Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Michael Horn: Governor, Ryan, welcome to The Future of Education. Thanks for being here.

Governor Bush: Good to be at a Primer school.

Michael Horn: Yes, it is indeed. And the history, Governor, of publicly funded widespread universal school choice, educational choice in Florida really gets its start from your time as Governor. You have laws in 1999, 2001, I’d say 2003, with funding following the student to Florida Virtual. You have all these milestones. As you look back now, 2026, at the state of educational choice here, how would you describe where we are in Florida? Where in the movement, if you will, are we right now?

Governor Bush: We’re not completely there, but we certainly got to scale for sure. When we started, I think we had 80 kids in that, parents went to a private school with public money. And that’s expanded over time. One voucher program, another corporate tax scholar program. Today, over 50% of parents in Florida choose where their kids go to school. It could be we have universal public school choice, we have universal Education Savings Accounts. And so we’re, we’re building what I think is the right way to educate our children by empowering parents. It’s really exciting.

Michael Horn: And as you noted, we’re sitting in a , literally one of hundreds of microschools, low-cost private schools throughout the state right now. I’m curious, did you envision this sort of education entrepreneurship that we’ve seen when you were Governor?

Governor Bush: I didn’t envision anything. I hoped that it would happen. My personal belief is that parents deserve to have this power to choose where their kids go to school and if they do that, that there will be schools like Primer, more tools for homeschool kids. Charter schools will emerge. The religious schools that were in decline in terms of providing education to their students would see growth, all of that. I was hopeful it would happen, and I’m proud that Florida has been a leader. But it’s also exciting to see it happen across the country.

Michael Horn: Ryan, you’ve been a direct beneficiary of really the foresight of these policies that I think it’s fair to say. And you also, as I understand it, have quite an intergenerational connection as well when it comes to microschools, educational choice in Florida. What’s your family connection to the story that’s unfolded here that started under Governor Bush?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a very personal connection, but then there’s also this sort of interesting macro connection. And the personal connection is my mom was a public school teacher, so she was very pro-public schools. We were zoned for. She took me to kindergarten orientation at the school that we were zoned for. And she quickly realized that it was a failing school. It wasn’t going to meet, you know, her standards for us. We were living with, in my grandparents house at the time in a low income area outside Orlando.

We didn’t have, you know, any choice to move. We couldn’t afford private school. And so she just took matters into her own hands. And so she ended up starting one of the first kinds of homeschool microschools in Florida. She got me and my siblings and then about a dozen other kids together and she just willed this thing into existence. And what’s interesting, and this is where it kind of connects to the macro. So I, this incredible education that frankly was like, you know, significantly higher quality than, you know, what I would have, you know, deserved, you know, relative to our socioeconomic status or what you would have expected. And what’s interesting is that she started that right before Governor Bush’s first term.

Impact of Governor Bush’s Policies

Ryan Delk: And so, we sort of experienced, you know, what I think of as the before times and it was very contrarian. We got a lot of questions. I think she was frankly judged by a lot of people, you know, for, for doing what she did. And then when Governor Bush took office, he, you know, sort of decided to, to go to the mat for, you know, a lot of these issues and make it a key priority. And so we, we actually sort of experienced the shift where it was, it was you know, not only just normalized but sort of like celebrated and empowered. And so I now feel this frankly like a real weight and responsibility as sort of the first generation to benefit from these policies. And then now, three decades later, you know, getting to spend my life building schools like this that open up those same opportunities to students with the same, you know, structure and work that, that not only, you know, Governor’s administration, but many, many folks since then have carried the torch to unlock these opportunities for kids. And so the weight of that is not lost on me.

And I think it’s quite powerful that we’re sort of seeing the second generation now. The folks that had the, that got these opportunities from, from sort of generation one of these programs now being able to reinvest in the next generation is, is quite exciting.

Michael Horn: Well, and it’s fascinating, right, that narrative of ostracism almost to norm, to expectation, right, for families. And as I understand it, you all at Primer are thinking a lot about the policy and regulatory landscape and some of the critical questions when it comes to things like microschools and the like, zoning, fire safety codes, things of that nature. I know there have been some big developments over the past couple years in Florida around some of those zoning questions. Can you just update us both on what’s happened, but also why it matters so much?

Ryan Delk: Yeah, so we are, we’re one of — there’s a lot of people doing great work on this ExcelinEd. There’s a ton of great, great orgs. And so we are one of many people that are working on this issue. There is one, you know, very narrow and perhaps, I think, very underrated, but maybe, you know, kind of unexciting part of the regulatory landscape that I happen to care a lot about, and that is the regulations around new school supply. So there’s an enormous amount of energy that’s gone into what I would articulate as the demand side, unlocking funding for parents, making sure that the funding follows the student. And that’s, you know, as we discussed, many decades in the making. But now that that exists, the reality is that a lot of the regulations around starting new schools, and I learned this firsthand, like the amount of nights and weekends that I spent early on at Primer staring at zoning maps of cities and counties is far more than I ever anticipated.

And the reason for that is that there’s all these regulations that sort of, you know, take as a sort of starting assumption that every school is still a, you know, 60,000 square foot, $30 million build to serve 2,000 students. And so in that framework where every single school looks like that, of course there’s traffic studies and school bus parking and very intense building regulations, that all makes sense in that context. But now in this world where you have a great educator who wants to open up a school in a church or a community center or, you know, a facility like this, those regulations are quite arduous. And they’re arduous, you know, we’re a fairly sophisticated operation. They’re arduous at times for us, but, but in many ways they’re impossible for like a sort of seasoned educator that wants to go serve their community. And so what I care is the sort of common sense, right sizing of these regulations specifically for small schools.

So for the large schools, a lot of what’s in place is, I think, serving that need really well. It makes a lot of sense. But for small schools, we want to make it much easier for those schools to open up in existing facilities to serve their community. And the reason that I care a lot about this is that I’ve seen firsthand stories of dozens, maybe hundreds of educators who want to start not just primaries, but all sorts of types of schools who reach out to us and say, hey, I got stuck. I have, you know, I’m trying to get this building permit, I’m trying to get this code, I can’t figure out zoning, or I’ve got to do a nine month variance process. All these things that are sort of just, just incredibly arduous for the task at hand. And so we spend a lot of time and a lot of energy from a legislative perspective making sure that we can knock down those barriers.

Michael Horn: Governor, I want to broaden the view now beyond Florida and think about these sorts of questions, supply questions, others, in the context of this sort of nationwide movement right now we’re seeing toward educational choice. And I’m curious both of your takes on a couple of items that we can run down. First, it strikes me just thinking about what you said on the zoning side of it. As an onlooker, there’s a pretty robust demand right now for different options that meet different kids needs. But the supply side that you just described, so you’re taking some significant steps there, but getting a sustainable supply side that’s affordable, low cost, private schools like Primer. What’s holding up the supply side? What else should we be thinking about in terms of that? Or maybe my perspective is wrong on this, but I would love to think about how do we really encourage this robust supply side.

Governor Bush: Ten years ago, the big fight was how do we get charter schools to be able to access, as public schools to access public capital, what we call in Florida pico dollars. And that was a struggle because look, the public schools feel threatened by all these choices. I mean my, my hope and dream is that there’ll be a superintendent in Miami-Dade County or some other place that says every child that goes to school in my county is my responsibility, and I’m going to create a menu of options for parents, and I’m going to try to do everything I can to make sure that every child succeeds.

Michael Horn: So really helping them navigate to the right option.

Funding challenges for private schools

Governor Bush: Yeah, but if you had that attitude, you wouldn’t be, you know, making it impossible for a private school to get a permit or you wouldn’t have, you wouldn’t restrict private capital to come in. I mean, there’s really one institutional source of money for private school capitalists, the Drexel Fund, which is for Catholic schools. The charters have, you know, three or four fundraising operations for their capital growth needs. So that’s part of it is you need to have more private philanthropy come in. But ultimately this should be a state responsibility as well. I mean, do we, do we do this in Medicaid? Do we have government run doctors and government run nurses and government run clinics? Some, but it’s not the dominant way that someone that is qualified for Medicaid gets access to healthcare. We should have the same mindset for education. And I think you would have an acceleration of really interesting options both in terms of hybrid learning, you know, where a parent could choose to take care of many much of their healthcare, their education needs, or they could go to Primer and take some of the money maybe and go to do something that accelerates the learning.

This is where we’re moving and there’s still, it’s work in progress. But I’m really excited that Ryan and others like him, education entrepreneurs, are advancing this at a pace that’s pretty exciting.

Michael Horn: Ryan, what’s your take on this in terms of the sustainable supply? What’s it going to take to get supply to meet the demand that we’re seeing?

Ryan Delk: I think it’s all about cost. And we have this core value that acts as the constraint. And so we start from the place of Primer needs to be accessible to every family, regardless of income. We’ve never turned away a student. And so some of the regulatory work that we’ve discussed that to me is all connected to this idea of how do you get these schools open as efficiently as possible and then how do you get the cost to educate down where parents can attend these schools for ideally nothing. Ideally it’s completely free. They just use their ESA and they can just attend the school. But if there is some out of pocket, it’s 50 bucks a month or 75 bucks a month.

And to me that is the key thing to unlock because then these scholarships are accessible or they’re unlocking opportunities for the families that need it most. The families that can afford a $15, $20,000 a year school, they don’t necessarily need these options as desperately as the families that are trapped in schools that are not serving their needs. And so that’s what we’re obsessed with. And I think there’s a kind of growing coalition that’s really focused on this low cost, high quality private school.

Michael Horn: Second thing I’m curious about, and we’ll go to my inner wonk here, your inner wonk here, which is there’s been a big proliferation of Education Savings Accounts across the country right now. But there are subtleties in the policies in different states, and I’ll just name a few of them because I’m curious what you all think about the impact of these differences. I’m thinking of the increasing number of states with accreditation requirements for example. Florida, you know, does not. You have some states that require external assessments of students in these low cost private schools. Some don’t. Some states are tuition first ESAs and some are not. Some allow you to roll over dollars even for post secondary education.

So it really creates a savings and value ethos as opposed to others that are not. We in the media often call these all ESA states. Are we sort of masking over these subtleties? Do they matter, the variants? Are we lumping them sort of at expense of understanding what we’re really trying to create here? What’s your perspective on these differences?

Importance of State Flexibility

Governor Bush: My perspective is that’s all good. You know, if we had one size fits all, it’d probably be driven out of Washington and that would be. It wouldn’t happen. It would be an unmitigated disaster. So having states have the ability to implement as best they can a version of ESA and then modify it as they go along because someone from another state’s done something interesting like the Education Savings Account where you can reinvest it if you didn’t spend the whole amount. I mean that’s an interesting idea that may catch on for all the states that don’t have it now. To me, I think the baseline should be there’s a financial responsibility that if you’re taking taxpayers money directly or indirectly, you should be a good steward of that money. And there’s health and safety issues that are really important, particularly for young kids. Beyond that, let’s let a thousand flowers bloom and come up with the best approach.

The important thing is that we get to scale so that parents demand that no one tries to take it away. That’s the first mission and that’s happening. You know, if 50% of all kids in Florida parents choose, it’s going to be hard to imagine if someone wants to come and try to re regulate this and have it just be traditional schools being the only option. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Texas, you know, having a hundred thousand kids to start with and over time that growing is going to create another kind of scalable moment for that state. And so if you try to impose a bunch of rules on top of that, it’s not going to grow at the speed that I think will make it more effective.

Michael Horn: Ryan, what’s your take on the variance?

Ryan Delk: I mean, I’m a personal big fan of federalism so I just have a personal bias towards that. But I think what I’m encouraged by is the movement is coalescing around the right things. And so when you look at the programs that have launched recently, they have measures to make sure that the providers are delivering for students, they’re fiscally responsible, the dollars are flowing to low-income, working-class, middle-class families that need them. And so I’m really encouraged by the way, I think the last four programs that have launched at scale have all had versions of that in place. And I think if that’s taking the best practices from other states, implementing them into new programs, and if that continues then I’m quite optimistic.

Improving financial accountability systems

Governor Bush: You know, one of the things that could be done in a federal system, and it’s happening right now, and ExcelinEd is working on this is to create a coding project because right now the technology isn’t the same as it would be for a health savings account, for example, or think about your MasterCard or Visa. All this stuff is done, you know, we have no clue how it, at least I don’t have any clue how it works, but it works really well. Whereas if you think about all the coding that could happen to make sure that there’s financial accountability and also that parents aren’t out of pocket making these commitments that they don’t have the resources to do because of some bureaucratic snafu at the state level. So there are things that could be done, but those are more like private sector enhancements that will make this more effective.

Michael Horn: And I guess it also helps the supply side so that those dollars actually reach the operators. Right. Ryan, you’re not sitting there waiting for it. Let me ask, Governor Bush, if we zoom out, what do you see as the big flashpoints to come in educational choice? It could be Florida, but also nationwide.

Governor Bush: Well, you can see it happen if there is, I’ll use Florida as an example. We have several hundred thousand, we have half of all the ESA kids are in our state. So you could have 1/10 of 1% of those transactions take place in a way that is inappropriate as they’re trying to sort out. You know, you’re dealing with scale, it’s hard to do all that. And so then you know, Senator Schmidlap will want to say well we need to like regulate this and regulate that. That’s the biggest danger is Washington getting involved or states trying to re regulate to deal with the tiny fraction of problems that impacts 99.9% of families. So regulate in terms of testing. We should trust parents to make these decisions and then give them the tools to be informed consumers and give them an array of choices.

And we need to protect that. That to me, you can see this happening at the state level. New governor comes in, they feel compelled to do something. And I’m very fearful of Washington getting involved. I’m excited about the tax credit program, but I haven’t seen the rules. And, you know, I’m paranoid about this stuff because I’ve seen there’s too many examples of Washington with good intentions getting things wrong.

Michael Horn: Ryan, I’d love to hear your reflections on the big flashpoints of the moment and both to comment around what the Governor just named, because you’re operating not just in Florida. So what are you seeing as those big questions or big issues that the field’s going to really have to think about or protect against in the years to come?

Focus on quality in education

Ryan Delk: I mean, I think a lot of people care a lot about education in this country, and that’s a good thing overall. And so there’s, you know, people with strong perspectives on both sides. A lot is changing. The world is changing really quickly. And my view on this is there will continue to be flashpoints, there’s going to continue to be contentious policy debates and accreditation and testing and all these things. But I really believe, I have deep conviction that if we stay focused on delivering high-quality academic outcomes in a way that’s accessible for every family, that is the winning strategy. And if we can stay laser focused on that and all the inputs to that, from, you know, great rigorous academics to unlocking the regulatory environment for new schools to open, to empowering educators to serve their communities, if we stay just maniacally focused on that, I think everything else falls into place. Because when you unlock those opportunities for those kids, and it’s not just that family that becomes a huge advocate for this movement, it’s their city council member, their city commissioner, all these people start to see, wow, this is transforming this community.

And when you do that, I think that is the winning focus. And so I hope that that can be the thing that we all rally around. And obviously these flashpoints will continue to happen. But that’s what we’re focused on. We’re going to stay maniacally focused on that. And I think a lot of other folks will too.

Michael Horn: I was curious about the assessment piece of this.

It seems this is much more of a trust the parents accountability model model that you’d sign up for as opposed to with traditional public schools. Let’s test. Is that accurate?

Governor Bush: It’s accurate, but I think parents — most states do have norm reference tests as a measurement of how kids are doing. And if you want parents to be empowered to make these choices, they need to be informed about the caliber of the education. So I personally support the idea of norm reference tests, and that’s the norm across the country. But I’m respectful of places like Arizona that, you know, want to have a little more libertarian approach. It seems to work well there, and maybe it’s part of their culture, a little bit more of their culture than it is in another place in the country.

Michael Horn: Final word. Governor, as you reflect over a quarter century of publicly funded choice in Florida, and we sit in a school that probably could not have existed, serving the students, you know, that could not have been in such an environment before if it weren’t for these policies that you started to put in place. What are your final reflections?

Governor Bush: Look, when you get a chance to serve, it’s really cool over the long haul to see successive legislatures and Governors embrace this idea and build on it. And I’m proud that our political leadership over the last 25 years has accelerated this. And my hope is that it stays the course. Look, big ideas take a long time. You could be patient. You got to be stubborn. In some cases you can. You just, you gotta, you know, stick with it.

Parental involvement in education

Governor Bush: And in Florida, that’s the case, I don’t think. And I would say there are external issues as well. If we didn’t have COVID, which allowed parents to really realize that maybe their kids weren’t getting the education that they thought they were getting because they became the teachers of their kids and they saw the slop that many of them sadly had to deal with, that accelerated it even more. So I’m excited about this. I think it’s really important that we stay the course because the world we’re moving toward at warp speed is exciting, but it’s also really scary. And you want to make sure that kids can read at the end of third grade in a capable way so that they can learn in a dramatic way, and that parents know what’s best for their kids to make the right choices. And there’s an array of them. That’s the mission, and it seems to be doing quite well right now.

Michael Horn: Governor, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me in this conversation.

Launched in 1967 by the College Board, the nonprofit that also administers Advanced Placement exams, CLEP provides a highly-accessible pathway toward gaining college credits and reducing the time and cost of earning a degree. Yet, it is largely unknown to most American high school students, who are more familiar with AP exams tied to high school-based courses that can also lead to college credit. 

Cruz’s school had limited AP options, so she took CLEP exams throughout high school with the plan of transferring her college credits to a local university, East Tennessee State, and completing a bachelor’s degree quickly and at a much lower cost. Then, her plans changed. “I found out I got into Harvard, and they gave me really amazing financial aid,” said Cruz, who plans to major in human developmental and regenerative biology. “I think having the CLEP exams on my resume showed that I had initiative.”

Unlike AP exams, which are typically tied to semester- or year-long high school courses and are administered only once each year, CLEP exams aren’t connected to a specific course and can be taken any time at a local testing center or online through remote-proctoring. This flexibility was also a flaw: CLEP was an exam without a course.

“That’s when the light went on,” said New York philanthropist and private equity executive, Steve Klinsky. He founded the in 2017 to offer free, online courses connected to CLEP exam content, as well as to provide testing fee waivers to expand access. “CLEP exams have been around since the Vietnam War, but everyone had forgotten about them. We reverse-engineered to create the courses for the exams,” he said, adding that it seemed like such a simple and straightforward solution to helping address the college access and affordability challenge. “It was so obvious that I felt duty-bound to do it,” he said.

Klinsky has been passionate about education since the early 1990s, when he launched an afterschool program in New York City named after his late brother. He then went on to create the first public charter school in Harlem in 1999, before starting New Mountain Capital, a private equity firm that today has $60 billion in assets under management. 

In the 2010s, Klinsky was intrigued by the rapid rise of massive open online courses or MOOCs that enabled anyone to take free courses, often taught by top professors and subject-matter experts. He appreciated the decentralization of knowledge but felt that MOOCs were missing a key element: course credit. At the same time, he saw that CLEP exams offered credit for content knowledge but without courses. Modern States was built to bridge that gap.

Over the past nine years, some 800,000 students have taken free courses through Modern States in preparation for CLEP exams, which range from 90 to 120 minutes in length. A passing score can lead to course credit at nearly 3,000 colleges and universities, from community colleges to state flagships. For Harvard-bound Cruz, Modern States was especially beneficial. She estimates that about one-third of her college credits came through CLEP.

I first heard about CLEP and Modern States two years ago when my older daughter took the Calculus CLEP exam at Bunker Hill Community College here in Boston, Massachusetts. She was a homeschooled high schooler at the time, taking dual enrollment courses through the community college. Modern States was the resource she used to review material for the CLEP exam, which enabled her to place into Calculus III and an advanced physics course. Those course credits transferred easily to the four-year university she attends, where she is now a pure math major.

Prior to Modern States there were not many options for course preparation or help in covering the $97 exam cost, plus additional testing center fees. These constraints limited the number of students who knew about the exams. Some homeschoolers and other nontraditional students took advantage of CLEP, as did U.S. military personnel who can receive exam fee waivers through the federal government. But it wasn’t a widely-known tool for acquiring course credit to save on tuition costs. 

At Bunker Hill, CLEP is touted as an opportunity to gain credit for content that students already know, with links to Modern States’s free courses and exam fee waivers featured prominently on the college’s website. Adult learners who may be returning to college or entering later in life find the exams particularly valuable, as do native French-, Spanish-, or German-speaking students, who gain credit for their language proficiency. “Community colleges in general can’t wait to save their students time and money,” said Danielle Tabela, Bunker Hill’s director of testing services and assessment.

Klinsky can’t wait either. He sees CLEP and free Modern States courses as a means to make college more affordable for more students “This is a paradigm for the way to really reduce the cost of higher or vocational education,” he said, explaining that he would like to see free online courses created for anything that has a credit-bearing exam as an endpoint, whether it’s for college or career.

“If Abe Lincoln was reincarnated — with no money, just brains and ambition — this is how he would get one year of college paid for, maybe two,” he said. “All you need is access to the internet.” Klinsky and his team at Modern States are eager to see this paradigm for course credit expand, including helping more high school students and their families access CLEP exams.Ìę

He also hopes that more organizations, employers and government agencies that care about expanding access to post-secondary education and reducing the costs of college will recognize the opportunity that Modern States has found, while exploring similar strategies beyond CLEP.Ìę

“My family is very proud to support this at a full level for many years, but ultimately free courses and exams is a method that could save money and help lots of people,” said Klinsky.

“Resting up from my vacay.”

“Netflix binge last night.”

Those were among the “lame excuses” for missing school that Oklahoma’s Union Public Schools featured during the 2024-25 school year, part of a humorous campaign intended to reduce chronic absenteeism.

Behind the comical posters, however, leaders were troubled by the data. During the 2022-23 school year, 29% of students missed at least 10% of the school year. At Union High School, the rate soared to 43%.

“I think there have been huge changes in behavior since COVID,” said Chris Payne, spokesman for the Tulsa-area district. He echoed what policy experts and school leaders nationwide have been saying since rates skyrocketed after schools fully reopened. “I think people reprioritized and decided, ‘You know, I’ve got things I need to take care of.’ ”

In addition to the attendance campaign, staff met with parents and visited students’ homes to find out why they were missing school. But starting in 2027, Oklahoma schools will no longer be judged on whether those chronic absenteeism rates go up or down. The legislature voted last year to remove the indicator from the state’s education accountability system as a factor that contributes to a school’s overall grade and can determine whether a school is labeled in need of improvement. 

Among , teachers and administrators, there’s a sense of relief.

“I’m not sure that it’s fair to evaluate schools based on something that we cannot control,” said Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City. Originally in favor of making chronic absenteeism a factor in schools’ A-F grades, he no longer thinks it’s a good way to assess schools.

Oklahoma’s most , for 2024-25, gives the state a D for the percentage of students with good attendance. Its chronic absenteeism rate of 19% is far from the worst in the nation, but it’s still 5 percentage points above the state’s pre-pandemic level of 14%. Data from shows the rate stands at about 21%. 

“It’s not just an Oklahoma thing,” Simpson said. “I’ve got colleagues and friends all over the country, and they’re fighting some of the same challenges.”

Oklahoma isn’t the first state to remove chronic absenteeism from its accountability system. Arkansas took it out in 2024 as part of . Illinois officials have recommended replacing chronic absenteeism with , and now reports broader attendance data rather than just chronic absenteeism.

‘States already had the data’

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires state accountability systems, and the report cards available to the public include indicators of academic performance, graduation rates, progress in learning English and an additional measure of student success. For that last metric, 38 states chose chronic absenteeism.

The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that it’s currently considering the state’s request to replace chronic absenteeism with a new measure, but so far, state officials haven’t said what that’s going to be. The challenge will be landing on a K-12 data point that is comparable across Oklahoma’s more than 500 districts, said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the Data Quality Campaign. The nonprofit has published reviews of state report cards since 2016.

Chronic absenteeism “was an inexpensive indicator to implement because states already had the data,” she said. Adopting a new measure, she said, could require districts to pay for changes to their student information systems and spend time training staff to collect and input the data. In addition, she said, it takes two years to ensure data is reliable enough to use in decisions about school ratings.

But the connections between chronic absenteeism and student achievement are backed by years of research. , for example, showed that a 1% increase in attendance was linked to a 1.5% jump in third graders passing the state reading test. showed that students who were chronically absent in middle school had lower math scores and were less likely to graduate on time than those who didn’t miss as much school. 

Kowalski said there’s plenty schools can do to improve attendance. Reducing bullying, increasing teacher retention and challenges, she said, can address some of the reasons students miss school.

Transportation surfaced as a barrier when the Union district surveyed parents, teachers and students on the issue. But teachers were far less likely than parents to say that reliable transportation would improve attendance — 25% compared to 47%. There were also stark differences between parents and students. Twenty-three percent of students said mental health reasons kept them home, while 12% of parents said that was a common explanation. 

Tulsa makes progress

Some communities in Oklahoma have adopted a tough posture toward parents whose children are frequently absent. Erik Johnson, a Republican district attorney in the southeastern part of the state, has prosecuted and jailed parents to force compliance with the law. 

Prior to the pandemic, Guthrie allowing police to fine parents for their kids’ truancy, but Simpson, the superintendent, said those measures didn’t “move the needle.”

In Tulsa, the state’s largest district, Board Member Stacey Woolley said she’s glad chronic absenteeism is no longer part of the grading formula because the indicator lowered schools’ scores.Ìę

“At the same time, we have to continue to make it a priority,” she said. When leaders examine student data, they find that students who struggle are chronically absent, regardless of their socioeconomic status. 

The district’s work shows that reductions are possible. The rate has declined over the past two years from 44% to 37%, and have seen drops of at least 10% compared to last school year. 

Such efforts won’t go completely unrewarded. Under the to the Education Department, schools that lower chronic absenteeism could still score “bonus points” toward their grade but the indicator won’t be used in determining which schools are identified as needing improvement. 

By the end of the Union district’s campaign, chronic absenteeism had dropped by about 1.4%, well below the goal of 7%. Still, Payne said, the progress equated to 200 fewer chronically absent students. 

Leaders also realized something else: Students in the district’s career-tech programs, like aerospace and construction, had lower absenteeism rates than those in the general student population. Now, in response to local workforce shortages, the district has launched a healthcare career pathway as well. 

“I had students that didn’t really have a direction,” said Jason McMullen, who teaches aviation courses at the district’s Innovation Lab. “Then they see a helicopter land and that lightbulb goes off.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, some students at the lab learned how to secure safety wire to the nuts and bolts that hold planes together, while others patched holes in sheetrock. 

The change to the state’s accountability system, “doesn’t mean we’re going to quit working on it,” said Payne, the district’s spokesman. “The reality remains that if students are not present, they’re not going to perform and have success in school and life.”

To Lila Byock, one of two California moms suing Curriculum Associates over its product i-Ready, the advisory was the right move. Thousands of school districts use the program, with its animated alien characters, to give students practice in math and reading.

“Excessive classroom screen use is a public health crisis,” she said, adding that district leaders should “reduce the use of individual devices, reinvest in paper curricula and stop letting Big Ed Tech exploit our kids for profit.”

Districts like and , are already rethinking their use of i-Ready or in response to growing backlash from parents. , led by the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, could be one reason. The complaint argues that the company gained “virtually unfettered access” to children’s personal information, like birth date, gender, race and disability status, and shared it with “myriad third parties.” 

Curriculum Associates denies the accusations. 

“Curriculum Associates takes student data privacy extremely seriously, and the claims in this litigation are without merit,” a spokesperson told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “We do not sell student data, use it for advertising, or create commercial profiles of students. All use of student information is limited to supporting the educational services requested and authorized by schools and districts in compliance with applicable federal and state laws.”

Ed tech vendors rely on long-standing federal that says “schools may act as the parent’s agent,” provided the data they gather is for educational, not commercial, purposes. 

The lawyers taking ed tech companies to court are challenging that guidance. Linnette Attai, a data privacy consultant and founder of Playwell, LLC, said the complaint over i-Ready is based on “a lot of speculation,” but it has still put vendors and education leaders on alert.

“Curriculum Associates is facing significant legal bills, but also a public relations and customer retention issue. The industry is sitting up and taking notice,” she said. But she said the issues the complaints raise are “better suited for legislators and not a courtroom.”

‘Theories of consent’

Congress passed the in 1998, requiring online sites to verify parents’ approval before they collect, use or share information from children under 13. 

Last , the Federal Trade Commission’s FAQ on the law says that schools “can consent under COPPA to the collection of kids’ information on the parent’s behalf.”

But with that put students’ privacy at risk and that digital tools benefit kids, the attorneys representing parents like Byock hope to defeat that interpretation of the law. 

“These theories of consent that companies rely on in order to bypass actual consent from parents are all bogus,” said Andrew Liddell, one half of the husband-and-wife legal team behind the EdTech Law Center. “They have no basis in the law whatsoever.” 

The FTC updated its COPPA regulation in early 2025, but left the school consent issue alone. The agency, however, it was “concerned about the use of and other engagement techniques to keep kids online in ways that could harm their mental health.”

Last summer, the FTC submitted an in support of EdTech Law Center in a separate , an online learning platform used by more than 18 million students. The Liddells sued on behalf of three Kansas families who said the company uses “deceptive design techniques” to keep kids hooked and shares their data with a “host of private companies.” The families have asked for monetary damages.  

The law, the FTC wrote, does not create an “agency relationship between schools and the parents of school children.”

The Liddells say the brief is the most definitive statement yet that parents, not schools, have the final say over what data ed tech vendors can access. But the FTC hasn’t changed its existing guidance, and other student privacy experts say schools can continue to it.

A spokesperson for the FTC told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ it doesn’t “have anything to add to the amicus brief.”

‘The long game’

Meg Leta Jones, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University, said there is tension in Washington over this issue. On one hand, the administration is “trying to be pro-AI,” she said. First lady Melania Trump entered a White House education summit in April alongside a saying, “The future of A.I. is ‘personified,’ ” 

At the same time, Republicans support parental rights, and a few months earlier, a Senate committee held to examine the harms of ed tech.

“It’s hard to move when both of those things are happening,” Jones said. The lawsuits are important, she said, because they take the issue out of federal officials’ hands. “Clarity around this consent issue is what will come in the long game.”

Outside the courts, the litigation has inspired more parents to push for restrictions on i-Ready and other ed tech platforms. Parents in New York City’s District 4, on Manhattan’s East Side, noted the i-Ready lawsuit in a calling for screen time limits. 

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a mom of two who chairs the Community Education Council for District 4, has already opted her kids out of i-Ready and NWEA’s MAP tests. But she said she remains “a thousand percent” concerned about her 14-year-old’s use of programs like Google Classroom, IXL and JumpRope, a grading platform.

The resolution cited a recent finding 141 data breaches or “unauthorized data releases” between 2023 and 2025. The district, the New York comptroller’s office said, doesn’t have an “accurate inventory” of all of the software programs schools use or the privacy risks involved. 

“It’s like ed tech on steroids,” said Salas-Ramirez, also a neuroscientist who trains future doctors. “We don’t have the data to validate that these quote unquote tools, instruments or assessments provide us anything worthwhile.” 

‘Administrative nightmare’

Ed tech experts say schools wouldn’t be able to function if vendors had to get consent directly from parents for all the online products students use in the classroom. 

It’s an “administrative nightmare” said Mark Williams, a California attorney who specializes in ed tech contracts and student privacy. “Throw that out the window; it doesn’t work.”

Vendors share data with third parties. That part isn’t in dispute. The question is if it’s being shared, as the FTC says, “for the use and benefit of the school” or falling into the hands of companies that use it for marketing or targeted ads based on students’ characteristics.  

A last year offered another look into what happens when kids click answers or type personal information into a program. The state board turned to , a nonprofit that tests software products, to investigate 100 apps commonly used in the state’s schools. 

The review found that over a third shared student information with advertisers. shared data with six advertisers. Others shared data with dozens of advertisers as well as with sites like Google and Microsoft.

The report stressed that the “presence of sharing alone does not necessarily constitute a contract violation.” Some sharing is necessary for an app to function properly, the authors wrote.

It’s “common sense” for a vendor to share data they collect to fix bugs or security flaws, said Steve Smith, executive director of , a global network of vendors and schools. But legally, it’s “a little bit of a stretch” for a company to create a new program with that information.

Vendors go too far when they share “incredibly sensitive student data” from a school monitoring app to develop a new product, said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center. Many schools use such programs to monitor for online threats or risks of self harm.

“The companies have everything the kid has done online, everything that they’ve written in the Google Drive,” she said. “You can think about that extremely personal information then being used to create a personalized learning platform that they sell back to schools.”

‘Pretty opaque’

Inspired by Utah’s work, Access4Learning is developing a tool that districts can use to track what vendors do with student information. Leaders expect to launch it later this year. 

But that might not satisfy the concerns of some parents leading the charge against ed tech. They often point out that such organizations or have received funding from some of the very companies the screen-free lobby opposes. The growing mistrust surfaced at last December that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held to discuss kids’ “excessive screen time.” 

“Ed tech is so devious that it’s created dozens of nonprofits cloaked as online safety organizations,” Lisa Cline, a Maryland parent who has advocated against screens in the Montgomery County Public Schools, said at the event. “Some of them are here today. Look closely. These guys are bankrolled by big tech and frankly, they mock the work that unpaid people like myself do to educate parents.” 

While the lawsuits between parents and vendors could drag on for a while, districts should at least be transparent about the products they’re using, said Williams, the California attorney. 

Parents are allowing districts “to collect and give to a third party data that they would not otherwise be entitled to,” he said. In return, educators should explain what data they take and what they do with it. “Unfortunately, that process can be pretty opaque.”

Naturally, the relationship among choice, income and quality varies across domains — but the relationship is consistent: If one’s budget can stretch only to McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s, dining choices are severely quality-constrained. 

In American education, the triangle of choice, income and quality is more complex. Higher income enables greater choice, both among public schools (some parents can afford housing in top-performing districts) and among private schools (where tuition isn’t an impediment). By contrast, lower-income parents in locations without extensive vouchers, tax credits or education savings accounts have little choice beyond their zoned public school. This basic inequity in quantity underpins the policy argument that expanding school choice per se is good.

But when it comes to educational quality, the story is less straightforward. First, parents can’t infer the performance of any particular school from a district’s overall results (especially in larger districts). Within districts, school performance often varies widely. Moreover, many larger districts are — de facto or de jure — internally zoned, giving wealthier parents disproportionate access to preferred schools.

But the quality of a child’s education is contingent not only on access to a supply of decent public schools. There are also questions of teacher capacity and academic content. According to , the spread of teacher effectiveness in this country is wide. More strikingly, variation in teacher quality is far more pronounced within America’s public schools than between them. Strong research from Harvard’s concludes that “85% of the variation in teacher VA [value added — the impact on learning] is within rather than between schools.”

Using by Eric Hanushek and his colleagues, and by , it is possible to assess the learning impact of having a more or less effective teacher. A reasonable estimate is that a child in middle school who moves from a lowest-quartile teacher to a top-quartile teacher gains from 5.5  to seven additional months of learning in the year with the more effective teacher. This is a stunning difference that most Americans are unaware of. Most assume that school-level choice is overwhelmingly the most important determinant of their child’s education. But what if it’s truly a matter of teacher-level choice? 

Multiple factors drive the variation in teacher effectiveness, including a shrinking pool of candidates, poor preparation, low barriers to entry, inadequate professional learning and support, and a lack of a widely shared curriculum. But the bottom line is that, statistically speaking, almost every school in the country has teachers whose classroom effectiveness ranges from the top to the bottom quintile of instructional quality. What do most parents know about the quality of the educator assigned to their child? Little beyond what their child may report, which can be influenced by any number of idiosyncratic factors.

In public schools, parents have access to school- and child-level data on academic outcomes — assuming they can find and understand it. (In Texas, parents can log on to the state education department’s to find their child’s very detailed results, along with interventions to help them respond.) But what impact has a particular teacher had on those results? Even in Texas, how many parents can realistically research the effectiveness of the next grade’s teachers and influence their child’s teacher assignment? 

Parents may — at least in theory — be able to find out what the curriculum is. But in practice, most teachers substitute or add multiple self-chosen items to the school district’s selection (the average public school teacher regularly ). Once again, parents are often in the dark. 

In many private schools, the challenge takes a different form. Some don’t use nationally normed tests at all (each Catholic diocese, for example, makes its own decision). In others, the sheer variety of exams administered makes interpretation difficult. How, for example, should a parent judge Stanford 10 outcomes against Iowa Assessments results, or either against public schools’ scores on state tests? 

When it comes to instructional materials, the picture is mixed. As in many public schools, some private school teachers blend multiple materials, assembling them like DJs putting together a playlist. In other schools, teachers may use nationally published curricula or faith-based materials from sources such as Christian Light. Some Catholic schools use textbooks from major publishers, and some private “classical learning” schools are embracing the “great books” in their instructional materials. While parents may choose a private school for the values it nurtures, judging the academic quality of a school’s curricular choices is much tougher. 

America’s wide span of teacher effectiveness would be less troubling if students’ baseline performance were strong. But recent data affirm that . In most advanced industrialized countries, ministries of education specify the national or provincial academic content students are expected to learn. Educators are trained to teach that content, both before and after they enter the classroom, and children are tested on it. School choice is built on this foundational structure. As my colleague Ashley Berner , in most of these countries, pluralistic systems fund a wide variety of schools, including religious schools, as long as they prepare and test students using content-specified common assessments. As a result of this virtuous cycle, the range of teacher quality within schools is usually narrower, and/or the overall quality is often higher. Information about student outcomes is transparent across all kinds of schools.

The United States urgently needs a far more equitable and academically coherent education system — one in which teacher preparation, instructional content and assessments are aligned. Louisiana briefly offered this essential triangulation through curriculum-integrated English Language Arts state assessments, and Texas may do so in the future. But in the meantime, the parental and societal benefits of greater educational choices will be realized only if two conditions are met: expanded choice must increase the supply of quality schooling options, and all schools must provide parents with greater access to the information they need to make informed judgments among schools.

What does this mean?

Expanding high-quality schooling options will require new state policies on multiple fronts: low-interest loan programs or credit enhancements for proven operators (charter networks and high-performing faith-based or community-based schools); expanded to finance private-school facilities serving voucher/ESA students; right of first refusal and discounted leases for proven nondistrict operators that want to rent, purchase or reuse unused or underused public school facilities; and streamlined regulations to create a single, clear, predictable and publicly accessible set of rules governing where schools can be built and how applications are evaluated.

Expansion grants for schools with proven track records, greater support for and stabilization funds for new schools (to date, given only in urgent situations such as COVID) would expand quality choices for a broader student demographic. Finally, we need to fund fellowships and in academics, operations, finance and community engagement, with a bias toward those who will open or serve in schools serving disadvantaged communities.

All schools receiving public funds should publish clear information on state- and/or nationally normed academic outcomes and retention data. Non-public schools should publish information about their financial condition (many are nonprofits that must file Form 990 tax returns). Ideally, all schools should identify on their websites the curricula or textbooks used in each grade for the four major subjects (math, ELA, science and social studies) or indicate that teachers have the autonomy to select their own materials. Schools should also be encouraged to list the total years of experience and years at the school for grade-level teachers, along with their areas of specialization.

Educators should have a place on the school website to describe their pedagogical approach and how they assess their own success. In math and ELA, if they choose to share growth data for their students from previous years, they should be able to do so once the principal has signed off on the data. Principals should share their vision for supporting effective teaching, outlining specific plans for providing professional learning and explaining how it will be distributed across the subjects and grades taught. Since repeated classroom observations using curriculum-integrated rubrics are the most effective form of professional development for raising teacher performance, parents should know the extent to which this is being offered (if at all).

Families can choose to ignore all information, of course. Only school performance — surely because, in the vast majority of cases, they have little or no practical alternative when selecting their children’s public school. However, the vast, unmet demand for places in top urban charter schools demonstrates that parents care about academic outcomes and want an education for their children that is more mentally nourishing than the dietary equivalent of fast food. 

Andrew Rotherham: I want to thank everyone for joining us today. For those who are new to Bellwether, we’re a national nonprofit that works with a range of organizations — school districts, state education departments, charter school networks, policy advocates, nonprofits, private sector entities and others — to help them solve challenges and create better educational experiences for young people. If you go to our website, , you can see the kinds of outfacing and field-facing published reports and resources that we publish. We also host conversations like this to help people make sense of the most pressing challenges, and what’s going on in the sector.

We’re very excited to partner on today’s event with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, which is a fantastic education media outlet. I’m biased — I’m on the board — but it really is fantastic. You should check out the range of work they do.

I am super excited to have Santelises here with us today for so many reasons. And again, just to get all the bias on the table — she’s a friend as well as a colleague, just a fantastic person in the sector. Sonja, we’ll get to your full bio as we go through the conversation. 

But I want to start with this: I was poking around and it seems like you’re the longest-serving superintendent in Baltimore City Schools since 1946. 

Ten years as an urban superintendent is a lot in any context. How did you do it?

Dr. Sonja Santelises: First I will say it’s an honor to have served for 10 years. Baltimore is a great city. It’s been very good to both me and my family. And I do think that matters, right? It matters that I feel a connection to the city. My children are Baltimoreans — despite, Andy, what we might think about New England roots, they do root for Baltimore teams, not the teams you and I root for.

Rotherham: The Orioles army — they’re not making it easy for you so far.

Santelises: No, they’re not. They’re not at all. But I think a lot of it has to do first with having an amazing team. And I’m not just saying that to say that — I’m saying it because there is no way that one single individual, particularly in an urban setting, can manage all that comes with leading a major urban school district where you actually want to see change. And so having a fabulous team, just at the senior level, has been wonderful, and we’ve had a lot of stability on that team.

Second — which you know intimately well as a former board member — my school board has been, I would say for the overwhelming majority of the time, very focused, very supportive. It doesn’t mean they agreed with me on everything. It doesn’t mean we didn’t have some internal factions, and I’d say with one major exception, we really have had a decade of stability and focus. And for the most part, real strong board leadership has really helped. And you know, you can be as gifted an educator as any one individual could be, but if you don’t have a team around you and you don’t have nine bosses who see what the larger picture is, you’re not going to last. I don’t care who you might be as an individual.

Rotherham: But nine bosses — that’s a lot. That’s like eight more than most people want, right? So there’s a lot of politics there. And I’m not giving away any state secrets by saying you were in the running for Secretary of Education in 2020. A lot of people hoped you would get that post, myself included, as Biden was coming in. And the unions — you were not their favorite, which I think says more about them than it says about you, because, again, you made it 10 years, you were able to work with a union in Baltimore and you were able to work with nine bosses. And this is also through the pandemic — a very disruptive time. So you obviously have a strong team that you credited, but you obviously also have some deft skills and ability to navigate complicated issues.

Santelises: Yeah. And what’s so funny about it, Andy, is one of the things someone said to me — someone whom I still have great respect for — was, “We’re not sure you’re going to be able to do this job as CEO because we’re not sure you have the political acumen to be able to do it.” And I now laugh at that. Because a lot of what people call political acumen I really believe is grounded in relationships and being forthright and knowing where people stand. And even when you don’t fully know where they stand, you develop a cadence of transparency, of telling people the real deal. And when you build that around excellence, I do think that helps.

The former president of the union, Marietta English, and Loretta Johnson — formerly of the American Federation of Teachers, and who I actually gave an award a couple of months ago — we would banter like all the time publicly. Negotiations were crazy. But I will tell you, and she won’t mind me telling you this, she was very active in the National Union for a long time, right next to Randi. But I knew with Loretta Johnson, when we closed the door and we had conversations, she cared about the communities of Baltimore. And she was actually the one — and I’m not afraid to say this — who I called during the pandemic, even though she wasn’t in the role anymore. And I said, “Loretta, what is it going to take to get people back to schools? I need you to tell me.” You know, our current president was new at the time, and I knew Loretta had the capital and the knowledge. And again, ultimately, because she believed that kids needed to be back in schools, it was real problem-solving with her, which she did behind the scenes.

The same thing happened, by the way, with a former Republican senator — which you know in Maryland politics you might say, “Why were you talking to that person, Sonja?” But Frank Kelly Sr. was amazing, and he knew kids needed to be back in school. And so again, behind the scenes, the people that you can call when you put aside the sometimes-artificial but sometimes real distinguishing characteristics that might seem lightning-rod-like — you know, former union president, former Republican senator — those borders go down and you actually start an interest-based conversation. And when you’re straight with people and people know you as an ethical player, you can get things done.

But those are names I’ve never said when people ask, “How did you make it through the pandemic?” because those are people nobody would believe as collaborators or supporters. Loretta was the one who said to me, “These are the things you’ve got to do and teachers will go back into schools for you.” And it was Frank Kelly Sr., who said, “These are the kinds of things that you need to do in terms of setting up the case for going back.” And then we had people like Senator Cory McCray, a Democratic leader. A lot of Democratic leaders did not want to stand for going back to school. And Cory McCray, who has three or four kids in our system, said, “I see at home that we’ve got to go back.” And he was one of the people who stood up with me. And people don’t know about those coalitions that are very much interest-based, and I think that’s part of what’s made it work.

Rotherham: I want to back out in a minute and get a little bit more of your backstory. But since we’re on it, let’s just do one more question on the pandemic. That was such a formative experience for so many people in so many different ways, and it broke trust with public education in a lot of places, and I think we’re still feeling the effects of a lot of that. But what did you learn from your experience leading through that — 2020, during the actual pandemic itself and people trying to figure out what was going on with this new virus and having to respond to it, then 2021 with schools, and then the learning loss after that? What did you learn from that experience?

Santelises: Wow. I don’t want to take the whole time on everything that I’ve learned because we could just stay on that. So, on the positive side I learned that when you make an appeal for what is good for children, there will be people who respond. And so those teachers who were in the early days — and that fall — you remember, Andy, Maryland was one of the last states to open. I mean, we felt like we wouldn’t open for five years at one point. 

Rotherham: And then we had Virginia say, “Hold our beer.”

Santelises: That’s right. That’s exactly right. This is why I always love talking with you.

But yes, we had people who understood that. For instance, we had families who had to go to work, who were first responders. And so those first teachers who went back when nobody knew what going back meant — those are the people who understood. And I learned that, when you model courage, there are always people who will step up as well. And that was fabulous learning.

I also learned — and it cemented my belief, as controversial as it might be — that we are expecting schools to do too much. My sister is my balance, and she always says, “Well, Sonja, people didn’t know at the time (of the early pandemic). It was really scary.” And I said, “Yeah, but we knew that kids needed to be in school.” And I think in places it just wasn’t important enough, Andy. I know we say it was fear. We have multigenerational families in many of our students’ homes. You know the concentrated poverty rates in Baltimore City. But I don’t think we tried hard enough. I think we thought school was a nice-to-have and not a must-have, and that was an unfortunate learning.

And then the third thing I learned is: Don’t assume title equals courage. The fact that — and I’m still burned about it — that we were asking public school educators and leaders to make health decisions because our health leaders would not lead, quite frankly, is still a burr in my saddle. The fact that people were like, “Oh, well, you can open if you want to.” And I’m sitting here looking like — I mean, I consider myself decently smart, but Andy, I don’t have a health degree. I don’t know about communicable diseases, even though I know far more now, by the way, than I did then about these things. And so again, this idea that schools are supposed to be all things to all people — we’re supposed to find housing for kids. We’re supposed to feed kids. And I think that we’ve got to take a step back and really say what is reasonable for schools to do.

I know that schools should do a lot of these things, or should be at least the hubs for these things, when you serve large numbers of students in poverty. But that’s my other learning — that I just stepped back and realized — Just because you have the title, that doesn’t mean you’re actually going to wade in and make a hard decision. You’re going to pass the hard decision to me because you don’t want to make the hard decision. And that’s kind of the flip side. I learned a lot that was great, but I also learned a lot that could have made me very bitter if I wanted it to. It didn’t. But it was amazing to see how people moved and who was willing to lead and who was not.

Rotherham: Yeah. Two big ahas from that. One was — parents, if people said the schools were safe to open, their views on opening schools would change. They trusted public authorities that if schools were closed, there must be a good reason, and if they were open, it would be safe. So they were shifting responsibility back onto people around the country who didn’t always live up to that responsibility. And then the health community. David Zweig has this book called Abundance of Caution that really just traces step-by-step how political it got. Particularly once Donald Trump — he was still president in 2020, in his first term — said we should reopen the schools. Suddenly the politics of that changed really rapidly, and it became a political flash point, rather than what he was saying, which was actually fairly obvious: we did need to get schools open and now we’re paying a price.

Let’s talk about your backstory. So you mentioned Massachusetts — you grew up in Peabody, am I right?

Santelises: Yeah. Very good.

Rotherham: But your parents are from the South. They’re from the pre-Civil Rights Act South. So talk about your upbringing. You worked in the Boston schools early in your career as well. Talk a little bit about your backstory and then what got you to Baltimore.

Santelises: Yeah. So my backstory is that my parents were part of a wave of Black professionals who were being recruited in the ’60s to come to the Boston area, north of Boston. My mom was a social worker, which was a big deal coming from Jim Crow Georgia. And my dad was a chemist — or got a job as a chemist. It’s interesting. It says a lot about our content now. He got a job as a chemist because he had enough chemistry credits, but actually was a biology major first. But he was recruited to be one of the first wave of Black folks to try to integrate companies like Kodak, Eastman and others. They were on the North Shore. They lived through the integration of housing, which was painful for them, and there are stories written about it that we have hanging up in our house. So they were some of the first Black families on the North Shore, and I grew up in the north-of-Boston suburbs.

So when all of the busing was happening, I was in it but not really in it. I remember my grandfather calling my mother when some of the pictures of the protests against busing in Boston occurred, and he thought that I was in danger. And my mom was trying to let him know, “Well, actually she’s not in that because we’re north of the city.” But it was very much part of my growing up. My parents were with Muriel and Otto Snowden — for those Bostonians who know — who founded Freedom House. My dad was very active in the NAACP, and all of those legacy organizations. And I grew up in a home that was very clear about the importance of education.

My dad was very proud that growing up in rural Mississippi, he was from one of the only Black families that got the regular newspaper, and they all had to read the newspaper every week. My grandfather drove the bus — the one yellow school bus for Black students in the rural area they grew up in, probably about 50 miles west of Montgomery. And I played on that bus in summers but didn’t realize the significance of it until much later.

And so, you know, one of the things I like to say — and I’ve said over the years — is that I didn’t realize Black people weren’t supposed to be smart until I got further along in high school, and maybe college. Because all the Black people I knew growing up, even in a majority-white neighborhood, were all really smart. And at that time, there was a wave of Black professionals coming to the North Shore. And so we were a small collection, but I went to school with Wayne Budd and his daughter, who went on to be one of the first Black female judges at the Supreme Court level in Massachusetts. I grew up with people who went on to work in banking in Europe, and they came from humble means — like, we weren’t part of some Black rich whatever, but we were just part of a community of Black families who saw education as the way out.

So for me, there was this belief that — why is Black academic performance somehow in question? I just didn’t get it for a long time, and it’s driven a lot of my work. Before then, I thought I was going to be Condi Rice when I grew up. I was all set to do international relations. Even now, I love listening to Condoleezza Rice — like she was talking about the whole Russia-Ukraine thing the other day and my husband was like, “What are you listening to?” And I was like, “Sh, listening to Condi Rice talk about XYZ, because I was going to be her.” But I fell in love with education. And I have been very focused and driven by that. And it’s why — and you know this, Andy — it’s why I believe a lot of the things I believe about what education should look like for all kids, whether it’s immigrant children, whether it’s first-gen, whether it’s poor white kids in West Virginia, or frankly nowadays in Northern U.K. That upbringing for me was absolutely formative. And so it also lends to my intolerance of the low level of expectations that we’ve talked about in education for a long time.

Rotherham: You referenced “north of Boston” a few times, which is a fantastic subtle Boston/New England callout. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like this became like your north star, just because of what you were steeped in — this idea of achievement and excellence for all kids regardless of their background or what they look like.

Santelises: Oh, without a doubt. 

Rotherham: And that just sort of steeped me and became like a north star. Which, tying back to our earlier conversation — I think you have almost a unique ratio. You are able to navigate politically, you’re able to do those things, but you also have an extremely high — in my view — sort of intolerant-of-nonsense stance for our sector. But you balance that with a deft touch, which may explain why we’re having a 10-year exit interview. So talk about when you arrived in Baltimore. What were the big pressing issues? I want to talk about reading and math and absenteeism, but first just start with when you arrived in 2016 — what was the scene? What were the big priorities that you saw?

Santelises: Yeah. So I was actually entering back into the district, having worked at Education Trust — shout out to my folks there. They’re about to celebrate a big anniversary.

Rotherham: Yes, they are.

Santelises: And Denise, if you’re watching, yes, I did get my RSVP, so I’m good to go. But I left — I was chief academic officer for three years, went to work for EdTrust, and then it was really like coming back. And when I came back, you know, the city was still reeling from the response to Freddie Gray, right? So that was there. Which is why when the country went through its convulsions a couple of years after that, Baltimore City was like, “Yeah, we’ve done this right recently.” 

Rotherham: And Freddie Gray — I think most people know, but it’s been a few years — he was a young man who was killed by police in Baltimore. 

Santelises: And a lot of the uprising in response to that led to the kind of conflict we’ve come to know in a lot of these situations. And so the city was still doing a lot of reflection. I entered during that time — this combination of this horrible incident that then leads to discussions about what in the history of Baltimore has changed or not changed.

There was also instability, which was interesting, because my former boss AndrĂ©s Alonso had been CEO for six years. There was this feeling of transition when I left, and then the intermittent years from the time AndrĂ©s left to when I was asked to come back — there was a feeling of instability, lack of direction. It doesn’t mean nothing good happened in those years. I actually think some of the arts work we continued happened during that time. But there really was that sense. It was also because of the push for site-based autonomy at that time. Site-based autonomy combined with unstable district leadership and lack of direction feels like chaos to a regular classroom teacher. Right? So what is it I’m supposed to be doing? And so when I talked to teachers at that time — they may say something different now — but at that time, they were just like, “Which curriculum am I supposed to be following? What’s optional? What’s not?”

And that led to the work that we did very early that’s now called quality instructional materials and PD, and the focus on literacy that came as part of the entry. And so we started that work before these things became national focal points, but a lot of it was because people were asking for them. And then just putting structures back in place. And this is the piece that’s frightening to me — I will be honest, Andy, I did not believe when I left the district three years prior that things like systems of getting folks paid, financial projection, legal cases — although the legal piece was okay, generally speaking — but just the infrastructure, like human capital, those systems like soak up your time. And then to walk into a $30-to-$40 million budget deficit in October when you’ve just come on board July 1 — you’re like, “OK, this can’t be true. Why is this gap here?”

And then a year later — and you’ll chuckle at this — I had said to my chief of staff when we were going through areas in those first three months, “Well, we can put operations off for a bit. I think that’s going fairly well.” And then 80 schools in Baltimore go down without heat. The pictures were seen around the globe. Like literally, I had cousins who were deployed in places like Germany who were sending me emails like, “What’s going on with your heat?” And they’re in Germany, and I was like, “How are you hearing this in Germany? This is crazy.” Or like, you know, my auntie in rural Georgia — “Girl, what happened up there to your heat? You can’t heat the schools?” So I immediately had to actually lean into finances and operations as an academic. And all those people who were like, “Well, we know she can do academics, but can she do the other stuff?” — immediately that was squelched, Andy. Like, people were like, “Oh, I guess she can.” But it’s that infrastructure piece that we take for granted, and it’s the behind-the-scenes piece that the public rightly should assume is going well. But it’s not, right? It’s not going well. And so you’ve got to piece that together.

Rotherham: Was that the normal — I shouldn’t say normal, we’ve normalized — the deferred maintenance? Or was this just previous inattention? What was it like? Because it sounds like you were inheriting a lot of stuff that was sort of adrift.

Santelises: Yes. I would say on the operations front, it was the convergence of multiple things. It was deferred maintenance, but it was deferred maintenance because of a long-term underinvestment. And the state said that was on them — the state came out with a report that said Baltimore City has been shorted $360 million a year for the past 8 to 10 years, and it’s led to this state of horrible buildings. And on top of that, very forthrightly, we also did not have systems and processes in place that needed to be there. Because the shift in resources to the classroom — which is a good thing, right, there’s nothing wrong with that — meant that we had borrowed from operations. And so we had to build those systems back in.

I tell a funny story that’s not really funny. When we realized we couldn’t tell centrally what the temperatures were in all of the buildings, I charged the chief operating officer: “We’ve got to get some way of reading the temp now, before we get a full system.” And Andy, they came back with a meat thermometer. And I went, “A meat thermometer? We’re just going to get a meat thermometer for every classroom in the district?” Needless to say, that person doesn’t work here anymore. But that’s the state of where the systems were — we’re using meat thermometers to tell the room temperatures.

Rotherham: Was it even a digital one or was it one of the really old ones?

Santelises: It was a digital thing. I think you should feel good to know it was digital. But being a cook, I was like — I don’t know HVAC as well. I know HVAC much more now. But I do know what that’s used for, and it’s not for room temperature.

Rotherham: All right. So you come in — if I have this right, reading scores in Baltimore are up 12 points over your tenure, which is faster than they’ve been growing in the state. You talked about the high-quality — you were sort of an early adopter of and proponent of curriculum, given your academic background. Talk about that piece. Then we’ll come back and talk about math separately. So, literacy — what worked? How did you get those gains?

Santelises: I think what worked was not just the high-quality instructional materials — which a lot of people have adopted — but also the shifts of focus around literacy and the alignment of systems around that focus on literacy. And that took longer than I would have wanted it to take, but I will happily say I know that we learned from that. We got a new chief academic officer six years ago, Joan Dabrowski, who is amazing. And I will tell you, if you look at the impact of our secondary literacy rollout of HQIM and the support — we learned from the elementary experience. If you look at our gains last year, we had the highest single-year gains in literacy since I’ve been in Baltimore, and that includes as chief academic officer. So that’s almost the last 20 years. And a lot of it was we learned from what went well with elementary literacy and what didn’t go so well.

My mantra has always been that it’s about growth, but it’s also about how to accelerate growth. So you know, the first year you take 1 or 2% when the state is stagnant or declining — you celebrate it, but you know you haven’t seen the lift yet. But each year, what started happening — and this is where the pandemic messed a lot of folks up, including us, I think in math — the systems we had in place were leading us to the point that the growth was increasing every year. And so even some of the thoughtful critics of the work in Baltimore City had to say, “Yes, that’s true — you are increasing the rate.” And so the hope is that now we can do that in other areas with the new leadership.

Math was harder, frankly, because we had a lot of focus on literacy for a while and had to bring math on board. All of the challenges everyone everywhere has in math were there, but what exacerbated it was that our students took a bigger hit because they had less protective tissue. But I can tell you — and I’ve told this story — my nephew is an engineering student at Cornell, and the Cornell folks will tell you that the pandemic-year babies in math — their kites in the kite festival didn’t look as advanced, even at Cornell, as they had the years before. So, you know, that’s what we’re now talking about with math. And Maryland is low in math overall.

Rotherham: Yeah. But double-click on that. I mean, why has that proven so stubborn?

Santelises: I do think we need to have a “science of math” moment the way we’ve had a “science of reading” moment. There is too much negotiation. There is not enough clarity. So that is one — and that’s more recent. Two, we have never really fully grappled with the lack of math knowledge and support of math teachers in the lower grades. And that’s true across the board — in those early years, we still have not figured out how to at scale really raise that level. I think the U.K. has done some fabulous work in this and we really need to look, because the U.K. story in math is a fabulous story in terms of where London and other jurisdictions were and where they are now. And again, it’s what a lot of people are writing about — and in my Substack, Andy, it’s not sexy. And so when we pull away the sexy things — like people want there to be one form of software that’s going to do it all, or we get this one piece of math curriculum and that’s going to solve it — but in the U.K., they were systematic, unapologetic. It doesn’t look sexy and they did it and the outcomes — no one can argue with those outcomes.

And I will tell you, visiting some of those classrooms with folks from the United States, where we want everything to be engaging and kids to just be laughing as they do now — they’re not tripping over that in the U.K. And their students of color are outperforming large numbers of other students, particularly in their urban centers, because they went deep on those foundational pieces. And we still leave things up to negotiation. Nick Gibb, who was the minister who led a lot of that work, has written a book about it. He’s out and about, and so that’s something if people are interested in, they can go deeper on.

Rotherham: Talk about chronic absenteeism. Obviously the pandemic exacerbated that, but getting kids into school is always a challenge. So talk about what’s worked and the work that still remains to be done there.

Santelises: There’s a lot of work that still remains to be done, and I’ve said this to Dr. Dawson, who’s the incoming CEO. 

Rotherham: He’s coming out of Philadelphia, and he’ll be taking over this summer. 

Santelises: We’ve already had great meetings, great conversations. But I have been very forthright with him — and the board has been forthright. We’ve reduced our chronic absentee rate by 12 percentage points since the pandemic, but it’s still way too high and we really have to focus on that.

So one thing is actually focus. And once we started focusing, we saw that. I do think — and you know, Andy, people talk about the trust that’s been broken with families around education — we also broke the trust of young people. And so the reason to come to school, I don’t think, is clear anymore. So there are a number of factors. One — for districts like ours, we have kids and families in crisis. But I would say even more so, it really is: what does a community-wide effort look like around chronic absenteeism, and how do we absolutely have the schools not abdicating responsibility — we won’t — but what is very clear is the places where we’ve seen the lift are places where we have partnered with community leaders and organizations. And I don’t mean the most formal or well-resourced ones. I mean people who will hit the ground. They know where kids are. They build relationships.

And we know the chronic absentee rates decline significantly in the schools where young people feel like they have at least one — if not more than one — adult who’s going to notice when they’re not there. So we have a cluster of challenges around this area. We’ve again taken the first full swipe at it, but there’s a lot deeper work that needs to be done. And I will tell you, a lot of our investment in expanding our career track is in response to young people who said that that will get them back in school. “I know that I have a place where I can do something that isn’t necessarily college immediately after, right? I actually want to know if I can work now.” And in some cases, young people are using it to pay their way through college. But in others, Baltimore City has a very rich industrial blue-collar history, and our community does not want to let that go. So it’s our responsibility to make sure we update that and equip kids. Kids were voting with their feet, and we have to compel — but we also have to have a community-wide expectation that young people are in schools. And I don’t think we still have that. We say we do, but I don’t think that we do.

Rotherham: It’s hard when — during the pandemic, we decided to reopen bars and restaurants but we didn’t open schools. And that sent a message that I think people actually heard then and responded to around the priority on this. The other thing with this career bringing-it-back piece — how do you make sure in a place like Baltimore that it doesn’t become tracking? That kids still can pursue whatever dreams or passions they have, and they have choice and agency?

Santelises: No, and you’re absolutely right. And I think part of what we’ve done with that is one — to ensure that we’re clear that the baseline to enter the trades or any area that’s going to yield a family-sustaining income is frankly just as rigorous. So you don’t get to bottom out on the state math test and then say, “Oh, I think I’ll go be a plumber.” Because actually that’s not true anymore. 

Rotherham: Before plumbers, there’s math.

Santelises: Absolutely. Absolutely.

And so that is part of it. And I think that’s why the efforts to really raise the floor across the district have been important. Then a lot of our equity work around taking some hard looks in the mirror over the last 10 years, Andy, and saying: Where is the access to the higher-level learning opportunities located? And being honest about the reproduction of economic instability and low-income generation that have persisted and are still along certain geographic lines, and really asking the questions about how we interrupt that.

Rotherham: So you had an equity plan when you came in. Talk about progress against that equity plan. I have a couple more questions and then I want to bring in the questions from the audience.

Santelises: Yes. So one of the things that we started was we did go back to Baltimore City’s history of redlining and mapped that to where educational opportunity is currently. Whether it’s access to advanced math classes, access to early music instruction — wherever that was, where were we and where did we fall short? In the early years, we used this equity index to guide our decisions about where investments needed to be made. Not just money, but programmatic high-quality teaching. Where were the teachers going? Where were they?

And so those were the first couple of years. And then we actually brought on Dr. Tracey Durant to say, “How do we then infuse some of those principles into our everyday work?” And that equity work has led to a definition, at least in our district, that goes beyond workshops. Our equity team — which is sometimes a point of consternation for them — has a return on investment analysis as well. It’s not just, “Do people feel good when they come out of your workshop?” It’s: “If we’re going to do an equity analysis, do we have more little Black boys in advanced math because of what we’ve done?” Because if it’s only about filling out a survey about how people feel, I got to tell you, Andy — you can do that someplace else. 

Rotherham: You’ve talked about this. You and I, in some other public events, have talked about how I think equity is one of these words that now means a thousand things to a thousand people. But the way you’re talking about it — it’s making sure kids have what they need to succeed. It’s not about lowering standards. It’s not about limiting opportunities. And I feel like that’s an important framework given the work that we’re ostensibly engaged in.

Talk about the money there in general. You talked earlier about a funding shortfall that Baltimore faced, and there’s been the constant dynamic — you’re the big city in the state, fighting with the state over resources. That’s a story that plays out in different states in different ways. So talk about the resource situation. And talk about in terms of this equity work — there’s some concern that if you put a pile of money on specific schools, it can end up working at cross purposes with efforts around integration and things like that. So talk about how you navigated getting Baltimore as much money as you could from the state for what it needed, and then how the actual allocations of that money inside the city work, while avoiding perverse consequences.

Santelises: Yes. And I think we’re now learning more about what some of those perverse consequences could be. For the first phase though, a lot of it was centered around active advocacy around the Maryland state school funding formula, which was — and you know this — by many accounts actually regressive. Like, EdTrust had a scale where they would analyze state school funding formulas and Maryland’s was actually regressive. And so the institution of the Blueprint — the proposed Blueprint for Maryland schools — really flipped that on its head, as you know, and gave more money connected to places where there was concentrated poverty. There are very specific ways you can use that money. It’s not a blanket “we just give you more money” — it has to go to pre-K, it has to go to certain functions like community school coordinators in schools that serve large numbers of students from concentrated poverty. But it flipped the idea of where the resources go.

I do think the growing pains — and I want to say growing pains, we shouldn’t be ripping it out at its roots — but the growing pains is exactly what you just said. And it’s what Thomas Sowell always says, right? Policy has tradeoffs. And so we’re now living through that tradeoff. Even in the poorest district in the state — the state with the highest percentage of concentrated poverty — I’ll have one school down the street that is getting $3 million in its increase for one school, and one down the street that’s actually getting less.

Now, by design, the funding formula is supposed to — and does — give money based on the demographics and background of the young people and their level of need. But it is fuzzier in reality. And one of the things that all of my colleagues, even superintendents in wealthier parts of Maryland, will agree is that we are going to have to take a look at what the base amount is. Because I would argue — and we benefit, which is why we’ve been able to increase arts and sports and everything else in Baltimore City schools — but what is true is if that base is too low for schools that aren’t serving large numbers of other students in need, there will be a backlash. There absolutely will be, and we will suffer because people will say, “Oh, it didn’t work,” and they’ll go away. And so we’ve been advocating that that base amount needs to be increased in order to make it viable for my colleagues across Maryland.

But it is a challenge. I give all the credit to the Maryland legislature for being willing to take a real about-face in the funding formula, but it’s not done yet. And the margins are still small. I said to a local reporter — was determined that over the course of 10 years we were not going to be in the paper every day. We were going to resolve this. It meant cuts in a lot of places, which were hard. But we have maintained a fiscal conservatism that I think has benefited the city and the state in showing that we can use money well. And all of our federal dollars there — you didn’t hear crazy stories about people building swimming pools or anything else. Our folks in our finance office were dogged about making sure we spent it well. But the margins are thin. And all it takes is giving in to political favoritism. Because, you know, I made a lot of people mad over the years, Andy. I said, “No, we’re actually not taking your contract.” “No, you do have to bid for this.” And “No, we’re not going to skip the cuts because seven of the people who got the notices —” And a lot of times — and this is true everywhere — those favors nip at very small margins. And I compare it to jackals. You can look up the characteristics of a jackal on your own. But the jackals are there and they are ready to be fed. So someone is going to have to tell them no.

Rotherham: So there’s a question in the chat I want to start with, from Susan Moore Johnson. It sort of anticipates what my last question was going to be, so I’m going to kind of combine them. It’s great to see Susan here. She wants to know the state of play around school autonomy and centralization versus decentralization. And I’d ask you to talk about that — and then from that, also talk about what’s the role of choice in a place like Baltimore. Maryland has a tortured history with charter schools, but how do you see it — what’s the role of choice in a place like Baltimore going forward?

Santelises: There’s actually been a lot of pressure to get rid of choice, and I still believe — which is why we have not gotten rid of choice — that when you are serving the communities of people that we are, you have to provide choice for those families. This is where me and my national charter folks absolutely have agreement. And to say you are relegated to a school that no one can guarantee — we have more of them now after 10 years. I am very proud of the fact that we have more schools that more families choose. But I believe you have to have choice, or you’re being hypocritical. And I have not changed on that.

What we have found though is that choice with autonomy without direction and accountability is not great. And we have recalibrated autonomy. So for example, the curriculum — when I came in as CEO, schools could pick whatever the heck they wanted, even if it was professional malpractice. And that we have stopped. Like, you don’t get to do that anymore. And we’re actually pulling back even more around that instructional core. You don’t get to choose whether children have art. And some schools were choosing that. They would change the art every year, Andy. So one year you’d have an instrumental music teacher — “Oh, well, enough kids didn’t like it. Let’s switch to Chinese.” And then they would switch again. And we serve children that cannot take the shifts of whimsical leaders who do that. And a lot of our principals were newer and asking for direction. So we’ve tightened. But I would say there are those who would say we need to tighten even more. We’ve kept some of that autonomy — and Susan, great question, good to see you. But yeah, we’ve tightened a bit on that because I don’t do choice of professional practice very well. We don’t give surgeons choice on how they want to cut. So you don’t get a choice, at least in the traditional schools, about how you teach reading. We’re not doing that anymore and it’s shown up in the data.

Rotherham: A couple more real quick questions, please. Caitlin Sullivan — and I’d get in trouble because she’s CEO of Leading Now and I’m on her board, so I have to respond to her question. She says, “You talked earlier in the conversation about relationship building — what advice do you have? What are some of the things hidden in plain sight that not enough superintendents are doing around relationship building?”

Santelises: One — I think broadening the net of who you’re meeting with, who you’re talking to. My previous example during the pandemic of the actors that people would assume I would not relate to — I actually was. And I think sometimes we allow ourselves to get stuck in those boxes.

Second, in terms of relationship building — know what your core is and be consistent. The vacillation based on the moment and the situation does not play well for long-term relationships. And let’s be clear, there are people who don’t like me and that’s fine, but they know what I stand for. And I’m willing to still have conversations with people. I think we’ve got to be open — a lot of new superintendents see everybody as coming for them. And you’ve got to suspend enough of that so that you can at least attempt to have some dialogue, even with people you might disagree with 90% of the time.

Rotherham: Yeah. I also find that people get upset — public comment, people are yelling at you and stuff — and it’s like, it’s a free country and that’s the job. That’s what you sign up for. And you don’t just get to engage with the people who want to tell you how great you are. You’ve got to also engage with the ones who want to tell you how wrong you are. And if you don’t want to do that, then you can’t really sign up for the job.

Santelises: Agreed. Well said.

Rotherham: So we got a broad question, then I’m going to finish on a more narrow question for you. The broad question is from Paul Manna, professor at William & Mary — known to his high school friends as Paulie. Paul asks — for his students — what do you see as the biggest looming K–12 challenges right now for the sector? Not just Baltimore specifically, but for a national leader for the sector at large.

Santelises: So I think at large I would double-click on two things. One, this issue of public confidence is not a pipe dream and we have got to take it seriously — whether you are in a sprawling, suburban, wealthy district or whether you are in Baltimore City or the south side of Chicago. We have to take it seriously and we have to build it back.

That is connected to — I do think this issue around what should school be? And not following this AI boogeyman — like, I love AI, I think it’s great. I don’t like the water it takes. My kids give me an earful every time somebody uses ChatGPT. But I am worried about — and I’ve been very clear about this in a number of settings — I’m glad L.A. is going the way they are. We have got to take back responsibility for the things that we try — and this is for you, Paul — that don’t work, and how we actually scale some of that back. And we don’t do that well in education. We love to layer, but we don’t like to say, “That didn’t work. Maybe we need to throw that out.” We don’t do that well. And people are coming for us if we don’t. And I don’t think we have full public trust in the same way, and we need to address that. We really do.

Rotherham: And I think it’s great that Paul’s whole class is watching this at William & Mary. So what are you hopeful about? Like, we talked about the challenges — what makes you hopeful?

Santelises: What makes me hopeful is that we still have people who believe in the power of education to transform lives. I worried a few years ago, prior to the pandemic, that we had given up on all children deserving access to a high-quality education. I was very worried about that. I’m not as worried anymore. Partly probably because of the students in Paul’s class, other folks around, people who still want to be superintendent — God only knows why. But those things give me hope. I think some of the policy rubs, while people might have their picks, I do think people like you, Andy — and I’m not just saying this because I’m talking to you — who continue to stir the pot, who continue to make the press — I don’t think public education is doomed. I think that there are people who still believe in it, but we’ve got to recalibrate. And I am so thrilled about this generation. I think they’re more innovative. The whole Gen Z thing is wild to me because I have Gen Zers at home, but I do think we’ve got creative young people and I think they have a voice. They know they have a voice. We just need to make sure that they’re well trained, they have the tools they need, and they have the foundation that we know they’re going to need.

Rotherham: Okay, that’s great. And you can tell your kids not to worry too much about the water — that’s a little overstated. Last question. Monnique Thompson — same question I was going to ask you. What’s next? I know a few things that are next for you. You and I are going to go watch the Red Sox play the Orioles in Baltimore. And you’re going to come visit us down at UVA. But what else is next for you, more generally? What’s the next chapter for Sonja

Santelises: So I don’t know. I’m going to make sure our two high school students at home with my husband and I actually get out and find themselves a college, with our help. So that’s a big focus for me. I love the work at Broad — it’s not full-time, but I literally had a call with them this morning.

Rotherham: You’re a superintendent in residence at the Broad at Yale.

Santelises: Yes. I’m a superintendent in residence and I love that. Love the fellows, love the faculty at the School of Management. Shout out to Yale SOM, because I’ve never met business-minded people who are so warm and thoughtful about education. And so I’m loving that. And then I’m going to explore some things. I’m going to think about what’s next, the possible ways of entry. And I’m going to take some time to write again. At least in a journal. I’m not coming out with a book, so don’t hold your breath on that one. But I am looking forward to kind of stepping back a little bit and having some reflection.

Rotherham: Well, you’ve certainly earned that. I hope you do some writing publicly because you have a lot of important things to say, and I appreciate you coming and joining us today and saying some of those things. So thank you very much to everybody listening, and Sonja, really thank you for 10 years on behalf of kids in Baltimore and families there, and thank you more generally for your leadership in the sector and specifically again for your time today.

Santelises: Thank you. No, thank you. And thank you, Bellwether, for always keeping us honest and holding us accountable. I appreciate it.

of all children of color nationwide have experienced racism in school, and nearly of LGBTQ+ youth have been bullied. These abuses have far-reaching consequences, as they with poor mental health, increased suicide risk and substance use, especially for youth of color and transgender students.

Now, as the Trump administration dismantles civil rights protections — labeling diversity, equity and inclusion efforts as “illegal” and gutting civil rights protections — students are being left in the lurch.

In Massachusetts, which tops national education rankings and prides itself on progressive values, brutal identity-based harassment still exists. Disturbing incidents across the state underscore the extent of this problem:

• A Black middle schooler in Melrose was called the N‑word and physically attacked by classmates. Another Black fifth grader at the same school was taunted with racial epithets such as “monkey” and “ape,” and had her braided hair — an expression of her cultural identity — cut off in the classroom by white students.
• A Black eighth grader in Brookline was called racially derogatory , such as “cotton picker,” and was physically assaulted, pinned to the ground while a white student placed his knee on his neck, yelling, “George Floyd! George Floyd!”
• Two Black sisters in Millbury were called the , “monkey,” “ugly” and “Black as fuck,” and were told to “go back” to their “motherland.”
• Students in Southwick conducted a mock “slave auction” on a Black classmate.

Identity-based harassment isn’t confined to classrooms or cafeterias, but also happens on the field, court and rink. Just last month, Black girls on a high school basketball team were the subject of viral racist social media referring to them as “hood rats” and “violent animals,” and calling for a return of segregation. And following the growing visibility and popularity of the television series “Heated Rivalry” depicting gay hockey players, there has been a troubling in reports of bullying, harassment and use of homophobic language within school-affiliated hockey programs.Ìę

Athletics is a space where young people can build self-esteem and learn life lessons like teamwork and fair play, but that opportunity is being corrupted by harmful stereotypes and bigotry.

Schools and associations’ failure to intervene meaningfully and protect their students from identity-based harassment has exacerbated these incidents. When institutions fail to protect students, the message is clear: Their safety and dignity are not priorities.

But we can send a different message. Lawyers for Civil Rights has filed civil rights complaints against schools for failing to protect students. We filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association seeking records regarding incidents of discrimination and harassment to better protect youth athletes from identity-based bullying.

And we brought the urgent issue of LGBTQ+ bullying in athletics to the attention of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. Legal action increases the stakes and demands reform.

But avenues for accountability are narrowing. With several offices of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights now , including the Boston office, students have fewer pathways to seek relief. 

One of the remaining avenues is pursuing a civil rights complaint with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office. The attorney general is currently considering investigations into certain public schools, and we need stronger protections to ensure schools are held accountable. We also need institutions like the athletic association to take meaningful steps to ensure that school sports are safe and inclusive for all students. 

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education can strengthen enforcement of the state’s existing anti-bullying law by requiring more robust incident reporting and mandating timely investigations. And the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination should prioritize student civil rights complaints, ensuring that the closure of the federal Office for Civil Rights in Boston does not leave students without a meaningful remedy.

Our children should not have to question whether their schools see them, value them or will protect them. And at a moment when the federal government has abandoned these commitments, progressive states like Massachusetts must step up. To remain a true leader in education, we must stand firmly with students.

What can the state do? One step might be to continue expanding its charter school sector, especially the brick-and-mortar schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students.

Oklahoma’s declining NAEP scores represent a sample of students across both traditional and charter schools, but Oklahoma has been fortunate to have a relatively successful charter sector. For example, using data through 2019, a Harvard found that Oklahoma had the sixth-highest-performing charter sector in the country.

A from the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board allows for a deeper, more up-to-date analysis. The biggest takeaways focus on size, performance and cost.

Both brick-and-mortar and virtual charters have grown in Oklahoma, collectively increasing from about 51,000 students in the 2022-23 school year to 55,000 last year. In the 2024-25 school year, 35,831 students attended a virtual charter and 19,190 were enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools. All told, charters serve about 8% of all public school students in the state.

A of student performance found 31 of 49 brick-and-mortar charter schools outperformed their neighboring traditional schools last year. For example, students at Stanley Hupfield Academy and John W. Rex Charter Elementary School outperformed the Oklahoma City average by 21 and 20 percentage points, respectively. The Dove and Santa Fe charter networks each had several standout schools, including Dove Science Academy, where students outscored nearby traditional schools by 34 points and which we named a Bright Spot for its third grade reading proficiency.ÌęThe largest outperformance was notched by a standalone charter called Deborah Brown elementary school in Tulsa, where students scored 59 points higher than peers in the neighboring district.Ìę

As for virtual charters, the analysis found that only one — the Oklahoma Connection Academy High School — outperformed the statewide average, while 15 did not.

Note: Brick-and-mortar charter schools are compared to the traditional public schools in their physical districts. Virtual charters are compared to all traditional schools in the state.

A new from Adam Tyner at the University of Oklahoma made similar comparisons for high schools. At that level, students attending brick-and-mortar charters had slightly lower ACT scores than peers attending traditional public schools, but they had higher graduation rates — especially the low-income students. Meanwhile, the virtual charters had significantly worse outcomes. 

Notably, Oklahoma’s charters are getting these results with significantly less money. According to the state charter board, traditional public schools received $10,643 per student in state and local funding last year, compared with $9,684 for brick-and-mortar charters. This disparity of almost $1,000 per student has widened over time and is largely due to the fact that charters do not have the same access to money for facilities and do not receive the same share of local revenues that traditional district schools do.

Closing this funding disparity would likely boost outcomes for charter students even further.

While it is impossible to know for sure whether Oklahoma’s charter schools are getting their results by cherry-picking the best students, or even whether the rise of charters may have contributed to stagnation on the part of traditional public schools, suggests that’s not the case. If anything, traditional schools tend to get higher scores when they face increased competition in the form of charter schools.

For instance, Tulane University researchers Feng Chen and Doug Harris found that the effects from this type of competition tend to materialize when charter schools a 10% market share in a given district. The new charter found that Oklahoma now has six communities where charters have surpassed this threshold, led by Oklahoma City at 23%.

When I spoke with Rebecca Wilkinson and Shelly Hickman from the Oklahoma Charter Schools Board, they said they wanted to create an annual report that was comparative and meaningful, and to dispel myths about what charters are and are not. They are optimistic about increasing market share in more communities, and they hope that success can generate even more momentum across the state. 

But by the time the class leaves the following spring, the majority are ready for fourth-grade reading. It’s a transformation made possible by Frederick Elementary’s third-grade teaching team, whose strategies include daily interventions that break down literacy into 15 distinct skills.Ìę

Frederick Elementary has roughly 360 students in a district of 737, located about 45 miles from Lawton, the nearest mid-sized city. About 87% of elementary students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch during the 2023-24 school year, which would predict a third-grade reading proficiency rate of only 40%, according to federal data that are the basis of ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Bright Spots literacy project. Instead, 71% of the school’s third graders were proficient in reading.

The academic scores of all schools in Oklahoma rose that year, after the education department, led by then-State Superintendent Ryan Walters, lowered testing standards. After the state last year, Frederick’s proficiency rate came in at 66%. 

Oklahoma requires students in early grades to receive reading intervention if they score below the 40th percentile on a screening test that’s given multiple times a year. Depending on a student’s level, state statute mandates specialized instruction in small groups at least twice a week.

At Frederick Elementary, reading intervention occurs daily.

The school’s program, called , can be difficult to implement, said reading specialist Danna Akin. 

“There’s been other schools that have wanted to get started in it, and they bought into the program, but it’s hard to get started,” she said. “The scheduling gets pretty complicated.”

Students who score below the 40th percentile then take an exam with 95 Percent and are grouped together by the specific reading skills they are missing, such as understanding silent “e.” A teacher — sometimes the librarian or special education instructor — works on a particular skill during a period called flex time, a 45-minute block that occurs each morning.

“The students above the 40th percentile obviously don’t need 95 Percent, so we put them in larger reading comprehension groups,” Akin said. “But for the 95 groups, we try to keep it to seven or less [students] so they can get that one-on-one intervention time.”

The instruction starts with plastic envelopes, each containing lessons and activities that teach a specific phonics skill. Students will move small chips over a board that has letter sounds and review them with their teacher. They’ll practice vocabulary, spelling and reading short passages that include words they’re struggling with. 

Each of the 15 skills in the 95 Percent program takes students roughly a week to 10 days to go through. After students graduate from a skill, they are tested again to see if they can advance to the next envelope taught by another teacher during flex time.

“If you’re only doing [reading intervention] twice a week, they’re not going to get the reinforcement that they need. But if you’re doing it five times a week and for 45 minutes, they’ll get what they need,” Akin said. “By the time you’ve done that much reinforcement with them and you’ve spent that much time on a skill, they’ve got it.”

Akin and Frederick’s three third-grade teachers review student progress at least once a week to see what each child still needs to become more proficient. A data wall in Principal Laura Yeager’s office tracks where each student in the intervention program is at.

“Sometimes it takes a little while, but eventually they all get out of the 95 Percent program, and then they’re working on those grade-level skills,” Yeager said. “This year, we’ve been really fortunate. We’ve been very, very successful getting kids out of it.”

Frederick Elementary has only third, fourth and fifth grades. Younger students attend the Prather Brown Center from pre-K through second grade.

“It’s really challenging, because when the second graders come to us, we usually have a large amount that fall under that 40th percentile,” Akin said. 

That’s a trend seen nationwide: A found that by the middle of the 2024-25 school year, only 58% of second graders were on track for core reading instruction and were likely to meet grade-level standards by spring.

Frederick’s third grade teaching team starts each school year with the mindset that they can’t begin with third grade standards, because they have to review second grade skills first. 

“We’re having to fill these phonics holes, which I think is happening probably everywhere — I don’t feel like that’s just a Frederick Elementary thing,” said Halle Pineda, one of the third grade teachers. “But I don’t feel like we really get their best third-grade self until about January. And by then, we only have four months until it’s time to start wrapping up. It’s a game of catch-up.”

Last fall, Frederick Elementary received $10,000 from the state to bolster the 95 Percent program. Yeager said the money was part of Oklahoma’s new , which has an initiative solely for rural schools. Frederick Elementary used the money for high-dosage tutoring in reading. Early data showed some students jumped from the 30th to the 60th percentile in literacy. Others, on average, improved 12 percentage points in their performance.

Oklahoma has been trying to improve its reading proficiency scores for . Legislation implemented in 2013 required third graders to be held back a grade if they scored poorly on the state’s reading test. After years of back and forth and added exemptions to the retention law, it was .Ìę

Now, literacy is back on the table, and it’s center stage. Lawmakers want to reverse Oklahoma’s , which show that 27% of students scored at or above grade level in English language arts and 36% scored below basic during the 2024-25 school year. 

A law has a robust set of guidelines for struggling readers and reinstates third-grade retention. It’s part of a by the state’s chamber of commerce to boost local economies and make Oklahoma more competitive against other states for employees and business.

Beginning next school year, the mandates that first and second graders who don’t read at grade level at the end of the year either be held back or receive reading interventions when they return to school. 

Parents will be notified of their child’s reading deficiency within 30 days of its discovery. Third graders not at grade level by the end of the school year will be retained unless they qualify for an exemption. Some exemptions are geared toward English learners, students with disabilities or children who were already held back in earlier grades.

Chad Warmington, CEO of the , said there have been “lessons learned” from the 2013 legislation that required third grade retention. This year’s law uses the practice as a last resort, he said. 

“You can’t put in place a retention policy at the expense of all the other things that are going to improve outcomes — that’s just not how it works,” he said. “Last time, there was far more emphasis placed on the retention part, and not enough on what we are going to do to make sure teachers coming out of teaching schools are trained on the science of reading. Or that the teachers in the classroom are retrained and given opportunities to improve their skills in the science of reading.”

Some educators want legislators to focus on other challenges in the classroom than reading proficiency, said Erika Wright, founder and former leader of the .

“Our teachers have been screaming about class sizes and behavior, and pay is always on the burner. When this whole literacy [initiative] came out, we pulled together a group with the State Chamber to sit in a room so that they could listen,” she said. “I sat in that room for four hours listening to the teachers saying, ‘This is awesome, but you’re not listening to us. This will not work because I have 29 kids in the kindergarten class and 14 of them have Individualized Education Programs and eight of them don’t speak English. I don’t have an assistant. I am spending all of my day managing behavior.’ ”

Warmington said he’s heard from teachers who are dealing with similar issues, but a “vast majority were absolutely for this deal.”

Yeager said very few Frederick Elementary third graders were held back when a retention law was in place a few years ago, so the new legislation won’t have much of an impact in that area. But that Oklahoma held back more students than all other states, except Mississippi, when the old retention law was still active.

A small number of third graders will go through the 95 Percent program again once they enter fourth grade to build back skills they lost over the summer, Yeager said.

“We have a unique culture and a great team that works together with these 95 Percent groups. We also do these groups in fourth grade to make sure we’re not missing skills,” she said. “It doesn’t just stop with third grade, but it gives you that idea that, ‘This is just not my class, and I’m responsible for my class’ scores.’ They’re all our kids, and that’s something my teachers say that makes the difference.”

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

When Celestina Castillo filled out the ethnicity forms at her children’s school, she’d always check Latino and Native American. After all, the family is proud of both its heritages.

But because of a loophole in the state’s data collection system, checking Latino or Hispanic meant that her children’s Native American identity was not counted at all, and they would not receive the extra services they’re entitled to. When Castillo learned of this, she stopped checking the Latino box altogether

According to the arcane way California counts its 5.8 million students, students who say they are Hispanic and Native American get counted as solely Hispanic. Native American students who also identify as another race, such as Black, white or Asian, are counted as “two or more races,” not Native American.

The problem affects all multiracial students, but it’s especially pronounced among Native Americans because the majority are multiracial. It’s resulted in an undercount of Native American students by as much as 90%, advocates said.

“If someone is Black, or Asian, or white, they’re counted that way,” said Castillo, a director of a college learning center who lives in Los Angeles. “Why does it not count if someone is Native American? That’s not OK. It feels like erasure.”

More services, fewer stereotypes

Last year California schools said they had 24,822 Native American students, but the actual number may be as high as 156,000, according to an Assembly report on a new measure, , that seeks to fix the problem. If those students were identified, they’d be entitled to cultural services and other programs that could help them succeed in school.

A more accurate count could also change the public perception of Native Americans generally, according to Assemblymember James Ramos, the San Bernardino Democrat who authored the bill. Instead of being thought of as rare or even extinct, the public could see that Native Americans are everywhere, Ramos said.

“We’ll start to see the true picture of Native Americans in California,” said Ramos, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe. “Native American students should be able to stand up in the classroom and say who they are and be proud of it.”

Changes in the U.S. Census

There’s a long history of the government marginalizing Native Americans in California, particularly in schools. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, not long after , the federal government forced thousands of Native American children in California into , where they were forced to speak English and abandon their cultures.

Things started to change in 1970 when the U.S. Census Bureau started improving the way it counted Native Americans. Now, Native Americans can write in their tribal affiliation or list themselves as multiracial, and still be counted as Native American. Although Native Americans are more than any other ethnic group, the census changes resulted in a tenfold increase in the official number of Native Americans in the U.S. In 1960, Native Americans only made up .3% of the population. In 2020 they were almost 3%.

The improved census data also revealed that California has more Native Americans than any other state. More than 760,000 people in California identify as Native American, with most living in urban areas like Los Angeles.

Ramos’ bill would allow Native American students to write in the name of their tribe on school forms and identify as Native American plus another race, if applicable. The hope is to give a more comprehensive, more nuanced view of California’s Native American student population, allowing them to get extra services regardless of their biracial identity. So far, the bill has no opposition.

‘We’re in the modern world, too’

Shannon Rivers, who works on education issues for the Los Angeles-based California Native Vote Project, said an accurate count of Native Americans is essential to dispel stereotypes and bring public awareness to issues affecting Native American communities.

“In the eyes of many Americans, there’s still this image of Native American people from the past, from the 1800s,” said Rivers, who is a member of the Akimel OÊŒodham tribe in Arizona. “That history is important, but we’re in the modern world, too. We’re doctors, lawyers, scientists, artists, educators.”

He’s hopeful that Ramos’ bill will improve conditions generally for Native American students in California schools. With more accurate student counts, schools could get more to provide extra services, such as tutoring, to Native American children. More schools could host events and curriculum centered on Native American history and culture.

When Ramos was growing up in San Bernardino, he remembers staring at the ethnicity form at school and not knowing what bubble to fill. His mother was Native American but she was labeled “white” on her birth certificate. His father, also Native American, was labeled “Hispanic.”

“Were we white or Latino? I didn’t know. We had to accept whatever the school told us we were,” Ramos said. “I’d go home and ask, ‘Are we Caucasian?’ That started a whole other conversation. It was confusing.”

Castillo, a descendent of the Tohono O’odham tribe in Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, said that as a child, she thought everyone was Native American. But when she started school she realized that very few people identified as she did, and worse, it was stigmatized.

Years later, she saw her own children singled out as oddities. One day her son, who had long hair, was dressed for a Native American dance and another child pointed and said, “Look, mom, it’s an Indian!”

“My son felt like a dinosaur or a unicorn, like we didn’t exist,” Castillo said.

By leaving the ethnicity question blank on school forms, Castillo knew it meant her children would not receive extra services they’re entitled to, either at the charter school they attend or through Los Angeles Unified.

“That angered me,” Castillo said. “I’m hoping that this bill will help make Native students visible to local and state education policy makers.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

The way she recalls it, nearly everyone in the group whose child had a summer or even late spring birthday was thinking about holding them back from kindergarten an extra year. Bollman’s son had an August birthday, making him the youngest among the bunch. 

The conversation stuck with Bollman, she said, and soon, she found herself asking any teacher she encountered during the next year for their opinion. 

“Not one teacher told me to send him early,” Bollman recalled. “They all said it was a good idea to hold him back — ‘especially with a little boy,’ they’d say.”

The idea of delaying a child’s entry into kindergarten — a practice often referred to as redshirting — has gone mainstream in recent years, so much so that a parent of a child nearing school age might get the impression that just about everybody is doing it. 

But that’s far from the case. 

A recent from NWEA, a research and assessment company, finds that rates of kindergarten redshirting in recent years have held remarkably steady with trends from the and , averaging about 5% each year and peaking in fall 2021 at 6.4%. 

The practice gained attention in 2022 when social scientist Richard Reeves, in his book “,” proposed redshirting all boys to account for their slower pace of development, relative to girls. Reeves’ proposal followed writings from author Malcolm Gladwell, who in his 2008 book “” that birthdays, relative to cutoff dates, contribute to a person’s long-term academic and athletic performance. 

Still, recent attention to redshirting seems to have amounted to minimal, if any, increase in the uptake of it, said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA. 

“A lot of families probably consider it and then opt out of doing it,” Kuhfeld explained, adding that, after reflection, many probably realize, “‘You know what, I don’t want to pay for an extra year [of preschool].’ We’re capturing those that went through with redshirting.” 

NWEA evaluated data from more than three million kindergarteners between fall 2017 and 2025 (and controlled for the 1-2% of kindergarten students who repeat the grade each year). The findings show that redshirting remains uncommon, and that among families who delayed kindergarten, the students tend to be white, male and enrolled in more affluent schools. 

The analysis also found that the academic advantages experienced by redshirted students, who are starting kindergarten as among the oldest in their class, tend to fade quickly. By third grade, most redshirters score on par with their peers who started kindergarten on time. 

But one of the limitations of this study, Kuhfeld acknowledged, is that it doesn’t capture students’ social, emotional and behavioral advantages, which are often the driving force behind a family’s decision to hold a child back a year. 

“It’s very possible there is a long-lasting behavioral component,” she said. “We aren’t able to see that. That’s an important caveat.”

It was social-emotional development that ultimately drove Bollman and her husband to make the decision to redshirt their son. 

Bollman wasn’t concerned that her son couldn’t handle kindergarten academically. Rather, she noticed that, at 4 years old, he struggled to cope when he lost a game or didn’t succeed at something on the first try. 

“I worried if he went into an environment where he was having a hard time keeping up with his peers, that he would kind of get discouraged and it would lay not-the-best groundwork for his academic life,” Bollman said. “A year later, he was more emotionally mature where he could handle those setbacks.”

Now that her son has finished up his kindergarten year, Bollman feels sure it was the right decision. It wasn’t without downsides, though. She estimates that her family spent $8,000 for him to attend preschool three days a week during the year that he could’ve been enrolled in kindergarten. 

Diane Schanzenbach, an economist at Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy who studies education issues, noted that there are financial costs on both ends of the redshirting decision. On the front end is the additional cost of a year of preschool, which about $11,500 in the U.S. On the back end, it’s a year of lost earnings, if that child eventually enters the labor force a year late but retires around the same age as everyone else. 

Schanzenbach, who has about redshirting in the past, sympathizes with parents who are on the fence about kindergarten, recognizing that they often have to decide many months before their child would actually start school. 

“Parenting is really hard,” she said. “The kid you’ve got today is not the kid you’ve got in a week, in a month, in a year. You’re trying to make the best possible decisions under a ton of uncertainty
 but there’s a lot of reasons to stick with the normal path.”

It’s clear that the vast majority of families come to a similar conclusion, since redshirting rates have not meaningfully increased over the decades. In fact, in 2025, in states with a Sept. 1 kindergarten cutoff, more than two-thirds of the 4.4% of students who were redshirted were born in June, July or August, NWEA shared. Those summer kids are more likely to be true edge cases, where families feel the child, at 4 years old or newly 5, is just not ready for the expectations put on children in kindergarten.  

Children who are redshirted are more likely to be from families with higher socioeconomic status, the report found. It’s all part of the “arms race” in education, particularly among wealthier communities, to try to give their child an advantage academically and athletically, Kuhfeld said. (The term “redshirting” is actually borrowed from college athletics and refers to a student-athlete delaying competition until sophomore year to allow for more development. When they compete the following year, they’re known as a “redshirt freshman.”)

“‘We want to give them an extra year so they can be really ready to go,’” Kuhfeld said, describing the mindset of parents who redshirt their kindergarteners. “It’s both, ‘Do you have the means?’ and ‘Are you in a community where this is more normalized?’”

Elia Garrison, a parent in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, opted to redshirt two of her six children — both boys with summer birthdays. But she wasn’t trying to join an education arms race. She was trying instead, she said, to protect her children from the intense academic pressure and competition that begins the moment they start school. 

“Once the rat race starts in kindergarten,” Garrison said, “it doesn’t stop.”

Garrison has noticed the way that kindergarten has become much more rigorous and structured than it was when she was growing up in the 1980s. When one of her kid’s kindergarten teachers told her that “,” it resonated with Garrison. 

“I wanted my son to have that one more year of play-based fun” in preschool, she said, referring to her fifth child, who has a June birthday. 

The COVID-19 pandemic also featured prominently in her decision to redshirt him. She had gone to the local school district’s meeting for incoming kindergarteners in spring 2020; she had been planning to enroll him for the fall. A few weeks later, the pandemic hit. 

Garrison imagined her young-for-his-grade son experiencing kindergarten over Zoom, and she changed her mind. They’d try again the following year. 

“Developmentally, it was a great decision with him,” she said of her son, who will be in third grade this fall. “I don’t know if it’s because we redshirted him, but I feel like he was able to grasp concepts better than had he been rushed into first grade and second grade.”

If he’d been born in April or May, she said, she wouldn’t have held him back. That was where she drew the line. She ultimately decided to redshirt her sixth — and last — child as well. His birthday is the day before the Sept. 1 cutoff.

“I’m OK with holding them back a little bit, within reason,” Garrison said. “I’m OK with that because we’re in such a hurry 
 to make our kids grow up 
 that pushing them creates problems later on — unnecessary goals and unnecessary stresses.”

She emphasized that, above all, it’s a personal decision that each family has to make for themselves. 

“I can’t reiterate it enough: One size doesn’t fit all,” Garrison said. “As a parent, you know your child best. Just because everybody is doing it doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Some kids will be bored and will want the challenge of kindergarten, even if they are younger. You don’t want to hold them back. You want them to have the challenges. It all depends on the parent and the kids.”

Others made a similar point. Kuhfeld clarified that neither she nor NWEA are coming out against kindergarten redshirting. “We’re not endorsing that no one redshirts,” she said. “For some kids it does help, but for a lot it doesn’t — and there are these long-term downsides you should think about.”

Schanzenbach, who believes that redshirting is “generally not worth it,” noted that, if she had been in Garrison’s case with a child who would’ve been starting kindergarten virtually, “I for sure would have redshirted my kid.”

At the end of the day, Schanzenbach said, whatever a parent decides, they can’t ever know what would’ve happened if they’d chosen the alternative. Maybe a young kindergartener would’ve had a nurturing teacher who helped him with his social-emotional development and gave him time and space to thrive. “It’s literally impossible to know,” she said.

Bollman, in Arizona, has another son — a toddler — who will be enrolling in kindergarten before she knows it. But his birthday is in January, and he’ll be starting kindergarten “on time.”

“It’s kind of a relief,” she said, “that it’s not a decision I have to make.”

The $37 million effort is the brainchild of Chris Brewster, founder of the popular Santa Fe South Schools, a charter school network that has already opened classrooms in former big box retail stores that anchor the mall. 

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s James Fields visited Crossroads this spring to see the work firsthand and to film the progress being made towards raising funds to scale available seats for families across the city. 

Stripped of careful phrasing, the logic is familiar: Some students are deficient, fixing them is costly, and enrolling too many of them threatens institutions.Ìę

That is deficit thinking dressed in the language of stewardship. When an institution implies that certain students are the problem, it has already made a judgment about who belongs.

Consider what deficit framing erases. Imagine a first-generation student who graduates near the top of her class from an under-resourced high school in a rural district. She has taken every math course available to her through Algebra II, taught by a long-term substitute, from a textbook nearly a decade out of date. She arrives at a university, sits for a math placement exam, scores below the cutoff and is routed into non-credit remedial coursework that she may have to pay for out of pocket. It delays her progress and drains her financial aid. Within two years, she leaves without a degree.Ìę

The institution calls this an outcome. The data suggests it was a decision made the day she sat for that test. But context is key.

The label “underprepared,” when used to disqualify students rather than support them, turns a snapshot of current performance into a verdict about their potential. Researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings argued that we should stop focusing on the so-called “achievement gap” and instead examine the “” — a historical accumulation of disinvestment that shapes who gets access to strong instruction, advanced coursework, advising and college preparation.Ìę

The core issue is not what students lack. It is what institutions have failed to provide. 

The math placement problem is not neutral. Given what , a significant portion of remedial placements may have been unnecessary. A placement exam, however well constructed, measures what a student has had access to, not what they are capable of learning. When a single test score is the primary determinant of a student’s math pathway, universities routinely mistake opportunity gaps for ability gaps. 

The result is that capable students — disproportionately students of color, multilingual learners and students from low-income backgrounds — are funneled into remedial sequences that delay and derail degree completion, while the system presents that routing as objective.

Research from Policy Analysis for California Education has documented in high school math access: Despite strong evidence that taking advanced math courses in high school predicts postsecondary success, access to and achievement in those courses remain unequally distributed.Ìę

A student who completes Algebra II in an under-resourced high school and a student who completes the same course in a well-resourced district may arrive at the same institution with the same transcript notation and radically different preparation — not because of any difference in their capability, but because of differences in what their schools were able to offer. 

The evidence on alternatives is clear. The Community College Research Center found that incorporating high school transcript data into placement decisions could . Studies of corequisite remediation — where students enroll directly in gateway, credit-bearing courses while receiving concurrent academic support — show stronger outcomes than traditional  prerequisite sequences.

 For example, Tennessee community colleges found that students in such courses were more likely to pass gateway math within one year. The conclusion is not complicated: Institutional design choices, not student deficits, determine who succeeds.

For more students to succeed, colleges should provide support alongside college-level instruction. The University System of Georgia replaced traditional, non-credit remedial math with a that places students directly into college-level courses while providing just-in-time support through labs, tutoring and aligned instruction. This approach has significantly improved outcomes, tripling completion rates in gatework coursework and boosting pass rates while offering more responsive, individualized help that keeps students on track, including in STEM pathways.Ìę

The students described as “profoundly underprepared” are not a liability. They are young people who have navigated inequitable systems — under-resourced schools, inadequate counseling, economic instability and placement exams that measure circumstance more than capability — to arrive at a gateway that institutions gatekeep. The question is not whether today’s incoming college students are capable. The question is whether colleges are willing to invest, build, and deliver the supports that remove the institutional barriers hindering their success.Ìę

Students do not fail the system. The system fails to build what they need to succeed. Restricting access is not stewardship. It is a choice and it is worth being honest about who bears the cost of the choice.

Last year, WalletHub, , ranked the state 50th — just above New Mexico — on a mix of criteria including test scores, graduation and teacher certification rates. More recently, a University of Oklahoma researcher zoomed in on the , where the state places 48th overall in math and reading.

The unwelcome attention typically prompts a wave of finger-pointing from politicians and . 

Sometimes, teachers like Sarah Clifford.

A single mom of two who relocated from New York, she’s among the thousands in the state who entered the classroom without completing a teacher training program. In 2023, as a new teacher in the Edmond Public Schools outside Oklahoma City, she struggled to write lesson plans and hated teaching math, a subject she disliked as a child. Districts statewide have increasingly depended on emergency certified educators like her to fill vacancies. In 2023-24, the number topped 5,000, state data shows. Since 2022, the state has also allowed schools to hire , who may have no more than a high school diploma.

“We don’t want to demonize any person who is stepping up to be a teacher, regardless of the pathway,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “But the difference in preparation launches people successfully or unsuccessfully into careers.”

Duke’s program has been part of the solution. In 2024, the university received nearly $2.5 million in from the state for scholarships to help teachers like Clifford complete their certification programs and earn a master’s degree. She graduated with last December after spending nine months instruction so she could “help students feel confident and start to love something that’s hard.” Most of her third graders students who were “on watch” in math ended up on grade level by the end of the year.

“Our state doesn’t look like we’re doing well,” she said. “But if you go inside a classroom with people who have the passion and want to be there, those kids are thriving.”

The data on the state’s decline is undeniable. In the mid-’90s, the state ranked 17th in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. With the 2024 scores, the state had fallen to 48th.

In a , University of Oklahoma researcher Adam Tyner described how Oklahoma missed the “southern surge” that brought academic turnarounds to states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those states saw improvement after pouring millions of dollars into teacher training, strong curriculum and coaching.

Oklahoma’s results have also affected public opinion. Less than a third of Oklahomans graded their local schools an A or B in from the university’s Oklahoma Center for Education Policy. Two years ago, 41% gave their schools high marks.

At about $12,500, the state’s per-pupil spending is . One reason is because it takes a in the legislature to approve a tax increase. District budgets could take another hit if voters this fall approve on property taxes. 

“If it’s really hard to increase revenues, you have to take away things from other areas,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s going to be hard to improve outcomes, if you think that money matters.”

One possible off-ramp for parents is school choice. Many charter schools their local district schools, data shows, leading to push for expanding the charter sector.

This year, lawmakers took a dual approach to tackling the state’s education challenges. They gave teachers a $2,000 raise — but the is still well below neighboring Texas and Arkansas. Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed a increasing the minimum number of days in the school calendar from 166 to 173. That will make it harder for some districts with four-day weeks to maintain that schedule.

“We’ve lost a lot of instructional days,” said Education Secretary Dan Hamlin. “It’s not the only thing that matters; you need other things, too. But it is a component that’s meaningful.”

‘Art of teaching’

State data shows that 184 districts are in session for 166 days or less, which they can achieve through four-day weeks with longer days. 

shows four-day weeks don’t necessarily improve retention, but districts that don’t adopt them can to nearby ones that do. The model is generally popular with teachers, who trade off longer hours for three-day weekends.

Superintendent Rick Cobb’s experience in the Mid-Del School District, outside Oklahoma City, illustrates the problem. When he became superintendent in 2015, he was “alarmed” that the district had 20 emergency certified teachers, he said. Now 114 either have emergency certifications or are adjunct teachers, according to .

His district, which serves a blue collar community near an Air Force base, never shifted to a four-day week. But others around Mid-Del did, luring away his teachers.

Knowledge of the subject matter generally isn’t a weak spot for emergency certified teachers, he said. But they often lack the skills to manage classrooms and modify lessons for students working at higher and lower levels.

“That’s the art of teaching,” he said.

Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City, has faced the same challenge. His district, where nearly 60% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, has lost teachers to districts with four-day weeks. But he never went that route because parents in his district depend on schools not just for education, but also for school meals. 

“If the parents go to work, who’s taking care of those kids? Who’s feeding them?” he asked. “I take that very seriously.”

The small, rural Jennings Public Schools, west of Tulsa, is among those that run four days. It received a waiver from the state to operate a 156-day calendar.

Superintendent Derrick Meador doesn’t struggle to find certified teachers. He had three job openings recently and about 10 applicants for each one. It was the first time in three years he’s had to hire a teacher. Families, he said, support the four-day week and don’t want to lose it. Fewer than 2% of students are chronically absent, and the district performs well academically.

“If we weren’t getting the results that we were, I would have ended it a long time ago,” Meador said. He doesn’t appreciate districts with four-day weeks getting for dragging the state down. “I don’t like being lumped in with other districts. We stand alone on our merits and should be judged accordingly.” 

He hopes the state will continue to allow waivers from the new 173-day requirement, but without it, Jennings will likely have to give up its four-day week.

‘Life experience’

It’s difficult to tie student outcomes to any one education policy, whether that’s the academic calendar or teacher certification. But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, said if performance is falling, teacher quality “is one of the very first things that I would look toward.”

Oklahoma is certainly not alone in lowering the bar to teach, especially since the pandemic. Goldhaber examined post-COVID outcomes for students in Massachusetts and found that those whose teachers had emergency licenses in math and science than their peers. 

In Texas, a third of teachers were unlicensed in 2023-24. aims to reverse that trend by gradually reducing the share of unlicensed teachers that districts can hire to 5% by 2029.

Oklahoma took a small step in that direction this year when it tightened restrictions on adjunct teachers, who are only required to have “distinguished qualifications in their field,” but not a college degree. Stitt signed that stops schools from hiring adjuncts to teach core content areas in K-5.

that educators with temporary or emergency certifications are more likely than those who are fully certified to leave the profession. But they often take positions that would otherwise be nearly impossible to fill. 

In the Union Public Schools, which serves southeast Tulsa and part of Broken Arrow, several teach at the district’s Innovation Lab, a hub for career and technical education courses. They include Jeremy Weber, a who teaches students the basics of aircraft maintenance. On a recent morning, he showed students how to use safety wire to secure nuts and bolts to parts of a plane.

“That life experience is pretty valuable,” said Kenneth Moore, the district’s executive director of secondary education.

Earlier this month, newly certified teachers with years of life and career experience gathered at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond to celebrate their graduation from the two-year alternative certification program. 

Grabbing refreshments at a pre-graduation reception and posing for pictures with their families and fellow graduates, they talked about wanting to reverse the stigma attached to teachers who take a nontraditional route to the classroom.

They included Cherice McDonald, a teacher in Oklahoma City schools who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, and is now being recruited to work as an assistant principal. 

Melanie Whitekiller Lawrence, a member of the Cherokee Nation, stayed home to raise her four kids before taking a job as a long-term substitute. When she took charge of a fourth grade class in Edmond, she said she “had no idea” there were academic standards in math and reading she was required to teach under state law. She’s come a long way since the days when a colleague in the classroom next door would supply her with ready-made lessons for the week.

Last fall, her colleagues at Chisholm Elementary chose her to represent their school as . 

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m more knowledgeable about current and best practices than my colleagues who have been teaching for a very long time,” she said at the reception. “We’re not just warm bodies.”

On a cool spring day recently, the 1-acre farm A. Mario Loiederman Middle School in Wheaton buzzed with activity.

In the lower field educational garden, students in the afterschool farm club are assigned their tasks, first to check on the seedlings and then to shovel and spread woodchips along paths in the upper larger production plot. They do this alongside a team of high school Department of Recreation interns who are crafting a wooden cover for the compost bin.

It’s affectionately called La Ranchera, a reference to the nearly two-thirds at the school who live nearby. But a little over a year ago this was the school’s backyard, then a grassy field over backfill from construction of Loiderman’s new Performing Arts Center, says Kate Medina, executive director and co-founder of the for Urban Farming (CKC).

The nonprofit has partnered with Montgomery County Public Schools to develop and run the Loiederman project. Medina says CKC was a natural fit. “We always had the mission to create and sustain a network of neighborhood farms,” she said.

In 2016, the Montgomery County Council afforded special agricultural tax credits to the downtown Silver Spring Charles Koiner family property, making it the first urban farm in the county. Three years later it became the first urban farm in the state to be protected by a conservation easement.

Rethinking school yards

In the 2024 agreement with CKC, the county school system designated Loiederman as a Resilience, Education, Action, Climate and Habitat (REACH) Hub. Medina says the pilot program at the school essentially is a mandate to rethink school yards as educational and community assets.

“It’s an opportunity for people to have not just a one-time snapshot or one chance at outdoor education, but to really see nature as this changing, evolving dynamic place and learn from every aspect of that,” she said.

And that vision required leveraging funds to bring it to life.

“The REACH Hub and Farm has generated $2 million for the buildout of this unique site, which is both a school farm and a community resilience hub,” she said. “This includes $1 million from the Maryland Energy Administration for the resilience elements, plus another $1 million from a combination of state, county and private funding partners, most notably the Maryland Department of Agriculture, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, and Montgomery County Office of Food Systems Resilience.”

Medina said it’s been a strong start to Loiederman’s first full season. Infrastructure is largely complete, except for the installation of the solar agrivoltaics, and the solar hook-ups that will operate the composter and open-air wash station, which she expects to go online in coming weeks. Also, since last season, fencing enclosed the gardens, safety lighting was installed and new trees planted.

“Through partnerships, grants and volunteer hours, we have built and filled 140 raised beds, installed a 10-by-10-by-8 walk-in cold storage unit, built tool racks and storage sheds,” she said.

Those beds are expected to yield 6,000 pounds of fresh produce annually, of which half will be donated to nonprofits and food banks for distribution.

Community liaisons flex civic muscles

Medina credits a small, but active group of community liaisons, largely women in the neighborhood, who help keep the project on track.

“At every turn they tell us how to name the farm, how to lobby the right people within MCPS, how to find volunteers, how to run the market, everything,” she said.

Lorena Davalos and Juanita Roca are leaders in the group.

Davalos is a Mexican-American, whose family migrated to California with the bracero program, a guest worker initiative that brought Mexicans legally to the United States during and after World War II to fill vacant agricultural jobs.Ìę She has carried that history forward, employed in agricultural projects worldwide. Roca, born in Colombia, now retired, shares that connection in agricultural development.

Now, they say it’s time to bring that know-how home.

The two advocates post messages, distribute flyers and go door-to-door to promote the farm and the twice-monthly farmer’s market that has stalls with fresh produce, homemade ice cream, honey and handicrafts. They are encouraging entrepreneurs to set up shop, and to learn from one another in workshops that tie into their values.

“Right now, I think what our vision is, is that this becomes a magnet for the community, what the community has to offer,” Davalos said. “There so much knowledge here within the community that [is being lost].Ìę We need to showcase it, and it’s a perfect opportunity for folks to make traditional drinks” or foods.

Minority-majority community reaffirms identity

Roca says the result empowers the community at the grassroots, reaffirming its identity.

“This is creating a civic muscle for other things,” she said. “It’s not just about food security, or it’s not just about can I grow a tomato. It’s going to help to improve the schools. It’s going to help mobilize resources to fix a road, all these different things.”

About 17,000 students from 20 schools live within a 2-mile radius of in the Wheaton-Glenmont area, a majority-minority community, largely Hispanic, but also with a significant African and Asian immigrant population. Medina says that proximity could help save lives in a natural disaster.

“This space being so close to where people live will activate with increased food production, public charging stations, and other resources needed in a climate disaster,” she said.

CKC has signed a 10-year agreement with the at Loiederman with the hope of replicating its farm model in other schoolyards.

“We would love to protect this property in perpetuity, but really the opportunity here is to make it so valuable to the school and to the community, that we couldn’t imagine life without something like this,” Medina said.

And it will take kids like Steven, a Loiederman seventh grader in the afterschool farm club to make the project thrive.

“I like the outdoors,” he says as he eagerly hauls wood chips with his good friend Bryson, alternating who shovels and who spreads the chips. “I feel great giving back to Mother Nature, doing these things around the farm. I like the hard work.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.

Unlike needs-based programs that are limited to households where students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch, families with of the median for their area would be eligible to apply for a Federal Scholarship Tax Credit from a participating organization. An estimated could benefit.

This could be a game-changer for New Yorkers currently struggling to afford educational opportunities for their children. At the same time, the scholarships could also prove an incentive for even more public school students to exit already . 

Since they would be the ones most immediately affected by it, I asked the New York City families subscribed to my and social media how they felt about Hochul’s announcement.

To begin with, there was general confusion about how the program would operate.

One anonymous poster asked, “(Does) ‘donate money to an eligible scholarship-granting organization’ means you gift a school $1,700 per year and that gets deducted from your tuition? Otherwise, how does this increase choice for parents? Also, can I donate $1,700 to a tutoring company and get $1,700 worth of lessons?”

That is not how it would work. Donors could not directly benefit from their donations, and the reason supporters believe the program would increase school choice is that it would give parents who otherwise could not afford private schooling a break on tuition.

As the majority of NYC private schools charge upward of $60,000 a year, detractors scoffed that a measly $1,700 wouldn’t make a meaningful difference. But that’s assuming the scholarships given would be only $1,700 per family. If 40 benefactors donated $1,700 to a private school like Trinity, Horace Mann or Dalton, one child could receive a full scholarship, or two children could get half-off tuition.

In addition, NYC is home to dozens of parochial schools, which charge much less than the independent schools name-checked above. Some Catholic elementary schools cost $6,000 to $10,000 per student per year, as do some Jewish yeshivas and Muslim madrassas. An increase in donations from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit might make it possible for many new students to attend at a discount.

This doesn’t sit well with NYC mom Rebecca Garte, who wrote that the program would be “publicly subsidizing private institutions.”

That’s true, but public money is already being used to subsidize city private educational organizations in a variety of ways across all grade levels. 

The only way then-Mayor Bill de Blasio could get his signature initiative, universal pre-K and, later, 3K, off the ground was to pay private schools, including religious ones, with public money. The majority of afterschool programming in public elementary and middle schools is who are paid by the city. And there are , which students can use for public and private colleges — again, including religious ones. 

Nevertheless, parents like Elizabeth Kelly don’t care about precedent. Her position is simple, “I am against the tax credit.  Let’s just make our public schools better.”

Yiatin Chu, parent of an NYC public school ninth grader, on the other hand, recognizes how the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit would help families like hers. She says, “I support the federal tax credit scholarship program because even middle-income families are eligible, a segment of public school families that don’t get much help. I like that the scholarship can be used for SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test) and SAT preparation or extra tutoring on any subject that our children might need. If Gov. Hochul doesn’t renege on her support, I hope to use it for my child’s SAT prep.”

In the end, opinions in support ran 3 to 1 versus those against. Those who were for the program expressed sentiments similar to those of mom Desiree Milin, who said, “Since the NYC public school system is not equal for all children, I would have no problem helping parents pay into a private school education. We switched our child into Catholic school after he did not get any of his public middle school choices. A good education should be accessible to all children.”

As of now, have signaled that they plan to opt into the program. Only three of them are headed by Democratic governors: Colorado (Jared Polis), North Carolina (Josh Stein) and now, New York. With New York City being the largest school district in America, the results of the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit here could become a case study for all those still on the fence about bringing it to their respective areas, and answer questions— not to mention address misconceptions — that many still have about it.

RAY LAKE, Wyo. — There was a lot of giggling in the parking lot as teenagers plunged bare hands into coolers filled with small, slippery rainbow trout fry. 

The objective was to catch the fish in clear plastic cups, but the juvenile trout were fast and very squirmy, and the effort elicited shrieks, splashing and laughter. 

The kids — middle and high school students from Fort Washakie, Wyoming Indian and St. Stephens schools — were pretty comfortable handling the baby trout. That makes sense, given that they hatched them from eggs and reared them in classroom tanks over the previous four months. 

Thursday’s fish release under leaky rainclouds was the culmination of the Trout in the Classroom program, which schools on the Wind River Reservation have participated in for three years. 

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department funds the program, which Trout Unlimited facilitates and the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative coordinates. Trout in the Classroom allows students to learn an array of scientific lessons as they do the hands-on work of raising the fish. 

After circling up in the Ray Lake parking lot, talking about watershed ecology and listening to a tribal blessing, students and their teachers got busy transporting dozens of fry from coolers in the parking lot to the nearby lake’s muddy shores. There, they released them, cup by cup, into the shallows, nudging them to their new wild home 

“OK, goodbye fishies!” a girl called as she knelt by the water. 

“Swim free!” a boy chimed in. 

Connecting the students directly to wildlife and its habitats helps foster emotional investment, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative Education and Culture Coordinator Jeremy Molt said. That contributes to the ultimate goal, “which is to inspire responsible cultural stewardship of the land.” 

Molt has seen the shores of reservation lakes like this one grow less littered since the trout program began, which he links to young people’s increasing awareness of ecological health and a desire to protect it. 

Through the program, he said, “we’re kind of healing some of those disconnections” with the landscape and natural food sources. “We’re trying to rewire some of that.”

Fort Washakie science teacher John Gookin was among the fish transporters. The program gives educators like him opportunities to teach about topics like beneficial bacteria, the chemistry of water, how trout extract oxygen through their gills and the life cycles of freshwater swimmers.

“It engages the kids, and gives something operational for things like biochemistry,” he said. 

For example, in the classroom, his students “test how much ammonia is in the water,” Gookin said. “Then we learn about the shape of the ammonia molecule, the cycles of it and why that even matters.”

Because his students are all anglers themselves, he said, they were excited to help stock the lake and perpetuate healthy waters. 

And though they became wet with rain and mud, the giggles never died down.

°ŐłóŸ±ČőÌę first appeared in .

A new bipartisan bill would require more transparency for Ohio private schools receiving Education Choice and Education Choice Expansion vouchers.

Ohio Sens. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, and Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Township, recently introduced , also known as the Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act.

“The key point with this piece of legislation is that if you are going to take state dollars, there has to be a degree of transparency and oversight,” Blessing said.

“This is a cornerstone of conservative philosophy in this state, where we have a program 
 and we have oversight over something like that. This is no different.”

The bill would require Ohio’s auditor to audit the funds of each school that is using EdChoice and EdChoice expansion vouchers each fiscal year.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce would be required to create a report card for chartered non-public schools in order to “hopefully get an apples-to-apples comparison,” Blessing said.

Schools accepting EdChoice vouchers would have to submit weekly attendance records, conduct criminal background checks of its employees, report the tuition and fees charged by the school in a five-year cost trend, report how many of their students have an Individualized Education Program, and publish their dropout and graduation rates.

“The current voucher system is doing two things — providing tuition coupons for wealthy Ohio families to be able to send their children to private schools, and it’s underfunding Ohio’s public school districts with drastic ramifications for Ohio students,” Smith said.

Lawmakers increased the EdChoice expansion eligibility to 450% of the poverty line in 2023 through the state budget — creating near-universal school vouchers.

This means K-8 students can receive a $6,166 scholarship and high schoolers can receive a $8,408 scholarship in state funding under the expansion.

Ohio spent more than a for the 2025 fiscal year, the second full year with near-universal eligibility. Nearly half of the money — $492.8 million — was from the EdChoice expansion.

“Why on earth would we spend billions of Ohioans’ hard-earned money on schools that don’t have to provide that level of transparency and accountability — it doesn’t make any sense,” said Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. “It’s what taxpayers deserve, that there would be accountability and transparency into all schools that receive public dollars.”

Students in some counties don’t have the option to attend a private school.

“Many of us barely know what vouchers are because we simply don’t have private schools,” said Ohio Rep. Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County. “Our best schools are our only schools, and those schools are public schools.”

Carroll, Champaign, Hardin, Harrison, Holmes, Meigs, Morgan, Noble, Preble and Vinton counties had .

Pizzulli said rural Ohio is frustrated with how schools are funded.

“We see our tax dollars supporting a voucher system that largely benefits areas with access to private schools, while communities like mine receive no or little practical benefit at all because those options don’t exist,” he said. “When vouchers were expanded, many of us were told, well, private schools would begin magically appearing and popping up all over the state, that simply has not happened.”

Nonpublic Ohio schools had 181,244 students enrolled in fiscal year 2025 — a 4.6% increase compared to fiscal year 2024.

“What frustrates us is seeing our taxpayer dollars increasingly flow towards families who already had the means to afford private tuition, and so we’re just asking for fairness,” Pizzulli said.

The lawmakers stressed Ohioans deserve to know how their tax dollars are being used.

“The taxpayers deserve to know where the money is going, who is benefiting, and whether the investment is producing results,” Pizzulli said.

Cleveland Heights Teachers Union President Karen Rego said her district is expected to lose $7 million over the next two years in layoffs and other cutbacks.

“I don’t know where that’s going to happen, we feel very stretched thin already, and to lose staff members that we’ve lost this year, and the possibility of losing more next year is a really tough pill to swallow,” she said.

Rego is not against people choosing what school they go to, but wants to see more accountability as far as how the taxpayer money is being spent.

This bill is being introduced late in the General Assembly — any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered.

“If it goes nowhere in this General Assembly, or even next, that isn’t the point,” Blessing said. “We have identified a major problem here. We also have a solution.”

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, questioned how serious the senators are about this bill since they waited until now to introduce it.

“Once that money goes to those private organizations, we don’t audit that, and I think if we’re going to come up with a scheme where something like that would happen, we need to make sure that the privacy part of it for people — kids and families going to school, and the people running the school — all of those things are intact,” he said.

More than 300 public school districts are suing over EdChoice. A trial judge ruled last summer that the program was unconstitutional, but a this month before the 10th District Court of Appeals.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Danielle Minnis can demonstrate what putting students first looks like after 20 years in the classroom, bolstered by rigorous self-evaluation.

If children fall asleep during a lesson, change the pacing. If a kid with dyslexia feels humiliated reading aloud to peers, do not force them to do it. If 60% of the class passes the test, fantastic. But focus on what could have helped the 40% who struggled.

“You start with where your students are, and you set goals. You do your lesson; you analyze your data; and then you adjust and you reflect,” said Minnis, who teaches eighth-grade reading to students with disabilities at Legacy Middle School in San Antonio. “A lot of times, teachers teach to the middle rather than looking at the outliers, because the outliers can be scary.”

Minnis credits her approach to National Board Certification, often recognized as the most respected and demanding teaching certificate in the country. Roughly — less than 1% — hold the credential. The state rewards those who earn it with salary raises of up to $9,000 under a pay-for-performance program known as .

But that could change by the end of the year as state leaders question the credential’s worth.

Texas’ new, nearly requires the State Board for Educator Certification to evaluate whether National Board Certification aligns with state law. The state board will determine if the national certificates will continue to qualify educators for raises under the Teacher Incentive Allotment.

During legislative debates last year, a prominent Republican state senator said the national certificate did not align with Texas’ goal of rewarding teachers based on merit. Other elected officials have since argued that the National Board’s emphasis on equity conflicts with state mandates prohibiting such practices.

“There’s this thing about, ‘Well, Texas knows what’s best for Texas,’” said , D-Houston, a supporter of the national certificate. “That seems to be part of the problem that we’ve got, without recognizing that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

About 620 nationally certified educators receive Teacher Incentive Allotment raises, according to the Texas Education Agency. Teachers say revoking the certification as a pathway to salary increases would show that Texas leaders do not value the highest quality of teaching — that is, those who center their practice on the most important person in education: the child.

“It literally makes you a better teacher,” said Minnis, who attained the credential in 2010. “One of the most important things in national certification is: How does a teacher create a safe, equitable learning environment for all students?”

Teachers sum up the National Board Certification process in two words: writing and reflection.

The program measures whether educators understand the content they teach, their effectiveness in evaluating what students need and their ability to keep children engaged and help them learn.

Teachers have five years to complete the certification. They demonstrate their effectiveness through a computer-based assessment of multiple-choice and free-response questions. They collect samples of students’ work and specify how they will help each grow. They videotape themselves during class instruction, analyzing each decision and interaction. They detail how they serve as leaders and collaborate with colleagues. They scrutinize test results, identifying patterns and adjusting instruction.

“It was harder than my master’s,” said Keke Powell, a second-grade teacher in the Hays school district. She earned her national certification last year. “You have to be able to really be elaborate and specific on what you’re trying to say. Whoever is reading your story, if they cannot paint a picture of what you’re trying to do and say, then it needs to be fixed.”

During the 2025 lawmaking session, legislators boosted educator salaries based on years of experience and district size. They funded training programs and enacted a ban on uncertified teachers. And they expanded the Teacher Incentive Allotment — which serves roughly across more than 800 school districts — so more educators could qualify.

Before agreeing on a review of National Board Certification, the Texas Senate proposed phasing it out of the state’s pay-raise program. Former state Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Conroe Republican who crafted the bill, acknowledged that teachers invested time and money in the certification.

But the certification did not align with the spirit of the Teacher Incentive Allotment, Creighton said during a February 2025 Senate floor debate. Removing it would ensure that Texas compensates teachers based only on their daily performance in the classroom, he noted.

“It’s a low percentage of teachers that are applying for that or working within that framework now,” Creighton said at the time, referring to the national credential. “We stuck with a framework that is generally merit-based across the board.”

Months later, during a Texas State Board of Education discussion, some Republicans offered more concrete reasoning for their objections to the National Board: references to diversity, equity and inclusion.

“About 10% of the training that a teacher would go to is based on DEI, gender identity and sexual orientation — and how to help transition children — which violates our state law and violates parental rights,” board member Julie Pickren said during the April meeting.

Pickren pointed to a National Board document that details standards the most accomplished teachers hold themselves accountable to. The explains how such teachers cultivate learning spaces inclusive of all children and offers examples of what that could look like in practice.

Pickren read aloud an excerpt: Teachers design and implement lessons that help students develop awareness of, sensitivity to, and respect for others. For example, accomplished teachers are aware that children may begin to question their sexual identity at a young age. Teachers know that acceptance of their curiosity will make them feel safe and secure. In such instances, teachers may feature children’s literature in which diverse gender roles are portrayed.

The Houston-area Republican said focusing on equity and inclusion would confuse Texas teachers and conflict with federal and state requirements that schools avoid educating students about gender identity and sexual orientation.

But “none of that is true,” said Peggy Brookins, president and CEO of the National Board.

Brookins clarified that the National Board does not train educators — on sex, gender or any topic — nor does it assign learning materials.

The certification is based on evidence teachers submit showing how they adapt to their students’ needs, she emphasized. The board evaluates how that aligns with what accomplished instructors and education experts deem best practice.

Contrary to Pickren’s concern about violating parental rights, for instance, the national standards highlight that accomplished teachers communicate frequently with parents about their children’s education.

Nevertheless, Brookins asserted that not every example written for teachers — such as the one Pickren referenced — applies or makes sense in the differing educational and political environments of each state.

“We do not engage in politics. We engage in policy,” Brookins said. “And the policy is to help teachers go through the process of board certification, to work with states to say, ‘How do we make this happen in support of teachers becoming accomplished teachers?’”

Alayna Siemonsma, a 28-year educator who coordinates services for students with dyslexia in the Montgomery school district, considers National Board Certification “the best professional development I’ve ever had the opportunity to be a part of.”

“I would hope that people in those positions — like our lawmakers, like our State Board of Education members — would reach out to people who are nationally board certified,” Siemonsma said, “and have conversations with them directly about what this process entails and how it has made an impact on our craft, on our teaching, on our colleagues, and, of course, on the growth of the students that we serve.”

A Texas Tech University report found that Texas students taught by nationally certified teachers experienced about 3.5 months of additional learning in math and 1.5 months in reading. Low-income students, children learning English and kids scoring below grade level saw the most significant boost in test scores. The report found that students experienced an 18% reduction in the likelihood of suspension and a 10% decrease in chronic absences.

The researchers recommended that Texas continue to recognize the national certificate in the Teacher Incentive Allotment.

The National Board has long prepared teachers to support students who historically need more support, lead researcher Jacob Kirksey said in an interview.

“Understanding that they have historically understood ways to prepare teachers to support these populations is something, again, worth considering from the state level,” Kirksey said.

Lawmakers required the State Board for Educator Certification to decide by Dec. 31 whether to continue including the national certification in the allotment. The Texas Education Agency, which works closely with the board, contracted with six educators to complete the review.

Agency officials did not provide information on the reviewers when asked by The Texas Tribune.

According to a recent presentation to the state certification board, the evaluators have collective expertise on National Board Certification, can interpret Texas law and know state standards for learning materials.

If the board revokes it from the state program, teachers could still earn pay raises for their students’ academic growth — but only as measured by their districts’ standards. The board could also conduct a subsequent review of the national certification and reinstate it at any time.

Still, nationally certified teachers question why state lawmakers decided on the current path.

Dropping National Board Certification from the incentive program would mark a sharp reversal from just four years ago, when lawmakers pushed for its continued inclusion and that educators with the credential receive more money than currently allocated.

Teachers see the upcoming decision as a simple math equation: If National Board Certification equals positive student outcomes, they deserve pay raises.

“I always just take it back to, everybody should be more educated about what good teaching looks like and how all teachers can make a difference,” said Minnis, the eighth-grade reading teacher. “I would ask everybody who has a stake in this. What do you think accomplished teaching looks like? What are we looking for? What are your standards? Why do you think somebody should get TIA?’”

“What’s going to be funny,” Minnis added, “is it’s always going to go back to, ‘Oh, like the national standards.’”

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Before 2024, students at Whiteland High School seeking advanced curriculum could already choose between Advanced Placement and dual credit courses.

So when school officials considered adding a new curriculum backed by the University of Cambridge in 2024, they wanted to address the needs of a specific subset of students: the community’s growing population of non-English speaking students, who represent around 14% of the district and speak 64 languages.

They found that the essay-based test in Cambridge courses allowed students to demonstrate their mastery of advanced content while they were still learning English, said assistant superintendent Cassandra Shipp.

“We don’t want to limit our students who we know are bright,” Shipp said. “Regardless of whether they’re taking AP or Cambridge, our students have to be global competitors.”

Indiana wants more schools to offer Cambridge STEM courses through $500,000 in grant funding earmarked in the latest state budget. The long-term goal is to create another way for students to earn an advanced diploma that leads to automatic college admission. Schools can apply for grant funding that will help pay for teacher training and program fees.

In February, the state’s department of education awarded six schools — including Whiteland — funds to introduce courses like Thinking Skills, Computer Science, Biology, and Chemistry. Now, it has opened another round of funding to allow up to 16 more public and private schools to start offering these classes.

What are Cambridge Courses?

Cambridge courses come from the University of Cambridge in England through its .

Though the courses are new to Indiana, and less common nationally than Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, they’re offered in approximately two dozen other states and 160 countries.

The offerings from Cambridge are a little like both IB and AP programs: Like IB, Cambridge offers programs that begin in elementary school and go through high school; but like AP, it also offers standalone courses.

Passing an A-level Cambridge course in an Indiana high school is equivalent to passing one in the U.K. or Singapore and indicates that a student is ready for college-level coursework, said Mark Cavone, the North American regional director for international education at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. While not necessarily aimed at multilingual students, some features make the courses a particularly good fit for them, like the incorporation of , a neutral form of English.

While most Cambridge courses are aimed at students going to college, the organization also offers some career-oriented courses, such as in marine science and travel and tourism, Cavone said.

“The thing that keeps us up at night is that we want kids to be college and career ready by the time they graduate high school,” Cavone said.

How can Indiana students use Cambridge courses?

Through the expansion, more Indiana schools will be able to allow students to earn the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education, or AICE, diploma, Cavone said.

The AICE diploma is one of the ways that students can earn an Honors Enrollment Seal in the state’s , which guarantees students admission to any of the state’s public universities. Students can also earn this seal by earning an associate degree, IB diploma, AP Scholar with Distinction, or other advanced pathway. And schools receive a $2,495 bonus for every student who earns an honors enrollment seal.

Cavone said Indiana’s diploma redesign and education choice policies made it a good fit for the organization’s expansion.

Currently, Cambridge courses are available mainly in traditional public high schools, Cavone said, along with some charter and private schools. The first round of grant funding from the Indiana Department of Education was awarded to four public high schools, one charter school, and one private school:

• Whiteland Community High School at the Clark Pleasant Community School Corporation. The district also offers Cambridge English courses in middle and high school that are not backed by the grant.
• North Central High School in the Metropolitan School District of Washington Township
• Terre Haute South Vigo High School at the Vigo County School Corporation
• East Chicago Central High School at the School City of East Chicago
• GEO Next Generation Academy
• Al-Haqq Foundation Academy

Schools interested in applying for the IDOE grant should fill out before July 17.

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 .

She taught for more than 40 years in the South Ward of Newark, New Jersey, one of the lowest-income communities in the country. Her students regularly achieved high Advanced Placement scores and earned admission to some of the nation’s most selective colleges. 

But those outcomes don’t fully capture her impact. Marie built a classroom grounded in intellectual rigor, cultural relevance and deep human connection. It was a place where students felt seen, challenged and capable. It was also where I learned how to teach.

As a young inexperienced student teacher, I entered her classroom full of conviction for teaching as a political act, but little understanding about what it would take to create learning opportunities that mattered. I was trying to figure out how to connect with students whose lived experiences differed from my own, how to teach in ways that were both rigorous and relevant, and how to confront my own assumptions about race, curriculum and schooling. 

Marie didn’t hand me any simple answers. She coached me, pushed my thinking, challenged my decisions and stayed in the work with me long after my formal placement in her classroom ended. What began as a student-teaching experience became a decades-long professional partnership that shaped my career.

Today, as a teacher educator and policy advocate, I have come to understand something that should be obvious but is rarely treated as such: Mentor teachers like Marie are not just “helping out.” They are doing some of the most important work in our education system. And we are almost entirely failing to support them.

Across the country, mentor teachers are the backbone of how we prepare new educators. They model instruction, provide feedback, guide reflection and help novice teachers navigate the realities of the classroom. consistently shows that high-quality mentoring improves teacher effectiveness, job satisfaction and retention, especially in the first three years when teachers are most likely to leave the profession.

Yet mentoring is too often treated as an informal add-on rather than essential to recruiting and retaining new teachers. Mentors are frequently selected based on availability, not expertise. Many receive little to no training in how to coach adult learners. Compensation is inconsistent at best or nonexistent at worst. And the time required to mentor effectively, often hundreds of hours, is layered on top of already demanding teaching loads. The result is a system built on goodwill instead of deliberately designed to support and sustain educators in this role.

Millions of research dollars have been spent studying the teacher pipeline, how to recruit more candidates into the profession, and how to retain teachers serving in our highest needs urban and rural schools. But schools spend far less time and resources addressing what happens once student-teachers get there. And mentor teachers are the missing link.

If schools are serious about strengthening the educator workforce, they need to treat mentoring as what it is: a form of adult education that requires skill, preparation and sustained investment. The best classroom teachers are not automatically the best mentors. Coaching new teachers, many of whom are young adults or career changers. requires expertise in facilitation, feedback and developmental support.

So, what would it look like to take mentor teaching seriously?

At the local level, school districts must create the conditions for mentoring to succeed. That means providing reduced teaching loads or dedicated time for mentor teachers to observe, coach and confer with new educators. It means selecting mentors based on demonstrated instructional expertise and relational capacity, not just availability. And it means integrating mentoring into the culture of schools, rather than treating it as a compliance requirement tied to credentialing.

At the state level, policymakers should establish clear standards for mentor teacher preparation and provide dedicated funding for stipends and professional learning. States can also require data collection on mentor participation, teacher retention and outcomes, ensuring that investments are tied to measurable impact. Without statewide expectations and funding, access to high-quality mentoring will continue to depend on local resources, exacerbating inequities between districts.

At the federal level, lawmakers should expand investments in teacher residency programs and other clinically rich preparation models that prioritize sustained, high-quality mentorship. Federal funding streams, such as Title II, should be leveraged to support mentor teacher development as a core component of teacher preparation and retention strategies nationwide.

When I think about Marie Gironda, I don’t just think about the mentor who shaped me. I think about the thousands of students she taught and the many educators she mentored — people whose lives and careers were influenced by her commitment to their learning. I also think about how rare it is to find someone like her in many schools, not because educators lack dedication, but because the conditions that sustain this kind of work are increasingly difficult to maintain.

We cannot build a strong, stable teacher workforce on exceptional individuals alone. If we want more teachers to stay, more students to thrive and more communities to benefit from excellent schools, we must invest in the people who teach teachers. We must invest in mentor teachers.

But when TV writer Ernie Bustamante read Manzano’s 2015 memoir, Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx, his mind went to an entirely different neighborhood: He thought her life story would make a great sitcom. 

He envisioned a coming-of-age series, with Manzano as “the ultimate protagonist” who pushes through all of her struggles. “She conquers. She overcomes.”

Manzano liked the idea, and the pair got to know one another as they worked to sell it to studios. But after years of trying with little success, they pivoted to a new enterprise.

The result is , a new feature-length documentary that explores Manzano’s life and career as the first Latina to appear regularly in an American TV series. The film is making the rounds at this spring as Bustamante searches for a distribution deal. In the meantime, he’s seeking out schools and universities to arrange “impact screenings” for aspiring filmmakers, actors, educators and anyone wanting to know more about the iconic actor — and the groundbreaking series that both offered her a platform and revolutionized children’s television.

“All young people want to change the world to some degree,” Manzano said in an interview. “I was lucky enough to fall into a group that wanted to do the same thing.”

In the film, she likens the show’s key creators — puppeteer Jim Henson, producer and composer , among others — to another seminal ‘60s group: “The Beatles are great — separately they’re all good. But together they made some magic.”

‘I had to be myself on purpose’

Manzano grew up in the South Bronx in the 1950s, before the notorious city planner Robert Moses “destroyed” it, in her words, with a tangle of expressways cutting through mostly Black and Latino neighborhoods. Her parents were both Puerto Rican — her father was a roofer, her mother a seamstress, and the everyday talk in the neighborhood revolved around la lucha, the struggle to survive.

Raised in a home where her father drank and her parents often fought, Manzano quips in the film, “Mostly they struggled with each other.”

She found solace in TV, movie musicals in particular, and imagined herself in starring roles. When a teacher took her to see the movie West Side Story, she was “absolutely overwhelmed” by the spectacle and awed by how it transformed the gritty streets of New York into art. At the end of the film, she burst into tears.

“I think it touched me so much because it was the first time I saw things in my neighborhood exalted and made beautiful,” she says in the film.

Manzano’s first big break came when a teacher encouraged her to apply to New York’s High School for the Performing Arts. She’d eventually make her way to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studying with, among others, the renowned mime , who introduced her to the physical comedy of Charlie Chaplin — she’d later bring her own to Sesame Street. 

By 1971, Manzano had fallen in with a group of Carnegie Mellon drama students helping classmate John-Michael Tebelak produce his senior thesis, an improvisational drama based on the Gospel of Saint Matthew. It was a hit at school and the group took it to on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where, with the help of composer Stephen Schwartz — only two years older than Manzano and the rest of the cast — it morphed into the surprise hit musical .

Sesame Street, another surprise hit, had debuted on TV in 1969, and by 1971, Mexican American activists on the West Coast were demanding more Latino representation on the show. Manzano got a call for an audition and impressed producer Stone, who offered her a part.

Manzano had actually glimpsed the show at Carnegie Mellon, wandering into the student union one day as a very young James Earl Jones slowly and deliberately onscreen. The scene cut to , married characters who also happened to be Black. “I really flipped because in those days you never saw people of color on television — and if you did, it wasn’t these charming couples.”

Coming on the heels of the Civil Rights movement, the show’s representations made sense. None of it happened in a vacuum, she said. “America was ripe for it.”

Manzano’s first moment of reckoning as a Latina on the show happened before she even appeared on camera: A makeup artist was at work heavily tinting her face when Stone walked in and insisted that she appear onscreen as natural-looking as possible. The makeup — at least most of it — had to go.

“It made me understand that these people at Sesame Street, they really meant what they said — they really were interested in having a real Puerto Rican on television that was not slick or glib. They wanted real humans.”

Recalling the moment more than 50 years later, she said, “It freed me, because I realized I didn’t have to play any part. I could just be myself.” Whenever she tells the story, she likes to cite her favorite line from : “I had to be myself on purpose.”

With her improv and musical theater background, Manzano soon became a reliable player who could do nearly anything.

Puppeteer , who performed on the show for 26 years, said her abilities shone through despite the show’s demands: In early seasons, cast and crew were expected to shoot as many as 130 episodes.

“Everybody is great, but when you had a scene with Maria, it was just guaranteed to be awesome, because she was such comedy gold,” he said in an interview. 

All the same, Mazzarino said, Manzano and her co-stars felt like real people. By the late 1980s, Maria would fall in love with and marry Luis, played by , another longtime player. Her scenes with Delgado rang true, he said, bringing a truly loving couple to the screen.

“Even though Sonia can do great comedy, she always felt grounded,” Mazzarino said. 

Manzano herself has a fondness for the show’s loose, improvisational feel, especially in the early days: It was, she recalled, a party-like atmosphere in which everyone was trying to crack up everyone else. That allowed her to both try out her comedy chops and search for a way to let the Muppets’ madcap humor shine. 

“They were completely zany,” she recalled. “They ate tables. You could throw them against the wall and nothing would happen to them.”

She recalled an early episode in which a scene began taping before puppeteer , who played The Count, could make it to the set. As his colleagues proceeded with the scene, Nelson swept in. “And there was no interruption,” Manzano recalled. “It’s a remarkable moment.”

Over time, she became renowned for the knowing gaze she’d offer to the camera, breaking through the fourth wall in exasperation each time a Muppet co-star — most notably Oscar the Grouch — did or said something ridiculous. 

“That was a real breakthrough — no pun intended — when I understood what my job was,” she said, “that I could have this relationship with the camera separate from my conversation with the puppet right next to me. I could look at the camera and say, ‘Do you get this? I mean, do you see what’s going on?’”

Over the years, Sesame Street scripts became more research-based and deliberate, and life on the set tightened up. Manzano left the show in 2015 and gets nostalgic about the “looser kind of environment” it had at the beginning. “As they became more tame, they kind of lost a little bit of that craziness.”

‘She never talked down to children’

Michael Davis met Manzano in 2005, when TV Guide sent him to write a piece marking the show’s 35th anniversary. By then, Manzano was also a writer for the show — she’d eventually earn 15 Emmy awards for her writing. She was the first cast member he met.

“I remember coming home to my wife and saying, ‘You know, I met the actress who plays Maria on Sesame Street today,’” Davis said in an interview. “‘I had a long conversation with her, and she’s the realest deal I think I’ve ever encountered. She is exactly as her character and her TV persona projects — open, funny, candid, intelligent, capable of making great sense about preschool children and their needs.’”

He filled a notebook with her thoughts that day.

Davis, who would go on to write the 2008 book , said that for all of her comedic instincts, Manzano understood her job as a trusted adult in kids’ lives. “She never talked down to children,” he said. “And I think this is true of the Muppet performers and other cast members: They never talked the cutesy voice or talked baby talk, even to 2-year-olds. They addressed children with great respect and interest and really listened to what they had to say. And yeah, it was just a beautiful thing to watch.”

It’s difficult to imagine another actor whose entire adult life has been captured by the camera, he said. Manzano grew up on the show, first appearing at age 21. She fell in love and , had a baby and changed careers several times, at one point working construction. In one renowned episode, she led the cast as they took viewers through the grieving process when old . 

In the documentary, Manzano quips, “We were the first reality show — without the whining.”

Davis, whose second book on the show, , is due out this fall, said Manzano herself underwent a remarkable transformation from her Godspell days. “She started out as an ingĂ©nue — basically a character who was in her teens, just this perky Latina who is new to the street.” She grew, he said, “into one of the most influential characters in the history of Sesame Street and a trailblazer in many, many ways.”

Manzano stuck around the show until age 65 before stepping aside to make way for a new generation of actors — and to write books and produce . At 75, she shows few signs of slowing down, working more recently with another Sonia from the South Bronx, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to help found the .

Through it all, Davis said, “she has the most level head, and she is almost painfully normal, and I love her for that.”

He added, “She knows who she is — she absolutely knows who she is, and why she’s here.”