Weeks before the first day of school, teachers across Mississippi say state leaders have made it more difficult for them to access money for classroom supplies. 

Educators have to complete training before they’re able to spend the money the state gives them for classroom supplies, but teachers say the live training has been hard to access — the online meetings have been filled to capacity. Teachers also say that to buy from local vendors, they now have to go through an arduous reimbursement process. 

The money for teachers’ classroom supplies comes from the Education Enhancement Fund, or procurement card program. EEF, established in 2012, gives every K-12 public school teacher $748 — around $25 million in total — to buy supplies for their classrooms. But educators have long said they get the money too late for it to be useful. A report released last year by State Auditor Shad White’s office found that a bulk of the money is  as they prepare their classrooms because of the state-mandated Aug. 1 deadline to activate the cards.

This year, Mississippi Department of Education leaders said they wanted to  by giving districts access to the money on July 15 and switching from physical cards to a digital wallet platform.

The agency has a one-year $573,000 contract with the platform ClassWallet, according to Shanderia Minor, a spokesperson for the state Education Department. 

The new platform is used in several states and allows teachers to purchase supplies directly from online, pre-approved vendors. State Superintendent Lance Evans said ClassWallet streamlines the process of buying classroom supplies, and the change reflects input from school district leaders across Mississippi. 

One frustration for teachers is that many of the vendors they buy supplies from are , where teachers can spend their EEF money.

According to the state Education Department’s website, five Mississippi-based vendors are approved for teacher reimbursements, as are Walmart and TeachersPayTeachers, an online marketplace for classroom supplies. 

But teachers then have to spend their own money upfront. Additionally, their purchase must be approved before they can be reimbursed. 

If teachers want to buy from local vendors not included on that list, the state Department of Education must first contact that vendor to ensure they’ll give teachers itemized receipts and that the items will be tax exempt. Then the vendor will be added to the list, and teachers can submit reimbursement requests through ClassWallet.

Because of the administrative burden, educators are concerned they’ll have to wait weeks to get their money back.

“The words I’ve heard are ‘insane,’ ‘cumbersome,’ and ‘frustrating,’ ” said Kelly Riley, executive director of Mississippi Professional Educators. Riley said she’s received numerous emails from educators across the state who are confused by the new process and annoyed by the extra layers of bureaucracy. “There’s just a lot of unknowns at this point.”

White’s office  on social media Tuesday that the education agency has “misinformed the public” about the program and called on the state Education Department to rectify issues with the new process. 

“Teachers will again, through no fault of their own, have to spend their own funds to get classroom supplies while they’re forced to navigate through bureaucratic hoops to get the money promised to them,” the statement reads. “This should not be complicated.”

State Education Department officials say they’ve been communicating with districts for months, but some teachers say the change has caught them by surprise. Additionally, educators must first attend or watch one of five  scheduled this month before their district can activate their accounts. 

Many teachers say they were unable to access the first training on July 13. 

Marie Lane, a longtime special education teacher in north Mississippi, was one of those teachers waiting for the Zoom meeting to start on Monday. 

“At 8:40 a.m., I had my notebook out, my laptop plugging in, all excited,” she said. But as the 9 a.m. meeting started, Lane was still waiting to get in. She got a message a few minutes later that the webinar had reached capacity. 

Lane hopes she can get into one of the other meetings. She’s been gleaning what she can from other educators on social media. That’s how Lane realized how much the state was paying ClassWallet to administer the EEF program. 

“That really grates on my last nerve,” she said. “That’s money that could be spent in the classrooms for these kids.”

She’s doubtful she’ll get what she needs for her class — such as cups for paint to make learning more accessible for her students, a walkie-talkie to communicate with her assistant teacher, dim lamps for her students with sensory needs — before the first day of school on Aug. 3.

“There’s no way at this point I’ll be able to submit a list and get it by the time students are back,” she said. “Lots of times when you’re teaching and someone isn’t getting what we’re doing, you think, ‘If I could run to Walmart real quick for Play-Doh or beads, I could help them.’ But now, if we don’t want to spend our own money, we’re going to have to place an order, wait for it to be accepted and delivered.”

Lane plans to use the money she’s gotten from a recent yard sale and selling items on Facebook to buy the supplies she needs. 

“We as teachers have enough on our plate,” she said. “For special education teachers like me, it’s still required that our students meet certain standards. Meeting those without the supplies we need is going to be really tough.”

Riley said that’s a frustration being voiced by educators across the state. They’re also concerned about the platform’s vendor list, she said, which includes about 50 homeschool-centric vendors.

ClassWallet’s website promotes  and includes testimonials from homeschoolers and education savings account recipients across the country. 

Jean Cook, a spokesperson for the state education agency, said the homeschool vendors are included on ClassWallet’s list because the platform operates across the country. The Mississippi-specific vendor list will be updated weekly, according to the agency’s website. 

A  released by the education agency on Monday notes, “Many other states do not have programs like Mississippi’s that give teachers money to buy supplemental instructional materials for their individual classrooms.”

David Bates, a former teacher, is the owner of one of the Mississippi-approved vendors — Old School Learning Depot in Pascagoula. His business provides tutoring services for students after school and sells classroom supplies for teachers. In past years, Bates drove a bus packed with supplies to local schools, allowing teachers to buy in-person with their EEF cards without leaving school property. 

But now, he estimates that the new process will result in a $60,000 loss in revenue for his business because teachers will want to avoid spending their own money.

“For a mom-and-pop shop, that is a pretty big chunk of money,” he said. 

“I’m not combating change,” Bates said. “I just want the opportunity to be part of the change. I’m frustrated about last-minute rollout and last-minute communication about how to make this work for everyone.”

Keyana Hawthorne, an English teacher at Murrah High School in Jackson, was initially skeptical about the agency switching to ClassWallet. Now, she said she hates that she was right. 

Hawthorne plans to attend a training on July 28, which she said conflicts with the professional development she receives in the days leading up to school. Her students return July 29. 

As a result, all of her classroom supplies will come out of her own pocket this year, Hawthorne said. She’s planning to buy them in increments because she can’t afford to buy everything in one go. With two children of her own to buy school supplies for, Hawthorne said she’s overwhelmed, frustrated and disappointed. 

“This is pulling from my little budget, and it makes me question: How are we supposed to survive over here?” she said. “I’m so frustrated right now. This is what happens when teachers aren’t asked to sit at the tables where crucial decisions are being made.”

During the school year, Mānoa Heritage Center hosts students of all ages learning about native plants, Hawaiian culture and history. But on a recent summer morning, teachers donned name tags, explored the gardens and diligently took notes as they became students for the day. 

On Thursday, 20 educators gathered for a professional development workshop, spending the morning learning new games they could use to teach their students about native and invasive plants, climate change and natural resources. The workshop was hosted by Trees for Honolulu’s Future, Mānoa Heritage Center and Hanafuda Hawaiʻi, an organization dedicated to teaching a Japanese card game to local communities. 

Mālama Mānoa, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the heritage of Mānoa Valley, covered the costs of hosting the workshop and providing learning materials to teachers. Teachers received a $100 stipend courtesy of Mānoa Heritage Center. 

The morning started with a lively  – a card game named after the Hawaiian word for tree. The game requires participants to collect the right combination of cards representing the resources they need to grow trees like ʻulu or kukui. 

Some cards, pulled at random, provided valuable nutrients, like water or soil. Others described worst case scenarios and natural disasters, like wildfires, that could set players back and hinder their trees’ growth.��

“I’m learning that it’s hard to grow a tree!” one teacher said with a laugh as she drew a card informing her that she planted a tree too close to a building, leaving it with less sun to grow. 

The game moves quickly and typically takes five to 10 minutes, but it’s meant to spark deeper conversations among students, said Daniel Dinell, president of Trees for Honolulu’s Future. For example, he told teachers, students might reflect on how the����is threatening native plants or practice using the Hawaiian vocabulary printed on the cards — like wai for water or lā for sun.��

Game time continued as participants rotated to another station, where teachers scattered brightly colored Hanafuda cards across the table. The cards included illustrations of both native and invasive plants and animals to teach participants about Hawaiʻi’s ecosystem. For the next 30 minutes, teachers diligently worked to match similar cards, laughing as they accumulated points during the game and marveled at the detailed illustrations. 

Phillippe Fernandez-Brennan, a teacher at Hālau Ku Mana Public Charter School, said he’s excited to introduce the games into his classroom. It’s important for students to see native plants and the Hawaiian language represented in card games — and it’s a valuable opportunity to get kids off their phones so they can interact with one another, he said.��

“There’s joy in learning,” he said.

Mānoa Elementary School teacher Danielle Montano said she takes her fourth grade students to Mānoa Heritage Center every year to learn about native plants and invasive species. But attending the workshop has inspired her to incorporate new games in her lessons for the upcoming school year, she said. 

For example, Montano said, she’s interested in using parts of the kukui tree as a natural dye for some of her students’ projects after taking a tour of the center’s garden and learning more about the use of different plants. Students are eager to learn more about the environment and native plants, especially those that are growing in their own communities, she said. 

“They know what’s in their area,” she said. “It’s not just something far out of reach.”

This was originally published by . Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong is again joining a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education as it continues trying to end federal grants for school-based mental health services.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Tong joined a one year ago. That’s when the Department of Education initially discontinued the grants, arguing they reflected DEI priorities that fell afoul of the Trump administration’s new interpretation of civil rights law.

Tong and the other plaintiffs in December to get the money back, but the department only awarded six months’ worth of funding and added new “hoops” for grantees to jump through, according to from the attorney general’s office.

“Trump is taking money meant for our kids to bankroll ballrooms and tax breaks for billionaires. We’re going to keep fighting for as long as it takes to stop this cruelty and chaos,” Tong said in a statement.

The money came from the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which Congress passed after the shooting that year at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. A five-year, $3 million grant went to the University of Connecticut to support 25 social work graduate students providing mental health services in schools in Hartford, New Britain, Waterbury and Vernon.

According to the attorney general’s office, the grant money — which totaled $1 billion nationwide — has allowed for the hiring of 1,300 mental health professionals and supported 775,000 K-12 students across the country. Participating high-need schools have seen suicide rates drop by half and a reduction in other problematic behaviors. Students have also reported shorter wait-times for services.

Despite the ongoing injunction, the Department of Education is still trying to end those grants permanently — but under a different section of administrative law.

The first time around, the department tried to use 34 C.F.R. § 75.253 to say it had the power to “discontinue” the grants. A federal appeals court ruled the government hadn’t followed the correct procedure, forcing it to release some of the frozen funds. Now, the department is saying it can still “terminate” the grants under 2 C.F.R. § 200.340, despite the previous decision.

“The Department does not believe that a decision to terminate a grant agreement, as distinguished from a decision not to continue a multi-year grant agreement into a subsequent calendar year, is affected by the Court’s December 19, 2025 injunction,” the department wrote in a motion it filed in the case June 10.

A hearing on whether “termination” and “discontinuation” are meaningfully distinct is set for July 24. According to the motion, if the court agrees the injunction does not cover the termination statute, the department could begin ending grants as early as July 31.

That’s why the plaintiffs, including Tong, have sued again, this time arguing the government cannot use § 200.340 to terminate grants, either. By filing a new lawsuit “protectively,” the plaintiffs hope to “secure a new injunction” regardless of what happens with the government’s June 10 motion. The new injunction would presumably prevent the Department of Education from following through on its plans to start terminating grants on July 31.

The Department of Education did not return a request for comment in time for publication.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

California’s latest budget includes $116 million over three years to help schools identify and support students experiencing homelessness — the first time the state has dedicated funding specifically for this purpose.

Homeless student advocates welcomed the investment after years of lobbying lawmakers to supplement the federal dollars California gets annually to address student homelessness. However, advocates cautioned that one-time funding will only go so far to address the long-term problem of student homelessness.

Nearly 300,000 students in California were identified as experiencing homelessness in 2024-25, according to state data. However, homeless student advocates say that number is likely an undercount because it’s challenging to identify homeless students. With dedicated funding, schools can hire specialized staff trained to identify students facing housing instability and develop longer-term support programs.

“There is a great need, but the hard part with this population is you have to find them and identify them, and we have never funded that,” said Margaret Olmos, senior director at the National Center for Youth Law.

For years, Olmos and other advocates urged California lawmakers to provide state funding dedicated to homeless students, arguing that the federal McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act — about $15 million annually to California — was insufficient to meet districts’ needs.

This year’s 2026-27 budget includes a one-time, three-year competitive grant program totaling $116 million. Although advocates had hoped for an ongoing funding stream, they called the allocation a significant step forward.

“Short-term money is very, very difficult for schools to utilize,” Olmos said.

Why dedicated funding?

California schools already can use several funding buckets to support students experiencing homelessness, including funding for community schools, Title 1 for schools to support low-income students, and supplemental dollars via the Local Control Funding Formula.

But those funding sources can help students only after they have been identified as experiencing homelessness. The state’s $116 million investment is intended primarily to help schools find eligible students and connect them with services, according to the .

“Whether it’s community school funding or other funding that California’s providing for its students, if homeless students aren’t identified, if they don’t have regular transportation, a way to get to school, has somebody who’s attending to all those other needs — they’re not going to be able to benefit from those other investments,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, an organization that advocates for homeless students.

Identifying students can be difficult if families are reluctant to disclose housing instability or do not realize they are considered homeless under federal law and thus qualify for services.

Under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, student homelessness is defined more broadly than it is for the general population under the more commonly used definition from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Under McKinney-Vento, students are considered homeless if they lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence — including many who are temporarily living with relatives or friends because of economic hardship.

This definition includes students living “,” meaning families who share housing due to economic hardship. The HUD definition doesn’t include families who are doubling up. live “doubled-up,” but they could go uncounted if they or people offering support are not aware of the different definitions of homelessness.

In recent years, California has taken steps to improve identification and access to resources.

, for example, requires schools to administer an annual housing questionnaire and report the results to the California Department of Education. Schools are also required under federal law to designate homeless liaisons responsible for identifying students and connecting them with services.

During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, billions have been allocated to address homelessness statewide, with a small percentage set aside for youth. have applied for and received grants via that program, but funds are exclusively for housing, and not for services such as transportation, food assistance, clothing, school supplies and more that students need.

Olmos and other advocates say that this is where schools come in. School staff work to identify homeless students, though often with little to no dedicated funding.

A teacher or classroom aide might notice a student whose grades have slipped, or another’s who has an unkempt appearance. An attendance team might note sudden increased absences and might know they should flag a homeless liaison.

In many cases, that a family recently lost housing, cannot afford basic necessities or lacks reliable transportation to school.

California received in McKinney Vento dollars during the 2025-26 school year, distributed among 151 of the state’s more than 900 school districts and 58 county offices of education. An additional was allocated to support the , jointly managed by the Los Angeles, Contra Costa and San Diego county offices of education. The homeless liaisons for each of these three large counties answer questions submitted by liaisons or school staff from other districts, help train new liaisons and offer webinars on McKinney Vento requirements, among other things.

Because federal funding for student homelessness nationally has remained flat nationwide for at least three years — about $129 million annually — advocates say California cannot rely on significant increases from Washington. 

The state’s $116 million will “signal to other states that there’s a way forward, but also that, within California, this is one-time funding that will help really show policymakers and educators that this needs to be the new normal in California,” said Duffield. “Because there’s no indication that homelessness is going to be down significantly in the next couple years.”

A proof of concept

Supporters of the new funding point to the federal American Rescue Plan-Homeless Children and Youth, known as ARP-HCY, as an example of the difference dedicated funding can make.

, through the ARP-HCY program, school districts nationwide received $800 million in one-time Covid-19 relief funding, including $98.76 million for California. Districts used the money to hire homeless liaisons and support staff, provide emergency housing assistance, expand after-school programs and connect families with basic services. 

But when the federal government announced in 2024 the would not be replenished, some of those programs began ending as well.

Homeless student advocates say California’s new $116 million allocation creates a new opportunity to demonstrate the value of dedicated funding, while also highlighting the challenges of relying on one-time grants.

“I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from ARP-HCY,” said Duffield. “How the funds go out, what they can be used for, how the actual disbursement is being tracked. All of that from the get-go.”

If districts can demonstrate measurable results, the hope is lawmakers will make the funding permanent, said Olmos.

“Our North Star has not changed. There has to be dedicated funding to this group that is safe in California moving forward,” she said. “So we have a window to prove that this is a wise investment, and we are really hoping that we don’t lose it.”

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The school year starts again in less than a month, and a remarkable number of big districts in Colorado and elsewhere will open it without a permanent superintendent.

Jeffco. Cherry Creek. Los Angeles. Miami-Dade. I’m guessing Denver will soon join this group of districts given the Denver school board’s growing frustrations with Superintendent Alex Marrero’s top-down leadership, poor performance and his search for other jobs.

That’s a lot of empty chairs in a lot of big districts, and it got me wondering who’s going to fill them and whether the pipeline that used to fill them looks anything like it did 20 years ago.

My hunch going in was that running a large school district has gotten harder since the pandemic: more expected of schools on mental health and basic student support, more divisive politics around almost everything a board does. So I decided to check that hunch, with the help of Claude and Google.

These are not low-paying jobs. Tracy Dorland’s starting salary when Jeffco hired her in 2021 was $260,000, and comparable big-district contracts run higher still ($440,000 for Los Angeles’ starting salary plus benefits). Yet the number of applicants for these jobs seems to be dropping.

Jeffco’s applicant pool fell from 69 candidates in 2017 to 43 reviewed (only 23 of them formal applications) in 2021. Broward County, Florida, went from 39 applicants in 2021-22 to 26 in 2023, of whom just 15 were considered qualified. Charlotte-Mecklenburg dropped from roughly 52 applicants in 2017 to 37 to 39 in 2023.

And it’s not just the volume. Max McGee, a longtime superintendent search-firm president, wrote in AASA’s School Administrator magazine in 2023 that “in most of our searches, applicants without previous experience outnumber those with experience by at least 3 to 1.”

School boards aren’t just getting fewer résumés. They’re getting fewer good ones.

The Council of the Great City Schools’ most recent survey puts average tenure at 2.72 years, which is close to where it stood in 2003 (2.80 years). But that flat-looking comparison hides a real story: Tenure climbed through the 2000s, peaking at 3.64 years in 2010, and has been sliding since. The same survey revealed something I found more telling: The predecessor of today’s average sitting superintendent had served 4.85 years, nearly double the 2.72 current superintendents have logged so far.

It’s worth remembering how differently this job used to be talked about. Rod Paige, U.S. secretary of education from 2001 to 2005 and Houston’s superintendent before that, said in April 2004: “Our nation is crying out for leadership in education. We’re asking more from schools and asking for it more quickly,” and, more bluntly, “I believe that superintendents are the best agents for change and have a great opportunity at hand.”

Eli Broad put it in CEO terms in his foundation’s annual report: “Success in any organization starts at the top. With responsibility for curriculum, instruction, facilities, finance, personnel, technology and community relations, school superintendents are chief executive officers of complex and demanding public sector enterprises.”

Not long ago, the right superintendent, especially a non-traditional one, could land on the cover of Time, get regular New York Times coverage and pull in serious money from Gates, Walton, Broad and other foundations to remake a district. That’s a different world than the one Jeffco, Cherry Creek and Denver are hiring into right now.

I asked Claude to code the résumés of every superintendent leading the 20 largest U.S. school districts in 2006, 2011, 2016, 2021 and today. Four traits got tracked for each person: whether they climbed the conventional teacher-to-principal-to-central-office ladder (“traditional”) or skipped it (“non-traditional”); whether they’d led anything outside K-12 education at any point (a company, a law practice, a military command, an elected office); whether their undergraduate degree was in education or something else; and whether that degree came from a conservatively defined selective institution.

The headline finding is a real decline in non-traditional hiring. Non-traditional pathways held flat at 20% from 2006 through 2016, eased to 15% by 2021, then dropped to 5% today. Outside leadership experience climbed after 2006, peaked at 40% in 2011, held around 30% through 2016 and 2021, and fell to 10% in the last few years.

None of that happened by accident. The Broad Superintendents Academy, launched in 2002, set out explicitly to recruit business, law and military leaders into big-city superintendencies, and by 2009-11 its alumni filled 43% to 48% of those, echoing the peak of Claude’s analysis.

All this was also reinforced with federal investments to improve big school districts, whether through programs like Race to the Top or philanthropic investments in school district reform and improvement.

Broad wound down its placement program in 2019, folding it into Yale with a $100 million gift and no distinct K-12 placement pipeline surviving after that. A recent conversation with the current Broad class from Yale found no non-traditional participants.

In summary, the infrastructure that created a broader pipeline for superintendents has been dismantled over the last decade.

A recent study by a team of Stanford researchers on the impact of Broad-trained superintendents showed they had fewer years as superintendents than traditional candidates and no impact on student achievement, but increased charter school enrollment.

Tom Boasberg’s nearly decade at Denver Public Schools is probably the most-studied case in the state: The district’s graduation rate rose from 39% in 2007 to 71% in 2019. Enrollment grew by more than 14,000 students at a time most urban districts were shrinking, and an independent comparison-group study found that two years of the district’s reforms produced achievement gains roughly equivalent to six months to two years of additional schooling.

Mike Miles in Houston shows the same tension in miniature, on a faster timeline. Standardized test score gains under his state-appointed leadership are real. But Texas Monthly reported that at least some of that improvement came from restructuring course access, delaying biology until 10th grade and narrowing algebra access. The article quoted a testing coordinator warning that the tactic can “increase your scores … at the cost of advanced academics.” It’s still too early to assess the impact of Miles’ changes in Houston

And then there’s Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor who ran the Los Angeles district from 2000 to 2006 — proof this pattern isn’t new. Romer’s district saw several years of real, sustained gains in reading on both state and national tests, driven by an enormous investment in teacher training. A governor with real political skill produced real gains and then hit a wall, 20 years before Denver, Houston and Chicago would each rediscover some version of the same ceiling.

Regardless of the superintendent’s background, leadership skills and management training, improving a big, complicated school district is enormously challenging.

So what are school boards supposed to do heading into a 2026 search?

They are going to have to dig deeper and work harder to get great district leaders. They will need to look closely at their own bench and will probably be limited to a pool of traditional district candidates.

With the lack of an outside pipeline and a smaller applicant pool, the job of finding the right person to improve the district is harder than it has ever been.

Here’s hoping a new generation of philanthropists and national policy leaders will rediscover what Paige and Broad were saying 20 years ago: Great public schools need serious leadership at the top, and the job is worth investing in again. Regardless of whether your preference is for traditional or non-traditional backgrounds for big-district leaders, we will need more effective superintendents and an ecosystem that supports wider and better pipelines for these critical seats.

Until then, Colorado and other school boards are going to have to do the hard, difficult work of finding a leader who can drive district improvement. Choosing and managing the superintendent is the important job of a school board, and it’s harder than ever today.

A version of this essay appeared on , an independent blog covering public education in Colorado, with a particular focus on Denver Public Schools.

Two hundred sets of eyes are now off their phones and on me. The laughter and talking stop, the room is silent. I have the audience’s complete attention as they listen to … my 35-minute, 24-song retelling of Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

It’s not as far-fetched as it seems. In fact, I’ve done my “Odyssey” performance almost 400 times in all 50 U.S. states and abroad in Greece, Italy, the U.K. and elsewhere.��

I call myself a “modern Homeric bard.”

I studied classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and for over 20 years I’ve helped high school students consider Odysseus by singing his song to them just as was done by bards predating even Homer’s time.��It is commonly one of the first texts taught to freshmen and comes with a number of challenges, among them how to guide students through a 12,000-line poem with unfamiliar names and strange customs and how to contextualize an ancient society with brutal practices that marginalized women and the enslaved.��

But with the proper introduction, nothing is more relevant to our current cultural moment than the epic’s complicated hero who does not behave in ways that conform with our modern understanding of heroism.��

With Homer’s epic in this summer, the coming school year is an ideal time to introduce students to this foundational text. Here are five strategies I’ve learned for teaching Homer’s complex hero:

1. Find a translation that resonates. There have never been more great translations with varied approaches available. The newest high-profile translation by Daniel Mendelsohn puts poetic meter and language at the forefront. Emily Wilson’s highly regarded translation (the first by a woman published in English) uses a lean rhythm and highlights issues of gender and power. Translations by Barry Powell, Stanley Lombardo, Robert Fagles, Robert Fitzgerald and Richmond Lattimore each offer a different mix of language, poetry and narrative, all with excellent introductions and insightful endnotes. You might even have different groups of students read different translations and compare approaches.
   
2. Highlight the universal. It’s easy for students to get weighed down by unfamiliar names and archaic (well, Bronze Age) behaviors and rituals. I’ve had success framing “The Odyssey” first as a human story and then as an Ancient Greek story. Universal themes like Telemachus’ coming of age, Penelope’s motherly concern for her son, the impact of war on a soldier’s return home, and Odysseus’ complicated relationship with the truth connect more easily than how many hecatombs of cattle one should sacrifice to Zeus (generally, a lot) or whose father was Nausithous (Alcinous).
   
3. Include modern adaptations in other media. With the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie, it is a boom time for modern retellings of Homer and these can be great tools for helping students find ways into the story. In fact, my initial motivation for my one-person was to provide emotional context for the characters. Other examples are the movies “O Brother Where Art Thou?” and “The Return,” the novel “Circe” by Madeline Miller, the viral TikTok sensation “Epic the Musical,” and the Gareth Hinds’ graphic-novel retelling. All these versions complement Homer’s text and replicate the malleability of the oral tradition that created the epic we read today.
   
4. Teach an “angle.” Unsurprisingly, “The Odyssey” is really long! Especially if you find you are limited in the amount of time you can dedicate to the text, pick one or two themes and go deeper into those aspects rather than trying to get through the whole poem. Some approaches that I’ve found resonate with high students in particular: Focus on the theme of home and what it means to the concept of identity. Read books 9 through 12 (the “monster” books) and dive into the physical adventure world of the poem. Read selections that consider the female characters of the story and how they do and don’t express agency.��Examine the role of divine influence and free will. Read other warrior homecoming stories and consider how Odysseus’ experience fits into our modern relationship with war and veterans.
   
5. Encourage creative engagement. One of the best ways to have students explore the poem and then demonstrate what they have discovered is by having them create their own versions of the story in other media. A song (or 24) inspired by a character. A drawing or painting of an episode. A podcast. A short video piece. Acting out a scene. The story can be told from any perspective in multiple formats.

I believe Homeric epic is perennially relevant and moving. It shows us what it means to be human. It considers identity, family, adventure, gender, leadership, failure, glory, and perseverance: It’s all there in “The Odyssey” (and “The Iliad”). “The Odyssey” has survived for 3,000 years because it encourages and inspires people to tell and retell it in their own times, and I have seen students tap into this legacy and in doing so both enlighten and be enlightened by Homer’s amazing poem.

Similar legislation introduced last year was backed by the United Federation of Teachers in an effort to address the city’s paraprofessional shortage. After the bill failed to move out of committee, it was in February by multiple council members. 

If Mamdani signs the bill, full-time paraprofessionals will receive four payments of $2,500 throughout the 2026-27 school year. The allows the council to reauthorize stipends each year as long as New York City Public Schools has a paraprofessional shortage or until the city changes the practice of — a local policy that lets the salary increases negotiated for one municipal union’s contract set the pattern for all the others.

The United Federation of Teachers and council members said pattern bargaining has contributed to low paraprofessional pay.

“Once the initial bargaining pattern is established, it becomes an enormous challenge to get the city to grant significantly better terms to another union,” the United Federation of Teachers said on its .

New paraprofessionals earn roughly $32,000 in the city. Over the past 20 years, have increased nearly $12,000 for paraprofessionals but top $86,000 for the highest-paid principals.

“We are going to pass this bill and we are going to put it on the desk of the mayor of New York City saying that the paraprofessionals have been unjustly treated and we are in a crisis,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a at New York City Hall on Thursday. “And the paraprofessionals are dealing with that crisis each and every day with their work, going above and beyond, and now it’s time for our city to act and do the right thing.”

Mamdani supported the bill while campaigning but expressed concern after he took office, compensation should be handled only in the collective bargaining process. He has 30 days to decide whether to sign the bill, according to the . If he vetoes it, the legislation will go back to the council, and members can override his veto with a two-thirds vote. If he doesn’t sign or veto the bill, it will become law.

Priscilla Castro, president of the paraprofessional chapter of the United Federation of Teachers, said several paras from each New York City borough gathered at City Hall as the bill went through a committee vote. 

“Today, we’re making a change. It’s a movement. We will not stop until we get this legislation passed and bring it home,” she .

During the council vote, members said paraprofessional pay raises were overdue and are crucial to rewarding some of the hardest-working school employees in the city.

Shirley Aldebol, chair of the council committee that passed the bill, said during voting on Thursday that the payments are the first step toward fixing the city’s paraprofessional staffing crisis. New York City Public Schools was short more than 1,500 support staff last year. 

“Paraprofessionals are critical members of our school environment, providing instructional, behavioral and physical support to students with disabilities,” she said. “I have a deep respect for the collective bargaining process. This bill’s structure does not interfere, in my view, with mandatory subjects of collective bargaining, as it does not attempt to legislate wages or benefits and matters that must be resolved at the bargaining table.”

Preschoolers with disabilities in New York City will gain access to an unprecedented set of programs and services thanks to a major expansion in special education announced Tuesday by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels.

The nation’s largest school system is investing $67.5 million in special education as families across the country fear the needs of their children with disabilities will go unmet amid the federal Department of Education’s continued dismantling.

In New York City, young learners will be able to participate in three programs designed specifically for students with autism that were previously only available to K-12 students. They will also have access to initiatives for students with emotional disabilities or in need of adapted academics and life-skills training. The programs will be available starting in the fall in 14 of the city’s 32 community school districts. The majority of them are located in areas with some of the highest concentrations of working-class and immigrant families in the city. 

“Children with disabilities should not be forced to travel across the city just to get the education they deserve,” Mamdani said in a statement. “That’s why we’re bringing those classrooms closer to home and taking another critical step toward making Pre-K truly universal. Every child deserves to learn and grow in their community, and every family deserves a public education system that meets them exactly where they are.”

The specificity of the investment is unprecedented in New York City, where . 

“For the first time, we’re giving young children with autism and other disabilities the same high-quality, specialized instruction that has delivered real results for our older students,” Samuels said in a statement. “This investment is about strengthening the foundation and when we get early childhood education right, we set children up for a lifetime of success.”

To expand special education services to the city’s youngest learners, New York City Public Schools will hire hundreds of staffers to help lower evaluation delays; assist families through the process of creating a legally binding personalized school roadmap for children with special needs, known as Individualized Education Program (IEP); and provide more bilingual assessment options. Overall, more than half of all children in New York City come from homes where a language other than English is spoken and in the majority of those homes, that language is Spanish. Among the new hires will be 35 psychologists, social workers, speech evaluators and occupational therapists across 10 additional Preschool Regional Assessment Centers, or city-run evaluation hubs that identify children ages 3 to 5 who qualify for special education services.

The Special Education Itinerant Teacher program will also grow, with an additional 29 therapists and specialists to support children attending community-based 3-K and pre-K programs. According to city officials, the placement of more special education teachers in general education preschool classes will help boost the number of small children with IEPs in inclusive learning environments.

In June, the Trump administration announced that the and rehabilitative services — a move that advocates and parents said will make it more challenging for millions of students to access services and for their families to appeal for help when needed. 

The transitions at the federal level concern Chris Treiber, vice president of advocacy services for AHRC New York City, which serves individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

“When you move services out of the U.S. Department of Education and start to put them in other places like the Department of Health and Human Services and then also into the Justice Department, you kind of lose all of the expertise and the specialized support that the U.S. DOE provided for so many years to so many states,” Treiber said. “It’s all going to be basically evaporated.”

In a statement, State Sen. Robert Jackson, a Democrat whose district includes several Black and immigrant neighborhoods in Manhattan, pointed out how families with disabled children have long had to fight simply to get basic support, a concern often raised by critics of the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal Education Department.

“For generations, families of children with disabilities have been asked to navigate systems that too often made support feel distant, delayed, or conditional,” Jackson said. “This investment reflects a different promise: that the doors of public education must open early, fully, and with dignity.”

Maria Odom, executive director of Advocates for Children of New York, drew a connection between special education for preschool children and universal childcare, which Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul launched in January.

“Child care can only truly be universal if every child has access to a program that meets their needs,” Odom said in a statement. “We thank Mayor Mamdani for making this important investment, which will help ensure more preschoolers with disabilities receive needed, legally required support. Access to high-quality specialized programs during these critical early years can have a lasting impact on children’s development while helping make New York City a more affordable and appealing place to raise a family.”

Advocates like Treiber and Jenn Choi of Jenn Choi Advocates LLC, which provides parents with support through the IEP process, told The 19th they welcomed the preschool special education expansion. Still, both raised concerns about the logistics and reach of the new effort. 

Choi hopes it gives economically disadvantaged families greater access to services. “There’s a lot of parents in the city who know how great these programs are,” she said. “These programs are very popular in neighborhoods like District 15 where the income is higher, but maybe they’re not as popular in other areas where there isn’t a cultural history of how important these programs are within the community.”

Choi also would like officials to work toward making these specialized programs available to all students who need them; one student she advocated for went without speech, occupational and physical therapy for two consecutive years, she said.

Treiber, for his part, wondered how the city plans to adapt programs designed for older kids to the preschool set. He also noted that many children in pre-K did not receive the early intervention services they needed from ages 0-3 and as a result, they might need even more intense support in preschool.

Most importantly, he wants officials to communicate effectively with families about the new programs. 

“They have to be able to provide some concrete information to families so they understand either the parameters of what’s being offered here or maybe the limitations,” Treiber said. “Like if I put my kid in this program, a parent should understand that they may not have a program for my child the following September when they turn 5 and go into kindergarten. It’s just important for parents to be as informed as possible so they can make really smart, informed decisions about their kids’ education.”

was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of . .

Federal teams charged with making sure states are doing right by students with disabilities appear to have visited fewer than half of the states originally scheduled for review in 2025 and 2026.

That information comes from U.S. Department of Education documents compiled and analyzed by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a group that supports students with disabilities and their families, as well as additional review by Chalkbeat of publicly available monitoring schedules.

If federal reviews of state special education systems continue at this pace, each state would be reviewed only once every 25 years, COPAA said in a . That would mean many students would go their entire school careers without federal oversight of state systems.

“The new administration has quietly rolled back their state oversight,” said Chris Roe, COPAA director of state policy. “We are worried that this sends a signal to states and eventually to local schools that this is not important, and they don’t need to be concerned about it.”

Drawing on nearly a dozen state monitoring reports based on reviews that started under the Biden administration, the COPAA report also raises concerns about states’ capacity to adequately monitor school districts’ compliance with special education requirements as the Trump administration pledges to “return education to the states.”

The Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the Education Department by assigning key duties to other federal agencies. Most recently, the department announced that , a change that has drawn and some bipartisan skepticism.

U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican who chairs the Senate education committee, has on that change later this month. By itself, a committee vote won’t reverse the Trump administration’s actions, but a vote against it would represent the strongest formal objection from Congress to date.

COPAA opposes having another government agency handle special education oversight. The group’s report calls on Congress to intervene.

A spokesperson for the Education Department said COPAA’s “entire premise is false,” without describing any specific errors in the findings. The department pointed to — the same ones that COPAA reviewed for its analysis — as evidence the department continues to keep tabs on states.

Citing previous remarks by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the spokesperson said the partnership between Health and Human Services and Education would improve coordination and benefit families and students, and “ensure states are in compliance with federal law.”

“Students will not lose any rights, including their right to a Free Appropriate Public Education,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “No agreement can alter the rights that students with disabilities are afforded under federal law.”

But Roe said the flaws identified in the monitoring reports show that students and families might struggle more to defend their rights without federal involvement.

Meanwhile, Politico this week to meet their goals for serving students with disabilities.

“When they say let’s return education to the states, there’s an assumption that states will backfill those responsibilities,” Roe said. “The case that that is not going to happen is pretty strong.”

Federal oversight finds gaps in special education protections

The Biden administration had previously urged states to take more responsibility for ensuring school districts meet their special education obligations. But according to monitoring reports, auditors repeatedly found shortcomings.

These included lax fiscal oversight; limited supervision of school district practices; states allowing districts to pick which student files they wanted reviewed; states not investigating parent complaints in a timely manner; and states either not informing parents of their rights or giving them incorrect information.

Roe said this system isn’t perfect. COPAA’s reviews of federal monitoring efforts over the years have found many cases where auditors identified problems, but there was limited follow-up and the problems continued. Nonetheless, the reports provide an important tool for advocates and lawmakers to press for changes, he said.

“Without them, we definitely face more of an uphill battle to getting systems in place to support our students,” Roe said.

The Education Department spokesperson said the department is “on track” to complete monitoring visits to all states by 2028, in keeping with a schedule established in 2022.

However, the spokesperson did not provide a schedule that showed how monitoring teams would visit roughly half the states in the next two years. The identifies only four states, Puerto Rico, and a few Pacific island territories for monitoring during the 2025-26 cycle and none thereafter. One of those states, Georgia, was supposed to be reviewed this spring, but monitoring visits have been pushed back to the fall, the department said.

During the Biden administration, the Education Department set a goal of monitoring 10 states a year, creating a five-year cycle for regular monitoring, in addition to off-cycle visits to address specific issues. COPAA found the Education Department monitored eight states in 2023 and 10 in 2024. A shows the department previously had plans to monitor nine states plus the territories in the 2025-26 cycle, and another 10 the next year.

It’s not clear why states previously identified for monitoring were removed from the schedule. However, the Education Department has laid off large numbers of workers. A published last month raised questions about whether the department could carry out its responsibilities at current staffing levels.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Gallup polls over the last decade have shown a decline in support of colleges and universities from a high of 57% of respondents having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them in 2015 to a low of 36% in 2023 and 2024.

Despite an uptick in support to 42% in 2025, it dropped back to 38% this year, the latest poll by Gallup and the nonprofit Lumina Foundation released this week shows.

Contributing to the decline, and the seeming uptick last year not holding, is an 11-point drop in support from Democrats, who have long been bigger backers of higher education than Republicans, from 61% last year to 50% this year.

The 19-percentage-point decline since 2015 is nearly four times larger than the 5-percentage-point decline — from 32% in 2015 to 27% today — Gallup has measured for other “core institutions” including Congress, the United States Supreme Court, big business and organized religion.

“Confidence in higher education is still very fragile,” said Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at Lumina. “We see that over and over again.”

The biggest concerns across all adults, according to the poll, are ideological differences over what is taught in college classrooms, a frequent target of President Trump and his supporters, and doubts about whether the benefits of college are worth the cost.

The findings are in keeping with a fall 2025 survey by the Pew Research Center which found up from 56% in 2020.

The repeated negativity over higher education has some universities studying why the public is losing confidence in them and how they can reverse the trend.

“Trust in higher education has declined faster than in other institutions and sectors,” a “Whether or not a diploma has enduring value depends on what it signifies: personal effort, professional skill, intelligence, knowledge, expertise. If the public ceases to believe that colleges and universities are fostering such qualities, support for higher education will necessarily suffer.”

Though not as dramatic, public confidence in all institutions that have been traditional pillars of government and society has declined over time. The 27% of support for other institutions — an average of high confidence in 14 institutions Gallup considers “core” to society — is just one point above its low of 26% in 2023.��

“Americans’ confidence in U.S. institutions remains historically low,” Gallup reported. 

“Americans no longer appear to share a broad faith in core civic, social and government institutions,” Gallup added. “Instead, their confidence varies with .”

Despite the large declines, Americans have more confidence in higher education than many other institutions measured by Gallup, including Congress, with just 9% support, as well as big business, the criminal justice system, television news and newspapers — all under 20%.

Public schools have also lost support over time. A separate Gallup poll in 2025 found that dissatisfaction with public schools had risen from 57% in 2001 to 73% last year.

And the latest poll this week shows public schools have 27% of respondents with “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence, down from 31% in 2015 and highs of 41% in 2003 and during the pandemic in 2020.

For higher education, the new poll found that political differences were a major reason for skepticism, with 30% of respondents citing as concerns the political and cultural battle over what schools teach and how much ideology is part of lessons.

Though a majority of Republicans — 56% — had strong confidence in higher education in 2015, it hit a low of 19% in 2023 as Trump and supporters sparked national debates over admissions, speech and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies at schools.

Republican support has bounced back slightly to 23% this year, but it’s now Democrats that are losing confidence in colleges.��

After 61% of Democrats reported having a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence just last year, only 50% did this year.

“Republicans pretty much stayed the same this year,” Brown said. “It was really Democrats that dropped down and account for some of the decrease that we’re seeing.”

She declined to attribute the drop in Democratic support to changes the Trump administration has made at colleges, placing it more on affordability and value concerns. She noted that support for colleges is low across the board, with less than half of all college graduates reporting strong confidence.

“Everybody’s kind of beginning to level out at the lower level,” she said.

At the same time, the broader Gallup survey found Democratic confidence across all core institutions at just 23% — its lowest since the polls began in 1979.

And Gallup polling earlier this year found that ��— personal finances, crime, the environment and quality of life among the 30 aspects measured — in Trump’s second term than either political party has had since 2000, even when the other party is in power.

Among 31% of those polled, the most cited reason for skepticism about college was its cost and whether it is a good value for students.

“Americans across the political spectrum are asking harder questions about value and affordability, and whether higher education is actually preparing people for the workforce,” Brown said. Those questions aren’t going away.”

The costs and benefits of college have come under extra scrutiny this year, as new college graduates have faced a tough job market that multiple reports have called or a ��Brown, though, noted that cost concerns have long been a big issue.

Discussing the long-term trend at a forum earlier this year, Brown said polls suggest the decline in support “isn’t a loss of belief, but a growing expectation” that colleges show how they bring value to students.

“People still believe degrees matter, but they’re asking for clearer signals, stronger connections to opportunity and more transparency around outcomes,” she said.

Now, it is artificial intelligence. And educators must ask: What does this innovation help students learn that they couldn’t without it?

Unlike previous classroom technologies, generative AI can perform the very thinking that many lessons are designed to develop. It can write essays, solve problems, summarize readings and produce analyses that students are meant to do themselves. 

��have now issued AI guidance for schools. Much of it centers on data privacy, human oversight and teacher training, rather than whether a given use of AI is developmentally appropriate for a child.

That leaves the question most states have been skipping: What thinking should students do themselves? To answer that, it helps to look backward. In 1958, psychologist B.F. Skinner designed a  around a simple principle: Students could not move to the next problem until they had produced the correct response themselves. The machine provided immediate feedback, but it never completed the work for the student.

Whatever one thinks of Skinner’s broader work, he understood that students learn by responding to problems, answering questions, making mistakes, receiving feedback and trying again. The student must do the thinking.

But today, generative AI can complete the assignment without the student.

This is referred to as cognitive offloading, handing one’s thinking off to an external system. A  involving about 1,000 high school math students tested this, comparing two versions of an AI chatbot. One answered questions outright. The other offered hints and guidance, but not the answer. Students with the first chatbot performed worse on later exams than those who did not use AI at all. Students who received only hints and guidance performed as well as the no-AI group. One tool did the thinking for students; the other made them think first.

The rule that should anchor any school AI framework is simple. Its role should expand only as a child’s own foundation grows.

In kindergarten through second grade, students are building the skills everything else depends on, including sounding out words, forming letters and developing number sense. How well a child masters these literacy skills  in third and fourth grade, and  is indicative of math performance years later.

Children build those skills by doing the work; such as sounding out words, making errors and trying again. If AI gives students the answer, that productive struggle never happens, and the skill never truly forms.����shows that the more students hand a task to a machine, the less able they become to do it themselves.��

So, in K-2, AI belongs only in the teacher’s hands. There, it can help educators in planning phonics instruction and generating practice at each student’s level.

Third grade marks the shift from learning to read to reading to learn. The same shift happens in math and writing, where the foundational skills become tools for building arguments, drawing inferences and working through problems. That’s what makes a different kind of AI use possible. 

In grades three through five, students should use AI only after they’ve done an assignment themselves, and only under a teacher’s direction. A teacher might take a paragraph a student has written, generate an AI version, and have the class pick out errors and find weak reasoning, wrong facts and claims that do not hold up.

Working with flawed examples is one of the oldest ways to teach analysis, and AI produces an endless supply of them. A  found that when students critique AI-generated work with a teacher’s guidance, their critical thinking improves. The same research points the other way, too; the more readily people trust AI’s output, the less they think for themselves.

By middle school, AI should become something students should study, not just something they use. This is the age when the judgment to evaluate information��.��Every eighth grader should be able to explain how these technologies work, where they fail and why they can produce convincing but wrong text — the beginning of true . Students’ own work should still come first, with AI used afterward and under a teacher’s direction.

By high school, students who can read critically, write clearly and work through problems independently can get real value from AI. In writing, they can first draft an essay, then use AI to help identify gaps or missing arguments. The students would then weigh the feedback to decide whether to follow the tool’s suggestions. AI could also work as a tutor, helping students, say, catch up in algebra or progress beyond grade level, giving feedback faster than a teacher with 25 students can.

High schoolers are also entering a world where AI is embedded in most professional fields, and they need to learn to use it well. That means having the capacity to think, write and reason without it, direct the tool and catch its errors. Those skills are the prerequisite to AI readiness. 

One principle should hold across all grades: Keep assessments AI-free. Tests should measure what the student can do, not what a chatbot knows.

Technology has never been the goal of education. Learning is. Schools exist to help students develop knowledge and skills they couldn’t develop on their own, and every technology should earn its place by helping accomplish that. AI may become one of the most powerful instructional tools schools have ever adopted. But its success shouldn’t be measured by what it can do. It should be measured by what students can do as a result of it.

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.”

Anthropic, one of the world’s most prominent artificial intelligence companies, is launching a version of its AI-powered assistant Claude for teachers, entering a race by technology companies to infuse AI into education.

Anthropic boasts that its product can incorporate academic standards from all 50 states, and teachers can use it to help devise lesson plans, personalize instructional materials to students, and harness data to improve instruction, according to a company news release.

Claude for Teachers joins Google, OpenAI, and Khan Academy — among others — in marketing AI products specifically to K-12 educators. The new product launched Tuesday and is available for free for verified educators in the U.S. It will also be piloted in Detroit Public Schools Community District for a study on educator well-being and practice.

Claude’s formal arrival into the classroom comes during a complicated moment at the intersection of technology and education. The , the , and have all encouraged educators to adopt AI. But a is simultaneously gaining momentum, prompting some of the nation’s largest school districts to rethink how much time students spend in front of screens, as well as the contracts they’ve signed with huge players in ed tech.

Drew Bent, education lead for Anthropic, said that teachers using Claude’s educator product could, for example, pull in a student’s past assessment data and assignment data, along with past lesson plans, and ask Claude to build lesson plans for individual students based on that data — all while they’re sleeping.

In developing Claude for Teachers, Bent said Anthropic staff often heard that while teachers are already using AI to generate lesson plans, the plans generated were often detached from the content teachers actually needed to address. Anthropic’s tool will help teachers save time and toil less to improve student outcomes, he said.

“There’s a lot of evidence of what works well for teachers in terms of aligning with high-quality instructional materials, formative assessments, differentiated instruction,” he said. “But of course, if you have 30 students in your class, you’re not able to do all of that.”

Bent said Detroit was already using other Claude products, and in a “human-centric” way that impressed Anthropic, leading to the pilot program in the district that will start next school year. Anthropic will train teachers at a handful of schools in Claude for Teachers, and evaluate how the product may shape teaching practices in the district.

While AI companies have been eager to cement the technology’s status as a classroom staple, tech giants likely have a long way to go to quiet skeptics. Student-facing AI and so-called cognitive offloading, a reference to the reliance on AI to complete tasks instead of using critical thinking skills.

Bent emphasized that Anthropic is focusing largely on teachers, and that most K-12 students can’t access the company’s Claude assistant, due to an age restriction for anyone under 18.

Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute, argued that if teachers outsource work to AI, “don’t be surprised when classroom community and academic outcomes rapidly deteriorate.”

Skeptics have also raised questions about student privacy in using AI, such as Claude.

Anthropic is working with the American Federation for Teachers on aligning the product’s privacy practices with what the labor union has said will become a “gold standard” in best practices around safety, according to the news release.

Among the privacy features in Claude for Teachers: It won’t use conversations between the AI assistant and teacher accounts to train its AI, student information will be protected in a manner built to comply with the federal law governing student privacy, and privacy terms of service are written without jargon so teachers can understand what they’re signing up to use.

“It’s important that Anthropic is committing to these principles in their new Claude for Teachers — a tool designed by and for educators to assist them instructionally and hopefully give them more time for the human relationships at the heart of learning,” wrote AFT President Randi Weingarten in the company’s press release.

Weingarten has been walking a tightrope when it comes to AI. She’s in elementary grades while promoting teacher training in the technology. Just a day before calling for the ban, she , an AI chatbot from Khan Academy, in action.

While AFT is working with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic on privacy standards and AI training for educators, it is notably not working with Google, .

Utah’s state education board recently made a deal with the tech giant , promising personalized instruction tools for educators.

It’s not yet clear whether one AI product reigns supreme in schools, but more teachers overall are using AI. Around 61% of teachers , compared with 32% in 2024.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .��

The mismatch between the childcare arrangements parents say they prefer and those that public policy tends to emphasize — which I call the childcare preference gap — was reinforced by two recent surveys. 

A administered to 1,000 parents with children ages 5 and under in December 2025 by GBAO on behalf of Third Way — a center-left think tank — found that around half of parent participants preferred having a parent stay home to provide care, with another 15% preferring a family, friend or neighbor caregiver. While families were generally satisfied with the care their children were receiving, only around half of those using home- or center-based care said it was their preferred childcare arrangement, compared to 80% of those with a parent staying home and nearly 70% of those using FFN care.

The largest U.S. of parents with children under the age of 6, released in May by New America’s New Practice Lab, echoes these findings. When asked about their ideal childcare arrangement, 49% of nearly 5,500 parent participants said they’d prefer to care for their child themselves or for the child’s other parent to provide the care. Meanwhile, 11% preferred an FFN caregiver, and just 15% listed their ideal as a formal setting.

Surveys conducted earlier in the 2020s by and reported similar results. Importantly, these preferences are dynamic: As children age, there is more interest in formal programs, such as licensed childcare centers.

It’s important to consider that most of the polls described above asked parents to envision their ideal childcare scenario, setting aside costs and the financial impact of having a parent stay home. But families don’t live in hypotheticals. There are real financial implications for decisions about childcare, and when opportunities to access free or low-cost licensed early care and education arise — like universal pre-K or childcare — . What’s more, the strong preference for parental care in the first year of life seems to implicate a need for better paid leave policy as much as childcare policy, particularly since .

There’s also the reality that what people say they want to do in a survey can differ from what they actually do when making choices. However, the data can still be meaningful and should be considered when designing family and childcare policies. It is no more justified to ignore the desires of parents who prefer their children in licensed programs than those who prefer to provide the care themselves. 

Doing so can give policymakers a false impression that all parents need is access to any childcare slot, regardless of its characteristics. However, from the nonprofit Child Trends found that among the 622 families surveyed, 64% of those that used any form of nonparental childcare said there was moderate or high “misalignment” between their current care setup and their preferences and needs. That misalignment reflected parents using programs that didn’t fit their budget, align with their quality standards, reflect their beliefs or match their ideal setting. This discrepancy can actually cause material harm: Studies have found that when parents feel uncomfortable about their childcare arrangement, it may lead to . 

Yet current federal childcare policy, as well as most reform proposals over the past 20 years, do a rather poor job of reflecting parents’ stated preferences. While public policy does not always match public opinion (if it did, the U.S. would have, for example, and ), there is clearly room for improvement here. 

When it comes to childcare, for example, receive most of the funding from the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that sends grant money to states and is a key source of funding for childcare subsidies. Families with stay-at-home parents are categorically ineligible for childcare subsidies, and the most recent reauthorization of the law governing the program, the , made it harder for FFN providers . The Build Back Better Act that passed the House during the Biden Administration did not make any fundamental changes to that orientation.

To understand the persistent preference gap, one must understand the origins of modern U.S. childcare policy. Because childcare became , the conceptual underpinnings of the CCDBG Act are grounded in the premise that childcare assistance can increase employment and earnings, ultimately (the reasoning goes) enabling families to move out of poverty.

The appeal of such an approach is understandable: It’s far easier for policymakers to wrap their hands around licensed programs caring for children during parents’ reported work hours than to engage with the messy complexity of actually ensuring that parents have the care they prefer in order to bond with and healthily raise their very young children. Closing the preference gap, then, requires politicians on both sides of the aisle to reframe the goals of childcare policy — and to get more comfortable with trusting parents.

America’s current approach to childcare policy isn’t the only pathway. In the past, the U.S. actually did experiment with that allowed eligible low-income parents to use subsidy dollars to pay themselves, though such efforts never caught fire. Other countries have also built examples to look to. A recent from the People’s Policy Project highlighted how Nordic nations have built a childcare system that couples affordable licensed options with support for informal care. While the financial support available in the Nordic countries is unlikely to be high enough to enable a parent to stop working entirely, it could be the key to unlocking greater flexibility in balancing work and family responsibilities.

A shift does seem to be underway in America. Some policies are becoming more inclusive. New Mexico’s universal childcare system, for example, allows and receive $750 a month per child, though it does still exclude stay-at-home parents. Politicians are changing their tune, too: Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna that would create new structures to compensate FFN and stay-at-home parents alongside licensed programs, while the Democratically-aligned Project 2029 recently that would guarantee parents the right to choose the childcare that works best for them by offering access to either free licensed programs or a monthly stipend of $1,000 to compensate stay-at-home parents or FFN caregivers.

More and philanthropic leaders are also speaking up about the need to meet parents where they are at. For instance, the WeVision EarlyEd initiative, led by the Bainum Family Foundation, reimagining childcare policy to support two pathways for families: high-quality licensed ECE, and “trusted caregivers” which include parents and FFN caregivers.

This evolution can’t come fast enough: All families deserve the freedom to get as close as possible to their ideal childcare arrangement. That would benefit kids, parents and society writ large. The more that public policy can align with family childcare preferences, the better off the country will be.

Disclosure: The Bainum Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

Indiana K-12 schools must meet new standards before seeking approval to implement a four-day school week.

The model, once favored by rural schools due to a shortage of bus drivers, is spreading nationwide to urban and suburban districts seeking to recruit teachers and students by extending the school day, so students and staff can take Fridays off.

Schools can apply for a flexibility waiver through the Indiana Department of Education to move to a four-day school week.

Now, schools must earn an “A” grade through the state’s A-F accountability model to be considered for a four-day school week waiver.

That’s one of four minimum requirements outlined in House Enrolled Act , which took effect July 1.

The Indiana Department of Education recently issued guidance to schools about the new criteria ahead of the coming school year.

Schools must also offer transportation for students who choose to attend a school operating on a five-day schedule, meet the state’s $45,000-a-year minimum teacher salary threshold, and offer enrichment and remediation at no cost to parents the day school is not in session.

The State Board of Education must then grant approval before a school can transition to a four-day week.

Vinton Elementary pilots four-day week

Vinton Elementary School is entering its third and final year piloting a four-day school week.

The Lafayette-area school, with an enrollment of 408, is the sole school in Indiana operating on a four-day schedule through the state Department of Education’s flexibility waiver for innovation.

School starts at 8 a.m. Monday through Thursday, with dismissal delayed until 3:45 p.m. — a necessity to meet the required 54,000 minutes of instruction each year, which the school accomplishes in a mere 151 days compared to the typical 180 days.

Students attend class on Fridays only when a holiday falls on a Monday, so they don’t miss two days in one week.

The National Conference of State Legislatures 850 school districts operate on a four-day schedule, saving their budgets an average of 0.4% to 2.5% a year.

Principal Cindy Preston is impressed by the results she’s seen thus far: Student disciplinary referrals are down from 495 before the pilot started to 293 referrals last school year.

Staff absences declined from 656 to 398 a year.

Eighty-nine percent of third graders passed their spring assessments last year, up from 73% when the school still operated five days a week.

And a clear majority of parents and staff report they are satisfied with the four-day schedule, Preston said.

Yet she looks at the new criteria and wonders whether Vinton will qualify for another waiver once the pilot expires.

The school already meets two of the four minimum standards for teacher salaries and transportation.

Students are provided free busing to other elementary schools within the Lafayette School Corporation if parents wish to keep them on a five-day schedule.

The YMCA offers on-site daycare at Vinton on Fridays, but few students participate.

Preston said she is exploring options to provide free onsite enrichment and remedial programming on Fridays to qualify for another waiver, but an “A” rating will be more difficult to achieve.

“We’re a high-poverty school,” she said. “We’re about 80-85% poverty, so hitting that mark is very hard. This will be my 15th year as principal here, and we’ve never reached that.”

A spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Education said waiver applications will formally open to other districts following the release of A-F grades later this school year.

The department prioritizes applications “that clearly center on student needs and include thoughtful engagement with families and school staff about the potential impacts,” said Courtney Bearsch, chief communications officer for the department.

Moving forward

Preston said she’s hopeful lawmakers will either grandfather Vinton in or revise the standards so the school can continue its four-day routine, even if it doesn’t receive an “A” rating this year.

The school applied for its initial flexibility waiver to make the district more attractive to families in neighboring districts.

While enrollment declined the first year, Preston said it rebounded the following year. Twenty-six percent of those new students transferred from a neighboring district, she said.

Initial staff concerns subsided as the year progressed, and the school no longer witnessed an influx of parents removing their child from school early for weekend trips, Preston said.

Teachers had time for deeper, uninterrupted instruction. The 90-minute reading block became 120 minutes, she said.

“Even though we’re squeezing five days (into four), teachers feel like they really do have a lot more wiggle room to do more hands-on, deeper dives into instruction instead of just hitting the surface.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

But here’s what it feels like from his seat. In his classroom, his teacher references a “silent e,” but the intervention software calls it a “magic e.” His tutor uses different hand signals and follows a different skills sequence. Supports meant to reinforce classroom learning are unintentionally cutting against that, leaving him to sort it out alone.

When a student hasn’t mastered something in class, the standard response has been to try a fresh approach — a different program, a new strategy. But evidence from Knox County Schools in Tennessee suggests the opposite: What they need is more of the same.

Last year, Knox County conducted a , the “gold standard” of education research. Students below the 40th percentile on literacy assessments were randomly assigned to one of two tutoring models. Both received the same amount of tutoring time and similar support. The difference was the curriculum.��

One group used off-the-shelf materials designed specifically for intervention. The other received tutoring built around the high-quality instructional materials used in their regular classroom. Content was delivered with scaffolding and pre-teaching, in groups no larger than four students who met at least three times weekly to ensure intervention kept pace with classroom instruction.

When Accelerate staff visited Pleasant Ridge Elementary, one of the pilot schools, the difference was immediately noticeable. Students receiving aligned tutoring moved seamlessly between intervention and regular instruction because the materials looked, felt and sounded the same. 

The data confirmed that impression. Students in the aligned group outperformed peers, posting gains of 0.12 standard deviations, or about 1.3 months of additional literacy growth, with even greater gains among students who began the year in the lower half of the tutored group. Those children saw the largest effect: 0.18 standard deviations in growth.

Under these conditions, trained paraprofessionals also delivered the aligned intervention at least as effectively as licensed teachers. That allows districts to keep experienced educators focused on core instruction while extending proven support to more children.

This idea isn’t unique to Knox County. In its recent report, “,” TNTP argued that instructional incoherence undermines learning acceleration and widens opportunity gaps. When districts align instruction across settings, students are better supported to engage in grade-level work.��

This doesn’t mean standalone interventions should disappear. Some students require specialized instruction. But districts should stop assuming a separate intervention program is best for literacy learning, especially when they have a high-quality curriculum in place.

The practical case is just as strong.

• Teachers benefit from a unified system. When intervention specialists and classroom teachers use the same materials, coordination becomes genuine collaboration. In Knox County, who experienced both models preferred the aligned approach.��
• Students face less cognitive load. When the words, routines, sequence and strategy hold steady between classroom and intervention, students stop spending energy navigating inconsistencies and can focus on learning.
• Cost savings are real — and can be redirected to other priorities. Districts invest approximately on literacy instruction, with a significant portion dedicated to parallel interventions. Tennessee SCORE estimated Knox County could save $2 million — — by drawing on the core curriculum rather than purchasing separate programs.
• Fragmentation falls hardest on students who need coherence most. Benefits should extend to multilingual learners and students with disabilities, who move between settings more than most. Knox County didn’t test that premise explicitly, but evidence from the pilot was promising enough that the district is expanding the aligned tutoring method to those students starting this fall. 

Exploring this sort of alignment doesn’t require major investments or a district-wide overhaul. Erin Phillips, Knox County’s executive director of learning and literacy, frames the opportunity in a refreshing way: “try in” rather than “buy in.”��

District leaders can begin with a pilot — a low-risk one where teachers learn and refine with support, leaders build context-specific evidence, and costs stay low since they’re using materials they already own.

are drawing national attention, and districts everywhere are looking for what to borrow. Right now, leaders are making decisions about next year’s budgets, staffing and schedules. It may feel late to act, but the strategy embraced by Knox County doesn’t require a change of course, just a refocusing of intervention around the existing curriculum. Here’s how to do it:

• Start with a coalition of the willing. Pick one grade level and schools whose leaders want to try this. 
• Plan professional learning. Teachers and paraprofessionals can deliver this well but need effective support. Build training before the year starts.
• Set clear metrics. Decide how you’ll measure success: student movement between tiers, curriculum-embedded assessment results, teacher feedback or dollars saved. Monitor progress and adjust as needed.

The most compelling lesson from the Knox County study may be that it doesn’t ask leaders to buy another program or adopt a new initiative. It asks them to reconsider how the pieces of their existing instructional system fit together.

Education has no shortage of products promising to accelerate learning. Before investing in the next one, leaders should embrace Phillips’ suggestion to “try in.” They might discover, as Knox County did, that the most effective intervention materials are sitting on their shelves.

I respond in our native tongue, “Muy bien, ¿y tú?”��

We chat briefly about students from our class, and I ask about Camila — a silly ninth grader who always brightened our days. 

“Hay … la deportaron, miss,” he whispers. In that moment, I’m astonished but not surprised. This has become a familiar reality for many newcomer students.

These days, as an English language development teacher to newcomers in Santa Maria, California, I often hear my high school students speaking casually about going back to their native countries. Voluntary and forceful deportations have become commonplace over the last year and a half. The has doubled since President Donald Trump’s second term began, and the number of immigrants in detention facilities is at an all-time high. 

But families being broken apart and people being uprooted from the homes they’ve built — in many cases, the only homes they know — is not OK or normal. We as a society cannot accept this. It’s an outrage. It’s also painful and traumatizing for the families experiencing it. And I know that because I’ve experienced it myself. 

Ten years ago, on a Monday morning, I received a text from my older sister. “Mom is going back to Mexico,” it read. I was at Starbucks, reading my book, when I stared at my phone in disbelief. But something in her text made me believe that this news was real. As I headed home that day, “Te Vas Amor” by El Coyote y Su Banda Tierra Santa played in my white Honda Accord. El Coyote sang, “Te vas amor, tal vez mis ojos no te vuelvan a mirar.” You are leaving love, perhaps my eyes will never see you again. 

I cried at the prospect of losing my mother to the border. Given that she was undocumented, I knew Mami would not be able to come back.

The hours and days after were a blur. When I got home, Mami revealed she’d be going back to Mexico to care for my grandfather before he passed. Because she needed to leave so urgently, Papi would have to join her later. My parents owned an agricultural business that he needed to tend to. When they’d first immigrated to the U.S., they’d picked strawberries; eventually they’d begun cultivating fruit and hiring workers of their own. My parents had found the American dream they’d longed for: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness here.

Mami began getting her affairs in order that same day. I don’t remember asking her to stay. I was 23 years old, a recent graduate from UCLA and technically an adult at the time. I was also a U.S. citizen. I felt it selfish to ask my mother to choose between her dying father and her grown daughter, so I just processed the news and supported her decision. 

The days after involved buying flights, speaking to a lawyer, putting the house — which they had just purchased and paid off — in my name, and changing bank accounts to include me as their fiduciary representative. I did all this while my heart ached at the thought of losing my mother to a border that would not welcome her back. 

By Friday night, just four days after Mami had made the decision to go back to Mexico, we were on our way to Los Angeles International Airport, where she said goodbye to her husband and boarded a plane to Oaxaca. 

Ten months later, once strawberry season had concluded, Papi was on his way to join her. Before he went through airport security, I gave my father a hug. This time, both my parents were leaving this country, leaving home.

It’s 2026 now, almost 10 years since I lost my parents to self-deportation. It’s a shame that things have only gotten worse for immigrant families like mine. It seems like every day we see social media posts about families getting separated from their loved ones and GoFundMe pages asking for help with legal expenses for family members who were deported. Each day, another family is broken by a border and laws that don’t allow them to stay together. 

And yet we, as a society, have accepted this new norm. Why? Why have we tolerated the idea that a father or mother can just be ripped apart from their child? Each day I walk into my classroom, overjoyed by the presence of my students, and think of the ache they must feel with this current administration. I lost my parents to the border at the age of 23; here they are, experiencing it as 15-year-olds. I understand that my students carry not only their backpacks, pencils and notebooks, but also the weight of potentially losing their loved ones. 

They also carry something else: resilience. Strength comes from trials and tribulations. Despite what they’re experiencing, my students are brilliant and thriving. I remind them of this each day. 

I offer a space of love and learning, a space where they know they are accepted and valued, no matter what else is going on in our country. In my classroom, they know they belong, and they know that while we’re working together to learn English, their native tongues are still welcome.

Despite what I can offer my students in my classroom, we as a society need to do better for them. What is going on in our country is not normal and should not be reduced to normalcy just because it’s happening. It should not happen at all. My students deserve to live and learn in a place where their only worry might be whether they studied enough for the science test or whether they made the baseball team, not whether their life will be uprooted by the presence of ICE at the local grocery store. 

For now, I cheer for them when they say, “Hello, Ms. Gonzalez, how are you?,” demonstrating they are capable of learning a new language. I celebrate them when they get a perfect score on a test they were worried about. For now, I do my best to put a smile on my face and assure them that no matter what, they are always welcome here.

The University of California Board of Regents chair said Tuesday morning she expects a recommendation from the faculty-led Academic Senate by the end of this academic year on whether the system should reinstate the SAT and ACT for incoming freshmen.

The announcement came shortly after the Senate’s admissions board said it was pulling back on its original timeline to have two working groups — one to consider resurrecting the exams and the other to review high school course requirements for UC admission — through next year. That news, , caused confusion and doubt over how and when the admissions test question would be addressed.

Regents Chair Maria Anguiano settled that issue at Tuesday’s board meeting after a vast majority of public speakers voiced strong support for reinstituting the SAT and ACT.  

“As stewards of this institution, we need to ask a broader and more consequential set of questions,” she said of the admissions process. “What knowledge, skills and experiences best prepare students for success at UC and beyond? We have a responsibility to continually examine whether our understanding of college readiness keeps pace with the changing world around us.”

And, just as important, she said, the system needs to work with educators, families and communities across the state to strengthen students’ academic preparedness. 

“The goal of this review is not to rehash old questions or data, but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world,” she said. “We anticipate a recommendation from the Academic Senate no later than the end of this academic year.”

Much of the enthusiasm about reinstating the SAT and ACT as a screening tool came from faculty: They’ve been waging a growing campaign to bring back the exams to screen out what they say are underqualified first-year students.

The idea arose in part because of incoming freshmen’s abysmal performance in math. Between 2020 and 2025, for example, the number of students at the University of California San Diego whose math skills fell short of high school standards increased nearly thirtyfold — and 70% of those students were below

Reading and writing has suffered mightily, too, in recent years, faculty note. 

But some K-12 educators and advocates in the Golden State are skeptical of the idea, saying it will only widen the opportunity gap for students and would fail to address the real and solvable problems in K-12 education — particularly around teacher readiness.  

“That exam will be a gatekeeper, punishing the most under-resourced districts, schools and communities,” said Rodolfo Ornelas, whose position as STEM coordinator at Oakland Unified School District was recently eliminated because of budget cuts. “Districts like Oakland Unified serve some of our most vulnerable populations and attract teachers who are newer in their career or are on a number of emergency credentials.”

Ornelas will soon start a job at San Francisco Unified School District where he will coach new principals. He said one of the most fundamental problems with math instruction is that many educators don’t know how to teach the subject effectively. 

“A lot of times, they lack that content knowledge and the confidence to even teach mathematics, so they teach it the way they learned it and so that’s where we see our kids getting shortchanged,” Ornelas said. “Or you see these districts typically prioritizing literacy without realizing math needs to be an equal partner.”  

Educators point to COVID-related learning loss, chronic absenteeism and the corrosive nature of social media as other factors that play into college students’ poor math performance. They say the university system must work closely with K-12 schools to help ensure students have the skills they need. 

Andrea McChristian, national policy director for Just Equations, a California-based math equity group, said the use of the SATs and ACTs in admissions runs against the university system’s stated goals. 

“Their core mission and admissions policy says that they’re supposed to be representative of the student population in the state,” she said. “So, if you’re saying that as a public institution you want to represent the diversity of student voices and student experience in the state, yet you’re putting in this screener in the admissions process — which has been shown to lessen and suppress that very diversity that you want to have within your class — then something’s not adding up there.”

After the regents meeting, Just Equations Executive Director Pamela Burdman called for greater transparency in the process moving forward and questioned the fast-moving events of the last few days.

“The abandonment of the originally announced plan came on the eve of today’s regents meeting — in which the public had its first opportunity to comment on the idea of reinstating admissions tests — and amid intense pressure from a group of faculty demanding that the regents take an immediate vote, with no time to inquire into the evidence,” she said. 

The university system stopped requiring the SAT or ACT in 2020 and then , said the tests could not be used at all in admissions as part of a settlement to brought by four students, six nonprofits and the Compton Unified School District. The 2019 complaint charged that the UC system knowingly created barriers to higher education for students of color and those with disabilities by relying on the SAT and the ACT.

Around the same time, Gov. Gavin Newsom expressed strong reservations about the exams, saying their use “ for underrepresented students, given that performance on these tests is highly correlated with race and parental income, and is not the best predictor for college success.” His office did not respond to requests for comments. 

But those working within the nine-school, student university system disagree: more than 3,000 faculty members last month imploring school leadership to bring back the tests. 

The first, signed by 2,300 people, called for the admissions exams to be reinstated for incoming students applying to STEM majors. 

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must re-teach middle school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other qualitatively demanding fields,” the STEM faculty . “UC has finite resources and can only help so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach.”  

The signed by 900 faculty members in social sciences, humanities, arts, business, law, education and other non-STEM fields, said the SAT’s and ACT’s reading and writing sections were also critically needed indicators. 

The university system is also considering using the state-level exams — annual math and English tests taken by high school juniors — in admissions, but there are complicating factors with that alternative, including that not every out-of-state applicant takes the test.

Josh Godinez is an assistant high school principal in Southern California and board director for the nearly 2,000-member California Association of School Counselors.

He said he knows socioeconomic status, access to educational resources, mental health and test anxiety can all impact a student’s performance on high-stakes exams like the SAT and ACT.  But he still believes standardized tests should be a component of what he called a “holistic” admissions review, adding these exams “provide colleges and universities with a valuable snapshot of a student’s current academic proficiency that complements transcripts, coursework, and other measures of achievement.”

The push to bring back the college entrance exams began at UC Berkeley, about eight miles north of the Oakland Unified School District. Lakisha Young, whose organization The Oakland REACH builds and delivers family-centered learning solutions in partnership with school systems, said the parents of the students who performed poorly in math at the college level surely would have wanted to know their kids were missing key benchmarks in earlier years. 

Report cards might not have revealed the depth of their problems with the subject, she said. 

“Grades don’t tell the story about competence,” Young said. “If a parent looks at a report card and sees Bs and C pluses, how are they supposed to make that connection? A ‘C’ is at least average. I think a parent would be floored about that, thinking, ‘My child has been moving through the system still stuck at a 6th- or 7th-grade math level.’”

Proponents of returning the admissions tests say they are better measures of how well students will do in college than their high school grades. They argue, too, the exams are a more equitable method of identifying high-performing students from marginal backgrounds than other, more subjective criteria, such as exceptional extracurriculars.

Liz Noone, an instructional coach who helps math teachers inside Oakland USD, is conflicted about bringing back the tests but sees some value in the move because they would allow her students — and her school — to learn how they compare to others. 

“People who are in a better socioeconomic position get tutors, they do classes, they get books, they get practice, they do this and that, where our students who are from lower socioeconomic status don’t have access to all those resources and support,” she said. “So, it’s a double-edged sword.”

Dave Kung, executive director of TPSE Math, a professional organization that works to better serve students in higher education mathematics, said the original decision to pull the entrance tests was based on an observed inequality — but was not a solution to the underlying problem. 

“We saw an injustice — big equity gaps on SATs, especially for students of color — and tried to act like that wasn’t the result of deeper issues: poverty, generational wealth, the echoes of educational exclusion,” he said. “Instead, we thought ignoring it might make it go away, or at least diminish the problem. That was clearly overly optimistic thinking.”

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations and to ����Ӱ��.

California’s audacious goal of having half of all K-12 students enrolled in bilingual education programs by 2030 has encountered one big stumbling block — there aren’t enough qualified bilingual teachers.

To help remedy that, a $10 million grant tucked in the state budget aims to help school districts recruit high school students as future bilingual teachers.

The funding in the that passed Thursday allows schools to partner with community colleges and universities to help students obtain a teaching credential and the bilingual authorization required to teach English learners.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-Chula Vista, said the idea for the legislation came in part from school districts that communicated about their struggles to find qualified bilingual teachers.

“I kept hearing from districts and educators that bilingual students want to become teachers but run into a fragmented system with no clear path through high school, community college, university and credentialing,” said Alvarez.

Researchers and coordinators of bilingual teacher preparation programs applaud the new grant program, but say it’s not nearly enough to meet the state’s needs.

“Grant funding is important, but to me it just doesn’t feel like it’s going to be enough, given our size and also the size of our dreams and our ambitions as a state,” said Lucrecia Santibañez, a UCLA professor and author of two recent reports on bilingual teacher preparation.

The demand for bilingual teachers

California set a eight years ago to enroll half of all K-12 students in programs that help them become proficient in two or more languages by 2030.

But to reach that goal in the next four years, California will need an estimated 6,000 more bilingual teachers.

Several recent reports paint a picture of California’s bilingual teacher preparation as an unfinished quilt filled with gaps, rips and uneven stitching. Not enough bilingual teacher preparation programs exist, the reports found, and those that do exist are too far from the districts with the highest demand for bilingual teachers. 

In addition, bilingual students interested in becoming teachers are often stymied by the extra cost to finish both a teaching credential and a bilingual authorization — which requires several classes and 20 hours of student teaching, and can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 on top of a college degree.

California has more than doubled the number of bilingual authorizations issued to teachers annually, from 617 in 2014-15 to a record 1,370 in 2023-24, according to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Yet Santibañez and other UCLA researchers found that districts issue hundreds of emergency bilingual teacher permits each year for teachers who are not fully qualified to teach bilingual instruction.

The demand for bilingual teachers is not the same everywhere. While some districts have developed thriving dual language immersion programs and found ways to increase their numbers of bilingual teachers, many others lack the teachers and the funding to build these types of programs.

“We’ve worked with districts that have had to close programs they started, and they just couldn’t staff it, and the parents were very disappointed, but the district didn’t want to have long-term subs running their dual language program, which is fair,” said Anya Hurwitz, executive director of SEAL, a nonprofit organization that provides bilingual curriculum training for school districts. “There are other districts that have built more robust relationships with teacher prep programs, but those are the early adopters or the outliers, not the norm.”

Bilingual teaching deserts

The areas in California with the greatest need of bilingual teachers are also the areas where preparation programs are scarce or underfunded, UCLA’s Santibañez said. Imperial County on the Mexico border, as well as Kings and Tulare counties in the Central Valley all have large English learner populations but have no preparation programs nearby.

“We know from the research that teachers and students in college who decide to become teachers like to stay close to where they live,” said Santibañez. “So when the teacher preparation places aren’t really building capacity in a region that has tremendous growth of multilingual learners, it’s going to create that sort of access or needs gap.”

Fewer established bilingual teachers in an area also means there are fewer teachers who can serve as mentors for student teachers, she said.

“We don’t necessarily see somebody from San Diego or even from L.A. making the two-hour trip to Indio or Coachella or Calexico or wherever to do those mentoring sessions. So it is important to grow the capacity where the capacity is needed,” Santibañez said.

Starting in high school

The new legislation responds to some of the researchers’ recommendations. For example, school districts will be given priority for grants if they have a high percentage of students who are English learners and not enough teacher preparation programs. 

Sparking interest in bilingual teaching among high schoolers, as the new grants would do, is crucial, said Adam Sawyer, director of the bilingual authorization program at California State University, Bakersfield. He said his university helps as many as 30 credentialed teachers get their bilingual authorization every year, and also has a bilingual teaching residency established with local elementary school districts that enlists about 10 to 15 student teachers per year.

Sawyer said CSU Bakersfield is working to establish an undergraduate pathway for prospective teachers and a dual-enrollment course for high schoolers, which will start next year. 

“I have always thought this would be a wonderful way to start tapping into high school juniors and seniors that may not have thought about bilingual teaching, but may start seeing that as, ‘Hey, that might be something I want to do!’ ” Sawyer said.

‘A drop of water in the sea’

Still, the new funding, which will be distributed in grants of up to $600,000, is not a lot to address the need for bilingual teachers, educators say.

“It’s not a whole lot of money to do great things,” said Eduardo Muñoz-Muñoz, San José State University professor and co-author of a report by the California Association of Bilingual Teacher Education and Californians Together. “It’s a drop of water in the sea.”

Researchers have called for California to collect and publish data on the number of dual language immersion programs in the state, how many students they serve and the number of teachers with bilingual authorizations working in them.

More data would help the state pinpoint where to fund more bilingual teacher preparation programs, Muñoz-Muñoz said. 

Santibañez and Muñoz-Muñoz also recommend the state offer more financial aid for students working on bilingual authorizations on top of their teaching credentials, a stipend for students to complete student teaching in a bilingual classroom, or bonuses for teachers who have bilingual authorizations, which not all districts provide.

“There’s just got to be an incentive,” Santibañez said. “You’re a college student, right? You’re getting your teaching credential, and you speak Spanish because you’re a heritage language speaker. So getting a bilingual authorization seems like something like a slam dunk, right? But you have to pay for it.”

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That doesn’t have to be the case. As researchers and parent leaders, we watched a rare shift emerge over the past several years in Evanston, Illinois. PTA funds, typically raised locally within individual school communities, are now raised collectively across all schools in the district and reallocated equitably.

The district-wide PTA Council pools and redistributes all fundraising across schools in the district through a new initiative called the One Fund. Every school receives an equality distribution of a standard amount per student, as well as an equity distribution based on student need. This initiative emerged from and is supported by the — a multiracial group of parents, caregivers, and community members committed to advocating for resource sharing and equity-centered community work. 

Before the One Fund, there were significant differences in the fundraising capacity of PTAs across the 13 schools in Evanston’s K-8 district–with a gap of more than $40,000 between schools, totaling hundreds of dollars per pupil. One school might modernize track and playground facilities with just one year’s fundraising, while another struggles to fund basic school supplies. Two early PEP leaders how these fundraising discrepancies materialized and how parent and caregiver organizers worked hard to raise awareness of the vast differences across schools, often along familiar economic and racial lines. That made some people uncomfortable. 

Similar inequities in funding PTAs and other parent groups show up across the country, as  our research from and shows, as well as in New York City. Indeed, there has been with and critical questions that challenge these common regressive spending patterns.

Across several years, PEP leaders in Evanston held town halls, meticulously addressed questions and concerns, and made a great effort to organize community support — including from some of the most affluent parents in the district. Parents and caregivers developed a shared, common understanding of the problem: PTA inequities were inconsistent with their values and with the district’s commitments to imbuing equity across educational experiences and opportunities for students. 

With a clear sense that there was a problem, the community muddled toward a solution. This didn’t come easy — there were uncertainties and there remain pockets of resistance. However, PEP emerged as a solution by accommodating a range of how people thought about solving the problem of PTA inequities. 

For some, the One Fund represented “a charity thing” involving those with more giving to those with less. For many, the One Fund seemed like a no-brainer: The benefits would eventually come around to support all children, since every student in the K-8 district attends the same high school. 

Still others understood the One Fund as a form of mutuality and solidarity,helping to reframe PTA support from focused on “my school” to “we are one district…we need to start working as one school, as opposed to mine, my school, my kids.” This reframing around solidarity reflects ways that the One Fund and the PTA Equity Project have helped to deepen community across the district.

In Evanston, the work continues. There is a more even distribution of PTA dollars across schools. And despite smaller annual budgets, PTAs are still able to support valuable enrichments and programming as they embrace the new orientation around the entire district community’s needs. Currently, the One Fund is set up on a three-year cycle for PTAs to recommit to the equity initiative, which enables continued engagement and commitment to shared values around equity in and across schools.

What happened in Evanston should encourage parent and community leaders elsewhere that it’s possible to do something, even when that something might at first feel hard and a bit amorphous. In fact, two of us have recently been working with similar efforts in districts across the country to understand each community’s needs and hopes.

Beyond differences in dollars, it’s important to think about other ways that racial and economic inequities can show up — or be challenged — in PTA spaces. Prior to the One Fund, there were sustained initiatives in Evanston aimed at laying a foundational understanding and establishing a shared language around equity. This can help build toward solidarity, which is core to deeper shifts toward more equitable educational opportunities.

The model used in Evanston will not neatly import to all places. A few other models exist, including:

• In , each public school can raise up to $5,000 for its own campus. Past that amount, the rest of the funds go into a centralized pot that is distributed across the district’s schools.
• In some places, there are informal “sister school” PTAs, which pair differently resourced schools to share dollars, information and ideas.
• In , Black parents hosted parent affinity groups as an alternative to the traditional fundraising-focused PTA. That ultimately launched a district-wide grassroots movement of parents organizing for equitable educational opportunities.

In reflecting on Evanston’s One Fund model, we find it remarkable and unremarkable at the same time. Dedicated parent and caregiver organizers have donated their time, talent, and treasure to do something rare — shift dollar resources in a much more equitable way. And it’s just how things are done now — it’s not a big deal that this is the way PTAs raise funds in the district. The three of us hope that other communities can reflect, engage and join us in our commitment to exploring possibilities of more equitable educational experiences.

A from the universities of Pennsylvania and California analyzed a longstanding San Francisco Unified School District ethnic studies program, piloted in 2010, that has since enrolled thousands of students and become a graduation requirement in 2024.

An ethnic studies course is a history class centered around the culture and experiences of diverse students, which has proven to be especially beneficial for vulnerable and high need students because of its “culturally relevant curriculum,” said Sade Bonilla, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the report.��

“The intention is to affirm students’ identities, … and to increase their engagement with the materials and content by giving students an opportunity to see themselves reflected in the curriculum,” Bonilla said.

In San Francisco, for example, a school district made up of nearly 50,000 students with a��majority identifying as , curriculum has included lessons about housing discrimination, schooling segregation and how Mexican-American and Chinese children were not allowed to attend particular schools in California, Bonilla said.��

A new standardized curriculum was approved after complaints about the course being “activist driven,” reported KQED, a local NPR station. President Donald Trump has also made similar criticisms about diversity, equity and inclusion practices in K-12 classrooms.

Using data from 10 cohorts of students from grades 6 to 12 between the 2007-08 school year to 2022-23, Bonilla and her colleagues said the study is the first to provide evidence about the academic impact of ethnic studies enrollment in a district-wide expansion.

Drawing on that found curricula that reflect student backgrounds not only can promote , but also improve , the researchers found enrollment in ethnic studies courses can improve a student’s GPA by 0.17 points and significantly reduce course failures across a school system.

The grade point boost resulted in 15% more students achieving a 3.0 GPA and becoming eligible for admission to the University of California, the report said. Researchers also found that all student groups benefited from enrollment, “with particularly strong effects for lower-performing students, male students, Black and Latinx students, and students receiving special education services.”

Bonilla and her colleagues found the course is especially effective for students entering high school.

Coined “,” the transition between eighth and ninth grade is often challenging for students as they’re exposed to a new environment and more difficult coursework, in addition to cognitive, emotional and physical changes. Students fail ninth grade more than any other grade, according to the , and other ninth graders have the lowest GPAs and most missed classes, behavior referrals and failing grades. 

Teenagers entering high school are often “more likely to be aware of news, events, policies. Some might experience discrimination or stereotypes for the first time, at the same time of this identity formation happening,” Bonilla said. “Ethnic studies provides them language to talk about what they might be witnessing, experiencing and noticing about how society works. … It’s not leaving students deflated that the world is unequal and unjust. It’s [instead] saying here’s some things that one can do about it, and how to participate in civic life in productive ways.”

Engaging students early, around ninth grade, paid off throughout the rest of their academic careers, the report found.

Ninth grade students who never took the ethnic studies class experienced a “noticeable GPA decline,” whereas the students who took the class did not. The study also reported students with the lowest eighth grade GPAs, below a 2.0, benefited from the class the most, with a 0.17 point increase as those with GPAs between a 2.0 and 3.0 saw gains of about 0.12 points. 

While all students saw academic improvement, gains were largest among Black and Latino students, who saw GPA increases of 0.23 and 0.25 respectively and male students, who saw a 0.19 GPA increase on average, compared to female students who improved on average by 0.15 points.

English language learners and students with disabilities also saw improvements in their GPA by 0.19 and 0.17 points respectively. 

“Although [ethnic studies] courses centered the experiences of communities of color, students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds benefited,” the report said. “Across core subjects, [ethnic studies] enrollment increased GPA in all areas, with the largest improvements in math (0.27 points) and science (0.20 points).”

The San Francisco school district has seen a steady increase in enrollment in ethnic studies classes, from 3.5% of all high school students in its pilot year to 13.4% in 2022-23, but the report stated it’s unclear whether other districts will follow, despite its benefits.

California became the first state to require ethnic studies as a graduation requirement and more than a handful of states – including , and – have adopted mandates such as requiring schools to offer similar coursework. 

The California graduation mandate has with funding, which could be a challenge for widespread expansion for other states too.��

“Legislating a high school requirement and not providing any additional funding means that districts would need to reallocate their spending of the money that they have,” Bonilla said. “In this fiscal environment, … being able to support the implementation of any new initiative is going to be challenging.”

In Jan. 2025, Trump signed calling to end “radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” and threatening to pull federal funding to schools if they taught “discriminatory equity ideology” or any lessons that “treat individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups.”

Even before Trump’s order, states have pushed back against comparable coursework, with more than ��including Arizona, which in 2010 Mexican American studies; Tennessee which certain concepts around race and racism in 2021; and Florida, whose leaders successfully advocated teachings in Advanced Placement’s African American studies in 2023.

But ethnic studies courses have “not been widespread,” Bonilla said, adding that many states that have restricted these types of classes never really offered them in the first place.

“By banning this type of curriculum [in states like Tennessee] … we’re not necessarily taking things away from those students because many students didn’t have access to this type of curriculum in the first place,” Bonilla said.

The challenges across the country “really underscore and speak to the importance of the local role in education,” Bonilla added. Families in San Francisco had to advocate for the ethnic studies offering and other communities could follow suit.

“It wasn’t something that the district decided to offer because they thought it would be good for students, but was actually from community groups and students and parents advocating to the school board,” Bonilla said. “Local districts [and] schools have a lot of power to advocate within their local school boards to make decisions about what meets the needs of [their] students.”

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.

“I’m not going to pretend like you aren’t,” he tells his students. “I know it’s readily available for most of you, if not all of you.”

A math teacher at in Fullerton, California, where he works with students as old as 19 who are struggling to get enough credits to graduate, Rabanera has watched AI creep into homework assignments over the past few years as students use powerful tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini to race through assignments. 

It has forced him to change his approach. 

He has stopped sending home problems that can be lifted wholesale into an AI chatbot and pasted back into an assignment. Instead, he builds lessons around what students actually care about, creating, for instance, a unit on buying a car that weaves together calculating interest rates and monthly payments with learning about credit scores. He has replaced rote problem sets with one-of-a-kind poster projects and in-class design challenges. 

When Rabanera assigns practice, he often has students devise their own word problems around personal interests to prove they understand the underlying concepts.

He’s hardly the only one scrambling to try something new: Nationwide, teachers at all levels are rethinking, scaling back or, in some cases, abandoning homework altogether as evidence mounts that students who outsource their assignments to AI aren’t just submitting work that isn’t theirs. They’re surrendering the cognitive struggle that makes learning stick and makes homework, well, work.

New large-scale research suggests that teachers’ fears are valid. A led by Sina Rismanchian of the University of California, Irvine, analyzed 3.2 million student math problems on the digital platform over a decade and found that after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, high school students spent 31% less time on word problems — the kind easily copy-pasted into an AI — compared with graph-based problems that required a hands-on interaction with the platform. College students showed a 27% decline. 

When students were tested under proctored conditions with no access to AI, the copy-paste behavior vanished. And when researchers examined whether students had actually retained anything, they found that the odds of correctly answering AI-susceptible word problems fell by 25% in the post-ChatGPT years.

“Students are using AI a lot,” Rismanchian said in an interview. For those who do, “it’s coming at a cost for their learning outcomes.” 

The College Board last fall that the percentage of high school students who said they use AI tools for schoolwork grew from 79% in January 2025 to 84% in May 2025.

In a , 37% of K-12 principals said students were using AI for homework help, slightly higher than the percentage who said students were using it to help draft essays.

John Singleton, an associate professor of economics at the University of Rochester and a co-author of the study, said the finding “certainly requires a rethinking of what the object of homework is.” For him, assigning short writing assignments to his college students is “insane these days, because you’re going to get back 25 AI-generated short essays, and so it’s really not gauging comprehension. It’s not even doing the work of forcing the student to engage with the material, because they can put it into the AI.”

Conscientious instructors are drafting AI policies that they post to class syllabi, he said, “but I think the temptation is there.”

Talking to colleagues, Singleton said, “Everyone feels sort of bewildered about whether they’re doing the right thing.” Moving toward presentations and oral exams make sense, but giving up traditional writing assignments as a way to assess student thinking, he said, “is too bad, in some ways.” 

The irony of this moment is that AI was supposed to offer students a , capable of explaining concepts, adapting to individual learners and helping them work through difficult material at their own pace. Instead, many educators say, for a significant share of students it has become the most efficient cheating device ever invented.

“There’s a zillion people that are trying to come up with these guided learning environments and Socratic tutors and stuff like that,” said Justin Reich, director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and host of the AI-focused podcast “.” “And I’m just like, ‘Guys, you’re putting the “Carefully teach me this stuff” button directly next to the “Do everything for me” button.’ ”

Reich has spent years studying why students cheat. When they’re being honest, they typically tell researchers that the assignment didn’t seem worth their time, or that they ran out of time. They felt pressure to perform or, in many cases, they found themselves stuck on a problem with no other help in sight. 

“What’s new now is that, with all the gen AI stuff, the cost of taking a shortcut is zero,” said Eric Cosyn, a researcher who co-founded the .

Ashley Kannan, who has taught eighth-grade U.S. history for 30 years in Oak Park, Illinois, said that if schools continue to go down the same path of assigning work and expecting students not to be tempted to take shortcuts, “the war is over — we’ve lost.” Classrooms, he said, will be left in “a race to see who can plagiarize and cheat the best, and who has the resources to do so,” a dynamic he calls a losing bet for everyone. 

Start your homework in class 

In interviews, many educators and researchers were quick to point out that AI didn’t invent academic dishonesty. 

Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of , a research and school reform project, has been tracking student cheating behavior for two decades. Long before ChatGPT, she said, copying a classmate’s homework was consistently the most commonly admitted form of academic dishonesty.

The group’s latest academic integrity study, drawn from nearly 30,000 high school students, shows that this pattern still holds: 32.7% of students reported copying someone else’s homework at least once in the past month, a figure almost identical to the share who reported using AI as an unauthorized aid: 32.8%.

Students, Pope said, are simply swapping out one shortcut for another.

“This sort of hand-wringing that AI is changing homework like never before is a little bit off,” she said, “because there were high amounts of copying and cheating homework long before.”

All the same, Pope’s team has surveyed more than 100,000 students since November 2022, and the results are unambiguous: They’re using AI to do homework. Many don’t frame it as cheating, making the case that consulting an AI is no different than asking a parent, calling a tutor or typing a question into Google. Echoing Reich’s findings, she noted, “Some of them are saying it’s another piece of technology that helps us when we’re stuck.”

Teachers, naturally, see it a bit differently. A Challenge Success survey of 678 faculty and staff members found that the most pervasive concern, raised by about 58% of respondents, wasn’t cheating itself but the erosion of critical thinking. Teachers complained that students aren’t developing the intellectual stamina that hard problems require. “If school is about skills and not content,” one teacher wrote, “ChatGPT takes away critical thinking skills at a time that we are supposed to be teaching those skills to the students.”

Pope said her group is hearing from teachers that they’re afraid to send homework home “because it’s even more clear that there’s this ‘Easy’ button, and students are not having the productive struggle that they need to really learn the material.”

She recommends rethinking homework, starting with what she calls a homework audit — a systematic review of assignments to ask whether they actually require a student to do the intellectual work required. Teachers should also be able to tell if the work was done by the student or by AI.

“Start your homework in class,” she advised. “You will get a really good picture of who understands what you’re asking and who doesn’t by looking around and seeing what happens in the first 10 minutes — one kid is done and one kid is still stuck.”

Kannan, the Illinois history teacher, has landed on a similar idea, built around conversations. He still assigns a version of the same paragraph students have long written to identify a historical figure and place them in context — but the process now unfolds through one-on-one conferences rather than solo writing. Because of the conferences, the writing looks different. 

The goal, he said, is to locate the assignment “in the hearts and minds of a student” rather than in a generic prompt that AI can complete on command. “I think that there’s a way to personalize rigor,” he said. “When students, when young people feel that something is personal to them, they do come alive.” 

Kannan said this kind of individualization isn’t new — special education teachers and speech-language pathologists have practiced it for decades. “All I’m suggesting is that there are pathways that we know work. Why not bring it into the mainstream classroom for every student?”

‘How this could this stronger?’

Researchers are also grappling with the limits of what they can measure. Self-reported cheating data, as Rismanchian’s paper notes, is “the least reliable way to measure anything.” In his own earlier research on 70 undergraduates, more than half of students who were directly observed relying on AI denied using it. “We were actually observing this copy-pasting behavior,” he recalled.

A group of McGraw-Hill researchers co-authored the Rismanchian study, and Dylan Arena, the publisher’s chief of data science, said solving the AI cheating problem has two prongs: Better detection helps, but it’s insufficient without a cultural shift inside classrooms. Students who believe their sole obligation is to produce a completed assignment, he said, will always find the path of least resistance. 

“There are kids who are here thinking, ‘I need to punch my ticket, I need to get this thing done,’ ” Arena said. “What’s the most expedient way to do that? Hand it over to this tool.”

But he suggested that something deeper is actually happening as AI colonizes students’ thinking: They’re losing their tolerance for “not knowing” something at any given moment, for what he calls the productive discomfort of sitting with a hard problem before the answer becomes clear. “It used to be that we would spend weeks not fully understanding something, and we would read, and we would write, and we would talk, and we would try, and we would write drafts — and they wouldn’t be quite right. But there is now an expectation that I either instantly know what I should do, or I should turn to a tool.”

A few teachers are experimenting with a more informal version of that transparency, built on relationships rather than documentation. 

Kannan described pulling aside a student last year whom he suspected, based on months of conversation, of leaning on AI for most of his schoolwork. “I knew that because I was taking the time to talk to him,” Kannan said. 

Rather than report the student, he asked him to run his own writing through the same chatbot he’d been using, in a bid to “reverse-engineer” and improve it. “Let’s actually ask questions to ChatGPT about how this could be stronger? How is this weak?”

Kannan has since built that move into his regular teaching: After students draft work with AI’s help, he sometimes has them ask the tool to critique the output, with students in effect “co-designing” assignments rather than simply handing them to a chatbot and turning in whatever pops out.

In the absence of such guidance, he said, students will do what they must to complete assignments. He recalled a student who’d been assigned an essay on the American dream by an English teacher. “There was really no instruction as to what that was, and she said, ‘I carried on a conversation with Gemini about what the American dream was, and that helped me understand it more.’ Given the demands of what the student was facing, she used AI as a partner, as an opportunity.”

, a longtime education researcher who has studied homework, noted that teachers have been assigning less homework for at least a decade — and that the rise of AI might reduce it further if teachers lose confidence that take‑home work is genuinely done by students. But it could also work the other way: If teachers believe that AI is a kind of all-purpose helper, they could actually assign more homework because they believe students “are going to be helped out and kind of semi-tutored,” he said.

Many school districts are trying to reframe the relationship between students and AI from the ground up. The Laguna Beach Unified School District in California, working with researchers at Stanford, found that AI policies had generated a culture of suspicion in which teachers spent their energy trying to catch cheaters — and students felt guilty for using AI.

Michael Morrison, the district’s former chief technology officer, called it “the absolute worst culture that I can think of.” 

In response, the district developed an add-on tool for Google Docs called , which asks students to disclose exactly how much and in what ways they use AI on a given assignment — a kind of nutritional label for AI-assisted work. Surveys suggest students generally use it honestly because the tool gives them something they didn’t have before: a sanctioned way to tell the truth.

Michael Keller, Laguna’s director of social-emotional support, noted that the district is already rethinking homework altogether for high school students, since 70% are athletes who devote an hour or more each day to practice and training. 

He sees the AI initiative as part of a broader commitment to treating students as full partners in their own learning. Monitoring how students are using AI, he said, is not the point. “We really view it as our moral obligation to make sure that we put trust and supportive relationships as the foundation to their learning experience,” he said.

For MIT’s Reich, transparency is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper challenge is motivational. “Kids are just natural boundary pushers,” he said.

And though they may not be able to articulate this, “the boundaries are what make them feel safe and loved and cared for.”

The problem, Reich argues, isn’t that students are weak-willed or morally deficient. It’s that the incentive structure of homework — grades for completion, not for thinking — has always been fragile. AI has simply exposed that fragility. 

“It’s not like homework is perfect,” he said. “Any teacher will tell you that some of the assignments are dumb or don’t work. But across the tens of millions of minutes of stuff that we ask kids to do in the afternoons, some of it’s got to be useful. And if we turn that spigot off, there’s just going to be less learning.”