For every aspect of a student’s life, there’s a tech company trying to digitize it. Inside the classroom, online tools proctor exams, create flashcards and submit assignments. Outside, technology coordinates school sports, helps bus drivers find the right route and maintains students’ health records. 

California has a number of laws aimed at protecting children’s data privacy, but those laws have exceptions that allow many tech companies to continue packaging and selling students’ personal information.

This year, Assemblymember , a San Luis Obispo Democrat, is carrying a high-profile state bill that would add new protections for students. She says it’s important, especially as the Trump admin is trying to collect data about California residents’ , , and their use of certain 

Historically, California has been a leader in data privacy. In 2014, California passed  that prohibited technology companies from selling students’ data, targeting students in advertising, or disclosing their personal information. Then in 2018, the state passed another unprecedented bill that required all companies give California users certain privacy rights, such as of data collection and delete some of their information. 

But as technology evolved and proliferated, privacy laws repeatedly fell short in protecting California’s students — at the same time that the federal government has tried to collect increasing amounts of personal information, Addis said.   

Her  would restrict how AI companies use student data and create new data protections for college students. Some of Sacramento’s most powerful players are paying close attention to the measure, including the , which supports the bill, and the , which opposes it. Combined, these two groups spent nearly $8 million on campaign donations to state legislators or other political activities in 2024, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. TechNet, a trade association that represents many of , also opposes the bill. 

The proposal, Assembly Bill 1159, would close certain loopholes in the state’s 2014 education privacy law, but experts say it may not be enough to prevent companies from selling students’ data. 

A privacy expert struggles to keep her information private

Jen King is a privacy and data policy fellow at Stanford’s institute for AI, where she studies the tricks that companies use to gather users’ data and prevent them from opting out, sometimes known as “dark patterns.” In her personal life, she’s vigilant about avoiding online data tracking and maintains a landline in her Bay Area home to avoid giving out her cell phone number. 

King doesn’t want her children’s information available online or for any company to sell, though sometimes it happens before she can stop it. 

In the fall, King got an email about a platform called TeamSnap, which her 12-year-old son’s cross country coaches were using to manage the team’s roster. The company wanted her information, including her name, date of birth, gender, email address, and phone number. Once she logged in to the platform, she could see some of her son’s information, such as his name, email, and date of birth, were already listed. Photos and personal information from all of her son’s teammates were also available for her to see. 

“I was super irritated,” she said. “You don’t need my birth date — I’m a freaking parent.” She acknowledged some personal information could be useful for a coach but said that other questions seem designed to help the platform sell information to data brokers and ultimately, to advertisers. 

Her 17-year-old son’s data is also on TeamSnap, she later learned, because his robotics team uses it. This month, when King tried to show CalMatters her TeamSnap account, a pop-up appeared, asking her if the company could track her activity across other apps and websites.

Federal law requires companies to get parental consent before knowingly collecting or selling data from , but once a child turns 13, their data is generally treated much like an adult’s information, especially when that child is interacting with tech platforms outside of school. TeamSnap’s privacy policy  it doesn’t knowingly collect personal information about users under 13 “without express parental consent,” though it says in some cases a team or organization may provide information on behalf of the child. 

The policy also says that TeamSnap has “not sold the personal information of any consumer for monetary consideration” in the last 12 months, but that its “use of cookies and other tracking technologies may be considered a sale of personal information under the CCPA (California privacy law).” Information sold to advertisers and marketers included users’ names, contact information, purchase history and geolocation, the policy says.

California privacy law specifically requires certain large for-profit companies to get consent to collect data from anyone under 16. Often, consent happens when a user first opens a website and a pop-up appears, asking if the website can sell your data or track your cookies. 

If a teacher, coach, or other authority figure tells a student that they have to use a website or an app, then the student cannot realistically opt out, King said. They may be too young to understand how to opt out, she added. “Most 15-, 16-year-olds don’t have any idea what this is about.” 

Even older college students may have little agency in the technology they use, especially if it’s required for class or residential life. At Stanford, for example, King said her undergraduate students are often required to create Facebook accounts for student groups. 

The same is true for parents. King said she reluctantly gave TeamSnap her personal information, including her name, email, date of birth, and the landline number for her home, because it was the only way to get updates about her son’s team.

How companies get around California’s education privacy laws

In 2014, California became the first state in the country to regulate education technology companies directly, but being first comes with its drawbacks. “We didn’t have examples of what best practice was,” said Amelia Vance, the president of the Public Interest Privacy Center, a nonprofit organization. The law only applies to products that “primarily” serve K-12 schools and that are designed and marketed for students. 

Many tech companies argue that their products aren’t primarily intended for students or at least that they were not designed or marketed that way. The language-learning app DuoLingo, for example, has , but the app is also popular for adults. Apps or technologies serving extracurricular programs or sports teams can claim they weren’t designed and marketed for the classroom, or that their use isn’t mandatory, said Vance. “You have this sort of black hole where there haven’t been protections.” 

Addis’ bill expands the number of education technology companies that fall under the state’s student privacy laws, but the language is murky when it comes to apps or online services used outside of class. 

In the case of TeamSnap, Addis’ communications director Alexis Garcia-Arrazola said the company would “most likely” fall under the scope of the bill if its technology is marketed to schools, if schools direct students to use it, and if the sports team is sponsored by the school.  

Public records show that Piedmont Unified School District in Alameda County, Tamalpais Union High School District in Marin County, and Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District all purchased versions of TeamSnap, but only the Santa Monica Malibu district responded to CalMatters questions about any privacy restriction imposed on the company. Brandyi Phillips, the chief communications officer for the Santa Monica Malibu schools, said the district has an annual subscription with TeamSnap, which is only available to sports staff and parents. She said there’s an agreement with the company “to protect District information and to prevent unauthorized access” but did not clarify if that agreement prevents the district from selling students’ information. 

Berkeley Unified School District, where King’s children attend school, did not respond to CalMatters’ questions about any contracts, purchase orders or agreements with TeamSnap. 

Locally, school districts and colleges have the power to negotiate the privacy terms of any contract they make with a technology company, but many websites and apps offer free versions that a teacher or coach might recommend without getting formal approval from their district. 

Last year, the California State University system signed with Open AI, the company that operates ChatGPT, including an agreement that the company will not train its models on student data. Advocates for Addis’ bill say the same privacy restrictions should apply to any AI company with access to California student data, regardless of whether the company has an agreement with the student’s school district or college.

Are privacy laws getting stricter or looser?

Addis’ bill comes as privacy laws in California and across the country are in flux. In 2020, California voters approved  to create a new state agency to enforce data privacy rules and regulate the businesses that collect data. Advocates for the proposition contributed over $6.7 million to the campaign, compared to just over $50,000 contributed by the opposition, according to . The state agency that the proposition formed, now known as CalPrivacy, released new rules this year, restricting the use of automated decision-making technology, such as the use of AI to make admissions or hiring decisions. Those rules were originally stricter but businesses, lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom pressured the CalPrivacy board to .

In Washington D.C., Congress is considering changing federal law to limit how companies interact with . Separately, Congress is considering a bill that would require social media companies to prevent and mitigate children’s sexual exploitation, bullying, and self-harm. California Attorney General Rob Bonta is concerned that one version of the social media bill contains language that could  in California law.

Bonta’s office is responsible for enforcing many of the state’s existing privacy laws. In November, he said the state worked with Connecticut and New York to reach $5.1 million in settlements against Illuminate, an education technology company that uses data to track and evaluate students’ progress, such as their testing scores and developmental milestones. The company had a data breach, exposing “sensitive information” from over 434,000 California students, the state attorney general’s office said in .

It was the first time California successfully went after a company for violating the state’s landmark 2014 education privacy law.

To increase enforcement, Addis’ bill contains a new provision — the right for students and parents to sue tech companies in certain cases for privacy violations. Business and technology groups have opposed the bill, arguing that the new regulations and the right to sue would stifle investment in AI-powered learning tools.

King said that giving consumers the right to sue is often the only way to increase enforcement. Otherwise, the onus is on individual consumers to find concerning practices and try to opt out. 

Despite being an expert in data privacy, King said that she struggled at first to figure out how to delete her TeamSnap account, only later to discover that she needed to send an email to the company. She laughed at the irony, since it’s these kinds of dark patterns in user design that fuel part of her research. 

In academia, the strategy of trapping customers is sometimes called the “roach motel,” she explained, a reference to a popular television ad from the late 1970s for a cockroach trap. 

“You can check in,” she said, “but you can never check out.” 

CalMatters reporters Khari Johnson and Ryan Sabalow contributed to this story.

In the three years since Pennsylvania overhauled its high school graduation requirements, Philadelphia students have increasingly graduated without passing state exams.

Instead, students last year were most likely to graduate by fulfilling alternate requirements, according to .

All students still must earn a certain number of course credits. But they can meet additional graduation requirements by being accepted into a four-year college, earning a certain score on career and technical education exams or SATs, and showing “evidence” that they’re prepared for college or jobs, among other options.

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The change has been fast. The Class of 2023 was the first to graduate via the new system. Since then, the portion of Philly students who graduated by meeting certain score thresholds for their state exams dropped from more than 50% to around a third.

But lawmakers and state officials have published little follow-up that examines whether the shift has left young Pennsylvanians more or less prepared for their futures.

Pennsylvania Department of Education spokesperson Erin James said in a statement that it is “difficult to correlate graduation pathways with other postsecondary metrics” because it is hard to track students after high school. Researchers partnering with the district in Philadelphia say understanding the impact of the new system in the city will likely take years.

Since the switch, one alternative pathway to graduation has ballooned in popularity: submitting industry-recognized credentials. That’s a broad term used to describe certifications that are sought after by certain sectors, like medical assistant credentials, emergency first aid certifications, and auto mechanic qualifications.

Last school year, more than 3,400 Philly students — around 40% of those who had completed enough credits that made them eligible to graduate — submitted at least one industry-recognized credential to graduate. Some submitted them exclusively.

Neither the district nor the state publish a list of which credentials students are using to fulfill this requirement.

When then-Gov. Tom Wolf signed the new graduation requirements into law in 2018, he that the aim was to give students “several options to demonstrate what they’ve learned and that they’re ready to graduate from high school to start a career or continue their education.”

The move permanently did away with the legislature’s previous plan to make passing the Keystones a requirement to graduate.

“How a student does on high stakes tests is not a useful way to decide if someone is ready to graduate from high school,” Wolf said at the time.

Yet amid the booming number of students earning industry-recognized credentials in Philadelphia and nationwide, some researchers worry that there isn’t enough evidence that they’re all useful.

“It’s great to have an alternative option, because there just are going to be some kids who aren’t going to go to college,” said Jay Plasman, a professor at The Ohio State University who has studied how earning credentials affects student outcomes. “The problem is not all credentials are created equally.”

Earning credentials is part of what’s called the “evidence-based” pathway to graduation. It requires students to submit three pieces of “evidence” from a pre-approved state list. Credentials count as evidence, as does being accepted into a two-year college; attaining a guarantee of full-time employment; earning a college-level course credit; achieving certain AP, IB, or SAT scores; and other options.

There are a total of 12 evidence options. Submitting credentials is the most popular one by far.

The state’s includes everything from certifications for barbers and child care workers to credentials related to Microsoft Office and ladder safety. Experts warn it’s important that states carefully review credentials to ensure they’re valuable to students and can lead to good jobs.

Philadelphia offers credentials from a subset of the state’s list, along with additional options based on student interest and industry recommendations for students graduating via the “evidence-based” pathway, according to district Executive Director of Career and Technical Education Michelle Armstrong.

It’s unclear which credentials are most popular among students, given the lack of public data about them.

The district’s graduation rate has risen in recent years, with more than 77% of students graduating within four years in the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year of data available.

Obtaining a high school diploma is valuable, and researchers have found that those who graduate high school are likely to earn more and live longer than those without.

But the increase comes as Philly students’ achievement on some state exams . Last year, Keystone. Even fewer achieved proficient scores in algebra and biology.

Alyn Turner, co-director of the Philadelphia Education Research Consortium, which partners with the district, said her team is working to analyze which pathways students are accessing and what evidence they’re using to fulfill requirements. But she said the larger question of whether students are more prepared for jobs or college is still unknown.

“The extent to which this policy is supportive of that, or adding additional barriers to that, we just don’t know,” Turner said.

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

Recognizing the stakes, three years ago the school underwent a complete overhaul, and the change has been remarkable. Monte Vista has seen math proficiency rise from to , and English Language Arts proficiency climbed from to on the Smarter Balanced Assessment. 

Here are three ways Monte Vista Elementary changed its trajectory and saw meaningful growth.

First and foremost, change began by reimagining the definition of leadership. Rather than relying on top-down directives, the school adopted a model built on trust, collaboration and shared purpose. The goal was simple but powerful: empower teachers to make instructional decisions and position them as partners in driving improvement.

Teacher leadership teams and data-driven professional learning communities were established, keeping student performance at the center of every conversation. These teams analyzed data, identified gaps and collectively determined next steps, ensuring that professional development and instructional strategies were grounded in real classroom needs.

Teacher leaders visited classrooms across grade levels to identify educators’ strengths, growth areas and opportunities to refine practice. The feedback was shared with the full staff, and teachers collaborated to design targeted action plans — whether that meant adjusting curriculum, securing supplemental resources or carving out additional planning time.

Peer observations further deepened this culture of collaboration. Model teachers opened their classrooms so colleagues could see effective strategies in action and reflect together on what worked. This kind of teacher-to-teacher learning proved far more impactful than traditional training approaches. It built shared ownership for student success, professional trust and a collective commitment to doing whatever it takes to improve student outcomes.

The second change came about when school leaders confronted an uncomfortable truth: The data didn’t add up. Internal assessments suggested strong growth, yet students’ performance on state tests told a different story. Misalignment between those results and Smarter Balanced scores signaled a deeper issue: Students could complete assignments that relied on following set steps accurately, but they struggled when asked to apply concepts or reason through complex problems.

Classroom instruction needed to mirror the cognitive rigor students would encounter on the Smarter Balanced exam. To bridge that gap, the school implemented a that provided real-time feedback, question-by-question performance data and types of questions designed to prepare students for the deeper thinking required on state assessments.

Teachers could now see in-the-moment how students were reasoning through problems, identify misconceptions immediately and adjust instruction before small gaps became larger ones. The platform’s dashboards made error analysis part of daily practice, revealing not just what students missed, but why. Educators began using this insight to reteach key concepts, group students flexibly and design interventions that targeted specific learning gaps.

Equally important, the tool reframed assessment as learning. Students were no longer passively tested — they were actively reflecting on their own thinking. They learned to articulate their reasoning, analyze their mistakes and approach challenging problems with confidence.

Integrating this technology also deepened the staff’s collective approach to teaching. With clear evidence at their fingertips, teachers collaborated around patterns in student learning, refining both their questions and their approaches to conceptual teaching. Over time, this focus on strategic approaches to problem-solving — rather than procedural repetition — became part of the school’s DNA.

The result was a powerful alignment between classroom learning and assessment performance. Students weren’t just better test-takers; they were stronger thinkers, capable of transferring understanding across subjects and demonstrating mastery under pressure.

The third component was engaging families through listening. Parents are involved through advisory committees that review data, provide input and offer feedback that is incorporated into achievement plans for English learners, students with special needs and gifted students. 

Over time, the school’s data culture has evolved from one focused on accountability to one centered on celebration — viewing results as a story of growth rather than a measure of failure. Each initiative is anchored in evidence, collaboration and recognition of progress, no matter the scale, ensuring that insights gained from data reach beyond the classroom. Family literacy and numeracy nights, “coffee with the principal” meetings and community events all connect data-driven academic progress, behavior and culture into a coherent framework that invites families to see and share in student success.

Monte Vista shows that regardless of students’ backgrounds or starting points, when teachers collaborate around shared goals, incorporate strategic thinking and prioritize family involvement, educational outcomes change. The focus moving forward is to sustain the assessment-driven cycles that have guided progress, deepen student ownership of learning and maintain a commitment to equity, excellence and the shared belief that our students will succeed.

For education research and data, the well caretaker is the National Center for Education Statistics. A father dropping his daughter off at high school or the grandmother watching her grandson get on the school bus has probably never heard of it. If loses staff in government layoffs and stops collecting, analyzing and reporting education data from across the country, will they notice? The school bell still rings. The lights are on. But when the metaphorical drought hits — when because enrollment drops and less money is coming into the district — families will be caught off guard. Without trend data, communities will be unprepared for budget cuts or other dramatic changes.  

Just like the city with the well, advocates will lose count of critical metrics, warning systems will fail and families will lose track of how well their schools are performing. From how much states spend on education to college enrollment trends to the outcomes of early childhood education, NCES data is the quiet but essential workhorse behind nearly every debate about school quality, access and student achievement.  

Consider school finance data. Dollars and cents should be easy to measure, right? Can’t states simply tally what is spent? The reality is that without NCES, that data would be insufficient. Without NCES’s continued stewardship, states will fall back on a patchwork of inconsistent reporting systems that make spending comparisons impossible. Without the federal mandate — and NCES’ careful planning, collection and validation — spending data will likely lack the detail and accuracy needed to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the billions of federal, state and local dollars spent on schools.  

But even that oversight hasn’t been enough. It is still difficult to say what is spent on specific classrooms, let alone specific students. Researchers using this data on a regular basis have been calling for better measurement — not the abandonment of the baseline. 

Incomplete data has real consequences. Without accurate enrollment and demographic information, states and the federal government to serve more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. If budget cuts come, and principals and district leaders lack evidence for cost-effectiveness, it will be more difficult to continue allocating scarce resources. State legislators will have less confidence in understanding , such as AI literacy or work-based learning that prepares young people for a rapidly changing economy. And, as a result of these cascading failures, students will miss out on learning opportunities that enable them to achieve their highest potential. 

Most importantly, the loss of school funding data will make it nearly impossible to conduct research on any multi-state education intervention. One of the most critical things researchers consider when structuring studies is the difference in spending between the subjects (states, districts and schools) that they are measuring. Many major national studies of charter school efficacy, for instance, have relied on this data in order to fairly analyze outcomes. There is a possible future in which evaluations of the effects of private school choice will be hampered by a lack of easily available and nationally normed data. This also holds true in conducting well-structured and rigorous studies of non-fiscal initiatives, like high-dosage tutoring.

No agency is perfect. We have both been critics of NCES, noting its slow pace, duplicative collections and outdated systems. The national data infrastructure has not kept up with the speed of technological and policy change. NCES’ are often hard to navigate. But in an era of misinformation and polarization, independent, transparent data is one of the few tools that the organizations focused on education research, advocacy and accountability must all agree on.

Hobbling NCES’ financial data collection now will unwind too much progress. It will create a vacuum that even well-funded researchers, policymakers and practitioners cannot fill. The nation’s advance warning system will be lost. The decades-long debate about whether America spends enough on education will become ever more muddled. Important indicators of school policy will become a guessing game, and students will be the ones who lose.

In other words, the well will go dry before anyone knows it.  

NCES must have the resources to revitalize and fulfill its mission. Despite recent proposals and federal actions, we do not believe that NCES must be eliminated to return power to the states; states already have power. Instead, the federal government should modernize NCES’s data tools, improve accessibility for the public and strengthen collaboration to reduce reporting burdens on states and districts. Without this standardized financial data, researchers will lose the ability to reliably study the results of any multi-state education reforms or interventions, because it is key to accurately adjusting state-by-state findings.

Since 1996, national organizations like the have helped 48 states create systems for seamless data collection from districts and public charter schools. Of those, 36 include information about school-level expenditures. These systems can be further improved to collect timely, detailed spending data that can be more closely aligned with federal standards while still managed by each state.

States like and are creating new portals that report spending data in a way that makes it easy for the public to understand. Places like are linking education and workforce data closer together. Imagine the power for parents and concerned citizens if NCES’ website were strengthened to include similar visuals and opportunities for data exploration. 

State and federal agencies can, directly or through public-private partnerships, create the 21st-century data infrastructure that America’s education and workforce systems need. In an era of personalized learning and career pathways, and increasingly diverse educational providers to serve them, researchers and advocates must embrace and encourage a stronger and more modern NCES, not run away from efforts to examine how dollars are used and whether they are being spent effectively.  

The fight for reliable education data isn’t just about numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s the dedication to checking the well to gauge the community’s well-being and creating better systems for measuring the water when technology evolves so this knowledge is never again imperiled. It’s about whether America is willing to make decisions based on facts rather than hunches, on the value of measurement over the burden of effort.  

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A transplant from Miami, Anallive Calle learned her way around Kansas City from behind the wheel of a big yellow school bus.

The tablet near the dash provides turn-by-turn directions to every stop and checks each kid on and off the bus throughout her route. It’s helped her navigate the narrow roads and one-ways that stretch through one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.

And from her phone, she can check on the status of her own son and whether he made the bus each morning and afternoon.

“So it’s transparent all the way,” she said. “You know when your child is picked up and where they’re at every moment.”

Last school year, Kansas City Public Schools started a new transportation contract with Zum, a company that provides busing services for districts across the country.

With the new vendor, drivers welcomed updates like air conditioning and tinted windows that keep the new fleet comfortable. But they also were given a suite of new technology — a main driver of the 15,000-student urban school district’s decision to ink a $100 million, 5-year contract with Zum.

Aside from navigation, the buses are loaded with live cameras inside and out. Checking in at the tablet allows parents to track their kids and schools to get a headcount on that day’s breakfast and lunch. From the bus barn’s dispatch office, a large screen shows the location of each bus, its exact speed, whether it’s running on time — and even the driver’s rating from parents.

Derrick Gines, a Zum driver and safety trainer with 10 years of experience, said the technology built into today’s buses make drivers and students safer.

“Versus yesteryear, they were designed for freight — human freight,” he said. “But now, there’s so much safety wrapped around this thing.”

While the iconic yellow buses might look like those of yore, school systems big and small are increasingly investing in a new wave of on-board technology.

New software programs monitor engine components, alerting transportation departments to maintenance needs. Other tools create the most optimal routes, saving on fuel, staff and bus costs. Turn-by-turn navigation and student manifests help ensure that no driver is lost and no kid is left behind. And live video feeds can help with student behavior issues — even allowing a school principal to speak to students on the bus in real time, in some cases.

This newfangled technology is a stark contrast to the machinery and aesthetics of the yellow bus, which have remained largely unchanged for decades, said Ryan Gray, editor-in-chief of School Transportation News, which covers the industry.

“Even when you walk onto a school bus, it still looks the same,” he said. “But the inner workings have just completely changed. All of the advanced electronics in it — the wiring to make all of this technology work, whether it be the hardware or the software — it’s grown by leaps and bounds.”

Schools see some of these technologies as intuitive progress: Technology has reshaped many other facets of public education, while many bus drivers were stuck with paper maps and CB radios. But with the rise of new technology comes new risks, and some advocates are cautious about the security of all the data flowing through yellow buses.

A booming market of vendors and limited regulations on bus tech has given more responsibility to school IT and transportation departments. But Gray said most school districts are embracing these new tools — if they can afford them.

“It always comes down to money,” he said. “I think that if they think they have the money, they’re going to want to buy this stuff.

School systems and tech companies say these tools can improve student safety, create efficiencies and help alleviate the chronic shortage of bus drivers.

“It’s a huge recruiting tool,” said Jason Salmons, transportation director for Bentonville Schools in northwest Arkansas.

Bentonville contracts with Transportant, a Kansas-based company, to equip its buses with new camera and tracking technology. Salmons said the navigation and student tracking provide peace of mind to drivers, who can easily traverse new neighborhoods. The seven live cameras on each bus also provide security if an incident arises.

About 13,000 of the district’s 20,000 students ride buses across 135 daily routes. In addition to an upfront cost, he said the school system pays a subscription of about $90,000 per year.

The software tracks not only every bus, but also every student’s boarding and disembarkment, even taking photos of the kids. If something happens, law enforcement can see where a child was and what they were wearing at dropoff — providing a “priceless” service, Salmons said.

With real-time tracking — much like a rideshare customer would see on their screen — parents and students view buses as more reliable, he said. With more precise pickup times, students don’t wait outside in the cold as long and older kids can even get a few more minutes of sleep, Salmons said.

“High schoolers use the app as their bible,” he said.

Data privacy

Given the national driver shortage and parents’ focus on reliability, Cassie Creswell understands the appeal of the new bus technology. But she has concerns about the growing loads of data being collected.

“It’s a mixed bag on this stuff,” said Creswell, the co-chair of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, which advocates to protect student data.

That group has pushed to keep cameras out of classrooms, but hasn’t taken a formal position on school buses, she said. Creswell, a parent of a Chicago Public Schools student, said the more data that is collected — such as GPS locations and video footage — the more opportunities for that data to be sold or illicitly .

“Are we actually clearing away stuff that you really shouldn’t hold on to forever?” she asked. “We’re so careless with student data — even very sensitive data — and we’re very careless about the long-term protection of that data.”

School systems interviewed by Stateline said their bus data is being securely stored separately from other student records and that data such as videos are routinely deleted.

Alan Fairless, a founder and chief technology officer of the tech provider Transportant, previously worked in building encrypted tech products.

He said the company doesn’t sell any student data and encrypts the memory of each device — so, someone stealing a tablet off a bus would have no access to its memory. The company was created in 2018 to tackle parent and school concerns about bus reliability and delays.

Fairless said he quickly learned many districts struggle with high driver turnover because of student behavior issues on board.

By providing multiple cameras that can be accessed live, he said, the company’s product provides a new layer of support to drivers.

“Now, when something happens, they push a button and a dispatcher or principal is going to watch that bus in real time,” he said.

Fairless said one school district has what it calls a seven-minute rule: When a driver alerts of an incident, a dispatcher aims to watch the video, figure out what happened and notify parents over text or phone call within seven minutes.

“The effect is, that video arrives to the parents, and now they know the real problem, and they know that before the student comes home and creates some other version of the story,” he said. “So now, it’s like the parents and the school district are working together to solve the problem.”

Since launching, the company has contracted with 88 school systems in 19 states to provide its all-inclusive tech suite that includes the app for families, on-board Wi-Fi, camera systems and routing services.

While prices can vary, school districts typically pay about $3,600 per bus up front and an annual subscription cost of about $69 per bus, said Jeff Shackelford, vice president of sales.

Changing parent demands

The addition of Transportant has helped keep parents informed in Oregon’s Estacada School District, which sprawls across 750 square miles southeast of Portland.

“It’s been great customer service for our families to just see, just like when someone orders an Uber, they can keep track of where their kid is at,” said Maggie Kelly, a spokesperson for the school system of about 2,000 students.

Kelly said the district expects to make up some of its initial investment in the technology as it realizes savings from more efficient bus routes.

Parents are demanding more real-time information on bus times and locations, said Rick D’Errico, a spokesperson for Transfinder, whose products build more efficient bus routes and provide tracking apps for parents.

“If I can track a burrito order, why can’t I track a bus?” D’Errico said. “Parents these days expect their districts to have ways to notify them on individualized ETAs and alerts for when their kid is on their routes, and not rely on schoolwide email blasts.”

Recently, school districts in Alaska, Texas and Wyoming have launched the company’s apps, which are free for parents.

Such services can provide savings by cutting back on the number of drivers and buses in operation. But they also relieve pressure on dispatchers, who can be besieged with parent phone calls during disruptions or delays.

Since rolling out a new bus tracking app this year, the St. Johns County School District in northeast Florida has fielded far fewer parent calls.

That app is just the latest addition to a portfolio of advanced onboard technology, said Jonah Paxton, transportation fleet technology foreman at the district, which serves about 27,000 bus riders.

The 52,000-student school system intentionally purchased separate products for bus cameras, parent tracking and driver navigation. Paxton said that allows the school system to avoid getting stuck with a single provider that could demand higher prices in the future.

“We’re not locked into a single sort of a walled-garden of products, which gives us a lot more freedom to pick and choose which products we like, which ones we don’t like, and gives us a little more negotiating power,” he said.

To ensure security, the school system stores video files on its own servers rather than those of outside vendors, he said. The district has a specific video retention policy and it blurs out student faces if videos are ever requested under the state’s public records law.

Paxton said student and driver safety drives many of the tech decisions for the school’s fleet of more than 300 buses.

“Buses are vastly different than they were even five,10 years ago,” he said. “I think many people who haven’t ridden a bus in a while can think of the bus as sort of an unpleasant place, or kind of the Wild West of schooling, but they’ve really come a long way.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira contributed to this story. Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Carter was in first grade when the suspensions began. His mom describes it as the year “all hell broke loose.”

As he made his way through the public school system in York County, South Carolina, the now-15-year-old, who has multiple disabilities, continued to struggle.

The situation reached a crescendo in 6th grade, when Carter was suspended out of school for 7.5 days and in school about a dozen times, according to school district records and his mother’s estimates. This was in addition to numerous lunch suspensions — during which he was forced to sit at a table alone in the cafeteria — and bus suspensions, which meant Carter couldn’t ride school-provided transportation. His offenses, Kimberly Tissot, his mom, said, ranged from minor ones,  like “incessant talking” and “cussing,” to the more extreme, including breaking one classmate’s glasses and threatening another.

While Tissot understands why these behaviors needed to result in clear consequences, she argued that every one of them was a manifestation of her son’s disabilities, which include ADHD, fetal alcohol syndrome, a disability involving written expression and a mild intellectual disability. They could have been avoided, she said, if Carter’s school had followed his Individualized Education Program, which lays out the supports and services the school is legally mandated to provide Carter so he can progress and learn.

Ultimately, her son, who has difficulty connecting his actions to their ramifications, was left confused and convinced, “he’s in trouble because he’s bad,” said Tissot, who is also the president and CEO of , an advocacy organization. 

Carter is one of hundreds of thousands of students with disabilities across the country who are suspended from school each year. It’s long been documented that this population of kids is generally more likely to face exclusionary discipline , but because of where he happens to live, Carter is particularly susceptible: No state removes students with disabilities from school for 10 days or fewer at a higher rate than South Carolina.

There, some 15% of special education students faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-23 school year — nearly twice the national average, according to ����Ӱ��’s analysis of the most recently available data.

These numbers may also be a substantial undercount, according to experts who told ����Ӱ�� they’ve witnessed widespread in South Carolina — in some cases to avoid the legal protections that kick in for students with disabilities once they’ve been kept out of the classroom for more than 10 cumulative days. Tissot said she was asked to pick Carter up from school without an official suspension on multiple occasions, a practice she knew to push back on only because of her advocacy work. And she said she only learned of some of Carter’s in-school suspensions, which weren’t all officially documented, from him.

Macaulay Morrison is assistant director of a at the University of South Carolina Law School who represents special education families in their legal battles with schools.

“It’s just reflective of the state of public education of South Carolina as a whole,” Morrison said of the IDEA suspension data. “Sometimes it’s easier for schools to exclude these students than it is for them to figure out how to support them.”

In response to ����Ӱ��’s findings, a South Carolina Department of Education official said they remain “committed to ensuring that all students, including those receiving special education services, are supported in safe and positive learning environments.”

The department has established a goal of working with districts to reduce suspension rates for students with disabilities to 9% or less — significantly lower than its current rate, but still higher than the national average — by working with advocacy and support groups, like the Behavior Alliance of South Carolina, to provide conferences, institutes and training opportunities.

And the department will continue to “closely monitor student discipline data to track progress toward this target … including assisting with district reviews of disciplinary referral data, revision of policies and procedures, and the development of targeted improvement plans at both the school and district levels.”

South Carolina was the only state whose numbers were not broken down by race after state officials notified the U.S. Department of Education of data quality concerns, according to federal Education Department staff. The South Carolina state education department official told ����Ӱ�� that they provided corrected data once they were made aware of the issue, but that update was not reflected in the final federal dataset. 

The federal Department of Education did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ����Ӱ��.

The IDEA dataset is particularly significant because it’s the first to document disciplinary rates among students with disabilities at the national level post-pandemic, a time when . The U.S. Department of Education’s more frequently scrutinized has long shown disparities in discipline between students with disabilities and their general education peers but the most current available complete numbers are from the 2021-22 school year — when most kids were back to in-person learning but some districts were still offering a hybrid model and still others were allowing kids to

����Ӱ��’s analysis of the more recent IDEA data of some 7.5 million students with disabilities across three suspension categories reveals the differences experienced within this vulnerable student group. For example, in addition to South Carolina, special education students living in North Carolina, Delaware and Nevada are far more likely to be excluded from school than students with similar disabilities living in Vermont, Utah and New York.  

The IDEA data, which is released annually, shows that race — also a well-established to suspensions — plays a role among students who are already facing disproportionate discipline. While Black students made up 16% of all students with disabilities nationally, they accounted for nearly a third (31%) of all those students suspended out of school for 10 days or less. 

In some cases, race and geography combined in striking ways in the IDEA data, such as in Nebraska, where almost 1-in-10 Black students with disabilities were removed from school for more than 10 days (a figure which includes in-school and out-of-school disciplinary removals) in 2022-23 — more than any other group in any other state.

Other key findings of the ����Ӱ��’s analysis include:

• Nationally, boys are more likely than girls to be identified as having a disability, and — even when that’s considered — are disproportionately removed from classrooms: While about two-thirds of students with disabilities are male, they account for about 75% of special education students removed from school for any duration of time.

• On average nationally, just over 7% of all students with disabilities received at least one out-of-school suspension for 10 days or fewer.

• Black students with disabilities are disproportionately suspended out of school for 10 days or less in every state, to varying degrees. In Georgia, for example, they make up 39% of those with disabilities, but 59% of those who were suspended. In Delaware, Black students make up just over a third of those with disabilities, but over half of those suspended.  In five states (Indiana, Nevada, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin), at least 20% of Black students were suspended out of school for 10 days or fewer. 

• In both West Virginia and Pennsylvania, almost 1-in-10 Hispanic children with disabilities were suspended for 10 days or less outside of school — more than any other state for this group, though closely followed by Nevada, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.

• In South Dakota, 17% of students with disabilities who identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander were suspended for 10 days or less in school — a greater share than in any other state.

• California suspends students with disabilities for 10 days or fewer in school at the lowest rate (0.8%), and Vermont suspends them out of school at the lowest rate (3%).
  
• No state removes students for more than 10 days at a higher rate than Missouri (4%), 2.5 times the national average.

While supporters of stricter school discipline argue suspensions and expulsions are necessary to keep schools safe, research also shows that these measures are associated with a host of negative outcomes, including , and a lower likelihood of and greater involvement with the

exclusionary discipline, which children with disabilities are more frequently subjected to, does not seem to positively impact students’ future behavior and, for younger students, may even exacerbate it. 

For students with disabilities, the loss of instruction time can be particularly devastating, said Amy Holbert, CEO of , a training and information center for families whose children have disabilities. And especially when students receive out-of-school suspensions, it can put a strain on working families who suddenly have to scramble to find child care, she added.

These challenges have only worsened since the pandemic, according to Holbert, who said referrals to her organization for educational concerns have increased 128% since 2020.

����Ӱ��’s data analysis confirms “what advocates across the country have been saying over and over again about the students most likely to experience school pushout and get deprived of access to instructional time,” said Jennifer Coco, interim executive director of .��

It holds up an “important mirror” she added, “on who is getting appropriate interventions and who are the students that we still collectively need to do better by.”

‘The Wild Wild West of civil rights enforcement’

Keisha Sims-Williams’ son, Savion, was just 2 years old when she began to suspect he might have a disability. He was hyperactive and impulsive. Sometimes she’d call his name and he wouldn’t respond. And he would often walk on the tips of his toes — a characteristic more common in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Some of these behaviors made starting school particularly challenging. 

Sims-Williams said she told Savion’s Columbia, South Carolina, school as early as pre-K that he would need extra help. But instead of having him evaluated for an IEP they repeatedly removed him from school — both formally and informally — and ultimately relocated him to a transitional program, though not one for students with disabilities, she said. 

“His pre-K year it got so bad, he was out of school more than he was in,” she said, estimating Savion was suspended for at least 30 days that year. 

Ultimately, Savion was diagnosed with ADHD and autism by clinicians outside of school, but still he wasn’t evaluated for an IEP, which meant he went through his kindergarten year without the same protections around school removals as other students with disabilities. 

As a kid with a suspected disability, though, he should have still had access to at least some of those guardrails, according to Morrison, the South Carolina attorney, who later filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sims-Williams family.

And so, Savion had another year filled with so many removals his mom lost count. 

“At some point it was like they were on a mission to get rid of him,” she said.

In November of his kindergarten year, Sims-Williams filed a formal written request for an in-school evaluation, but his IEP wasn’t developed until May or implemented until the following August.

“It took two years of me fighting and pleading in order for him to finally get an IEP and be heard and seen as he should,” Sims-Williams said. She believes if that IEP had come along sooner, her son’s early years in school could have looked a lot different.

“No child’s experiences in their education should have been as bad as my son’s,” she added. “They ruined his good years of school. They ruined it.”

Much of this was confirmed by the state’s response to the family’s lawsuit. The South Carolina Department of Education found that the district had violated a number of Savion’s rights as a student with a suspected disability — including by not evaluating him for an IEP in a timely manner and not officially recording removals or creating a behavior plan once he hit 10 days of removals. These failures ultimately led to even more suspensions, according to court records shared with ����Ӱ��.

Since extra supports were implemented, school has been significantly better for Savion. He’s been on honor roll, won awards and no longer cries when she drops him off each morning.

Still, “he’s had some bumps here and there,” she said, noting the now-7-year-old was suspended out of school for about eight days throughout first grade, but “compared to 20 or 30, that’s progress to me.”

“I’m hoping next year we’re down to five. Or none.”

Savion’s race, gender and disability status all make him particularly likely to be suspended, as does the fact that his family also lives in South Carolina. The Palmetto State leads the nation in , as well.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides protections to students who have been removed from school for more than 10 days, but much of the enforcement is left up to schools, districts and states, leading to a patchwork landscape, according to interviews with over two dozen advocates, experts, parents and attorneys. 

“Schools don’t seem to have any incentive to improve their processes and procedures because there isn’t anybody holding them to task,” said Mike Mathison, a juvenile justice resource attorney at the Children’s Law Center at the University of South Carolina Law School.

And in certain cases — like Savion’s — even if a student has a documented disability, it can be challenging to get schools to provide an IEP in a timely manner, leaving vulnerable kids unprotected. 

The disproportionate removal of students with disabilities — especially for boys and those who are Black — experts told ����Ӱ�� is the result of a confluence of systemic issues including discrimination, teacher and school counselor shortages and a dearth of training in positive behavior management techniques, like establishing strong relationships with students and clear routines. Added to that are administrators not understanding or enforcing students’ IEPs or the law, parents not knowing their kids’ rights, a return to top-down “zero tolerance” disciplinary policies and a lack of federal accountability.

This trend of disproportionality is well established: In the 2017-18 school year, 9% of students with disabilities were suspended, compared to 4% of their general education peers, according to a 2022 from the Learning Policy Institute — largely based on analyses of four years of Civil Rights Data Collection. For Black students with disabilities, that figure was even higher: 20% were suspended. 

Students with disabilities are also more likely than their peers to be punished for “broad and subjective categories” of behavior like defiance, according to a 2024 investigation by  .

“There’s disadvantages of being Black when it comes to disciplinary outcomes, and there’s a disadvantage of being a student with a disability as well,” said Richard Welsh, associate professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University and author of “You can times that together … and that’s the definition of intersectionality.”

While disparities are cause for closer inspection — and can be evidence of discrimination — they alone are not proof of bias, cautioned Paul Morgan, director of the at the University of Albany. That being said, he added, even when controlling for differences in behaviors, Black students appear to be more frequently suspended than their peers. And a recent GAO report determined that Black girls are more likely to be removed from class than their white female peers for similar behaviors in the same schools.

Regardless of whether or not active discrimination is at play, the disparities are at least “a sign of weak systemic practices” and “a call to action,” said Coco, from The Center for Learner Equity.

Despite this, in April, President Donald Trump released an saying he intended to roll back Biden administration discipline guidance, which encouraged school districts to collect, analyze and adjust their policies in light of disproportionate racial outcomes. Trump argued that approach actually weaponized federal civil rights laws in ways that discriminated against white students.

Critics have the executive order, titled Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline, will only further widen disparities for students of color and students with disabilities, especially as  more than consider a return to stricter student discipline policies, including four that have already done so. 

“Common sense is students in school every day learning, and students can’t learn if they’re not in school,” Coco said. “I recognize we need to keep schools safe, so to me a common sense investment is saying, ‘How do we ensure that schools are a place where students are getting access to what they need to thrive and be successful, both in terms of education and wraparound supports?’”

Trump has also been systematically working to dismantle the Education Department, which could mean even less federal accountability and data collection moving forward, said Dan Losen, senior director of education at the National Center for Youth Law.

“We’re in the Wild Wild West of civil rights enforcement,” he said.

A ‘huge oversight’ in IDEA enforcement

The federal law defining the rights of students with disabilities was first passed in 1975 and then updated and renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1990. IDEA mandates a “free appropriate public school education” for eligible students ages 3-21. In the 2022-23 school year that included or 15% of all those attending public schools — a two percentage-point increase from the 6.4 million students covered under IDEA a decade ago. The federal guidelines provide baseline regulations that states must follow, but some — like New Jersey — have implemented stronger protections as well. 

Under IDEA, states must submit annual data about students who receive special education and related services to the Education Department, including the data analyzed by ����Ӱ��.

And the law provides certain protections around disciplinary removals: If a student with a disability is removed from their classroom for more than 10 days, IDEA mandates a process called a Manifestation Determination Review, a hearing during which a group — including the parents and the student’s  IEP team — meets to determine if the child’s behaviors were either related to their disability or the result of a failure to implement their IEP. 

If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” the school can’t move forward with the removal and has to instead make a plan to provide updated support.

Experts and parents told ����Ӱ�� that once a student is diagnosed with a disability, schools tend to become particularly cautious about hitting that 10-day mark and triggering the legal review process. In some cases, that means educators pay closer attention to implementing a student’s IEP. But, in others, schools attempt to skirt the system by suspending students “off-the-books.” 

And when schools do implement the hearing process, they don’t always do so thoroughly or with intention, sometimes just “doing [it] to check the box,” said Morrison, the South Carolina attorney.

A recent , for example, found that New York City’s public schools routinely flout these federal guidelines by not properly considering a student’s disability during hearings. 

It can be challenging to hold schools and districts accountable for faithfully implementing these hearings, since the federal government isn’t collecting data around them, according to Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law.

“For monitoring the enforcement of these supposedly important protections, we don’t get to see any of that data,” he said. “Nothing. And I think that’s a huge oversight.” 

Carter, the South Carolina student suspended multiple times throughout his school career, is now leading his own IEP meetings and learning to control his behaviors, his mother told ����Ӱ��. 

Tissot said he made it through the past school year without any suspensions — a first for him — and this fall he’ll start high school. His mom describes the teenager as a sweet, talkative kid who loves to try new foods — “He’s a little foodie!” — play video games and make people laugh.

While Tissot is proud of Carter’s progress, she also worries he’s still not where he needs to be academically, and his history of repeated suspensions has heightened his anxiety at school. 

“He has told me that he tries so hard to control himself that he’s unable to concentrate,” she said.

And she worries for other students with disabilities who don’t have the same resources Carter has — like a mom who’s an advocate in the field — a fear that’s only intensified under the Trump administration.

“The future is not looking good for kids with disabilities who require IEPs,” she said. “It’s very scary because they’re taking away the federal oversight right now so really relying on parents to enforce it. And, I mean, that’s not going to work at all.”

Yet virtually every educational aim rests on the same foundation: giving students a strong academic grounding and developing the knowledge and habits of mind that allow them to think critically, communicate effectively and acquire knowledge and skills over time.

At this challenging moment in American education, with student achievement in decline, FutureEd and the Keystone Policy Center decided to approach the question of from scratch. We combed the research about the features of schools that make the greatest contribution to academic achievement and identified five research-based characteristics that together provide a more complete and precise picture of school quality than is typically available. 

All the measures can support school improvement and provide parents and the public with a fuller understanding of school performance. But not all are suitable for high-stakes accountability decisions. Some metrics lack the reliability, validity and comparability necessary for ranking schools, replacing their staff or closing them.

1. Growth in Student Achievement

For decades, accountability systems judged schools based primarily on state test scores. But these correlate strongly with demographics and family income, making it difficult to gauge the real contributions of schools to improved student outcomes. A fairer, and increasingly popular, way to judge schools also considers how much they contribute to growth in students’ test scores over the year.

2. Access to Rigorous Instruction

To achieve at high levels, students need access to challenging coursework. Policymakers can address this in accountability systems by measuring whether schools offer access to a broad range of course offerings, including the arts, sciences and technology, so schools don’t narrow their focus to just reading and math. To help teachers deliver strong instruction, research increasingly points to the importance of using high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials, which many states and districts are starting to emphasize. Research also has found that completion of one or more advanced math and science classes in high school predicts both college readiness and later health, job satisfaction and well-being. This can be measured by the availability of and enrollment in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and dual-enrollment programs, for example, but only if they are made accessible to students who may have been shut out in the past.��

Student surveys also provide insight into whether schools provide a learning environment that promotes high achievement. But any use of surveys should include safeguards against adults influencing responses, and states must ensure they are valid and reliable. That’s why many states and districts use surveys for school improvement rather than accountability.

Accountability systems also could include reviews of student work, with a focus on instructional rigor, though doing so requires systematically collecting and evaluating work samples across schools.

3. Effective Staff

consistently shows that teacher and principal quality contribute more to student achievement than any other school-based factors. Traditionally, teacher quality has been measured by years of experience and subject-specific expertise, such as degrees earned or passing of teacher-licensure exams. But these measures often don’t correlate with student achievement. A sounder strategy would be to identify the percentages of effective or highly effective teachers in a school through teacher evaluation systems that use multiple measures of quality and classroom observation, though few states have such systems at scale.��

States and districts can measure a principal’s impact on student success using multiple measures and several years’ worth of achievement data. Educator surveys of principal-teacher and teacher-to-teacher trust; principals’ instructional leadership; and teachers’ commitment to their school also provide an important window into a school’s overall professional capacity. To prevent pressure from influencing survey results, states and districts should limit such measures to school improvement.

4. Supportive Climate

Many states include chronic student absenteeism in their accountability systems as a proxy for student engagement and whether a school’s climate is safe and conducive to learning. It is a reasonable strategy. But well-designed and well-implemented student, teacher and educator surveys — again, with sufficient validity and reliability safeguards — can provide more direct measures of school culture. Such surveys also can provide key insights into where improvement is needed.

5. Postsecondary Outcomes

Test scores are proxies for long-term measures that parents value. But metrics such as whether students attend and graduate from college or career-training programs, enroll in the military, find gainful employment, and lead healthy and fulfilling lives are better gauges of readiness for adulthood. Though few states measure outcomes such as college enrollment when evaluating schools, better connecting pre-K-12 data systems to postsecondary and labor market data could help monitor a range of important post-high-school outcomes.��

Many high-performing countries use inspection systems that combine test scores and other quantitative measures with classroom observations and interviews conducted by teams of trained experts who visit schools to gather information on important features of success. These reviews typically include a school self-assessment followed by team site visits. They result in a comprehensive report describing a school’s strengths and weaknesses and recommended steps for improvement. While such inspection systems have spread rapidly around the world, the cost and logistics of conducting valid and reliable school site reviews at scale has slowed their adoption in the U.S., particularly for high-stakes accountability decisions.

Test scores matter. But by themselves, they provide an incomplete measure of school success. They also offer little guidance or support on how schools can improve. A more comprehensive set of research-based metrics would provide parents, educators and policymakers with a richer understanding of what makes schools successful and a clearer sense of how to strengthen them. Measurement systems that combine standardized test scores, access to rigorous and advanced coursework, prevalence of effective teachers and school leaders, evaluations of respectful and supportive school cultures and data on student success after high school are most likely to promote higher student achievement. Responsibility for weighting each strand and the specific metrics within them should rest with state and local education officials. But each component should play a role in evaluating school success.

And yet, systematic and regular use of data is at the heart of successful schools. In a from Education Reform Now, we surveyed 53 principals, assistant principals and superintendents across Colorado, Massachusetts, Texas and Georgia to understand the strategies central to the success of their high-performing, high-poverty spotlight schools. Despite a wide range of geographies and school models, all of them agreed: Data is key.

While DQC’s polling indicates that most teachers struggle to access and mobilize the data they need, 100% of the leaders from the “spotlight schools” we surveyed agreed that data and assessments are very important for professional development. This highlights how these schools have invested in building data literacy so that all their educators understand what the data means and how to use it to help students succeed. 

During follow-up interviews, “data” was the most frequently mentioned word, with administrators describing extensive use of both academic and non-academic data to shape a wide range of decision-making.

But what does effective data use actually look like in practice? Here are five ways schools are leveraging data:

1. Daily instruction

Quick and can be used to briefly assess students at the end of lessons to gauge their understanding of the material covered. This serves as live data to help teachers adjust instruction in real-time. At IDEA Carver Academy in San Antonio, Texas, administrators design end-of-lesson quizzes — exit tickets — to monitor content mastery consistently across classes. Teachers discuss the data with one another during daily “exit ticket huddles” to determine appropriate instructional adjustments.

2. Interventions

Implementing tests to evaluate student learning throughout the year allows educators to identify which children need extra help, inform how they are grouped, shape instructional priorities during intervention blocks and monitor progress.

Several spotlight schools in Massachusetts leverage data cycles to shape WIN (“What I Need”) time — a type of small-group instruction. Nicole Mack, executive director of Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, uses “June data to start the first round of interventions during the second week of school. …Then we do five intervention cycles across the course of the year, where our administrative team does the review of our data to identify the kids that should go into the different interventions,” such as tutoring or extended learning time.

In Texas, administrators are guided by Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (), which serve as specific, detailed standards that are aligned with the state’s standardized exams. At Ortiz Elementary in Brownsville, Principal Julie Peña says, “We monitor data on a regular basis to help identify the TEKS that have not yet been mastered and plan targeted instruction. … If students are missing a TEKS, then we regroup the students and we make sure that we’re giving them lessons that are geared toward learning those skills. So if a student is falling behind, they are asked to participate in tutorials, they are asked to come on Saturdays and they’re given the reviews targeted to what it is that they’re missing.”

3. Professional development

Both academic and non-academic data can be leveraged to pinpoint professional development sessions that address key shortcomings, evaluate the effectiveness of these sessions and identify educators who may benefit from further coaching or support. For example, at IDEA Carver Academy, administrators collect data through “cultural and instructional observations” each week using the — a benchmarked tool designed to objectively evaluate what teachers are doing well and how they can improve, Principal Laura Flack says. These rubrics, alongside classroom climate, exit ticket and disciplinary data, are then “reviewed, and professional development is created to address areas of need across the campus.”

4. Chronic absenteeism

As schools navigate unprecedented levels of chronic absenteeism, it is vital to collect detailed data to properly identify, diagnose and monitor the issue. For example, Rocky Mountain Prep charter schools in Denver have teams that collect attendance data each morning and call the families of each student who is absent. Teachers are notified of the total absences for the day, how many students came to school after their parents were called and who teachers should follow up with.

5. Student and family empowerment

Data isn’t just a tool for educators — it also empowers students to take an active role in their learning and helps parents better support their children’s academic growth. At Eastside Elementary School in Grady County, Georgia, Principal Chiquila Wright reports that students have one-on-one “data talks” with their teachers to discuss their interim test scores. Families are engaged through trainings that teach parents how to “understand their child’s assessment scores and how to support growth at home.”

Data is not a new concept. However, it is one that is too often underutilized in education. Children cannot learn and schools cannot thrive based on subjective observations and good intentions alone. The data revolution is already here, and it’s time students reaped the benefits.

Fortunately, real-time attendance data is standard in most districts. Yet when it comes to understanding what happens to students after high school — trade school or college enrollment, persistence and completion — many schools are left with years-old, incomplete or nonexistent information. Without timely insights, schools cannot meaningfully evaluate or improve practices, interventions or partnerships.

Nationwide, schools are making concerted efforts to improve college and career outcomes, but they are hamstrung by data limitations. School and district leaders often turn to publicly available state report cards which provide a snapshot of postsecondary enrollment information. At best, these report cards include data from the previous year’s graduating class — though, in many cases, the snapshots are even older. This gap is a serious issue. School and district leaders, as well as the public, need timely access to this data to make informed decisions and improve college and career advising practices. 

The National Student Clearinghouse database, containing enrollment and completion data from over 3,500 colleges nationwide, is shared with the vast majority of states and includes updates on the most recent graduating class. States could combine these statistics with, for example, employment data from their department of labor to offer school districts a comprehensive view of student outcomes after high school. However, most states fail to make clearinghouse data accessible in their publicly available report cards and, based on OneGoal’s experiences in seven states — Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan,  Texas and Wisconsin — this information is also not shared directly with districts.

Our district partners in those seven states report that none received the most recent clearinghouse data release from Nov. 27, which includes enrollment information for the class of 2024’s first fall semester. In a separate, 50-state analysis of publicly available state reports and postsecondary enrollment data, we found that just 23  states made available college enrollment data from the high school  class of 2022, while nine offered only older data. For researchers interested in general postsecondary enrollment trends, this might suffice. But it’s not enough for school and district leaders who need timely information to guide their work. 

While some districts with adequate resources buy a StudentTracker subscription directly from the clearinghouse, this option is often unknown or unaffordable. It’s also unnecessary — states already purchase this data on behalf of districts. But if it’s not passed on, school and district leaders can’t improve their advising practices for the next graduating class, as they won’t understand what happened to the graduating class that just walked across their stage.

Still, in the last several years, school districts nationwide have established novel solutions to build bridges from high school to college, supported by data sharing at the state level:

• Wisconsin published class of 2023 enrollment outcomes for the 2023-24 school year in a publicly available that offers interactive visualizations of trends over time and disaggregates data by student subgroups. School leaders can securely access individual student-level data to inform their practices.
  
• Vermont displayed an “” on its state report card to help school and district leaders analyze the difference in postsecondary performance between students who have been historically underserved in schools and their wealthier peers.
  
• Mississippi shares real-time clearinghouse data directly with districts through its state student information system and is training school and district leaders to use it.
  
• Indiana combines two- and four-year enrollment statistics with employment data through its (Graduates Prepared to Succeed) dashboard to paint a holistic picture of what happens to students after high school graduation, including non-degree pathways.

These efforts are a good start. But as every teacher, counselor or leader knows, real-time, disaggregated data is needed to meaningfully inform advising practices and interventions.

• School leaders should advocate for access to their state’s most recent student data. Almost every state has a direct contract with the clearinghouse. If feasible, they can also consider purchasing a .
  
• State education agencies nationwide need to follow the lead of states like Wisconsin and create better systems for sharing data as soon as they receive it. They should also form collaboratives with other state agencies like the department of labor to obtain data on students who enter the workforce directly after graduation. These agencies also need to join a organized by the Council of Chief State Schools Officers, which is working with the Department of Defense to help standardize the process of sharing military enlistment data with school districts.
  
• Partnerships with organizations like and the can complement school district efforts by providing robust data analysis expertise.

Developing a shared understanding of postsecondary enrollment patterns can inform schools’ advising practices, course sequences and partnerships with local organizations, colleges and universities, community colleges and employers. More access to data means a more inclusive approach to postsecondary preparation and better access to pathways aligned with students’ interests and workforce needs.

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Heckscher Foundation for Children provide financial support to OneGoal and ����Ӱ��.

Duplicative counting is one of the issues that have long bedeviled Thomas and her fellow researchers. Let’s say a particular 4-year-old boy simultaneously participates in the and . Is he being counted once or twice in the IECAM database? In evaluating the efficacy of these state programs, Illinois’s newly formed , among other public and private bodies, needs to know the answer when determining the impact of each program.

Illinois is not alone in grappling with data on programs and services for families with young children. The newly formed Big Ten Early Learning Alliance (Big Ten ELA) was designed to address issues that span research and policy, like the challenges facing the IECAM team. Led by Ohio State University professor Laura Justice (who also heads the ) and Rutgers University professor W. Steven Barnett (who founded and co-directs the ), the alliance is open to researchers from Big Ten universities, which comprises 18 higher education institutions across 14 states. Members collaborate on research that addresses important early childhood issues and work together to champion and disseminate solutions to the field. The states involved collectively have nearly 5.8 million residents aged 5 and under, according to , a recent brief published by Big Ten ELA — and the alliance is dedicated to improving their early learning experiences and lifetime outcomes.

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“For these nearly six million children, it is crucial that their states provide high-quality early childhood education to ensure that these children experience optimal environments and interactions in the earliest years of life,” Justice and Barnett wrote in the brief.��

“States are increasingly taking the lead in enacting policies that affect early childhood,” Justice says. “One of our goals in establishing this alliance is to ensure that science underlies these decisions by state policymakers. We also want to leverage the expertise in early childhood at our Big Ten universities. Bringing researchers together through this alliance will ease collaboration and allow us to advance our understanding of crucial issues in early childhood by engaging our diverse research perspectives.” 

Critical Data Solutions

Why is data critical to service delivery, and why did the Big Ten ELA’s zero in on data solutions? “Part of the rationale for many investments in early childhood programs,” Justice and Barnett explain in their report, “is to capitalize on the potential return on investment of preschool participation, such that for every dollar put into the system, dividends are returned in the future.” If the data can’t be trusted, policymakers might balk at the price tag. Improving early care and education depends on a sophisticated understanding of demographics, services received, program enrollment and learning outcomes.

While IECAM has been tracking aggregate data for early childhood programs and demographic data for young children and their families since about 2006, the (ILDS), a project staffed by Northern Illinois University (NIU), tracks which early childhood services the state’s children are receiving over time and the outcomes of receiving them. The longitudinal data is designed to answer questions about which programs can be credited for increasing wages and income mobility.��

Benjamin Boer, senior director of data for Education Systems Center at NIU, notes that the complexity of data poses challenges and opportunities. “I don’t think people understand all the different programming that goes on,” he says. “There are prenatal programs, early childhood programs, home visiting, Medicaid-funded screenings for special needs and so on.” Boer hopes to establish correlations between participation in these various programs and third grade assessment data. (If you’re keeping score at home, NIU is not part of the Big Ten, but Boer appeared on the Alliance’s webinar, and their collaboration with University of Illinois makes them honorary members.) 

Recently, the partnered with ILDS to study the flow of children through the education system. — which comprises the state’s quality rating and improvement system along with education training and referral functions — is also using the data resource.��

“Other states may want to use data for accountability — justifying the expense — but our goal is ensuring that children get the services that they need,” Boer says.��

Sarah Clark, senior director of strategy and development for Education Systems Center, refers to the longitudinal project as “a space where researchers can collaborate and build upon each other’s work. And that’s critical because it’s not just from university researcher to university researcher, but also back to state agencies, who have such limited capacities.”

As Big Ten ELA continues to promote best practices on data systems, a more recent webinar in December examined two landmark studies on the effects of early childhood education — the , which began in the 1960s and followed students through age 40, and the , which has been ongoing since 1986. According to Barnett, both studies “show the full potential of longitudinal data systems to inform science and policy on early childhood education.”

Thomas sees promise in the “open dialogue going on between advocates, researchers, and other stakeholders who are invested in knowing more about young children and about the early childhood landscape.” Ultimately, this work will lead to what she envisions as “a public portal that will be used for a lot of our integrated data.” 

“We’ve been talking about these data issues for years,” Thomas acknowledges, “but I really feel like this is the closest Illinois has been in decades. And now we actually can see… maybe not the end of the tunnel, but I can see that little light.”

According to a 2023 Pew Research Center , U.S. teachers’ opinions on the use of AI tools in K-12 education remain divided, with 32% believing there’s an equal mix of benefit and harm, 35% indicating they’re not sure, and 25% citing more harm than benefit. Just last month, the federal government for K-12 schools to navigate the emerging technology.

Whether you support it, fear it, or just don’t quite understand it, AI is poised to fundamentally shape how we learn and consume information — and sooner than one might think. Students must be ready to meet this moment.

Understanding the basic processes that fuel AI require data literacy. That is as fundamental to navigating society as traditional reading and writing skills. Parents need to understand that this isn’t just a technological “wave of the future.” Equipping students with these skills now is critical for their future success and for maintaining a well-informed society.

A foundation in data literacy goes beyond preparing students for future jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), which alone are to grow twice as fast as other careers over the next decade. We experience data literacy every day in many routine ways — from understanding our electric bill, to managing personal finances, or evaluating a nutrition label. 

Data literacy is everywhere, which means that everyone benefits from data science education. 

While data science refers to a subject that can be integrated into common curricula like math, science, and computer programming, data literacy refers to the collection of technical, critical thinking, and communication skills needed to make data useful and understood in the real world. 

Together, they give students the tools to comprehend data, think thoughtfully and analytically as they engage with AI technologies, and form their own informed perspectives on the world — all of which contribute to their lifelong learning potential.

In Ashley Hinton’s second grade classroom at in North Carolina, start on the first day of school.

As their first assignment, Hinton asks students to draw a response to the question, “How are you feeling?” Students then split into groups to analyze responses — discussing how they could group similar answers, label commonalities, and visualize the results to share with peers and parents. Long before these learners will enter an AP Statistics classroom, this simple exercise is helping them gather, sort, display, and discuss data.

According to , a national initiative that strives to make data science a fundamental part of K-12 education, data literacy is an excellent way to connect concepts across disciplines. This makes for a perfect introduction in early grades where integrated learning is the standard.

Doing so does not come at the expense of prioritizing the fundamentals — something that’s very much on the minds of district leaders as they seek to recover from pandemic learning. Rather, setting this foundation in data fluency tees students up to succeed in later courses that integrate the more technical aspects of data science, such as algebra, chemistry, or statistics.

Of course, this isn’t just for STEM students. Parents need to understand how schools are equipping all students with the data literacy and communications skills they’ll need to navigate the increasingly complex, interconnected world that awaits. This is true for theater kids, future journalists, and artists just as much as it is for students primarily interested in STEM. As Ms. Hinton’s class proves, the concepts behind data science can be applied across all subjects and grades.

We need to make sure parents know why this is important and how to advocate for these opportunities for their child. That’s why , the nation’s leading nonprofit school information site, partnered with Data Science 4 Everyone to bridge this gap. Together, we’re helping parents understand and creating opportunities for school leaders to share their data science offerings on their GreatSchools profile.

Providing parents with this kind of information not only allows them to make better educational decisions for their family, but also can increase interest and demand for data science education within their schools.

Just as reading proficiency is critical for understanding the world, data literacy skills are the next foundational competencies required to thrive in today’s economy. When students are not exposed to data science or data literacy, they are excluded from a fundamental, lifelong skill set, much like if they weren’t taught to read.

We can — and should — still push foundational learning, but we ought to adapt to the needs of modern learners while we’re at it.

Every day, 402.74 trillion bytes of data are added to the internet, presenting a daunting challenge to K-12 students. The new information provides vast new troves of knowledge, but it’s also a breeding ground of disinformation, intrusion, and scams. How can children navigate their education amidst this overwhelming influx of data?

Education experts say the answer lies in acquiring data and AI literacy skills. Such skills, they argue, lead to improved critical thinking, academic gains, and career prospects.

Unfortunately, U.S. schools lag behind other nations in teaching data literacy. A , a coalition seeking to expand access to data science education, shows how other countries are implementing data and AI literacy education for children throughout the K-12 grades. From Canadian fourth graders learning about the importance of data in science class to Chinese middle and high school students getting new textbooks dedicated to AI, a range of countries have already embraced new curricula, standards, and teaching strategies to help their students master these hugely important skills.

So, what is data literacy anyway?

Data literacy is a deceptively simple concept. On the one hand, it means exactly what it sounds like. On the other hand, it includes such a vast array of academic and critical thinking skills, that it’s helpful to break it down.

• Data refers to information in any form: words, images, numbers, statistics, charts and graphs, audio, video, etc.
• Literacy is the ability to read, understand, analyze, question, and communicate new information.
• Data literacy is the ability to explore, analyze, comprehend, and communicate with data in a productive way.

Data literacy involves both a collection of technical skills as well as all the thinking and communication skills needed to make data useful in the real world.

Kristin Hunter-Thomson is a former teacher and researcher who now works to help educators understand and incorporate data literacy into their classrooms through her company, Dataspire. “I approach data literacy from the perspective that every citizen in the 21st century should be data literate, in the same way we are able to read, write, and have numeracy skills,” she explains. “Many people think of data literacy as large datasets driving corporate decision-making, but I think about it in terms of what data visualizations show up on your electricity bill or through your smartwatch or in the news. Teaching students data literacy is teaching them the language of data so that they can be successful going about their lives in our data-filled 21st century.”

In other words, data literacy can’t be taught in a vacuum. It’s a skill set that can only be learned after many other skills are in place, including:

• Research. Students need to understand how to find information not just by googling or  a query, but by pinpointing their searches.
• Being savvy consumers of information. Once presented with information, students need to learn how to evaluate different sources: Are they valid? What’s their point of view? Where is the information coming from? Answering these questions requires domain knowledge (including academic subjects like history or science and current events like the news or technological trends).
• Critical thinking. When analyzing information, students need to know how to question assumptions and employ logic as they evaluate the information they find.
• Technical fluency. Students need a range of technical skills to understand and manipulate data, including managing data sets, mining existing data, warehousing, and organizing data. To extract meaning from the data they need to be adept at using a variety of data-related tech tools (e.g. Excel, sheets, Tableau, Mixpanel) and may require programming, statistics, algebra, or calculus.
• Communication is essential. To be truly data literate, students need to be able to communicate with others about their work, findings, and thought processes. This requires strong communication skills, including active listening, writing, public speaking, and presentation design — including visualization — skills.

With these skills in place, students can interact with data in smart and meaningful ways. Are these skills enough for your child to be ready for a world of fast-changing jobs and technology? Not quite. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), experts are arguing that students also need AI literacy to help them navigate the technology that is expected to upend everything from office work and truck driving to medicine and manufacturing.

What is AI literacy?

Artificial Intelligence (AI), the transformative technology that enables computers to perform human-like tasks by organizing huge quantities of data, has already changed many students’ lives. According to a , about 46 percent of high school students have used an AI tool (most commonly ChatGPT) with school work as their primary reason. Since so many high school students are already using AI it stands to reason they should also acquire AI literacy skills.

AI literacy involves both the ability to:

• understand how artificial intelligence works; and
• use AI technologies competently.

Many underlying critical thinking skills needed for AI literacy are similar to those needed for data literacy, but .

As an example of an AI-focused curriculum, , an online program taught by students and graduates of Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, offers fifth to seventh graders an AI education that starts with learning block-based programming tools and advances to machine learning models for chatbots and self-driving cars. For seventh and eighth graders, the Inspirit curriculum includes programming in Python and RunDexter, training AI to fight disease or understand human language, and applying algorithms to real-world data sets.  offer small mentor-led groups that use AI to design socially useful projects that are presented to parents and guests on the last day of the class.

Hunter-Thomson, founder of Dataspire, believes teachers need to help students understand how AI is trained by previous human input and how to think critically about AI tools and outputs. In the era of AI, when there can be less transparency about information sources, she says it’s essential that students understand “where information shared online comes from, how it is created, and how to vet the source” since AI can both generate falsehoods unintentionally and can easily be used to deceive.

The benefits of data literacy and AI literacy

• Academic gains. The Thinking With Data Project in 2012 conducted a  where seventh graders in two different schools in Ohio learned data literacy skills in math, science, English language arts, and social studies while students in the control group did not learn data literacy skills. The students who learned data literacy skills ended up earning higher test scores in both math and social studies than the control group.
• Ethical thinking skills. Some research suggests data literacy also helps K-12 students’ ethical understanding. For instance, in a , researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College found that AI literacy in middle school helped students identify bias and understand ethical and societal concerns.
• Future prospects. Data literacy may also ensure students have a crucial set of skills for their careers. The  surveyed 558 business leaders in the U.S. and the U.K. about the need for data literacy skills when hiring new employees. According to the report, 66 percent of business leaders “would be willing to pay a higher salary to candidates with strong data literacy skills.” Seventy-seven percent of the business leaders suggested a salary increase of 10 to 15 percent for data-literate candidates, and approximately 25 percent said they would offer a 30 percent hiring bonus. Additionally, the  shows the current median salary for the occupation Data Scientist is $108,000 and projects that the occupation will grow 35 percent between 2022 and 2032 — with related fields also being in high demand and earning high pay.

Where does the U.S. stand compared to other countries in teaching data literacy?

In countries around the world, schools are rushing to teach data and AI literacy. In Germany, starting in fifth grade all students do a year-long data science project focused on machine learning and data exploration. In U.K. secondary schools, students learn to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to collect, map, analyze, edit, and visualize geographic data. In grade nine, students in India study ethics in data science.

Other nations stand out as leaders in the field of data and AI education. China published AI textbooks for middle and high school students in 2018, while downgrading geometry, algebra, and calculus from mandatory courses to optional. Questions related to these downgraded math classes were also removed from the college entrance exam and replaced, in part, by questions related to data analysis.

Equally sweeping is Singapore’s . The initiative helps teachers use AI to customize education for every student, especially those with special needs. AI “companions” provide individualized feedback to motivate every pupil after identifying how they respond to classroom activities and materials. Similarly,  plans to provide every student with an AI tutor that understands their specific learning behaviors and guides them toward personalized homework assignments. In addition, they have pledged to implement AI as a subject in the K-12 curriculum nationwide by 2025.

In New Zealand, each year 30,000 primary and secondary students participate in the Census at School project that teaches data science, probability, and statistics using data they collect. New Zealand also has early learning centers that embrace data literacy as a form of language for kids as young as 4 and 5. “The work that folks are doing in New Zealand … is really exciting and pushing the field forward,” shares Kristin Hunter-Thomson of Dataspire.

Slower progress in the U.S.

American schools trail behind the nations listed above, but efforts are being made to catch up. A “data literacy crisis” was announced in the U.S. after math scores for 15-year-olds plummeted 13 points during the Covid-19 pandemic. To combat this, a bipartisan group of legislators have supported the passage of , the Data Science and Literacy Act. The bill would provide funding to develop curricula in data literacy, purchase high-quality learning materials, and hire and train data science educators. The bill is expected to be introduced in the U.S. Senate in September 2024.

In the meantime, data literacy is gradually taking hold at the state and federal levels.  indicates that as of March 2024, a dozen states have added data science to their course catalogs, nine more have added pilot courses or professional development training for teachers in data literacy, and six others are working on adopting standards. Zarek Drozda, Director of Data Science for Everyone, also noted in a  that 19 states have a subject code that allows them to offer data literacy and data science programs to their students.

AI literacy lags farther behind. In November 2023, the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC)  that recommends education in AI Literacy. Unfortunately, the NAIAC proposal prioritizes college and university students, all but ignoring K-12 students.

What’s the future of data and AI literacy in our children’s classrooms? To paraphrase an old cliche: AI is the limit. Just as AI itself is transforming our economy, workplaces, and everyday tools, it’s inevitable that it will ultimately change how our children learn as well. The question remains: how fast will America’s schools and families adapt?

But it’s not just Chicago. Over the last decade, districts have closed fewer and fewer schools. As of 2021-22, the most recent year for which national is available, districts closed 666 schools — the lowest number in more than 20 years. (Charter school closures are also at historically low levels.)

In many cases, closing neighborhood schools is disruptive for students and communities, and deciding which to shutter tears neighborhoods apart. So the decline in shutdowns might seem like a positive trend. If school closures are bad for students, it’s a good thing that fewer kids are displaced, right?

Not necessarily. For one thing, districts may have simply delayed the inevitable, because student headcounts have been falling. Public school enrollments fell by 1.2 million children in the wake of the pandemic, and thousands of schools nationwide suffered declines of 20% or more.

Worse, the most recent suggest enrollments will fall another 5% by 2031 — and those don’t take into account any reductions in immigration during the next Trump administration.

Too many district leaders closed their eyes to financial reality and hoped for population trends to suddenly reverse. But there are signs they may be starting to grapple with the harsh budget truth. Denver tried to close schools two years ago and backed down, but is trying again this year. ; ; ; ; , Texas; and , Georgia, are all in the midst of painful deliberations about school closures. The district outside San Jose, California, is considering closing or consolidating nearly half of its schools.

It is precisely because school closure decisions are disruptive that districts should have acted when times were good. Making these decisions under real financial duress constrains their choices and potentially exacerbates the negative effects. For example, Philadelphia overwhelmed its school system when it was forced into a massive wave of closures a decade ago, ultimately shuttering 10% of its schools over two years. , for both the displaced students and their new peers, as the number of students affected grew.

But the of school closures largely depend on what happens to the affected students. And as EdNavigator’s Tim Daly wrote last year, there are no-cost ways for districts to mitigate the downsides. For example, they could ensure that any displaced student has access to a school that is better than the shuttered one —not just the closest. Money can also help, in the form of counselors and other types of navigators who can help kids with the transition.

Of course, selecting which schools to close is no easy task. When I looked at this question recently for a large urban district in the South, I found there was a Venn diagram that found quite a bit of overlap among schools that were small and expensive, that were losing students, and that were getting poor academic results.

Consider the table below, with three real but anonymized schools. The school I call Washington could be a likely candidate for closure. It is serving 40% fewer students than it did pre-pandemic, which has driven its per-pupil cost far above the district average of about $14,000. The state has also given it a “D” rating for academic performance.

But the district wouldn’t want to blindly follow the enrollment and cost trends, or else it might close a school like Adams, which sports an “A” rating from the state. On the other end, the Jefferson school is comparatively cheap to operate, and its student enrollment has held up comparatively well, but those kids are getting only middling results. By closing high-cost, low-performing schools like Washington, this district would have more money to invest in schools like Jefferson, to help them raise their students’ performance.

Outsiders like me have access only to academic and financial factors like these, but districts would also need to factor in geographic and demographic issues to see which communities would be affected, whether there are any potential growth patterns in housing that could improve population trends, and whether the district has other viable uses for the buildings themselves.

A district might also decide on a course of action other than closure or consolidation, but that would require the shrinking schools to operate differently. Could they restructure their compensation packages to invest in fewer, higher-paid employees, like a school in New York City that pays its teachers $140,000 a year? Could they adopt team-based staffing models that break apart the traditional one-classroom, one-teacher approach?

Or, rather than engaging in a centralized decision-making process, district leaders could learn from the school choice world and let families vote with their feet. For example, recent research on found that a combination of improving options for families and closing the lowest-performing schools had large benefits for students. And, when the Reason Foundation looked recently at inter-district transfer programs in three states, it found that families to the highest-rated schools and away from the lowest-rated ones. Similarly, of Los Angeles’ “Zones of Choice” program found that it boosted student achievement and raised college enrollment rates by 5%. Districts could lean into those findings and help families make informed choices about the best options available to them.

But regardless of what approach they take, district leaders need to start with honest projections of enrollment trends in their community, followed by a plan for how to handle them. Students will be better off if district leaders look for proactive solutions sooner rather than later.

In most states, young people overwhelmingly supported pro-abortion ballot measures, even while voting for GOP President-elect Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, according to a new data analysis of young voters in the 2024 election.

Although young people listed the economy and jobs as the most important issue in the election, abortion came in at number two. This was particularly significant given that more than a dozen states had ballot measures related to protecting or codifying access to abortion rights,

In all states for which Tuft University’s , had reliable data, young voters ages 18-29 overwhelmingly voted in favor of these reproductive rights measures, even as they moved right from the 2020 election, voting for Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris by much slimmer margins or — in Florida and Missouri — pulling the lever for Trump. 

In Florida, over half (52%) of young voters cast their ballot in favor of ending the state’s six-week abortion ban, despite voting for Trump by a 10-point margin.

Youth activist and chairman of the Jayden D’Onofrio saw this play out live on Florida State University’s campus on the last day of early voting when he shuttled students to their polling place via golf cart. 

He said he heard from countless young Republicans who voted for Trump — whose Supreme Court nominees were largely responsible for overturning the constitutional right to an abortion — yet also supported Amendment 4. If the ballot measure had passed, it would have established a statewide constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability.

“The first two, three times, it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s interesting. You’re voting for Republicans, but you’re voting yes on four,’” he told ����Ӱ��. “And then after like the first three times, it was just like, ‘OK, holy crap. You know, how many of you people are there?’ ” 

He largely blames the state Democratic party for this disconnect, arguing they failed to message, motivate, or educate youth voters “on where we stand on this issue and where Republicans stand on this issue, and as a result, [young Republicans] voted antithetical to their own beliefs.” 

He added that this mismatch was particularly prominent among young people who told him Trump was pro-choice as well.

Harris garnered 43% of the overall vote in Florida, and the ballot measure received 57.2% of the vote. The amendment ultimately didn’t pass because it didn’t reach Florida’s 60% threshold. Most states require a simple majority. 

This overwhelming support of pro-abortion rights ballot measures, despite a movement to the right generally in 2024, matches and previous , which found 53% of all young voters identify as pro-choice.

Ruby Belle Booth, a researcher at CIRCLE, said it’s further evidence of an emerging trend in which young conservatives and Republicans are consistently more liberal than older ones on a few key issues such as climate change and abortion.

“With this more conservative electorate, it doesn’t mean that they’re more conservative on every single issue,” she said.

Rhea Maniar, a Harvard University freshman and former chair of the said she wasn’t expecting the “magic wand… miracle” of a Harris win in her home state, but she was cautiously optimistic about the ballot measure.

Ultimately, she was left disappointed by her party’s inability to hit the 60% mark and encouraged leaders to reevaluate their approach to the youth vote generally. 

“There has to be a reason why folks are willing to put Trump on the top of their ticket and then still vote for abortion,” she said. “And I think Democrats are really going to need to take a hard, long look at what’s happening.” 

The ‘frat boy vote’

Youth turnout this year (42%) was lower than the historic turnout in 2020 — more similarly mirroring that of 2016 — except in the battleground states, where it was much closer to the 50% mark. 

“What the turnout in the battlegrounds really shows,” said Booth, “is that when young people are engaged in elections and when there’s a lot of investment in engaging young people in elections they learn to feel like they can make a difference. They feel like their voice matters and they have resources that young people in a lot of other states don’t have.”

The young people who did turn out to vote were significantly more conservative. Young voters backed Harris overall by a mere 4 points (51% to 47%) but gravitated toward Trump compared to 2020, when they gave President Biden a much larger margin (+25). 

The youth electorate was more Republican than 2020 by 9 percentage points, whereas Democratic-identifying youth dropped by five points. It’s not yet clear if this indicates an ideological sea change among the youngest generation of voters or a shift in who turned out to vote, said Booth.

“It just goes to show that there’s so many different kinds of young people out there with so many different priorities,” she said, “and I think for a long time people just assumed that all young people were liberal voters and this election proved that that was not the case. And that’s something we’ve been saying for a really long time — but I think not everybody has been listening.”

One thing she believes is clear this early: young voters were driven by issues. Forty percent of young people chose the economy and jobs as their top issue, and those who did so were about 20 points more likely to vote for Trump. Abortion came in second place, followed by immigration in third — a shift from 2022 when immigration was ranked lower. 

This appears to be a driving factor in the movement toward Trump, who throughout his campaign and is now planning for . Young voters who listed immigration as their top issue supported Trump by a 70-point margin.��

Early data suggests the migration overall is largely attributable to young men, who supported President Joe Biden over Trump by six points, but voted for Trump by a 14-point margin this time around. Among young white men, that margin ballooned to 28 points.

Black and Asian youth overwhelmingly voted for Harris over Trump by the largest margin — about 50 points — while young white voters favored Trump overall (54% to 44%).

The largest shift for any racial or ethnic group of youth between the 2020 and 2024 elections were Latinos, who favored Harris by a 20-point margin this year but went for Biden by a 49-point margin. Young Latino men were 14 points more likely to identify as Republican than they were four years ago, though they still were more likely overall to identify as Democrats.

Youth organizer D’Onofrio, who identifies as “just as a regular, straight white dude who’s 19 years old in Florida,” said he’s seen this dynamic play out among his male friends, the majority of whom are Republicans.

He said he’s started to notice that despite supporting some liberal issues — such as abortion rights — many of these young men have been of hyper-masculinity that “makes them feel good,” which Trump and the Republican party have successfully tapped into.

His peers see Trump going on conservative talk shows, like The Joe Rogan Experience, or engaging with Twitch streamers or billionaire businessmen like Elon Musk. Meanwhile Democrats, he said, are not meeting this demographic where they are, nor do they understand how to talk to them. 

Ultimately, he said, Democrats must recruit strong messengers, with relatable information that they get out on the platforms young men actually engage with.

“It’s the frat boy vote,” he said. “You know, embracing it is unfortunately the way to do it. But by embracing it, you can actively change their minds on it and show that we’re regular people [who aren’t] trying to destroy or dilute their vote.”

Correction: Young male voters favored President-elect Donald Trump by a 14-point margin this year. An earlier version of this story had that number at 28, which is the margin by which young white male voters favored Trump.

Bronx Principal David Liu did not notice an abrupt change in attendance when students returned to in-person learning three years ago after pandemic campus closures. Instead, the problem became clearer to him as the year progressed.

Students and staff at Gotham Collaborative High School became fatigued by five-day school weeks. Child tax credits and supplemental unemployment benefits also , forcing parents back into the workplace and requiring students to take on more responsibilities at home.

“The grind of what school was started to hit students at different times of the school year,” he said. “That’s when chronic absenteeism became kind of more like this slowly growing thing in our school.”

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Now, the school has begun to crack the code on chronic absenteeism, a problem challenging school districts . Administrators implemented a data system to better track students’ attendance and leverage staff and community organizations to counsel those at risk of chronic absence. The school even offers incentives to get students to show up, such as early-morning breakfast raffles or day trips.

Schools across New York City have introduced new initiatives to address the longstanding issue. Some have started to use restorative justice as a guiding principle in group interventions that target chronically absent students, rather than resorting to more punitive measures. Increasingly, schools are enlisting other students to encourage their friends to attend school regularly.

Most districts, including New York City, consider a student chronically absent if they miss at least 10% of the school year, whether those days are considered excused, unexcused, or part of a suspension. With a 180-day academic calendar, that is 18 missed days of school.

The citywide chronic absenteeism rate stood at about 25% before the pandemic. Once students returned to in-person learning in 2021, the city’s share of chronically absent students jumped 15 percentage points. While schools have made progress to lower that rate over the years, citywide chronic absenteeism still hasn’t returned to what it once was. Nearly 35% of public school students were chronically absent last school year, according to data recently released in the .

Though higher-poverty schools began closing the gap on chronic absenteeism in 2022-23, that gap still hovered about 14 percentage points higher than their counterparts. As a result, more and more schools have found themselves addressing issues that exist beyond the school’s environment, such as students’ access to health care, child care, and .

That is why some teachers and school administrators say tackling chronic absenteeism is so challenging – it often requires a deeper knowledge of the students and families that they serve. In its 2022-23 , Gotham Collaborative cited “not knowing our students well” as the root cause of the school’s chronic absence problem.

And while data collection often serves as a first step to addressing chronic absenteeism, creating plans that lead to improvement requires people, said Kim Nauer, an education fellow at The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who has looked at .

“Every single one of those numbers needs to be a kid and a name and a parent and a person attached to them,” she said. “Otherwise you’re not going to make progress in any sustained way. Like robocalls [are] useless.”

Using data to target specific student groups

Gotham Collaborative High School, which served a little over 300 students last school year, had already viewed chronic absenteeism as an issue worthy of intervention before the pandemic. The school’s pre-pandemic chronic absenteeism rate was already higher than the average, at about 56%, and it then grew to 61% in 2020 when the pandemic forced school closures across the city.

During the 2022-23 school year, however, the high school’s rate of chronically absent students dropped to roughly 29%, its lowest in years.

Tackling the issue has taken years of targeted work and has relied on a data system the school created, grouping students into four buckets according to their absences. Each group receives certain interventions depending on the severity of their record. Those are provided through several support teams that might include peer mediator ambassadors, school counselors, and a social worker.

Sometimes intervention looks like an in-depth, individualized assessment of a student and their needs, or a home visit with a student and their family. But other times it may look like a school social for students who feel that they don’t have a strong network of friends, or an early-morning breakfast raffle.

Addressing the needs of students whose attendance and academic performance didn’t raise warning flags was critical, Liu said. Before introducing the new system, he said, the school identified only a small selection of students – those who came in the least, or about half of the school year, and those who had near-perfect attendance. Changing their focus helped shift the school toward lower instances of chronic absence, he believes.

“This was a main ‘aha’ moment for us,” he said. “These are our students that are coming 80% of the time, four out of five times a week, they might be B-average students. It sparked a lot of conversations about how do we show them that what they’re doing is not meeting what they can be doing and their potential?”

Many schools with a high share of chronically absent students use some variation of Gotham Collaborative’s data tracking system.

New York City schools receive weekly automatic that list students who have missed five or 10 school days. Schools can also print additional reports that show all students who have missed school five or 10 times, or chronically absent students from the previous school year. The reports are most effective when schools create workflows to immediately address what they are seeing in the data, said a spokesperson for the education department.

Hedy Chang, director of Attendance Works, a national and state initiative to address the issue, also noted that early intervention is important. When she and other researchers began using the current, widely adopted 10% rule, she said one of its main purposes was to serve as an early-warning metric. So if a student misses two days of school in a month, she said, that should alert teachers and staff that a student is in need of support.

“I don’t want you to wait til 17 days to notice that things are a challenge,” Chang said, in reference to annual absences. “Or even in the first month, if it’s 10 days, that’s a problem.”

Using peer-to-peer support to overcome chronic absenteeism

Researchers like Chang and Nauer often examine chronic absenteeism among younger students because it is more representative of families’ circumstances. A 5-year-old, for example, isn’t missing school on their own accord, Chang said.

But for teens, chronic absenteeism comes with its own set of complexities. Liu has noticed that some of his students may miss school due to working long hours or having to bring younger siblings to and from school. Some may choose not to show up to avoid conflict with friends, he said.

And because the conversations that staffers have with students inevitably look different than those that students might have with people closer to their age, Liu is now focusing on tapping students’ ability to deeply connect with their peers to curb chronic absence.

“Every year we get older, but the kids stay the same age,” he said. “So every year the staff gets one year removed from being generationally, culturally relevant.”

At The International High School for Health Sciences – where all students are newly arrived immigrants – students may also grapple with other hurdles that affect engagement, such as learning English for the first time, or preparing for standardized tests unfamiliar to them, according to administrators at the school. Yet the high school’s chronic absenteeism rate during the 2022-23 school year fell to 29.5%, nearly cutting its rates from the previous two years in half.

In 2018, the school began using restorative justice — a practice that the school has used in lieu of other disciplinary measures since it opened over 10 years ago – to address chronic absenteeism, administrators say. A chronically absent student – typically in their final year of high school – sits down with a group of their closest friends, a teacher that they have a strong relationship with, and the assistant principal. The group discusses the student’s strengths, reasons for why they don’t show up at school, and how others in the group can support them moving forward.

International High School also receives extra support from staff at Queens Community House, the school’s community-based partner. Now in its third year, the partnership is funded through NYC Community Schools, a grant-based program that extends to of the city’s more than 1,500 schools.

Queens Community House provides services such as tutoring outside of regular school hours – particularly during Regents season – and events that range from self-care workshops to game nights. Communicating with families, however, is one of its primary functions, said the school’s Community Schools Director Lizbeth Mendoza.

“The framework for a lot of these conversations is building relationships,” she said. “So I’m actually the person that sends out the message letting a parent or guardian know that their student was absent at the end of the day.”

At the High School for Teaching and the Professions in the Bronx, groups of older mentors and younger mentees start pairing together in October. The mentors, typically 11th or 12th graders, receive training in their own classes on how to support their mentees, whether that be through engaging in activities together or talking through the mentees’ experiences.

“They go in and they really create this bond,” said Principal Roberto Hernandez. “And what I found within the last two years was a sense of ownership that our mentors are having for their mentees.”

This sense of commitment has trickled into other areas of focus for the school, like attendance, Hernandez said. For some students, it has also created a sense of commitment to the school at large: Two of the high school’s guidance counselors are former students. Now that the school has a designated guidance counselor for every grade level, Hernandez said it is easier for the administration to connect with individual students.

“It’s not just teaching, it’s getting to know them and letting them get to know you, and they love it,” he said. “And I think that’s all contributing to where we are today.”

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

Upgrades to the system Texas uses to collect student, staff and financial data from school districts are causing serious concerns among school administrators and data specialists across the state who say the changes have led to thousands of unresolved errors that could potentially cause them to lose out on state funding.

Each of Texas’ more than 1,200 school districts is required to regularly submit data to the state, including information on attendance, enrollment, students who receive special education, children experiencing homelessness and the number of kids who have completed a college preparatory course. State officials use the information to determine whether schools are meeting performance standards and how much funding they receive each year.

Three years ago, the Texas Education Agency major changes to the reporting system. The goal was to make it easier for school districts and the state to share data and reduce the amount of manual labor required from school officials. Districts were supportive of the proposed changes.

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Almost a dozen other states are using the same standard on which Texas based its system upgrade, said Eric Jansson, vice president of technology for Ed-Fi Alliance, the organization that created the standard. Texas is the largest state to implement the changes.

More than 300 districts participated in the pilot program during the last school year, according to the TEA. All school districts began using the new system this school year.

Before the upgrade, school districts would submit data directly to the TEA after working with a software vendor that would ensure the education agency didn’t have any problems interpreting the information.

Under the new arrangement, the software vendors are now responsible for transmitting the data to the state, a change that school officials say leaves them without a chance to fact-check the information before it goes out.

They also say a litany of errors and inaccuracies surfaced during the pilot program. In some instances, hundreds of student records — from enrollment figures to the number of students in certain programs — did not show up correctly.

A TEA spokesperson said the agency is confident districts will have ample time to resolve any errors between now and the first reporting deadline on Dec. 12. The agency also noted that districts have until Jan. 16 to resubmit any data needing corrections.

But districts say they have no idea how to solve some errors. Their concerns, shared in interviews with The Texas Tribune, have not been previously reported.

In an August letter to TEA Commissioner Mike Morath, Lewisville Independent School District Superintendent Lori Rapp requested that the agency delay the full transition to the new reporting system until all districts are able to submit “100% of all data elements” successfully.

Rapp said thousands of errors surfaced after the district’s software vendor submitted data to the new system during the pilot. Her staff spent “tons of hours” trying to figure out why the miscalculations had occurred, she said in an interview.

While Rapp’s staff had made some progress working with the new system since the pilot started, “[w]e have not been able to fully send, promote, and validate our data to the point where a successful submission could have been made,” Rapp’s letter said.

After receiving the note, the TEA organized a virtual meeting with Lewisville ISD officials to discuss their concerns. Rapp said the state did not seem concerned about whether school districts were prepared to make the transition.

“Maybe because there’s no ramifications to them and the stakes aren’t as high, they don’t have a concern,” Rapp said. “But for districts, the stakes are extremely high, and it’s a gross oversight on their part if they are failing to recognize that.”

While the TEA says it has resolved more than a thousand tickets submitted by school officials reporting problems with the new system, officials from nearly a half-dozen districts told the Tribune the state has not explained what’s causing some of the errors or told them if they have been resolved.

School administrators and data specialists who participated in the pilot say the implications of adopting a system that still doesn’t have a clear process to correct mistakes are massive. An inaccurate assessment of the students enrolled in Texas public schools could mean school districts receive less funding from the state. Schools are funded based on students’ average daily attendance, and they receive additional dollars if they have children with specific needs, like students with disabilities or kids learning English as a second language.

Funding has been a major point of contention between Texas schools and state officials in recent years. Many districts entered the school year having to spend more money than they have, largely because of the state’s rising costs of living and a half-decade of no increases to the base-level funding they receive from the state. Public school leaders remain upset that last year’s legislative sessions ended with no significant raises despite the state having

Texas’ school accountability system also relies on the data school districts submit to the state. Some parents rely on those performance metrics to make decisions on where to enroll their children. Poor performance can also lead to state intervention — like it happened when the state Houston ISD’s locally elected school board and superintendent last year.

Full accountability ratings have not been released in five years due to over changes to how districts are evaluated. Many have publicly released their unofficial ratings to share their progress with their communities.

School districts say they can’t afford to have mistakes in their student data.

“I think everybody understands the situation that public education is in right now,” said Frisco ISD Superintendent Mike Waldrip. “And there is no confidence by anyone that I’ve spoken with that that data is accurate or will be accurate when it comes time to submit it to the state.”

School districts that have piloted the new system say they understand errors are part of the process. They just wanted more time to troubleshoot them before it went live.

“We need more answers around not only supporting the system to be successful, but while we are making sure that it’s successful, how are we going to continue to assure that we’re not suffering consequences for a delay or inaccuracies in the data?” said Mark White, assistant superintendent of accountability for the Tomball Independent School District. “And none of those assurances have been received by districts.”

A TEA spokesperson said the agency did not see a need to expand the trial period because the pilot showed the channels through which it receives data from software vendors worked.

The TEA said it plans to continue working with districts to help resolve any errors well before the first reporting deadline. The agency said districts should reach out if they are still experiencing problems.

Tammy Eagans, who oversees the student data reporting process for Leon ISD, said the agency was helpful throughout the pilot year whenever the school district had problems submitting information. She added that the task of switching to the new system may not pose the same problems for her small district of fewer than 800 students as it might for larger districts with thousands of children.

Still, she said she is “not 100% confident” that the system as it’s being rolled out works as intended. Extending the pilot “would not have been a bad idea,” Eagans said. But she is also hopeful that the education agency will be understanding of districts’ concerns and not blame them for errors out of their control.

The upcoming reporting deadline “just kind of puts a little extra pressure on us,” said Eagans, adding that she’s “a little nervous, a little apprehensive, but hoping that it goes smoother than I think it will.”

Other school officials say the pilot was unsuccessful, and if adopting the new system requires more time, the state should be willing to cooperate.

While districts’ summer data submissions are the largest and have major funding implications, each reporting period is significant in helping paint an accurate picture of a district’s latest demographic, financial and personnel situation. For Tomball ISD Superintendent Martha Salazar-Zamora, the looming fall reporting deadline — the first since the adoption of the new system — is the most important.

“If the data is inaccurate, then we live with that inaccuracy throughout the entire year,” she said. “So it has a lot of relevance on many levels.”

Mary Mitchem, a former TEA employee, said she started worrying about the system’s readiness shortly after she was hired in June to make sure the system met the needs of its users. Mitchem no longer works for the agency as of early August.

Within days of being hired, she said it appeared that no one had done the work to ensure the data coming from software vendors accurately translated into the education agency’s system. Having helped manage data systems for Texas school districts and worked on statewide software projects across the country, she said she was also surprised that, two months before the pilot was set to conclude, no one had audited or tested the system.

“You’re converting a state accounting system, and you have to make sure it balances — you have to,” said Mitchem.

Mitchem sounded the alarm up the chain of command, but a supervisor told her that anything beyond making sure the data was flowing into the new system was the responsibility of the software vendors and school districts.

“It just blew my mind,” Mitchem said.

In early August, she sent an email to Morath saying, in part, “You will be in litigation if you don’t help fix it, and it will be with the largest districts in the state of Texas.”

This article originally appeared in  a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Similarly, educators share a deep concern for the well-being of their students, families and communities. However, they lack the life-saving constraints and coherent, systemwide guidance SOLAS gives sea captains.

In 2023, a team of education leaders and researchers launched the (EAC) to address harms caused by the absence of SOLAS-like guidance. We saw too many education initiatives that were initially successful fail to endure because of a lack of consistent licensure, accreditation, continuing education or accountability grounded in evidence.

To fill this void, our are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of . These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional well-being, could become the basis for specific education policies, programs, and practices. They will be accessible on our website, distributed through collaborating partner organizations and promulgated through convenings with education agencies.

Just as the maritime safety standards improved safety and saved lives, the EAC is committed to constraining the use of non-evidence-based programs that cause waste and even harm. For example, , an  intervention targeted to lowest-achieving first graders, has been used with at an per child, which has resulted in total expenditures of $2.5 billion. But, as noted in the , “Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a [December 2022] . The tutoring seemed to harm them.”

 Even the much-touted reading initiative that moved Mississippi from the lowest-performing state on fourth-grade NAEP reading scores to 21st in the nation, may have serious flaws. EAC co-founder Kelly Butler, CEO of Mississippi’s , worries that not all components of the state’s education system are being held to the same level of accountability, which can undermine sustainability.

To fulfill its mission, EAC’s first goal is to make evidence the basis for licensure, educator preparation programs, and continuing education. Toward this end, we are collaborating with national organizations including , at the Hunt Institute, , , and the to identify evidence-based resources for licensure, educator preparation and continuing education. We plan to present the results of these collaborations to an audience of higher education professors through the Alabama Department of Education, through the University of North Dakota at a conference for K-12 educators from across the state and through the New Hampshire Department of Education’s conference for teachers and administrators. We are also identifying selection criteria for model policies as a first step in recruiting and convening a coalition of states that will audit the degree to which their licensure, educator preparation programs, accountability and continuing education policies align with the evidence-based resources identified by the EAC and other trustworthy organizations.

To ensure that successful reform efforts will be sustainable, our second goal requires focusing on what is necessary to make evidence central to decisionmaking in nine major components of the U.S. education system: educator preparation, state policy, district and school leadership, assessment, parent and family advocacy, professional learning, linguistic diversity, special education and instructional materials. These components are represented by nine EAC teams that are identifying and organizing evidence-based resources for use by education decisionmakers. Already, Stephanie Stollar, co-lead of the EAC’s educator preparation team, is advising the leaders of 12 educator preparation programs on the use of evidence-based resources and practices to ensure new teachers are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to improve student achievement.

Because education is a complex, multifaceted system, decisionmakers need to adopt a systems perspective, recognizing that failure of one component can impact the effectiveness of the entire ecosystem. Once the full set of constraints and guidance is in place, accountability will be possible and will contribute to educational equity by significantly and permanently improving the achievement and social-emotional and behavioral well-being of all students — with special attention to those with learning differences and other marginalized groups.

In the for the transformation of the profession into an evidence-based system, educators will relinquish certain freedoms — notably the leeway to employ ineffective practices — but will gain guidance that empowers them to fulfill their original purpose by profoundly impacting the future of students, families and communities. The alternative is to continue rearranging the deck chairs under the guise of education reform.

in ensuring parents, communities and the broader public have accurate information about the academic progress of K-12 students. But getting this information into the hands of parents has been tricky, as the data has been and even harder to understand.

Four years ago, my organization launched to provide a simple and easy way to access statewide academic assessment data from across the country, as well as make it easier to stay up to date on changes across the K-12 testing landscape. Our most recent update encompasses 42 states and Washington, D.C., which have released assessment results for the 2022-23 school year.

This level of transparency is a critical first step in ensuring parents have a window into how well school systems are serving their children, as well as insight into achievement gaps, areas for needed investment and successful efforts. Too often, results from statewide tests are buried on confusing and outdated state education department websites or delivered in formats that don’t readily help parents identify gaps in their child’s learning. Collecting and displaying all available data from across states and in an easy-to-read format helps to address this challenge.

Assessment HQ also provides a snapshot of state compliance with federal reporting requirements (as measured by the Every Student Succeeds Act) to provide participation data for all students and student groups — an important element of full transparency. Of those that have released data, 26 are fully compliant with federal law. This information, while seemingly wonky, allows anyone exploring state student assessment data to understand the extent to which their state’s report is accurate, reliable and inclusive of all students. 

Along with compliance, accessibility to statewide assessment data is critical to ensuring that decisions and policies impacting young people are grounded in real evidence and results, as well as keeping families adequately informed of student progress. Equipping parents with information enables them to make the important, necessary decisions about their child’s education — such as enrolling in summer school or tutoring if their students are below grade level.

In the , Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona describes how his office plans on supporting and incentivizing states to pilot and adopt new approaches to assessment that may provide better information to parents on how their children are progressing toward grade-level standards. Cardona is right that current assessment systems could be improved upon, but he should also recognize that many complaints about standardized exams have nothing to do with the tests themselves.

For example, when looking at results across the country, it is immediately clear that the effective reporting and use of data is uneven, at best, with most states releasing results months after tests are administered. Indeed, reporting is generally — an issue of timing rather than testing. 

This has a huge effect on parents. Newly conducted by Gallup and nonprofit Learning Heroes finds that almost 9 out of 10 parents believe their child is performing at grade level — a perception that unfortunately does not meet reality, as statewide assessments show that far fewer students are on track. Having access to student assessment data earlier expands the options for parents and educators if a student is struggling. 

That’s why I’m encouraged by actions taken in states , where the state legislature now requires that the results of annual statewide assessments be released no later than June 30.

With the federal government calling for states to pursue more innovation in testing, it’s critical that elected and appointed education leaders — from the federal Education Department to state legislators to district superintendents — remain clear-eyed and transparent about which aspects of K-12 state assessment systems must be preserved to ensure schools can identify and meet students needs — and which must be improved upon.

Ensuring that parents, teachers and education leaders have accurate, timely information about learning is the first critical step in empowering data-driven decisions on behalf of students. In encouraging testing innovation, the federal government must make sure that states focus on strengthening the aspects of K-12 testing that work, like accurate measurement of student achievement, while acknowledging and tackling issues like slow reporting and the lack of guidance for educators and families.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to the Collaborative for Student Success and ����Ӱ��.

The online tool, its creators say, will democratize school performance data at an important time, as schools nationwide struggle to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scheduled to go live today, the new website sports a simple interface that allows users to query it conversationally, as they would a search engine or AI chatbot, to plumb math and English language arts data in grades 3-8. At the moment, there are no firm plans to add high school-level data.

If, for instance, a superintendent is curious about math scores for kids learning English in her state, she can : “Show me math scores over time for English learners and non-English learners in Minnesota.” Want to know the 10 school districts in Mississippi with the highest ELA scores in 2023? .

Similarly, parents moving to a new town or neighborhood can ask about data for individual schools in most cases.

The project, dubbed , is a partnership between Brown University and , the company that built the site’s AI functionality. 

The tool takes a cue from data dashboards, such as the federal government’s , which collect statewide assessment information. This one goes further, allowing more up-to-date analyses of state, district and even school-level data, with protections that shield individual students’ scores in small districts and schools. 

Within state, local and school-level data, users can also break down results by race, ethnicity, economic level and other indicators.

The AI aspect allows users to query the database in plain language, said Emily Oster, a well-known economist who often writes on parenting. Oster led the tool’s development and said its potential customer base is broad, from parents and school board members to state policymakers and journalists.

“You can imagine people actually wanting to see in a more granular way, or be able to explore in a more granular way: ‘How are different schools in this district doing’ or ‘How is my district doing relative to another district?’ This will make that much easier.”

Oster said the tool is so easy to use that a school board member sitting in a board meeting could pull out her phone and in a few seconds produce a chart showing school-by-school test results districtwide. 

Policymakers could also benefit from the tool, she said, since they can’t always access state assessment data without cumbersome requests to state education officials. “And that takes time. If you want to have access to get an insight quickly, this is going to make it easier.”

What’s perhaps most useful, Oster said, is the ability to look inside individual states, down to the district or school level, to figure out which schools and populations are doing better than others. “I think that’s actually pretty powerful in terms of where the policy is made.”

Reliance on ‘plain language’

Project Manager Clare Halloran said Zelma grew out of Brown researchers’ own frustration in trying to compare COVID recovery data across states. “It was usually hard to find out where the information was, what was missing,” she said.

Even states with public-facing data portals and dashboards don’t make the job easy, she said, as many are “a little bit clunky.” They rely on dropdown menus that can only offer one indicator at a time. With Zelma, she said, “You can really just kind of say in plain language what you’re looking for,” even if it involves several variables. 

“I think it will make a lot of data just a lot more accessible to a lot more people,” she said. “When the states release their data, we get the headline. But it’s hard for the average person to explore it a little bit more.”

All queries are public but the authors aren’t identified. The site resembles a Twitter-like feed, with the most recent queries at the top so users can see what others want to learn about.

It also offers warnings — dubbed “notable events” — that caution users not to read too much into proficiency levels in certain cases, such as in states and districts where new assessments are being administered, or where they see lower participation rates.

And while it can offer rudimentary comparisons between states, Oster said neither Zelma nor the assessments themselves are built for such comparisons. 

“There are things across states you might get out of this, for example how much recovery has there been” in one state vs. another, she said. “You can sort of squint a little and think about differences in trends. And I actually think there is some stuff we can learn from those kinds of trends. But in terms of levels, these data are just not well suited to a question of, ‘Is Mississippi outperforming Michigan?’ That’s why we’ve got the NAEP data.”

Actually, asking the tool to compare states will prompt a warning saying that states administer different assessments and that proficiency rates “are not comparable across states.” 

Even with a more user-friendly interface, though, the site is only as good as the data underlying it — and it’s uneven among states. Minnesota, for instance, offers test scores clear back to the late 1990s. But Rhode Island has no data before 2018.

And, of course, virtually no states returned test scores in 2020 and 2021, when the U.S. Department of Education granted blanket standardized testing waivers amid the pandemic.

Paul Peterson, who directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, said he welcomed the ability to more easily dig into states’ updated testing data.

“Any enhancement of transparency is a good thing,” he said.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to Zelma and ����Ӱ��.

At the Data Quality Campaign, we know this to be true — because we’ve asked. In surveys, 80% of , 94% of , 93% of and 98% of said they would feel more confident making decisions with better access to data.

In May, DQC released a that lays out how states can revolutionize how they deliver access to information that people need about education and workforce pathways — for individuals, the public and policymakers. This vision — of robust that help individuals make decisions and support policymakers in driving systemic improvements — is based on the collective work of more than 40 national research, policy and advocacy organizations, as well as state advocates, leaders and funders.

Six months later, this work is starting to happen across states and at the federal level. 

During the , Alabama, Montana and Rhode Island passed laws to codify cross-agency data governance involving early education, K-12, postsecondary and workforce. This is the single most important step states can take toward enabling robust data access, as establishing clear governance ensures that agencies come together for shared decisionmaking and that the efforts outlast changes in state priorities and leadership. Three states might not seem like a lot, they have nearly doubled the number that now have cross-agency data governance policies in place. Before this year, only California, Kentucky, Maryland and North Dakota were on that list. We look forward to seeing that number rise again in the coming years as other states consider these important changes. 

Four states and Washington, D.C., made strides this year by funding their state data systems, and three states passed privacy laws to mandate safeguards for student data use — two additional steps toward ensuring that each state has a that enables robust access to information. 

Leaders across the federal government are also working to untangle the red tape and supply the funding necessary for states to get this work done. Last year’s appropriations process not only led to a $5 million increasing in funding for the federal Statewide Longitudinal Data System Grant Program — which assists state education agencies working to improve their statewide data systems — but this year’s stated explicitly that the goal of the program is to help all states create “comprehensive P-20W (early learning through workforce) systems.” The Senate is also the reauthorization of the Education Sciences Reform Act, which allows the government to collect information and conduct research on the education system. While funding for the act has continued since it expired, reauthorization underscores the necessity of strong data and systems for evidence building and decisionmaking.

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor to explore revising its regulations and guidance for sharing unemployment insurance wage data — vital information for understanding and supporting how individuals move into and through the workforce. And the Office of Management and Budget released a proposal to revise the government’s Uniform Grants Guidance, clarifying that both indirect and direct funds can be used for a range of data and evidence-related purposes.

But the work can’t stop here. 

State leaders — including governors, legislators and education agency staff — must continue to prioritize access and take the leap to share data in ways that people can use to make decisions. In addition to codifying cross-agency data governance and funding their systems, state leaders must take the following to ensure that everyone has access to the data they need:

• Establish an independent entity to administer the state’s data system — because when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge;
• Map the state’s existing technology, tools, data, funding, staff, legal supports and other assets and policies so leaders can be strategic about where to begin and what investments they should make;
• Engage the public to understand how to prioritize people’s data access needs;
• Create a shared understanding among state leaders of how state and federal law are interpreted and implemented;
• Help people understand how to use and benefit from state data tools and resources while supporting schools, community colleges, agencies that administer workforce education and training programs, and others in building their own capacity to use data;
• Invest in the talent necessary to staff this work sustainably;
• Ensure that people’s data is kept private and secure. 

Federal leaders must states make changes by clarifying how state decisionmakers are permitted to use different types of funding and increasing available dollars for state data systems; expanding privacy technical assistance and support available to states; providing guidance on and support for linking and accessing data; and sharing information on how states can emulate best practices.

States have an opportunity to make big changes to their data systems so they meet the needs of the many users who require this essential information to make decisions. It takes courage and leadership — but it’s possible. And it’s time for leaders to build on the momentum already growing across the country to make robust access to education and workforce data a reality. Their communities deserve it.

The documents identify current and former special education students by name and include letter grades, disability status and mental health data. In one particularly sensitive disclosure, a counselor identified over 60 students who’ve struggled with issues like depression, including those who have engaged in self-harm or been hospitalized. 

A letter from the district to the state provides copious details about the condition and care of a medically fragile fourth grader. And a document containing “attorney work product” marked “privileged and confidential” references a pair of Title IX cases. It identifies two students as “Jane Doe” — a common practice with alleged victims of sexual assault or harassment — but then names the students in parentheses.

The disclosure of private student data is likely the largest since 2020, when the hacker group MAZE , including Social Security numbers and birthdates, on over 170,000 students and employees in the nation’s 13th-largest district. But this time, it looks like human error, rather than ransomware, was to blame. 

“Why worry about people from the outside?” asked Callie Oettinger, who received the recent document collection. “They’ve got the door wide open from the inside.”  

Oettinger, a parent and special education advocate with a long and contentious relationship with Fairfax administrators, went to a school on three consecutive days last month to examine her children’s files — data such as test scores, attendance records and audio recordings of meetings she’s been requesting for years. In addition to boxes of paper files, the district provided her with thumb drives and computer discs that Oettinger estimates include personal data on roughly 35,000 students.

Parents who have challenged the district over special education services said the leak opens their children to further harm. Among the records released to Oettinger was a 2019 email exchange in which officials questioned the cost of an independent educational evaluation for Julie Melear’s son, who has dyslexia. 

“Is my kid, for the rest of his life, going to have to look over his shoulder to see what Fairfax is putting out there?” asked Melear, who had three children in the district and now lives in Denver.

The latest disclosure is not an isolated incident. Oettinger, who also runs a special education , said the district has repeatedly released information on her now 19-year-old son to other parents and unauthorized staff and, on at least six occasions between 2016 and 2021, provided her with documents on children who are not her own. One was a 2020 internal on special education that included students’ names, their attorneys and costs for services.

But those instances seem small compared to the volume of records she received in October, which span the years 2019 to 2021. It also comes four years after the district’s former superintendent apologized to Oettinger for a similar disclosure and two years after a county judge ruled against Fairfax in a case related to leaked student records. 

Contacted last week, Fairfax officials — who pledged to improve security after the 2020 breach — appeared unaware they had given Oettinger access to students’ personal data. The district’s communications office forwarded an inquiry from ����Ӱ�� to Molly Shannon, who manages the district’s public records office. In an email, Shannon asked a reporter to identify who accessed the records and where it occurred ”so we can investigate and remediate the issue at the school, notify any affected families, and work with the parent to ensure other students’ information is properly secured.” 

Under , the district is required to alert parents “as soon as practicable” if there’s a violation under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

The records release is the latest dilemma for Virginia’s largest school system, which has come under intense scrutiny for its handling of special education. Following a federal civil rights probe last year, to make up for services it failed to provide to students with disabilities during the pandemic. For years, federal officials the state to improve its monitoring of districts to ensure they’re complying with all special education laws. As recently as February, they told former state Superintendent Jillian Balow that remained a sticking point.

Data leaks linked to are not unique to Fairfax. In 2017, for example, the Chicago Public Schools posted , including health conditions and birthdates, to unsecured websites. Time-consuming records requests to school districts have also skyrocketed in recent years, fueled in part by controversies over COVID protocols, library books and curriculum. Many districts have struggled to keep up, but one expert said Fairfax shouldn’t be one of them.

“I have a lot more sympathy for the many, many small districts,” said Amelia Vance, founder and president of the Public Interest Privacy Center. But with an annual $3.5 billion budget, Fairfax, she said, “certainly seems to have the resources and they’ve had these requests for years. If they don’t have a system to respond in a protective manner, in an efficient manner, that’s on them.”

Phyllis Wolfram, executive director of the Council of Administrators of Special Education, a national organization, said she doesn’t think it’s common for districts to release students’ files to the wrong parent. But if record requests are increasing, she said, security should be tighter. 

“Given the shortage of school staff all around, we must be extra vigilant and ensure high-quality training for all staff,” she said. 

‘Process and protocols’ 

FERPA is that gives parents the right to examine their children’s educational records. Oettinger said she asked to see original documents in person — after the state overruled the district’s initial refusal — because past responses have been incomplete or contained electronic files that didn’t open. 

She said she is unsure who in the district ultimately signed off on the recent release. On Oct. 16th, she received an email from Shannon saying the records were ready. From Oct. 17 to 19, she sat in a small room next to the main office of her local high school and viewed the files. A paralegal from the central office supervised as she copied records to thumb drives and scanned paper documents on her phone, Oettinger said. He offered assistance and even called in an IT expert when a media file didn’t open. She recorded everything and shared audio files of her visit with ����Ӱ��. Ironically, she said, some of her own children’s records are still missing.

At one point, she spotted an unredacted document with a teacher’s notes and suspected there were more. But she said she didn’t realize the full scope of the disclosure until she began reviewing the files at home. 

She filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights on Oct. 20 and contacted a handful of parents she knows with children named in the documents.

Oettinger said she didn’t report the leak to district officials because she doesn’t trust them — a skepticism that has only intensified over time. When her son had reading difficulties in elementary school, educators responded three times that an evaluation “is not warranted,” according to district records and, she said, told her that boys learn to read slower than girls. 

“You get one chance with your kid, and there’s no handbook,” she said. “In special education especially, nobody knows what to do. All you know is that you’re fighting.”

It took an independent evaluation for her son to be diagnosed with dyslexia, and by seventh grade, he had an Individualized Education Program, a plan that outlines the services a district is obligated to provide students with disabilities. Like thousands of Fairfax parents, she also complained that the district failed to follow that plan during the pandemic. He graduated in 2022, but her daughter remains a Fairfax student.

As she navigated the system for her son, she became a sounding board for other families. She launched her website, Special Education Action, in 2020. She’s filed at least 100 complaints with the state education department over special education services in the district and another dozen with the federal civil rights office, of which at least two have resulted in investigations. Her persistence — sending detailed, sometimes biting, emails and pressing for answers to all her questions — has earned her a reputation for “berating” staff, according to one 2019 email from Dawn Schaefer, director of the district office that handles special education complaints.

“It’s obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about, so let me break it down for you,” Oettinger wrote in a 2020 email to a staff person regarding a diagnosis for her son.

In addition to requests for documents on her own children, she submits Freedom of Information Act requests with the district each year for more general data that she uses in her advocacy role. In one internal 2020 email she obtained, John Cafferky, an attorney who handles special education cases for the district, said she files them because she’s “waiting for someone to slip up.” 

District officials have promised her they would do a better job of safeguarding student privacy. In a 2019 email exchange with former Superintendent Scott Brabrand, Oettinger reported multiple cases of school staff forwarding information about her son to the wrong people. 

“I am sorry to report that the school did make a mistake and unintentionally provided information about your son to another parent,” he responded. “We take student privacy very seriously. Following our process and protocols is paramount to ensuring we protect student information.”

Following the 2020 ransomware incident, the district and released a statement saying it was “committed to protecting the information of our students, our staff, and their families.” The state also stepped in to help the district clean up its “internal practices, and ensure it should not happen again,” state Superintendent Lisa Coons told ����Ӱ��.

But it did. 

In 2021, another Fairfax parent, Debra Tisler, filed a public records request seeking invoices for legal services in an attempt to learn how much Fairfax was spending on attorneys’ fees related to students with disabilities. The district released records that included personal information on about a dozen students. 

Tisler shared the files with Oettinger, who posted , with names blacked out, on her website. The district to get the records back, but lost the case. 

Judge Richard Gardiner, who heard the lawsuit in a Fairfax County district court, said the records were “obtained quite lawfully.” 

“The [district], for whatever reason — maybe it was ineptness, I don’t know; I have no evidence on that — made the decision to turn over the information, and they’re stuck with that,” he said, according to of the hearing. 

Following the lawsuit, an from December 2022 showed the district’s in-house attorneys didn’t finish redacting students’ personal information before its records office released the documents. Fairfax instituted new procedures to ensure records go through multiple reviews, including checks by a paralegal and a staff attorney. The district also to keep up with demand.

‘Basic data protection’

But it appears the system broke down. Some parents whose records ended up in the recently released files said they weren’t surprised because they, too, have previously received documents pertaining to other students.

“Some of the information I found out about other people’s children I don’t want to know,” said Melear, the parent who relocated to Denver. 

In the files released to Oettinger, Torey Vanek’s daughter was included on a spreadsheet of students who receive special education services or accommodations for a disability. A ninth grader at Woodson High School, her daughter has dyslexia. 

 “There is a joint frustration among many parents in Fairfax,” Vanek said. “Part of me is not surprised, but part of me is like this is just basic data protection.” 

Some have modified graduation requirements or retooled stalwart courses — particularly Algebra II — to include data science, statistics and probability, topics of great interest to a wide swath of students headed to college or the workforce. 

No longer are they steering everyone toward calculus, a course that is not universally available — nor pertinent to all students’ academic and professional lives. 

And high schools are not making these critical decisions in isolation: Many are working with college administrators — post-secondary math is also being reconsidered — to better align their coursework.��

Many member states also pledge to train high school teachers to help make the switch.

“Everyone agrees that different college students need different math — quantitative literacy for humanities, stats for most social sciences, calculus for STEM and economics,” said David Kung, the Center’s policy director. “Everyone also agrees that all K-12 students should be in the same math through at least algebra. The big question is where and how to branch [after that], with different students getting different math — and how to do that equitably.”

The , which seeks to ensure all children — particularly the underserved — have equitable access to high-quality mathematics and science instruction, began operating out of the University of Texas at Austin in 1991. It has helped shape math for students in that state and has also worked with dozens of districts outside Texas, its efforts funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The revamping of mathematics comes at a critical time: Math proficiency tanked nationwide during and after COVID, prompting educators to seize the opportunity to overhaul the subject with the hope of improving student engagement and outcomes. 

Josh Recio, the Center’s course program specialist, said change of this magnitude takes time: It often requires agreement from several entities, including mathematics teachers’ organizations, the legislature, and parent and community groups. Then, every district in the state has to change its graduation requirements, while also incorporating new course material.

“Each step of this process takes coordinated actions that are not easy to achieve,” Recio said. “And yet, states are persevering because they can see the benefit to students.”

The Center requires those participating in its to make a three-year commitment: Washington and Georgia are on their second cycle. 

Utah started working with the Center around that same time, though it wasn’t officially a member state when the program began. Still, the partnership proved fruitful: In its first three years, the state accomplished three essential goals — and has already seen remarkable academic gains. 

First, it brought K-12 educators and state college leaders together to identify three entry-level college math courses: statistics, quantitative reasoning and college algebra. 

“It really helped to solidify that progression of math content that gets taught all the way through from high school to early college,” said Lindsey Henderson, secondary mathematics specialist with the Utah State Board of Education. 

Then, it made sure to offer these classes to high school students so they could earn college credit for them prior to graduation. 

Finally, Henderson said, the state changed its mathematics offerings so that not all students would be pushed toward calculus: Through pamphlets and online literature, Utah encourages families and students to pick classes aligned with their goals. 

“If you want to be a STEM major or work in business, you should consider college algebra,” she said. “If you’re interested in humanities or performing and language arts, you should take quantitative reasoning. If you’re interested in nursing or psychology, you should take statistics.” 

Like many other participating states, Washington also reworked Algebra II: It identified the elements of the subject it believes all students need and added data science, quantitative reasoning and mathematical modeling, said Arlene Crum, director of mathematics for the state education department. The new course was piloted in the 2022-23 school year.

“We have multiple graduation pathways within Washington where we support and value students heading in many different directions, not only to a four-year university, but many to two-year colleges, the military or into industry,” Crum said. “So, Algebra II should not just be a course that prepares students for the calculus pathway, but it should help students in their thinking for wherever they’re going.”

Washington also reworked its eight-year-old “transition to college” math class, often taken in the 12th grade, bolstering the course’s social-emotional learning elements while also emphasizing statistics. 

Oregon also has changed its high school math standards with the goal of increasing student engagement and participation while improving outcomes for all. 

It now requires two years of foundational algebra, geometry, and data/statistics and a third year that allows students to choose courses from a variety of options, including quantitative reasoning, data science or advanced mathematics. Students can continue into a fourth year through advanced courses in these pathways, including calculus.

“Increasing the number and percentage of students who excel in math and meet high school mathematics graduation requirements is critical to ensuring future post-secondary success — and keeping career options open to students in a variety of CTE and STEM-based fields,” said Oregon Department of Education spokesman Peter J. Rudy. “This is important for all students, most especially for students who are farthest away from mathematics learning opportunities that bring math to life.”

Henderson, of Utah, said these changes have helped more students meet and exceed state mathematics requirements: Just 28% of students completed four years of high school mathematics in 2012 compared to 87% in 2020, after the new initiatives were implemented. 

And, she said, children with disabilities are faring much better in the subject: While only 43% were earning grade-level mathematics credit in 9^th grade in 2012, the figure shot up to 85% in 2020. 

“The pandemic has forced us to recognize that student interest in mathematics is really important,” Henderson said. “It helps us to reach really great outcomes. We want to show kids that math is useful. It’s not just a set of procedures that can only be used by a few.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

This expansion is critical because many students with high potential do not have access to or participate in advanced learning. For example, students in Title I schools than non-Title I schools are identified for advanced education, and Black and Hispanic students are among Advanced Placement exam takers. Inequities in student participation are so stark that some parents are for the dismantling of advanced programs entirely. But that’s not what’s needed. We need more of these programs, coupled with systematic examination of participation and outcomes to identify inequities, eliminate barriers to inclusion and build programs that involve students from all backgrounds. 

Collecting, reviewing and acting upon student participation and performance data is essential. Administrators can utilize state, district, school and classroom data to understand who participates and how they fare, and to identify programs where students are systematically underrepresented. There is little need to collect new statistics; existing enrollment and standardized test data will provide sufficient information. For example: 

• At the elementary level, educators should track and examine enrollment in gifted and advanced classes and the percentage of students reaching the highest level on state assessments in math, reading and science.

• In middle school, educators should track and examine enrollment and grades in honors courses, data on how many seventh- or eighth-graders complete algebra and the percentage of students reaching the highest level on state assessments in math, reading and science.

• In high school, educators should track and examine enrollment in AP or International Baccalaureate courses and performance on subsequent examinations; honors coursework; participation in dual degree programs or college courses; and the percentage of students reaching the highest level on state assessments in math, reading and science. 

In addition, student growth should be measured in each grade. of students begin school each fall at grade level, because students in the United States are grouped based on their age, not knowledge levels. Comparing performance at the beginning and end of each year can help ensure that all students learn, even those who are ahead of the curve. 

Most importantly, data should be disaggregated by gender, race/ethnicity, family income and English learner status, to identify discrepancies that can be addressed with targeted programming or outreach. Annually reviewing participation and outcome data can help educators identify students who might benefit from advanced learning, need more support to succeed or are underrepresented.

When I directed the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s research initiative, I visited Virginia’s Department of Education to discuss the Governor’s School Program for advanced learners. Staffers described numerous barriers to participation faced by lower-income students, including parents’ disparate access to information, lack of teacher referrals and language gaps. Yet ,when I asked how many lower-income students were enrolled, they did not know. Why? Because student income is captured by the financial aid department, not the system’s enrollment database.

We don’t know what we don’t measure. Many useful data exist, but pulling them together coherently requires intention. Data can be shared internally with administrators or externally with all stakeholders. Analysis can range from reporting head counts in a table to building interactive comparative displays of statistics. While directing gifted education in Paradise Valley district in Arizona from 2006 to 2022, for example, Dr. Dina Brulles annually reported state assessment math and reading results broken down by district and school, to make clear the percentage of students scoring as proficient versus advanced. Every year, she created pie charts by grade, gender and ethnicity, so administrators could see where discrepancies were and create flexible learning groups so all students were challenged.

New software tools make this even easier. For example, Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools uses , a data analytics platform, to generate an . This website publishes annual performance measures at the school and district level using interactive displays that viewers can customize to show data for specific schools or student populations. For example, the figure below shows the percentages of various student groups scoring at or above grade level for third grade reading. It’s great that the district shares these data publicly; even better would be if they also reported learning at the advanced level.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges cannot use race in admissions decisions. Yet racial differences still drive the percentages of students who have access to and successfully complete advanced courses that are often heavily weighted in admissions to selective colleges and universities.

Using data to understand which K-12 students participate in advanced learning, how they are doing, who might benefit from inclusion and who is being excluded can identify places where educators need to redesign coursework or bolster supports to enable more students from all backgrounds to successfully complete these courses and become college-ready. This will help ensure that colleges and universities have access to a pool of academically talented students whose demographic backgrounds match the nation’s great diversity, preserving education’s role as a pathway to upward mobility. To do anything less sells short the American Dream of opportunity and advancement for all.

Kristy Maxwell realized something had to change the day she picked her son Levi up from school and found out his teacher had left the autistic kindergartener alone crying and throwing pencils from under his desk.

The Michigan mom switched her son to a school that had a good reputation serving students with disabilities, but things didn’t improve. Because Levi was a “math whiz,” staff ignored his trouble socializing and his difficulty handling the cafeteria’s loud noises, Maxwell said. Meanwhile, she was unsuccessful in lobbying the school to screen her child for autism, a way to secure the extra services required by law for students with disabilities. The mother worried her son might never get the learning support he needed.

Then, in March 2020, the pandemic shifted all classes at his school online and forced the family into an accidental experiment in a new model of education. 

During remote school, Levi could get one-on-one attention sitting next to his mother, who had to temporarily stop her work as a massage therapist due to COVID. His younger sister, who struggles with anxiety, could take breaks to pet the family’s dogs.

“When everything shut down and we were forced to go virtual … my two younger kids did really well,” Maxwell said. 

“We decided after doing that, since the younger two kids did so well outside of a brick-and-mortar [school], keeping them virtual would be the best way to help them academically.”

The Maxwells, whose three kids are now 9, 11 and 15, are among the thousands of families across the U.S. that tried virtual learning for the first time during the pandemic and are now staying with it.

New data indicate that online schools have had a staying power beyond the pandemic that few observers suspected. While some virtual academies have operated for decades, they saw a well-documented in 2020-21, the first full school year after COVID, as many virus-wary parents looked to protect their children from infections and anti-mask families sought a way out of face-covering requirements. But in the following year, even as brick-and-mortar schools fully reopened and mask mandates fell, remote schools mostly maintained their pandemic enrollment gains — and in many cases added new seats.

On average across 10 states, virtual school enrollment rose to 170% of its pre-pandemic level in 2020-21, then nudged up further to 176% in 2021-22, according to data obtained by ����Ӱ��. 

The new figures contribute to a more far-reaching understanding because, while have documented the uptick in new fully virtual schools and standalone remote academies offered by districts, scant analyses have provided a national picture of student enrollment in those schools.

‘Looks like it’ll stick’

The trend reveals that for many families virtual learning has become more than a temporary model to get through the pandemic — but rather a long-term option preferred in increasing numbers.

“It looks like it’ll stick,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “In some states, the numbers went up temporarily and came back down a bit. But overall, if [families] are staying for a couple of years, I would expect that they would keep it going.”

Six states in the dataset — Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota and North Carolina — saw consecutive year-over-year virtual enrollment increases, while four — Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin and Wyoming — saw dramatic upticks in 2020-21, then a slight dip in 2021-22.

“We didn’t know what to expect after the [mask] mandates were lifted, but we maintained our enrollment and we continue to grow,” said Jodell Glagnow, attendance administrator at Wisconsin Virtual Academy.

In Iowa, an extreme case, virtual school enrollment swelled to 373% of pre-pandemic levels in 2020-21 and notched up even further to 388% in 2021-22. The growth corresponded with an increase in the number of approved online schools in the state from three to nearly two dozen over that span, a state Department of Education spokesperson explained.

The data represents K-12 students enrolled in standalone online academies and excludes students taking remote classes offered by their home brick-and-mortar school. The scope, however, varies slightly state by state. For example, the Florida numbers reflect enrollment in the statewide Florida Virtual School, while the Arkansas figures come from its two approved virtual charters and the Michigan tally encompasses students at all 88 providers approved for online instruction.

Oregon was the lone state to provide , revealing white students were overrepresented in the state’s virtual schools in 2020-21, while students with disabilities, those navigating poverty and English learners were underrepresented. Overall, enrollment rose to 172% of pre-pandemic levels that year and reduced slightly the next year. 

GeRita Connor runs Lowcountry Connections Academy, a virtual school in South Carolina. Her school opened last year to accommodate the overwhelming demand for online schooling once capacity was reached at its partner academy, South Carolina Connections, which contracts with the same for-profit provider, Connections LLC, an offshoot of publishing and testing giant Pearson. 

The families who were newcomers to online academies like hers in the fall of 2021, she said, often hadn’t even considered remote schooling before COVID.

“I think that what happened during the pandemic is that families became more aware of the option of virtual learning,” Connor said. “[It] really opened the doors for those opportunities to exist.”

For the Maxwells in Michigan, Levi stayed in the online option his school maintained through the 2020-21 year, then in the fall of 2021 switched to the statewide Michigan Great Lakes Virtual Academy. His younger sister, Aria, briefly returned to school in person, but switched back to a district-run online option in January 2022. In September, she was able to join her brother at Great Lakes.

Rotten apples?

Experts caution the emerging trend could translate to poor academic outcomes. Virtual academies far predated COVID in some states, often with lackluster track records. And during the pandemic, students who spent the most time away from in-person classes suffered the largest learning setbacks.

Research from the using pre-pandemic data shows students at online schools score far worse on academic tests than their peers learning in-person, even when controlling for factors like race, poverty level and disability status.

To now see more and more families enrolling in online learning worries Heather Schwartz, a researcher at the Rand Corporation who has during the pandemic.

“Until we have proof the virtual schools can perform just as well — for at least some students — as traditional public schools, yeah, I’m concerned,” she said.

Participating families and administrators, however, attest to a positive impact on student learning at many virtual schools. Levi Maxwell, for example, has seen his grades improve dramatically while learning online, his mother reports. Last year, he wrote his first story by himself, after struggling for years in English.

But Gary Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University and outspoken critic of virtual academies, believes the negative experiences outweigh the positive ones and is frustrated to see student enrollment continue to rise.

“It defies market theory,” he said. “You’d think consumers would wake up and say, ‘I’m not going to buy these apples. They’re rotten. I’m going to get another producer.’ But they’re not.”

He also warns that many virtual schools — including Connections Academies — have nonprofit “shells” that contract with for-profit management organizations. Those contracts often include costly management fees and six- or seven-figure salaries for top executives, he said. 

“Those so-called nonprofits are just incredibly profitable,” Miron said.

Connections Academy spokesperson Chantal Kowalski countered that schools in her organization are public and, like traditional brick-and-mortar schools, are governed by boards that “make all material or budget decisions and publicly post board meeting minutes online.” She added that they “contract with Pearson for online education products and services like curriculum and technology.”

Still, GAO education director Jacqueline Nowicki remains concerned about oversight.

“To the extent that the sector grows and becomes larger, I do think the risk to the federal government grows in terms of accountability,” she said.

Virtual schools, real relationships

The primary concern for Lake, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, is whether students enrolling in online schools lose out on facetime with teachers. Many remote academies rely heavily on asynchronous lessons and offer fewer hours of live instruction than traditional schools.

“Virtual learning can be a great option, but it isn’t a substitute for connections with adults,” she said. “You have to make sure that the virtual program is providing a lot of student-teacher interaction.”

At their Michigan virtual academy, the Maxwells feel like their needs are being well met. The school has provided more specialists to accommodate her children’s special needs than their brick-and-mortar schools ever did, Kristy Maxwell said. But she admits the energy required to keep her children on task through the school day can be considerable.

“It is a lot of work on my part,” the mom acknowledged.

In a nearby Great Lakes state, seventh grader Helena Warren has also felt satisfied with a recent pivot to the Wisconsin Virtual Academy. She transferred in January 2022 and appreciates how much one-on-one time she gets with her teachers through Zoom breakout rooms or phone calls when she needs extra help.

The middle schooler made the switch because the work at her old school was too “basic and easy,” she said, causing her to tune out and get bad grades, including some C’s and D’s. Now her grades are better and the assignments are more challenging. When she demonstrates mastery of a concept, her teacher asks her to help explain it to her peers, which she enjoys.

“She’s doing higher-grade stuff than she would be doing at a regular brick-and-mortar school,” said her proud mother, Melody Warren, who plans for Helena to stay online indefinitely.

“I think she’s gonna go through high school,” Warren said.

“It’s actually a little surreal” seeing the rich slate of offerings, said Brodrick Clarke, vice president of the .��

He’s worked at summer learning organizations for over a quarter century, making what used to be a difficult case to school administrators: That districts should offer camp-style July programs to all students rather than enrolling only those who flunked classes during the academic year.

Suddenly, his job has become much easier. 

A growing consensus has elevated summer learning programs to top priority after three consecutive school years disrupted by the pandemic. Several studies, including a 2018 , show camps blending fun and academics give students a leg up in key subject areas. So with millions of students nationwide lagging behind grade level in math and reading, and with schools sitting on billions of dollars in COVID relief cash, summer learning programs have become a go-to solution. 

So far, schools nationwide have poured $3.1 billion in American Rescue Plan dollars into summer and afterschool initiatives, according to an from Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Summer learning has emerged as districts’ “number one priority” for academic recovery spending, said Phyllis Jordan, the organization’s associate director.

“We’re actually investing in programs that we know work and have had results. We just get to do them at a much larger scale because there’s finally funding for it,” U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Cindy Marten told ����Ӱ��. 

“If you put enriching, engaging experiences together for kids and give them a chance to be together, they can learn.”

However, the picture remains murky on just how much progress states, districts and community organizations have actually made toward catching up students before the school year re-starts.

“We do not have data on the number of summer programs this year compared to years past,” said Jen Rinehart, senior vice president of strategy and programs at the Afterschool Alliance. “Similarly, we do not have data on the number of students enrolled this year.”

Marten acknowledged she was not aware of any federal effort to track how many youth are engaging in summer learning programs this year and did not clarify when the results of these programs will come into focus.

To fill the gap, ����Ӱ�� obtained exclusive datasets from , a data service that tracks school policy, and the research-based auditing publicly shared information about districts’ summer offerings. Burbio’s figures include the 200 largest U.S. school systems and CRPE’s cover 100 major metropolitan districts, many of which overlap. Though there are roughly 13,800 districts in the country, the 200 largest account for over a quarter of the nation’s students.

The analysis comes after the Department of Education announced the Engage Every Student Initiative in July to expand access to summer and afterschool offerings. Accompanying the launch, First Lady Jill Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured programs in Connecticut, Michigan and Georgia.

The Burbio and CRPE numbers reveal that the vast majority of school systems did indeed provide opportunities for students to catch up on learning and most offered their summer programs at no cost to families. Specifically:

• 93% of districts, according to Burbio, and 87%, according to CRPE, offered summer learning programs this year

• 79% of school systems that had programs provided them at no cost to families

• The average program length was 154 hours, just under four weeks and roughly equivalent to 12% of the academic school year. However, some offerings only covered about 30 hours, while others made up nearly 350 total hours

Additionally, most districts offered programs that went beyond rote academics — including activities such as theater, debate and robotics — and about 2 in 5 worked with community organizations to flesh out their camps. Nearly all programs included breakfast, lunch or both:

• Of the districts that offered summer learning opportunities, at least 83% included credit recovery options, 80% mixed academics with enrichment activities such as sports, arts or social-emotional learning, 48% offered programs for students with learning disabilities and 39% had dedicated options for English learners

• 96% of programs provided meals to children and 74% offered free transportation

• At least 39% of districts partnered with community organizations on summer offerings

The data align with recent figures reported by the , which surveyed a representative sample of 859 public schools in June. The figures are not an apples-to-apples comparison with the Burbio and CRPE data because they focus on individual schools rather than districts, but also point to extensive programming nationwide. NCES found:

• Three-quarters of schools offered learning and enrichment programs this summer

• School leaders estimated that 18-20% of their students enrolled, compared to 13-16% during a typical year

• 49% of education leaders said they partnered with an outside organization, 14% offered internship programs and 13% offered summer jobs or work-based learning programs

“When we talk about academic recovery … you can’t do it just within the regular school day,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “You need to make sure acceleration is extra time. The summer has become that time.”

A question of equity

Maritza Guridy, who has five children in Philadelphia public schools and also works as deputy director of parent voice with the , said some families in her network were able to find programs that met their needs while others were not.

“For those that [registered] early, they were able to get in there. For those that waited, it’s unfortunate,” she told ����Ӱ��.

She enrolled her kids in a local chapter of the nationally acclaimed program and also for a shorter stint at an organization called . Among her considerations were aspects like program cost, learning opportunities and emotional supports, but also factors like fun, clear communication from leadership and a building with central air.

In addition to academics, her children have practiced yoga and went for twice-a-week swim lessons at the local YMCA. One day, they came home with a gleeful announcement: “Mommy, I jumped into the deep side of the pool today — and I wasn’t scared!”

It thrilled Guridy, but she knew other families have missed out on similar joys because of barriers such as lack of transportation or no translated information about the opportunity. Guridy wants officials who plan programs to consider accessibility.

“Is [messaging] being offered in different languages?,” she prompts them. “How are parents supposed to enroll their children if they don’t even understand the application?”

It’s an equity issue, said Clarke, the National Summer Learning Association VP.  Youth who don’t have access to summer programs can see academic gains evaporate between June and September, a well-documented concept known as “summer slide.” Now the issue is particularly pressing, because students living in poverty have the starkest pandemic learning deficits.

“Families with access and privilege go into their bank accounts and provide great opportunities for their kids during the summertime,” he said. “The 26 million young people that are on free and reduced lunch … don’t have that luxury to do so. But they certainly need, want and deserve to have those opportunities.”

‘Explosion’ or ‘afterthought?’

With the stakes at an all-time high as schools reel from the pandemic’s impacts, experts have mixed views on whether summer offerings have actually scaled up this year.

“We’re seeing an explosion of programs,” said Ron Ottinger, executive director of , an organization connected to a network of thousands of providers across the country.

Meanwhile, Christine Pitts, who has done her own summer learning analysis as CRPE’s director of impact and communications, has a more pessimistic view.

In 2022, “[districts] were offering less than they were last year. So it’s almost like summer slipped back into that characterization of being an afterthought again,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her team found that school systems provided fewer offerings for English learners and fewer programs with social-emotional supports this summer compared to last.

“It’s hard to speculate at a national level, why that might have dropped off,” said Marten, the deputy secretary. Some districts may have decided their 2021 summer programs had done enough to catch learners up and that they could scale back this year, she said. However, if leaders wanted to maintain programs but were facing a lack of funds, she encouraged them to tap resources from the new initiative.

Contrasting the data Pitts saw, Nicholas Munyan-Penney spoke to officials in over 30 states about their summer learning programs while researching for a report with . The narrative he heard was of continued growth.

“Anecdotally, they’ve said that there’s definitely been an increase in enrollment this summer,” the researcher told ����Ӱ��.

Rinehart also cites data that indicate an upward trend. In the spring of 2022, her organization and 90% said they were planning to offer summer programs, compared to 79% at the same time a year earlier. Respondents also indicated they expected upticks in enrollment, with an increased share expressing concern they wouldn’t be able to meet families’ demand for programs.

In one of the only direct comparisons between this year and last, the recently released NCES data found no change between 2021 and 2022, with the share of schools saying they offered summer learning programs holding steady at 75%.

‘How are we going to fill the staff?’

One factor often hindering summer learning expansion has been a staff, only the latest symptom of wider shortages that have affected K-12 schools for much of the past year.

“Officials are finding it very hard to find teachers,” said Domenech. “In many cases, the problem has been that where the district has large numbers of kids sign up for the summer programs, they wind up wanting to cut back because they just don’t have the staff to cover it.”

In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, administrators had to from their summer offerings, about 1 in 6 students who had signed up, because of “unanticipated staffing challenges.”

Gia Maxwell works as a site director at summer learning provider . Throughout the spring, she joined monthly calls with leaders from across the Breakthrough network, which operates in 26 cities. Her colleagues were continually worried about finding enough instructors.

“Everyone was talking about, ‘How are we going to fill the staff? How are we going to fill the staff,’” she told ����Ӱ��.

Her Miami program usually finds all 130 youth and 30 adult staff for its summer teaching corps by May, she said. But this year, it took until halfway through teacher training in mid-June to recruit everyone, and they had to hire more teenage candidates than usual. 

The Providence, Rhode Island Breakthrough location was forced to this summer altogether, explaining “we have struggled to recruit students and teachers this year.”

To combat shortages, Arkansas brought in tutors from its to staff summer programs, said Munyan-Penney. In West Virginia, program leaders pulled from teacher training programs in the state to fill out their summer learning staff ranks. And Arizona boosted teachers’ wages 20% for the summer months to entice instructors.

They’re among the states “​​thinking about the staffing issue and being proactive about it,” said the Education Reform Now researcher.

‘Math, Reading and a Little Stampeding’

Several states shared provisional data with ����Ӱ�� on their summer offerings, though many said they won’t have finalized enrollment or academic impact numbers for months.  

In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey launched the which state leaders estimate has served about 100,000 campers — 10% of the state’s 1 million students — across 680 sites, including at least one in every county. 

Arizona officials went to great lengths to spread the word about the program. The state ran a including ads on television, radio, social media and in magazines, and direct texts to parents in both English and Spanish informing them of the free programs.

“We targeted lower-income families, as the goal of free summer camp was to see the highest number of campers from families that may not have been able to afford an adventure-style summer camp in prior years,” Kaitlin Harrier, the governor’s senior policy advisor, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. 

The governor’s office opted for a “summer camp” approach rather than a “summer school” model, describing the opportunities as “Math, Reading, and a Little Stampeding,” said Harrier.

“It is no secret that when kids are having fun, it sets up a great foundation for learning,” she added.

In Connecticut, the state also rolled out a grant program to help providers beef up their summer offerings and defray program costs for low-income youth. The state disbursed roughly $8 million in grants last summer and increased that sum to $12 million for 2022, said Eric Scoville, communications director for the State Department of Education.

Enrollment across a sample of 121 locations nearly doubled, from 17,000 to 32,000, between 2020 and 2021, according to an spearheaded by University of Connecticut researchers. However, it’s too early to tell how many students the state reached this summer, said Scoville.

In North Carolina, all 115 school districts offered one or more summer learning programs this year funded by COVID relief money, each attended by 30 to 200 students, said Todd Silberman, a public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. The enrollment figures will not be finalized for several weeks, he said, but he expects the total will be lower than 2021, when the state legislature required math, science, English and enrichment summer learning programs.

At the city level, Baltimore City Public Schools has scaled up its programming sharply thanks to COVID relief dollars. The maximum number of youth the 77,800-student district had served between June and August previous to the pandemic had been 9,000, said Ronda Welsh, the district’s extended learning coordinator. But in 2021, they reached 15,000 and have served at least that many again in 2022.

“Our goal was to provide as many opportunities as we could for students in Baltimore,” Welsh told ����Ӱ��.

Tulsa, for its part, has also cultivated a thriving summer learning culture, part of a wider “City of Learning” initiative that has been in the works for several years. That infrastructure has made the district into a poster child for community partnership, with over 40 youth-serving organizations contributing to the district’s programming this summer — including clubs for debating, biking and rowing.

“The summer is the time that kids get to experience those things they otherwise would not have the opportunity to do, especially during the school year,” said Jackie DuPont, executive director of the , which orchestrates the connections between the nonprofits and the district.

However, the district has not been able to maintain its high summer learning enrollment. Last summer, about a third of its 33,000 students participated in summer learning — an unusually large share. This year, a total of 7,000 youth engaged in the school system’s initiative, Director of Expanded Learning Jessica Goodman estimated. 

“​​Last summer was really an immediate response to not having kids in our school buildings … so some families just needed that time more than they did this summer,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Despite enrollment fluctuations, Marten believes the proliferation of new summer learning programs nationwide will outlast the influx of federal funding.

“Communities will fall in love with these programs,” she said. “They will say, ‘We’re never going to let this stop. We’re not just doing this because there was a pandemic. We’re doing this because this is what’s good for kids. Let’s keep doing it.’”