Black and Asian candidates both struggled to clear early hurdles, such as being classified as minimally eligible for a position by a district screening protocol. But Asians faced the biggest obstacles to hiring, ultimately receiving job offers at half the rate of their counterparts.

Study author Dan Goldhaber, an economist and director of the , said the disparities for Asian applicants were particularly striking once he and his coauthors accounted for factors that should have made them more competitive, including greater teaching experience and a higher likelihood of earning an advanced degree.

“Once you control for those differences, then it looks like they’re doing even worse because they look like better candidates on paper,” Goldhaber said.

takes up the key question of how schools can achieve greater racial diversity within their teaching ranks. Education leaders have worked toward that goal for decades, citing a need for minority students to have access to role models of their own background. A series of from the last few decades shows that children see higher levels of academic achievement after being assigned to a same-race teacher.

School districts have rolled out designed to attract and retain more teachers of color, hoping that the result will be a teacher group that more closely resembles their student demographics. But these reforms to the teacher “pipeline,” including sizable investments in alternative teaching pathways and “grow-your-own” programs, don’t address the individual hiring decisions of districts and schools. 

To put a spotlight on those choices, Goldhaber and his collaborators gathered data from Nimble Hiring, a to schools. The service supplies hiring teams with information on the gender, race, and ethnicity of their applicant pools, along with detailed work histories including applicants’ prior job titles and descriptions, highest academic degrees, and reasons for separating from their former jobs.   

In all, they assembled records for over 46,000 job aspirants between 2019 and 2024. Applications were drawn from 18 school districts and 24 charter school organizations across multiple states. Each application was tracked across four escalating steps, from an initial screening by a district central office to the final decision to make a job offer.

With each successive stage, the pool was narrowed further, but not all groups saw the same degree of winnowing. For example, Asian and African American candidates were somewhat less likely to make it through the primary screening (80 percent and 86 percent, respectively) than whites (92 percent). But the next step showed a huge divergence between groups: Black candidates had their applications passed to school-level hiring managers at a rate of 63 percent, measurably less than the 80 percent chance for whites; Asian candidates saw the lowest rate of all, just 46 percent. 

By the final phase, they were substantially under-represented relative to other job seekers. Between 15 and 18 percent of white, Hispanic, and African American applicants received job offers, compared with 7 percent of Asians. Even that proportion shrank to just 5 percent when controlling for professional qualifications that should have made Asians particularly attractive: Sixty-four percent reported holding an advanced degree, while just 38 percent of white applicants said the same. 

Evidence of bias?

Goldhaber warned that the paper’s findings should be interpreted with care. Such a large difference in hiring rates between racial categories certainly “lends itself to concerns” about bias, he acknowledged, especially given the research team’s efforts to directly compare candidates with similar credentials applying for similar roles.

Yet even the broad dataset they assembled differed from that used by school administrators. 

For instance, the authors knew more than hiring managers about the race of individual applicants; that information was not directly reported to district and school officials, though they could develop intuitions based on factors like candidates’ names. On the other hand, the researchers knew less about what facts came out in the course of the hiring process, such as applicants’ self-described teaching styles or the perceived quality of their colleges or graduate programs.

“‘Discrimination,’ to me, is that if all else is equal, there are still differences in hiring rates by demographics,” Goldhaber said. “We did our best, given the data we had, to make all else equal, but we’re not looking at quite as much information as the school systems are looking at.”

Still, he added, a hypothesis of either conscious or unconscious discrimination would be supported by evidence from other research examining racial hiring differences. Those “audit studies” have found that companies — including those to their job postings — are with evidently Asian surnames.

Chris Chun is a private school administrator in Berkeley, California, and the treasurer of the , a group aimed at expanding opportunities for educators of Asian descent. In an email, she argued that working in K–12 schools may contribute to a “chicken-and-egg” problem.

“People do not have Asian teachers growing up and don’t see Asians as teachers,” Chun wrote, citing her own experience. “Then, when it comes to hiring, Asians aren’t seen as teachers because the people doing the hiring haven’t had very many Asian teachers.”

Making matters even more complicated, there is little reason to think that hiring decisions are the only, or even the primary, reason why comparatively few Asians take jobs as teachers. Melanie Rucinski, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, that Asian college students in Massachusetts were less likely than those of other racial extractions to pursue education at the undergraduate level. They were also less likely to gain a teaching license after passing their licensure test — and less likely to be hired at a school after receiving their license. 

Rucinski cautioned that her studies of teacher labor markets focused on applicants’ behavior rather than that of employers. Yet she added that it was possible that a dearth of Asian educators could be somewhat self-perpetuating, and that that theory “would track with what we know about discrimination in employment in other settings.”

“Asian teachers are just less represented, even compared with African American or Hispanic teachers,” Rucinski said in an interview. “So it’s very easy for me to imagine, based on broader literature on discrimination in hiring, that that will generate feedback loops for who gets hired into teaching.”

The , circulated through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute in January, examines the learning of American students attending traditional public schools, charters, Catholic academies, and schools operated by the Department of Defense. While disparities between high-flyers and their lower-performing counterparts have widened across the board, they grew the fastest in public and Catholic schools. 

Education leaders have warned of the trend toward increasing educational inequality for much of the last decade. During that time, each release of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federally administered exam commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — showed lower-scoring test takers falling further behind; typically, top-scoring participants were also pulling away from the pack. By the end of the COVID era, differences in outcomes that were large at the outset had ballooned even wider.

Patrick Wolf, an economist at the University of Arkansas and one of the paper’s co-authors, called his findings “demoralizing,” arguing that many American schools are clearly failing the students who most need their help.

“We expect and hope our public schools will be great equalizers and will reduce gaps between the top performers and the low performers, or the rich and the poor,” he said. “But over the last 20 years, we don’t see that in the data, and the gap has grown by a lot.”

‘We were not being heard’*

Wolf and his collaborators set out to measure what he referred to as the “90/10 gap” — the difference in NAEP scores between students who score at the 90th percentile (i.e., those scoring higher than 89 percent of their counterparts across the country) and those at the 10th percentile (those outscored by 90 percent of other test takers). To do so, they measured performance data from 2005, the first year that charter schools participated in the test, through 2024.

In all, the research team gathered scores from six million test takers through 10 iterations of the exam, controlling for factors like students’ race or socioeconomic status, as well as the educational background of their parents. Each NAEP administration generates data for both fourth and eighth graders in the core subjects of math and English.

Their estimates show that the academic gaps grew fastest in public schools. In each of the two decades between 2005 and 2024, scores for fourth graders at the 90th percentile increased by about four points in math and three points in reading; 10th-percentile scores dropped by roughly three and five points, respectively, resulting in a net disparity that was seven points larger in both subjects. 

While those calculations are somewhat technical, the bottom line is much starker: The already-substantial gap between the most advanced and most challenged fourth graders expanded by 1.3 years’ worth of learning gains between the Bush administration and the Biden administration. For eighth graders, the gap grew by one-half year of learning in both subjects over the same time period.

Similar divergences, though of somewhat smaller magnitude, were found in Catholic schools, which enroll . During the period under study, the 90/10 gap grew by roughly 5 points per decade in fourth-grade math, six points in eighth-grade math, and four points in reading for both fourth and eighth graders.

Strikingly, the 90/10 gap for both sectors swelled even in the years preceding the pandemic. Those gaps, leading up to 2019, reflected both steady growth from children at the top of the heap, along with a lack of progress — and, in some cases, pre-COVID learning loss — from those at the bottom.

Peggy Carr is a former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the research entity responsible for administering NAEP and reporting its results. Until February, when she was fired by the Trump administration along with most of the NCES staff, she regularly communicated with both politicians and the public about the meaning of the exam — the growth of the 90/10 gap and the persistently disappointing performance of children scoring at the 10th percentile.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, she said the discourse around NAEP was too focused on scores at the average, which tend to conceal wider swings among students far above or below that point.  

“We were not being heard as clearly as we wanted to be,” Carr said. “We were trying to make it very clear that you need to look at the entire distribution for years, but it wasn’t the focus of policy makers.”

DoD schools, charters

Notably, both charters and DoD-administered schools saw a much slower drift between high- and low-achieving students, much of which appears to have been triggered directly by the pandemic. 

In charter schools, the 90/10 gap grew by less than one point between 2005 and 2019 for fourth graders; for eighth graders, the gap actually shrunk during that period because students at the 10th percentile improved in performance faster than those at the 90th. The same narrowing was seen in fourth-grade math scores at DoD schools, where students across the spectrum made huge gains before the onset of COVID.

Tom Loveless, a veteran observer of K–12 schools and former director of the Brookings Institution’s , called those results impressive, but noted that the lessons that can be drawn from the charter and DoD sectors were limited. Collectively, they account for only about 8 percent of America’s K–12 students, and parents enrolling their children in them can differ dramatically from the public at large.

“If you work for the Defense Department, your employer is running the school,” he observed. “Your superior officer can call you up and say, ‘Your kid is acting up,’ and something’s going to be done about it quickly.”

Perhaps the most dispiriting part of the trend is that America’s 90/10 gap exploded so visibly at the same time that achievement gaps — whether along racial, socioeconomic, or other lines — transfixed the education world. Educators, office holders, policy wonks, and activists all put academic disparities at the heart of their work during the years between the late-1990s and the mid-2010s.

For a large portion of the “education reform” era kicked off by the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind law, underperforming students did see significant progress, Wolf said. But the years since 2013 have been marked by a pronounced reversal of those gains.

“By definition, there will always be a gap between the students performing at the 90th percentile and students performing at the 10th percentile,” he acknowledged. “But we don’t want it to be wide, and we don’t want it to be getting wider.” 

State test results released last fall in math and English scores since 2024, yet still lagged far behind the standard set before the COVID pandemic. Meanwhile, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam administered biannually to hundreds of thousands of students, recently placed Oregon in the country. Adjusted for student demographics and poverty levels, it ranked 50th among states in fourth-grade math and reading, 49th in eighth-grade math, and 47th in eighth-grade reading.

Now local observers are pointing to Oregon’s relatively brief school year, as well as high rates of absenteeism, as one explanation for the dismal results. In released by the nonprofit group Stand for Children, researchers show that sizable gaps in seat time between Oregon and other states — and even larger ones separating districts within Oregon — compound over years into massive disparities in opportunities to learn. Advocates argue that loose rules governing how states report attendance data also contribute to the problem.

Sarah Pope, the executive director of Stand for Children’s Oregon affiliate, said her state was “definitely on the low end” in terms of instructional time made available to children. On average, their school year lasts 165 days (compared with 179 days in the U.S. as a whole), and students receive 9 percent fewer instructional hours than their counterparts around the country; over time, that adds up to well over one year of missed schooling.

“When we tell people that we’re 9 percent short, their eyes glaze over because people can’t imagine what that means,” Pope remarked. “But when we tell them it’s a year difference over the course of a K–12 experience, which is like graduating as a junior, they’re like, ‘Oh gosh.’”

The group’s report notes that Oregon is one of just 10 states that sets no minimum of total school days per year, allowing districts to set their own schedules so long as they hit an annual minimum of instructional hours (900 for students enrolled in kindergarten, elementary school, and middle school, and slightly more for high schoolers). In practice, the state’s average K–8 student receives 1,111 hours of designated school time each year, considerably below the national average of 1,231 hours for K–12 students. Only Maine, Nevada, and Hawaii provide less schooling.

Those figures are drawn from by Brown University economist Matthew Kraft, which also found that differences in instructional time between states can be dwarfed by those within states. By the end of elementary school, for example, Oregon students living in a district at the bottom of the state’s school time rankings receive a full 1.4 years less education than those in a district at the top. The gap explodes to nearly three years’ worth of instruction by the time those students graduate high school.

Aside from the length of the school year, the pandemic-era spike in chronic absenteeism (the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year) has further eroded the amount of time that kids spend learning. And while that trend has proven stubbornly persistent in nearly every jurisdiction, Oregon’s spike has been higher and longer-lasting than most. , a think tank based in Washington, D.C., Oregon’s rate of chronic absence reached a stunning peak of 38 percent in 2022–23, only falling to 33.5 percent by 2024–25 (compared with a national average of 22 percent the same year). 

Kraft, who on the subject before the education committee of the Oregon House of Representatives, said it was “wildly inequitable” for students in different parts of a state to enjoy vastly less time with teachers than those elsewhere. Both researchers and elected officials needed to examine the intersection of poor attendance and inadequate instructional time more closely, he continued.

“The outliers offering substantially less time have wound up with far less learning opportunities for students,” Kraft observed in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “Curriculum is built around having x amount of minutes in a day to teach math or science, and when teachers and students don’t have that, the results illustrate the negative consequences.”

‘We should not be proud’

Those consequences could be reversed with policy changes, according to Stand for Children’s analysis. 

Using existing estimates of the of and on student test scores, the authors calculated that Oregon would dramatically improve its NAEP performance by lifting statutory requirements for schooling time and cutting absenteeism to pre-COVID rates. If those conditions were both reached, they found, Oregon students enrolled in kindergarten today would move from 48th in the nation in reading to sixth-place by the beginning of high school. A somewhat smaller leap, from 49th place to 25th place, could be achieved in math scores.

As of yet, no such sweeping changes are in the offing. If anything, a combination of diminished enrollment figures — the product of both lower fertility and a COVID-era flight from public schools — has led at least some districts to consider paring the school year back further. Reynolds School District, which enrolls around 10,000 students in the suburbs east of Portland, from its school calendar in response.

During , the state was around the country where districts chose to compress learning time. It has also been one of the national leaders in popularizing the four-day school week, with operating on a truncated schedule. While sometimes popular with family and school staff, that shift often leads to a deterioration in learning and comparatively few benefits in faculty retention.

Given Oregon’s clear decline in academic achievement, Stand for Children’s Pope said that district leaders should refuse to shorten their school year at the very least. Her organization is backing the passage of , a bill that would require state authorities to report on absenteeism four times during the school year, rather than just once, as is now mandated. Such a law — scheduled for hearings before the state Senate’s education committee in the coming days — would allow for school systems to conduct earlier outreach to families when their students are at risk of becoming chronically absent.

She also supports the adoption of a more exacting definition of learning time. At the moment, she said, up to 60 of the required instructional hours can be filled through activities like professional development and parent-teacher conferences, which occur when children aren’t in school.

“Do we think it’s right that our definition of instructional time has an allowance for approximately 10 days when kids don’t have to be there? And it can count for instructional minutes?” Pope asked.

Emielle Nischik, the executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, said that the state’s students deserved “as much time in school as students around the country. But she added that more instructional hours and better data reporting could only be gained through increases in education spending. 

“Oregon school funding adjusted for inflation has essentially been flat since the 1990s, even as Oregon and the federal government have added staffing and services requirements that cost money,” Nischik wrote in an email. “We are open to any discussion of increasing class time as long as it comes with the understanding that more days will cost more money.”

Last summer, Gov. Tina Kotek of $11.3 billion to cover the K–12 system through 2027. According to by the National Education Association, Oregon spent nearly $19,000 per pupil in daily attendance in the 2023–24 school year, ranking 20th among all states. 

Kraft compared the resource of time to that of money. While lawsuits have been won to force states and districts to spend more money on schools, no such litigation has focused on learning time as a necessary educational input. 

“That has not been the case around time, in large part because schools are following the law, and the minimums we set in many states — not all, but many — are very, very low. We should not be proud to have met these minimums.”

Circulated in January through the National Bureau of Economic Research, used survey data from a nationally representative sample of thousands of teenagers to investigate one of the more controversial questions in American life: How much is young people’s engagement with the internet contributing to of their mental health?

With youth exposure to technology reaching saturation levels — a 2025 report showed that now have their own mobile device — prominent scholars have spent the last few years pointing to between kids’ use of screens and social media and their mounting rates of depression. Skeptics counter that the theory mistakes correlation for causation, and that troubled adolescents likely spend more time plugged in to escape the stress or loneliness they are already feeling.

Brandyn Churchill, the paper’s lead author and an economist at American University, said that he sought to overcome the “ambiguity” of cause and effect by exploiting the uneven pace of broadband’s expansion across the country.

“This avoids the correlation-versus-causation issue because it’s a natural experiment with a control group and a treatment group,” Churchill said. “In states where they gained greater access to broadband, mental health among kids got worse compared to states where they did not.”

Complicating somewhat the broadly observed trend that girls experience worse consequences from time spent online, the study also shows that suicidal thoughts also intensify among male students in proportion to internet access. But its findings generally dovetail with other research from around the world that has tied high-speed internet with psychological problems.

Relying , Churchill and co-author Kathryn Johnson tracked the deployment of broadband across American counties between 2009 and 2019, a period during which the U.S. moved from just under 70 percent coverage to approximately 90 percent. Sizable variation existed between states, with broadband reaching less than 50 percent of Mississippi counties and almost 90 percent of Massachusetts counties as the 2010s began.

As each new community mothballed its dial-up internet, the adolescents living in them responded by logging on more frequently. Responses to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a school-based poll administered by the Centers for Disease Control to thousands of high schoolers, showed that heightened access to high-speed connections predictably led to teenagers devoting more hours of each day to online activity. 

The switch “enabled new types of technologies that we didn’t have when dial-up was more common,” Churchill said, including streaming and video-based social media. “You gained the ability to move to photo- and video-based social media like Instagram, Snapchat, and obviously TikTok nowadays.”

But with the increased internet usage came a more disturbing increase in children’s attitudes. According to the CDC survey, those who spent more than five hours online each day were 68 percent more likely to have considered suicide in a given year than those spending at most one hour online. Heavy users were 64 percent more likely to have actually attempted suicide.

Growing body of evidence

By digging further into the survey responses, the authors discovered possible channels for the negative emotion, each familiar to many parents and educators working with young adults. 

For example, with each increase of broadband access by one standard deviation (a common statistical term measuring difference from a statistical average), adolescent girls were 9 percent more likely to complain that they were being cyberbullied. They were also 8 percent more likely to describe themselves as overweight, though broadband availability was not associated with changes to youth body-mass index during the time under study. Boys became almost 10 percent more likely to report that they were getting insufficient sleep each night.

While girls absorbed a larger impact than boys, each group saw significantly higher levels of suicidal thoughts as they took part in more high-speed internet.

Esther Arenas-Arroyo, an associate professor at the Vienna University of Economics who has conducted similar studies within Europe, said that there are some drawbacks to focusing on internet usage rather than the penetration of specific technologies, such as smartphones or social media apps. Still, she added, access to broadband represents “a necessary condition for the types of online behaviors most plausibly linked to deteriorations in youth mental health.”

“Existing evidence shows that adolescents are far more likely to engage with social media, entertainment, and video platforms when they are at home with high-quality connectivity,” Arenas-Arroyo wrote in an email.

Last year, the economist published on youth mental health and its interactions with digital activity. Rather than simple access to broadband, that work examines the rollout of ultra-high-speed fiber optics that have increasingly replaced slower forms of broadband in her native Spain. Like Churchill, she and her collaborators concluded that the acceleration of internet connectivity led to more “addictive” internet usage; additionally, however, she combined that data with hospital records, finding that fiber deployment contributed to a documented jump in mental health diagnoses and suicide attempts.

Arenas-Arroyo argued that the body of research around the topic has become too large for education leaders and the political class to ignore. 

“A growing body of causal evidence, including my findings, shows that as internet access becomes faster and more ubiquitous, its potential risks to adolescent mental health may intensify,” she observed. “This shifts the policy debate away from whether there is a problem and toward how to mitigate its negative effects.” 

Policy changes across multiple countries have already begun to alter the way that students interact with the internet. A survey released last month by the University of Southern California found that 98 percent of America’s K–12 students attend a school with some form of limitation on cell phone use, with over three-quarters of teenaged respondents saying they supported the restrictions.

Even blunter tools have been embraced internationally, with by banning all use of social media for children under 16. On Tuesday, Spain to do the same, with the country’s prime minister decrying social media as “a failed state.”

Churchill conceded that it would be impossible, and probably undesirable, for countries across the West to attempt to push back the adoption of broadband. But with the research consensus around the potential downsides of the technology growing louder, he added, governments will likely find themselves charged with the task of addressing them.

“Our work is built on national estimates of adolescents across the entire United States — and yes, our results line up with a lot of the other results that existed,” he said. “That should increase our confidence in making policy recommendations based on these findings.”

Nearly half of those surveyed reported leaving their jobs to provide child care, 80% experienced food insecurity and just over half worried that their child was missing out on care that is safer or more welcoming. This was especially true for kids with disabilities.

The research is particularly relevant given the federal government’s recent attempt to freeze $10 billion in social service funds to five Democratic-led states, including at least $2.4 billion in child care subsidy funding.

Daphna Bassok, the report’s author and an education and public policy professor at the University of Virginia, said if the funding to the five states were to disappear overnight, the impacts would be “pretty dire” and quickly felt.

“The findings highlighted just how meaningful these resources are for families. This is not help around the edges or help just to make things a little better,” she said. “The results suggest they are driving families’ abilities to work and go to school and do basic things, as well as children’s ability to go to child care centers.”

On Jan. 6, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was halting billions in child care and family assistance funds to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, alleging “serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs.”

Within days, the attorneys general for all five states claiming the move was “cruel,” unconstitutional and would lead to immediate and devastating impacts. A federal judge has since issued two , halting the freeze through Feb. 6. 

Three key programs serving particularly vulnerable children and their families hang in the balance: the Child Care and Development Fund ($2.4 billion), the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($7.35 billion) and the Social Services Block Grant ($869 million).

The Child Care and Development Fund is the main federal grant program allowing states to assist low-income working families with child care, and even before the attempted freeze the need was greater than what the dollars were able to support, according to Julie Kashen, the director of Women’s Economic Justice at The Century Foundation. 

“It is a program that has long been starved,” she said.

The move by HHS to cut off funds to the five states followed a conservative YouTube personality alleging widespread fraud in child care centers in Minnesota. A from 2019 did find significant weaknesses in anti-fraud controls, vulnerabilities that were addressed by and . Separate and highly publicized instances of substantial fraud in a Minnesota child nutrition program during the pandemic have since led to dozens of . The more recent allegations made via viral video have so far proven to be

Some 12.5 million children are eligible for the subsidies based on federal guidelines, yet only about 2 million received them in 2019, covering just 16%, according to a 2023 Between July 2024 and May 2025 in Virginia alone, almost 19,000 families who applied for a subsidy were placed on a waitlist.

Brookings researchers collaborated with the Virginia Department of Education to survey these families. They received responses from 6,548 (35%) of them between August and September of 2025, making it one of the largest studies to date looking at the experiences of eligible families missing out on subsidies. At the time of the survey, 67% of respondents were still awaiting the benefits, while 33% had made it off the waitlist and were receiving funds.

The vast majority of surveyed families still on the waitlist reported significant impacts to their employment as a result, with 76% saying they worked less than desired, 71% saying they turned down additional work or a promotion and 64% saying they reduced work or school hours to provide care. Nearly half had left their jobs altogether.

In open responses, parents described the financial bind they were in: each needed child care to work but, without subsidies, also needed work to afford child care.

“So many of these families felt trapped in this cycle,” said Bassok.

One parent wrote: “I feel like I can’t commit to any plans or ideas about the future months or year until I know if my daughter can go to daycare because we simply cannot afford the rates without subsidy.”

This challenging loop could be exacerbated if HHS is allowed to proceed: The Century Foundation has that if child care providers in the five states are forced to shutter because of withheld federal subsidies, it could impact more than 500,000 children, cost more than $400 million annually in lost parental earnings and could drive 156,000 moms of young children out of the workforce.

It’s not clear what will happen once the temporary halt lifts on Friday; the judge is currently considering a request for a temporary injunction, which would secure the funding while the underlying case is litigated.

For now, the families who eventually made it off the waitlist in Virginia are faring significantly better: nearly two-thirds reported they were able to increase work or school hours, start a new job, or accept a promotion or new position as a result. In all, those still awaiting funds were twice as likely to remain unemployed as those who received them, a difference Bassok described as “massive.”

Those still on the waitlist were also 11 percentage points more likely to experience food insecurity (80% vs. 69%); 15 percentage points more likely to frequently worry about running out of money before getting paid again (51% vs. 36%); nearly twice as likely to have bills that are often past due (31% vs. 18%); and 10 percentage points more likely to buy things with credit, hoping to have the funds later (25% vs. 15%). 

Half of families awaiting support said they were unable to find any care for their kids — including with relatives or friends — and the vast majority (69%) worried their children were missing out on care that could better support their learning and development. That percentage plummeted to 21% for the families that eventually made it off the waitlist.

These concerns were particularly pronounced for parents of kids with diagnosed or suspected learning disabilities and delays, according to Bassok, who described this as an “intense and common theme in the responses.”

Families were “really worrying about what the wait for a child care center was doing for their kids at a critical moment in their development,” she said.

“My son is turning 2 years old and is not yet talking or interacting with other children,” wrote one parent. “Without access to affordable, quality care, he is missing vital opportunities for socialization and early learning that could support his development.”

Another argued her daughter’s delays were a direct result of low-quality care: “She is just being ‘watched’ and not taught much. She doesn’t say many words and I have to put her in speech therapy. … I didn’t have enough money to pay for the day care center that teaches babies.”

These concerns extended to physical safety as well: parents struggling to afford care were less likely to rely on regulated child care centers and more likely to turn to options they didn’t trust.

“The wait for assistance has forced us to rely on unlicensed home daycares out of desperation,” wrote another parent, “which comes with safety concerns and constant instability.”

On the flip side, parents of kids with disabilities who did have access to the subsidy reported an ability to access high-quality care. One wrote, “[Receiving a subsidy] has meant that my son, who has high functioning autism, can attend a safe school where he can get incredible care and since starting there he has been thriving.”

Bassok argued that the Brookings report demonstrates a growing need for more of the exact resources the federal government is trying to strip away. 

“Aside from this moment of what’s happening nationally around these cuts,” she said, “the real takeaway is around needed expansions in federal and state dollars to meet these demands for kids.”

, authored by Israeli academics Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman, used survey responses from nearly 500 American colleges and universities to isolate the political impact of students’ choice of college majors. Those who predominantly take classes in humanities and most social science disciplines became substantially more likely to self-identify as liberal over the course of their college years; those earning economics and business degrees, meanwhile, largely resisted that drift, adopting more right-leaning stances on economic issues like taxation and socialized healthcare. 

Because those effects might result from self-sorting by liberals and conservatives into majors that affirm their already-held beliefs, the authors controlled for undergraduates’ pre-college ideologies, intended majors, and life goals. Those steps showed very similar young people taking opposite political paths after being exposed to divergent academic content. 

Kolerman, a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn’t offer an explanation for why those changes occurred, observing only that the main result clearly showed “very, very important” consequences resulting from the choices made by students selecting their course of study.

“It just seems that college majors have huge effects,” he said. “We don’t know many other social science papers that find such large effects on any institution in democratic societies.”

Kolerman and Matan drew their data from UCLA’s , which has been administered to both incoming freshmen and exiting seniors since 1990. Their sample focused on roughly 310,000 undergraduates attending 477 four-year colleges between 1990 and 2015. The poll includes students’ intended course of study upon enrollment, their actual major upon college completion, and a spectrum of political self-description along a five-point scale (1 for furthest right, 5 for furthest left). 

The average respondent was about seven percentage points more likely to self-identify as liberal or left-wing by the end of college. Humanities and social science majors were especially likely to move left (by 10.5 points and 10.7 points, respectively), while business and economics majors migrated much more incrementally in that direction (2.4 points). In general, students who began in the middle of the spectrum were more likely to eventually describe themselves as liberal (26 percent) than conservative (15 percent).

The authors also studied how students in each category changed their positions on individual policy questions relative to those studying the natural sciences (such as physics or biology), who were chosen as a reference group because of the largely apolitical content of their coursework. The comparison showed humanities and social science students gradually taking a much more leftward orientation on virtually every item, including the death penalty, marijuana legalization, climate change, and higher taxes on the wealthy. But business and economics majors developed more conservative positions than those focusing on natural sciences — and the effect on economic issues, such as tax levels or socialized healthcare, was more than three times that of cultural issues like abortion or LGBT rights.

Kolerman remarked that, given America’s “heated debate” over both college instruction and social politics, it was significant how much of the influence of different majors hinged on economic questions.

“Much of the political debate in the U.S. is related to cultural issues, but it seems like a larger fraction of the effect is on economic issues,” he observed.

Strikingly, some evidence also pointed to broader behavioral shifts depending on major choice. 

Queried about their life goals, business and economics majors were more likely to assign greater importance to financial success than other students, even including those focusing on high-earning fields like engineering. They were also more likely to prioritize starting a family, while social science and humanities majors placed more emphasis on keeping up with current events, influencing social goals, and seeking purpose in life.

‘Compelling evidence’

While the researchers hesitated to make strong claims about the cause for students’ ideological movement, the data do suggest that these trends reflect the political values of college faculty themselves.

Most polls of professors demonstrate favoring liberals and Democrats across virtually all academic departments, though appeared to show the skew receding as more instructors disaffiliated from parties altogether. To examine the relationship of teacher and student beliefs, Goldstein and Kolerman relied on UCLA’s faculty survey, which has been conducted regularly at the same colleges enrolling their undergraduate sample.

Among students who chose the humanities or social science same major, they discovered, exposure to more liberal liberal faculty members was significantly correlated with the adoption of more liberal views.

Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University, called the study “compelling evidence” that students’ political transformation during their college years can be attributed to what is being taught in classrooms, rather than the residue of social interactions between students. Still, he added, the force of professors’ ideology is likely applied indirectly — in the sheer predominance of liberal-minded faculty, for example — rather than through deliberate preaching.

“I wouldn’t go as far as calling this evidence of indoctrination,” Kogan argued. “I don’t think this is conscious. I just think it reflects the lack of ideological diversity in some of these disciplines.”

Goldstein and Kolerman’s work . Its conclusions also dovetail with those of some other scholars. In 2024, British political scientist Ralph Scott published a study showing that U.K. graduates who studied the arts, humanities, and social sciences than their peers at the same institutions. pointed to a similar phenomenon even earlier in the education cycle, finding that high school students who devoted more time to arts and humanities subjects were later more likely to vote for more liberal political parties. 

Kogan warned that institutions of higher learning, especially those accountable to Republican voters and officeholders, could pay a price if they are seen as shepherding their charges to the left. Already, red states like Texas in public universities, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of the New College of Florida, vowing to recreate it into a school steeped in the principles of classical education.

“We want to continue getting support from taxpayers, and it’s going to be really hard to make that argument if policy makers think that you’re going to be turning future voters against them,” Kogan concluded. “It’s something that I definitely think we need to take seriously.”

The article, , draws on state and national data to measure changes in student enrollment over the last half-decade. Both in Massachusetts and around the country, white and Asian parents were far likelier to pull their children out of public schools than Hispanics and African Americans. Kindergarten and middle school enrollment plunged, while elementary schools actually saw a small bump in total students.

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University and one of the study’s authors, said the uncertainty of the COVID era has given way to a new equilibrium for the 2020s: The families of the highest-performing K–12 students, and those with access to greater resources, increasingly disaffiliate from traditional public schools.

“The question that worries me is whether this means that public schools have now cemented a reputation as not being the place where high-achieving students attend,” Goodman said. “If you’re a family that’s looking for a challenging curriculum, and you have a talented student, you’re no longer seeing public schools in quite that light.”

The number of pupils filling seats in all Massachusetts schools, public or private, was lower in fall 2024 than five years before. But that erosion, driven in part by broader changes to the state’s demographics, is less striking than the changes going on beneath the surface. 

Enrollment at private schools shrank by just 0.7 percent during that period, much less than the 16.3 percent decline that was predicted by years of falling head counts leading up to the pandemic. By contrast, traditional public schools saw a drop of 4.2 percent, nearly double the projected reduction over the first half of the 2020s. 

Various racial and ethnic subgroups also exhibited radically different behavior. At the beginning of the last school year, enrollment in Massachusetts public schools was much lower for white and especially Asian students (-3.1 percent and -8.1 percent percent, respectively) than was presaged by trends running through the 2010s. Black and Hispanic enrollment, however, actually climbed upward compared with the same projections. Goodman and his co-author, BU doctoral student Abigail Francis, found similar patterns in data collected from around the United States, though those figures run only through 2023.

Perhaps the most jarring divergence arose along class lines. In the state’s most affluent 20 percent of school districts, as defined by their share of students qualifying for free lunch, K–12 student rolls fell by 5.7 percent; everywhere else, the slide amounted to just 1 percent. In all, that slice of the richest communities lost about 150 percent as many pupils as the bottom 80 percent.

Those findings offer a suggestive update to those of earlier studies. One, , showed that white, Asian, and higher-income families in Michigan were the least likely to return to their local public schools in the second year after school closures began. Among them, four-fifths of students who moved to private schools in 2020 stayed there the following year. 

In examining student flows in the initial years of the pandemic, University of Michigan economist Brian Jacob found that white families removed their children from public schools at much higher rates in districts that were slow to reopen for in-person instruction. Jacob said in an interview that he was “not surprised” to see that parents who had found private alternatives hadn’t yet switched back.

“There was evidence that more affluent families were shifting kids away from public schools during COVID because they wanted more in-person instruction,” he observed. “It may be that schools are going to have to work a lot harder to win back some of the families they lost.” 

Even today, with COVID quarantines and Zoom classrooms long in the past, Americans’ feelings about public schools are notably cool by historic standards. In a Gallup survey released in February, 73 percent of U.S. adults expressed dissatisfaction with the state of public education, up from 57 percent in 2001. 

Parents, directly invested in their local schools and regularly exposed to their children’s teachers, are more sanguine about the issue than other respondents. But they to say that K–12 education is headed in the wrong direction than in years past. 

Martin West, Education Next’s editor in chief and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the “exit of quality-conscious families” — particularly those with the means to afford private school tuition — provides a real-time picture of how perspectives of local schools are changing, even in a state with comparatively impressive academic results. 

“We have lots of survey data telling us that parents are concerned with public schools,” West said. “This analysis gives us data on families’ revealed preferences, based on the decisions they’re making.” 

Over the last few years, news accounts in Greater Boston have reflected building frustration among parents in some of the area’s wealthiest towns, with many departures apparently spurred by new constraints on access to advanced coursework. and , each boasting some of the highest home values in the state, have reportedly lost sizable portions of their pre-COVID enrollment to nearby private schools. As one Newton teacher in the conservative Free Press, those migrations largely followed the district’s move away from “tracked” math classes.

Goodman, a resident of middle-income Cambridge, said he had seen parents in his own social circle consider independent schools out of impatience with both a lack of rigor and growing behavioral problems in their neighborhood schools.

“That’s the piece of the conversation that’s been missing for me in Massachusetts,” he said. “I haven’t seen school districts grappling with the questions of why they lost all these families, and whether they actually want to do the work to bring them back into schools.”

Le plus ça change…

The past year marked the beginning — or re-beginning — of a new, old era in American schools: the Trump administration’s second term, which promised an explosion of school choice programs, further rollbacks on controversial content in classrooms, and a radical reduction in the federal government’s intervention in public schools. There was a new sheriff back in town.

To one extent or another, those priorities have all been embraced as predicted. But they were also the K–12 hallmarks of President Trump’s first term, however, the somewhat muddled results of which were largely overwhelmed by the chaos of COVID. Even beyond the pendulum lurches between presidencies, many of the perennial debates over education policy, politics, and governance in the United States seem to carry echoes of the distant past: Will the U.S. Department of Education cease to exist? Too bad we can’t ask Ronald Reagan.

Yet education research shows clearly how the renewed fervor of the second MAGA wave has, in some senses, fulfilled the hopes and anxieties embedded in the first. While educators that fear of immigration authorities could depress school attendance among English learners, multiple studies now persuasively link ICE and Border Patrol operations with rising absenteeism in local schools. Early evidence from states implementing voucher-like programs suggest an enthusiastic uptake among families that could have barely been dreamt of in the 2010s. And the president’s has now gone national, with county-level analyses of MMR shots revealing unmistakable downward movement since 2020. 

Indeed, this fruitful year for social science came even as the White House made good on campaign commitments to liquidate Education Department staff, cancelled dozens of contracts with research firms, and rescinded grants that had been awarded through the National Science Foundation. It remains to be seen to what extent these steps will limit the public’s insight into how schools perform and children learn, but the early signs are foreboding.

For now, though, it’s worth reviewing the empirical insights that taught us the most about education in 2025. Welcome to the year in charts.

ICE

Immigration Enforcement Worsened Absenteeism

The impact of the Trump administration’s clampdown on illegal immigration this year was felt immediately, with the number of detainees held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement between January and August. That aggressive approach is correlated with a meaningful decline in school attendance, according to released by Stanford University economist Thomas Dee.

Studying the aftermath of in California’s Central Valley — initiated a few days before President Trump was inaugurated, using tactics that would by a federal judge — Dee found that student absences increased by 22 percent across five surrounding school districts. Extrapolated across the rest of the school year, he calculated, the reduced attendance would result in over 700,000 lost days of student learning.

Similar trends were observed in on Connecticut and Rhode Island, where absences for English learners increased by 4 percent. Just as striking, showed that Spanish-speaking students at schools that were more exposed to heightened immigration enforcement experienced both lower academic achievement and fewer disciplinary incidents. 

Learning Loss

Districts Still Lag Pre-COVID Achievement

More than a half-decade after the first COVID-19 cases were detected in the United States — today’s high school seniors were just wrapping up the sixth grade when emergency school closures were announced — K–12 learning has not fully recovered in most communities. 

A February report from the , a research consortium dedicated to studying the pandemic’s effects, found that just 6 percent of American elementary and middle schoolers live in school districts where average math or reading levels have returned to the levels seen in 2019. Combining state test scores for 35 million students with results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally administered exam known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the authors estimated that the average American pupil was still a half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both core subjects.

Even given the enormous federal funding spent to offer catch-up instruction, the prospect of improvement can’t be taken for granted: Scant improvement was seen in student scores between 2022 and 2024, with reading performance actually declining after schools reopened.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Harvard economist Thomas Kane told ����Ӱ��. “But no, actually.” 

Academic Achievement

K–12 Learning Was Stagnant Before COVID

The academic damage inflicted by the pandemic has been well chronicled by Kane and others. But a range of voices rose this year from around the K–12 world to critique other sources of the national school stagnation, including and . 

One, Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, circulated this fall charting the trajectory of educational outcomes in the 21st century, arguing that the years preceding 2020 were no golden era of academic achievement. According to his estimates, only one-quarter of the decline in students’ average reading performance since 2013 — often described as the high-water mark of learning, as measured by NAEP — took place during the pandemic itself. What’s more, he continued, the cost of that lost educational growth could number into the many trillions of dollars as time goes by.

It is an assessment largely shared by the equally prominent University of Virginia researcher James Wyckoff, who released looking at similar trends earlier in the year. That study asserts that the roots of learning loss began even earlier than is typically assumed, in the years spanning the Bush-Obama transition, and notes an abundance of potential explanations (including smartphones, Great Recession-related school funding cuts, and the implementation of Common Core standards). 

Readers can expect to see more such forensic examinations of the last few decades. As the shadow of COVID recedes further into memory, policymakers will need to come to grips with the K–12 fundamentals that hurt student performance in the 2010s.

ESA’s

Education Savings Accounts Lift Private School Enrollment — and Tuition

The march of private school choice picked up steam in 2025 as the availability of education savings accounts, which provide families thousands of dollars to use for private tuition or other K–12 expenses. Most were conservative bastions like Idaho, Wyoming, or Tennessee — Texas, in particular, is poised to become the largest school choice marketplace in the country — but New Hampshire also became the first blue state (albeit Republican-led, for the moment) to join the party.

With so much of the country stampeding toward the policy, social scientists are also beginning to understand its effects. In , Tulane University’s Douglas Harris and Gabriel Olivier studied the 11 states that enacted universal ESAs between 2021 and 2024, ultimately discovering that they led to slight bumps in both private school tuition (5–10 percent) and enrollment (3–4 percent) compared with other states. The bump in costs is particularly noteworthy, they argue, given that many private schools already substantially raised their prices during the COVID era.

While that study incorporated data on nearly 60 percent of all U.S. private schools, the RAND Corporation also released at the ESA picture in one state, Arizona. That work also revealed that the switch from income-targeted to universal ESAs led to a 12 percent jump in elementary school tuition; in a pattern that will likely take hold elsewhere, the number of students participating in the program also leapt from 12,000 in 2021 to almost 90,000 in 2024.

Digital Distractions

Cell Phone Bans Boost Student Performance

While the ESA wave is still building, the push for phone restrictions in classrooms has exploded to . Thirty-seven states have either passed laws to curb phone usage in K–12 schools or required school districts to adopt their own policies to similar effect. The movement caught fire over the last few years in response to complaints from families and educators that digital devices present a major distraction during the school day.

In investigating the effects of such restrictions in Florida, University of Rochester Professor David Figlio and RAND economist Umut Özek found that bans were associated with slight improvements in standardized test scores (1.1 percentiles, on average, two years after a ban was put in place) that were somewhat larger for male students and those enrolled in middle or high school. A substantial portion of that boost, they write, is attributable to improved attendance resulting from the bans.

Not all of the news was rosy. Male students, and particularly African Americans, also saw elevated rates of disciplinary infractions and suspensions in the wake of a phone ban taking effect, though that trend mostly subsided by the second year following the adoption.

Academic Standards

Exam-Free Admissions Lowered Standards at UC

The late-breaking leader for the most stunning chart of the year came in November, with the release of from the faculty Senate of the University of California San Diego. A working group convened to study the academic preparation of students reported that over 12 percent of incoming freshmen in 2025 could not meet high school math standards — a figure that had increased by a factor of 30 since 2020. An astounding 8 percent of freshmen could not perform to middle school standards in the subject.

While COVID-era learning loss is undoubtedly to blame for some of these developments, the faculty group also cast blame on slumping standards at both the K–12 and higher education levels. Among students channeled into the university’s remedial math course, which was originally designed to teach a tiny fraction of freshmen, roughly one-quarter were admitted with 4.0 GPAs. 

Those deceptive grades became a crucial indicator of student readiness in 2020, when the UC system in admissions decisions. Whatever the chief explanation for these results, one thing is clear: At an internationally recognized college, considerable numbers of students are paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to be taught material they should have mastered years ago.

Workforce

Interest in Teaching Lower Among Men, Non-Whites

A wave of recent research a pronounced decline in the prestige of the teaching profession and the job satisfaction of in-service educators. In , academics from the University of Virginia and Texas A&M put that swoon in particularly stark relief by investigating exactly who expresses interest in becoming a teacher.

Gathering data from 64 million college applications between 2014 and 2025, the authors were able to assess the aspirations and traits of high school seniors who declared an interest in the teaching profession. The group was polarized heavily on lines of sex, with males roughly one-third as interested in the career as females. Black students, similarly, were only about one-third as enthusiastic about teaching as their white counterparts. 

Even more intriguing, the paper leverages the applicants’ college recommendations to get a detailed view of how they were perceived by their high school teachers. Rated on a set of personal characteristics, potential future educators were described as being relatively higher in leadership, integrity, and care for others — but relatively lower in intellectual promise, academic achievement and self-confidence. 

Public Health

Vaccination Rates Are Lower

The politics of public health have also become more divisive of late, particularly in response to pandemic-era public health measures. This year, the ascent of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy — who that childhood vaccines have no relationship to autism — marked a dramatic change in federal policy toward pediatric medicine.

A published in the Journal of the American Medical Association gives reason to think these fractures are leading to real consequences. Using data from 32 states, the authors calculate that vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella have declined significantly since the emergence of COVID. Across roughly 2,000 counties, more than 1,600 reported declines during that period, and only four states (California, Connecticut, Maine, and New York) saw increases in the median vaccination rate at the county level. Around the nation, the average rate fell from 93.92 percent to 91.26 percent; the herd immunity threshold is 95 percent, the authors note.

“I think this is only going to get worse,” one pediatrician and vaccine advocate told ����Ӱ��. “I think vaccines are under attack.”

Demographics

Enrollment Losses Are Steeper in Wealthier Schools

COVID scrambled the populations of districts across the country, with early estimates showing in total U.S. public school enrollment in the 2020–21 school year. But that exodus was seen in radically different magnitudes depending on school demographics, according to research from Boston University’s Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis. 

Focusing on data from Massachusetts, that the state’s white and Asian enrollment figures were significantly lower (3.1 percent and 8.1 percent, respectively) by fall of 2024 than pre-pandemic trends would have predicted. Black and Hispanic enrollment, meanwhile, is now actually higher than expected — a major change in racial composition just in the course of a half-decade.

Notably, declines in public school enrollment were at their most extreme in Massachusetts’s wealthiest communities, where families were to private or charter schools that prioritized reopening for in-person instruction: The total number of students who disenrolled from the most affluent districts (those ranked in the top 20 percent of average income) greatly exceeded departing students from districts in the bottom 80 percent. 

Early Learning

Montessori Preschool Beats Other Models

The long-respected Montessori pedagogical model has gained a buzzy cultural prominence of late, as evidenced by for wooden toys in new parent groups. New evidence from the University of Virginia and the American Institutes for Research suggests that all those building blocks are well worth the price tag. 

In a study of roughly 600 students in preschool and kindergarten, the researchers pointed to large benefits from attending one of two-dozen public Montessori programs. Compared with a control group, the Montessori students (randomly selected through an admission lottery) enjoyed sizable advantages in executive function, reading, and short-term memory. What’s more, partly thanks to larger class sizes, the program cost over $13,000 less per child than conventional preschool offerings over a three-year span.

Considering the for this type of schooling, parents can likely expect to see more private Montessori options emerge in the coming years. But the authors conclude that expanding access to public programs “may be a cost-effective way to sustain early learning gains at least through the end of kindergarten.”

Education Polarization

College Majors Shift Students’ Politics

Much of the last two decades of political history have been characterized by “education polarization” — the of voters without college degrees to vote Republican while their more credentialed counterparts favor Democrats. The question is whether that phenomenon is the effect of college itself, or simply the product of ideological self-sorting.

According to , the actual content of college courses plays an important role shifting undergraduates along the partisan spectrum. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of survey responses from undergraduates at 377 colleges, the authors learned that students increase in “liberal” or “far-left” self-identification by seven percentage points between college entry and graduation. That average conceals a great deal of variation, however: Controlling for a swath of variables like pre-college ideology, life goals, and intended major, the data suggests that the act of studying social sciences or humanities makes students four percentage points more likely to consider themselves on the political left relative to those focusing on natural sciences. Majoring in economics or business, meanwhile, decreases that likelihood by six points. While all college students tend to slide leftward in their cultural politics, economic issues like taxation are particularly sensitive to major choice.

In all, the influence of enrolling in social science or humanities coursework over voting preferences is about equal to the effect of growing up in a heavily Democratic congressional district. If all students in left-leaning disciplines switched to business or economics, the paper estimates, education polarization would decline by roughly one-third.

Critical Race Theory

CRT in Classrooms Isn’t a Myth

The debate around critical race theory in schools has raged for much of the last half-decade, with many conservatives alleging that children are bombarded daily with messages derogating American history and Western values. Defenders of public education have responded by calling CRT an obscure sub-discipline of legal education with little purchase for K–12 students.

In January, published in the journal Education Next offered some evidence that CRT — or, at least, some of the key ideas proliferated by its academic theorists — does indeed find its way into high school classrooms. More than one-third of respondents said their teachers characterized the United States as a racist nation “often” or “almost daily,” while similar proportions reported hearing frequent messages about the racist complicity of white people and police officers. At the same time, majorities of pupils also said they’d been taught that the country had made strides toward racial equality since the 1970s.

It is difficult to say with certainty which areas see more of this kind of teaching, or even in what context such statements are made. “I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” University of Missouri Professor Brian Kisida told ����Ӱ��. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.”

As of this past April, nearly three-fourths of the more than 64,000 students eligible for the state’s universal education savings accounts were homeschooled or enrolled in a private school before they participated in the program, researchers from the Rand Corp. found.

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ESA students are also more likely to live in districts with higher median incomes, more white families and schools with better test scores.

“If the goal is to have tax dollars follow students, then a universal policy can achieve that,” said Susha Roy, lead author of the report. But if the goal is to reach the neediest students or those in failing schools, she added, “what we’re seeing in Arizona suggests that a universal policy is not the best way to expand access.”

To skeptics of ESAs, who see them as handouts to wealthier families, the findings provide further evidence that conservatives’ preferred school reform policy often leaves lower-income families behind. But supporters predict that use will spread over time to those with greater needs. In Arizona, for example, 57% of students who enrolled in the ESA program over the past year attended a public school just prior to switching — up from 21% in 2023, state data shows. In Indiana, over half of ESA students live in families earning $100,000 annually or less. Advocates working to promote school choice in lower-income communities say Rand’s findings just mean there’s more work to do.

“We’ve seen the national studies and we’re not dissuaded at all,” said Ryan Hanning, a fellow with the San Juan Diego Institute, a Phoenix-based organization that supports faith-based and nonprofit groups. “How do we make sure that ESA is fully adopted by marginalized communities, specifically Spanish-speaking and Black communities?”

Application windows too early

One consistent argument against ESAs is that the dollar amount doesn’t cover the costs at many private schools. of parents who didn’t use their ESA showed that nearly 20% said the funding wasn’t enough to afford tuition at their preferred school. Another 20% of parents were concerned that even if they could pay the tuition, they would struggle to afford additional fees, and almost 10% said lack of transportation would be a barrier.

Stephanie Parra, executive director of All in Education, an education advocacy group focused on Latino families, sees the same challenges in Arizona, which she called “the most choice-rich school environment in the country.”

“Eighty-five percent of our families are choosing their neighborhood public schools,” she said. “It is really a choice rooted in logistics and what is accessible to them.”

Proponents of private school choice say one solution is to build up the supply of schools, like those in the rapidly expanding microschool sector.

The San Juan Diego Institute promotes school choice to underserved communities, but has also provided start-up funds for new private schools where tuition costs no more than the amount of the ESA, generally in the $7,000 to $8,000 range. They include Hands2Teach in Peoria, which serves deaf and hearing students and teaches American Sign Language, and Vita High School, a Montessori-style program in Phoenix where students learn A.I. skills.

“Awareness is the biggest barrier. Many families don’t know ESAs exist, and early materials weren’t in Spanish, limiting accessibility,” said Andrew Lee, Vita’s founder and CEO. “Documentation requirements, such as proof of residency, can also create obstacles.”

The school provides scholarships to cover additional costs like transportation and school supplies.

The Indiana-based Drexel Fund has a similar mission and has helped launch new, mostly faith-based schools in multiple states that primarily serve students who qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch or have disabilities.

Microschools are more approachable to parents who have no experience with private schools, said Naomi DeVeaux, a partner with Drexel. Another way to open up ESAs to lower-income families, she said, is to allow parents to apply as late as a month before school starts, or to add late application windows.

“In some states, the window to apply for your voucher is too early. Families that are mobile or who just aren’t thinking ahead to the next school year will miss it,” she said. “That’s a big thing that states really could improve upon.”

The growth of super small schools has expanded access to private education, said Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University. He published research earlier this year showing that voucher-like programs have led to a 3% to 4% increase in private school enrollment. Most schools that receive ESA funds enroll about 30 students.

But he warned that more schools doesn’t always mean better student performance. In fact, with microschools, there’s no way to tell, according to another recent Rand study. Researchers concluded that there is insufficient data to determine how students who attend microschools compare academically to their peers in traditional public schools.

‘A case study’

Rand’s latest findings, said lead researcher Roy, have implications not just for states with existing ESA programs, but for those considering whether to opt in to a new federal tax credit scholarship program included in President Donald Trump’s tax cut and spending package.

The Treasury Department and the IRS are now collecting public comments in advance of issuing regulations for the program next year. It’s unclear whether governors will have a say in how the programs operate or whom they serve.

“It’s our hope that we can use Arizona as a case study for other states that are now potentially considering ESA programs because of the federal policy,” she said.

The potential to open more educational options for underserved students has captured the support of some Democrats, a departure from how the party typically views vouchers and ESAs. Arne Duncan, education secretary during the Obama administration, and Democrats for Education Reform CEO Jorge Elorza urge states to participate.

“For both current and incoming governors, it’s a chance to show voters that they’re willing to do what it takes to deliver for students and families, no matter where the ideas originate,” they wrote in The Washington Post.

There are key differences between ESAs and the new federal program, which won’t start until 2027. ESAs, like most voucher programs, are state funded. Taxpayers will fund the federal Educational Choice for Children Act by donating up to $1,700 annually to a nonprofit scholarship-granting organization in their state. In exchange, they’ll get a dollar-for-dollar credit on their taxes.

The size of the scholarships will depend on how much those groups can raise. Families earning three times their area’s median gross income will be eligible for funding, meaning that those making as much as $500,000 in some parts of the country will be able to participate.

Critics argue that the tax credit is still expected to cost the government at least $10 billion annually and will increase over time. Additionally, if higher-income families end up benefitting more from the new program, that would “totally run contrary to the way that we have understood the federal role in education to be for decades,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank.

He added that there’s no guarantee that private and religious schools would offer the same civil rights protections for LGBTQ students or those with disabilities as public schools.

“What are we losing when we move away from what has been our universal public education system?” he asked. “Who could really slip through the cracks?”

Talking about college

In a September paper, he pointed to North Carolina as an example of a state that is ensuring lower-income families get first crack at school choice dollars. The state gives its highest Opportunity Scholarship payment of $7,686 to the lowest-income families and gradually reduces the amount for families who earn more.

Until the state made its program universally available in 2023, “private school was never an option for us,” said Tabitha Lofton, whose two younger sons attend Amandla Academy, a microschool with locations in Greensboro and High Point.

She moved Jamaal and Jackson out of Dudley High School in the Guilford County district, where they often skipped class and struggled to keep up. As a welder who often travels for work, and had to stretch her income to pay the bills, Lofton felt she couldn’t devote enough time to her kids’ education.

All Jamaal wanted to do was play basketball — at churches, local gyms, wherever he could, Lofton said. It was that passion that caught the attention of a coach who worked for Amandla and recruited Jamaal to play. Eager to get her boys out of Dudley, she applied for the Opportunity Scholarship and soon realized that they were thriving in the smaller environment.

“I see A’s and B’s and C’s on their report cards, which is something I’ve never seen,” she said. “My children are talking about going to college. Before going to that school, that was not a conversation at all.”

Marcus Brandon, a former state legislator who pushed for the universal program, founded Amandla in 2022. As executive director of CarolinaCAN, part of the 50Can advocacy network, he’s well-versed in ESAs.

As in the Rand study, state data still shows that most students in North Carolina’s program were already enrolled in private schools before they received state funds, but that doesn’t deter him.

“You still have people who were making sacrifices,” Brandon said. Maybe they were working two jobs or put off buying a second car, he said. “Just because they were [paying tuition] doesn’t mean they were doing it comfortably.”

When asked about how they paid for what they considered their most important license, 71% said they used their own money while 19% reported tapping into government or private loans and nearly 25% said they received support from their employer. 

Ama Takyi-Laryea, a Pew senior manager who contributed , said up until now, there’s been a gap in knowledge about how individuals are financing this level of skill acquisition, even as the number of people pursuing credentialing is rising dramatically.

“Having data to inform different pathways towards quality credentials — no matter what form it takes — is what’s essential right now,” she said.

A third of all adults in the United States have a nondegree credential, Pew found, and of those, 18% also have a college degree.

Michelle Van Noy, director of Rutgers University’s Education and Employment Research Center, said understanding where the money is coming from for certificates and professional licensing sheds light on whether that type of education and training is being properly supported.

“If we see so many people paying on their own, we want to know if this is fair for people who are trying to seek out these pathways,” she said. 

The underlying data for the Pew report comes from the pilot, a survey of 15,734 respondents, ages 16 to 75, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau. For a number of key indicators, this dataset is the only nationally representative source, according to researchers.

Nondegree credential programs are typically designed to train students in specific skills, like dental assisting or computer programming. There is no industry standard definition, yet they differ from associate and bachelor’s degrees in a number of ways: they are often much shorter in duration, ranging from a few weeks to less than a year; they are offered by both accredited and unaccredited schools — as well as businesses, associations and government agencies — and they can expire.

Critical to the cost consideration is the fact that they have historically been ineligible for government aid, though recently passed will mean that starting in July 2026, federal Pell Grants for low- and middle-income students can be applied to select accredited programs.

When asked about their most recent vocational certificate vs. their most important active license, the financial sources shifted: fewer people (about half vs. roughly 70%) said they paid using their own money, about the same amount (20% vs. 19%) reported relying on loans and the number looking to their employer for funds shrunk from nearly 25% to 15%.

“It is concerning that most students pay out of pocket for their sometimes-costly NDCs [nondegree credentials], especially because one study found that over half of these programs’ hourly costs minimum wages across 15 states,” according to the Pew report.

Researchers found that the annual rates at which people recall earning nondegree credentials tripled between 2009 and 2021. During this time, rates in vocational certificate attainment jumped from 0.4% to 1.2% and those earning professional licenses jumped from 0.5% to 1.6%. Researchers noted that these shifts occurred against the backdrop of waning enrollments in traditional college programs.

Nationally, over 1.1 million credentials are available, ranging from big tech certifications to community college programs, yet quality and outcomes are highly mixed, according to by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. They found that only about 12% of programs lead to significant wage gains for workers beyond what their peers make without the credentials.

And while the top 10% of credentials boost annual earnings by almost $5,000 within a year of completion, the average credential increases earnings by just $1,200, and “many credentials fail to move the needle at all, leaving learners exactly where they started,” according to the report.

“Without better data and transparency, countless Americans risk wasting time and money on credentials that lead nowhere,” the AEI report says.

This variation in quality, paired with a scarcity of reliable data, “leaves people to sort of fend for themselves, “ Rutgers’ Van Noy said. “It points to this larger systematic problem.” 

While these initial findings provide significant new information and are “the best we have,” Pew’s Takyi-Laryea stressed that they have limitations and should be viewed as a jumping off point for future work. 

She said forthcoming research will look more granularly at payment methods; analyze educational pathways that lead to these programs and the industries they’re in; and look at student perceptions of their programs in terms of both value and quality. 

The goal is to allow students to make better-informed decisions and for states to set guardrails. This is particularly important as state-level investment in these programs has significantly increased, with to short-term credential initiatives.

“I cannot stress enough the need for researchers to fill these data gaps around quality and value for students, for states that are investing heavily in these programs, for employers — even for the providers,” Takyi-Laryea said.

“I had to let him know I couldn’t be his dad, but I could be his friend,” said Padia, 49. 

The boy’s request made Padia, who was 18 at the time, realize the “impact that these programs make on young people,” and it’s stuck with him for over 30 years.

“Not every kid has both parents at home. Not every kid has somebody waiting for them at home after school. So, we give them a place to go,” said Padia, who currently serves as a recreation administrator in Arizona. “That’s what these programs mean to young people.”

That young boy was one of the lucky ones, a new study shows.   

Thousands of American families, mostly low-income and families of color, face persistent barriers enrolling their children in after school and summer programs, according to a report released earlier this month from the nonprofit advocacy group . 

The report found in a survey of more than 30,500 parents earlier this year  about 77% who want to enroll their children in after school programs can’t — most citing cost, accessibility and availability as the main issues. 

The “unmet demand” of after school programs affects about 22.6 million children and is expected to worsen unless states take action, according to the report, as President Donald Trump’s eliminates more than $1.3 billion in federal funds dedicated to these programs. 

The report found that 96% of families in the highest income bracket enrolled their child in some type of out-of-school-activity, “including organized sports and special lessons,” which was 30 percentage points higher than families in the lowest income bracket.

Access to a variety of programs often comes at a cost high-income families can afford, while lower wealth communities are more dependent on programs that are subsidized by federal, state or local funding streams. 

The report found that high income families spent about nine times more – about $6,500 per child – than low-income families who spend around $730 on average for after school programs. The spending gap has increased since 2020 when high-income families were outspending lower income families by five times as much, according to the report.

Though after school programs were one of the top investments when schools received an influx of COVID-19 funds to support learning loss, the report argued that “federal funding has not kept pace with demand” since – which limits opportunities and continues to shut families out.

“When families can’t access afterschool programs, we all pay a price. We cannot afford the opportunities lost for youth to realize their potential, for working parents to provide for their families,” wrote Afterschool Alliance Executive Director Jodi Grant and Lisa Lucheta, the organization’s board chair, in the report. “Millions of students are being left behind, costing our country dearly now and dampening our prospects for the future.”

Grant, at a news conference in mid-October, added that while federal funding is “only a small percentage of the overall spending in after school, it is absolutely key to helping our low-income families access programs in the after school world.”

The report also found:

• About 84% of low-income families, and 73% of middle-income families, don’t have access to after school programs compared to 59% of high-income families.
• About half of low- and middle-income parents would enroll their children in a program if it was readily accessible.  
• Unmet demand is highest for Black, Latino and Native American children which has grown between 2020 and 2025 by seven, five and eight percentage points respectively. 

Most parents surveyed recognized the benefits after school programs provide, ranging from keeping students off screens and out of trouble, developing better relationships with their peers and supporting mental health. But it’s often hard to find programs to fit their budgets or that are conveniently located.

Fifty-six percent of families said the cost of after school programs were “an important factor preventing them from enrolling their child.” Nearly half also said their child did not have transportation to and from the programs. 

For families who did have their child enrolled in a program, a quarter of them said they had been on a waitlist; and more than 60% of those same parents said the wait was longer than a month.

“After school programs are seen as extra recreation programs … that are not necessary, not essential, but the harsh reality is that these programs provide so much development for young people,” Padia said. “When you talk about what these programs can provide to communities — it’s resources.”

The report cited the grant as the only “exclusive” federal funding stream into after school and summer programs. 

Investment into the grant program, however, has remained the same since 2022. When adjusted for inflation, “the federal dollars going to support our low-income families has decreased,” Grant said.

Earlier this year, Trump’s administration withheld , which was later released to states. But advocates worry the money is on the chopping block again, which means state officials are being called upon to step up. 

“There’s 27 states that have state funding streams. We want to get to all 50,” Grant said.

Washington D.C. in the largest percentage of students involved in programs, with 38% of K-12 students compared to the national average of 13%. D.C. also was named as the top leader in accessibility, which was defined by states that have prioritized funding for transportation and expanding opportunities in areas with limited options.

The report credited the city for its “significant investments,” in after school programming over the past eight years, including over $100 million of funding in its Office of Out of School Time Grants and Youth Outcomes. 

Hawaii, South Dakota, California and Connecticut followed as top states with the highest percentage of students involved in out-of-school programs. Kansas, New Mexico, Alaska and South Dakota were also highlighted as states leading in accessibility.  

Trump’s current budget proposal would consolidate 18 education grants, including the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, into one general $2 billion funding stream. 

The Afterschool Alliance said the proposal, if passed, would cut funding for education programs .

What she saw in Finland was especially “eye opening” — a recognition of the value of play in a child’s educational journey. The schools she visited enjoyed a 15-minute break for exercise or physical play for every 45 minutes of instruction time.

“I thought, how can I replicate that here? We don’t do enough of it.”

“We’ve really worked hard, especially at the K-5 level, to bring kids outdoors as much as possible,” said Sinha, who in years past has directed funding to develop multiple outdoor classroom spaces across the district’s five elementary school buildings. Educators are encouraged to incorporate movement breaks into snacktime, and they recently fenced the schoolyard around the middle school so that older students can enjoy a recess and be more active.

But when it comes to boosting physical activity, any significant alteration to the daily schedule comes with a cost: precious lost minutes required for core academic classes. 

“I do think if kids had that extra physical activity, we’d need to teach less,” Sinha said. “It’s weird to say, but I think they retain more when they have more opportunities to be active.”

She’s not wrong.

New from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, shows that when students engage in high-intensity interval exercises, they score significantly higher on standardized tests measuring verbal comprehension. In a study of elementary school children aged 9 to 12, researchers examined a type of brain neuroelectrical activity called “error-related negativity,” which occurs when people make a mistake and is associated with reduced focus and performance. What they found is that after acute exercise, the error-related activity decreased significantly.

“We have to be aware of our child’s health, and if we want them to succeed academically and mental health-wise, exercise is something that needs to be in the forefront,” says Eric Drollette, the study’s lead author and a professor at UNC. “Yes, it helps with their physical health, but we can’t forget the brain part of it. The benefits of exercise can be influential in an [educational] environment .”

Drollette had a pretty good idea that the experiment would reveal some type of positive relationship between exercise and academics. After all, research has long borne out the benefits of physical exercise on the mental health and general wellness of adults and children alike. One of Drollette’s own previous involving college students who underwent high-intensity interval training showed improved brain function and cognition. 

But having three children of his own, he knew anecdotally that any type of prolonged high-intensity activity, like running on a treadmill or using other types of exercise equipment, just wasn’t feasible for younger children. Not only, he suspected, would they get bored or lack motivation to complete the exercise, but it also wasn’t a scenario that educators could easily replicate in their own classrooms. 

The goal instead was to design a fitness regimen that would hold student interest and could be performed in the classroom without taking up too much time. What he came up with was a series of stationary exercises – think high knees, jumping jacks, lunges and squats — performed one after another, alternating between 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off for nine minutes total. 

“This is more natural for a kid’s type of exercise,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that if a teacher reads this, or if the public reads this, they can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s something that’s possible to do in the classroom.’”

What ended up surprising Drollette, he said, was how selective the benefits were for certain academic achievements — most notably, for word recognition and fluency, which include reading and word processing — and much less for math. Another surprising result? The children didn’t realize they were exercising as hard as they actually were, suggesting, Drollette said, that they truly enjoyed the movement break.

The study comes against the backdrop of schools recess and physical education classes in order to prioritize instructional time and boost academic achievement — especially in the wake of the pandemic, which wrought steep learning loss. According to the , children should get four 15-minute recesses every day. While more than of the country’s elementary schools incorporate regularly scheduled recess into each school day, on average students receive just 27 minutes. 

As it stands, only require schools to offer a daily recess, and most districts don’t have a formal recess policy. Since the mid-2000s, up to 40 percent of school districts have reduced or cut recess. Moreover, some districts still allow educators to take away recess as a punishment, which experts say does more harm than good.

While Drollette acknowledges that the main focus of schools is academics — not movement — the practice of shortening recess and physical education, he says, is short sighted. 

“As a nation, we’ve really struggled to recover loss in physical activity since the pandemic,” he says. “If we keep removing physical activity, we may be hampering mental health as well as cognitive function. And then if kids are performing poorly cognitively, they’re not doing well with academics, causing schools to keep pushing academics. And so my approach is that we may need to flip the other direction. We need to focus on physical movement for a better healthy mind in order for kids to do well in school.”

This summer, the Trump administration appeared to recognize as much, issuing an establishing a President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, as well as reinstating the Presidential Fitness Test — the latter of which harkens back to back to the 1950s under President Dwight D. Eisenhower but was phased out in 2013.

“For far too long, the physical and mental health of the American people has been neglected.  Rates of obesity, chronic disease, inactivity, and poor nutrition are at crisis levels, particularly among our children,” the order reads. “These trends weaken our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale.”

It’s unclear what the new regimen will look like, but the original test required students to compete in their schools and nationally by completing circuits of pushups, pullups, situps and the mile run, among other exercises. Notably, the test was retired under the Obama administration in exchange for the “Presidential Youth Fitness Program,” which focused more holistically on student health and less on the competitive test.

Starting this school year, one thing is certain: School district leaders like Sinha and classroom educators will continue to be hard-pressed to inject more time for physical activity into the day due to time requirements for core academic subjects.

“Physical activity is more important than ever before for our students,” she says, noting that students in Finland traditionally score at the top on the international benchmark assessments known as — far above students in the U.S. “It’s always been important, but kids are different today, and they need to be moving their little bodies around.”

The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s latest notes the number of teacher preparation program graduates ready to teach math fell by 36% from 2012 to 2020, dovetailing with a decline in student achievement. While the study released today did not prove causality, the link, researchers say, seems clear. 

“High-quality teachers matter,” CRPE director Robin Lake said. “It’s the most powerful in-school factor in kids’ learning experience and it’s something people are not talking about enough.” 

At the same time, a topic that has been widely discussed — the debate over whether explicit direct instruction trumps a more student-centered learning approach — has left some educators unsure of how to teach the subject, researchers found.

“The math wars are as old as education itself,” said CRPE senior fellow Alexander Kurz. “That debate is alive and well through the science of math. As an educator, you are caught in the crossfire.” 

The result: Nearly 4 in 10 eighth graders failed to achieve even the most basic level of math proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, such as calculating the area of a circle or multiplying fractions, the study notes. The most recent NAEP scores, released just last week, showed the nation’s 12th graders doing worse in math than any senior class of the past generation.

While those scores were the first to come out for seniors since COVID, the study’s authors say the problem long predates the pandemic. They note that math performance in U.S. public schools has been declining for more than a decade and achievement gaps are at historic highs.

Girls, low-income kids, Black and Hispanic students, children with disabilities and multilingual learners are struggling most, CRPE reports. Citing NAEP data, the report notes that since 1990, the gap between the highest- and lowest-scoring students has grown 18% wider among eighth graders and more than 8.5% wider among fourth graders.

In addition to the teacher shortage and instructional quagmire, CRPE cites a number of other factors it believes contribute to abysmal student performance pre- and post- pandemic, including that many states’ test scores are inflated, obscuring results, “especially for different student groups.”

The report, the fourth of its kind, found that in , for example, students’ average math grade point average jumped 0.34 points from 2019 to 2021, triple the increase of the prior eight years. 

In , the report notes, math proficiency dropped 11 points on state exams while A and B grades on local courses declined by only 3 points. 

“A national study from 2021 to 2023 found that 57% of grades didn’t align with student knowledge as measured by tests, and two-thirds of those misaligned grades were inflated, most often for underserved groups,” the CRPE report reads. “ACT data show rising GPAs, especially in math, despite falling test scores. By 2021, even students scoring in the 25th percentile were graduating with B averages or better.”

The study found, too, schools are overly rigid, tracking students and hindering their success in the subject.

“Middle school math-tracking acts as math predestination, putting some students on a track to take Algebra I in eighth grade or earlier,” the report reads. “Less-advantaged students are less likely to be placed in advanced math courses, even when they demonstrate readiness.”

Joel Rose, co-founder and chief executive officer of New Classrooms, a nonprofit that focuses on student-centered learning, called the report spot on, adding schools don’t account for children learning at different speeds. 

“There is really only one track, the grade-level track,” he said. “If you stay on it and never fall behind, you do fine. The problem is most kids fall behind for one reason or another and there are not any viable paths for them to catch back up.”

It’s because of this, he said, that math education is turning into “our nation’s social sorting machine.” Students who don’t catch on to the subject will find a whole series of career pathways closed off to them, he said. 

But all of these problems are solvable, CRPE contends, noting that states like and school districts like New Jersey’s and , have made replicable gains. 

Alabama is the only state where fourth graders scored higher in the subject than they did in 2019, prior to the pandemic. 

Karen Anderson, director of the state education department’s Office of Mathematics Improvement, said Alabama has worked hard to align classroom lessons with state standards and to use evidence-based practices and high-quality instructional materials to help all students — no matter their zip code or performance level.

“We want to make sure we are using instructional strategies that actually provide results,” Anderson said. “We also want to make sure we know what students know — and what they don’t know. And, when we see students who need help, we provide assistance immediately.”

CRPE recommends schools stop poo-pooing direct instruction — in which teachers demonstrate or explain procedures and concepts. Likewise, it concluded teachers need clear guidance on how to balance conceptual understanding with procedural fluency — in addition to real-time data to identify gaps and better structure their lessons.

Melodie Baker, founder and executive director of , which aims to use research to empower communities of color, has worked in mathematics for decades. She said robust teacher preparation at the elementary school level is critical for student success.

“The lack of emphasis on math in elementary is a big issue,” she said. “For example, teacher prep programs spend far more time on early literacy than math.”

But they are of equal importance, Baker said.  

CRPE concluded states should consider better pay, team-teaching models and math specialists as a means to address the math teacher shortage. 

In terms of improving the student experience, it advises schools to adopt “flexible pathways with multiple on-ramps, automatic acceleration, and no lower-track dead ends.”

Based on their conversations with students, CRPE concluded that schools need to better serve children who require more time to understand math concepts.

“One thing I don’t like is when I ask a teacher a question because I don’t understand it, and then they make me feel like I’m a bother and I really shouldn’t ask more questions,” an 11th grader from Connecticut told CRPE researchers in 2022. “And that prevents me from learning. And I hated that because I actually want to know.” 

The student’s claims correspond with what CRPE found: Schools are regularly missing opportunities to address academic problems head-on. 

And while the federal Every Student Succeeds Act explicitly requires states to develop a concise and easily understandable online report card, most don’t meet the standard. CRPE found just 18 break down math achievement and growth data by student subgroups “in a way that we thought was clear and understandable.”

Only Illinois, the report notes, earned the highest rating in this category by providing comprehensive math performance and opportunity data that CRPE thought most parents would be able to use and understand.

But suggests that in an attempt to right these inequities, those reforms often got it wrong. 

State school finance policies designed to close funding gaps between high- and low-income districts did not reduce racial and ethnic funding inequities and in some cases increased them, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Educational Research Association. 

“I was quite surprised. And depressed, frankly,” said Emily Rauscher, lead co-author and professor at Brown University. “My guess going into the study was that these income based school finance reforms that worked to reduce inequality of funding by income would also at least slightly help reduce racial inequality of funding.”

The U.S. is unique in that school district budgets are tethered to property taxes, meaning schools in wealthier communities automatically start with a larger pot of local funding. Since school desegregation efforts slowed after the 1980s, civil-rights minded policymakers have tried fixing this discrepancy between low-income districts that serve lots of students of color and rich districts that serve lots of white students by directing more money to districts with more low-income kids.

State funds are typically distributed through a formula, or set of formulas, that send money to districts. From there, districts send it to schools. Each state uses different criteria in their formulas, but most try to target at least a portion of their funds to school districts that enroll lots of students with greater needs and those that struggle to raise funds from property taxes. Sometimes, courts make them do it.

According to the , the number of states with co-called “progressive” funding systems — where high-poverty districts receive more per-student funding than low-poverty districts — more than doubled, from 13 states in 2012 to 28 in 2022. States such as New Mexico, Wyoming, California, and Colorado saw some of the largest gains in funding equity during this period. As it stands, more than half of the 48 states studied have at least a modestly progressive distribution of state and local funding, providing at least 5% additional funding to high-poverty districts. That is twice as many states as a decade ago.

But Rauscher and co-author Jeremy Fiel, a professor at Rice University, found that while these reforms narrowed funding gaps by income, they did not lessen — and sometimes widened — disparities by race and ethnicity. 

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics, the researchers examined the effects of school finance reforms across the U.S. from 1990 to 2022. They found that such policies reduced school spending gaps between the highest- and lowest-income districts by over $1,300 per pupil on average. However, the reforms also increased the spending advantage of districts with low percentages of Black and Hispanic students—by $900 and $1,000 per pupil, respectively.

Reforms were more effective at reducing racial disparities in states where those inequities were already relatively modest. In contrast, reforms were less effective, or even regressive, in states with high levels of racial and economic segregation between school districts. In these more segregated states, reforms not only exacerbated racial and ethnic disparities but also failed to narrow economic gaps.

While the study did not pinpoint the exact reason for this, researchers posited that it may be driven by demographic and political processes related to implementation. Additionally, many funding reforms boosted spending broadly rather than targeting it, leading to minimal effects. Many court-ordered solutions, by contrast, stipulate that states must target racial and ethnic inequality. 

Notably, the funding reforms worked best at directing money to historically marginalized students in districts that were less segregated, likely a reflection of separate policies aimed at supporting students of color, low-income students and their families, Rauscher said. Moreover, the study showed that the biggest inequities exist between states – not within them.

Rauscher offered that it’s likely not random that states funding their education systems the least are also the ones with the highest concentration of students of color. And that’s exactly why, she said, the federal government needs to step up to fix it. 

For many school funding experts, this realization is not surprising. After all, while most states distribute funding relatively evenly by the racial and ethnic composition of districts, wealthier states still spend significantly more per pupil than poorer ones. And since these states tend to have higher shares of white students and lower shares of Black and Hispanic students, national disparities are bound to persist.

“The concentration of non-white students is in the lowest-funded states, and the concentration of white students is in the highest-funded states,” says Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit that funds school finance research. “So when you compare the funding levels of a low-income school district in Mississippi that has a lot of Black and Hispanic students to a tawny suburb of Boston in Massachusetts where all the kids are white, you’re going to pick up a huge gap. It just distorts the amount of money when you’re comparing across the entire U.S.”

It’s worth noting, Sibilia says, that recent state funding reforms, like those in Tennessee, Colorado, Mississippi and Alabama, are poised to make a real difference. Tennessee’s model, adopted three years ago, directs more funding to students who need it most, including those living in high concentrations of poverty. It also accounts for students in small and sparsely populated districts, which formulas sometimes shortchange. Meanwhile, Alabama’s model — the newest in the country — includes additional funds for students with special needs, such as those with disabilities or who are English language learners.

“There’s no way that you’re going to change interstate funding differences, because people are so focused on schools in their communities, and because half of the money is coming from local property taxes,” she says. “The federal government can’t touch those dollars, so you have to focus within the state. And when you look at the effect of the intrastate reforms, you tend to see that they’re working.”

The new research comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, eliminate policies aimed at increasing equity for students of color and significantly curb federal spending, including on long-standing programs like Title I and IDEA, which are the federal government’s two biggest levers for bolstering state education funding.

In other words, it’s a political environment not likely to prioritize issues of racial inequity.

“You’re never going to have a funding formula that says we’re going to add x hundreds of dollars per Black student in each state, because that’s just not a viable policy,” says Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “We’ve had these differences all along, and there’s no way that you’re going to suddenly get the federal government stepping in on overall spending differences between states.”

Rauscher says that given the political environment, she’s concerned that her research may be used in bad faith by policymakers who have no interest in closing racial gaps in education. 

Her message to them: “You are mortgaging the future of the country, because all these kids who are under-resourced in school are going to enter adulthood without adequate skills and training. It’s an ongoing battle. We’ve been here before.”

Except education.

In 2025, most students still learn in a system designed a century ago. Despite pockets of innovation, public education remains largely standardized and slow to adapt — ill-equipped to meet the needs of every learner in a changing world. 

This lag isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a threat to our global competitiveness and our young people’s futures. If we want to engage and prepare students for the opportunities and challenges ahead, states must prioritize education R&D to transform education systems: investing in new ideas, testing what works and scaling promising approaches. While the United States consistently on assessments, sitting idle isn’t an option. 

As states navigate a changing federal landscape where they are encouraged to take the reins of their education systems, now is the opportunity to adopt R&D as a top strategic priority. Fortunately, states don’t have to start from scratch. Across the country, leaders are leveraging communities, learning science, and holistic outcomes to lay the foundation for R&D conditions and infrastructure.

In Washington State, the is guiding future policy for high-quality mastery-based learning by transforming student experiences in almost 50 schools across the state. Through rigorous evaluation, Washington is collecting insight into the time and resources required to implement new teaching and learning systems.

Wyoming created the , uniting the governor’s office, education department, universities and school administrators around a shared vision for the future of education. The state’s aims to shift teaching and learning practices toward more student-centered approaches aligned with its Profile of a Graduate. State pilot programs have reached half of Wyoming’s students, and the state has been able to identify and address roadblocks that prevent schools from implementing these practices.

In Virginia, Old Dominion University’s Center for Educational Innovation and Opportunity leads the state’s and collaborates with educators, researchers, and designers to advance Virginia’s mission of transforming education. This work was spurred by a $100 million state investment in developing lab schools to test innovative teaching methods. 

And in Massachusetts, the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to examine how technology can be leveraged to support district priorities, including refining the use of specific technologies, centering digital equity and showcasing best practices around technology integration in alignment with district goals.

These efforts show that meaningful R&D in education is not only possible, it’s happening. This starts with a bold vision and an aligned public research agenda, informed by and responsive to communities’ needs. from Education Reimagined, Transcend, and the Alliance for Learning Innovation, outlines steps that states can take to build the infrastructure and conditions to enable system-wide education R&D. These include:

• Create dedicated capacity within SEAs or partner institutions/organizations with staff whose primary responsibility is shepherding this work across systems.
• Empower local leaders to test evidence-based solutions and develop innovative models that improve learner experiences and inform systems transformation.
• Build supporting infrastructure, including strong data systems to inform continuous improvement and innovation networks that connect and leverage the insights educators, researchers, and communities.

Most importantly, this work requires fundamental changes in how we approach educational transformation. State leaders can model critical mindset shifts and create cultures of trust and empowerment that embrace calculated risks, diverse evidence, and learner-centered design.

If we care about the future success of our young people, and our competitiveness as a nation, it’s past time to invest in the engine that powers other sectors to evolve and thrive. Learners deserve an education system that leverages R&D to enhance and continuously improve their experiences and outcomes. States must lead the way. 

In a released today, the foundation and its offshoot, , scored state education departments on whether and how they define immigrant students, collect and report data on their educational progress and fund programs that support them. 

They assigned grades to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., based upon their findings: None won a mark above a C+. Forty-two states ​scored between C- and D- and five — Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana and West Virginia — earned an F.

The results come as the Trump administration continues to zero in on this vulnerable student population as part of its multibillion-dollar immigration crackdown: Young people have been arrested, detained — in the case of one Los Angeles teen this month, at gunpoint — and deported. 

The federal government also recently directing schools to accommodate English learners. Immigrant advocates are pleading with state lawmakers to push back by showing their support for these students and better preparing teachers to meet their needs.

“We are witnessing a sinister daily attack on our immigrant neighbors from a federal government bent on stripping immigrants’ access to work, health care, educational opportunities, and even their sense of safety,” said report co-author Alejandra Vázquez Baur, a foundation fellow who heads its National Newcomer Network. “All students show up with a twinkle in their eye, excited to learn — newcomers included — and states need to do more to support them.”

The Century Foundation, founded as the Co-operative League in 1919, recommends states develop specific and consistent definitions for this population, which includes refugees, asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors and migratory children. 

In an effort to better serve this diverse and largely growing student body — there are more than inside the nation’s K-12 public schools — agencies must also collect and publish data on key indicators about their educational experiences, including years in the United States, English proficiency, home language, prior schooling and academic outcomes. Such data points might include school engagement, participation in clubs and sports and any behavioral issues that could arise in school, the foundation concludes.

State education agencies should use the data to inform funding formulas, the report recommends, and to create a newcomer-specific funding structure that supplements federal money. This additional aid should provide support for students in their first few critical years in the public schools system, “with transparent reporting on its use and impact.”

The report highlights the scattershot nature of data collection across the country: 17 states collect no discernable data on immigrant students at all. Twenty-two compile such information to determine eligibility and maintain compliance with federal earmarked for English learners. 

Eight states collect data that might include newcomers, but it isn’t differentiated or used to determine how supports are allocated. Only four have clear definitions of the term “newcomer” and consistently collect robust data about these children. 

requires all districts to submit what it calls Recent Arrivers data and uses the information for federal reporting and to allocate Title III funds, according to the analysis. collects disaggregated immigrant student data annually and later divides it by subgroup, while state, according to the researchers, requires districts to track all eligible English learners in their student information systems and report key data points like birth country and U.S. school enrollment date. 

But outdoes them all, the study shows: It publicly reports disaggregated English learner data by year, including counts and percentages of immigrant, refugee and migrant students, among other groups, and breaks down this data by district, home language and ethnicity. The state, population , had less than residents in 2023. Nearly 84% were of working age. 

“This is exemplary,” the report notes of North Dakota’s approach, adding it allows for a clearer understanding of the diverse needs within this student population and supports targeted interventions for many children, including those with limited or interrupted formal education.

The report cites the unevenness of young immigrants’ educational experience, as they sometimes move between districts striving for stable housing. 

“When these programs differ across district lines within a state, this group of often highly mobile marginalized students may not qualify for comparable services when they move, and their new schools may not receive the resources they need to properly serve them,” the report reads. “State education agencies have the unique opportunity to address these inconsistencies to best support all students, including newcomers.”

English learners nationally had a , as of the 2019-20 school year, compared to the 86% national average.  

At a moment when anti-immigrant fervor was beginning to build in this country, ����Ӱ�� last year tested the enrollment practices of more than 600 high schools, attempting to register a 19-year-old newcomer who spoke little English and whose education had been interrupted. More than 300 schools refused to register him — including 204 denials in the 35 states and the District of Columbia where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20.

Vázquez Baur said newcomer students are here to stay and their presence predates the laws guaranteeing them educational access, including the 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe. The quality of their education, she said, will determine not only their opportunity but the health and well-being of their communities.

“Newcomers students are in our classrooms regardless of what our president says,” she said. “They are valuable neighbors and students. They become valuable leaders in their communities. Especially at this moment, it is the states that are on the front line against the federal government.”

The RAND study found a 22-point difference in stress levels and a 6-point difference in the degree of burnout — gender disparities that have held constant since at least 2021. Female teachers are also almost twice as likely as similarly educated women in other professions to report frequent stress.

These trends are worrying not just for teachers, but also for students, said Elizabeth Steiner, senior policy researcher at and the lead author of the report.

“Teacher well-being is … really important because it is related to how well teachers are able to do their jobs, which is related to how well students learn,” she said.

“Having a teacher who is present and engaged and putting forth their full effort to help the students they teach could make a real difference,” Steiner added, “as opposed to a teacher who is less engaged or struggling with mental health, or poor well-being, or poor work-life balance.”

Steiner said she is particularly concerned about female teachers, especially because they make up about of the workforce. A RAND report this fall will explore which factors may be driving the disproportionate levels of stress.

Overall, 62% of teachers surveyed reported frequent job-related stress this year, up 3 percentage points from last year but down from the record high of 78% in 2021. Still, they were almost twice as likely as similar working adults to report persistent stress. Teacher burnout levels dropped over the past year, from 60% to 53%, yet remain 14 points higher than levels reported by their non-educator peers. 

Black teachers were more likely than their white peers to report burnout (59% versus 53%), symptoms of depression (25% versus 18%) and an intention to quit (28% versus 14%). Notably, they were less likely to report frequent job-related stress, a discrepancy that Steiner called “a puzzle.”

The findings, published June 24, come from the fifth annual State of the American Teacher Survey, which looks at well-being and retention for K-12 public school teachers. Researchers focused on sources of job-related stress, pay, hours worked and intention to leave. This year’s sample consisted of 1,419 teachers.

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, said she is “not surprised at all by these findings.” The “chaos and confusion” of the current political moment, she said, has made being a teacher an even more stressful job.

“Meeting the needs of whole students,” she added, “has gotten increasingly more difficult.”

Despite reporting persistently high levels of stress, the share of teachers overall who said they intend to leave their jobs by the end of the school year fell 6 percentage points, from 22% in 2024 to 15% this year. Fewer teachers also reported feeling burnout this year (53% versus 60%). The relative consistency of responses since 2023 suggests teacher well-being may have stabilized since the pandemic, according to the report.

The most common source of job-related stress for teachers across the board was student behavior (52%), followed by salary (39%). Black teachers were less likely to attribute their stress to student behaviors but more likely to point to salary as a key factor.

This could be tied to their pay: Black teachers, on average, reported earning 6% less than white teachers. Researchers think this could be, at least in part, driven by where teachers live and whether their states have collective bargaining units.

Teachers overall reported an average base salary of approximately $73,000 in 2025, a roughly 4% increase from 2024 but still significantly lower than the $103,000 average salary reported by similar working adults. 

Just under half of teachers (46%) said they were better off financially than their parents, compared with 61% of similarly working adults. 

has shown that while pay is a major contributing factor to teacher satisfaction, it is not the only one.

“If there are ways to look at the constellation of factors that include pay, administrator support, hours worked and a cornucopia of other working conditions that could help improve those things, that — based on what we found — seems like a solid recipe for improving retention and improving teacher engagement in their jobs,” Steiner said.

Hours and benefits also may play a role in overall stress and burnout levels: On average, teachers this year reported working 49 hours a week — four hours less than last year, but still 10 hours more than they’re paid to work, on average. 

And while more teachers had paid sick leave and employer-funded health insurance than similar working adults, fewer reported receiving paid parental leave. Just over a quarter of teachers said they receive this benefit, versus about half of similarly working adults. 

Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, which the lack of paid parental leave, stressed its importance.

“It’s both a smart policy to recruit and keep good teachers, and it’s the right thing to do,” she said in an email.

Overall, Peske added, “Districts that offer teachers competitive benefits are better positioned to attract great teachers, reduce turnover and maintain the stable workforce that is essential for students to succeed.”

The , published by the research firm Tuesday, also points to pervasive trends of disengagement and boredom among more than 400 respondents in grades five through 12. The vast majority of students said they regularly lost interest in their math classes, and 49% said they tuned out at least half the time. By contrast, children who have identified as “math people” — even if only in the past — are much more likely to retain interest in their day-to-day lessons, along with those who feel they understand and enjoy the process of doing math.

Heather Schwartz, RAND’s vice president for education and labor and a co-author of the report, said that students’ self-conception as being detached from or uninvolved with math was likely worsened by the pandemic, which stifled understanding across a range of subjects while most of the poll’s participants were still in their foundational years of learning. The problem of post-COVID boredom is “endemic,” she added.

“It’s not just girls or boys or middle schoolers or high schoolers, it’s widespread,” Schwartz observed. “In terms of talking about post-COVID recovery and the lack thereof, this boredom is potentially one leading reason for the high levels of disengagement we’re seeing.”

Indeed, students from different backgrounds and age groups all reported high amounts of indifference to math. Girls were slightly more likely than boys to say their attention faded during math lessons at least half the time (53% versus 45%) — perhaps a reflection of a post-COVID pattern in which males have performed somewhat better in STEM subjects — but middle schoolers and high schoolers, along with white, Hispanic, and Black students, all said the same in roughly similar numbers.

Notably, among high schoolers who said they felt comfortable with math, most said they reached that realization in their elementary years. That claim dovetails with , which have also placed the development of math attitudes in early childhood. The frequently reported phenomenon of , as well as the gender gap in math skills, both tend to emerge as kids first explore the subject.

Meanwhile, only a small number of secondary school students who say they are math people developed that notion in high school, the poll shows.

Jon Star, an educational psychologist at the , said in an email that it was particularly difficult to combat children’s belief that they may simply be unable to succeed in courses like algebra. 

The work of persuasion may have become harder since the COVID-era, which in academic performance and preparation in K–12 classrooms. While many of America’s top-performing students held their ground during the period of virtual learning, or even pulled ahead, their struggling schoolmates declined to levels of math achievement last seen decades ago. Middle school math teachers, who are responsible for helping their pupils transition from arithmetic to more challenging concepts, now have to differentiate their lessons to accommodate both high-flyers and those in need of serious remediation.

“To what extent should a sixth-grade teacher continue to work with students on the material from prior grades that they have not yet mastered, versus moving forward toward (pre)algebraic content?” Star wondered. “It is very hard to do both of these at the same time, yet each approach may increase boredom for some subset of students.”

Jason Roberts is the co-founder of , an online learning platform that offers users personalized instruction developed partly through the use of artificial intelligence. In an email, he noted that there was nothing surprising about large numbers of students being bored in math class. Still, he said, cynicism and discouragement could be overcome through support from families and teachers, and no shortcuts existed to the satisfaction of mastering complex ideas.

In particular, he wrote, teachers who are passionate about STEM subjects can play a role as enthusiastic evangelists.

“There do exist gifted math teachers who possess so much charisma, energy, expertise, and passion that they can make the subject come alive, even for students who never gave it a second thought,” Roberts remarked. “However, they are a rarity, and this isn’t something that can be acquired by attending a few professional development sessions or even one-on-one coaching.”

Even hiring qualified math teachers has become a major difficulty since 2020, with certified instructors commanding a premium in an ultra-tight labor market. According to one poll, one-quarter of all K–12 teachers themselves . 

Schwartz argued that the only way to conquer that discomfort and bring more expertise into the classroom was to change the way teachers prepare for the job. More need to be trained explicitly as math teachers, with a heavy focus on content knowledge, while still serving as trainees, she concluded.

“Frankly, I think it’s got to involve more training for teachers in the content, especially during teacher prep. They should be subject-matter experts, not just pedagogical experts.”

Circulated as a working paper on Monday, offers a statistical analysis of the effects of shifting to a shorter week alongside extensive reflections from educators themselves. Most of those teachers, principals, and superintendents spoke favorably about the change, saying they believed it had helped their schools attract and retain teachers in the midst of a tight job market. 

The numbers tell a different story, however: On average, the 178 Missouri districts that adopted a four-day week since 2010 did not improve at either recruiting new teachers or retaining their veterans. Andrew Camp, a scholar at Brown University’s and one of the paper’s authors, said district leaders’ enthusiasm for four-day weeks was likely grounded in the sincere belief that they could be the answer to persistent staffing challenges. 

“These things spread through word of mouth, they grab hold of people’s imaginations, and we end up with this rapid adoption of four-day school weeks,” Camp said. “But the fact that it was such a small effect — for a lot of these districts, it’s one teacher being retained every three years — was really striking.”

The almost negligible results, and officials’ apparent misapprehension about their true magnitude, are particularly salient given both the scale of the four-day phenomenon and the speed with which it has been embraced.

Mirroring national trends, the number of districts throughout Missouri operating on a shortened schedule has skyrocketed over the last decade and a half, accounting for one-third of the statewide total last year. Twelve percent of all students, and 13 percent of all teachers, now experience a four-day week (smaller figures proportionally, because they live almost exclusively in rural areas with smaller headcounts). 

The initial wave of transitions, beginning in the early 2010s, is to states’ need to contain education costs in the aftermath of the Great Recession. But in the study’s 36 interviews with leaders of Missouri schools and districts, along with several teachers, respondents generally agreed the main effect of the scheduling change was to slow turnover and make schools more attractive places to work.

At least one superintendent credited the four-day week — which requires teachers to work longer days when school is in session, effectively holding instructional hours constant — with a surge in job applications and a sizable drop in workforce churn. Several others claimed that a longer weekend was a vital feature in drawing teachers to far-flung communities that cannot afford to offer top salaries. 

But after examining state administrative data between the 2008–09 and 2023–24 school years, including figures on teachers’ school and district assignments, education levels, and experience, Camp and his co-authors found that four-day districts won only meager advantages. Switching to a truncated schedule resulted in just 0.6 job exits per 100 teachers, an effect that falls below the bar for statistical significance. 

Camp said the findings were broadly in line with those of prior work on the four-day schedule. While the transition might prove appealing, especially to new teachers, it likely would not address about salary and working conditions.

“We don’t rule out the possibility that there is a short-term, very small bump in teacher retention and recruitment,” he said. “But what our results from Missouri show is that, over this lengthy period, there’s no lasting effect.”

Echoes past findings

It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the new paper will have on the ongoing debate around the often controversial policy.

On one hand, it can only be said to be representative of one state’s approach. Around the country, different legislatures and districts have permitted distinct versions of the four-day week. Unlike in Missouri, some states do not specify that overall instructional hours stay the same even in a shortened schedule, resulting in less instruction being delivered to students over the course of the school year. 

In Oregon, where more than 150 districts adopted a four-day week in the years leading up to the pandemic, one found that students missed out on 3–4 hours of teaching each week, even with the remaining days of instruction lengthened. Math and English scores fell in those classrooms (particularly among middle schoolers, whose sleep schedules could be disrupted by the earlier start times on days when classes were in session).

A echoed those results, revealing significant declines in standardized test scores in six states where large numbers of districts adopted a four-day week. Another paper, , found no detectable impact on student achievement — though it observed that school expenditures did fall slightly in four-day districts.

Notably, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education indicating that implementation of four-day weeks was associated with only minor drops in test performance during the 2019–20 school year, though they disappeared in later years.

Negative findings do not appear to have dimmed the public’s enthusiasm for the idea. In 2023, from the education advocacy group EdChoice showed that 60 percent of parents supported the possibility of their children’s school moving to a four-day schedule; just 27 percent of respondents were opposed. 

Emily Morton, a researcher at the assessment group NWEA who has conducted several studies of the effects of the four-day week, said the Missouri paper was yet more evidence that the policy, whatever its attractiveness to parents and schools, did not offer much measurable upside. 

“Whether or not the four-day week is a good thing, it doesn’t seem to meet this particular need,” Morton said. “It doesn’t save a lot of money, it doesn’t seem to do good things for students, and we don’t have evidence showing that it improves student attendance. My sense, after studying this for a few years, is that communities just really like it.”

‘This should make everyone very cautious’

Still, with the continuing spread of shortened weeks, more and more states and districts will have to at least give careful thought to their possible impact.

Jon Turner is a former district superintendent in Missouri and a professor at Missouri State University. While not an avowed advocate of the four-day schedule, he has traveled to multiple states to advise school districts considering making a switch. Lately his peregrinations have brought him to Indiana and Pennsylvania, where — as in most states east of the Mississippi River — the practice is still comparatively rare.

Turner said that local K–12 leaders he had met with took the question seriously, often weighing the evidence of achievement losses against their falling student enrollments and challenges in hiring new staff. Many feel the lifestyle flexibility offered by the change is one of the few perks they can offer to teachers who can easily move across district or state lines for better pay.

Particularly in regions where neighboring communities have already shifted from five- to four-day weeks, he added, holdout districts may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

“No school district makes this decision lightly, and no one sees the four-day week as a solution,” Turner said. “It’s a symptom of challenges that schools are facing.”

The rapid spread of the trend has nevertheless met some resistance — including in Missouri, where the state legislature recently requiring larger communities to gain the consent of voters before implementing a shorter school week. In neighboring Arkansas, lawmakers are considering legislation that would establish of 178 days of in-person instruction.

Camp said the results of his study offer forewarning to the education community. In light of the existing evidence around diminished instruction, he concluded, state and local authorities shouldn’t make cavalier decisions with their instructional time.

“This is something that’s a potentially risky gamble, and there don’t seem to be any benefits as far as teacher retention or recruitment. So I do think this should make everyone very cautious about adopting the four-day school week.”

Those findings emerge out of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Amid an otherwise-disastrous release of fourth- and eighth-grade scores last month, experts hailed the emergence of a new hierarchy of educational excellence that largely runs through the South.

There’s a catch, however: That revised national leaderboard is visible only after researchers account for the wide variety of student populations in each state. to the 2024 NAEP were produced by the left-leaning Urban Institute, which has long applied statistical controls to scores in an attempt to develop a more precise understanding of how well schools are teaching children. 

At the heart of the effort is an acknowledgment that student demographics are not evenly sorted across state borders. Black students live across the Deep South, while English language learners are to be found near the Mexican border. Perhaps most prominently, rates of child poverty below the Mason-Dixon line than above. Higher or lower concentrations of these student groups, which have all historically posted lower NAEP scores, can heavily sway states’ performance in ways that may not accurately represent the quality of their schools and teachers, said Matthew Chingos, Urban’s vice president for education. 

Adjusting for demographic traits produces “more of an apples-to-apples comparison” between different parts of the country, he added.

“If you want to go to a random state, ask a fourth-grader a math question, and have the highest chance of them getting it right, you’ll probably be fine going to the place with the most white, high-income kids,” Chingos said. “But if you want to randomly place a kid in the state where he’ll learn the most, then this list is a better approximation of that.”

To reach that approximation, Chingos and co-author Kristin Blagg used NAEP’s national data to compare test takers in each state directly against those of the same age, gender, race, socioeconomic background, special education status, and English language learner designation. These calculations effectively simulate a world in which Hispanic students, for example, are as plentiful in Maine as in Arizona. 

The consequent shifts are surprising. 

In NAEP’s raw (statistically unweighted) scores for fourth-grade math, the one subject in which American students made significant gains over the last two years, the top 10 states were Massachusetts, Florida, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, North Dakota, Minnesota, Texas, and New Jersey. But only four of those (Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and Indiana) remained among the top 10 in Urban’s estimates. Strikingly, New Hampshire and North Dakota actually fell to the 11th- and 12th-worst in the country after controlling for demographics. 

Inter-state contrasts can be even more stark. New Jersey eighth graders earned an average reading score of 266 second-best in the U.S.), while their peers in Arkansas scored 255 (tied for tenth from the bottom). In Chingos and Blagg’s report, however, the two states are nearly identical.

Among all states, Urban measured Mississippi — which underwent a much-celebrated academic revival over the past decade — as receiving the highest adjusted scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math, as well as fourth-grade reading. It nearly grabbed the top spot in eighth-grade reading for good measure, finishing just behind Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Georgia. A (illustrated and by education advocate Marc Porter Magee) also placed Texas, Indiana, Florida, South Carolina, Illinois, and Kentucky among the top states after averaging all four age/subject combinations.

Carrie Conaway, a senior lecturer at Harvard who previously served as chief research officer at Massachusetts’s state education agency, said that both raw and adjusted scores provide an important lens on the true extent of learning. But when local leaders want to benchmark their results against other states’, she added, Urban’s release is “the only way to do it.”

“It’s not that one measurement is better than the other, it’s that each question comes with a different set of assumptions and conclusions you could draw,” Conaway said. “But I do think that more people are interested in the question of whose system is the best, independent of demographics.”

A matter of perspective

The unavoidable reality is that states must educate the students who actually enroll in their schools. No amount of empirical maneuvering will change those headline numbers.

Yet Urban’s alternative perspective undoubtedly reflects some authentic improvements in school outcomes. Not only did the adjusted scores for Louisiana rank second only to Mississippi, the state also saw some of the fastest-growing raw scores on the 2024 round of NAEP — including the only significant ascent in elementary literacy anywhere in the United States since 2019.

Those strides have accompanied the implementation of of reading instruction that was consciously modeled after strategies first adopted by Mississippi. But it is difficult to identify which factors led directly to better achievement, Chingos said, arguing that any theories about how learning gains were accomplished would have to allow for the fact that states “have done a whole bunch of things over a long period of time.”

“In Florida, was it the , the , or something else? In Massachusetts, was it or the ? You seldom see a clean story like in Mississippi, where they did a big overhaul of reading instruction, and they saw reading scores go way up,” he said.

Some also question the importance of rankings themselves. Derek Briggs, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in student evaluation, said that he was more interested in examining the rise or fall of scores over time rather than states’ comparative positioning on a list. Adjustments like Urban’s have value as a way of delving into the results of a one-time exam, he continued, but they are ultimately less useful in the context of NAEP, which tracks each state’s performance going back to the 1970s.

“If the perspective you’re taking is to look at trends and change over time, then in some sense, it doesn’t matter that certain states begin in different positions,” said Briggs. “Yes, you can see that the states are in different spots in the original year, but what you really want to focus on is the change.” 

Chingos conceded that top-down ordering is “always a little weird,” particularly in the middle of the rankings, because changes of just a point or two in either direction can meaningfully alter how states perceive and present themselves. While he and his colleagues try to communicate the complex ways in which academic reality can be obscured by demographics, the response of state leaders is typically more predictable.

“The states that get adjusted up love this,” he said. “The states that get adjusted down ignore it.”

‘We take seriously our role as leaders’

Few will have the option of ignoring the decline in student learning over the last decade, which worsened dramatically during the COVID era. According to a district-level study of the NAEP results conducted by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, just 6 percent of American students live in school districts where math and reading levels are higher than they were in 2019. And in areas with large numbers of minority and low-income students.

With the from Washington, states are attempting to launch an academic recovery that will accelerate growth for the kinds of student populations that feature prominently in the Urban Institute’s analysis. While their paths to improvement may not be easy to emulate, top-scoring states provide a model for stragglers. 

John White served as Louisiana’s superintendent of education between 2012 and 2020, when local schools — historically some of the lowest-performing in the country — . In an interview, he said he believed that states like Louisiana were able to reach disadvantaged student populations through assertive K–12 oversight led by governors, legislatures and state education agencies. Many others embodied a more “passive” approach that largely centered on dispensing resources to schools and districts, he argued.

“If you look at the states at the top of the Urban Institute list, you would have to say that it’s almost synonymous with those that have said, ‘We take seriously our role as leaders of classroom- and school-level change, and we don’t see ourselves just as rule makers and check writers,’” White observed.

While significant differences exist among successful school systems, White said, the unifying element is usually a leadership class that willingly embraces its role as a guarantor of student success. Those responsibilities extend to the selection of high-quality curricula, the provision of teacher training in domains like the science of reading, and the maintenance of high standards and accountability for schools and teachers. 

In a recent essay, literacy advocate Karen Vaites Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama as beacons of reading growth for the rest of the country to follow. White agreed the region has gained momentum in recent years, adding that the “golden age” of education reform was by Southern governors like Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Jim Hunt in North Carolina, and the Bush brothers in Texas and Florida. Along with strong state leadership, he said, particular features like unelected state superintendents and county-level school districts likely explain some of their progress. 

To policymakers in states that have struggled to boost student success, and particularly those whose NAEP scores fall after demographic adjustments, he recommended that the challenge be “taken seriously.”

“If you’re the state chief in a place like that, the question in front of you is how to use the tools you have to systematize a long-term approach to change,” he concluded. “I don’t see any evidence — and Massachusetts has proven so for decades — that you can’t systematize improvement over multiple years.”

But now the department she wants to lead has abruptly canceled more than $600 million in grants designed to prepare teachers, especially in high-need schools.

The cancellations include a $3.38 million grant to in Fairfield, Connecticut, where McMahon serves on the Board of Trustees. The funds supported a program focused on recruiting special education teachers and strengthening instruction in STEM subjects. 

The university was among 20 recent recipients of a Teacher Quality Partnership grant, a program that aimed to attract and prepare a more diverse educator workforce. In response to Biden administration priorities, several of the grantees targeted the funds — $70 million in 2024 — toward recruiting and training future educators from underrepresented communities. But now those goals put organizations at odds with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“Without warning all funds were swept, thus all employees on the grant were terminated without cause or warning,” Erin Ramirez, an associate professor at California State University Monterey Bay, said in an email.

Ramirez said her university’s $5.7 million grant was “illegally terminated.” The funds were supporting an alternative teacher preparation program that aimed to draw 1,350 residents of the central California region into teaching in their local school districts. The revocation of funds, including $3.76 million in scholarships, will result in larger class sizes, higher teacher turnover and “exacerbates existing workforce shortages and economic instability,” according to a summary Ramirez provided. 

In letters sent to grantees last week, Mark Washington, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for management and planning, said the cancelled grants were “inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, department priorities” and could “unlawfully discriminate” based on race or other characteristics. 

In a , the department cited some of the activities it found objectionable, such as workshops on “building cultural competence” and an emphasis on social justice activism. Grantees have until March 12 to challenge the department’s decision.

Also among the cancellations were Supporting Effective Educator Development grants, which sought to train more highly effective educators. TNTP, a nonprofit that aimed to prepare almost 750 teachers to work in the Austin, Baltimore and the Clark County school districts, and , which worked to address a teacher shortage in New Orleans schools, were among those affected.  

“Not only does it feel like chaos, it just feels disheartening,” said Libby Bain, executive director of talent at New Schools for New Orleans, one of the organizations working on the grant. The funds supported nearly 300 high school students in nine schools who were earning credit toward an education major in college. Schools might have to cancel summer school, she added, because the grant also paid for the aspiring teachers to work as tutors to gain extra experience.

“They’re going into a field that already feels hard to go into,” Bain said. “Now this thing that they were so excited about at 17 or 18 is being taken away.”

Three-year grants were last and would have ended in September. The department is arguing that under , it has a right to terminate grants early if they are no longer in line with the administration’s goals. But some grantees say they plan to appeal, and Julia Martin, director of policy and government affairs at the Bruman Group, a Washington law firm, added, “We’ll likely see some litigation.”

‘The next generation of teachers’

Both grant programs help lower the cost of becoming a teacher through scholarships and stipends that help defray housing expenses, especially for teacher education students completing their training in higher-priced urban areas. The universities and nonprofits often focus on recruiting teachers for math, special education and other hard-to-fill subject areas. The grants also pay for research staff who evaluate which aspects of preparation programs, like having a mentor, are more likely to keep novice teachers in the field.

“I have a lot of concerns over what’s going to happen to aspiring teachers in areas where we already had local teaching shortages,” said Kathlene Campbell, CEO of the National Center for Teacher Residencies, which had a $6.3 million grant that was cancelled. 

The center was working with 13 organizations, including several historically Black colleges and universities, in four states. Some students might not complete their program if they can’t cover tuition and fees on their own, Campbell said. She was still collecting data on how many staff members have lost their jobs because of the cuts. 

“If we lose the people who are preparing the next generation of teachers, as well as a significant portion of aspiring teachers, we could see a really big problem in a couple of years,” she said.

Such programs seek to respond to multiple challenges in K-12 classrooms. Over 400,000 teaching positions last year were either unfilled or were staffed by someone without the proper credentials, according to the .  

The nation’s public schools also continue to grow more racially diverse. By 2030, Hispanic students are projected to make up a third of enrollment. Between 2012 and 2022, the percentage of white and Black students in the nation’s classrooms fell, while there was an increase in Asian students and those of two or more races. A diverse teacher workforce has been shown to have positive effects on students, including higher math and reading , regardless of students’ race. Black students matched with Black teachers are also more likely to and less likely to be identified for .

The education department’s move to pull funding for the programs came ahead of its Friday “” letter putting districts on notice that any efforts that could be perceived as encouraging DEI would not be tolerated. 

In the letter, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, discouraged schools “from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.” And he encouraged those who think any programs or activities violate laws against discrimination to file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.

Campbell, with the teacher residency organization, said there’s a misunderstanding over how the programs view diversity.

“Individuals who come from a different socioeconomic status are now able to become teachers when they didn’t think they could afford to do so,” she said.

And Stephanie Cross, an assistant professor who was preparing teachers to work in Atlanta Public Schools, said her program didn’t discriminate against anyone who wanted to be in the program based on race.

The department’s DEI purge — in keeping with President Donald Trump’s inauguration day — explains why officials turned against the grant programs, but some observers also question whether they offered taxpayers a good return on their investment. Chad Aldeman, who conducts research on teacher workforce issues, said the Teacher Quality Partnership and the Supporting Effective Educator Development programs “aren’t exactly screaming cost-effectiveness.” One Teacher Quality Partnership grant for aimed to prepare 60 teachers and administrators in South Carolina. 

“With this kind of money, the more effective route would probably be paying people directly,” he said. “My preference would be paying in-service teachers who demonstrate strong results and are serving in hard-to-staff roles, rather than focusing on the supply side.”

But Bain, in New Orleans, said higher pay alone might get people into teaching, but won’t necessarily keep them there.

The cancellation of the grants also seems to contradict other signals from the new administration and Trump’s supporters in Congress. Trump nominated former Tennessee education chief Penny Schwinn, who has championed “grow-your-own” teacher preparation initiatives, to serve as deputy education secretary.

Tennessee was the first state to implement a teacher apprenticeship program registered with the Department of Labor. Forty-four states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have . At the time, the effort would “remove barriers to becoming an educator for people from all backgrounds.”

And during McMahon’s hearing last week, Sen Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, focused on getting more teachers in the classroom. 

“We need teachers,” he said. “We need people in the classroom teaching these kids. Hold them accountable and put more money in the teachers and less money in administrators. I think we’d be a heck of a lot better off.”

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman, who writes about school finance and teacher compensation, is a regular contributor to ����Ӱ��.

Released Tuesday morning, is the latest dispatch from the , a data project led by a team of researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and the testing group NWEA. In two studies released last year, the consortium unearthed in high-poverty areas since 2020, along with resulting from billions of dollars in federal assistance to K–12 schools. 

This week’s update comes on the heels of a disheartening publication of test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. While some had hoped that results from that exam would provide reason for hope, only minimal progress was made in fourth-grade math; reading scores were actually worse than in 2022, the nadir of the pandemic. 

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard, compared the sustained learning loss of the last few years with “the tsunami following the earthquake” — a destructive after-effect that has almost entirely resisted remediation efforts by local, state, and federal authorities. Struggling students, in particular, have fallen further behind their higher-performing peers, he observed.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Kane said. “But no, actually. Students continued to lose ground, especially at the bottom end.” 

While NAEP offers state-by-state comparisons, along with the results from several dozen major urban districts, the Scorecard group combines those figures with local testing data for 35 million students across 43 states, allowing the public to chart the trajectories of individual districts since 2019. 

Across the country, Kane and his collaborators calculate, just 11 percent of students in grades 3–8 are currently enrolled in districts where average reading levels exceed those measured in 2019; 17 percent are in districts where math knowledge is higher than the last pre-pandemic year. Set against the continuing fall in literacy, a slight rebound in math scores — about one-tenth of one grade level since 2022 — represents most of the good news. 

In relatively poorer communities, that silver lining is almost entirely accounted for by federal ESSER funds, which totaled $190 billion between 2021 and 2024. The report indicates that those grants prevented an even greater freefall in learning, while noting that “there were higher-impact ways to use the dollars” to speed student recovery.

Rebecca Sibilia is the founder of , a research and advocacy group that advocates for more and better-designed resources for schools. A frequent critic of the quality of school finance data, she said the breakneck pace at which ESSER dollars were appropriated and distributed made it virtually impossible for them to be maximally effective.

“We absolutely have research that shows money matters, and helps us understand how money matters,” she said. “ESSER was not constructed in a way that aligns with that research.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the Scorecard study “devastating.

“We already knew that the bottom had fallen out for most states, but now we see how hard it is to find districts bucking the terrible trends,” he wrote in an email.

‘Two kinds of bad news’

Perhaps the most alarming trend of the period bridging the COVID depths of 2022 and the present day has been a substantial rise in educational inequality. 

By sorting thousands of school districts according to their number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a commonly used proxy for poverty), the Scorecard researchers found that academic recovery over the last two years has proceeded much more quickly in affluent areas.

In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts. 

A similar dynamic has been apparent in NAEP scores going back more than a decade. While the 2010s saw gradually declining results on average, the highest-scoring students tended to make some progress in each administration of the exam. Meanwhile, their struggling classmates experienced much larger reversals. Since 2013, the disparity in fourth-grade reading performance between kids at the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively, grew by 14 points; the divergence in eighth-grade math grew by 16 points over that decade.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, who leads the Scorecard project alongside Kane, said the widening gaps make it clear that the task of general academic recovery must be accompanied by a special focus on students who are at risk of never getting back on track. 

“There’s two kinds of bad news between the NAEP results and ours,” Reardon said. “One is the disappointing lack of recovery, and even continued decline, in reading. Those average trends are disappointing, but they’re compounded by the fact that the negative trends are worse for the kids in the highest-poverty districts.”

The worrying class bifurcation is apparent from coast to coast, but Kane specifically identified achievement gaps in his home state of Massachusetts. There, the well-to-do Boston suburbs of Lexington and Newton have either surpassed their academic performance of a half-decade ago or have very nearly dug themselves out of the hole. 

Just a few miles away, however, in the working-class cities of Everett and Revere, the average student is floundering more than a year behind the pace set by similarly aged students just five years ago. In Lynn, one of the most troubled school districts in the state, elementary and middle schoolers are two years behind in math and over 1.5 years behind in reading.

The report includes from relatively disadvantaged communities (including Union City, New Jersey, Montgomery, Alabama, and Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) that had made significant strides back to normalcy. But the typical such district still faces years of work to regain what was lost. 

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University, said that education leaders needed to guard against the sense that emerging gaps simply represented the “new normal.” If he’d been told in 2020 that children would still be scuffling to this extent by the middle of the decade, he said, he would have been shocked and disappointed. 

“I think I implicitly believed that, once the pandemic receded and schools reopened, the normal operation of kids’ lives would somehow cause them to bounce back,” Goodman recalled. “I don’t know if I was just being naive or not thinking it through properly, but this is a very grim result.”

Meager return from COVID funds

The dour note struck by observers is largely related to the meager returns of Washington’s relief efforts. 

Previous work from the Education Recovery Scorecard has pointed to a modest bump in student performance that followed an infusion of billions of dollars to states and districts. But that upward movement didn’t come close to reversing the full extent of COVID’s damage; for that, researchers estimated, hundreds of billions of dollars more would be needed.

With federal funds now expired, and no new federal appropriations on the horizon, ESSER’s final impact can begin to be measured. For every $1,000 spent per student between 2022 and 2024, the authors estimate, math scores increased by roughly .005 standard deviations (a scientific measure showing the distance from the statistical mean). 

In comparison with other policy changes in education, Kane and Reardon showed, this is a fairly small figure — just a tiny fraction of by schools that adopted the Success for All reform model, for example, or those that followed the implementation of high-dosage tutoring programs. 

Kane said the relatively freewheeling structure of ESSER funds — states were only required to spend 20 percent of the aid on programs specifically aimed at lifting student achievement — meant that many expenditures were not efficiently targeted at the schools and students of greatest need. The small payoff could serve as a warning to Republicans reportedly the Department of Education and disbursing its various revenue streams to states to spend freely. 

“This is an example of bypassing federal regulators, or even bypassing state regulators, and giving all the money directly to school districts,” Kane argued. “We just saw what happens: Some school districts will figure out how to use the money well, but others won’t.”

Referencing widely circulated papers by school finance researchers Kirabo Jackson and Eric Hanushek, Sibilia said the general case for spending more on K–12 schools was sound. But ESSER money was sent out the door quickly, often to districts that didn’t serve large numbers of needy students. While spending it, district leaders had to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The simultaneous and temporary explosion in districts’ budgets had led to a concurrent increase in shoddy vendors for services like tutoring and professional development. No matter the amount of money that Congress might have awarded, she added, the effects of ESSER would have been dampened by the limited supply of high-quality providers.

“There are a few researchers in the country that are dogmatic in saying that money, no matter how it’s spent, will give you a positive return,” Sibilia said. “But I think 95 percent of the people studying money in education will tell you that spending is only as good as what you can buy.”

For example, teachers in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are almost three times more likely to be early in their career, with less than three years of experience. And students in these districts are 16 times more likely to learn from a teacher with temporary or emergency credentials than their peers in Michigan’s wealthiest school districts.

“The teacher shortage crisis that we hear a lot about here in Michigan is far worse for our students with the greatest needs,” said Jen DeNeal, director of policy and research at EdTrust-Midwest and lead author of the report. 

DeNeal noted that research shows that novice, not fully credentialed teachers are generally less effective in the classroom.

While the national teacher shortage in certain subjects has been as an intractable issue that’s worsened since the pandemic, the EdTrust study released last month uniquely zooms in on district-level data and demonstrates the scope of the problem.

“Having gaps is, of course, not a surprise,” said Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Having gaps of this magnitude is pretty stark.”

DeNeal and her team at EdTrust, which advocates for educational equity with a focus on children who have been traditionally underserved, spent two years analyzing educator workforce data from public and non-public sources, conducting focus groups and reviewing previous research.

They used Michigan’s a state funding formula passed in 2023 that includes an index for concentrations of poverty, to divide school districts into six bands. Band one includes districts with fewer than 20% of students living in concentrated poverty while band six includes districts where 85% to 100% of students live in these conditions. 

Researchers then looked at how highly qualified teachers — defined as those who were fully certified with more than three years of experience teaching in their certification or more refined speciality areas — were distributed across these districts.

They found that in the 2022-23 school year, more than 16% of teachers in high-poverty districts were teaching a subject or grade not listed on their license — that’s twice the state average. These districts accounted for more than a third of all out-of-field educators in the state, despite only employing 13.5% of Michigan teachers. 

While out-of-field teachers are typically a stop-gap resource preferable to a revolving door of substitutes, they may lack the content knowledge and skills needed to effectively teach, and students who learn from them tend to have in that subject. Those with emergency credentials are also able to fill teacher vacancies when more qualified ones aren’t available, though they’re more likely to be rated as when compared to other new teachers.

Hansen noted that being trained and fully licensed makes a teacher more likely to provide quality instruction in the classroom, but “it’s no guarantee.” And while these findings do likely point to a “more effective teacher workforce in these more affluent settings, and … a less effective workforce in the high-needs settings, it’s probably not the case that it’s going to be 16 times more effective.”

Yet, “of all these different factors and characteristics that they’re highlighting in this report, experience is the number one that’s documented to show an impact across multiple studies and multiple grades,” he added.

Persistent vacancies may be particularly hard to fill in Michigan, where teacher attrition is slightly worse than the national average, and teacher turnover is far higher for students living in poverty. For example Black students, who account for only 18% of the statewide student enrollment, make up 45% of where teachers were most likely to leave.

In districts where a majority of children are Black, students were nearly four times more likely to learn from an out-of-field teacher, four times more likely to learn from a teacher with emergency credentials and nearly twice as likely to learn from a beginning teacher than in districts serving primarily white students.

In focus groups, teachers pointed to a number of factors contributing to the shortage, including the pandemic, discipline challenges and chronic absenteeism. They also reported that their classrooms are overfilled, they have less one-on-one time with students and less planning time because they’re being called on to substitute teach. One issue, though, came up again and again: pay.

“We’re not competitive regionally and we’re not terribly competitive nationally,” DeNeal said.

Between Michigan’s inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell more than 20%, representing the second-largest teacher salary decline in the country. First-year teachers in Michigan earned, on average, about $39,000 a year, rendering it 39th nationally and last among Great Lake states. And researchers found that teachers in the wealthiest district are paid, on average, about $4,000 more annually than those in the poorest districts.

This is exactly the opposite of what the pay structure should look like, according to Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the American Institute of Research and the University of Washington. He argued that teachers in more challenging environments should be paid more than their peers to compensate for the additional hurdles.

“I don’t think this is an issue where we need a lot of research to know that this problem exists and to know at least what some of the potential solutions are,” he said. “This is an issue where the politics I think make it challenging to implement at least some of the solutions.”

DeNeal said that although these challenges are “troubling and extremely persistent, they are not insurmountable.”

The report put forward five recommendations, based on teacher focus groups and previous research: prioritize fair and equitable funding; improve state education data systems to increase transparency; provide greater support for school administrators; focus on making teaching an attractive and competitive career and increase access to high-quality professional development for teachers.

Thomas Morgan, spokesperson for the Michigan Education Association, emphasized the importance of incorporating teacher voice in the solutions.

“When you want to know what to do to fix our schools,” he said, “the first people you should talk to are people working on the front lines: those teachers working in our schools. They see things, they live it, they breathe it and they should be consulted.”

Newly released scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, show that both fourth and eighth graders have lost ground in reading — not just compared with the status quo of 2019, but also the most recent round of the exam, which was conducted during the heart of the pandemic. Math scores were flat for eighth graders and up slightly for fourth graders, but those gains were predominantly driven by the progress of high-performing students. 

The alarming results are in keeping with those revealed by earlier iterations of NAEP and highlight decade-long trends of both stagnation in overall academic growth and growing disparities between top students and their struggling classmates.

Jane Swift was the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 2001 to 2003 and now serves on the , the nonpartisan entity that oversees NAEP. In an interview, she expressed frustration that the country is still “stuck where we were” two years ago. 

“Everybody is tired of hearing about the pandemic,” Swift said. “This is not an issue that is driven solely by the pandemic. Looking at this data, it’s clear that we’re in enormous risk of losing an entire generation of learners unless we show some focus and leadership.”

The highest-achieving test takers continued to pull away, or at least hold steady, while lower-performing children lost yet more ground. In fourth-grade reading, only participants testing at the 90th percentile staved off a drop in scores; those at the 50th percentile fell by two points, and those at the 10th percentile experienced a four-point slip. In eighth-grade math, scores at the 90th percentile jumped by three points since 2022, while those at the 10th percentile fell by five points. 

Another notable divergence opened up on ethnic lines. While eighth graders from most demographic groups were statistically unchanged in reading over the last two years, Hispanic students fell dramatically: by five points on average, by eight points for those at the 25th percentile, and by three points even for better-than-average participants at the 75th percentile. 

In all, about two-thirds of eighth graders exceeded NAEP’s “Basic” level of achievement in reading, fewer than did so in 1992. Thirty-three percent of students about to head into high school placed below the Basic threshold, the most in the history of the exam. 

Julia Rafal-Baer, a NAGB member and education consultant who was previously the assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, said K–12 policymakers had to acknowledge the persistent failure to alter the trajectories of low-performing students.

“If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,” Rafal-Baer said. “They can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”

Some hopeful signs in math

Even with the abundance of bad news, some positive signs indicated the beginnings of a turnaround in math learning. 

Fourth graders climbed upwards by two points in the subject over the last two years, after dropping by five points between 2019 and 2022. While falling somewhat short of a major stride — again, higher-scoring students enjoyed significant gains, while those at the bottom of the distribution did not — it marks the first sign of post-pandemic progress on NAEP.

Bob Hughes, director of American K–12 education programs at the , said that while it was critical to track year-to-year fluctuations in math scores, national leaders in government and philanthropy needed to focus more on the broader development of better tools and strategies to deliver math instruction. Compared with the decade-long coalescence of educators around the science of reading, which has taken hold in dozens of states around the country, no similar consensus exists for math, he argued.

Further, he added, a host of technological applications and tutoring models has continuously evolved since the emergence of COVID. While the best classroom use of such innovations is still to be discovered, Hughes described himself as bullish on their long-term prospects.

“I don’t think the technology is positioned now to be a magic bullet in solving some of the challenges we see on NAEP,” Hughes said. “But there are some promising developments that, over time, should help us accelerate achievement amongst even students that are the farthest from standard.”

Among results for individual states and school districts, often closely watched for exceptions to national or regional trends, comparatively few distinctions were in evidence. Fifteen states, mostly clustered in the Northeast and South, enjoyed a significant bounce in fourth-grade math compared with 2022 (Nebraska was the sole state in which scores declined over the last two years); still, only Alabama elementary schoolers are now farther along in the subject than similarly aged students in 2019. 

Another exception was Louisiana, the only state in which fourth-grade reading scores were higher than in 2019. Notably, the state’s scores in fourth-grade math were also higher than in 2019, though not by a statistically significant amount. Local losses in eighth-grade math and reading were among the smallest of any state.

John White, who served as Louisiana’s superintendent of schools from 2012 to 2020, said the state’s progress was due to a long-running emphasis on the improvement of curricular materials and strong accountability.

“There have been changes to rules and programs over time,” he said, “but the essence of the plan remains constant: select evidence-backed curricula, build teachers’ skill every day on the practices needed for those curricula, and be transparent about the results schools achieve.”

White added that the “jarring” results for the nation as a whole could not all be attributed to the hangover of COVID learning loss, and that education leaders have to arrive at a better understanding of how to improve them.

“We have to look deep within the test results themselves, and across a broad range of factors inside and outside of schools, to come to a stronger hypothesis than we have today,” he concluded. “That should be a national priority, and if national leaders don’t lead it, prominent state and city leaders should.”

Published on Wednesday by the journal , of 850 high schoolers reports that 36 percent say their teachers either “often” or “almost daily” argue that America is a fundamentally racist nation. No less striking, roughly the same proportion of respondents said they frequently heard claims that African Americans are victims of discrimination by racist police officers and an unjust economic system, while whites contribute the most to racism in society. 

At the same time, large numbers of adolescents also absorb comparatively positive views about the United States, with 56 percent saying their teachers regularly discussed the progress made toward racial equality since the 1970s. 

The data offer a somewhat rare student perspective on a question that has roiled education politics for much of the last five years: whether the tenets of critical race theory, a contentious and little-understood academic field that scrutinizes the relationships between race and power, have trickled from university campuses down to K–12 classrooms. In both his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, President Trump warned that students were subjected to ubiquitous anti-American bias in their lessons and pledged to root out CRT from public school curricula.

University of Missouri professor Brian Kisida, the lead author of the polling analysis, said that the student responses made clear that teachings opposed by Trump and his allies had taken root in many schools as “the function of a certain progressive politics.”

“I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” Kisida said. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.”

While they burned especially hot between the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, controversies over instruction on race, gender, and sexuality have quieted in recent months, subsumed by the larger disputes that helped power Trump’s reelection. But in his inauguration address Monday, the president signalled that he has not given up his aim of cleansing education of unpatriotic themes, at “an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.” The commitment echoed his to defund schools that teach CRT. 

Whether Washington has the authority to meaningfully alter K–12 teaching remains in doubt; curricular choices ultimately rest at the local level, though that a GOP-led Department of Education could penalize school districts for teaching material deemed racially discriminatory. 

Further uncertainty clouds the true prevalence of indoctrination in American school systems. Even if significant minorities of students say they encounter progressive concepts throughout their time in high school, the authors of the report note that they are far from universal. 

Gary Ritter, Kisida’s co-author and dean of the Saint Louis University School of Education, said he was surprised by the occurrence of apparently ideological programming in high schools, but that he also believed teacher bias was not overwhelming or uniformly left-coded.

“I expected there to be roughly zero of this, and there’s obviously more than zero of it going on,” Ritter said. “Still, I don’t think it’s a problem.”

‘It doesn’t feel one-sided’

In an interview alongside Kisida, Ritter said he had been relieved by high schoolers’ responses to explicit questions about partisan animus and self-censorship.

Specifically, 77 percent of survey respondents said that they were either never or rarely made to feel uncomfortable about disagreeing with their teachers’ stated views. Over half of students, by contrast, said their teachers typically encouraged them to share different opinions. While 18 percent said their teachers had spoken negatively about Republicans, slightly more said that they’d heard Democrats disparaged. 

What’s more, he added, educators appear to deliver affirming statements about race in America with some frequency. Forty-two percent of students said their teachers cited the United States as “a global leader” in securing equal rights for its citizens, exactly the same proportion as said they’d heard their teachers express support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I wanted to know if these statements were made as much as people said, and if they were one-sided,” said Ritter. “We’re hearing various claims, and it doesn’t feel one-sided.”

Some of the messaging tested in the poll veers more toward advocacy than simple observation. Along with the sizable number of teachers who praised Black Lives Matter, considerable numbers argued “often” or “almost daily” that African Americans should receive an advantage in the hiring process (22 percent) or college admissions (21 percent), students reported. Nearly one-in-five respondents said their teachers made frequent calls for reparations to be made for slavery.

But it is a challenge to interpret the exact nature of classroom references to concepts such as institutional racism or white privilege. Majorities of students said they had heard teachers voice two phrases often held in tension with one another: “Black lives matter” (64 percent) and “All lives matter” (53 percent). 

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was necessary to understand whether teachers were inviting open-minded discussion of such ideas or delivering an unsubtle form of propaganda. The wording of one poll question simply asked participants if their teachers had used one of a list of phrases — including “anti-racist,” “systemic oppression,” “decolonization,” and “the 1619 Project” — without specifying whether they were described approvingly, or even properly defined.

“Some of the kids saying that they heard the phrase ‘inherently racist country’ will have heard it in the context of a discussion, and some heard it as part of something resembling indoctrination,” Zimmerman said. “The question is the relative proportion of those.”

Thaw in the culture war?

Though the second Trump administration is only getting underway — the president’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has yet to undergo a confirmation hearing — Republicans have loudly announced that they plan to attack what they view as unchecked political interference in K–12 learning.

When preparing his third run for the presidency, Trump himself from any school teaching critical race theory or “gender ideology,” a promise renewed in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy document. Meanwhile, during Trump’s four years out of office, GOP lawmakers across 18 states passed laws restricting the teaching of what they often call “divisive concepts.” Similar bills have been filed and debated in 25 other legislatures. 

Still, the uproar over equity efforts and identity politics in schools had appeared to be settling over the last year. The prominent parent advocacy group , which has energetically challenged library books and curricular materials it considers divisive, to win school board seats throughout 2023, and the pace of new anti-CRT legislation compared with the early days of the Biden administration. 

More evidence for the apparent thaw came in by the libertarian Cato Institute. According to policy researcher Neal McCluskey’s ongoing tracker of culture war disputes in school districts, 2024 saw the fewest such conflicts since 2020, when COVID-related school closures set off a wave of parental dissatisfaction. The gradual end of online learning, along with the spectacle of the 2024 campaign, may have diverted outrage away from local clashes, McCluskey argued.

Trump’s second term will likely bring a resumption of hostilities. Earlier polling has indicated of instruction on the facts of slavery and discrimination throughout American history, but also widespread skepticism of teaching strategies such as separating students into different identity groups to talk about racial matters. 

In Education Next‘s poll, 14 percent of students — more than one in eight — said they had been separated along racial lines for discussions of racism.

Kisida noted that good instruction must “walk a tightrope” between candor about the shortcomings of American society and an equally comprehensive accounting of the strides that have been made to overcome them.

“There’s a general idea that parents want their kids to learn a sense of pride and patriotism about the United States,” he said. “So there has to be a good balance where we’re able to talk about all of the struggles, but also talk about the successes.”

Dealt a harrowing blow by their loss of Congress and the presidency last November, Democrats may opt to formulate a new line of argument on cultural dust-ups in schools. At , the party spent much of the Biden administration attempting to counter GOP claims of political influence over schools. 

Zimmerman said schools should encourage discussion of thorny issues among older students, while cautioning that educators needed to recognize the line between teaching and preaching.

“It’s false to say that all teachers are telling kids to hate America and that America is racist. But it’s also false to say that none of those ideas have penetrated our schools.”