publicized education interventions have tended to focus on the K–12 sphere, from an early push for to subsequent efforts around teacher evaluation systems and the .

Golston, who will be leaving his position at the end of August, said the organization’s strategic shift did not portend a retreat from younger students and that preparing middle and high schoolers for Algebra necessitated the development of rigorous and complementary math curricula from kindergarten onward. 

What role artificial intelligence may play in that endeavor, if any, is unknowable. Acknowledging the incredible pace of evolution in frontier technology, Golston noted that the next few years could uncover entirely new applications for AI inside and outside the classroom.

“That might be tutoring in Calculus 1, if a student needs help at 10 p.m. when they’re studying and there’s no teacher or teaching assistant available,” he said. “It can also help students who have credits from across multiple systems to understand how those credits come together to get them on the path to a degree.”

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to 91ɬ��.

But unlike other states with millions of eligible students, like Texas, Florida and New York, California hasn’t opted into the new Treasury Department program, and so far, there’s no sign it will. 

That’s one takeaway from by advocates showing the number of students in each state who would qualify for the funding under the Education Freedom Tax Credit. Overall, 51.7 million children in public, private and charter schools could potentially receive a taxpayer-funded scholarship, according to the analysis from the American Federation for Children, the leading advocacy group behind the legislation. Past estimates have shown how much scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs, might each year and what the tax credit might cost the federal government in . But author Patrick Graff, a senior fellow at the organization, said it was important to look at the program from another angle. 

“Who are the kids that would actually benefit from these programs, and who are the families that would receive services that they otherwise wouldn’t receive?” he asked. Founded by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the federation has historically championed private school choice. 

But with public school students able to receive funds for tutoring and other supplemental programs, Graff expects district superintendents “especially in states where there are going to be budget crunches to strongly call on leaders” to participate, if not next year, then in 2028.

To calculate the number of eligible students, Graff used Census Bureau estimates and survey data. K-12 students qualify if their household income doesn’t exceed 300% of the area median income. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, that’s almost $500,000. In Perry County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in the nation, the family income limit would be $125,500. 

The report also notes that close to 800,000 homeschooled students would be left out of the program even though they meet family income requirements. Under current guidance, those children would only be eligible if their states classify homeschoolers as private school students. Unless the Treasury Department provides further clarification on the issue, that means some homeschoolers who use microschools would also be excluded. 

‘Complete mystery’

So far, 31 states have opted in by submitting paperwork with the IRS or indicating that they will. New York and Colorado are the only two Democratic-led states that plan to participate.

In California, school choice advocates are frustrated. 

“It’s a complete mystery why Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn’t made the easiest no-brainer decision and opted into the program already,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of the conservative California Policy Center and a former Republican candidate for state superintendent.

But the governor, who President Donald Trump and criticizes his policies, has been silent on the issue. A spokeswoman for the governor declined to comment about the program. 

Congressman Kevin Kiley, an independent from the Sacramento area, Newsom to opt in before he leaves office in January. A state legislator, Republican Assemblyman Josh Hoover has also introduced encouraging the governor to participate. 

Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary in the Biden administration, is leading in to succeed Newsom, but his focuses on early-childhood education and lowering class sizes. Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate, and would be more likely to opt into the tax credit.

‘Benefits for public schools’

Starting next year, the program, also known as the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, allows taxpayers who donate up to $1,700 annually to a nonprofit SGO to deduct that same amount from what they owe in taxes. States will have to submit a list of approved SGOs, and according to , won’t be able to set additional requirements on those organizations, like only approving nonprofits that intend to serve students in public or private schools.

To help prepare district leaders, AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and Education Resource Strategies launched a last week. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and outspoken critic of publicly funded vouchers, said the guidance will help districts and nonprofits that intend to serve public school students catch up with what has traditionally been a private sector model.

“There’s nothing like this with respect to the benefits for public schools,” said Cowen, who doesn’t want districts to miss out on new funding. His views on the program changed when the final version of the law, part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, made participation optional and limited what donors could contribute. “I think public school students are going to be by far the biggest beneficiaries.” 

By early next year, he expects the number of states opting in to reach 40, but he doesn’t think the American Federation for Children’s analysis will prompt any action from undecided governors. 

In fact, he thinks Democrats are turned off by Tommy Schultz, CEO of the federation, for opting in over from the teachers unions and Education Secretary Linda McMahon promoting the program. In June, she participated in aimed at getting Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro to sign up.

On one hand, governors “understand there’s substantial revenue for public schools involved in this,” Cowen said. But the same Trump administration, he added, in Minnesota earlier this year and is from California and Minnesota as it conducts a review. “It’s really hard for them to look at the program and say ‘Well, this is a good faith effort.’ ”

In court documents, the administration has also clean energy grants to states that didn’t vote for Trump in 2024. Those larger political issues are getting in the way, Cowen said. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said she won’t opt into the tax credit program because she the administration, and recently called it a “tax scheme” that would benefit private schools.

Critics, like the left-leaning Century Foundation, argue that the new source of funds will support private and religious schools that LGBTQ students and those with disabilities. As the number of private schools increases in anticipation of the new program, students will likely be able to use the scholarships at schools that receive . 

In a , Jack Schneider, director of the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and journalist Jennifer Berkshire called the program “a Trojan horse designed to bring the chaos of privatization into Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts,” and warned Gov. Maura Healey against it.

Taking the opposite view, Charles Barone, senior director of the National Parents Union’s Center for Innovation, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill to opt in, calling the policy “a potential tool for expanding opportunity within the public system.”

Because taxpayers can donate to SGOs in any state, Graff, with the American Federation for Children, predicts that it will be especially hard for states in the northeast to resist.

“They’re pretty quickly being surrounded by states that are signaling their intent to opt in,” he said. In addition to New York, New Hampshire will participate. “That’s giving a few of those other governors a little more permission to step out on this issue.” 

In AP Chemistry, the share of students scoring a 3, 4 or 5 (generally interpreted as a passing grade on , which are scored on a 1-5 scale) increased from 54% in 2022 to 75.1% in 2023. In AP United States Government and Politics, that proportion grew even more, from 49.2% to 73% from year to year. By , roughly 100,000 more students hit the passing threshold on AP U.S. History in 2024 than in 2023.

The change came — the nonprofit education organization that owns and administers both AP and the SAT — to adopt a new scoring methodology intended to tamp down volatility in results. The organization’s leadership said the new procedures brought their standards into better alignment with those of universities themselves, making the AP a more reliable indicator of students’ readiness for college-level work. Since scores of 3 or above are generally accepted for college credit, there needs to be a close equivalency between high ratings on the 42 AP subject tests and what is expected by postsecondary institutions.

Yet some critics say the surge in higher marks shows that the tests have simply been made easier to pass. The most prominent, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, pointedly accused the College Board of “dumbing down” its hallmark products in a recent of published by the journal Education Next. 

Peterson said the shift might be seen as a reflection of grade inflation at the college level, adding that, after a long period , it could be seen as “appropriate” for a test taker to now earn a 4 with a performance that previously would have merited a 3. 

On the other hand, he faulted the College Board for stirring confusion over what American students actually know — and for not being more forthcoming about changes in their methods.

“The College Board wants to say, ‘We haven’t changed our standards, and we’re the one reliable benchmark out there that everyone should pay attention to,’ ” Peterson told 91ɬ��. “But at the same time, they’ve modified the way they score the material.”

Trevor Packer, the College Board’s senior vice president for AP and instruction, rejected that characterization. Passing rates have risen precipitously because the old grading process, reliant on small panels of college instructors, dramatically understated high schoolers’ actual readiness for college, he said.

For a number of tests, Packer wrote in an email, “prior panels had established artificially stringent standards that produced pass rates well below the historical AP standard.” 

Much could depend on whether states and colleges accept that explanation. Dozens of states to sit for the exams, and about the same number for passing scores. What’s more, governors and local education leaders and participation rates as in their states.

Tom Loveless, a veteran K–12 researcher who formerly headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the upsurge in AP grading is particularly incongruous with the results of virtually all other standardized testing from the last half-decade, which have shown significant drops in academic achievement coinciding with the emergence of COVID-19 and subsequent closure of schools to in-person learning. 

“They started this [change in scoring] during the pandemic, and no one in their right mind thinks the scores went up during the pandemic,” Loveless said. “Yet the AP tests are defying what every other test is telling us.” 

The ‘Great Recalibration’

Peterson’s analysis, based on the College Board’s scores on each subject test, shows that the phenomenon produced startling effects immediately.

Student grades across a selection of AP’s — Biology, Chemistry, English Language and Composition, English Literature and Composition, Human Geography, U.S. Government and Politics, U.S. History, World History and Psychology — leapt at both the middle and top of the distribution. 

The fraction of students rated 3 or higher in those subjects rose from 52% in 2021 to 71% in 2025, while those scoring a 4 or a 5 ( as as either “well-qualified” or “extremely well-qualified” for college coursework) increased from 28% to 45%. The progress was not obviously the consequence of a more selective pool of participants; in fact, the total number of test takers grew by over 10% during those four years.

The sharp ascent accompanied called “evidence-based standard setting,” which incorporate input from hundreds of college faculty members about the performance expectations for their undergraduate courses. In the aftermath of that changeover, far more high schoolers were deemed capable of passing such courses than in years prior.

Packer, who has led AP for over 20 years, vigorously defends what critics call as a necessary step to smooth out inconsistencies in scoring that had plagued the program. In , he said the boost to scores under EBSS was actually much smaller than the annual changes generated by the earlier system — citing as an example a group of biology teachers whose 2013 update “subjectively reduced” the number of students earning 5s by approximately three-quarters.

That example comes with a caveat, however: Far from a sudden jolt, the 2013 compression in biology grades followed an overhaul to the course curriculum that was previewed . At the time, that university professors considered the new exam “the gold standard of college-level Biology.”

In an email, College Board spokeswoman Sara Sympson said that the biology panel had erred in aligning their cut scores (the minimum score to attain a given mark, such as a 3) with the course’s new content and expectations.

“The redesigned course was excellent; the standard-setting was not,” Sympson wrote.

Perhaps more pressing is the fact that little of the College Board’s recent data support claims of wild swings in student performance from one year to the next. Of the nine tests that were initially converted to the EBSS rubric, most had seen only modest scoring increases or decreases in the two decades before the pandemic. 

Between 2002 and 2019, the biggest year-over-year change in the share of students earning a passing grade on any of those tests was 12.3 percentage points (in AP Biology, after the 2013 redesign). By comparison, in the first year after EBSS’s adoption, the proportion of students who scored a 3 or above grew by an average of 17.4 points across all of the nine subjects. In virtually every case, the new system quickly lifted the number of passing grades to their highest level in recent memory. 

One noticeable example of scoring inconsistency occurred in 2022, when the pass rate for AP English Literature and Composition number skyrocketed by 34 points over the previous year. In an email, the College Board listed that explosion as an impetus to move away from its existing scoring process. 

Its description was somewhat ambiguous, however, specifying that the increase did not result from “the full EBSS methodology.” 

When publicizing the increase four years ago, to both the efforts of AP teachers and “an accumulation of powerful data from colleges” — wording that strongly echoes of the EBSS process, which it says “collects input from hundreds of experts and assembles fine-grained student performance data for analysis.” This suggests the evolution toward new criteria may have already been underway that year, at least in part. 

A question of rigor

Packer has repeatedly explained the changes in a number of venues — including by authoring in which he dismissed as “entirely false” the notion that the rigor of AP exams has been diluted.

In doing so, he addressed a secondary question that is decidedly murkier than the issue of cut scores. Over the last decade, some students and educators have questioned whether alterations to content and formatting may also be driving the growth in high scores. 

Most prominent among them is John Moscatiello, a career teacher and tutor who founded his own . In with Peterson in May, he said that the English Literature and Composition test now features shorter, simpler literary passages for student response than were common in the early 2000s. A of the items’ textual complexity reveals a substantial deterioration in difficulty over the last two decades, Moscatiello has argued. 

Tweaks at the margins may subtly impact how high schoolers experience the assessments. The College Board (a slight deduction in points for wrong answers, as opposed to leaving a question blank) in 2010, added in the U.S. History exam’s analytical reasoning section and recently in its virtual testing platforms.

Still, the cumulative effect of these shifts is difficult to know with any precision. 

Two years ago, when the AP history exams lowered the citation quota for their document-based questions (i.e., the number of sources that students are asked to reference in response to an essay prompt) from six to four, Steve Heimler that the decision would make a high score “much easier” to achieve. 

The Georgia-based tutor, who once specialized in homeschool instruction, on YouTube and TikTok during the COVID era by dispensing tips to nudge his viewers’ point total upward. Many of his almost 1.3 million subscribers laud Heimler for guiding them to a better score, but notwithstanding the occasional adjustment from the College Board, Heimler believes that AP’s materials have lost little of their academic challenge.

In an email, he said he found it unlikely that the organization would deliberately water down their own assessments.

“I suppose it’s possible that they have modified their equations to result in higher scores, but I’m skeptical of that explanation since colleges rely on certain standards of rigor in AP exams in order to award credit,” Heimler wrote. “I assume they’d soon dissolve their partnerships with the College Board if it was clear that the scores were artificially inflated.”

Calls for greater transparency

Some colleges already curtail students’ ability to substitute their AP scores for credit.

A from the Progressive Policy Institute found that, among the 153 most competitive postsecondary institutions in the United States, half restrict the amount of AP credits students can receive. Over 80% limit the applicability of AP credits in at least one subject area, and 10 schools — among them Dartmouth, Brown and CalTech — do not accept AP credit at all.

But those are fairly exceptional cases, and across the country, the vast majority of colleges honor AP scores of 3 or above. In part, this is because they are made to: Thirty-seven states actually require their public universities to award AP credits. 

Many of the same states for economically disadvantaged students to sit for the tests, which come with a $99 fee. Their investment in the program therefore imposes multiple demands on local taxpayers — both of which could become more tenuous if lawmakers and education leaders come to believe that the academic value of the exams and courses have been debased.

Richard P. Phelps, a longtime observer of K–12 policy and the founder of the , has previously criticized the College Board’s financial and organizational structure. But in an email, he was sparing in his criticism of the so-called Great Recalibration, which he called a reasonable effort to make sure that AP coursework did not hold high school juniors to a loftier standard than college freshmen. 

Where Phelps did critique the Advanced Placement program was in its aggressive approach to public affairs. The College Board’s , he wrote, has “successfully constrained many public colleges’ freedom to adjust their course credit policies.” 

“They must award course credit for certain AP exam scores even if they no longer believe those scores merit it,” Phelps lamented. 

The prestige of AP clearly maintains a hold on the public, as evidenced by the growing numbers of students enrolling in its courses. Over 1.3 million pupils took at least one AP test in 2025, and about 80% of public high schoolers attend a school in which five or more AP courses are available. And political leaders in states like and have recently hailed “record-high” AP scores and course participation rates. 

But calls for transparency will likely grow. One early sign of skepticism emerged in February, when the boards overseeing admissions and academic policy throughout the University of California noted several concerns about AP scoring in to the system’s academic senate. The authors recommended that UC faculty carefully study “specific parameters … within EBSS that may be responsible for a sharp increase in pass rates” and, if needed, reconsider their criteria for admissions, course placement and course credit.

To date, the College Board has only released addressing the controversy. More technical reports, including psychometric analyses from EBSS’s originators and historical scoring data from different AP iterations, haven’t been made public.

Loveless said that the College Board likely had defensible reasons for rolling out the policies that began in 2022. But what he called the absence of clarity in the organization’s actions “raised suspicion,” he continued.

“They probably have data to justify a lot of what’s going on. The problem is they just haven’t released it,” he said. “They need to do a lot more explaining of what they did.”

For decades, he said, Washington politicians gave young people “nothing but debt,” he said.

“The government is finally giving money back to our children,” he told the crowd at Wheeler High School in Cobb County, inviting families who have opened accounts to join him on stage with their children.

The event brought together several cabinet members who joined the president in urging families to open Trump Accounts. Before Trump took the stage in the school’s large gymnasium, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Treasurer Brandon Beach, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Kelly Loeffler, a former Georgia senator who now serves as head of the Small Business Administration, all described the child savings policy as transformational.

McMahon called it “one of the largest generational investments in upward mobility that our country has ever made.”

Under the savings initiative, which went live July 4, the administration will give $1,000 deposits to children born during the president’s term if their parents open a Trump Account. Over seven million children are already enrolled in the program, Bessent told the crowd. 

The child savings account program was included in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Parents and others can contribute to the tax-deferred account until the child turns 18 and converts it into a traditional individual retirement account. 

Philanthropists Michael and Susan Dell expanded on the government’s contribution last year when they to provide an extra $250 for 25 million children 10 and under living in ZIP codes with median incomes below $150,000. Other donors have since made contributions, some for specific states. 

Chris Woods, a financial adviser and Cobb district parent, told 91ɬ�� that he thinks the policy is a wise move.

“There are a lot of ways to save for children’s college and their future,” he said. “The difference is you’re getting funds from the government.”

But Eli Speer, a recent high school graduate and Trump supporter, said the program isn’t “fiscally conservative.”

“We have to prioritize shaving down the debt, cutting red tape,” he said.

The agreed, calling Trump Accounts a “government welfare program” that further complicates the tax system and might not be a better investment opportunity than existing options. Others question whether the families who would benefit the most from the program are even aware of it. An showed that higher-earning adults and those who already have at least $5,000 in savings were more likely to know about the program.

Bessent, however, pushed back on criticisms that the policy will favor wealthier families. Of the families who have already opened accounts for their kids, he said 86% earn household incomes of $200,000 or less.

“Trump Accounts are reaching the very people they were designed to serve,” he said. “President Trump is creating assets for the American people, not more debt and broken promises.”

Despite the strong turnout Wednesday, Cobb County is not actually “Trump country,” as several speakers called it. Trump lost Cobb all three times he ran for president. The district, however, is led by a majority Republican board. 

“The school board is the last bastion of Republican control that Cobb County has,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, a co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a watchdog group that this week about whether district resources were being used to support what was in part a political rally. District staff handled several logistics for the event, organizing refreshments and helping with security.

“It clearly wasn’t to advocate for public education, our students or to share all that’s great about our schools,” she said. “It was to serve the Republican Party.”

Several students also gathered in a Kroger parking lot a few miles away to protest the president coming to one of their high schools.

Some of Trump’s policies haven’t been popular at the school, where the majority of students are Black and Hispanic. In late January, Wheeler students were among the hundreds across Cobb County schools who walked out to protest immigration enforcement activities nationwide.

“I don’t love the fact that we are using a public school to promote a partisan political agenda,” said Edward Kim, a Wheeler graduate.

Multiple candidates running for statewide office had a chance to make campaign pitches Wednesday.

State Sen. Brian Strickland, candidate for attorney general, said families are relocating to Georgia to leave blue states that supported former President Biden’s agenda.

“In November, we have a big decision to make,” he said. “We have to get this right.” 

Trump also told the attendees to vote for Rep. Mike Collins, who didn’t attend because of votes in Congress. Collins will face Democratic Sen. John Ossoff in November. Ossoff, he said, will “bankrupt your families.”

Rick Jackson, GOP candidate for governor also greeted the crowd and joined Trump on the platform. While he touted his expertise as a businessman as the solution to Democrats’ “affordability crisis,” he also spoke at length about Trump Accounts.

As someone who grew up in foster care, he applauded first lady Melania Trump’s initiative, in which states can open accounts for children in foster care.

“This is more than just an account. It’s a message,” he said about Trump Accounts. “You are seen, and you are valued.” 

Many attendees said they just wanted a chance to see a sitting president in person. Melissa Moeller, who has two children in Cobb schools, learned about it because her 10^th grader’s marching band practice was relocated from Wheeler because of the event. 

It didn’t bother her, however, that the school’s landscaping was spruced up for the official visit.

“They’re doing that anyway. With the president coming anywhere, I’m ok with a little pomp and circumstance,” she said. “Will it ever happen again? I don’t know.”

As Texas schools face at least $600 million in federal funding cuts, multiple mental health programs, particularly those implemented in response to the pandemic and mass shootings, are at risk of losing funding.

School programs focused on chronic absenteeism, mental wellness and crisis services that were created in response to the Uvalde school shooting, as well as social workers and counselors, could all be on the chopping block.

Texas schools rely heavily on federal funding to support mental health programs. Data shows that two federal programs that are of being cut or account for 86% of the school mental health funding for more than 2,500 campuses statewide, according to Mental Health America of Greater Houston.

Bracing also for the impending expiration of COVID-19 relief funding, school districts and advocacy groups this legislative session had pushed for more money through a dedicated funding source for school mental health, but lawmakers did not approve it.

Currently, such funding is combined with school safety in the so-called school safety allotment in the state school funding formula, and school districts tend to prioritize the allotment on school security.

“I don’t want to get into a situation where I am asking, do I hire a police officer or do I hire a counselor? I want them both,” said Adrian Johnson, superintendent for the Hearne school district.

The funding cuts and lack of progress on getting a statewide dedicated funding stream for mental health comes at a time when . The special legislative session starts July 21, but Gov. Greg Abbott has not assigned school mental health as a directive to lawmakers.

The funding crisis

Created in response to Uvalde, the federal helps fund two grant programs in Texas, the and the . The former implements mental health training and support in 60 high-needs districts and the latter helps 98 public school districts with case management tools that identify struggling students, as well as mental health personnel.

Almost three years later, the Safer Communities Act is losing over $1 billion spread across the country. Funds that were supposed to last until 2027 are expected to dry up by the end of this year.

This cut puts programs like , which deploys evidence-based mental health resources in three Central Texas school districts, at risk. The state homed in on those school districts because of their higher rates of community impacts from the pandemic and high rates of population growth.

The cut to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is just one in a series of proposed changes to federal funding for public education that will impact how mental health is addressed in schools.

According to an analysis from the , the freezing of five other federal programs that support public schools are expected to result in the withholding of approximately $600 million from Texas, more than 16.1% of the state’s federal K-12 funding. These funds have been used for a variety of services such as English language instruction and literacy, but also after school programs and summer programs focused on mental wellness.

Medicaid and CHIP are also facing cuts in the federal spending bill passed earlier this month, and both provide each year to school districts and local mental health authorities, enabling them to hire and retain mental health providers, offer preventive mental health screenings, and support students with disabilities using specialized services.

Separately, COVID-19 funds are set to expire this year , forcing some smaller schools to lay off staff or find alternative ways to keep the social workers and counselors hired during the pandemic.

The confluence of these cuts come as Texas lawmakers missed opportunities to properly fund school mental health this year.

During the legislative session that ended in June, Texas lawmakers agreed on a robust that adds $8.5 billion to the state’s public school system. However, most of it has been earmarked for teacher pay; with roughly $250 million being set aside for school support staff and mental health support staff are not necessarily included in the pay raise.

Over 70% of the schools that sustainable funding for school-based mental health staff and professional school counselors was the main barrier to having adequate resources to address student mental health needs, according to a survey of 2,690 schools by the .

“We are hopeful that this will translate to more dollars for mental health. But without any legislation currently earmarking those dollars, that is not a guarantee,” Rebecca Fowler, the director of public policy and government affairs at Mental Health America of Greater Houston, said about the new school funding.

In 2023, wrote to the Texas Legislature, urging the creation and funding of a separate “student mental health allotment” because programs were not reaching enough students.

Only 13% of schools used the school safety allotment for mental health supports, according to the

by Rep. , D-Dallas, attempted to secure dedicated mental health funds, but it did not pass this year.

“Uncertainty around different funding streams makes it hard to navigate these conversations about the future of mental health and young people,” said Kate Murphy, director of child protection policy for Texans Care for Children.

Changing conversations

After the devastating school shootings in Uvalde and Santa Fe compelled lawmakers to prioritize mental health, such support has waned in the last few years. Mental health advocates have pointed the blame at the culture war happening in the Capitol, namely that lawmakers have suggested mental health programs in schools are diagnosing children and reinforcing LGBTQ identities without parental consent.

For example, by Sen. , R-Brenham, would have required parental consent for any psychological or psychiatric examination, testing, or treatment conducted on a student by a school employee. The bill had eight senators as sponsors, and although it died in the less conservative Texas House, it demonstrates the shift in the legislative conversation surrounding school mental health.

“I don’t think there is a uniform understanding of the role of behavioral health in public schools. Who should be providing support? When should support happen?” Seth Winick, director of the , said.

Johnson, the Hearne superintendent, said he understands parents’ concerns but says schools are the best place to address mental health issues for Texas families who might not have the income or time to schedule mental health services. Until a better solution is proposed, school mental health needs support, he said.

“We have students pre-K through 12 sitting in the school system for 180 plus days a year, and we should take advantage of that by not only giving them a strong educational foundation but a strong mental health foundation,” he said.

What does the future hold?

Without federal funding support, school districts will have to get creative in addressing mental wellness within their walls.

Johnson said his school district is focusing on partnerships not only with local mental health authorities and health agencies, but also with other school districts. He said his district shares staff and cut costs by joining in on a special education cooperative with four other districts and can be modeled in other parts of the state.

“We have 700 kids, a neighboring district might have 600 kids, and another district may have 150; we have to learn to work together to help lower some of the costs during these budget cuts.”

Collaboration is necessary, Johnson said, but even that is at risk under current funding restrictions.

Some schools are unable to expand partnerships with programs like , which directly works with students to provide mental health support and address chronic absenteeism.

“CIS is currently serving two campuses in our district, but we would definitely expand to have CIS serve all of our campuses if we had a state funded allotment that would help the district provide the matching funding that is needed to partner with CIS,” Chris Smith, superintendent of the Brownfield school district, said. “We just don’t have the funding available.”

Rural and smaller schools also face laying off social workers and psychologists hired during the pandemic and eliminating programs to ensure they can retain teachers through raises instead.

“We are adopting a budget this year that’s probably going to have a $2 million deficit. We are dedicated to making sure mental health services are available and luckily have been able to sustain through partnerships, but it has been tough times with the economy, and schools are struggling to keep up with costs,” Smith said.

The endless loop of putting mental health on the back burner until tragedy hits is unsustainable, according to education advocates, who say it’s time for funding dedicated to school mental health.

“I would like to have funding similar to what they said with police officers. You have to have a police officer on every campus, but that costs money yearly, and they provide. We should be doing the same with social workers and psychologists,” Johnson said.

This first appeared on .

But now, some offices that handled the hundreds of inquiries that pour in each month — from parents, reporters and watchdog groups — have either been eliminated or have no remaining employees, according to a by the agency’s inspector general.

A FOIA group within the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, for example, had eight employees before President Donald Trump took charge in January 2025. After staff reductions, none remained, the report showed. 

Those cuts have further jammed an already clogged system. A review by 91ɬ�� of publicly available shows that out of the more than 4,900 requests the Education Department has received since February 2025, only 3% have been granted in full or in part as of last week. The department doesn’t carry the largest backlog of requests, according to . But its own annual , released earlier this year, said it was unable to reduce a backlog that makes up over 86% of pending requests. 

Officials blamed their lack of responsiveness on an increase in requests, the department’s downsizing and the 43-day government shutdown last year. Experts, including a former FOIA official, say the administration’s push to eliminate the department has especially hampered the public’s ability to understand the inner workings of the agency.

“The people who remain at the Department of Education are either not subject matter experts in the relevant issue or they’re massively overworked trying desperately to do the jobs of all of their departed coworkers,” said Jill Siegelbaum, who spent 15 years as the agency’s senior FOIA attorney. 

With the department offloading key offices to other agencies, hunting down records could become even more difficult, she said. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will take responsibility for special education, has also .

“No one is going to have any idea what agency has which responsive records,” said Siegelbaum, now a partner with Sligo Law Group. “All of this adds up to a nightmare for FOIA requesters.”

Those include parents whose children aren’t receiving the services they’re entitled to, news outlets covering fast-moving stories in their local schools and student loan borrowers trying to make sense of what they owe after all the changes to in recent years.

The requests frequently become .

In one example, a reporter from the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts asked for civil rights data from the local school district in 2021. The request is still pending, but the reporter has since moved on, according to the outlet’s executive editor.

In early 2023, Callie Oettinger, a special education advocate in Virginia, requested documents from the Office for Civil Rights related to its oversight of Fairfax County Public Schools during the pandemic. After an OCR investigation, to make up for the services students with disabilities didn’t receive during school closures. 

Oettinger wanted to ensure OCR was holding the district accountable, but two years later, she hasn’t received a response. She recently talked to a mom who is still trying to get services for her child as part of that agreement. 

“We’re six years past COVID,” she said. “Kids needed help years ago.” 

In March 2025, 91ɬ�� asked for submissions to the department’s short-lived tip line for examples of diversity, equity and inclusion activity in public schools. The department had to shut down the portal as the result of litigation, but the request is still pending. In all, 91ɬ�� has submitted 20 requests since the current administration took office. Seventeen have not been processed and three cases were closed because they were duplicates. A separate request to the Office of Inspector General was fulfilled within four weeks. 

FOIA wasn’t meant for “historical purposes,” said Jon Maier, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a public disclosure statute that’s designed to get information into the hands of the American public.” 

The left-leaning watchdog group sued seeking records from the Department of Government Efficiency, which oversaw widespread layoffs and cancelled contracts. Requesters can sue if they haven’t received a response in 20-30 days. The department’s current wait time for simple requests , but many take much longer.

“That these preposterous delays are acceptable goes directly against the purpose of FOIA,” Maier said. The backlog is only likely to grow. “When the government isn’t telling you what it’s doing there will only be more FOIA requests.”

‘Ignoring FOIA officers’

In addition to tallying the staff cuts, the inspector general’s office hoped to evaluate the agency’s ability to process requests. But the department refused to turn over all the information its internal watchdog requested and declined to “permit unrestricted access to its staff,” said Catherine Grant, a spokeswoman for that office. “We were unable to make definitive determinations in several areas, including major activities,” like FOIA requests.

In the largest share of open cases, roughly 41% of them, a FOIA officer has sent the request to the office that is likely to have the records, but is still waiting, often months later, for a response.

Lauren Harper, an expert on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wasn’t surprised. 

If the department is “stonewalling the inspector general’s office, it’s an extremely safe bet that they’re absolutely ignoring FOIA officers who are asking for information,” she said. 

The logs also show:

• Since February 2025, 37% of FOIA requests have been closed, but the majority of those were either withdrawn or were invalid requests to begin with. 

• During the current Trump administration’s first 16 months in office, the department received an average of 295 requests per month. During that same window under President Joe Biden, from February 2021 through May 2022, the department received an average of 185 requests a month. 

• Many requests submitted during the Biden administration and even Trump’s first term still haven’t been processed. For fiscal year 2023, 23% are stuck in that “request for docs sent” category. 

‘Find funding elsewhere’

Problems with the federal government’s FOIA system are longstanding. The law, which turned 60 on July 4, has always been “underfunded,” Siegelbaum said. 

“Congress doesn’t appropriate funding for FOIA, so you have to find funding elsewhere,” she said. “Sometimes it has to struggle to get attention, to get the appropriate resources, both in terms of money and staff at the Department of Education.”

Comparing the handling of FOIA requests from one administration to the next isn’t a simple math problem. Each new team inherits requests that were still pending when the department changed hands. Clearing out the backlog was a priority for Mitchell Zais, former deputy education secretary during Trump’s first term.

“As I recall, we were able to hire some temporary staff,” he said in an email. “As a consequence, we made significant progress, but not as much as I would have liked.”

In 2024, the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, where Zais is a board member, analyzed the department’s FOIA logs, concluding that the response rate was higher during the first three years of Trump’s first term than during the same period under Biden, 67% to 48%. 

The analysis also showed that during Zais’ tenure, the department was quicker to respond to liberal groups it disagreed with, like American Oversight and the Center for American Progress, than the Biden administration was to conservative advocates and think tanks, including Parents Defending Education and the America First Policy Institute.

Zais suggested that while he was there, some requests “were made with an eye toward harassing the department … rather than generally seeking information that could be legitimately used for any positive purpose.”

But Harper, at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, that whether or liberal groups are flooding the system, the onus is on the government to respond in a more timely manner. The current administration, she said, has been especially hostile toward releasing information, and staff working on FOIA requests have been among the first to go at agencies the administration is “interested in eliminating.”

Last year, the administration put in the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave before shutting down the agency entirely. Trump has the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which for releasing a memo about .

In addition to mass firings at the Education Department, active litigation contributes to the growing backlog of requests, officials said. According to its FOIA report, the agency is facing 57 FOIA-related lawsuits, which have “negatively impacted the department’s ability to keep pace with other requests.” Last week, civil rights groups filed two more FOIA-related lawsuits, one about the department’s failure to release data on cases and another seeking .

ProPublica in February for failing to release information including civil rights investigations. In April, the to the complaint, acknowledged it received the requests and said its search for records is “ongoing.”

‘Proactively’ posting records

Harper gave the department credit for posting up-to-date FOIA logs, something other agencies haven’t always done. The department, however, between December 2023 and mid-2025.

Officials reported that they’ve taken actions to improve turnaround times on requests, like training staff across the agency and “proactively” posting frequently requested records. These include student loan data and a list of involving accusations of antisemitism.

As McMahon moves forward with splitting up the department, spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse said the agency is “complying with all applicable laws and looks forward to restoring excellence in American education through these critical partnerships.”

, agencies that are “reorganizing, terminating or transferring offices or functions” have to work with the National Archives and Records Administration and the receiving agency to ensure records don’t get lost in the process. 

“This all requires a lot of communication,” Harper said. She emphasized that the National Archives hasn’t been spared from or . “Restructuring has not happened on the scale that it’s happening now. It’s truly a perfect storm.”

Notably, however, these effects fluctuated over time. After consistently outperforming district schools for more than a decade, MIT researcher Geoffrey Kocks found that charters forfeited their relative advantage entirely between 2015 and 2019, only to bounce back during the pandemic. By 2022, charters statewide once again enjoyed a meaningful edge, though not one as great as they exhibited before the slowdown. 

The shifts depicted in could reframe perceptions of a school choice sector that has for . They also offer a more textured picture of how one of the most influential education initiatives of the 21st century has evolved during a period of major social and economic changes, including the COVID shock and a lengthy period of academic stagnation that has been felt around the country. 

“I found it really interesting to refresh our understanding of what’s taking place, and to see that these effects were not static,” said Kocks, a doctoral student working under the auspices of MIT’s . “It’s not some kind of fixed charter effect that’s going to be large no matter what.”

A half-decade slide

To track those effects over time, Kocks gathered data from admissions lotteries for 32 Massachusetts charter schools between 2002 and 2025. When charters receive more applications than they have seats, those lotteries determine which families are offered a place. They also create a natural experiment, effectively assigning otherwise-similar students to either charters or their local public school on a random basis. 

Prior lottery-based research — conducted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joshua Angrist, who helped oversee Kocks’s work at MIT — has demonstrated powerful gains accruing to students enrolled at urban charters embracing the so-called No Excuses model of high academic standards, rigorous behavioral codes, and supplemental instruction through tutoring and extended school days. But much of that literature was published during the Bush and Obama presidencies, with fewer follow-up studies through the 2020s.

Kocks broadly points to similar benefits. By combining the lottery outcomes with students’ academic records from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, he also estimated large improvements to learning in the charter sector. For each year of attendance at a charter middle or high school, he estimated that students’ scores on the state’s mandated MCAS exam rose by six percentile points in math and three points in reading. 

Composite scores on the SAT also rose by 11.5 points per year of exposure to a Massachusetts charter school — a phenomenon driven almost entirely by charters in Boston and a ring of communities in its immediate vicinity, which lifted SAT scores by 25.7 points annually. Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged children also experienced an especially large boost, ascending by an average of 8–11 points in math and 5–6 points in reading on the MCAS.

Yet those impressive results began a steady decline in 2013, eventually receding to the point that charter performance was statistically indistinguishable from that of neighborhood public schools. Again, the trends were highly place-specific, with steep declines in urban charters and much gentler ones elsewhere; SAT scores for Boston-area charter students fell by a disquieting 43.1 points per year of charter enrollment between 2015 and 2019. 

The latest lottery and testing data offers signs of a strong rebound. Boston charters have reversed most of the damage sustained during the late 2010s, with the average student in the 2020s actually outpacing the annual literacy gains seen from 2010 to 2014.That movement is variable, though, with top-performing schools pulling away from scuffling ones.

Jim Peyser, who served a long stint as Massachusetts secretary of education during the period included in the study, said he was glad to see Boston students bouncing back. But he described the recovery in the state capital as “a tale of two cities.”

“Some of the charter schools that fell off a lot between 2019 and 2021 have come back pretty strongly,” Peyser said. “But then you’ve got others that were struggling before COVID. They lost ground during the pandemic, and they haven’t necessarily recovered even back to where they were before.”

Searching for explanations

But what could have caused the mysterious, half-decade slide in relative charter performance?

Kocks first ruled out a set of possible explanations, including modifications to state tests (Massachusetts shuffled through several assessments during this time) and transformations to student demographics (which were mostly small). Instead, he detected two important changes to charter school personnel at a critical time.

First, he found that principals at Boston-area charter schools turned over somewhat faster than those employed by Boston Public Schools in each year from 2015 to 2018. Greater churn was also evident when examining charters in and around Boston against those scattered further afield; just 20% of Boston-area charters were still led by their original CEO as of 2017, compared with 60% in others across the state.

Even more suggestive was a long-running trend in teacher qualifications: Boston-area charters were initially more likely to hire teachers who majored in, or were specifically licensed to teach, their classroom subject. But between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of their teachers with domain-specific knowledge fell from 55% to 40%, while the share of those teachers stayed flat in non-Boston charters. 

Kocks noted that these findings did not represent causal proof. Yet several sources noted the potential importance of changes to Boston’s charter workforce around the time learning began to slip.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Orin Gutlerner led a teacher residency program at the highly regarded . During that time, he said there was no difficulty signing up would-be educators with sterling academic credentials. With unemployment still high in the wake of the Great Recession, and the education reform era approaching its zenith, he sometimes received 20 or more applications for each slot.

But as the labor market recovered, many young employees chafed at the long hours and tough expectations at No Excuses schools. Testing evidence was promising, but school leaders were concerned enough about burnout to consider changing their practices. Gutlerner cited the example of a charter that quietly abandoned a requirement that teachers make at least 10 check-in calls to families each week, reasoning that it didn’t rise to the importance of their other commitments.

“When we saw those strong academic results, and the teacher attrition, we said, ‘We need to go all the way in the other direction and be much more mindful of teacher sustainability,’ ” recalled Gutlerner, who now leads in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. “It’s not that that’s necessarily bad, but these things are very delicate balances, and it started to tip more in that direction.”

At the same time, Boston Public Schools was becoming more aggressive at recruiting high-level talent. In 2014, BPS that it had hired for 82% of its open positions by the end of June — a startling increase from just 9% the year before. 

Sarah Cohodes, a professor of education policy at the University of Michigan who has published a string of influential studies on Boston charter schools, observed that the district’s generous compensation package also helped draw job seekers away from alternatives like Match, Bridge Boston, and Uncommon Schools.

“The BPS salary scale gets you close to $100,000 in nine years,” she said. “So people wanted those jobs, and once BPS got it together in terms of hiring, that was much more appealing than the charters.”

‘Antiracist’ policies under scrutiny

Kocks’s paper does not directly address another prominent hypothesis for charters’ temporary swoon.

In for The Boston Globe, education advocate Steven Wilson asserted that a sector-wide embrace of “antiracist” policies led to the drop in achievement. The former charter leader — who was from the high-performing network he founded after authoring a blog post calling for more rigor in classrooms — last year making the same case in a national context.

The implementation of equity-focused initiatives, such as restorative justice or culturally responsive curricula, can be difficult to document over time. The MIT study did consider the possibility that Boston charters’ gradually decreasing rates of out-of-school suspension harmed learning, but ultimately showed that suspensions fell at BPS schools at the same time (albeit from a lower baseline). 

Gutlerner called Wilson’s views “a pretty narrow analysis,” while noting that increasing skepticism toward many aspects of school reform led to a reconsideration of discipline in some campuses. Charter teachers themselves suddenly became conversant on topics like the then-ubiquitous “,” spurring dissent within schools, he remembered.

“Instead of methodically evaluating and shifting practices and making improvements, there were some wholesale calls to just rip out the entire behavior management system,” he said. “Or to stop retaining students, ever.” 

Besides suspensions, a raft of stringent expectations and customs came to define many successful charters, such as silent hallway transitions and . The , and other moment-to-moment techniques used by school staff to keep instruction running smoothly, could have played a more important role than disciplinary penalties like suspension and detention, Gutlerner reflected. 

Peyser added that, as charter leaders became more distantly removed from the generation of founders who established the schools’ cultures, some of the organizations’ urgency and vision dissipated as well.

“That [turnover] is associated with a weakening of the ‘No-Excuses’ culture, which many of the schools had adopted,” he said. “That possibly led to a general relaxation of school culture, which had been so important to their success.”

Kocks said those historic observations, along with the drifting trajectory of learning outcomes at charter schools, indicated that much of their striking benefits could be contingent upon their own policies and implementation, along with conditions far outside their walls.

“What surprised me was seeing how unstable these effects were, both in terms of the decline and the eventual rebound,” he concluded. “That means that these inputs matter a lot, and we have the potential to make big changes in how effective schools are within a relatively short period of time.”

This year, at least six states enacted laws trying to reduce the number of students chronically absent from school.

The measures include requiring monitoring of absences and publicly releasing data, developing new guidance on the best ways to address the problem and increasing punishments for parents and guardians of chronically absent students.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school days in an academic year, which equates to about 18 days or two days per month.

A signed in March creates a student attendance monitoring system and requires the identification of at-risk students. Parents of students in grades 1-6 will receive a notice of violation after five truancies. If parents don’t meet with school officials to address the truancy, they could face a class B misdemeanor.

requires every school district and public charter school to compile data about the students who regularly attend class or are chronically absent, which will be made publicly available by the state’s Department of Education.

overhauls how the state defines and handles chronic absenteeism and truancy. Chronic absenteeism will remain categorized as 10% or more days of missed attendance. Truancy is classified as 20 or more unexcused absences within a school year.

If a student is considered truant and school-based interventions haven’t improved attendance, the law allows the state’s attorney to fine parents a maximum of $1,000 or to file a court petition against the parents.

Additionally, by July 2027, the state’s Agency of Education must develop a model policy on chronic absenteeism and truancy, including guidance on excusing absences, addressing absenteeism among students with disabilities and considering how bullying and hazing could impact a student’s attendance.

Under , a student transferring during the school year will have the number of unexcused absences reported to their next school, and any future unexcused absences will be added on a cumulative record. And it removes the five-hour limit on the amount of community service a judge may order for the parent or guardian of a student with five or more unexcused absences during a school year.

Under a sweeping K-12 education legislative enacted this year in Mississippi, the state is required to fund one attendance officer per 4,000 compulsory‑school‑aged children.

And a recent New Jersey law establishes a chronic absenteeism task force, which will develop recommendations on the best way to address the problem.

According to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, lawmakers filed this legislative session about chronic absenteeism.

Of the 44 states and Washington, D.C., that have released 2024-25 attendance data, most states showed improvement, FutureEd found. But Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Mexico and the district reported a rise in missed school days. And no state has fully returned to pre-pandemic levels, it said.

According to its most recent data, the U.S. Department of Education says the national rate of chronic absenteeism reached about 31% in 2021-22 and fell to 28% in 2022-23.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

That’s why our newsroom recently launched a new on Instagram () spotlighting a handful of important articles, case studies, data analyses and solutions snapshots that might have gotten lost in the noise. (You can also get these kind of daily highlights delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for our national newsletter.)��

From the new demands facing college students in this era of artificial intelligence to a leadership transition at America’s largest union, here are five stories you might have missed this week: 

1. Elementary Principals Are Getting a Crash Course in How Young Kids Learn Best

Young children need different conditions than older students to thrive. Some school leaders are adapting their practices to reflect that reality.

2. Princess Moss Elected NEA President With Votes From 50% of Assembly Members

The former music teacher, who previously served as the union’s vice president, narrowly avoided a run-off in July 5 election.

3. What Today’s College Students Need That Previous Generations Didn’t

College degrees don’t guarantee good jobs anymore, so students must build resumes and AI skills in high school and college, experts say.

4. A Restored Detroit Rail Station Looks to the Future, Offering Training for Teens

Michigan Central Station, long a symbol of decline and decay, is now an innovation hub with workshops and cutting edge equipment for youth.

5. Q&A — ‘Rehumaning’ Education: Banning Screens Is Only Part of the Solution

‘We don’t have to remove all tech,’ author Stephanie Malia Krauss says. ‘We need to remove toxic tech’ and bring back play and adequate sleep.

But for microschools, a growing segment of the private school market, the initial guidance from federal officials has left school leaders worried they could be left out.

The law says that students can use scholarships for expenses at a public, private or religious school. But many microschools operate outside of their state’s private school sector — as tutoring centers, homeschool groups and learning pods. Depending on state law, they may or may not be classified as private schools.

In his , Kevin Salinger, the deputy assistant secretary for tax policy, added that “a homeschool would be treated as a school if it is treated as a school under state law.”

His comments have left some microschool leaders scratching their heads.

Even if a state decides to opt in to the new program, “it is my concern that some will exclude microschools,” said Don Soifer, CEO of the National Microschooling Center, who is closely monitoring the issue.

To him, Congress’ intent was clear. The states that if a student is eligible to attend a public K-12 school, then they will qualify for a scholarship as long as their family’s income doesn’t exceed 300% of the area median income, a high bar. Florida, Ohio and Tennessee are among the states that plan to participate in the program but have microschools that don’t fall under the private school umbrella. Some who advocated for passage of the law say microschool leaders should stay tuned for more information.

“We think Treasury misspoke or is misinterpreting the statute,” said Jim Blew, a former Department of Education official who is working to implement the new program. “It’ll all be cleared up by the time they issue the rules for 2027.”

The Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.

‘In the hands of the states’ 

Under the program, which starts next year, taxpayers who donate to a nonprofit scholarship granting organization will get a dollar-for-dollar credit, up to $1,700. Opponents, including Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, want Congress to , and the teachers unions are to opt out. They note that Salinger, the Treasury official, said states won’t be able to “impose” restrictions on SGOs. They can’t, for example, only approve nonprofits that offer scholarships to public school kids and not approve those that serve students attending private schools.

Other Democrats, like former Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, have urged blue state governors to opt in. that the program “opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.”

Cecilia Retelle Zywicki, founder of LearningSpring, which is building a system for states to track SGOs and payments, expects the Trump administration to stay out of the debate over how states define a school.

“Details like this are going to remain in the hands of the states,” she said. “The Treasury has made it clear in actions and words that oversight and compliance will remain with the states.”

‘A bummer’

That means even in red states that already intend to participate, some students could be left out. 

“It’s a bummer because I know it would help the families,” said Tonya Kipe, who runs Kipe Academy in Winter Haven, Florida, as a nonprofit tutoring center out of a Methodist church. 

She’s among those microschool founders who prefer not to organize as a private school. In addition to the microschool, which serves 36 students, she offers afterschool tutoring and a monthly science workshop. Becoming a more formal private school, she said, might require them to find a different facility and add testing requirements

As a former second grade teacher and mother of two boys, she knows how students can have vastly different learning needs. Her older son, she said, is the “compliant one,” while her younger son wasn’t motivated by public school routines like earning points for reading books. She launched her own school in 2021 to break out of a “cookie cutter” approach to education. 

The families who signed up for her microschool were looking for the same thing.

“They like the flexibility of being able to just be here for academics from 8 to 11:30 and then join us for field trips if they want to,” she said. While many in her program already use Florida’s various private school choice options, she said the federal program could allow them to “double up” on tutoring, buy more supplies or add other supplemental programs.

Large microschool networks, like KaiPod Learning, are preparing for a patchwork approach across the country.

With locations in 21 states, KaiPod has 91 affiliated schools, about half of them private schools. The others operate as less-formal learning pods or co-ops, said CEO Amar Kumar. 

Kaipod will add about 40 more schools next school year, a third of them in Texas, where the state’s new Education Freedom Accounts program launches this fall. With that growth, he thinks the percentage of private schools in the network will likely climb to 65%.

Microschools, he said, are moving toward “more formalized structures” as public funding for private school choice expands. 

“Our view is that this is healthy for the microschool movement,” he said. “Families want flexibility and personalization, but they also want confidence that the school is stable, accountable and able to access available funding.”

With roughly 1,000 microschools , the Prenda network helped introduce the public to the model during the pandemic when sites began to pop up . While there are Prenda microschools in nearly every state, founder Kelly Smith said the organization has focused on expanding sites, like those in Texas, where they qualify as private schools and families can apply for public funds.

“Wealthy families already participate in microschools by paying out of pocket,” he said. But the federal program “has the potential of allowing lower and middle class families to send their kids to microschools.” 

He said he was “baffled” that some states were saying no to additional federal funds.

“That is something governors almost never do,” he said.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative court said that West Virginia and Idaho did not break the law when they passed legislation prohibiting trans athletes from competing against biological women and girls. 

Becky-Pepper Jackson, a transgender 10th grader and track athlete in West Virginia, argued that such regulations are “unreasonable.” 

“We disagree,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh , bringing his perspective as a girls’ to the case. “Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable: Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”

Attorneys who represented Jackson and Boise State University transgender student Lindsay Hecox called the opinion a “heartbreaking ruling” and “deeply harmful.” The decision, however, doesn’t settle an ongoing legal debate over whether Title IX requires that participation in sports be based on biological sex determined at birth. 

“I’m not terribly surprised by the outcome, given the court’s opinions in the last year,” said Jenny Denny, a specializing in education and Title IX compliance. “I think we could read the writing on the wall.”

Last year, the court upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting gender affirming care for minors, and in April, conservatives sided with California parents who argued that districts should alert parents if their child wants to change their gender identity.

But she said the court’s opinion did not redefine Title IX to suit the administration. 

“Using a sports analogy, which is fitting for today, it’s not a slam dunk for the U.S. Department of Education,” she said. “I think we’ll see the Department of Education cherry pick some language from the opinion today, but it still doesn’t give a clear answer.”

The decision doesn’t prevent states like California from maintaining policies that allow trans athletes to compete in line with their gender identity. But it also means the administration will likely continue its to prevent trans-inclusive policies through and threats to strip federal education funds from districts. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon suggested as much in her comments on the ruling.

“This is a tremendous victory,” she said, “and we look forward to ensuring that every educational institution in America abides by the law of the land.” 

The department’s enforcement actions have been based on an President Donald Trump signed last year, but now officials will likely apply the court’s opinion to any future effort to rewrite the Title IX rule, said Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He frequently writes legal commentary for EdNext. 

He agreed that whether Title IX allows schools to include trans athletes in girls’ sports is still “an open question.”

Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel for the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, called the opinion a “huge win,” but added, “There’s more work to do.”

Congress, she said, needs to “do its job” and pass legislation that would apply to all states.

In a partial dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberals on the court, agreed with Kavanaugh on Title IX. But she said the majority should have sent Jackson’s case back to the lower courts for further “factual findings about the state of the scientific debate” under the equal protection claim. 

“A restrained approach, based on all relevant facts, is particularly necessary when the court is faced with a consequential decision of constitutional dimension,” she wrote.

While Jackson will likely not be able to compete in track this fall, Andrew Ortiz, senior policy attorney at the Transgender Law Center, said Tuesday’s decision won’t have a major impact. because there were already so few trans students participating in sports in the 28 states that tried to ban their participation. In those states, intramural sports and private schools, “could still be options,” he said. While the cases now go back to the lower courts, he expects the states to “pretty quickly” prevail in their efforts to enforce their laws.

‘Back of the pack’

As is often the pattern, the justices released opinions with the most nationwide impact at the end of their term, one in which Trump’s agenda, from immigration reform to voting laws, has . While Hecox and Jackson challenged the laws in their states before Trump took office, the administration took part in the case, arguing that states shouldn’t have to carve out a special exception for transgender athletes even if, as their attorneys argued, their physical advantages have been diminished by puberty blockers or drugs to suppress testosterone.

In fact, several months after the oral arguments, Michael R. Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, argued that the opposite is happening. In May, he that Jackson finished fourth in discus and first in shot put in a statewide track and field competition. 

“As a high-school sophomore, B.P.J. is not finishing ‘near the back of the back,’ “ , referencing the from Jackson’s legal team in the case. Jackson “is instead defeating every — or nearly every — female in the state in these events.”

But LGBTQ advocates, like the , argue that because transgender athletes represent such of students participating in sports, it’s misleading to say they are dominating competitions or “stealing” first place medals from women and girls. 

The debate continued at the appeals court level even while the Supreme Court deliberated in the West Virginia and Idaho cases.

In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit an advocacy group, , in their argument that a Minnesota policy is discriminatory because it allows trans athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

The court said that Trump’s executive order and the administration’s actions against states and districts didn’t settle the legal dispute over the issue. 

“The executive branch’s views on that question may guide its own enforcement approach,” wrote Raymond Gruender, a George W. Bush appointee. “But they cannot independently establish a ‘strong likelihood’ that [the athlete’s] participation violated Title IX or its implementing regulations.”

As Petersburg’s once-booming manufacturing base hollowed out, crime and residents’ health . Along the way, places for kids to be kids disappeared, and many of them stopped coming to school.

Over the last year, about a quarter of students haven’t shown up for at least 10 days of class, even as Virginia overall that had spiked because of the pandemic. While chronic absenteeism is high, state tests show students’ academic performance . Most campuses weren’t accredited until a few . The whole school division and its 4,500 students has essentially been for decades. 

It’s a cycle that seemed unbreakable. Yet for almost four years, something quite extraordinary has been happening here. 

“Petersburg has the worst outcomes of anyone on everything,” said Aimee Guidera, Virginia’s  secretary of education during former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s term. “That’s why we went in.” 

Guidera is referring to a 2022 encounter at a community meeting between Youngkin, a Republican, and Petersburg’s longtime Democratic mayor, Samuel Parham, which led to a yearslong relationship, . The partnership drew $447 million in state, federal and private sector investment to this city just south of Virginia’s capital, plus $2 billion in commitments to develop the area. It also helped fast track the city’s grant applications and approval for projects like , which will bring jobs and revenue, and supported small businesses , like the expansion of a Montessori-style childcare center.

In the schools, there is more before- and after-school childcare, more summer programs for kids and a new playground at the YMCA. There’s also more staff to help intervene when students and families are struggling, a new mentoring program for girls and more. 

Despite the intervention and attention, however, Petersburg schools are still floundering and remain under close watch by the state. But there is hope that as the city changes, its schools will keep changing too. 

Parent Lakeshia Tinsley, who leads the school division’s Parent Advisory Committee and can rattle off a list of concerns about the city schools, summed it up this way: “Petersburg has been on the move, slowly but surely.”

‘It’s all connected’

That’s quite different from how Tinsley felt when she first moved here, lured by Petersburg’s low cost of living. The schools were thought to be so bad, she recalled being told that she’d need to move again once her daughter grew to school-age. 

At the time, just one of the city’s four elementary schools offered childcare before and after hours — care that, for many parents, makes working full-time possible. 

In the early days of the partnership, Guidera said members of the community frequently complained about that lack of care, along with the dearth of summer camps and activities for kids in general. 

“You can’t just deal with crime without dealing with health, with poverty, with education,” Guidera said. “It’s all connected.”

In response, the commonwealth leveraged grants and federal dollars to expand care provided by the YMCA, before and after school at every city elementary school. 

For free. 

“Before, I was having to pay daycare at an actual daycare. That’s another bill that you have,” said Tinsley, who is now running for a seat on the Petersburg school board. “It’s more convenient to drop off at school,” she added, recalling that the bus taking children from the private childcare center to her daughter’s elementary school in the mornings sometimes ran late.

A related endeavor led to and giving kids a hand in designing it. 

Girls with Pearls

Those kinds of spaces to play and gather are essential for kids, said Wanda Stewart, who grew up in Petersburg during the boom times in the ’70s and ’80s.

“There were baseball games at the park, Little League games, city events in the parks for families,” she remembered. She attended college in North Carolina and later settled there with her husband. But phone calls home with nieces and nephews distressed her. 

The thriving city where Stewart grew up had gone.

Petersburg, a transportation hub that hugs the Appomattox River and a city , . The mall closed. So did the skating rink and movie theater. Even the bowling alley shut down. 

Family who remained wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Stewart, with her experience in dropout prevention, to use her talents supporting children back home in Petersburg. When a job running Petersburg’s opened up, she seized the opportunity to return.

And because of the Partnership for Petersburg, she had the chance to tell then-first lady Suzanne Youngkin about her organization, which works to keep kids in school, in part by taking stock of needs like food, clothing and mental health. Many Petersburg students’ parents or underemployed compared to those in other parts of Virginia and the country as a whole.

Stewart got Youngkin’s attention. The partnership three of Petersburg’s eight schools to hire its own CIS site coordinator. A dedicated staff member in school meant getting early warnings about students’ and families’ needs and handling them in real time.

Stewart also told Youngkin about “Girls with Pearls,” one facet of Communities in Schools she brought with her from North Carolina. Each participating student is paired with an adult mentor, who works with them on issues like leadership, self-care, etiquette and navigating conflict. The name comes from how the year ends: Selected girls at every Petersburg school are presented with a strand of pearls they’ve earned for their monthly sessions. 

Youngkin attended a sixth-grade center as a child in Texas and took a special interest in working with the Girls in Pearls at Blandford Academy, the Petersburg school for sixth graders. Sixth grade centers can : the year between the safe space of elementary school and the more daunting middle school years, when some students drop out. 

“I have a sweet spot for sixth-grade girls,” said Youngkin, who recruited members of her staff to mentor Blandford students.

Stewart said Communities in Schools staff and other school employees nominate girls they think would benefit from the monthly conversations and mentoring.

They are girls like Lakeshia Tinsley’s daughter, Serenity, and her classmate Zoey Williams, a fellow Blandford sixth grader who was Suzanne Youngkin’s mentee. At the group’s April gathering, Zoey and Youngkin chatted for a few minutes before getting into an ask-me-anything style conversation with a local OB/GYN who was there to explain menstruation. Many girls in Petersburg may be skipping school because they don’t have the menstrual supplies they need. The girls and their mentors filled 145 backpacks with pads and wipes — a two-month supply — so every Blandford girl would be outfitted with what they might need.

Before the Youngkins left the governor’s mansion in January, the girls got to visit. At the end of the school year, each received a strand of pearls as a parting gift. They were also given a journal and a binder filled with lessons to look back on. But “it’s not about gifts,” Youngkin said. “It’s about time.”

“I got to learn stuff I didn’t really know about,” Zoey said, citing sessions on anxiety and how to deal with emotions gone haywire. “I got to meet new people.”

‘Not … a finger snap’

Though the Partnership for Petersburg is over, and the Youngkins moved some 120 miles north, Youngkin said she plans to return when the next group of Girls with Pearls participants is selected in the fall. 

“It’s just sort of gotten to be what we do,” she said.

Like Tinsley, Stewart said she’s noticed positive differences in Petersburg, even if there’s a long way to go on the school system’s biggest concern, student performance in math and reading.

The school division offers a glimpse of the changes: Several schools are now accredited. The division has had , offering a sense of stability at the top, after running through several others in the last few years. Brown has for every student to be ready for college, the military or a career upon graduation.

But getting them to show up to school, every day, remains one of Brown’s top priorities. For example, absences are now tracked by a school division website , and Brown to the school that cuts down the most on absences every month. Still, chronic absenteeism remains above 20% at every Petersburg public school and is greater than 30% at a few. 

The school board and superintendent also adopted to guide how it will improve student achievement and hiring qualified teachers, among other goals. At the same time, , its first in 50 years. 

A Petersburg City Public Schools spokeswoman said neither the superintendent nor any of the division’s five board members would answer questions for this article.

Before- and after-school options grew because of the partnership. Girls with Pearls and the broader services afforded by Communities in Schools remain. But another effort directly tied to helping Petersburg students academically was short-lived.

Guidera helped hash out an agreement with the school division to bring in a surge of tutors, including students from nearby colleges, to work with students in person. Done right, it’s the kind of strategy can effectively address learning loss — “huge in Petersburg even before COVID,” she said — and something Virginia throughout the commonwealth. 

But the arrangement, started under a superintendent who has long since left, lasted just a single school year. Another tutoring program hasn’t gotten off the ground, though talks with the current schools chief are ongoing. 

Guidera also said the commonwealth’s oversight of schools in Petersburg, and elsewhere, was revamped so it is supportive, not punitive. “It’s not shaming and blaming. It’s very much focused on what works, and how do we use data … as a flashlight rather than as a hammer to identify what’s working, and learn from that.”

For Guidera, however, the truth is that Petersburg schools have not improved enough — “not as much as I want,” she said. But she recognizes it will take time: “It’s not going to be a finger snap.” 

Nevertheless, she thinks the intense investment of time and money was worthwhile.

“This is about partnership, community, relationships and building hope and using data.”

The Texas State Board of Education on Friday adopted new social studies standards for the elementary and middle grades that take an America-first approach to history and feature Christianity more prominently than other faiths. 

While standards for several high school courses were approved, the board postponed the final votes on U.S, Government, World History and World Geography. 

In a separate vote, the board adopted a that includes biblical stories like Daniel and the lion’s den and passages from scripture, like the 23rd Psalm and excerpts from the Book of Exodus.

The Texas State Board of Education will vote Friday on a set of that have drawn fire and fervor for espousing pro-American views and Christian values. 

If approved, the vote would typically mark the beginning of a long, and probably divisive, process to design curriculum based on the standards. But 91ɬ�� has learned that Education Commissioner Mike Morath jumpstarted the process a year ago, signing a $67 million contract with a Tampa-based consulting firm for a series of social studies instructional materials. The standards, with topics like the spread of Christianity and the role of religious freedom in America’s founding, dovetail with the controversial Bluebonnet reading program adopted in 2024, which also came under fire for the perception that it promoted Christian nationalism. A required reading list, including some biblical passages, is also scheduled for a Friday.

The contract, with MGT Impact Solutions, wasn’t accessible to the public for a year because the Texas Education Agency failed to submit it to the state legislature, as required by law, until April.

In a state where the education chief holds over schools, some board members feel left in the dark.

“Of course, I had no idea,” Staci Childs, a Democrat, told 91ɬ��.

“Those agreements should be public knowledge,” said Evelyn Brooks, a Republican. “There should be a considerable amount of transparency because we’re dealing with public money.”

Jake Kobersky, a spokesman for the agency, said MGT has been working from “publicly available drafts” of the new standards in preparation for the final approval. The contract wasn’t submitted to the legislature because officials “originally planned to award multiple contracts” and were still negotiating with other vendors, he said. He declined to state whether officials made additional awards, but said the agency followed the standard contracting process. State law doesn’t require the board to approve requests for proposals or contracts.

“The State Board of Education has no role in this solicitation,” he said.

The contract is the latest development in the state’s four-year quest to overhaul what students learn about history and government. In 2022, the board came close to . But like many red states, Texas had recently passed limiting classroom discussions on race and gender, and conservative groups argued the proposed standards were unpatriotic and violated the new law. The board voted to delay the revision until 2025. Now members have renewed the debate. call the standards “unbalanced” and say they lack diversity, while Republicans are pressuring the board not to dilute them with changes.

Kelsey Kling, a government relations specialist and policy analyst with Texas AFT, the teachers union, called the MGT contract “a little bit of a cart-before-the-horse scenario.”

“Is this whole vote by the State Board of Education simply a formality for a curriculum that’s already been in the works?” she asked. 

Supporters of the new standards, namely the powerful, right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, say they replace a vague in the current standards with a chronological study of history and would allow students to see how ideas and events build over time. 

But Democrats in and on have called for delaying Friday’s vote because the foundation paid the Texas Center at Schreiner University $70,000 to develop the standards. The center’s director, Donald Frazier, is a member of a on the rewrite. Robert Koons, a senior fellow at the foundation, is also an adviser.

“Given the scope and significance of this work, which impacts more than 5.5 million public school students across Texas, it is essential that the process remain transparent, objective, and free from undue influence,” wrote the five Democrats on the 15-member board.

Brian Phillips, spokesman for the think tank, called the Democrats’ demand

Critics, like the American Historical Association, say the draft standards exclude major events throughout history from Africa, the Middle East and Asian countries, and minimize the effects of racism and the contributions of women. In April, the board deleted a standard that would require students to learn about Muslims’ role in developing astronomy and algebra.

But conservatives, like state Sen. Mayes Middleton, called the statements “a clear victory for pro-America, pro-Texas education.”

Students, he wrote in a letter to the board, must “receive an honest understanding of the ideologies and threats that shape the modern world, including the evils of Sharia law, the realities of Islamification, and the documented threat of Islamic terrorism.”

Some in the state are frustrated with Morath’s outsized role, with support from Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP leaders, in directing what students learn. Critics say a top-down approach to curriculum is wrong for such a large, diverse state. 

State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat running to unseat Abbott in November, said that if she wins, one of her first moves would be to , who has served for 10 years. 

‘Political interests’ 

But the legislature in 2023 to enter into contracts with groups like MGT to develop open educational resources and pay districts up to $60 per student if they adopt them. Morath argues the state-owned materials will improve test scores and ground students in “classic works,” including the Bible, he told 91ɬ�� in 2024. 

That was the process the state followed when it originally purchased reading materials from Amplify, a curriculum provider, during the pandemic. Under an $84 million contract with Public Consulting Group, a Boston-based firm, the state made sweeping changes to the program, adding biblical passages like the Prodigal Son and the story of Queen Esther. PCG brought in conservative groups, like Hillsdale College and a media company founded by Mike Huckabee, now ambassador to Israel, to work on the materials. 

Some educators argue that Bluebonnet has of the world with lessons on figures like King Solomon and say critics have overreacted to the biblical material. 

The Amarillo Independent School District is among those using the Bluebonnet reading program. Jennifer Wilkerson, assistant superintendent, said she appreciates that the social studies lessons will cover some of the same topics. 

But the top-to-botton revision of the social studies standards, with a planned 2030-31 roll out, was bound to attract controversy and, if adopted, will require major shifts for teachers.

“Any time you do a complete overhaul of standards, it begins to be about political interests and not about what’s best for kids,” she said. She’s among the hundreds of educators, parents and advocates who have traveled to Austin to address the board. In April, she said, arguments over the standards “got so intense, that there were shouting matches happening outside of the boardroom.”

The temperature of the crowd was similar in 2024 when the board adopted Bluebonnet. And as with the MGT contract, board members were largely unaware the work was underway until the state unveiled drafts of the reading lessons. 

says that an agency can’t spend money on a contract over $10 million until it notifies the , which provides oversight of state government and develops budget recommendations. That notice is supposed to come within 15 days of when a contract is awarded. 

Whether the agency was still considering other bids “does not have an effect on determining when a contract is to be reported,” said Dushyanth Reddivari, assistant general counsel and the communications officer for the budget board. 

A Texas Education Agency shows that as of Tuesday, the state has paid MGT over $1.8 million on the contract since Nov. 19.

Worth over , MGT has a big footprint in Texas and is represented in the legislature by Daniel Hodge, a who previously served as Abbott’s . The company has multiple contracts with state agencies and universities for projects ranging from economic impact studies to software services. In K-12 education, the firm specializes in . 

MGT directed questions about the contract to the state agency.

The contract, which includes work on multiple subjects, listed several organizations as potential subcontractors, including TNTP, a New York City-based nonprofit, and Success Academy Charter Schools. Ann Powell, a spokeswoman for Success Academy, said the network, also in New York, is not involved and didn’t know it was named in the contract. 

Kathryn Zielony, a spokeswoman for TNTP, said there’s a potential the organization could work on the project, “but there is currently no finalized contract in place.”

Kobersky, the Texas Education Agency spokesman, said MGT is still in the “planning phase.”

But Rabbi Joshua Fixler, who has three children in the Houston schools, suggested one reason why supporters of the standards are adamant about the board rejecting any last-minute revisions is because the work is already under way. He spoke to the board on Monday with concerns about items related to Christianity in both the social studies standards and the reading list.

“If work is already happening behind the scenes using these proposed [standards] that haven’t even passed yet to build curriculum,” he said, “it would make sense that the message would be ‘Don’t change this.’ ”

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a member of the House education committee, filed three articles of impeachment against McMahon, noting the secretary’s “willful intent to unilaterally dismantle and eliminate the Department of Education.”

Bonamici a week ago, prompting a swift response from McMahon defending her track record.

“It speaks volumes that House Democrats think an impeachable offense is working to improve student outcomes and reduce the federal bureaucracy,” she .

The resolution accuses McMahon of compromising the ability of the department to fulfill its duties. That’s also the conclusion that the department’s Inspector General reached in released Wednesday detailing how the administration has slashed the agency’s staff by 40% and canceled billions of dollars in grants and contracts. 

McMahon has been forced to backtrack. The department currently has several job openings posted, including and .

Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment against multiple members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, including Health and Human Services Secretary and Defense Secretary . But historically the attempts have rarely succeeded. Two years ago, the House impeached Biden Homeland Security for what members said was a failure to stop migrants from crossing the border, but the Senate dismissed the two articles against him.  Before him, the last cabinet member to be impeached was William W. Belknap, secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant, on , in 1876. 

Critics of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first education secretary, called for her to and some groups advocating impeachment. But lawmakers never took formal steps to do so. A federal judge, however, held her in 2019 and fined her $100,000 when she continued student debt collections in violation of a court order. The department .

While some Republicans have also been critical of McMahon, Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the education committee, called the action “political theater.”

“Secretary McMahon is doing exactly what voters elected President Trump to do: rein in a bloated bureaucracy and put students, parents, and taxpayers first,” he said in a statement.

The effort is also largely “symbolic” and unlikely to succeed, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

“Symbolism can be important, and a case can be made for using this as a way to draw attention to the dismantling of the department,” he said.

The resolution says McMahon has “decimated” the agency and “created a culture of fear and chaos” that has harmed education programs.

Specifically, the articles of impeachment are:

1. Willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law

The text cites McMahon’s actions to transfer responsibilities, which under law rest with the Education Department, to other agencies. Just last week, she announced that the office overseeing special education would move to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights would transfer to the Justice Department.

2. False statements before Congress

The resolution accuses McMahon of lying to Congress during her confirmation hearing that she would follow the law in disbursing education funds appropriated by Congress. Instead, the text reads, she has defended the cancellation of several research contracts and discontinued grants for programs like community schools.

3. Breach of public trust

Again focusing on funding, the resolution states that the administration held up payments for services like migrant education and afterschool care and put “critical” K-12 programs at risk.

Bonamici said parents, especially those of students with disabilities are “distraught” over splitting up the department. “They are asking us to take action to stop these illegal transfers,” she said. “To them I say, ‘We hear you.’ “

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, suggested McMahon’s actions aren’t grounds for impeachment.

“The race to the bottom continues, in this case regarding the definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ ” he said. “This is just politics, but I can appreciate that Congressional Democrats don’t feel like they have any other recourse right now.” 

That gave her an idea.

The staff at Legacy Prep built a three-week summer schedule around the theme of “Lights, Camera, Action,” blending drama, music and dance, culminating in a final performance. But between learning choreography and exploring careers related to content creation, students this month are spending three hours a day polishing the math and reading skills they’ll need for next school year.  

After three years of the program, Johnson sees more confidence in kids when they come back in the fall and considers it one of the reasons why Legacy Prep’s elementary school went from a D to on the state report card.

“Our test scores were in the tank,” she said. During summer school, “our kids have more time to talk to the teacher. They know what they need to focus on.”

It’s a model that prevents what’s known as the summer slide, not just at Legacy Prep, but at nearly 460 charter schools in seven cities. Standardized assessments show that over 39,000 students in gained, on average, nearly a month more learning in math and two and a half extra weeks in English language arts, according to a new study. While the growth is significant, the fact that the study found improvement across so many sites makes the findings stand out even more, said Geoffrey Borman, a researcher at Arizona State University who led the study.

“A key thing to keep in mind is the scale at which these impacts are being made,” he said. “We’re talking, in this case, about tens of thousands of students per year.”

In education research, he added, there are examples of small, “one-off efforts” that produced “groundbreaking impacts.” But those effects often fade when a program — high-dosage tutoring, for example — expands to more students and locations. 

Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spent $50 million to launch Summer Boost in 2022 to from academic decline during the pandemic. The program served over 16,000 students that year in New York City and has since spread to six more cities, including Baltimore, Nashville and San Antonio.

Students retained the skills and material they learned into the next school year, even though they often didn’t take follow-up tests, either i-Ready or NWEA’s MAP tests, until months after the summer program ended.

“These kids are going back to school better prepared to engage in instruction and benefit from it,” Borman said.

The study design didn’t include a comparison group, but the researchers looked at whether scores were higher than what they would have predicted if students hadn’t attended the program.

The positive effects in math are similar to what the when it studied summer learning programs in five urban districts, several years before the pandemic. The Rand sample, however, was much smaller, about 5,000 kids, and the researchers found no improvement in reading, attendance or social-emotional skills.

In another study, after the COVID-era school closures, a team from Harvard, NWEA and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research examined the use of federal relief funds for in 10 districts, serving nearly 450,000 students. Students gained two to three weeks of learning in math on MAP tests, but as with the Rand study, the researchers saw no impact on students’ reading skills. 

In the Arizona State study, Borman noted that because students often lose more math than reading skills when they’re out of school, a summer program can have a bigger impact in math. 

The expectation that sites prioritize phonics-based instruction, a shift that has picked up momentum since the pandemic, may help explain why students in Summer Boost made gains in reading when the earlier studies didn’t find impacts on literacy, said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser on the Summer Boost study. 

Small classes also contributed to the reading gains, Borman wrote. The results were weaker when class sizes exceeded 21 students.

Consistent student attendance, a rate of at least 70%, matters as well. It’s a principle Summer Boost reinforces by holding back 30% of the funding to sites until the program is over. Students exceeded the target with a 75% rate last year. 

“The more kids attend, clearly, the better they perform,” Borman said. “This is something that has been a problem with a lot of summer school programming in the past.”

‘The big question’ 

The findings clarify what it takes to run an effective summer learning program. But districts no longer have federal COVID funds to spend on summer school. Foundation funds, like those for Summer Boost, are limited.

“The big question is how to sustain summer learning programs now that the federal [relief] funding has lapsed,” Kane said. 

One source will likely be the new federal education tax credit, he said. Advocacy organizations like the Afterschool Alliance are to form scholarship-granting organizations that focus on public school students. 

In Alabama, districts are already required under state law to offer summer instruction for students who are significantly behind in and . But the $29,000 Legacy Prep received from the state would have only been enough to pay three teachers, Johnson said. Without the $200,000 Summer Boost grant from Bloomberg, she would have had to narrow the focus of the program to third graders who needed to pass the state reading test to advance to fourth grade. 

She found, however, that just reaching the proficiency level at the end of third grade doesn’t mean kids are strong enough readers and writers to tackle challenging material. The Bloomberg grant allowed the school to hire 12 teachers. 

On a Thursday morning earlier this month, the school was busy with activity as younger students worked on reading and math skills while middle schoolers danced to a hip-hop beat in the gym. After lunch, they switched. 

Using that’s specially designed for a compressed summer schedule, teacher JaMeshia Moore worked with rising first graders on words they should learn by sight. She wrote “because” on the board, carefully demonstrating where each lowercase letter should fit on the lined pages in their workbooks. In math, students worked out subtraction problems by hand, using small strips of paper that represent hundreds, tens and ones. 

Before opening enrollment to all Legacy Prep families, Johnson prioritizes students who are significantly behind and often need one-on-one instruction to catch up. The research showed that students who often fall below grade level — English learners, those from low-income families and kids with disabilities — benefitted the most from the program. They gained over four weeks of learning in math, compared to three and a half weeks for the overall sample. 

At Legacy Prep, the staff works just as hard to make sure students attend as they do during the regular school year. They call students if they’re absent, and for the first time this year, Johnson offered door-to-door bus service if students needed it. Some students come from as far as Huntsville, roughly an hour and a half away. 

Daniel Runner, a rising eighth grader, said he hoped to get some extra help on percentages, while Malaysia Speight said she didn’t have a lot of choice over whether to attend.

“My aunt said that me and my sister were not going to be sitting around in the house all summer,” she said. 

But she was drawn to the line up of activities, like learning how a storyboard illustrates the scenes that make up a film and the chance to work with professional musicians. The Summer Boost grant paid for the artists’ involvement as well as special T-shirts, a field trip to a local theater and a red carpet awards show. 

The academic and attendance requirements combined with the flexibility for schools to design an engaging program is why Bloomberg Philanthropies has seen a positive return on its investment, said Sunny Larson, who leads K-12 programs for the foundation.

“We really need to do everything we can to catch back up to where we need to be,” she said. “Beyond that, we didn’t want to be too prescriptive. We really wanted to leave a lot of flexibility, creativity and ingenuity up to those individual schools.” 

On Thursday morning, Kenyan McDuffie , effectively clearing the way for Democrat Janeese Lewis George to become the city’s next mayor.

The Associated Press had not formally declared a victor as ballots continue to be counted under the District’s new ranked-choice voting system. But Lewis George maintained a substantial lead, and McDuffie acknowledged that the remaining votes were unlikely to change the outcome.

The result marks a significant turning point for a school system that has been governed by Mayor Muriel Bowser for more than a decade. For education advocates, Lewis George’s victory raises new questions about the future of a reform agenda that has driven notable gains in student achievement during that time. The Democratic nominee has proposed some changes to school governance — including an end to the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, as well as a move toward greater independence for the superintendent’s office — and her breakthrough suggests that voters are willing to embrace a broader shift in political leadership.

Correction appended June 16

The mayor’s race in Washington, D.C., technically won’t be settled until this fall. But on Tuesday night, the winner of the Democratic primary will assume presumptive leadership over a school system educating nearly 100,000 students.

That expectation is a function of sheer partisanship: Over 90% of local voters , opening a wide path for the party’s nominee to march to City Hall in November. But the road ahead for public education is much less certain. After nearly two decades of outstanding growth in both student enrollment and academic outcomes, as well as 12 years of leadership from a largely consensus-minded incumbent, the next mayor will need to provide answers to a range of new problems afflicting K–12 schools.

The District’s long economic expansion of the 2000s and 2010s, which drew into its orbit, finally stalled in the face of federal job cuts and a pandemic-fueled flight from the urban core. Combined with a decline in birth rates, the slump has caused the student rolls to go negative for the first time in recent memory — just as on the horizon. Even a promising recovery from post-COVID learning loss is imperiled by a collapse in daily attendance, with missing one-tenth of the school year or more.

The two leading candidates to succeed Mayor Muriel Bowser are widely seen as ideological opposites. Attorney Kenyan McDuffie has courted business groups with a moderate pitch to bring down crime and avoid overextending city finances. Janeese Lewis George, a city councilor and self-described democratic socialist, won over the Left with a huge proposal to offer subsidized to all Washington families.

The broader clash in visions — playing out in the national Democratic Party — is overshadowing a K–12 debate that could be more consequential in the long run. signal continuity with foundational policies enacted in the hard-charging reform period of the 2000s, including direct mayoral control over schools and holding teachers and schools accountable for student performance. Lewis George has issued a subtle challenge to that settlement, voicing a desire to grant education leaders more independence from the mayor’s office and scrap a framework.

The progressive favorite’s eagerness to break from the status quo secured the support of the Washington Teachers Union, which has long sought to de-emphasize teacher quality metrics and win more bargaining latitude for its members. WTU President Laura Fuchs, a frequent critic of the leadership of both District of Columbia Public Schools and D.C. charter schools, said teachers “worked very hard to minimize the harm” imposed by top-down reforms. Under Lewis George, she argued, educators would enjoy much better relations with city leaders.

“We do believe we will have a much friendlier and more listening ear” with Lewis George in power, Fuchs said, while adding that she did not believe the candidate would necessarily supply every item on the union’s wish list. “What Janeese represents, in so many ways, is that she takes us seriously and believes that we are partners.”

Neither of the two contenders could be reached for comment for this article. But the differences between them highlight a fissure in their party that has widened since the Obama-era peak of ambitious experimentation in public schools. Washington has seen some of the in student achievement of any American school district in this century, with student test scores climbing persistently during a time when they were stagnant almost everywhere else. But national Democrats have made little hay about the generational gains, which have attracted fewer boosters and national headlines than similar turnarounds in red states. 

Thomas Toch, director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd research institute and a defender of the District’s model of educational improvement, called the city’s approach “a beacon nationally” and warned against a change in direction.

“It is one of the most important reform success stories in the country, in part because the city has continued to do well by its students for a long time,” Toch said. “The leaders have sustained the reforms, and the reforms continue to make a difference for students.”

Michelle Rhee’s legacy

When Toch and others refer to “the reforms,” they are largely describing a package of policies that began in 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty overhauled school governance in what was then one of the lowest-performing urban districts in the country.

Virtually overnight, the governance of DCPS was transferred to Fenty himself, who also wielded substantial influence over a rapidly growing charter school sector. His hand-picked schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, soon rolled out a new evaluation system known as IMPACT, which ranked teachers based on their students’ test scores; top performers received hefty raises, while .

The groundswell seemed to crest in November 2008, with Rhee posing for in Time magazine and president-elect Barack Obama embracing a similar suite of K–12 recommendations in his national agenda. But Washingtonians grew weary of the pace of change, including the that received failing grades, and turned the mayor out of office.

But his successor, a reform critic who challenged Fenty , surprised many by opting away from a course correction. After another — particularly alienating to some parents in the wake of a — voters again soured on their leadership, selecting Muriel Bowser as the city’s mayor and reelecting her twice.

Part of Bowser’s success may lie in the public’s in local schools. While the tumult over the initial reforms quickly stirred anger, subsequent data on student learning has proven highly favorable.

Findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal exam commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card) show that D.C. fourth and eighth graders comparable to virtually any other major city between 2003 and 2019. A 2021 by the research group Mathematica estimated that Washington’s ascent through the 2010s was comparable to the massive leap made by New Orleans schools in the wake of the district’s post-Katrina restructuring.

While the pandemic pushed achievement downward for a time, local testing from the past few years shows that year-over-year academic progress since the COVID nadir preceding the public health emergency. The Education Scorecard, a data project led by scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford, that DCPS schools saw the fastest recovery of those in any city between 2022 and 2025.

Chelsea Coffin, and education policy specialist for the D.C. Policy Center, called the latest round of state assessments “a very good sign for D.C. students.”

“What we saw last school year were really large gains — even compared to what D.C. had been posting pre-pandemic — in both math and English, across almost all wards and most major subgroups,” Coffin said. “D.C. has a long way to go in terms of all students being on grade-level, but this new forward momentum is really exciting.”

David Grosso, a former city councilor who chaired the body’s education committee between 2015 and 2020, said in an interview that the stream of good news has mostly quieted the consternation that greeted Fenty and Rhee’s dramatic shakeup.

At the time of his election, Grosso recalled, “people were clamoring for success right off the bat. After five years of reform, they were asking, ‘Why aren’t our schools all better?’ The challenge was to explain to people that when you have 100 years of bad schools, you can’t turn it around in five years.”

Teacher evaluations under fire

But dissatisfaction has lingered among detractors of the reform regime, none more energetic than the Washington Teachers Union. 

Pointing to the District’s , which have exceeded 20 percent in some years, the WTU’s leaders lay the blame with IMPACT. Fuchs dismissed the evaluation system as “a tool of control,” saying that it mandated an overreliance on testing and made teachers fear for their livelihoods. 

“Any time they find the union finding a quote-unquote ‘loophole,’ so people could keep their jobs, they cut it off,” Fuchs remarked. “Anything that gives teachers a little bit of power or wiggle room, they cut it off.”

Indeed, refinements to IMPACT have been ongoing since its debut. led to over 20 instructors being ranked lower than they deserved in 2013, denying bonus payments to several and resulting in one mistaken termination. More recently, DCPS officials intended, in part, to combat perceptions that evaluations . 

Echoing some of these complaints, Lewis George has declared that she will end IMPACT if elected. In circulated by WTU, she claimed the system “undermines educators’ expertise and students’ joy of learning.” While committing to retain mayoral control, she has also suggested that she will transform Washington’s office of the superintendent into an independent agency — an idea that could lead to less direct oversight over student data and standards, .

Ongoing resistance from the union and its allies may help to illustrate the somewhat muted response to D.C.’s positive trajectory. While states like Mississippi and Louisiana have emerged as widely cited examples of educational success in deeply conservative locales, Democrats are less likely to harp on the consistent growth attained in the single bluest jurisdiction in the country. Toch said the critiques of progressives and unionized workers now make the story an awkward fit with the party’s national profile.

Still, he added, it would be a profound mistake to walk away from teacher ratings, even if IMPACT could potentially benefit from tweaks. The data organized through the rubric provided the “foundation” for many other workforce improvements realized in recent years, including the opening of new leadership opportunities for teachers receiving good ratings.

“It’s discouraging to hear someone even consider abandoning it,” Toch said. “How would you do pay-for-performance? How would you create a career ladder if you couldn’t distinguish between good teachers and bad teachers? That’s the problem we had in the District in the past, and it still exists in much of the country.”

Whether Lewis George or McDuffie ultimately claims the Democratic nomination, the next mayor will have to navigate structural challenges that go beyond old battles around reform. The city faces mounting budgetary shortfalls that threaten its ability to spend at the level to which both charter and district schools have become accustomed.

Funding for school renovations and new academic programs will likely need to wait until the District’s financial picture adapts to a post-COVID, post-Trump reality in which both businesses and the federal government have shrunk their local presence. Even the pay incentives provided through IMPACT add to the fiscal pressure.

Bisi Oydele is the CEO of Education Forward D.C., a reform-friendly advocacy group. While stressing the need to pursue retrenchment equally, among both DCPS and charter providers, he acknowledged that educators and families might have to prepare for leaner times.

“You can track the CFO revenue projections, and they’re not great,” Oyedele said. “D.C. spends about $2 billion on education per year, and that is obviously tied to revenues and economic forecasts.”

Grosso also noted the long set of issues that the mayor and city council will confront through the end of the decade, including the likely need for schools to tighten their belts and the immediate task of finding a replacement for outgoing Chancellor Lewis Ferebee, who announced his resignation last month. 

Amid that flurry of contingencies, he cautioned policymakers against pursuing “reform for reform’s sake.” While he had previously pursued some major policy changes through the Council — including one resembling Lewis George’s notion of making the superintendency more autonomous — such moves needed to be carefully studied before action was taken, he concluded.

“If I didn’t learn anything else in all the years I was making education policy, at least I learned this: If you make massive changes… and you don’t have a real understanding of what the outcome will be, then you shouldn’t make the change.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the first female mayor of Washington, D.C.

Mississippi continues to outperform most of the nation in education, according to a new report, but health outcomes for children remain dismal. 

The , published annually by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, shows the state’s education ranking has held steady at 16th nationwide. Unchanged since last year, this ranking on education is Mississippi’s highest score ever, according to the foundation’s rubric.

In other measures, though, Mississippi still struggles.

The report puts Mississippi at 49th for economic well-being, 50th for health and 49th for family and community. 

“When we think about children and families where the household head lacks a diploma, that’s tied to a chance of children living in poverty in that house,” said Ashley Parker Sheils, executive director of Children’s Foundation of Mississippi. “Every one of these indicators is an opportunity for us to work together to do better for the children of our state.”

Despite progress in categories that measure economic well-being and outcomes for families and communities, those rankings fell this year for Mississippi. States are ranked relative to each other. Other states also saw improvements, so Mississippi’s rankings fell slightly in those categories. The results put Mississippi at 50th in the country for overall child well-being compared to 48th last year. 

For the first time since the foundation began maintaining these child-centric data rankings in 1990, states received a comprehensive score in the Data Book, tracking a number of indicators from 2019 to 2024. Across the country, state education scores were the lowest of the four categories — education, health, economic well-being and family and community.

Louisiana and Mississippi were the only states to make progress in education during the five-year period, according to the KIDS COUNT data. The Data Book attributes the state’s success to investing in teacher training, strengthening early education infrastructure and passing the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. Experts say that helped raise reading proficiency among the state’s youngest students. 

“Mississippi’s continued progress is the result of effective work by our educators, supportive families throughout the years and strong policies,” said Lance Evans, state superintendent of education, in a press release about the KIDS COUNT data. “We are proud of this milestone and remain committed to building on it for Mississippi students.”

Chronic absenteeism, however, remains an issue across the country and in Mississippi. The Data Book notes that chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% of the school year or 18 school days, among Mississippi students is 27.6% — more than double what was reported immediately prior to the pandemic.

State leaders have increasingly expressed concern about the chronic absenteeism rates in Mississippi. Absenteeism is directly tied to student achievement, and small schools in high-poverty districts are especially impacted.

Despite the state’s performance in education, Mississippi is still dead last in child health outcomes and had one of the sharpest drops in child health outcomes since 2019, according to the report.

Sheils said the findings were bittersweet. Her organization helps produce a  for the data each year, which provides county-specific information for local communities.

“You see the numbers and you have that moment of, ‘Should we just pack up and go home?’ ” she said. “There’s definitely disappointment … We must improve and do better for our children.”

But over 40% of those planning to launch new schools in the coming years are Black, according to the latest national report on the growing sector of small, unconventional learning programs. Just 18% of current school founders are Black.

New leaders include Monette Mottenon, a retired educator who will open in Montgomery, Alabama, this summer. It’s a goal she’s had for 15 years, ever since realizing her middle schoolers would “bomb the test” because they could barely read.

“They knew the material, but they couldn’t understand what the questions were asking,” she said. When she learned more about microschools at a conference in Atlanta, she thought, “I have found my people.”

The National Microschooling Center’s annual update also shows that a slightly higher percentage of Asian and Hispanic leaders plan to open microschools. The latest analysis doesn’t include the racial and ethnic makeup of students served, but Don Soifer, the center’s CEO, plans to gather that data in the future. 

Microschools are “shifting to more closely reflect the communities in which they operate,” he said. One reason is because “leadership positions for educators of color are lacking in many communities and states.”

The report, based on a survey of 1,000 microschools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, also covers topics such as tuition, enrollment and government regulations. Here are some of the other top findings:

Half of all microschools receive more than a quarter of their tuition funds from state private school choice programs.

That’s a big increase over last year, when 38% of microschool leaders said their students use state school choice funds, like education savings accounts. Another 18% said they have students who use an ESA for a portion of tuition and pay the rest themselves.

Soifer attributed the jump to the proliferation of ESA programs like , which went into effect this school year, and the addition of more survey respondents in states with existing ESA programs.

Next year, the percentage could be even higher. Texas’ program launches this fall. In addition, during this year’s legislative season, a restriction on microschools participating in the state’s private school choice program. 

In South Carolina, however, some families are in limbo. The state has allowed one segment of homeschoolers, known as “unbundlers,” to receive ESA funds. These families often supplement homeschooling with a couple days a week in a microschool. But lawmakers are that would lock unbundlers out of the program. Some homeschool advocates, worried about government involvement in homeschooling, pushed for that provision in the law. 

Over 1,000 families are now “eagerly waiting and wondering” what the legislature will do, said Ryan Dellinger, director of education policy at the Palmetto Promise Institute, a school choice advocacy group. If the proposal passes, the unbundlers might be restricted to homeschooling only or “may need to scramble to get themselves on a waiting list and find a private school or a charter school” for the fall, he said. 

Future microschool leaders are heavily focused on nonacademic learning.

In a subsample of 199 “prelaunch” founders, 172 said their greatest hope for students is growth in nonacademic learning. Specific skills might depend on the school’s model, Soifer said, but would likely range from self-management and social awareness to resilience and workforce readiness. That category was followed by 163 who said students’ academic proficiency or mastery was their top goal. 

A from the center last December highlighted a few schools using online platforms, such as IXL and i-Ready, to track progress.

But the field still lacks independent comparisons between microschool students and their peers in traditional schools. Last year, the Rand Corp. said it was “nearly impossible” to measure the impact of attending a microschool on students’ academic outcomes. A lot of schools didn’t have enough assessment data to determine growth in reading and math over time.

1 in 5 microschools have been open at least six years.

The largest share, 45%, have been in operation for three to five years. While the movement exploded during the pandemic, the numbers show that the small programs are more than a short-term solution to a crisis. 

The Success Center, operating out of a former courthouse in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, began as a tutoring service and expanded to offer a microschool when COVID hit. Joining the state’s independent school association was a way to “avoid looking like we just put out a shingle,” said Alicia Dickerson, who co-founded the program with her husband Doug. 

The small schools can also form close relationships with families, which contribute to a longer lifespan for a program, Alicia said. According to the report, the majority of current microschool leaders, 70%, said they expect to operate for 10 years or more.

Those who have closed their microschools are staying in the business.

Microschools shut down for a variety of reasons. The lease on a facility might run out, or the founders’ children age out of the program, Soifer said. 

Some leaders lack the skills to run a business, said Allison Serafin, vice president of the Building Hope Impact Fund, which offers loans and financial tools to founders. Tasks like budgeting, invoicing and getting business insurance are time-consuming, she said, “but they make the business durable.”

But 78% of former microschool leaders said they’re still part of the movement.

With a background in management consulting, Sheila Banister didn’t struggle with the administrative aspects of the microschool she co-launched in the Huntsville, Alabama, area during the pandemic. But there were other rough patches.

“It’s definitely a challenge finding a teacher who is willing to teach in this type of environment because it’s so different from public school,” she said. The teacher they hired had experience in early childhood, but lacked the skills to teach higher-level math skills to older students. 

Banister’s expectations for the program also didn’t line up with those of the other parents who co-founded the school. 

“I think they wanted more of a co-op experience, not necessarily focused on academic growth,” Banister said.

They decided to discontinue the program at the end of this school year. But Banister said she still believes in the microschool approach. She leads the state’s affiliate of Love Your School, a nonprofit school choice advocacy organization that began in Arizona, and coaches prospective founders on administrative aspects of the business, like how to incorporate.

Like many former microschool leaders, she said opening another one is “not off the table.” 

Public microschools are bigger than private ones.

The median number of students attending private microschools is 20. But with more districts and charter schools launching small, individualized programs, this year’s report notes that the median enrollment figure for public microschools is 30. 

There’s growing interest from public school leaders in opening microschools. Some examples include in Middletown, New York, in the Hudson Valley region, and a new in the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank district in North Carolina. But Soifer said it’s too early to get an accurate count. 

The Eastern Hancock district, in a rural community outside Indianapolis, enrolled 62 students in Nature’s Gift Microschool this school year, with 140 students on a waitlist. Several more public microschools will launch across Indiana this fall, and Superintendent George Philhower said he’s “in discussions” about creating a multi-state collaborative.

The term microschool, he said, has more to do with a “mindset” that emphasizes personalization and flexibility than with a specific enrollment number.

93 hours per year — that’s the average amount of time microschool leaders spend on compliance issues.

Getting government approval, whether that’s obtaining a business license or passing an inspection, takes up about 20% of that time, the respondents said. Business permits, zoning and facility regulations, and fire or safety code requirements top the regulatory categories that microschool leaders would like to see eliminated.

While standardized test requirements and ESA reporting rules only apply to some microschools, 8% of founders said they would like to see these requirements go away. 

School choice advocates argue that state and local laws haven’t kept up with the . The Institute for Justice, for example, which has won major school choice cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, also provides legal assistance to microschool founders originally meant for traditional schools.  

of the movement say those rules exist to protect students and that if microschools receive ESA funds, the public should know how the money is spent and whether children are learning.

Some states have tried to make it easier for founders to open and operate. Because of a legislative change this year, microschools registered as private schools will be able to operate out of former churches, libraries or other community facilities without getting zoning changes or making facility improvements. 

But many other jurisdictions require extensive renovations to run a school during the week in the same church classrooms used for Sunday school, Serafin said. 

“Life safety is critical, no argument there,” she said. “But I’m not sure the International Building Code leaders or local planning commissions envisioned a world of 20- to 50-student schools.”

Newly released data from America’s longest-running measure of student learning have delivered a decidedly split verdict on the state of schools.

Math and reading scores from the “Long-Term Trends” edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federally administered test commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — offer some of the first proof of recovery from COVID-era learning loss, with the average 9-year-old improving by 4 points since 2022. Surprisingly, those gains were driven in large measure by struggling students, who enjoyed their first major leap in several decades. 

But 13-year-olds made no similar progress, with scores in both subjects flat or declining for virtually every demographic group. Average performance in reading for these students was no higher than in 1971, when the exam was first conducted.

The differing trajectories underline a critical split among U.S. pupils in 2026. The youngest test takers were still in preschool when COVID-19 emerged, and largely avoided the most severe educational consequences of the public health emergency. But today’s middle schoolers were second- and third-graders at the beginning of the pandemic, which led to several years of school closures and virtual instruction in many areas of the country. As this micro-generation of children proceeds through their K–12 careers, they bear the scars of that upheaval.

Kirsten Baesler, who leads the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, said she was “very excited” by the progress made by 9-year-olds, while adding that the prolonged stagnation experienced by teenagers was somewhat predictable.

“They were in some of their most formative years of both literacy and numeracy [at the onset of the pandemic], and it was a seismic event,” she said in an interview. “It’s going to take equally seismic effort to ensure that those students are coming back to where they need to be.”

Learning recession

Others placed the downturn on a timeline extending much earlier than 2020. John White, Louisiana’s former state superintendent for public instruction, argued that Wednesday’s revelations were consistent with earlier research showing that students transitioning from elementary to middle school have had “a particularly hard decade-plus.” A recent analysis from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford labeled the period since 2012, marked by declining achievement for all but the top students, as a “learning recession.”

“We have plenty of evidence that [a] learning recession in the middle grades predates the pandemic,” said White, now serving as CEO of the educational publisher Great Minds. “You can imagine two compounding problems: One, a general challenge in the success that American schools are having with adolescents, and two, a pandemic that hit this group of soon-to-be adolescents particularly squarely.”

Both core subjects showed signs of the division between younger and older students. 

After seeing a 4-point boost since the last version of the Long-Term Trends test, 9-year-olds have now caught up to their performance level in reading from before COVID. Their average score is now 10 points higher, on a 500-point scale, than in 1971 — if not a gargantuan leap, at least measurable upward movement. In math, while significantly lower than the pre-COVID status quo, average scores are 19 points higher than in the late 1970s.

Remarkably, growth over the past few years has been powered overwhelmingly by the students performing at the lowest levels. Nine-year-olds scoring at the 25th percentile (i.e., lower than three-quarters of their same-age peers) made strides of 7 points in math and 6 points in reading since 2022; those at the 10th percentile gained even more ground, ascending by 9 points in math and 8 points in reading. That momentum flies in the face of the defining pattern of the 2010s, when only the highest-performing NAEP participants posted significant gains.

By contrast, the average performance of 13-year-olds has remained flat since 2022, and is statistically worse than in 2020. Even among those scoring at the 75th and 90th percentiles in math have endured a significant dropoff during that time.

In 2012, 85% of test takers in the older age group exceeded 250 points in math, a benchmark signaling their ability to solve one-step word problems involving addition and subtraction; in the most recent iteration of the exam, only 70% met that standard. The share of 13-year-olds scoring 250 or higher in reading fell from 66% to just 58% over the same period.

There was little variation between NAEP participants of various demographic categories, with children from various racial and socioeconomic groups generally following the same trajectories. But one notable exception related to sex: While nine-year-olds surpassed their overall results from 2022, only boys made statistically significant gains, jumping by an average of 7 points in reading and 5 points in math. Girls improved by a single point in reading and 3 points in math. 

Drop in reading for pleasure

A few other secondary findings were drawn from a survey traditionally accompanying the exam, which generates thousands of student observations in order to construct a representative picture of their day-to-day experiences. Responses revealed that in-school attendance is still much lower than before the pandemic, with the proportion of 13-year-olds absent at least one day in the previous month climbing from 44% in 2012 to 61% in 2025. Meanwhile, the fraction of 9-year-olds saying they’d been assigned no homework the previous night rose from 19% to 39% over the past two decades.

Perhaps most striking of all, far fewer students reported that they routinely read in their downtime. Just 37% of 9-year-olds, and 14% of 13-year-olds, said they read for fun “almost every day” in 2025; those numbers peaked at 58% and 37%, respectively, over 30 years ago.

Education leadership consultant Julia Rafal-Baer is a member of the National Assessments Governing Board, the entity that helps design and administer NAEP. She observed that the reading results are indicative of a widespread and concerning decline in literacy that is likely linked to increased use of smartphones and social media.

“We’ve got to put real books back into kids’ hands,” Rafal-Baer said. “Libraries matter so much, and we’ve got to have adults helping kids to be curious.”

The importance of the Long-Term Trends exam, she continued, lay in its consistency over time: The test has presented students with similar content, in a paper-and-pencil format, for a half-century. Even amid the education community’s often-loud debates over curriculum and accountability, the same fundamental skills have been assessed and recorded. In her view, that makes this version of NAEP “the closest thing we have to a long-term memory of how kids are doing.”

“There have been periods of time when we really did see growth,” Rafal-Baer reflected. “We were climbing for decades, and then we peaked around 2012 and have dropped ever since.” 

Bringing the ‘clouds in’ 

For Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist who sat on the governing board from 2019 to 2023, the lengthy slide in student outcomes is the central phenomenon of K–12 schooling since the Obama administration. Even the apparent progress made by the youngest group of test takers has not dislodged his view that transformative changes are needed for the education system to turn things around.

“Every time we see a little bright spot about what 9-year-olds are doing, for example, people jump on it as though it’s a long-run trend,” Hanushek said. “It’s going to take a lot to convince me that we’re not still in a general downhill slide, even with some nice green shoots here and there.”

A longtime skeptic of various school improvement efforts, he noted the long list of policies adopted throughout the U.S. since NAEP debuted, from increasing per-pupil spending to reducing class sizes to heightening academic accountability requirements. While some growth had been achieved, particularly in math, his assessment of the situation was largely disappointing.

“I’m here to bring the clouds in,” he joked.

Beyond the immediate questions of student learning, some ambiguity even surrounds the future of the test itself. Baesler voiced some doubts about the validity of the Long-Term Trends assessment, noting that its testing format and some of its content could be seen as antiquated by today’s standards. The disjunction between some of the verbiage and expectations of the Ford administration and those of the Trump era may argue for an update, she continued.

At the outset of Trump’s second term, rumors circulated Washington of a forthcoming purge of NAEP exams, possibly to include Long-Term Trends. The assessment for 17-year-olds was, in fact, cancelled early last year.

“There is discussion being had” about the fate of the test going forward, Baesler said.

“There needs to be serious consideration whether we should continue the Long-Term Trends, whether it is valid and accurate.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the peak percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who read routinely for pleasure, as well as the date at which they reached that peak.