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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Paying the piper’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Random tutoring’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attendance throughout history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best ways to count

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

There was no single reason why Ryan Higgins decided to leave teaching.

It was a job he loved: invigorating, unpredictable, a chance to make the world a bit better. But several years into his career, Higgins, who taught high school social studies in the Fort Worth, Texas area, was increasingly frustrated.

For one, his salary — decent when he was fresh out of college in 2016 — felt stagnant and mediocre. He coached basketball and football, so his days often stretched from early morning to late evening. And “teacher appreciation week” began to feel borderline demeaning: You can wear jeans all week! There’s free pizza in the teachers’ lounge!

Then there was the time a parent complained after he chewed out and benched a member of the basketball team who was slacking off. The school’s assistant principal didn’t back Higgins up. Yes, maybe he had been a bit too tough, but he was also giving up his Saturdays, doing students’ laundry, and even driving the bus.

“You’re running around like crazy trying to solve problems, and yet people who aren’t with you are always telling you what you need to do better,” Higgins says.

What finally pushed him out was the aftermath of the pandemic. Trying to effectively teach students over Zoom was all but impossible. Then when students returned to classrooms, they were breathtakingly behind academically and socially. Behavior was out of control. Parents, it seemed, were less trusting of teachers, too. “It felt like the walls were closing in,” he says.

Higgins left teaching in the summer of 2022. A member of the Army Reserve, he soon took an assignment overseas. Today, he’s going into his third year of law school. He sees himself as part of a “lost generation” of teachers.

The year Higgins left, more teachers departed public school classrooms in Texas than at any point since at least 2007, the earliest year with state data. This was not just a blip: From 2020 to 2025, the state lost 35,000 teachers who would have stayed in the classroom if the state had maintained its pre-pandemic turnover figures. That’s equivalent to nearly 10% of the current teacher workforce.

The pattern in Texas has repeated to varying degrees in states across the country, according to an extensive Chalkbeat analysis of data since 2019 spanning 21 states. Most of those states have experienced four to five straight years of elevated teacher turnover, compounding the losses year after year. High-poverty schools in particular were already having a hard time keeping teachers.

Even though turnover finally appears to be trending down, the consequences persist. Research has to . At a moment when policymakers are seeking to , the loss of teachers and instability in schools deserves to be on the list of plausible contributors.

[See our  including detailed data from each state. You can also  about teacher turnover.]

A teacher turnover dip, then a sustained rise

There is no comprehensive national data on teacher exit rates. To fill this gap, I conducted an extensive state-by-state review, using a variety of sources.

Across most states, a pattern emerged: Compared with 2019, fewer teachers left in the summer of 2020 when the economy was at a standstill due to the pandemic. But then . Rates peaked in 2022 but typically remained elevated for the next couple years.

Only a couple of states in this analysis, Connecticut and Maryland, avoided any meaningful rise in turnover.

A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said the state has “experienced many of the workforce challenges seen nationwide, which is why teacher recruitment and retention remain a priority.” Texas, for instance, has expanded a merit pay program, which , according to a recent study.

High-poverty schools, which struggled with teacher churn before the pandemic, likely suffered the most from the turnover spike. In South Carolina, for instance, exit rates rose especially sharply at those schools. A number of states have reported increases in , , and educators. Those teachers are typically concentrated in high-poverty schools.

It hasn’t just been teachers departing. In , , , , and principal attrition rose too. Turnover often has a cascading effect in schools. When a principal leaves, an assistant principal may take over, a teacher may become an assistant principal — and another classroom vacancy opens up.

Justin Wax became principal of a junior high school in southeast Louisiana in 2021. He was the third leader in three years. That made keeping staff harder since many were looking for stability at that moment. Most of the teachers who were at the school when he started are now gone. “You’re scraping the cream off of the top of all of the most veteran people,” Wax says. “There ends up being a vacuum.”

Turnover appears to be finally coming . In the 12 states with figures through last summer, rates were below post-pandemic highs, although some places have not fully returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Wax says he’s had his best year of retention recently and is well staffed going into this coming school year. He’s prioritized making his school a supportive community where teachers are given professional autonomy and backed up on student discipline issues. Today, surveys show that from pandemic-era spikes. Most teachers are at least somewhat with their jobs.

More comprehensive recent data on turnover is not available because many states report figures with a significant lag. Other states numbers at all. And no state appears to have data yet for the share of teachers who have left this summer.

Teachers face worse behavior, stagnant pay, fewer perks

What drove the sharp increase in teacher exits?

Meghann Seril has been teaching elementary school in Los Angeles for 18 years. These days, she finds students’ behavior more challenging and their attention spans more limited. She’s seen many colleagues who struggled with classroom management leave in recent years.

“It has such a ripple effect because the administrator is focused on supporting those new teachers,” she says. “You’re working on putting out little fires all of the time.” In surveys, teachers that student behavior is their , and many reported that behavioral issues after school buildings reopened.

Meanwhile, many other professionals have received a new perk since the pandemic: the ability to work from home. “Being a teacher is arguably the least flexible job around,” says Alex Baron, principal of a charter middle school in Washington, D.C. He suspects that’s made it difficult to recruit and retain teachers in his school.

At the same time, teacher salaries, never particularly high, have in real dollars, as inflation soared and school officials used new funds to rather than give teachers a raise. The salary gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals in recent years.

Tyra Damm’s decision to leave teaching came down to money. Some of her colleagues with higher-earning spouses saw teaching as a nice-to-have second income. One called it “fun money.” Damm, who lives in the Dallas suburbs, did not have that luxury. She took up teaching in 2013, soon after her husband died of brain cancer. She figured it would provide a stable income with a parent-friendly schedule as she raised two young children.

She loved the job. Damm most recently taught middle school reading and writing to gifted and talented students and was named secondary teacher of the year in her district in 2019. But with only anemic raises and the price of everything rising, “I just couldn’t pay the bills anymore,” she says.

When the American Heart Association, which she had done freelance writing for, offered her a full-time job with remote work and higher pay, Damm felt like she had no choice but to take it. She left teaching in 2024.

“I miss it every day,” she says.

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

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. to follow our work.

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.”

In exchange, each teacher-leader earns substantially more — without leaving the classroom.

The idea grew out of an emerging staffing model called , now in its fourth year in the Carlsbad Municipal School District. It’s reshaping how schools there and elsewhere deploy teachers.

In one model, a “core team” of two to six skilled teachers — at least one of whom is a special education teacher — teach classes of 50 to 100 students, with assistance from aides and volunteers. 

Since Opportunity Culture emerged more than a decade ago, it has spread to more than . At its core is a teacher known as a Multi-Classroom Leader or MCL — a master teacher who takes on formal responsibility for coaching up to eight colleagues while keeping their own classroom. They get a bump in salary that can be significant, said Allison Hervol, who oversees curriculum and instruction for Carlsbad. “Some of our MCLs make close to, if not more than, what their principal makes,” she said. 

The key is that these teachers aren’t pulled out of the classroom entirely. An MCL coaching three teachers might still teach for four hours a day. That avoids creating teacher vacancies in an already tight labor market.

The structure grew out of a model developed by the North Carolina-based around 2013, but it has only recently earned wider attention. Before 2013, Public Impact was “a multi-topic consulting and research organization,” said , the organization’s co-president. It soon pivoted to trying to optimize teacher roles, time and pay.

, an assistant professor and Head of Innovation and Policy Initiatives at Arizona State University, is careful to note that the idea of strategic staffing isn’t actually new, pointing to team-teaching experiments dating to the 1960s and ’70s, when districts short on trained staff began recruiting “homeroom moms” to help manage classroom data — a role that eventually evolved into the modern . 

What is new, he said, is the technology available to make those teams work well: tools for grouping students, tracking data and designing roles that didn’t exist 40 or 50 years ago

of strategic staffing insists on at least two certified educators at the core of a team, with paraeducators, community members or part-time teachers added as needed. Most importantly, he said, staffing decisions must map directly onto a school’s actual instructional priorities: If a school wants to raise math achievement, for instance, it should build math teams.

While it seems self-evident, he said, the key is to have priorities in the first place.

‘A mentor teacher isn’t anything new’ 

In December 2023, the consulting firm , which helped popularize new teacher models, laid out the pressures pushing schools toward them. On the student side, it pointed to steep pandemic-era drops in NAEP scores, including an eight-point decline in eighth-grade reading between 2019 and 2022. 

On the staffing side, it found that teachers were earning about 24% less than similarly educated peers, with nearly one in five working a second job. Giving effective teachers more pay, more influence and a better reason to stick around, it concluded, could help solve both problems.

By then, Opportunity Culture had already reached more than 800 schools, encompassing over 5,400 teachers and 150,000 students. The data also suggested that the model could turn average teachers into excellent — or nearly excellent — ones. 

And it proved popular with teachers: 97% of MCLs and 87% of teammates wanted to keep using Opportunity Culture the following year.

MCLs earn roughly 20% above typical teacher pay, according to Public Impact’s Hassel.

The model has grown well beyond a handful of pilot districts: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina now runs it in 179 schools, amounting to nearly every building.

Carlsbad’s Hervol said keeping proven teachers in the classroom not only preserves their direct impact on students — it also builds trust among teachers, who would rather be coached by a colleague than a trainer from central office. 

The district also paired the rollout with Doug Lemov’s framework, with teachers retaining freedom over their own rooms.

The results, Hervol said, have been hard to ignore. At one elementary school, fourth-grade reading proficiency climbed from around 35% to 68%, with higher scores at “almost all of our campuses” that have implemented the Opportunity Culture framework. 

In North Carolina, which a decade ago began piloting a teacher-leader program, 76% of participating schools showed higher growth scores on state tests, compared to 45% of comparison schools. And teacher turnover dropped to just 1% to 3% in the pilot schools, compared with 7.5% to 9% statewide.

‘It’s really working’

In her first year as an MCL, Michele Cope coached eight teachers at her Carlsbad middle school and said more than 61% of eighth graders scored proficient on New Mexico’s state test before, up from 18%.

What changed wasn’t any single technique as much as consistency across each building. “Think about every teacher in your hallway using the same structured supports, regardless of what they taught,” said Cope, who now helps lead training and retention efforts for the district. 

Misty Hightower, another former Carlsbad teacher who now coordinates Opportunity Culture programs in elementary schools district-wide, thought back to her first year as a coach. She was coaching eight teachers, and one colleague, a third-grade teacher, was “not interested in it at all.” 

But at the end of the year the teacher saw his student performance data and something shifted. Once he saw that consistency worked — that “the kids would actually learn if that consistency was there,” he became a believer.

Two years later, he applied to be an MCL and eventually took over for Hightower when she moved into her new job. “It clicked with him,” she said, “and he absolutely loves his job.”

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.”

Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers since 2020, was selected Wednesday to lead the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation. The Indiana state legislature created that board earlier in the  year, over opposition from the school district, to give charters a greater say in running the city’s schools.

Rausch, who led the Indianapolis mayor’s education office from 2007 to 2011, will now guide efforts to increase the share of local taxes going to charter schools, create a joint district-charter bus system and find ways to close and share school buildings. The city now has 50,000 school seats for just 41,000 students, a costly surplus of 9,000 seats.

He’ll take the position this fall in the middle of a campaign to pass a tax increase in the November election that will be split equally between the school district and charter schools. That sharing of taxes was mandated by the state legislature after bitter fights between district and charter supporters.

Rausch, a resident of Indianapolis since 2000, told the IPEC board before the vote that he considers himself a “bridge-builder” who will work with both the district and charters. He said the Indianapolis Public Schools has expertise he hopes to tap into.

“I was not looking for a new opportunity,” Rausch told 91ɬ�� after the vote. “I love the work and impact we are making at NACSA. This opportunity was very unique and a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to be the founding executive director, allowing me to help make a transformative difference in Indianapolis.” 

IPEC board member Patricia Castaneda said she believes Rausch is “answering the call of community” in leaving his national post for the job.

“It is not often that someone comes home to their community to do the work that they have so successfully done across not only the state, the city, the state, but also the nation, and that is encouraging to me,” said Castaneda, former chair of a charter school network in the city.

Board member John Hammond said he is happy Rausch wants to “help us lead a very special effort here that is unique in the country.”

“I think he understands the special circumstance that we’re in as a community… and the balance that needs to be struck as we kind of move into a new era, and understands both sides and all sides of the equation,” Hammond said.

Rausch’s selection continues a push, driven by Republican state legislators, to shift more control of schools in Indianapolis from the school district to charter schools, which have gained so many students in recent years that Indianapolis is one of nationwide where more than half of students attend charters 

The legislature’s creation of IPEC, whose members are appointed by the mayor instead of elected like the district school board, moves power away from the school board. 

The tax increase on the November ballot, for example, previously would have been sought by the district just for district schools. Now, only IPEC can ask voters to approve taxes for both the district and charters.

Experts said earlier this year that Indianapolis is rivaling New Orleans, the most charter-friendly city in the country, in its support of charter schools. Charter supporters say the majority of students deserve more say and to close a gap in funding for district schools and charter schools, while critics say IPEC threatens to drain money and resources from district schools. 

Though IPEC members, by law, include members of Indianapolis Public Schools’ board, it still leans heavily pro-charter. A majority of its members have worked for or served on boards of charter schools. Its chairman, David Harris is founder of several charter schools and led the Mind Trust, a local advocate of charter schools, until 2018. 

The selection of Rausch continues that pattern.

Rausch, who has a PhD from Indiana University, was director of the city’s Office of Education Innovation under two Indianapolis mayors from 2007 to 2011. He then was director of Stand for Children, an education advocacy group in the city, before later joining NACSA as vice president of research and evaluation in 2014. 

Long story short, our divisions and the dysfunctional governance are painfully, visibly real. 

As we start the country’s 251st year, we need to restore public confidence in the effectiveness and legitimacy of our whole political system. That starts by showing the country that American public institutions can work, that they can do the jobs that our democratic officials set for them — and deliver the opportunities and outcomes that the public expects of them. 

We need a firm commitment to public accountability in every possible sense. That means more firmly committing to holding our public systems — including K–12 education — accountable to serving public goals. 

Sure, the solution to America’s flagging social cohesion must be more than new school accountability pilot programs. Of course. That would be like bringing a screwdriver to a hazmat cleanup. Our social tensions are far beyond . 

But the depth and breadth of America’s problems now are also why school reforms have a role in resolving our troubles. Public education is uniquely central to the most elemental promises of our 250-year-old creed. If America means anything, it means that people who work hard, follow the rules and find solutions to persistent problems get rewarded. Public schools are our most tangible collective commitment to that promised — however imperfectly — American Dream. Surely that’s something we can all agree on. 

Indeed, if Americans are divided now, it’s at least partly because that basic bargain isn’t as robust as it once was. A kid who grinds out years of K–12 schooling now can’t count on a . Work hard now, and she still might not be able to cover her health care costs, let alone buy a house where there are good jobs or save up for retirement. 

Young Americans feel the frustration. , the share of young Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track has been three to four times greater than the share of young Americans who think we’re going in the right direction. What’s more, just 30% of respondents said that they expect to do better than their parents, financially speaking. also broad pessimism about public schools.

A path forward for schools will require rebuilding public confidence in the public education system’s ability to deliver upward mobility to students — to future graduates — who show up, work hard and follow the rules. 

How? Local, state and federal policymakers need to set compelling, transparent goals for K–12 systems that reflect families’ actual priorities for kids and schools. For instance, fashionable as it might be to posit that public education needs to be remade with AI and other ed tech tools, about in schools is growing. Leaders can’t persuade families that schools are on the right track by ignoring the things families really want. 

And what might those be? While recently took to The New York Times’ opinion page to argue against the country’s accountability focus on math and reading scores under No Child Left Behind, it’s worth exploring whether Wiener has his finger fully on the public pulse. After all, when the Pew Research Center asked what’s taking schools in the wrong direction, more parents — — said that “schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.” 

I’ve long suspected that the pandemic reset American families’ views on schools and testing. Months of uncertain instruction and learning — and a drumbeat of media coverage about the pandemic’s impacts on student learning — left many families eager for more information about how their children were faring. Without some sort of standardized assessment, it’s almost impossible to efficiently track how students are doing. This is easier to appreciate after a major disruption like the pandemic — subjective evaluations or holistic, local rubrics are unlikely to provide useful, comparable data on students’ progress. 

We might not want to return to No Child Left Behind, but education leaders should consider whether schools need stronger incentives to get kids on track in core subjects. It’s not enough to establish public education goals — policymakers also need to make them matter for schools and educators. Whichever priorities we set for schools, we need to 1) track their progress towards these, and 2) build systems that provide resources and pressure for educators to prioritize that progress. 

To work best, accountability requires clarity about the outcomes we want to see. Effective school accountability systems need goals for student growth and benchmarks for academic achievement in each grade. Data on schools’ progress towards those goals should be published in easily accessible formats. Schools that persistently fall short shouldn’t be punished as they might have been under No Child Left Behind — instead, they should be given supplemental resources with strict strings attached that lead to meaningful school-level changes that will support better student learning. 

That’s accountability, and it’s a key element for building trust in public systems. 

If policymakers want Americans to believe in public institutions, they need to build safeguards like these for showing how these institutions serve the public interest. Notably, the simple, blunt, unlovely, unloved, imperfect No Child Left Behind accountability era coincided with , including for . 

Then, after — over my warnings, for what it’s worth — Congress replaced those priorities with a much looser, lower-accountability system under the Every Student Succeeds Act, . (For the record, I was unimpressed, even back then.)

A quarter millennium’s a long time, during which the American experiment has substantially evolved more than once. Like the 2026 reflecting pool — which has been — our collective project needs much more than a fresh coat of paint. 

To move forward, we need to reduce our suspicions of one another, increase our levels of social trust and reimagine just what it is we’re trying to be together as a country. That means rebuilding trust in public, democratically accountable systems. Where better to rebuild that faith than in public education?

The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations.

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.”

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.”

If communities continue treating facility investment as a secondary concern, they should not be surprised when families decide those schools are no longer the best place to educate their children.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has given for three consecutive report cards, while the rest of the country’s infrastructure improved. Nearly four in 10 public school buildings were constructed before 1970. The funding gap to bring them up to a functional standard now stands at an estimated $429 billion — and it keeps growing because communities keep deferring the problem.

On the ground, that deferred maintenance looks like leaking roofs, asbestos ceiling tiles and mold scraped from between wall coverings. It looks like parking lots full of potholes, playgrounds with rusted equipment, and classrooms that are too hot in summer or too cold in winter because the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems failed years ago.

Another similarity most of these buildings share is a lack of any real technology infrastructure in an era when students cannot learn without one.

The physical condition of a school building is one of the primary drivers of the educational experience delivered inside it. And the research is catching up to what communities have been living with for years.

The economist Julien LaFortune, working with the Public Policy Institute of California, studied school facility investment using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and in test scores, attendance and surrounding property values after new school buildings were constructed.

What made LaFortune’s findings notable was that the gains were not primarily explained by changes in class size, teachers, principals or student composition. When researchers stripped away every other variable, what was left was the building. By his analysis, for every dollar invested in school facilities, the program increased housing values.

Research going back two decades has documented a between facility condition and teacher retention. When a school building deteriorates, the teachers with the most options leave first. The ones who stay are often the ones with nowhere else to go.

When a school is modernized, that dynamic reverses. Qualified educators who previously passed over the school begin applying, while teachers who are already there choose to stay. The result is a more experienced, more committed faculty working with better tools in a better environment — and students who receive stronger instruction as a direct consequence.

That instructional improvement shows up in measurable ways. Students in modernized facilities score higher on standardized assessments and miss fewer days of school. Researchers saw this trend emerge during COVID, when they first noted the correlation between better ventilation and . More recent studies have found that boosted math scores and reduced suspensions in schools — because student comfort matters. 

When those results become visible, other families in the community begin seeking out the school. As enrollment grows, schools gain the resources that come with a larger student population and the capacity to expand what they offer.

One example of this is the Detroit Public Safety Academy, a dropout recovery program. It’s a school designed specifically for students who have already left the system or are on the verge of leaving it. The program does not offer a GED. It instead delivers a full, certified high school diploma, the same credential that any other public school confers. Upon graduation, students walk directly into careers in public safety with real wages and real futures. The school now posts a 90% graduation rate among a population that had largely been written off, and Detroit’s public safety workforce has a pipeline it did not have before.

That model wouldn’t work in a building that is falling apart. The aging building underwent a dramatic renovation, which has enabled its success. Without it, the program wouldn’t exist, and those students wouldn’t have that pathway.

Modern workforce-development programs require modern facilities. A manufacturing lab equipped with computer-controlled machine tools and robotic arms requires purpose-built space that a building from 1963 cannot provide. Forty-seven states . More than 11 million students nationally. The demand exists. In too many communities, the buildings to support it do not.

As enrollment grows and school quality becomes visible to the broader community, the effects extend beyond the school itself. Families relocate to be within a school’s attendance boundary. That increased demand for housing near high-performing schools drives up property values.

By tracking housing markets near improved schools, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that roughly $20 in housing value accumulates for every additional dollar in per-pupil spending — a signal of how much families are willing to pay to be near a school that works.

We tend to describe declining enrollment as the cause of deteriorating schools, but the arrow may point the other way more often.

Families leave schools that no longer meet their expectations. They move to districts with better facilities or choose alternatives that have multiplied over the past decade. The school loses students, loses funding and deteriorates further. That cycle is not inevitable. Modernize the building, and the sequence can begin running in reverse.

The question is whether communities are willing to treat the building as the starting point rather than the last priority. Children only pass through the education system once. They should not spend those years waiting for adults to decide that the building matters.

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.

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.”