Missouri lawmakers have banned educators from leaning on a model of reading instruction called the “three-cueing” method as part of a bipartisan education package signed by Gov. Mike Kehoe on Wednesday.

The law mandates that three cueing, which teaches students to , can be used to supplement lessons, but phonics should be the majority of instruction.

State Rep. Ed Lewis, a Moberly Republican and sponsor of the legislation, told The Independent that the law builds on prior legislative efforts and work from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“We’ve come to the realization that phonics is crucial,” Lewis said. “The three cueing system, when used as the primary source, evidence shows a decrease in the amount of learning that occurs, and for that reason, we want to use it less.”

Three cueing is widely criticized for encouraging kids to make guesses when reading and doesn’t show how to sound out words, which is important for understanding complicated texts.

Missouri isn’t the only state to ban three cueing. By the end of 2024, had explicitly banned the method.

The problem with three cueing, which once was lauded as an alternative to phonics, came to public attention when American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford and later launched the podcast series “.”

The series between phonics instruction and context-clue-based models and state laws followed — including a passed in Missouri in 2022.

The 2022 legislation required state education officials to create a teacher preparatory course on literacy. DESE, in turn, launched its , including instruction for educators.

As of this spring, 429 school districts and over 8,600 educators have had training in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS.

“It is pretty intense training,” Missouri Education Commissioner Karla Eslinger told The Independent. “It creates an opportunity for the teachers to use that science of reading, that evidence-based best practices on how you teach reading.”

The training and other science-backed materials provided by the department are not mandatory but participation has been encouraging, Eslinger said.

She expects elementary literacy rates to rise as a result of the training and other efforts since 2022, like literacy coaches the department hired.

With a charge to ban three cueing as the primary form of reading instruction, Eslinger said the department will continue to push best practices.

“We are not going to police this,” she said. “We are going to show good practice and give support to good practice, so it just bolsters what we’re doing.”

As part of a checklist school districts provide annually to the department, they will be required to confirm that they are not using three cueing as a primary instructional model.

“The work that our literacy teams are doing in the state is all being very well received. (Educators) are wanting more and more,” Eslinger said. “It is not because it is mandated, it is because it works.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

During the 2023-2024 school year, Florida schools removed nearly twice as many books than the year before following challenges from parents and community members.

Schools removed 732 titles during the , on top of .

Twenty-three districts contributed to the list, with Clay, Indian River, and Volusia counties making up significant portions.

The removals stem from requiring school boards to adopt protocols for screening books deemed to be pornographic or contain sexual content.

Florida book removals have been the subject of lawsuits claiming censorship and limiting freedom of expression.

“There are no books banned in Florida, and sexually explicit materials do not belong in schools,” Florida Department of Education Communications Director Sydney Booker said in an email to the Phoenix. She added that of the more than 700 books on the list, some of the same titles have been counted in multiple districts.

The number of book challenges may have been too high in the eyes of legislators.

A law passed earlier this year, after the reporting period for the above data, could lower the number of challenges in the years to come. limits nonparents living in a school district to one book challenge per month.

PEN America report

Less than two weeks ago, of books that had been removed from Florida school libraries during the 2023-2024 school year.

By PEN America’s count, schools removed about 4,500 books from Florida libraries. The methodology between the freedom of expression advocacy organization and the state differs, though.

PEN’s list includes books temporarily removed while awaiting a final decision from the school board, and administrative removals, another method to take books off shelves.

The state’s count includes only books removed by school boards and does not include books removed pending challenges.

By PEN’s tally, Florida removed more books than any other state during the previous school year.

and several authors of removed books argues state definitions of “pornographic” and “describes sexual content” are unconstitutional and have resulted in censorship.

The publishers argue that “vagueness and ambiguity result in overbroad interpretations of [the law’s] prohibition on content that describes sexual conduct and chill protected speech.”

The Florida Department of Education stands by the limitations put on school libraries.

“Once again, far left activists are pushing the book ban hoax on Floridians,” Booker said. “The better question is why do these activists continue to fight to expose children to sexually explicit materials.”

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A cohort of book publishers and award-winning authors have filed a legal challenge to the 2023 Florida law that enables challenges to books in school libraries.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Orlando, alleges that the process of removing books from school libraries spelled out in  is overbroad and has caused a chilling effect.

The action names members of the Florida Board of Education and Orange and Volusia County school board members as defendants.

HB 1069 has enabled parents to seek removal of materials from schools if school boards deem them to be pornographic or contain sexual content, in line with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “parental rights” agenda.

The publishers and authors are asking the court to deem the state’s interpretation of “pornographic” and content that “describes sexual conduct” unconstitutional.

“The State has mandated that school districts impose a regime of strict censorship in school libraries,” the plaintiffs argued in a 93-page complaint. “HB 1069 requires school districts to remove library books without regard to their literary, artistic, political, scientific, or educational value when taken as a whole.”

The plaintiffs are Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster, Sourcebooks, and the Authors Guild, plus authors Julia Alvarez, John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, Jodi Picoult, and Angie Thomas.

Two parents joined the suit, one from Orange and the other from Volusia, arguing for their children to be able to check out books that have been removed by challenges permitted by the law.

They argue the law does not specify a level or amount of detail to determine if a book “describes sexual conduct.”

Overbroad

The law has created a chilling effect, the plaintiffs argue.

“The term ‘describes sexual conduct’ is so broad that it would require removal of the Oxford English Dictionary — which defines ‘sex’ as ‘physical activity between two people in which the touch each other’s sexual organs, and which may include sexual intercourse’ — from school libraries. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, is not obscene,” the lawsuit reads.

“This vagueness and ambiguity result in overbroad interpretations of [the law’s] prohibition on content that describes sexual conduct and chill protected speech.”

In an email response to the Phoenix, Department of Education communications director Sydney Booker said the lawsuit is a “stunt.”

“There are no banned books in Florida. Sexually explicit material and instruction are not suitable for schools,” she said.

The publishers call for the state government to keep hands off, even in school libraries.

“Authors have the right to communicate their ideas to students without undue interference from the government,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Students have a corresponding right to receive those ideas. Publishers and educators connect authors to students. If the State of Florida dislikes an author’s idea, it can offer a competing message. It cannot suppress the disfavored message.”

‘Not remotely obscene’

The plaintiffs argue that they do not wish to prevent schools from ensuring school libraries do not have obscene materials. Instead, their problem is with removing books deemed to be “pornographic that are not remotely obscene resulting from the Florida State Board of Education’s unconstitutional construction of the term ‘pornographic.’”

The plaintiffs list several books they believe should not have been deemed inappropriate by school boards, including Alvarez’s “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” Anderson’s “Speak,” Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes” and “Change of Heart,” and Thomas’s “Concrete Rose” and “The Hate U Give.”

“As publishers dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and the right to read, the rise in book bans across the country continues to demand our collective action,” the publishers said in a .

“Fighting unconstitutional legislation in Florida and across the country is an urgent priority. We are unwavering in our support for educators, librarians, students, authors, readers — everyone deserves access to books and stories that show different perspectives and viewpoints.”

The publishers have also taken over a similar law and challenged the constitutionality book removals in .

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

This story was updated on May 28 at 5 p.m.

Patrick Keefe says he just wanted to teach Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”

The high school English teacher has long included the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about slavery in his curriculum at Litchfield’s Campbell High School. And in the past, he had questioned students about whether Morrison’s themes about the legacy of slavery applied to the present.

But after a state law passed in 2021 that regulated how teachers may talk about race and other concepts to students, Keefe became more cautious, he testified in a deposition last year. Any student-led discussion about structural racism might lead to a complaint under the new law, and might cause Keefe to lose his teaching license, he feared.

On Tuesday, a federal judge cited Keefe and other teachers’ examples in an order striking down the law, siding with teachers unions and the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire and ruling that the law is unconstitutionally vague.

In , Judge Paul Barbadoro held that the law, known by opponents as the “divisive concepts” or “banned concepts” law, violated teachers’ 14th Amendment rights because it is too vague for them to follow.

“The Amendments are viewpoint-based restrictions on speech that do not provide either fair warning to educators of what they prohibit or sufficient standards for law enforcement to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” Barbadoro wrote, referring to the statutory changes passed by the law.

The law prohibits K-12 public school staff from any instruction that advocates for four concepts: that a person of any race, gender, sexual orientation, or other characteristic is inherently “superior” to another; that any individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive against another for any characteristic; that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment for any characteristic; and that people of one characteristic “cannot and should not attempt to treat others without regard to” one of their characteristics.

The characteristics covered by the law are a person’s “age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color, marital status, familial status, mental or physical disability, religion, or national origin.”

The law, which was in part modeled after an executive order by President Donald Trump that applied to federal employees and was repealed by President Joe Biden, was presented by Republican lawmakers as an anti-discrimination statute meant to ensure that all students were treated equally. It came as Republican lawmakers raised concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts implemented in public schools, and argued that teachers were espousing “critical race theory” in classrooms.

The law allowed parents to bring complaints to the state’s Commission for Human Rights against teachers and school staff who they believed violated the new anti-discrimination statute. And it gave the State Board of Education the power to revoke educators’ teaching licenses if they were found by the commission to be in violation.

But teachers unions and others raised concerns that the prohibited concepts were too unclear to follow and would result in educators self-censoring instruction around certain topics such as race or gender for fear of losing their teaching credentials.

In his order Tuesday, Barbadoro sided with the state’s two teachers unions – the National Education Association of New Hampshire (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers of New Hampshire (AFT) – who had argued that the law violated their 14th Amendment rights because it did not provide clear guidance of what teachers should or shouldn’t teach.

Barbadoro’s ruling grants “declaratory relief” to plaintiffs, meaning he is ruling that the law is unconstitutional, but it does not grant “injunctive relief” – a stricter ruling that would have stopped the state from carrying out the law. In his order, Barbadoro wrote that he didn’t believe he needed the latter relief because he believed the state would respect the ruling and stop enforcing the law.

The ruling was a setback for the state, which had argued that the Attorney General’s Office had given teachers sufficient guidance in a “Frequently Asked Questions” released in 2021 that outlined scenarios in which teachers would violate or not violate the law.

There are no known cases of New Hampshire teachers who have been found by the Commission for Human Rights to have violated the law.

But Barbadoro said there were a number of scenarios that the FAQs did not address. One such unanswered question centered on Keefe’s attempts to teach “Beloved.”&�Բ�����;

According to his deposition, Keefe had asked for clarity from his school’s administration but “was told there was none available other than the Attorney General’s Frequently Asked Questions,” Barbadoro noted.

Barbadoro also noted the example of Jennifer Given, a former high school social studies teacher at the Hollis Brookline High School who “felt the need to significantly modify her teaching methods ‘out of fear that [she] would be accused of’ violating the Amendments, regardless of whether she was actually doing so.”

And he argued that the uncertainty applied to extracurricular activities as well, citing the testimony of Ryan Richman, a high school history teacher at Timberlane Regional High School. Richman said as a faculty adviser for the school’s Model United Nations team, he felt the law hampered his ability to help students for their competition in fear of saying something that might be seen as a violation.

Barbadoro used the examples to bolster his larger conclusion.

“The Amendments are vague not because they subject teachers to severe professional sanctions, but because they fail to provide teachers with sufficient notice of what is prohibited and raise the specter of arbitrary and discretionary enforcement,” he ruled.

He also said that the vagueness would allow state officials to apply their own arbitrary interpretations to enforcement.

“… Because the Amendments fail to establish ‘minimal guidelines to govern [their] enforcement,’ officials are free to ‘pursue their personal predilections’ when applying the law,” Barbadoro wrote.

The decision was hailed by the plaintiffs; Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, called it “a victory for academic freedom and an inclusive education for all New Hampshire students.”

“New Hampshire’s ‘banned concepts’ law stifled New Hampshire teachers’ efforts to provide a true and honest education,” agreed NEA-NH President Megan Tuttle in a statement. “Students, families, and educators should rejoice over this court ruling which restores the teaching of truth and the right to learn for all Granite State students.”

And it was cheered on by Democrats, including the two lead Democratic candidates for governor. Former Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig praised the plaintiffs who “fought this unconstitutional law.” In her own statement, Executive Councilor Cinde Warmington said, “Teachers should be free to teach – the truth – and students should be free to learn.”

Republicans said they would redouble efforts to pass the bill. In a statement, former state Senate President Chuck Morse, a Republican candidate for governor who had helped push for the law in the Senate, said he was “deeply disappointed” in the decision but vowed to press on.

“As Governor, I will work tirelessly with lawmakers, educators, and community leaders to draft and pass a stronger bill that addresses the court’s concerns while keeping our fundamental goal intact: to prevent the dissemination of any materials that promote racial superiority or inferiority,” Morse said.

In a post on X, State Rep. Keith Ammon, a New Boston Republican, wrote: “Judge Barbadoro just put stopping Critical Race Theory back on the ballot in November.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that he will sign legislation restricting challenges to books in public schools, blaming “activist” teachers and others of making a “mockery” of his parental rights legislation by filing frivolous challenges.

The 2021 Parental Rights in Education Act, sometimes referred to as “Don’t Say Gay,” allows parents the opportunity to review, and potentially object to, school library books that they find “inappropriate,” with the goal of removing questionable material from school libraries, even if other families are OK with the content.

Especially targeted was LGBTQ content.

What followed were wholesale challenges to books and other material, requiring their removal from libraries and classrooms pending sometimes protracted reviews of their suitability.

Legislation passed during this year’s legislative session () allows only one challenge per month unless the challenge comes from the parent or guardian of a child in a public school.

“It is done intentionally, and it is part of an agenda, and that’s wrong,” DeSantis said during a news conference.

“I mean, schools are there to serve a community. Schools are not there for you to try to go on some ideological joyride at the expense of our kids,” he said.

The Legislature hasn’t sent the bill to DeSantis yet, but he said that he will sign it once that happens.

DeSantis appeared at Warrington Preparatory Academy, a charter school that opened last year at the site of a consistently poorly performing public school.

The bill is an omnibus pertaining to state education policy. The governor highlighted the book challenge changes plus language that expedites charter conversions, requiring districts to allow charter operators access to the facilities to devise a turnaround plan. Districts couldn’t remove resources or charge rent and would have to maintain the building. Children in the public-school zone would be first in line for charter school admission.

‘The Bluest Eye’

House member Jennifer Canady, a Republican from Polk County, mentioned a new bar on placing students in dropout prevention programs “solely because of a disability.” Students who are placed in those programs would be entitled to individualized goals “so we are focused on what they need to do in order to be successful,” she said.

“This bill is going to require that we treat students as the individuals that they are and make sure that they are in the best learning environment for them,” Canady added.

As for book challenges, in 2022 set up a more orderly system for them, including review by the Florida Department of Education.

Still, books and sheltered from access by kids have included bestsellers including “The Kite Runner” and “The Bluest Eye,” the latter by the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison, plus “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson about growing up Black and queer.

In Jacksonville, books about , which are on the state’s recommended list, were unavailable to students for months pending reviews.

During the 2022-2023 school year, recorded 1,406 book ban cases in Florida, which accounted for 40% of the national total. That organization the Escambia County School District over its banning policies.

DeSantis insisted he is only after books that aren’t “age and developmentally appropriate.”

“You should not be having books in these schools, particularly in younger grades, that are sexually explicit, that are promoting ideology like gender ideology. We don’t believe you teach a kindergartener that they can change their gender — that’s just not appropriate, that’s not what parents want to be taught in our schools,” he said Monday.

Litigation

PEN America and the Florida Education Association, representing classroom teachers, have complained that the laws are so vague that they invited districts to overly restrict access to material. The state laws don’t directly threaten felony charges for violations, but the Duval County district that that could happen if they expose children to material deemed pornographic.

To DeSantis, such concerns are “performative; that’s political. You’re trying to be an activist when you should be trying to be an educator.”

He did concede: “It’s from all ends of the political spectrum — I mean, there’s some people that really think all these books that have been in school are inappropriate; there’s other people that know that they’re appropriate but are trying to act like Florida does not want these books in.”

Overall, “it’s being done to create a narrative that somehow, oh my gosh, all these books are, quote, banned. No book is banned in Florida. The most grotesque pornographic books that are in schools that have been removed because they’re inappropriate, you can go buy it in a bookstore if that’s what floats your boat, you’re able to do that. But do not jam that down the throat of a sixth-grade child,” the governor said.

“…Just as it’s wrong for a school district, an activist teacher, a school union to try to impose an agenda on a student, it’s also wrong for a citizen activist or parent to do these passive-aggressive false challenges to try to act like somehow we don’t want education in Florida,” he said.

“If you are trying to be an activist, if you’re trying to withdraw valid materials as a way to basically lodge a protest, you’re going to be held accountable for that, because you’re depriving the students of their right to be able to have a good education.”

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The Florida Senate approved a bill Tuesday with a provision for placing a cap of one book challenge per month for people who don’t have students enrolled in the school district in which they placed an objection.

The vote came after the Legislature’s top leaders expressed the need to rein in frivolous objections to materials available in classrooms and libraries.

Lawmakers have been weighing different options to curtail objections following sweeping book challenges that have disrupted Florida school districts across the state. Most of the options discussed targeted people who aren’t parents of students in the districts in which they challenge materials.

The vote was along party lines, with Democrats opposing the bill (.

But the House had already approved a $100 “processing fee” on subsequent challenges filed by people who have already unsuccessfully challenged five materials available in a school district where they don’t have children enrolled. So, the House has to approve HB 1285 again before the session ends.

Reining in the book challenges

Senate President Kathleen Passidomo said she hoped the provision senators approved today would be the final product.

“What happened is people went overboard and they started objecting to the classics like Shakespeare, which I think is ridiculous,” Passidomo told reporters on Tuesday. “So it’s like everything. We needed to rein that in, and the devil’s in the details and the kind of language and how to do that. But I think we’re on the right course.”

Democratic Sen. Lori Berman of Palm Beach County questioned what impact the change would have if it didn’t restrict challenges from parents.

“I guess we went a little bit too far when we did this the first time through, but do we know that a lot of these people are not parents or guardians? Do we think that this is going to truly make a difference in the way that our larger book bans have gone?” she said.

The number of book challenges in the state has garnered national attention.

In the 2022-2023 school year, recorded 1,406 book ban cases in Florida, which accounted for 40%. The next state with the most book ban cases was Texas with 625. The PEN America report notes that Moms for Liberty, Citizens Defending Freedom and Parents’ Rights in Education are groups with chapters across the nation that have pushed for book bans.

“I don’t believe that we stepped on anything in the original bill that we passed. What we’re doing, though, is recognizing that we could always improve and in doing so we’ve seen some things happen across the state we just want to make sure aren’t being taken advantage of and it’s as simple as that, and that’s why I think this is a good faith measure,” said Republican Sen. Danny Burgess of Hillsborough and Pasco counties.

Requirements for classical school teachers

Another provision in the bill would require the State Board of Education to establish specialized teaching certificates for people seeking to work in schools using a classical education model.

A person who holds the classical education teaching certificate wouldn’t have to demonstrate the same requirements as teachers in other schools, such as mastery of general knowledge, subject area knowledge, and professional preparation and education competence.

The curriculum at current classical schools —public charter schools — focus on grammar, logic and rhetoric, according to a of the bill. There are 18 such classical charter schools in Florida.

Under the bill, the State Board of Education would “adopt rules to allow for the issuance of a classical education teaching certificate. Upon the request of a classical school, the DOE (Department of Education) will issue a classical education teaching certificate to any applicant who fulfills the requirements for a professional certificate except for demonstrating mastery of general knowledge, subject area knowledge, and professional preparation and education competence,” according to the staff analysis.

Teachers with the classical education certificate would still need to have a bachelor’s degree, be 18 years old and pass a background check, Burgess clarified.

Democrats voted against the bill because of the classical education teaching certificates.

“No other avenue has certifications like we’re about to give now to the classical schools. We have certifications for Greek, Latin, Humanities. So the issue for me here is why is there a special treatment,” said Duval County Democratic Sen. Tracie Davis.

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A bill that would open up librarians to felony charges for showing obscene material to minors will head to the House of Delegates for consideration.

On Monday, bill sponsor  Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, called for support of his legislation in a fiery speech, in which he said libraries were “the sanctuary for pedophilia” where people needed to be held accountable for exposing children to obscene content.

“I’m voting to protect children from being groomed and targeted by pedophiles and get rid of the sanctuary that was set up in our code 25 years ago,” Steele said to members of the House .

He continued, “If it’s a crime in the parking lot, it’s a crime in the building — period. I hope the chilling effect chills the pedophiles. We’re not going to create a safe space for them.”

Libraries are currently exempt from state law that bans displaying or disseminating obscene materials to minors.

The legislation, , had stalled for a few weeks after a in late January, where some people in support of the bill read outloud graphic sexual material they said was found in school libraries. Those opposing the legislation, including several librarians, said the bill would open libraries to potential costly prosecution.

The Judiciary Committee took it up again and passed it through with a 21-3 vote.

The committee’s three Democrat members voted against the bill, citing concerns over censorship and the measure’s failure to define obscene. They said its broad definition could lead to community members challenging the display of the Bible or the “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

“While this bill doesn’t technically ban books, the impact of the bill is to remove books from our shelves,” said Del. Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia.

Hansen also pointed out the potential cost to librarians, some of whom are employed by schools.

An attorney for the Legislature told lawmakers that the librarians would be on the hook for their own legal fees.

Librarians could face a $25,000 fine or five years in prison under the state’s obscenity regarding minors.

Megan Tarbett, president of the West Virginia Library Association, told lawmakers during a lengthy bill debate that the state’s 171 public libraries already had a system in place to decide what types of books are appropriate to display. There is a separate system for patrons, including parents, to challenge the inclusion of a book in the library.

Around 50 books had been challenged, Tarbett estimated.

“A handful of library systems have had multiple challenges to their collections, but it is not widespread,” she said. “5.2 million items were borrowed from libraries last year. Out of 1.2 million library books borrowed last year, the vast majority were checked out on a parent’s card — not the children’s card.”

In response, Del. Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, said, “We learned here today that there’s a challenge process that’s being followed.

“This bill has been sitting here for years. Nothing crazy has happened, we’ve just run out of bills to use for political purposes. The bill probably isn’t going to do a whole lot, but it’s going to have some librarians fear they got locked up.”

Del. J.B. Akers, R-Kanawha, questioned if the library’s screening system was adequate. He presented a photocopied page from “Gender Queer,” a book that Tarbett said was typically shelved in the adult graphic novel section of the library.

Akers asked Tarbett to describe what was displayed.

“I do believe it is a sexual act,” she responded.

Akers, a parent, said he was in full support of the legislation, which he said wasn’t aimed at banning books. “We’re saying don’t put this in the school library. These are graphic, sexual novels,” he explained.

Tarbett also warned lawmakers that the bill could lead to staffing challenges as librarians could fear prosecution. The state’s universities don’t offer a degree in library sciences, so the libraries rely on out-of-state applicants to fill jobs.

The bill will need to be taken up by the full House by Feb. 25.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on and .

Wisconsin’s Kenosha Unified School District removed four books from school libraries this year, joining a nationwide debate about removing books from schools. The books, which focused on LGBTQ topics and characters, were purged for having “pornographic material,” one school board member explained on social media. While their removal satisfied some residents, others worry about the effects on vulnerable kids.

On Sept. 8, Kenosha Unified School District School Board member Eric Meadows posted on Facebook about the book removals.

“A few weeks ago, several parents in the community looked into reportedly explicit books in our libraries,” Meadows said in the post. “See my previous post about this. Since then, a national spotlight has shined on this same topic. A number of graphic books were identified as being in some of our schools through numerous open records requests from several people. The following books have been removed from our libraries, not because of the LGBT nature of them, but because of overtly explicit and obscene pictures and descriptions.”

The post identifies the books as This Book is Gay, Gender Queer, Let’s Talk About It, and All Boys Aren’t Blue. “I am opposed to exposing children to any pornographic material in school, whether LGBT or heterosexual. Neither belong in public schools,” Meadows wrote in his post. “I will work towards clarifying our policy to ensure this doesn’t happen again. I will receive a lot of anger from some in the community just for writing this. I don’t care. My first priority will be to protect the innocence of our children.”

Meadows accused the Wisconsin Examiner of bias when reached for comment. He added that the district “removed a few books because they were sexually explicit. Those books are widely available to purchase and at the public library. … I stand by my Facebook post.”

The Kenosha Unified School District didn’t respond to requests for comment.

When she heard about the removals, Kenosha resident Amanda Becker said she was “left disappointed on a few different levels. I was disappointed that it was specifically LGBTQ+ content that was being targeted. And I was disappointed that this was happening at all.”

“It’s a form of censorship and I don’t agree with it,” Becker added.

Barb Farrar, director of the Southeast Wisconsin LGBT Center, said the fallout for students from removing books shouldn’t be downplayed. “As an LGBT person, any time people are talking about taking away your freedom to read literature for young people, it’s really hurtful,” Farrar told Wisconsin Examiner. To help educate community members and defeat stigma, the Center runs its own LGBTQ book club. “It’s always by learning that you truly understand what some else’s experience is,” she continued. Taking the books away from students “is depriving them of access to being able to broaden their understanding and appreciation of others, as well as potentially their own identities.”

Becker’s daughter, Ruby, who recently graduated from high school in Kenosha, remembers what it was like to come out to her classmates “Harry Styles, the pop artist, actually helped me come out at one of his concerts,” she says. “Pretty public coming-out my senior year, but even before that people kind of knew.” Prior to attending the KUSD during her high school years, Becker went to a Catholic school. “The change in my surroundings definitely helped me to come to terms with that part of myself.” She says, “If I didn’t change schools, I don’t know who I’d be today.” Becker added, “It was just nice finding people like me, or people who are also queer but are either non-binary, trans, just other queer experiences.”

Despite finding people like her, Becker also encountered students who bullied LGBTQ students. Becker fears that things could change for students still attending Kenosha schools. She recalled conversations about banning flags and banners at school including Black Lives Matter flags, LGBTQ flags, and other banners. Becker recalled that, “teachers were always kind of told to stay away from ‘controversial topics which, I don’t know, my identity is not controversial, but whatever.”

Farrar recalled attending annual school board meetings, where she noticed a strong anti-LGBTQ contingent among the attendees. There, Farrar told Wisconsin Examiner, “some people were referencing banning books… trying to interject that into the meeting.”

“Everything started to get a lot more aggressive,” Becker says of school board meetings since the pandemic, “where people weren’t necessarily talking to each other, but more so talking at each other and kind of screaming, to where the winner was whose voice was heard the loudest.” At  county budget hearings, a vocal group organized to cut education funding. “So I think that the book thing is just the next item on the list,” says Becker.

Becker read Gender Queer and This Book Is Gay. “I thought it was good,” she says. “It was a coming-of-age story about a child discovering their gender identity. And I picked it up because my older daughter has some friends that fall into the various areas of the LGBTQ+ spectrum.” It took time for Becker herself to understand LGBTQ issues, and reading the book was part of that journey. “I wanted to be able to understand it better, and I wanted to support my child and her friends.” Farrar also read some of the books during the Center’s book club, and found them to be “phenomenal.” She said, “all of those books” are useful for students trying to figure themselves out.

Farrar says she has heard children repeating things they heard at home, bullying LGBTQ classmates. “We’ve had examples of young children saying really hurtful things like LGBTQ students shouldn’t exist, or they shouldn’t be allowed to live,” said Farrar. “I mean just really, really hateful things.”

“It’s very targeted, and it feels organized, and very political at this time,” says Farrar.

Policies banning and restricting books in schools have grown across Wisconsin since 2020. This week reports, the school district of Menomonee Falls removed more than 33 books from the high school library including titles on the Advanced Placement English Literature reading list, including The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, because they were deemed “too sexually explicit” for students.

Last year, on a list of books furnished to Republican lawmakers by concerned parents. The books largely covered LGBTQ topics, but some also touched on racial inequality and discrimination. In an email to now Sen. Jesse James (R-Altoona), one parent described having seen books which she felt taught “our kids to hate cops and their white skin” in elementary school classrooms.

James used the list to approach libraries within his legislative district to see whether the books were available. A nearly identical list . There, as books on the list were removed from shelves, a new policy of reporting a student’s library checkouts to parents took effect. The shift slashed the district’s student privacy policy for book checkouts, allowing only parents to opt out. Meanwhile, James and other Republican lawmakers explored ways of exposing librarians and teachers who provide certain books in class to felony charges. In May, those efforts were . This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson, one of the books removed from the KUSD, also appeared on both of those lists.

Farrar is deeply concerned by policies like Elmbrook’s, which could “out” children to their parents. “Just because they’re interested in a book doesn’t mean anything about their identity, and that’s a complete lack of children’s privacy,” said Farrar. “So we over-emphasize parents’ rights, we really need to start thinking about the rights of young people to explore, and to have privacy to do that.”

While Amanda Becker is prepared to support her children, she’s aware that not all of KUSD’s students have a parent in their corner. “There’s kids out there that don’t, and that’s why I feel that I need to say something,” she told Wisconsin Examiner. “That and, you know, you give in on books and freedom to read and what’s the next thing that’s going to happen? It has the potential to have a domino effect.”

Ruby Becker tells current students to “find community with your peers. Try and find a teacher who you can trust, and be 100% yourself around.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

A school board in southeastern Wisconsin has rejected a book recommended for use in a 10th-grade accelerated English class due in part to concerns that it lacked “balance” regarding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The Curriculum Planning Committee for the Muskego-Norway district, which about 5,000 students in Waukesha and Racine counties, had “When the Emperor Was Divine,” a  by Julie Otsuka based on her own family’s experiences. The book, of the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Asian American Literary Award, tells in varying perspectives the story of a Japanese American family uprooted from its home in Berkeley, California, and sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert.

But on June 13, the board’s Educational Services Committee, made up of three of its seven members, sent the book back to the curriculum committee, from which it is not expected to return. 

At that meeting, committee and school board member Laurie Kontney complained that “When the Emperor Was Divine” was selected as a “diverse” book, according to taken by Ann Zielke, a school district resident and parent. Corrie Prunuske, a Muskego resident and parent, confirms hearing this: “I think she said, ‘They only looked at diverse books.’ ”

“I asked why that would be an issue,” Zielke recounts in her notes. “[Kontney] said it can’t be chosen on that basis and I asked again if she had proof of that. Which they don’t. She said it can’t be all about ‘oppression.’ ” Committee member Boyer, by this account, said the selection committee needed to pick a book that was “without restriction”—that is, not intended to promote diversity. 

Kontney is the board’s newest member, having been elected in April on a platform that , “CRITICAL THINKING NOT CRITICAL RACE THEORY.”&�Բ�����;

Zielke also says she was told, in conversations with school board president Chris Buckmaster and board member Terri Boyer, who serves on the Educational Service Committee, that using the book would created a problem with “balance,” in part because the accelerated English class curriculum already includes a 10-page excerpt from a nonfiction book about the internment camps.

“So their claim is that having two texts in this class from what they’re terming is one perspective — meaning it’s the perspective of the Japanese who were interned — creates a balance issue,” Zielke says in an interview. The feeling was that “we need to have more perspective from the American government about why they did this.”&�Բ�����;

Buckmaster, she says, explained to her that the kind of balance he has in mind would include discussion of the , the mass killing of Chinese civilians committed by the Japanese that began on Dec. 13, 1937 and continued for six weeks. “So what he’s saying is, what you would need in this class is some sort of historical context of how horrible the Japanese were during World War II in order to understand the viewpoint of the American government in interning the Japanese.”

‘False balance’

Zielke, for her part, sees “no need for this type of false balance or both-sides-ism in telling the story of Japanese internment. The American government was wrong and has apologized for the racism that led to Japanese internment.”&�Բ�����;

David Inoue, executive director of the , a national nonprofit with offices in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., agrees. 

“The call for a ‘balanced’ viewpoint in the context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans is deeply problematic, and racist, and plays into the same fallacies the United States Army used to justify the incarceration,” he wrote in a to the Muskego-Norway School Board. “We urge you to reconsider your position on the book’s use, understanding that while not every book and story can be told, to deny the use of one such as this under the pretenses you’ve given is wrong.”

Zielke says both Buckmaster and Boyer, in their conversations with her, said the district’s Curriculum Planning Committee may have been given a directive — it’s not clear from whom — to select a book by a non-white author. According to Zielke, “the board is saying that that somehow negates the process, because that is akin to some type of discrimination.”

After the June 13 committee meeting, Buckmaster got into a heated exchange with Hapeman, who works for the district as an educational assistant. She says he told her, regarding the board’s action, “This is why they were elected. This is what they ran on.” Emily Sorensen, a community member who was sitting nearby, says she heard him make this comment.

Buckmaster, Boyer, Kontney, and Tracy Blair, the third board member who serves on the Educational Resources Committee, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Kelly Thomspon, the district superintendent.

Absent from ‘banned books’ lists

Across the country, the MAGA crowd has gone on a rampage against educational materials deemed inappropriate for young minds. 

PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of expression, 1,585 instances of books being banned from schools between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, involving . 

“When the Emperor Was Divine” is not among them.

In a to the Muskego-Norway board, Jordan Pavlin, editor-in-chief at Alfred A. Knopf and Otsuka’s editor at the publishing house, noted that “When the Emperor Was Divine” “has been course adopted in hundreds of schools throughout the country, where it has become a staple of high school English classes.”&�Բ�����;

She added that historical fiction “has the power not only to edify but to transform and deepen our perspectives; it enables us to look outward, beyond the confines of our circumscribed lives, with greater sympathy and understanding.”

In the 2020 presidential election, the city of Muskego, which makes up the majority of the Muskego-Norway School District, for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by a margin of two to one. That’s even higher than the margin that voted for Trump in all of deep red Waukesha County, in which Muskego resides. 

Yet all of the objections to “When the Emperor Was Divine” have come from school board members, not the community at large. 

“I am not aware of any opposition to the use of the Otsuka book from any parents, students, teachers, or community members,” Hapeman says. “The only opposition to the book I am aware of is from school board members.”

Parents show support

Indeed, in advance of the June 13 meetings, more than 130 parents and community members, many of them alumni of the Muskego-Norway School District, signed a supporting the book’s selection. Written by Lawrence Hapeman, Allison’s son and a 2021 graduate of district schools, the 1800-word petition takes issue with the various objections to “When the Emperor Was Divine.”

These included a claim, purportedly made by more than one school board member, that the book is “too sad.” The petition calls this argument “fundamentally nonsensical,” noting that other books approved for classroom use in the district include Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” “in which most characters die by the end of the novel in often brutal and graphic ways.”

The petition also argues that the educational staff involved in the selection of “When the Emperor Was Divine” deserve to have their decisions supported. It cites a June 10 in the Wisconsin Examiner about how the school district of Waukesha “has received at least 54 resignations from employees between April 1 and June 5 of this year, as compared to 28 resignations last year during that same time period—a 93% increase.”&�Բ�����;

“Many of these resignations come from teachers who have cited a lack of respect and acceptance from their school board as primary causes for their departure,” states the petition. It anonymously quotes two district teachers about a perceived lack of support.

“I’ve never felt so under attack for just doing my job or doing my duty to teach kids about others and their world,” one teacher says. “I feel like I have to defend every book that has a person of color in it.” Another teacher says, “The anti-diversity and lack of pushback against that from district leaders has left me actively seeking other positions in districts that support diversity.”

As for the argument that “this book should not be approved because the selection committee was non-negotiably set on picking a work by an author who is a woman of color,” the petition links to a , issued in 2020, to seek ways “to support understanding of the history of marginalization and the positive impact we can have on a daily basis when we use an equity focused mindset that addresses disparities.”&�Բ�����;

The petition states: “As residents of the world and heirs of its history, we must be given the opportunity to reflect on the past and point out the pain and suffering caused in the past. This reflection is meant to prepare ourselves to create a stronger country and world by rejecting outright the mistakes of the past.”

Or, as Inoue put it in his letter to the school board, “The story of what happened to the Japanese American community is an American story, one that balances the challenges of injustice, but also the patriotic stories of service and resistance. If anything, these are stories that need to be told more in our schools.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

A significant share of respondents report being happy with the status quo regarding these hot-button subjects: 37% of Americans believe schools focus “about the right amount” on racism and 40% said the same about sex and sexuality, according to the survey released last week by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“I would think elected officials already know, but it might be useful to be reminded of the fact that their constituents’ political opinions may not be so easy to know and may not be so clear from what they’re seeing in the press or from who happens to show up at school board meetings,” said Adam Zelizer, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who helped write the survey.

Efforts to and limits on classroom instruction about racism and gender have become staples of conservative electoral politics. Despite a surge in book bans, the move is wildly unpopular — at least in theory. Among respondents, just 12%, including 18% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats, supported policies prohibiting books about divisive topics from being taught in schools. Yet Zelizer cautioned the finding could be misleading. 

“In the abstract, no one really supports banning a book from the library or preventing teachers from teaching,” he said. “It’s just when you get to specific examples that almost anyone can be convinced that some books are not appropriate.”&�Բ�����;

Stark differences do exist across party lines on a range of contentious education issues. Slightly less than half of Republicans — 47% — said that schools focus too much on racism in the U.S., compared with just 9% of Democrats. Similarly, 42% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats said schools focus too much on issues around sex and sexuality. Slightly more than half of Democrats support policies that allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity compared to just 9% of Republicans. 

On another topic that has dominated school politics, the question of who should control what is taught in the classroom, half of respondents, including a plurality of both Republicans and Democrats, said that parents and educators had too little influence on classroom curriculum. Yet for GOP respondents, that meant parents lacked adequate influence while Democrats were more likely to say that teachers had too little voice in classroom curriculum decisions. 

Local and federal governments fared far worse. Nearly half of respondents — 45% — said that state governments maintain too much influence over curriculum and 43% said the same about federal entities. The largest share of respondents — 44% — said that local school board members maintain about the right amount of influence over curriculum decisions. A fifth of respondents said that school boards had too little power over curriculum and a third said they have too much. 

Overall, a minority of respondents support COVID-19 precautions in public schools. While 43% favor vaccine mandates, just over a third support mask mandates for students attending school in-person. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poll identified partisan differences for COVID-related questions, but also found a discrepancy between parents and those without school-age children. In fact, parents were less likely to support COVID-19 mitigation measures than those without kids. A third of parents with children in K-12 schools support vaccine mandates compared to 46% of those who are not parents of school-age children. Similarly, just 29% of parents support mask mandates for students attending school in-person compared to 39% of those without kids in school. 

“Parents want their kids in schools and apparently they’re willing to put up with some spread of COVID,” Zelizer said. “Meanwhile nonparents, everyone else in the public, are maybe only concerned with the spread of COVID and don’t care quite as much about whether kids are in schools or being homeschooled because it doesn’t affect them.”

Scenes of irate people at school board meetings have played out across the country over the last year as they protested COVID-19 mitigation measures like mask mandates and so-called critical race theory, an academic framework about systemic racism in legal systems that has become a catch-all for classroom instruction about race. 

Yet few Americans are actively engaged with their local school boards, the poll found. Just 12% of Americans said they attended a local school board meeting in the last five years and 15% communicated directly with a school board member. Fewer than half — 43% — reported following news about their local school boards. 

In some places, school board members have faced significant public scrutiny and in some cases, threats of physical violence. In the poll, however, about two-thirds of Americans said they’re at least somewhat confident in their local school board. Zelizer noted that Republicans and Democrats held similar confidence levels on their local school boards. 

“It’s not like all of this activism and advocacy and policymaking activity has led to one of the parties being more angry at school boards than the other, at least in our sample among regular voters,” he said. “The scenes of rowdy attendees at school boards to the point of harassing school board members or experts who are working with school boards doesn’t seem to be indicative of the broader population.”

Despite all of the partisanship, Zelizer said he was most surprised that many issues remained far less polarized. For example, just 38% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans support standardized testing to measure student achievement. While 64% of Republicans support a full-time police presence in schools, nearly half — 49% — of Democrats agreed. 

The national survey was conducted in mid-March using telephones and the web to conduct interviews with 1,030 adults for the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. 

Here were our ten most read and shared articles this month on the nation’s students and schools:

Skyrocketing School Board Recalls Offer Window into Year of Bitter Education Politics

EDlection: Public dissatisfaction with school boards has been building throughout 2021 as American politics careens from one K-12 controversy to the next: the pace of reopening schools, proposals to bar trans athletes from youth sports, “critical race theory” and mask mandates. Throughout, Americans have become increasingly willing to resort to the seldom-used practice of recalling school board members as a way of forcing change. According to the nonpartisan elections site Ballotpedia, 84 recall attempts targeting over 200 board members have been initiated so far in 2021, a huge upsurge over the typical year. And while the efforts have typically fallen short, they gained momentum in two large and nationally prominent districts. One is Loudoun County, Virginia, where parents began to revolt last year against COVID mitigation measures and perceived excesses in the school board’s equity initiatives. The other is San Francisco, where anger grew as pandemic-related school closures dominated national headlines. “The school board is maybe the most obvious candidate for a recall in this situation because their impact is very clear: The schools are shut down, or there are masking requirements, so the [effect] is right there,” said political analyst Joshua Spivak. Read Kevin Mahnken’s full report. 

—November Recalls: The two latest school board recall efforts fell short on Election Night (Read more)

Lone Star Parent Power: How One of the Nation’s Toughest Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Emboldened Angry Texas Parents Demanding Book Banning, Educator Firings

Parent Activism: Laws forbidding the teaching of critical race theory in Texas have emboldened parents like Mary Lowe and members of her local Fort Worth chapter of Moms for Liberty, a right-leaning national organization. The pandemic gave Lowe and her members a window into what their kids were learning about racism and sexuality — and they didn’t like it. “Honestly, it’s disgusting,” said Lowe, whose members show up at school board meetings to make their concerns heard. The new laws have gotten parents attention and results — sometimes through intimidation and threats. A few quick examples: A suburban Dallas principal accused of promoting critical race theory was put on leave with an eye toward not bringing him back. At least one North Austin teacher packed away her classroom library to avoid controversy. For school board members, the meetings have become “terrifying,” said Leander school board member Gloria Gonzales-Dholakia. “There are people there with utility knives on their belts, they’ll shout at me, scream at me that I’m a racist. They’ll call me a communist, I’m a ‘Marxist,’ I’m a ‘traitor to the country,’ I’m an ‘enemy of the state.’” Andrea Zelinski has the story.

Fueled by Grants, States Bet Innovative Career Training Programs Will Lure Disengaged Youth Back to School After COVID — Starting in Middle School

Career Readiness: Even as it threw the economy into shambles, costing millions of mostly low-skilled, low-wage workers their jobs, the pandemic also rendered high school an abstraction to countless teens who, faced with unprecedented stresses, disappeared from classes. As vaccines arrived and schools and workplaces are reopening for in-person activity, civic and educational leaders are left with twin conundra: How to re-engage displaced workers and students at a moment when both groups are more disaffected than ever? A group of philanthropic leaders, state and school system officials and workforce policy gurus believe they have at least a partial answer: Bet big on the expansion of the most promising career technical education programs in communities that were poised, pre-COVID, to try new ways of using cutting-edge job-based learning to make the rest of school more relevant and, by extension, students more likely to buckle down. Beth Hawkins talked to backers to find out why this might be job-based learning’s golden moment. Read our full report.

Exclusive: As Minneapolis Weighs Police Dept’s Fate, Records Show School Cops Had Lengthy History of Discipline, Civil Rights Complaints

Investigation: After a 2007 shooting outside a Minneapolis high school, a police officer with a national reputation pressured prosecutors to go easy on a school security guard who drove off with the guns and was arrested at a nearby gas station. Another was accused of pounding in a man’s face for littering. Records suggest a third officer had a tendency to respond violently when under stress. He was assigned as a school resource officer a year after a superior officer warned investigators he could “completely lose control of everything and harm himself, other officers or the public.” The incidents are among dozens of allegations and disciplinary findings — including police brutality, racial discrimination and domestic violence — against cops recently stationed inside Minneapolis public schools. After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the Minneapolis school board ended its ties with the police department. Misconduct records and court files obtained by ����Ӱ�� reveal a lengthy list of allegations and disciplinary findings against officers previously stationed in district schools — many alleging violence on the part of police. The records raise new questions about how the officers, half of whom remain on the force,  wound up in schools in the first place. Minneapolis voters will decide Nov. 2 on a ballot measure that would eliminate a police department that’s long been accused of sweeping officer misconduct under the rug and replace it with a public safety division focused on a “comprehensive public health approach.” Read Mark Keierleber’s latest investigation here.

Will the Tea Party of 2022 Emerge from the Debate over Schools? Virginia Election Offers GOP Template for Midterms

Analysis: It will take weeks for number-crunchers in both parties to pull apart meaningful conclusions from this month’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. But the races — especially in Virginia, where a well-liked Democrat was denied a second term in a state that Joe Biden won by 10 points last year — have made a few things clear. One is that education, an issue that voters have overwhelmingly trusted Democrats to manage in years past, could be a major vulnerability for the party as the 2022 midterms approach. The other is that, with the midterms now less than a year away, both parties have significant incentives to seize the initiative on K-12 schools. The GOP, which appears to have harnessed public outrage over COVID-related closures and school equity initiatives, has already announced plans to make a national education pitch with a proposed “parents’ bill of rights,” and polling indicates that their base hasn’t been this animated about the state of schools in recent memory. “In many ways, the critical race theory debate of 2021 is just the latest version of the death panel conversation from Obamacare, or the Willie Horton story of 1988,” political scientist Stephen Farnsworth told ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken. “The question is whether this can be weaponized to benefit Republicans.” Read our full analysis.

The COVID Crisis Cracked Our Education System. A New Reform Coalition Must Come Together to Fix It in the Interest of Children

Commentary: Anyone who cares about kids must rejoice over their being back in school with their peers. But, writes contributor Robin Lake, that should not blind us to the harsh truths we have learned about American public education. A rigid system designed for sameness cracked under the pressure of a crisis. People were rightly outraged that some students did not have access to Wi-Fi and portable devices. But where was the outrage over unequal access to technology before the pandemic struck? Why were people not furious over the decades of research that shows historically marginalized students are taught by less effective teachers? Or the large and persistent gaps in academic outcomes by race and income? It is time for a new, broader reform coalition made up of all those who saw things in the American education system during the pandemic that they cannot unsee. Education supporters from all corners must come together to align, strategize and win legislative battles in the interest of children. Time is wasting for this generation of students, and history will repeat itself for the next generation if we do not act.

‘No Signs of Recovery’: 5 Alarming New Undergraduate Enrollment Numbers

Higher Education: Early fall undergraduate enrollment data suggest “no signs of recovery” after the worst declines in a decade, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — and public universities historically serving low-income students of color are hit hardest. Numbers continue to decline nationwide, now 6.5 percent below 2019 levels. First-year classes at community colleges are over 20 percent smaller than before the pandemic, while only elite, selective institutions are rebounding. Twenty-two percent fewer Black first-year undergraduates are enrolled this year, the biggest decline of any ethnic/racial group since the pandemic began. Some 8.4 million students and about half of higher education institutions are reflected in the National Student Clearinghouse’s report, which includes data through Sept. 23. Read Marianna McMurdock’s full report.

California Aims to Come From Behind in Making Sure Children Learn to Read, But Some See New Push as Political

Early Literacy: A state task force focused on getting all California third-graders to read by 2026 and new legislation aimed at strengthening teaching candidates’ skills in early literacy are among the myriad initiatives currently aimed at reducing racial achievement gaps in reading. Advocates say it’s about time, with 37 percent of the state’s fourth-graders below the basic level on federal reading tests and districts struggling to teach disadvantaged Latino students — a large segment of the state’s K-12 population — to read. Some, though, say the approach is too scattered in a state the size of California. “Where’s the coherence and the coordination of those efforts?” asked Stephanie Gregson, a former state official who now works with the nonprofit California Collaborative for Educational Excellence. And others see the emphasis on reading as a political strategy for Superintendent Tony Thurmond, who faces re-election next year. But district leaders say the data is enough of an impetus to take action. “We aren’t chasing a statement from Secretary Thurmond,” Palo Alto schools Superintendent Don Austin told ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson. “We identified the issue, put action steps in place, and plan to see what happens if a district can attack an issue with laser focus.” Read our full report.

Indianapolis’ Innovation Network Schools See 42 Percent Jump in Enrollment During Pandemic

Enrollment: As school systems around the country confront a second consecutive year of unprecedented student enrollment losses, leaders of Indianapolis Public Schools’ Innovation Network might be forgiven for taking a victory lap. Enrollment in the district’s autonomous schools is up nearly 42 percent since the start of the pandemic, reaching its highest level in a decade. Backers of the innovation experiment, which enables the traditional district to keep a number of charter school families for purposes of funding and state accountability, note that the new schools’ growth is larger than the drop in the number of students attending traditional, district-run schools. Beth Hawkins has a quick look at the numbers. 

New Study Shows Reading Remediation in Middle School Led More Students to Attend College and Earn Degrees

Learning Recovery: Postsecondary remediation has gotten a bad name, and for good reason. Students who begin college in catch-up classes pay billions of dollars each year to learn content they should have mastered in high school, and a huge number drop out due to their stalled progress. But new research indicates that remediation may have its place earlier in students’ academic careers. According to the study, struggling middle schoolers in Florida who were assigned to a double courseload in English — a remedial class and a concurrent, grade-level class — saw significant benefits on their state test scores. Those faded over time, but the same students were later more likely to enroll in college, persist past their first year and eventually earn a two- or four-year degree. Kevin Mahnken reports.

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