From the classroom to the ballot box to the dark web, we’ve been tracking the key storylines of 2023. Here’s our most memorable and impactful journalism of the year: 

‘Education’s Long COVID’: New Data Shows Recovery Stalled for Most Students

By Linda Jacobson

Data released this past July from NWEA showed that learning recovery had essentially stalled for most students, in the wake of the pandemic. The results from 6.7 million students showed that, on average, they need four additional months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels. Older and Black and Hispanic students need much more, and the gap between pre- and post-pandemic achievement for kids in fourth through eighth grade grew larger this year instead of smaller. Read Linda Jacobson’s report.

Exclusive Spending Data: Schools Still Pouring Money Into Reading Materials That Teach Kids to Guess

By Asher Lehrer-Small 

Districts across the country continue to pour money into expensive reading materials criticized for leaving many children without the basic ability to sound out words, an investigation by ����Ӱ��’s Asher Lehrer-Small revealed. Since the blockbuster Sold a Story podcast launched in October of 2022, opening the eyes of many to problematic reading instruction nationwide, at least 225 districts have spent over $1.5 million on new books, training and curriculums linked to the flawed “three-cueing” method, according to a review of their purchase orders. Read our full report. 

Seizing on Parents’ Frustration, GOP Governors Push for Education Savings Accounts

By Linda Jacobson

Originally published in January: Republican governors across the country have put education savings accounts at the center of their 2023 legislative agendas. Many draw inspiration from states like Arizona, where almost 46,000 students use ESAs for private school, tutoring and homeschooling. “Parents want an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to how their kids are educated,” said ExcelinEd’s Tom Greene. But Jessica Levin of the Education Law Center said there’s still “a broad spectrum of groups that come out against them.” Read the full story. 

Campus Road Trip Diary: 8 Things We Learned This Year About America’s Most Innovative High Schools

By ����Ӱ��

For months, ����Ӱ��’s  journalists crisscrossed the country visiting innovative high schools, both established and emerging, that are headed by educators seeking answers to one common question: What if we could start over and try something totally new? The 13 schools profiled in our High School Road Trip series represent just a small sample, but they offer a promising vision of what young people, freed from 200 years of tradition and offered freedom, guidance, opportunity and agency, can look forward to. Greg Toppo and Emmeline Zhao have eight key takeaways.

As Test Scores Crater, Debate Over Whether There’s a ‘Science’ To Math Recovery

By Jo Napolitano

Are you team Fact Fluency or team Conceptual Understanding? That’s how one professor boiled down the debate over what’s being called the “science of math.” That movement favors fact fluency, which says students need explicit, orderly instruction and must learn math’s vocabulary to understand it. Others argue that children are more likely to engage with math when they can explore its concepts and the reasoning behind them, and call the alternative approach failed and outdated. Jo Napolitano reports.

Sales Skyrocket for Phone Pouch Company as In-School Bans Spread

By Linda Jacobson

Yondr, a company that produces pouches for locking up students’ phones, has seen more than a tenfold increase in sales since 2021 — a clear sign that the movement to keep phones out of classrooms is spreading across the U.S. A Senate bill that calls for $5 million to support such bans could send even more business Yondr’s way. One proponent called the system a game changer for improving students’ focus in school, but others say a complete ban goes too far. Linda Jacobson reports.

Due Process, Undue Delays: Families Trapped in NYC’s Decades-Long Special Ed Bottleneck

By Beth Hawkins

Twenty years ago, disabled children in the nation’s largest school system had their day in court and won. But today, even with fat files of documentation and legal orders in their favor, thousands of New York special education families can’t get the district to pay for services. Now, a backlog of children who went unevaluated and unserved during the pandemic threatens to further overwhelm the system. Beth Hawkins reported in June on a court-appointed overseer’s daunting list of recommendations and the struggles of one family caught in the dysfunction.

ChatGPT Is Landing Kids in the Principal’s Office, Survey Finds

By Mark Keierleber 

Ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year, educators have worried that it could help kids plagiarize. While 50% of teachers say they know of a student being disciplined for using — or accused of using — generative artificial intelligence, students say they are more likely to access it for personal problems than homework. That’s a top finding from a Center for Democracy and Technology report released in September that also documents a surge in school-based digital privacy concerns among students and parents. Read Mark Keierleber’s report. 

The Mystery of Ryan Walters: How a Beloved History Teacher Became Oklahoma’s Culture-Warrior-in-Chief

By Linda Jacobson

Ryan Walters was one of the most well-liked teachers at McAlester High, known for skillfully explaining complex social and political movements in AP history class. But former students and colleagues barely recognize the man who last year was elected Oklahoma’s schools superintendent. Walters’s relentless crusade against “woke ideology” and attacks on educators have pushed the former small-town teacher into the national spotlight, alarming even some fellow Republicans. One lawmaker told reporter Linda Jacobson, “This guy cares more about getting on Fox News than he does about doing his job.” Read the full report. 

Why a New Brand of Cyberattack on Las Vegas Schools Should Worry Everyone

By Mark Keierleber

It was a Thursday morning when Las Vegas mom Brandi Hecht woke up to an unnerving email telling her that sensitive information about her daughters had been leaked and here were the PDFs to prove it. Hecht was being used as leverage in a new kind of cyberattack where the hackers went directly to parents and local media to issue threats and where they didn’t use sophisticated skills to infiltrate and extract data, but instead exploited weak student passwords and flimsy file-sharing practices in Google Workspace. With “virtually every school in the U.S.” relying on similar cloud-based suites, one K-12 cybersecurity expert said the breach methods used against Clark County Public Schools should set off alarm bells for educators nationwide. Read more. 

Six Hidden (and Not-So-Hidden) Factors Driving America’s Student Absenteeism Crisis

By Greg Toppo

As schools face record-setting chronic absenteeism nearly years after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators are looking for ways to bring students back into the fold of school. Here are six hidden and not-so-hidden possible reasons why so many young people are missing so much school — from worsening mental health to a higher minimum wage. 

Exclusive: Despite K-2 Reading Gains, Results Flat for 3rd Grade ‘COVID Kids’

By Linda Jacobson 

As of late February, the percentage of third graders on track in reading hadn’t budged since the same time in 2022, according to data provided by curriculum provider Amplify. The results, from 300,000 students in 43 states, was a reminder of the literacy setbacks experienced by those in kindergarten when schools shut down in 2020. But the data showed racial gaps had narrowed and K-2 students showed growth over the previous year, as skills among younger students slowly inched back to pre-pandemic levels. Linda Jacobson reports.

With More Teachers & Fewer Students, Districts Are Set up for Financial Trouble

By Chad Aldeman

To understand the teacher labor market, you have to hold two competing narratives in your head. On one hand, teacher turnover hit new highs, morale is low and schools are facing shortages. At the same time, public schools employ more teachers than before COVID, while serving 1.9 million fewer students. Student-teacher ratios are near all-time lows. Contributor Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, plotted these changes on an exclusive, interactive map — and explain how they’re putting districts in financial peril. Read the full story. 

‘U.S. Education Is a Challenged Space’: In Exclusive 74 Interview, Bill Gates Talks Learning Recovery, AI and His Big Bet on Math

By Kevin Mahnken

Bill Gates may wield more influence over U.S. schools than any other figure outside the federal government. In the past 20 years, his massive philanthropic efforts have fostered a movement for small schools, fueled the spread of the Common Core standards and supported experimentation in teacher evaluations. Now, with student achievement still mired in the post-COVID doldrums, his foundation is making a billion-dollar commitment to revive math learning. “U.S. education is a challenged space,” the Microsoft founder told ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken. Read our full interview. 

Go Deeper: See our complete archive of 74 Interviews

Stockton, California: What Happens When a Dysfunctional District Gets $241 Million

By Linda Jacobson

The Stockton school district in California’s Central Valley received $241 million in relief funds to help students recover from the pandemic. But, beset by dysfunction in its central office and deep mistrust among board members, it spent millions on two abandoned projects and six-figure salaries for its central office staff. Last winter, an independent auditor released the results of a long-awaited fraud investigation into the district’s finances. Linda Jacobson reports.

Explore Our Full Series: Following the COVID Money

New Study: Schools Prioritizing Social-Emotional Learning See Strong Academic Benefits

By Jo Napolitano

A recent study of Chicago Public Schools shows high schools that prioritized social-emotional development had double the positive long-term impact on students compared with those that focused solely on improving test scores. “How safe students feel —  physically, socially, psychologically — how deeply connected they are to others, how much they trust their teachers and their peers matters,” University of Chicago senior research associate Shanette Porter told Jo Napolitano. Read our full story. 

They Stood Up to NYC Schools For Their Disabled Child. Then Child Protective Services Arrived

By Asher Lehrer-Small

After their autistic and nonverbal 7-year-old son came home from school with unexplained injuries, Luis and Michelle Diaz pressed for answers. But, to their surprise, the school pointed the finger back at the family, alleging neglect of their child. The response reveals a startling pattern: Across the nation’s largest district, parents who speak up on behalf of their special education children say they are accused of abuse — a tactic advocates say schools use to intimidate parents. Asher Lehrer-Small reports in this special 74 Investigation.

Teen Mental Health Crisis Pushes More School Districts to Sue Social Media Giants

By Marianna McMurdock

Teenagers’ mental health has so taxed and alarmed school districts that many are suing the social media giants they say helped cause the crisis. At least 11 districts, one county and one county system that oversees 23 districts have filed suits this year, representing roughly 469,000 students. Sources say more will follow. “Schools, states and Americans across the country are rightly pushing back against Big Tech putting profits over kids’ safety online,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told ����Ӱ��’s Marianna McMurdock. Read our full report. 

Amid the Pandemic, a Classical Education Boom: What if the Next Big School Trend Is 2,500 Years Old?

By Kevin Mahnken

Classical education, perhaps the oldest model of formal instruction in the Western world, is rapidly gaining adherents in the modern day. Sharing a focus on the liberal arts that can be traced back to the ancient world, classical schools have spread across the charter, private and homeschooling sectors in recent decades. Particularly since the pandemic, reports Kevin Mahnken, they’ve been embraced by families seeking an alternative to traditional schools — and by politicians, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who see them as a check on progressive influences in the classroom. Read the full story. 

Exclusive: Virginia’s Fairfax Schools Expose Thousands of Sensitive Student Records

By Linda Jacobson

The Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest, disclosed tens of thousands of sensitive, confidential student records, apparently by accident, to a parent advocate who has been an outspoken critic of its data privacy record. The files identify current and former special education students by name and include letter grades, disability status and mental health data. “If they don’t have a system to respond in a protective, … efficient manner, that’s on them,” said privacy expert Amelia Vance. Read our full report.

‘A Bankrupt Concept of Math’: Some Educators Argue Calculus Should Be Dethroned

By Jo Napolitano

Some in education say it’s time to reconsider calculus as an unofficial requirement for entrance to the nation’s top colleges. Many high schools — particularly those serving large numbers of Black, Hispanic or low-income students — don’t even offer the course. And even when they do, it’s of dubious value, critics say. “High school calculus is a complete waste of time and a form of torture,” Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA, told ����Ӱ��’s Jo Napolitano.

Florida Just Became the Nation’s Biggest School Choice Laboratory

By Kevin Mahnken

With the stroke of a pen, Gov. Ron DeSantis made Florida the nation’s biggest K-12 marketplace. The March law makes every student in the state eligible to receive a private school voucher or education savings account. In the best-case scenario, said economist Krzysztof Karbownik, schools and families will be able to “leverage the power of competition” to provide better options for kids. But he worries the new policy could create “a whole market for relatively low-quality private schools.” Kevin Mahnken reports.

Report: In 24 States, Using False Address to Get Into a Better School is a Crime

By Linda Jacobson

In nearly half the states in the country, parents risk criminal prosecution — and jail time — if they use a false address to get their children into a better school, according to a report from the nonprofits Available to All. The authors say enforcement largely targets minority families, and they want more states to follow Connecticut’s lead in decriminalizing so-called address sharing. But those tracking down offenders say residency fraud puts a strain on school budgets. .

Schools had one foot in the shutdown era, still struggling to restore a sense of normalcy that disappeared in 2020. A steep rise in behavioral and disciplinary issues, which many teachers hoped would be only the temporary product of COVID’s generational disruption to routines, stayed with us. Millions of kids have remained separated from their local schools — not because they’re prevented by public health measures from entering the building, but because they’re simply choosing not to attend classes. And across a whole range of academic subjects, actual student learning is lower and slower than it was before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, school systems are adapting to trends and technologies that have arisen just over the past few years. Districts are spending billions of dollars to establish or expand tutoring programs, which may be America’s best tool to combat learning loss, while AI platforms like ChatGPT are transforming the way instruction can be delivered (and challenging schools’ ability to keep ahead of cheating). 

And researchers continue to ask all the questions that have traditionally set the parameters of America’s K–12 agenda: Why do student populations self-segregate? Is it better for kids to be assigned to tough or easy graders? How much do teacher training programs really help? Have charters caught up to traditional public schools?

As we do every year, ����Ӱ�� has compiled a year-end inventory of the most fascinating discoveries, insights, and ambiguities that came out of education research in 2023.

Welcome to the year in charts.

Student absenteeism is out of control

You could spend a lot of time simply tallying the aspects of student life that COVID made worse: significantly diminished achievement, lower odds of graduating on time, escalating behavioral challenges, and fewer applications to college. But the most dangerous consequence might be its effects on how often children came to school.

According to by Stanford University Professor Thomas Dee, the proportion of K–12 students who were chronically absent — i.e., who missed 10 percent or more of the school year — nearly doubled during the pandemic, vaulting from 14.8 percent in 2019 to 28.3 percent in 2022. Extrapolated across all schools, that means an additional 6.5 million kids became chronically absent following COVID. Every state Dee studied saw an increase of at least 4 percentage points, but those with higher pre-pandemic rates of absence experienced the largest jumps.

The findings jibe with those of other alarming research on attendance. from Johns Hopkins University’s and the advocacy group Attendance Works, covered by ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson in October, showed that in 2021–22, two-thirds of American students attended a school where at least 20 percent of students were chronically absent. In over half of all high schools, chronic absenteeism rates topped 30 percent that year. 

Catch-up learning hit a wall last year

But are kids (at least, the ones actually showing up) regaining the ground they lost since 2020? According to much of the testing data that emerged this year, the answer is no — or at least, nowhere near quickly enough.

In , researchers from the nonprofit testing organization NWEA combed through nearly seven million children’s scores on the , which is administered both in the fall and the spring to measure how much students learn during the year. But test takers in the 2022–23 academic year made markedly less progress in key subjects than comparable elementary and middle schoolers who sat for the exam before the pandemic, with growth in reading and math falling by as much as 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively. Only third-graders exceeded the pre-COVID learning averages. 

The stalled momentum was directly cited in on “State of the American Student,” which distilled a host of worrying trends and warned that America has little time left to reset the trajectory for millions of adolescents. According to ongoing indicators like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which released long-run scores for 13-year-olds this spring, average performance in math and reading has been set back to levels last seen decades ago.

Even if schools and families feel like they’re through with the pandemic, the pandemic — and the harsh blow it has dealt to kids — isn’t done with us. 

Virtual tutoring can work

Thankfully, states and districts aren’t sitting on their hands in the face of learning loss. Supported by billions of dollars of federal funds, many have invested heavily in tutoring programs that promise to help struggling children overcome the challenges imposed by past school closures and virtual instruction. The question is whether those efforts work for enough students to justify their cost — and according to data generated by , a Stanford initiative devoted to studying the effects of tutoring, there is reason for hope.

In October, the Accelerator circulated showing impressive results from , a fully virtual program provided to developing readers. The study found that among 1,000 students enrolled in Texas charter schools, participating in OnYourMark resulted in kindergartners gaining the equivalent of 26 extra days of learning in letter sounds and first graders receiving 55 additional days of sound decoding. The news is particularly encouraging in that it shows a path to success for virtual tutoring, which has often been shown to be far less effective than in-person instruction. 

Grade inflation got worse during the pandemic

As the chaotic transition to online learning got underway in 2020, schools had to decide how they would judge the work of students cut off from their teachers and classmates. Many opted for , including and granting credit for , out of a desire to avoid more punitive measures during a crisis. 

It’s difficult to chart the average impact of the shift across thousands of school districts, but the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) recently released focusing on a decade of student records in Washington State. The picture was stark: While the average middle and high school GPA for math rose by 0.11 points between 2011 and 2019, it got a boost three times that size — one-third of a GPA point, or about the difference between a C-plus and a B-minus — between 2019 and 2021. 

In general, wrote CALDER director and American Institutes for Research vice president Dan Goldhaber, the relationship between student grades and their scores on state standardized tests “has diminished over time,” particularly in math. A similar pattern is suggested by , which show scores remaining largely flat in recent years even as students’ self-reported high school grades have climbed. And just like with price inflation, GPAs that soared during the pandemic still haven’t fully come back to earth.

Tough grading has its advantages

So what are the effects of higher course marks? Several papers released this year indicate that they can be surprisingly negative.

In this fall, a trio of researchers explored the consequences of a statewide switch to more lenient grading standards undertaken in North Carolina  in 2014. The policy was meant to make grades more comparable between school districts, but in effect, it also lowered the threshold for each letter grade in high schools. It also seemed to affect various student groups quite differently. As expected, the highest-achieving kids received higher grades (though only in their freshman year), but disturbingly, struggling students didn’t receive a similar bump. They also seemed to disengage from school, accruing substantially more absences than students who weren’t exposed to the looser standards; over time, those absences likely hurt their learning, as measured by relatively lower scores on the ACT.

If easier grading holds the potential to hurt attendance and widen achievement gaps, the opposite may also be true. In a study that also focused on North Carolina schools, American University Professor Seth Gershenson discovered that eighth and ninth graders assigned to math teachers with relatively tougher grading standards later saw higher math scores throughout high school. And far from validating fears that hard classes make kids tune out, those students were also less likely to be absent from class than their peers. 

COVID hit social studies too

Much of the concern over learning loss is focused on weakened performance on the core disciplines of math and reading. In fact, the academic harm was widely dispersed. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federal standardized test often called the Nation’s Report Card — only measures proficiency in social studies every four years. The exam’s latest results, revealed in May, showed that eighth graders’ average history scores fell by five points; civics scores fell by two points, the first decline in the history of the test. All told, the results for both have fallen to levels last seen in the early 1990s, the latest evidence that COVID has triggered a generational reversal in knowledge acquisition.

The swoon came amid a national debate over how to teach about American history and government, with states like Virginia initiating significant overhauls of their academic standards. But the phenomenon appears to be international in scope: Results from , which tests over 80,000 eighth graders across 22 industrialized countries on civic knowledge, showed that large numbers of test takers couldn’t answer questions about election fairness or democratic governance. Only 55 percent of respondents said they felt their nation’s governmental system “works well.”

Choice might be good for public schools

The explosive growth of school vouchers and education savings accounts, which allow families to spend public funds on private education, has dominated the school choice debate this year. Public school choice (i.e., charters and open enrollment policies), while also controversial, has receded somewhat from conversation.

But indicates that, in addition to providing more instructional options to families that want them, intra-choice can improve learning throughout wider communities. University of Chicago economist Christopher Campos and data scientist Caitlin Kearns scrutinized Los Angeles’s , which allows families within designated neighborhoods to select among multiple high schools rather than send their children to the one nearest their home. Participation in the program, they learned, significantly increases students’ English exam scores and boosts their enrollment rate at four-year colleges by 25 percent. Those gains were concentrated among schools exposed to the most competition and those that previously performed the worst, strongly hinting that inclusion in the Zones pushed them to hold onto students by improving their offerings. 

A in North Carolina yielded broadly similar results, though with caveats. Focusing on the state’s decision to lift its cap on charter schools in 2012, the paper’s authors revealed that the move incrementally improved public schools’ value-added scores as measured by state standardized tests; that improvement, while small in scale, generated huge value in the aggregate, as the study concluded that the average public high schooler’s lifetime wages were lifted by $1,500 by allowing more charters to open. As in the Los Angeles study, the promising effects seem to have come about through competition for students.

Dispiritingly, however, the impact on pupils who actually enrolled in the charter schools after the cap was lifted was negative, perhaps because the newly established schools tended to employ more “non-traditional” models (e.g., project-based or experiential learning, such as Montessori) that weren’t as successful as existing charter options.

No one said this stuff was simple. 

Charters aren’t underperforming anymore

Charter schools have been around for over 30 years. For most of that time, their advocates and detractors have argued passionately over just how effective they really are at improving academic achievement. The primary arbiter of those disputes, most often, has been Stanford’s (CREDO), which has released over more than a decade comparing the performance of charter students with those enrolled at district public schools.

In the first few editions, those reports showed the newer schools lagging behind their traditional counterparts — evidence that the sector’s opponents’ throughout the fierce school reform battles of the Obama era. But — CREDO’s first national evaluation in a decade, including data on 1.8 million students across 31 states and cities — calculated that charter students receive the equivalent of 16 extra days of learning in literacy, and six extra days of math, than students at the local public schools they would have otherwise attended. The edge, while decidedly slight, masks larger variation among subgroups: Black students gained an average of 35 extra days of reading growth and 29 extra days of math, equal to more than a month of supplemental instruction.

Not all charters are created equal, however. published last month in the journal Education Next, and covered by ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo, compared the performance of charter sectors in each state based on their students’ performance on NAEP. Somewhat surprisingly, the state with the top showing was Alaska, where charter students score an average of 32 points higher on the test than the national average for charter school students. Their peers in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, Tennessee, and Hawaii weren’t so fortunate, with each scoring at least 21 points lower than the national average.

Teacher prep can be rethought on the fly

Starting in spring 2020, Massachusetts launched a grand experiment: Concerned that the tumultuous working conditions of the pandemic would discourage young people from becoming teachers, the state began issuing emergency credentials to teaching candidates even if they hadn’t completed the necessary coursework to be licensed. Over the next three years, almost 20,000 such licenses were granted to instructors who worked full-time while simultaneously working to meet their licensure requirements.

Boston University’s Wheelock Education Policy Center has followed the progress of those early-career teachers. Their analysis, laid out , presents a quietly stunning observation: As measured through a combination of school-level performance evaluations, principal questionnaires, and student scores on standardized tests, the emergency-licensed teachers perform similarly to their colleagues who completed traditional teacher preparation programs. Students assigned to them were not disadvantaged in learning in spite of their unconventional path to the classroom. What’s more, by the program’s second year, one-quarter of emergency licensees — vastly more than the statewide average in Massachusetts.

The notion that aspiring educators can thrive in the profession without reaching it through the traditional channels isn’t a new one; Teach for America and other alternative credentialing programs have existed for decades, during that period. But the Massachusetts experience illustrates some of the specific benefits of dropping licensure requirements during a crisis. Namely, making entry more flexible (and shaving off the years of study and thousands of dollars in tuition that often act as a deterrent to otherwise qualified candidates) can produce a more diverse and no less effective workforce.

More good news on third-grade retention

Legislation around the science of reading has swept through dozens of states over the last decade. In part, the political success of the new literacy agenda is due to the popularity of most of its planks: evidence-backed curricula, teacher coaching, and additional resources for kids and schools that need them.

By contrast, third-grade retention — holding back students for a year if they’re not on track to succeed by the end of — plays the role of the bad cop. In spite of the existing evidence that struggling elementary schoolers in states like and can see large benefits from repeating a grade, many parents and teachers still consider that step too punitive.

But according to , the upsides of the approach extend in some unexpected directions. In a study of 12 large school districts in Florida, which has had a retention policy related to reading scores for over 20 years, researchers found that third graders made significant gains in scores for both math and reading after being held back. Even more promising, targeted students’ younger siblings also saw larger learning gains than the brothers and sisters of comparable students who weren’t retained. 

It’s unclear what feature of Florida’s law led to the positive “spillover effects,” but study co-author Umut Özek told ����Ӱ�� that families might be responding in an advantageous way to the experience of their older children. “When you get a signal that says, ‘Your kid is not performing at a level that will allow them to be promoted to fourth grade,’ that’s a very clear signal that will likely induce a response from parents.”

Asian students in, white families out

“White flight,” as it’s usually understood, refers to the phenomenon of working- and middle-class white families decamping from inner cities in the 1960s and ‘70s as a response to increased crime, deteriorating local economies, and growing numbers of African American residents. It’s a , but many in the education policy world blame it for contributing to school segregation and shrinking the tax base of urban school districts.

This year, applied the concept to a different setting. A at the city level, the Princeton economist studied the movement of Asian-American students into 152 California school districts, all of them suburban and relatively affluent. The sizable growth over the decades of the early 21st century appeared to generate its own version of white flight — more specifically, for every Asian student who enrolled in local schools, 1.5 white students left. 

The departures weren’t correlated with any other demographic changes. But accompanying survey evidence convinced Boustan and her collaborators that they also likely weren’t triggered by racial animus. Instead, they pointed to white parents’ wariness of academic competition with Asian-American kids, who in virtually every academic metric. 

“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do,” Boustan said in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “In relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”

Extracurricular activities show large racial gaps

The most significant education development of 2023 may well have been the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case that prohibited the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The end of affirmative action as we’ve known it, occurring just as colleges like the SAT and ACT, means that admissions decisions will increasingly be made on the basis of other parts of the application package.

One of those will undoubtedly be extracurricular activities — the menu of clubs, productions, athletics, and volunteer opportunities that high schoolers have learned to embrace in order to be considered well-rounded. But if their aim is to foster diversity while adhering to new legal constraints, colleges might think twice before relying on them too heavily. drawing on nearly 6 million college applications from the 2018–19 and 2019–20 admissions cycles, participation in extracurriculars is surprisingly race-specific. White, Asian-American, and wealthy students, along with those attending private high schools, reported engaging in many more activities than their African American, Latino, American Indian, and low-income classmates. The activities they choose also tend to feature more leadership roles and confer more honors, both of which could help win a university slot.

If race, test scores, and extracurriculars are reduced in prominence, however, it’s difficult to say what will take their place. Separate campaigns have been waged against the use of admissions essays, to favor wealthier students, and , which often leverage social capital that disadvantaged kids don’t have. In the end, admissions officers might be left throwing darts at the wall.

Flexible pay has unintended consequences

The Act 10 legislation, by Wisconsin Republicans, ignited one of the most furious school reform controversies of its era. By stripping teachers of the right to collectively bargain over salary schedules and benefits, then-Gov. Scott Walker dealt a massive blow to teachers’ unions, perhaps the most influential progressive force in state politics. It was also a provocation that some credit with catalyzing the revived organizing movement of the last half-decade, which has seen a rash of teacher strikes and renewed hostility to other planks of the reform agenda.

In a study published in the education journal Education Next, Yale economist Barbara Biasi looked at the transformative effects of Act 10 on teacher labor markets, which suddenly became much more flexible as schools could opt to pay different salaries to teachers on the basis of either career tenure or classroom performance. That had some positive effects for individual districts: Younger, more effective teachers were able to win large pay increases by moving to areas where their lack of seniority wasn’t held against them.

But the state also saw an unpalatable side effect. In part because younger female teachers are more reluctant than their male counterparts to negotiate aggressively for higher pay, flexible-pay districts also saw a newfound gender wage gap begin to open. Though small on average, Biasi found that the cumulative effect over a teacher’s career could amount to an entire year’s pay.

Gifted education does little to increase segregation 

The last few years have brought a clash between advocates for educational equity and proponents of gifted education. That battle — over gifted programs’ place in the K–12 portfolio, and whether all kids truly have access to them — has largely played out in major urban districts like New York and San Francisco, where both and have been criticized for their disproportionately tiny number of seats offered to Hispanic and African American pupils.

But several studies recently emerged that tell a different story. , published in Education Next by Williams College economist Owen Thompson, examines the effect of K–6 gifted programs on the racial makeup of kindergarten and elementary classrooms. Examining enrollment information for nearly 47,000 public schools around the United States, Thompson found that the special sections are disproportionately made up of white and Asian students. But because they are so small in scope, they make a negligible impact on the overall demographics of the schools in which they are housed. In fact, eliminating every such program would not significantly change the exposure of different student groups to one another.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that gifted learning opportunities can’t be made available to more kids, however. And , by NWEA researchers, suggests that the key to welcoming more English learners and students with disabilities into accelerated classrooms is for states to enact formal mandates related to the provision of gifted services, require districts to maintain their own formal gifted plans, and regularly audit them for compliance. 

Here at ����Ӱ��, we’re also looking to celebrate the most memorable education coverage from the past year, and to champion the journalists who have helped us think a little differently about an array of issues — from COVID learning recovery to teen mental health, student trauma, school discipline and more. 

Coast to coast, our reporters have pored back over their bookmarks, tweets and browser histories, and revived the links that moved them most. Below, in no particular order, are 17 important articles we wish we had published in 2023. We hope you’ll read the stories you might have missed and help share the standouts, so even more readers can benefit from their insights. 

Chalkbeat New York

Nearly four years after the emergence of COVID-19, too much uncertainty remains about what students actually learned while their schools adapted to pandemic conditions. At Chalkbeat New York, former English teacher Amanda Geduld explored one of the controversial measures that school authorities took to support struggling high schoolers in New York City: the so-called NX (or “course-in-progress”) grade, which was assigned to tens of thousands of kids who didn’t complete their coursework during the tumultuous era of remote instruction.

The NX designation was originally intended to replace failing marks for a small subset of children dealing with life crises. But by the end of the 2021-22 school year, 1 out of every 3 New York high schoolers received one — and they may help account for the city’s unusually high graduation rates during those years. According to the dozens of educators interviewed by Geduld, the NX marks were typically cleared, either by teachers or administrators, regardless of whether students ever finished the necessary make-up work. The story gives reason to doubt whether the “incomplete learning” of the early 2020s will ever be completed. . 

The New York Times 

Better test scores. A narrowed achievement gap. Solid wages for teachers. Higher standards for all students. It’s not the outcome of a plucky, one-off campus beating the odds, but of an entire school system, one spread all over the world, Sarah Mervosh explains. The Pentagon’s schools for children of military members and civilian employees, which serve some 66,000 students in the United States and abroad, have built a system seemingly impermeable to the outside forces that often keep children from success.

Pentagon schools boast low teacher turnover, the result perhaps, of far higher wages — plus a steady and reliable budget for supplies. They also have enacted meaningful curriculum improvements rolled out with consistency and over time, creating an enviable system, particularly for children who are often underserved: Defense Department schools yield far better outcomes for many Black, Hispanic and impoverished students as compared to their peers elsewhere. And while racial disparities remain, overall performance has continued to grow during the past decade, propelling students forward, even through the trauma of the pandemic.

ProPublica & InvestigateTV

I grew up by the railroad tracks. We loved watching the graffiti-covered cars, laying coins on the tracks to get smooshed and throwing snowballs at the Amtrak cars full of passengers as they whizzed by. But I also vividly remember those cold Minnesota mornings when my brother and I would have to climb over stalled train cars to reach our bus stop. As a child, I thought it was an adventure. Now, as a parent of two, I find the thought of my own children doing the same gives me shivers.

I felt that same shiver reading ProPublica and InvestigateTV’s investigation into blocked train crossings in Hammond, Indiana. The terrifying images of children who have to risk their lives climbing over or under trains to get to school reveal that stalled trains are not just a mere inconvenience, but a slow-motion accident waiting to happen — especially in the impoverished communities these trains bisect. The rail companies appear reluctant to act on their own, but, hopefully, the unforgettable scenes captured here will propel the government to force changes before it’s too late. . 

Rolling Stone

I’m a sucker for two things: heartbreaking accounts of the arts uplifting kids … and teachers with long commutes. This piece by Julyssa Lopez has both. Lopez, a senior music editor, takes her time telling the story of Uvalde High School’s varsity mariachi group and the dedicated teacher who drives his silver Nissan Sentra 140 miles round trip each day to lead the group. It goes without saying that you’re going to cry while reading the account of this scrappy group as it comes together, finds its voice and prepares for the state mariachi championships.

What’s surprising is how central to the community’s healing this group becomes. Its leader is a surprise too: Born in Puerto Rico but raised in El Paso, Albert Martinez originally thought he’d have a career as a jazz or merengue trumpeter, but plans changed. Then, after the shooting at Robb Elementary, they changed again. The result is a beautiful, restrained depiction of music bringing kids together, with exceptional portraits of the main players. . 

The Hechinger Report 

It’s no secret that schools are gearing up for a financial storm — pandemic relief funds are sunsetting; the Department of Education estimates a 5% decline in enrollment through 2031. As more districts weigh closures, Rebecca Redelmeier’s dive into Louisiana’s largest district serves as a cautionary tale. Weaving trends that reach back 30 years and family histories, Redelmeier unveils a troubling reality: Black and brown students are most likely to be the ones grieving their shuttered schools, forced into new communities, their friends and teachers scattered across town. Even when performance is comparable to that of predominantly white schools, those serving predominantly students of color are the ones on the chopping block, their students pushed into lower-performing schools. Experts fear that, should the trend continue, academic gaps across racial lines would grow even more. In this suburban New Orleans district, two top-performing high schools were closed, including the first to offer a high school education to Black students, built after community members pooled money in the 1930s for land and construction. The story begs the question: if closures have to be on the table, how can districts ensure the impact is felt equitably? . 

The New York Times Magazine

The New York Times Magazine took readers deep inside the story of an immigrant teen’s drive to support his family by working in a dangerous industry — one that is illegally depending on minors as young as middle school age to stay in business. At a time when some states are rolling back child labor laws, Hannah Dreier’s deeply reported feature called it “a perfect match between the needs of the plants and the needs of the newcomers.”

In heartbreaking detail, the article describes the life of 14-year-old Marcos, who nearly lost an arm in an accident at a poultry plant. Meridith Kohut’s photos depicted scenes of Marcos’s rural Virginia world — characters like the USDA inspector who said it’s not her responsibility to report child labor violations and scenes such as the trailer park Marcos shares with his cousin. While not specifically an education story, it delves into the way working impacts immigrant students’ ability to learn, and raises questions about the responsibility of educators when companies break the law.  . 

Houston Landing

From former 74 scribe Asher Lehrer-Small comes this  to the Houston Chronicle’s that revealed an illegal cap on the number of students with disabilities that schools could serve. The original investigation found that tens of thousands of students with profound needs were arbitrarily left without support. This failure is one of the reasons used to justify a state takeover of the sprawling Houston Independent School District that took place earlier this year. Now at Houston Landing, Lehrer-Small used public records to report “Houston ISD still off-track on key fixes to special education,” revealing the district’s continued struggle to improve special education for thousands of children. (and bonus reading: ����Ӱ�� reported on slow-to-nonexistent progress statewide in 2019.)

The New York Times

There was no shortage this year of reporting on teen mental health and the impact of social media on developing brains. But apart from some brief conversations with friends’ younger siblings, I’ve heard little firsthand from teenagers themselves about what it’s like to live in a world that revolves around phones, apps and social platforms. “I wanted to put a face to the alarming headlines about teens and social media — in particular, girls,” Jessica Bennett writes in her year-in-the-making interactive Times feature, “Being 13.”

The thoroughness of the project — complete with real diary entries, texts, voice memos and photographs — brings into focus the harsh reality behind the mental health stats: One teen’s text says she feels more self-conscious than ever. Another reveals she has a “close connection” with her phone. Lined with reminders of the proverbial adolescent struggle, the article also spotlights the unique pressures being faced by teens in 2023, from social media to growing up during a pandemic and a collective sense of doom that overshadows daily life. The three brave voices of Anna, London and Addi draw readers into their complicated worlds while unique visuals bring the storyline to life, transforming a web page into something fun, unique and a tad overwhelming, as texts and emojis flood the screen.  

USA Today 

Diversity, equity and inclusion. Add the word “training,” and you will have stepped on one of education politics’ third rails, along with how race in America is taught in classrooms and how LGBTQ+ students are treated in schools. While the arguments raged, Katherine Reynolds Lewis — with contributions from Rachel Ryan, Maureen Ojiambo and Andrew Hahndid — did a deep dive into the more than $20 billion a year public schools spend training teachers, the majority of whom are white, to teach more successfully across racial lines. They queried the country’s 100 largest school districts and got responses from 42. Their reveal: None measured the training’s effectiveness against metrics or by conducting objective research studies. That may be a disappointment, and one that could fuel ever-ready criticism of DEI efforts, but it doesn’t dim the passion of many educators to banish low expectations, end the school-to-prison pipeline and develop a more diverse teacher workforce. “The disease in education is the predictability of student achievement by race,” says UnboundED’s CEO Lacey Robinson. .

The City

New York City’s education leaders had pledged for years to stop calling the cops on students in the midst of mental health crises, but as The City’s Abigail Kramer exposed in May, they’ve failed to keep their word. Under a court settlement from nearly a decade ago, educators are supposed to call 911 only on students who pose an “imminent and substantial risk of serious injury” to themselves or others. Yet Kramer’s reporting revealed the practice remains commonplace, with police officers called thousands of times a year to intervene with children in mental distress. In response to behaviors that are often attributed to students’ disabilities, police routinely handcuff children — and Black students disproportionately — while they wait to be transported by ambulance to emergency rooms. The outcome, for many students, is further trauma.

Inside Higher Ed

In October, Inside Higher Ed’s Johanna Alonso took a closer look at colleges paying students to serve as mental health counselors — an increasingly difficult demand as schools nationwide struggle to meet students’ mental health needs. This includes having students lead educational workshops, on-campus programming and one-on-one coaching for their peers. California State University, Fullerton is one of many colleges offering these services — a responsibility that used to fall on traditional counseling centers. “It’s really important to us that any intervention we offer is accessible — it’s quick and it’s free. When it comes to wellness, there’s a negative belief that you have to have money in order to take care of yourself,” said Jessica Leone-Aldrich, a professional counselor and prevention education coordinator at Cal State Fullerton. .

The New York Times

Hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of times every school year, students with disabilities are taken out of their classrooms in what are known as off-the-book suspensions — informal actions that are not reported or tracked, but routinely violate students’ civil rights and are devastating to their academic and social well-being. In contrast to formal expulsions, these transfers allow schools to remove challenging students from class rather than provide special education supports and accommodations required under federal law. “The reality is that there are children in this country who are still considered of insufficient quality to go to school,” Diane Smith Howard, a lawyer with the National Disability Rights Network, told Erica Green. “This would never be deemed acceptable for students without disabilities.” .

The Washington Post

America’s ubiquitous culture wars pose a dilemma for any journalist. Tough to cover, impossible to ignore, such stories often devolve into the equivalent of grown people biting each other. Much heat, little light. Grounded in fine details and beautifully drawn scenes, this article by Greg Jaffe and Patrick Marley of The Washington Post offers a kind of antidote: the story of how the election of a majority far-right, Christian Board of Commissioners derailed one life in one Michigan town. Giving birth to a son at age 17 inspired Heather Alberda to pursue a career as a sex educator for the county’s health department. In her 21-year tenure, teen pregnancy in Ottawa County decreased 76%; the abortion rate fell 18%. But none of that appeared to matter after the 2022 election. Alberda’s work fell prey to an insidious brand of McCarthyism, one that linked support for LGBTQ children to completely unfounded allegations of “grooming.” The article never takes its eye off what this political shift means in real terms: lost funding and, for Alberda, an inability to do her job. The story ends on a haunting note, as Alberda, mostly “confined to her office cubicle,” performs bureaucratic tasks, her work as a sex educator “largely shut down.” . 

Scalawag Magazine

Scalawag Magazine’s series turned the pen over to young Southerners to reflect on the issues contributing to their declining mental health. This eye-opening read from students as young as 13 named issues ranging from racism to gun violence to the climate crisis as causes of major stress and loss of hope for the future. Many of the students, whose identities are multi-marginalized, explore how their queerness, Blackness or low-income statuses contribute to the disparate treatment they receive and the impact it has on their mental health. Their remarkable vulnerability in sharing their struggles with grief, anxiety and depression are paired with suggestions for mitigating the crisis, including free mental health care, legislation that properly tackles the climate crisis and having more than one counselor at school. . 

EdSurge

Outliers always make great news stories. EdSurge’s tells the tale of American Falls, a small Idaho farming town whose leaders have found a way to establish a nearly universal pre-K program in a deeply conservative state that provides no money for early childhood education. District leaders made early learning a priority, and the United Way followed up with scholarships for children who don’t qualify for Head Start or subsidized child care. Sullivan explains that advocates developed a simple message — “read, talk, play” — that transcends politics and is attracting attention from larger districts. Their goal, she wrote, is to “prove to state lawmakers that early learning programs are good for all Idahoans and worthy of state money.” . 

NBC News

We all remember NBC’s Peabody-winning “Southlake,” which chronicled a suburban school district racked by conflict after some residents pushed back against a plan to protect Black students. But what about “Grapevine”? From the same reporting team, this and documentary series narrates — with gut-punching immediacy — what happens in a north Texas school district after a parent publicly accuses a teacher of persuading her child to change genders.

Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton describe “a transgender child desperately wanting to be heard [and] a mother determined to put God first,” the prism through which the audio series investigates “a fringe religious movement wielding newfound power.” . 

The Washington Post 

As school shootings grow more frequent — and deadlier — an investigation by a team of reporters at The Washington Post used public records to provide a raw, behind-the-yellow-tape look at the carnage of American gun violence. The team made the extraordinary decision to publish crime scene photos from mass shootings, many of which had never been released publicly, to offer what it described as “the most comprehensive account to date of the repeating pattern of destruction wrought by the AR-15 — a weapon that was originally designed for military combat but has in recent years become one of the best-selling firearms on the U.S. market.”

The reporting spans 11 years and includes visuals and first-hand accounts from the mass killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. .