OKLAHOMA CITY — While , and intensify their focus on improving Oklahoma public education, complaints have grown among teachers that they should have a more prominent role in those policy discussions.

“I’ve been begging people for years, for years, to ask actual teachers, ‘What do you need? What do you think would make these improvements?’” longtime Oklahoma public school teacher Jami Cole said. “We know what would do it, but we’re never asked. We’re just passed over for people who have more influence and power than what we have.”

Education, particularly reading proficiency, is primed to be a top legislative issue over the coming year, with the Oklahoma State Chamber and new state Superintendent Lindel Fields already suggesting policy changes. Student literacy has emerged as , as well.

Two weeks ago, the State Chamber announced a platform of literacy-focused policies that would have struggling readers repeat a grade. Fields, who said improving reading levels is among his top priorities, floated the idea of , which currently sits at 181 days or 1,086 hours.

Both ideas have generated debate and opposition from educators, particularly among the 64,000-member Oklahoma Edvocates Facebook group, which Cole administers. Educators in the group have contended the suggestion of grade repetition and a longer school year are a sign that teachers aren’t consulted often enough in education policy conversations.

Cole said she opposes both ideas and sees a different set of needs from within her second-grade classroom. She has 23 students of widely varying education levels, she said, ranging from advanced to bordering on needing special education services.

More teaching aides, tutors and reading interventionists paired with smaller class sizes and properly trained teachers “is where the focus has to be” for state policymakers, Cole said.

“There’s so much going on in my classroom right now that I just have such a hard time with someone who has never been in the realm of teaching or education saying, ‘Oh, we just need to do this,’” she said.

The State Chamber’s plan, known as “Oklahoma Competes,” proposes a greater investment in reading coaches to assist teachers and more training in the phonics-based science of reading, along with retaining struggling readers.

The chamber announced its education plan at its State of Business Forum with endorsements from business leaders and Republican lawmakers, but not educators.

However, when developing “Oklahoma Competes,” the chamber sought input from classroom teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, superintendents, higher-education experts and school leaders across the state, President and CEO Chad Warmington said in a statement.

He said the chamber’s role is “not to dictate classroom practice, but to support the people who do this work every day.”

“Teachers are the frontline of this effort, and any meaningful policy solution has to reflect their experience and earn their buy-in,” Warmington said.

However, teachers still “don’t feel like they’re being heard,” said Tori Luster Pennington, president of the Oklahoma City American Federation of Teachers union, which collectively bargains on behalf of teachers in Oklahoma City Public Schools.

More interest from different groups, like the chamber, in improving education is a positive thing, she said. But her union members, who see the day-to-day realities within public schools, have given a very different list of solutions.

They cited a need for more support for students’ mental and behavioral health, she said. Chronic absenteeism also remains a persistent issue.

“Since COVID, even though we’re not in that same time, there’s still so many lingering effects of kids just not being ready and just not having the support that they need,” Pennington said. “So, we really just need more support and more engagement and helping those issues and those behaviors, and we really have to start there before we can add (school) days.”

Fields said his remarks on lengthening the school year weren’t a formal proposal, but rather a “very preliminary discussion” made during a TV interview. He said he had little dialogue with educators about the idea before floating it.

But, he’s since invited teachers to complete an to share their thoughts on a longer school year and to contribute other ideas for improving academic outcomes. The survey received nearly 4,000 responses after a week, Fields wrote in a Nov. 24 letter to teachers.

Fields said he intends to follow that up with visits to schools, education groups and teacher meetings with the goal of having open communication with teachers as he leads the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

Former state Superintendent Ryan Walters’ frayed the relationship between the agency and many educators. After Walters to lead an anti-teacher-union nonprofit, Fields, a longtime CareerTech center leader, came in with a different approach, .

“I want to visit with teachers, hear from teachers, hear their hearts and what’s on their minds,” he told reporters after an Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting Nov. 20.

State leaders should consult teachers or risk losing valuable feedback, said Rep. John Waldron, D-Tulsa.

Waldron is a former public high school teacher elected to office amid a groundswell of support for public education in 2018.

“If teachers aren’t part of the discussion, you’re not going to get to hear from teachers who have seen what a third-grade retention test does to 8 year olds,” he said. “And if you talk about adding 15 days to the school year at a time when teacher burnout is at historic highs, then yeah, you’re not going to develop a policy that makes more people want to be teachers or stay teachers.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

States that joined a national pledge led by three high-profile education advocacy and research groups to cut chronic absenteeism in half over five years fared better. The 16 states and Washington, D.C. posted results “substantially above the average rate” of decline, though exact numbers are not yet available, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the trio.

The national chronic absenteeism average dropped from 28.5% in 2022 to 25.4% in 2023, and fell an additional two points to 23.5% in 2024. Virginia, which is among the 16 participating states, cut its chronic absenteeism by 4.4 percentage points, year over year, to 15.7%, as of spring 2024.

Speaking of the states collectively, Malkus told ����Ӱ��, “That’s good but it’s not as good as we need it to be. I think it points to the need for sustained pressure and a sustained campaign to bring absence rates down and to bring more students back to consistent attendance.”

Last July, AEI and EdTrust, right-and left-leaning think tanks, respectively, and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to launch The 50% Challenge. This week, the organizations hosted in Washington, D.C., to report on their progress, re-up the call to action and hear insights from state, district and community partners on how they are improving student attendance and engagement.

With California and Georgia recently joining, the 16 states and D.C. who signed on to the pledge account for more than a third of all students nationally. While Malkus doesn’t necessarily attribute their better results to the pledge itself, he noted that their participation shows a willingness to commit to the cause and be publicly accountable for their results. 

“I will hold their feet to the fire on this goal,” he added during his opening remarks in D.C.

While felt most acutely by students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike in chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — regardless of size, racial breakdown or income. Chronic absenteeism from 13.4% in 2017 to 28.5% in 2022 before beginning to drop in 2023.

Only about one-third of students nationally are in districts that are on pace to cut 2022 absenteeism in half by 2027, according to an , and rates improved more slowly in 2024 than they did in 2023, “raising the very real possibility that absenteeism rates might never return to pre-pandemic levels.

Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are more likely to fall behind academically and are at a greater risk of dropping out of school. About 8% of all learning loss from the pandemic is attributed just to chronic absenteeism, according to soon-to-be-released AEI research.

The continued disproportionate impacts of chronic absenteeism were confirmed by recent , which found that in roughly half of urban school districts, more than 30% of students were chronically absent — a far higher share of students than in rural or suburban school districts.

RAND also found that the most commonly reported reason for missing school was sickness and one-quarter of kids did not think that being chronically absent was a problem.

SchoolStatus, a private company that works with districts to reduce chronic absenteeism, also released  for some 1.3 million K-12 students across 172 districts in nine states. Districts using proactive interventions, the company reports, drove down chronic absenteeism rates from 21.9% in 2023–24 to 20.9% in 2024–25.

At this week’s event, numerous experts across two panels emphasized the importance of a tiered approach to confronting the issue, which has resisted various remedies. Schools must build enough trust and buy-in with kids and their families that they are willing to share why they are absent in the first place. Once those root causes are identified, it is up to school, district and state leaders to work to remove the barriers.

And while data monitoring must play a significant role, it should be done in a way that is inclusive of families.

“We need to analyze data with families, not at them,” said Augustus Mays, EdTrust’s vice president of partnerships and engagement.

It’s imperative to understand the individual child beyond the number they represent and to design attendance plans and strategies with families so they feel supported rather than chastised.

“It’s around choosing belonging over punitive punishment,” Mays added.

One major and common mistake schools make is “accountability without relationships,” said Sonja Brookins Santelises, the superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools.

“You can’t ‘pull people up’ if you don’t have enough knowledge of what they’re really going through,” she said.

Panelists were transparent that all this would require immense funding, staff and community partnerships.

Virginia achieved its noteworthy drop in chronic absenteeism after launching a $418 million education initiative in the fall of 2023, in part after seeing their attendance data sink, with about 1 in 5 students chronically missing school. At least 10% of those funds are earmarked to prioritize attendance solutions in particular, according to panelist Emily Anne Gullickson, the superintendent of public instruction for the Virginia Department of Education. 

These strategies are far-reaching, she noted: Because parents had been told throughout the pandemic to keep their kids home at the slightest sign of illness, schools partnered with pediatricians and school nurses to help counter the no-longer-necessary “stay home” narrative.

Gullickson said she also broke down bureaucratic silos, connecting transportation directors and attendance directors, after realizing the role that transit played in chronic absenteeism. The state now has second chance buses as well as walking and led by parents or teachers along a fixed route, who pick up students along the way.

And they are “on a mission to move away from seat time and really deliver more flexibility on where, when and how kids are learning,” she said. 

“This isn’t one strategy. It’s a set of strategies,” said Attendance Works founder and executive director Hedy Chang, who moderated the panel.

In Connecticut, state leaders have launched the , a research-based model that sends trained support staff to families’ homes to build relationships and better understand why their kids are missing school. 

A recent study confirmed that six months after the program’s first home visits, attendance rates improved by approximately 10 percentage points for K-8 students, and nearly 16 percentage points for high schoolers, said Charlene Russell-Tucker, the commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education.

Schools must also work to motivate kids to want to show up in the first place, panelists said, making it a meaningful place that students believe will support and help them in the long run. The only way to do this is to start with student and family feedback, said Brookins, the Baltimore schools chief.

During the pandemic many parents saw up-close for the first time what their kids’ classrooms and teacher interactions looked like, “and I don’t think a lot of folks liked what they saw for a variety of different reasons,” Brookins said.

“I think it opened up boxes of questions that we — as the education establishment — were unprepared to answer,” she added. But chronic absenteeism cannot be successfully fought without engaging in those uncomfortable conversations.

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

Their reactions were followed by a sigh of relief at the next question: How has life changed since your schools implemented phone bans?

A huge change, they both said, in their classrooms and throughout their schools. Where once TikTok videos were being filmed in school hallways and Instagram Reels watched during instruction, teachers now feel like they “actually have the whole attention of the class,” Corletta said.

“It’s like night and day. It’s so different,” said Corletta, comparing his experience as an English language arts teacher at MS 137 in South Ozone Park Queens, which began using magnetically locked phone pouches about five years ago, to his previous experience at a Bronx school with no restrictions. “I don’t touch [the phones]. I don’t hold them. I don’t see them, I don’t do anything like that and it’s really really nice.”

Once silent cafeterias now have kids yelling, gossiping and playing cards – a refreshing sight for many educators like Corletta and Leston, who teach in middle and high schools respectively. Lunchtime, for many school leaders, used to feel like phone time. 

But now, “students are playing Uno again in the cafeteria,” said New York City Department of Education Deputy Chancellor Danika Rux in an interview with ����Ӱ��. 

New York City schools have had of phone restriction policies, with an outright ban in the early 2000s that was reversed about . Individual schools, like the ones where Corletta and Leston teach, have had the their own restrictions. 

That will change again in the new academic year as all schools in New York state will implement a bell-to-bell ban — one of the strictest among dozens of other states that — barring students from access to personal devices that can connect to the internet for the entire school day. Schools will be required to provide storage for the devices. 

But with such new policies, many being implemented for the first time this school year or in effect for less than two years, no one knows what the perfect model looks like. 

Researchers are moving cautiously as they grapple with uncertainty about the effectiveness of in-school phone bans on mental health. Data yields — and there’s growing a sentiment that more has to be done outside of schools to get kids off their phones and back into the world. 

A recent Pew Research survey found that nearly restrictive phone use in schools, up six percentage points since last year — but many are also unsure how far the bans should go. About 44% of respondents supported all day bans, with others split on whether students should have access to their phones between classes or at lunch. 

“We do have some emerging evidence from the research that shows that phone bans can have pretty substantial positive effects,” said Katie Rybakova, an associate professor and chair at the Lunder School of Education at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. 

But studies are limited and “really small from the researcher lens.” Inconsistencies in how bans are implemented from state to state, district to district, school to school and classroom to classroom make it hard to measure, she said. 

“You can’t compare a rural district in Alabama to a suburban district in New York,” Rybakova said. “It’s going to look very different, depending on the place and space, and the students that you’re working with, the teachers, how it’s monitored and what kind of accountability measures are in place.” 

With the ban in New York about to take effect, some schools have had to scrap policies that have worked for them to now adhere to new legislation, while others are implementing digital bans for the first time.

“Implementation is daunting,” Leston said. “When I heard of the [state] ban, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ My school already had one, but then I thought about it for a minute, and I said, ‘Oh, this is going to be a big deal for a lot of schools, especially large comprehensive high schools.’ … It’s going to be a very hard norm to create cellphone free schools.”

Growing support across the country

Annette Campbell Anderson, an associate professor at John Hopkins School of Education, said increasing legislation calling for cellphone bans in schools nationwide has come from a “perfect storm” of push and pull between district leaders, teachers and parents.

The COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning pushed students into an unprecedented dependency on technology use for school, socialization and entertainment. 

“There was this overwhelming desire for kids to get their education online, and so because schools were closed, … everyone thought, ‘Well, we’ve got these phones. We’ve got this access to technology. Why don’t we use that?’ ” Anderson said.

At the same time, parents also had unparalleled access to the classroom during the pandemic where they got to see what and how their children were being educated. When students returned to their physical campuses, parents wanted to “keep a bird’s eye view on what was happening in school,” and tried to remain in close communication with their children, Anderson said, also acknowledging growing fears of school shootings and school safety.

The result? “We pushed the phones into the hands of our young people,” Anderson said.

In schools, students remained mentally checked out and educators grew frustrated.

“Before we instituted a ban, kids were preoccupied with their cellphones. They were on their social media. … They were creating TikToks in the hallway,” Leston said. “It contributed to conflict in the building. Kids couldn’t communicate with each other. They were distracted in the classroom.”

Mental health issues , hitting a breaking point for everyone.

“All these things were coalescing into this perfect storm of a moment,” Anderson said. “What you have [now] is a bunch of people who have the instinct that we’ve gone too far.”

Extent of cell bans triggers split response

Around 31 states across the country have implemented or recommended some type of school-based technology ban, according to tracking from . 

There’s some argument that New York’s policy may be too restrictive and left some superintendents across the state feeling like their hands were tied when their schools had bans that were working.

“We’ve seen districts which had adopted very thoughtful policies, and in some cases, with student engagement, they were accepted,” said Robert Lowry, deputy director for advocacy, research and communications for the New York State Council of School Superintendents. “They seemed to be working well, so [the new legislation] was a point of contention.” 

One New York district, for example, allowed students access to personal devices in certain areas of their schools buildings and with permission, which was popular with students, parents and educators, Lowry said. 

But with the state ban going into effect, that policy will quickly have to be revised with limited time and community input. 

“If you want to try and engage parents, teachers and others in developing a policy – hopefully building a consensus – summer is not the best time,” Lowry said.

New York State allocated in its latest budget toward implementation, which is expected to help purchase storage options. New York City has also added an to its budget to help support the shift for the upcoming school year.

“We’ve given them templates of what a policy could look like, so that they can customize for their school community. We’ve given them sample communication to families,” Rux said.

More work to be done, in and out of school buildings

For researchers, cellphone bans raise concerns if parents and educators are going to see the outcomes they’re hoping for — with many researchers saying there needs to be more proactive measures outside of school to see an improvement in children’s mental health.   

“I feel like the bans don’t go far enough, and if we just check the box to say we’ve banned it in school, we’ve basically pushed this responsibility on to teachers and administrators to be responsible for this and then we’ve also said that we don’t care what happens after school,” John Hopkins’ Anderson said.

Researchers suggested reform may begin with better educating parents on the effects of screen-time and a push toward better modeling of behavior, but it may also be a call for more legislative action on social media use as a whole.

“What we really need is a digital code of conduct for our young people to understand what they should be doing,” Anderson said. “We’ve got warnings on nicotine, we’ve got warnings on alcohol, but the device that’s actually in a kid’s hand more times than not – we don’t have any guardrails around any of that.”

Judge Myong J. Joun of the District Court in Boston in the preliminary injunction that the Trump administration had sought to “effectively dismantle” the Education Department without congressional approval and prevented the federal government from carrying out programs mandated by law. 

Trump administration officials have claimed the March layoffs of more than 1,300 federal education workers were designed to increase government efficiency and were separate from efforts to eliminate the agency outright, claims that Joun deemed “plainly not true.” 

“Defendants fail to cite to a single case that holds that the Secretary’s authority is so broad that she can unilaterally dismantle a department by firing nearly the entire staff, or that her discretion permits her to make a ‘shell’ department,” Joun, a Biden appointee, wrote. 

Combined with early retirements and buyouts offered by the administration, the layoffs left the Education Department with about half as many employees as it had when Trump took office in January. That same month, Trump signed an executive order calling on Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged it cannot eliminate the 45-year-old department — long a goal of conservatives — without congressional approval despite layoffs that have left numerous offices unstaffed. Yet there is “no evidence” the Trump administration is working with Congress to achieve its goal or that the layoffs have made the agency more efficient, Joun wrote. “Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite.” 

“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” he said. “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Education Department said it plans to appeal. 

In a statement, Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann blasted the court order and called Joun “a far-left Judge” who overstepped his authority and the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit to halt the layoffs — including two Massachusetts school districts and the American Federation of Teachers — ”biased.” Also suing to stop the layoffs is 21 Democratic state attorneys general. 

“President Trump and the Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education clearly have the authority to make decisions about agency reorganization efforts, not an unelected Judge with a political axe to grind,” Biedermann said. “This ruling is not in the best interest of American students or families. We will immediately challenge this on an emergency basis.”

Cutting the federal education workforce in half — from 4,133 to 2,183 — undermines its ability to distribute special education funding to schools, protect students’ civil rights and provide financial aid for college students, plaintiffs allege. They include the elimination of all Office of General Counsel attorneys, who specialize in K-12 grants related to special education, and most lawyers focused on student privacy issues. Plaintiffs also allege the cuts hampered the agency’s ability to manage a federal student loan program that provides financial assistance to nearly 13 million students across about 6,100 colleges and universities. 

The Office for Civil Rights was among those hardest hit by layoffs, with seven of its 12 regional offices shut down entirely. The move has left thousands of pending civil rights cases — including those that allege racial discrimination and sexual misconduct — in limbo. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the temporary injunction the “first step to reverse this war on knowledge.” Yet the damage is already being felt in schools, said Jessica Tang, president of the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts. 

“The White House is not above the law, and we will never stop fighting on behalf of our students and our public schools and the protections, services and resources they need to thrive,” Tang said in a media release.

In interviews with ����Ӱ�� Thursday, laid-off Education Department staffers reacted with cautious optimism. It remained unclear if, or when, they might return to their old jobs — or if they even want to go back. 

Keith McNamara, a laid-off Education Department data governance specialist, said he’s “tempering my enthusiasm a bit” to see if Joun’s order is overturned on appeal. But he said he was “ a lot more hopeful than I was yesterday” about the potential for the department to return to the way it operated prior to the cuts. 

For federal workers, he said the challenges have been ongoing and monumental, saying the last few months without work have “been very chaotic.” 

“It’s been very difficult to look for other work because tens of thousands of us are all pouring into the job market at the same time,” he told ����Ӱ��. “It’s been very stressful.” 

Rachel Gittleman, who worked as a policy analyst in the financial aid office before getting terminated, called the court order on Thursday “a really broad rebuke on the administration’s attempt to shut down this critically important department.” 

“But in many ways, the damage has already been done” as fired employees begin to find new jobs, Gittleman said, and Education Department leadership works to push people out.  

McNamara said it was unclear Thursday whether the department would order fired employees back to work. Nearly his entire team was eliminated, he said, so it was uncertain what work he might do if he returned to the job. Asked if he was interested in doing so, he responded “I’d have to really think about that.”

“Quite frankly, I don’t think this administration is taking the job that the Education Department is supposed to be doing very seriously,” he said. “I’m not sure I’d want to work for an agency that — from the very top — is hostile to the work that the department does.”

Today, America’s assumptions about its technical advantages are being challenged anew.

China announced recently that all students in Beijing will receive starting next fall. And the emergence of China’s has shown that commonly held assumptions about the U.S.’s technical advantage are once again just that — assumptions.

This could be American AI’s competitive wakeup call, illustrating that the U.S. needs to dramatically strengthen and expand its approach to AI education. But in this new Space Race, America doesn’t have years to catch up. AI advancements are happening at the fastest pace of any innovation in modern history. 

If we wait, we will lose.

Under the Beijing Municipal Education Commission’s plan, will be enrolled in hands-on introductory courses for artificial intelligence, middle schoolers will learn how to apply AI in their schoolwork and daily lives, and high schoolers will focus on strengthening innovation in the field.

China isn’t alone. The governments of Singapore, South Korea, Finland and Canada have all passed initiatives to . That list will only grow as more nations realize how vital AI will be in the . 

Countries that lead in AI education will subsequently lead in AI-driven economic growth and military advancement. If the U.S. doesn’t prioritize AI literacy and readiness, it isn’t just setting students up for failure — it’s undermining its own economic and national security. By 2030, artificial intelligence will contribute nearly . America must stay at the forefront. 

This means AI literacy — the fundamental understanding of these technological tools — isn’t optional. Neither is AI readiness, the ability to leverage those tools to the nation’s advantage. Instilling both concepts in America’s schools will set the foundation for the future.

Admittedly, the structure of the education system in the United States restricts the government’s ability to mandate AI courses from the top down, the way China can. 

But history shows that America’s community-based approach can be a catalyst for innovation, especially when states, schools and nonprofits are empowered to collaborate and lead the charge. AI education doesn’t need a one-size-fits-all approach; it needs momentum and sharing of what works and what doesn’t. If we leave it to each state or school to figure it out on their own, we risk further alienating Americans who fall on the wrong side of the .

So, how can U.S. schools get on the right track?

First, don’t ignore the ongoing technology race. Developments like those in Beijing should spark conversations and action among school district leaders, teachers and parents. 

Second, recognize AI education as a national priority. Federal officials must discuss AI literacy and readiness as imperative for the nation’s economic security and competitiveness. Though economics and education tend to be separate policy discussions, they go hand in hand when it comes to the ability of future generations to participate in an increasingly tech-driven global workforce.

Third, even without any federal action, states and school districts can and should recognize the importance of AI education and integrate it into their curriculums. This is already happening in places like Ohio, where the state has funded workshops with ongoing training in AI concepts for all educators and its Educational Service Center Association . In Maryland, Prince George’s County Public Schools have .

There’s also lots of room for nonprofit organizations to pick up the slack on AI education. Organizations like (where I work), and MIT’s initiative have done a lot of legwork creating pilot programs and teacher training so schools don’t have to figure it out from scratch.

America must rise to the moment.

A year after the Soviets launched the first space satellite in history, Congress passed the , which increased funding for education — particularly in science and math. The home-grown scientists and engineers that effort produced strengthened national security, transformed the U.S. into the world’s top superpower within a generation and resulted in discoveries that drive computing, medicine and mobile technology to this day.

The new technological developments and educational investments in places like China require a similar response. America must push forward to implement AI education that will help the nation prosper and compete in the years ahead.

Education has never been a top priority of President-elect Donald Trump’s, but that doesn’t mean schools — or students — will be immune from Trump’s agenda in the next four years, education experts say. 

Trump may slash school funding, cut civil rights protections and gut the U.S. Department of Education, based on his previous statements and the visions outlined in the  and , a conservative manifesto reimagining the federal government. 

But students may experience the most devastating effects. Trump has  of undocumented residents and crackdowns on LGBTQ rights, which could lead to higher absenteeism, higher rates of bullying and greater anxiety generally on school campuses.

“The stress created by the threat of deportations cannot be overestimated,” said UCLA education professor John Rogers, who’s studied how politics plays out in K-12 education. “It absolutely will have an impact on attendance, and it absolutely will affect parents’ ability to participate in their children’s education.”

Student  somewhat in California since the COVID-19 pandemic, but remains very high — 24.3% last year. During the first Trump presidency, Latino student attendance and academic performance dropped significantly in areas affected by deportation arrests, . 

During Trump’s first term, his deportation efforts were foiled a bit by the courts and by disorganization at the White House, Rogers said, but those obstacles aren’t likely to be present this time.

That could leave thousands of children vulnerable to deportation or becoming separated from their parents. More than  were undocumented in the most recent census count, and almost half of California children have , the Public Policy Institute of California reported. Most of the undocumented residents are from Latin America, but a majority of newer arrivals come from Asia.

Threat to cut $8 billion for California schools 

LGBTQ students are also likely to face challenges under a Trump presidency. Trump has often disparaged “woke” policies that protect the rights of trans students and threatened to withhold federal funding for states that uphold those policies. In California, that could mean a loss of about $8 billion, or 7% of the overall education budget.

But beyond financial matters, the anti-LGBTQ language is likely to exacerbate challenges for trans students, Rogers said. Students’ rights to use bathrooms and play on sports teams that align with their gender identity are among the protections that Republicans have singled out for elimination.   

“This election proved that the culturally divisive rhetoric can be an effective way to garner public support,” Rogers said. “Now that Trump has a bully pulpit, I expect we’ll see an amplification of this rhetoric.”

Mike Kirst, former president of the State Board of Education, agreed that the threat of deportations may be Trump’s biggest effect on California schools. 

“If they succeed in deporting a lot of families, that will be horrific for California schools,” Kirst said. “That’s what keeps me up at night.”

More power to the states?

The other proposals — dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, or eliminating “woke” curriculum, for example — would be complicated and time-consuming to accomplish, he said. Eliminating the Department of Education would require majority votes in Congress, which would be a difficult hurdle because the department provides many popular programs with bipartisan support, such as special education.

Curriculum is left to the states, and the federal government has no input.

Traditionally, Republican presidents have sought to minimize the federal government’s role in education, leaving most decisions to the states. If Trump takes that approach, California’s mostly Democratic leadership would have some independence from the Republican power brokers in Washington, D.C., Kirst said.  

Regardless, Trump would be able to use executive orders to scale back Title I, which provides benefits to low-income students, and Title IX, which prohibits gender discrimination. And school choice, school vouchers and promotion of charter schools are likely to be priorities of the incoming Secretary of Education, although it’s not clear how much impact those policies would have in California.

Trump has also been outspoken in his opposition to teachers unions, saying he wants to eliminate tenure and institute merit pay.

The California Teachers Association, which campaigned heavily for Vice President Kamala Harris, said it was undeterred by Trump’s attacks.

“We are prepared to stand up against any attacks on our students, public education, workers’ rights and our broader communities that may come,” union president David Goldberg said. “We’re committed to fight for the future we all deserve.”

In a rare display of unity, Los Angeles Unified board members and union leaders also vowed to push back against any policies that would negatively affect students and families.

“We stand together in our commitment to protect, affirm and support everyone in the Los Angeles Unified community,” the groups released in a joint statement. “We will always provide a safe, welcoming and inclusive environment for all students, families and employees.”

State leaders fight back

At the state level, elected officials said they’d fight Trump’s efforts to interfere in California. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond on Friday said he’d ask the governor to backfill any funds the federal government withholds from California, and he’d sponsor legislation to protect students.

He also reminded school districts that laws already exist to protect undocumented and LGBTQ students. , passed this year, bans school staff from “outing” students to their families. And , a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, prohibits schools from denying students an education based on their immigration status. The state offers a plethora of guidance on how schools can support  and  students and their families. 

“While others demonize education, we will continue to help California students, wherever they are,” Thurmond said.

Attorney General Rob Bonta vowed to fight Trump’s policies with legal action, much as his predecessor Xavier Becerra did by filing or joining more than 100 lawsuits during the first Trump term. Gov. Gavin Newsom last week said he’d work with the Legislature to  and otherwise “” California.

Students, meanwhile, are waiting to see how the policies — and pushback — will play out in the coming months. Maria Davila, a high school senior in Beaumont in Riverside County, said that for now, she’s not overly worried about how a Trump presidency would affect schools. Some of her peers are concerned, she said, but she has faith that student activism and adult leadership will protect young people from the most extreme outcomes.

“In California we have legislative leaders who listen to students and care about young people,” said Davila, a volunteer with a youth advocacy group called GenUp. “I think we’ll get the support we need. Students can be hopeful.”

This was originally published on .

Three high-profile education advocacy and research groups crossed political lines in Washington, D.C., Wednesday to announce an ambitious goal: cutting chronic absenteeism in half over the next five years. 

For the first time, the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to confront an issue that continues to plague K-12 classrooms four years after the pandemic first hit. 

“This is not a problem for some schools. This is not a problem for some subset of students. This is a nationwide rising of a tide that’s going to harm [all] students,” said Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy studies. 

While felt most acutely by students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike in chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — regardless of size, racial breakdown or income. Chronic absenteeism from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2022 and remained high in 2023. 

Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are more likely to fall behind academically and are at a greater risk of dropping out of school. The three organizations are eyeing a return to those pre-pandemic percentages.

“The goal is to get us back to a baseline where we knew we needed to do a lot more work anyway, but at least we can work towards that and do so aggressively,” Lynn Jennings, The Education Trust’s senior director of national and state partnerships told ����Ӱ��. 

Five years from the launch would be 2029, but the groups are hoping that districts further along in their efforts will be able to hit the benchmark by 2027 — five years after chronic absenteeism’s 2022 peak.

The goal is doable, according to Topeka schools Superintendent Tiffany Anderson, who spoke at a panel discussion Ed Trust, AEI and Attendance Works held in D.C. this week to launch their initiative. The 12,858-student district was able to lower its chronic absenteeism by investing in families through home visits. In Topeka, if a student is absent for more than two days without parent contact, it warrants a visit.

“You cannot serve needs you don’t know. So the key is understanding … it works,” she added.

Numerous experts at the event discussed the importance of a tiered approach to confront an issue that has resisted various interventions. Schools, they said, must create trust and communication with families so they can learn why students are absent — as officials did in Topeka — but then, they must work to actually remove those barriers. 

Anderson said in speaking with her Kansas families she learned that chronic health issues, such as asthma, were impacting student attendance. So, she brought health care to the school, partnering with a local hospital. Now students and their families can see a pediatrician on site.

Some schools, panel experts noted, get stuck in that first tier: understanding families’ struggles in getting their children to school, but never implementing the solutions. Another remedy discussed at the panel, which included the vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, Caitlin Codella Low, was emphasizing career pathways so school feels more meaningful to students and necessary to their own futures.

At the event, Attendance Works presented a six-step roadmap to assist states in achieving a 50% reduction in chronic absenteeism and will develop resources to share with state leaders moving forward.

“Our work over the past 10 years shows us that state leaders are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge,” they wrote. And these three organizations, they believe, are uniquely positioned to help.

Attendance Works founder and executive director Hedy Chang said her organization brings the “how:” They’re able to provide states and districts with the advice, tips, and resources to take action. Education Trust brings the advocacy lens and helps keep school districts accountable through data. And The American Enterprise Institute brings a more conservative audience to the conversation, along with the data.

�Ѳ�����ܲ�’s , where he compiles and analyzes district-level attendance data for over 14,700 school districts and charter schools nationwide, will serve as the hub to help states see if they are on track to meet the five-year benchmark. 

“We’ve got to take a long-term approach, and we’ve got to use our data to call everyone,” Chang said. “It needs all hands on deck.”

Denise Forte, president and CEO at Education Trust, noted the importance of the cross-organization partnership, saying that while she and Malkus haven’t historically always agreed on policy issues, this was one where they knew they could — and needed to — come together. 

The urgency of the issue created a shared sense of purpose, all three groups said.

“We’re in a pretty partisan world. People feel so divided on so many things,” Chang added. “But we can’t risk our children’s future by being divided on this one.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to better reflect the timeline in which the three organizations aim to cut chronic absenteeism by half.

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

This is the context in which I’ve been thinking about the , a measure placed on the November ballot that would high schools to offer, and students to take, a semester-long personal finance course. 

Of course, I’m in favor of increased financial literacy. Many Americans lack such skills, and it leaves them at a serious disadvantage. It’s important to understand things like how to save for retirement (many people ), how to pay taxes (many people ) and how to avoid predatory lenders (many people fall victim to and credit card companies). High school may even be a good place to teach such skills — there is some decent that financial literacy can improve personal finance , like saving.

But I’ll be voting against the ballot initiative. There are several reasons why I oppose it, related to the idea of mandating curriculum via ballot measure in general and to this specific initiative in particular. 

The primary general reason I oppose this initiative is that it sets a terrible precedent. While we might all like financial literacy, it’s not hard to imagine future ballot initiatives that try to change curriculum in ways we might not like. Referendums could try to strip race- and LGBT-related content from the curriculum, mandate abstinence-focused sex education or ban environmental content in science classes. Education policy is already too much like a pendulum, giving educators whiplash with constantly shifting demands. The last thing we need is to pile on new mandates via popular vote — and ballot measures in particular are notoriously difficult to undo.

Another general reason I oppose this initiative is that California already has paths for education policymaking that are subject to electoral accountability, and those elected folks should be allowed to do their jobs. There’s the governor and the state legislature, plus the state board of education and more than 1,000 local school boards on top of that. If voters want their government officials to do something about a curriculum issue, they can lobby for change or vote them out of office. The legislature has indeed already been in this area, with new curriculum requirements in ethnic studies and computer science and a financial literacy proposal very much like one on the ballot.

Beyond that, legislators, boards and executives in state government are much better positioned to pass rules that make sense in the context of existing education policies. In this case, for instance, California high schoolers , and that course covers many of the same topics as the new proposed mandate. Why not simply sharpen the list of subjects that need to be included in the economics course, rather than layering another partially duplicative requirement on top? The California Department of Education can also work to ensure that appropriate supports are provided to teachers — especially high-quality curricular materials that align with the new expectations — so financial literacy classes don’t become just another complicated-to-understand, unfunded burden on educators.

As for the specifics, I’m not opposed to teaching students about financial literacy, but it’s important to consider the tradeoffs in terms of what will be replaced. With in math and English Language Arts and widespread disengagement from school, I am worried about new course requirements that would distract from the educational core. 

And while financial literacy is great, it is no substitute for more direct actions the government can take to help people make better and easier decisions. We can teach children about doing their taxes, but we can also increase that saves taxpayers from needless fees from for-profit tax-preparation companies. We can coach children in how to manage checking and savings accounts, but we can also ban or sharply cap overdraft or ATM fees. We can teach young people the importance of early retirement, but we can also create safer and more generous retirement options that . 

If I’m feeling bored, the next time I get in my Lyft, I’ll bring up education policy, as usual. But I’ll tell the driver to oppose the financial literacy ballot initiative and leave the education policymaking to the policymakers. Or maybe I’ll do what my husband does when he doesn’t want to talk to his drivers and just tell them I do HVAC repair while I put in my headphones.

Variants and Vaccines

BA.2.86 Variant

• This caused quite a bit of buzz a few weeks ago because scientists were concerned Some have dubbed the new variant “Pirola.”
• “ which burst onto the scene in the winter of 2021, resulting in a spike in infections.”
• “Two more lab groups — one from Sweden’s Karolinska Institute and the other from Harvard University — have reported results of antibody neutralization lab experiments, which suggest vaccination or previous infection offer some protection against the highly mutated BA.2.86 SARS-CoV-2 variant.”
• Early indications are that the new boosters will work against this variant too:
  • “Moderna, Pfizer say versus BA.2.86.”
  • “These data were published () with Moderna’s XBB.1.5 booster and show very good levels of neutralizing antibodies induced against BA.2.86, in keeping with the response to the target of XBB.1.5. Also note the similar response to 2 of the major current circulating variants of EG.5.1 and FL.1.5.1.” 
  • We’re lucky,” Topol said. “This one could have been really bad.”
  • “Early research data has shown that antibodies produced by prior infection or existing vaccines against the coronavirus .”
    

Reformulated Vaccines

• The updated COVID vaccine is based on variant.
• CDC advisers make universal COVID vaccine recommendation: .
  • “The advisory committee voted 13-1 to recommend updated COVID-19 vaccines for people ages 6 months and older.” It came one day after the for emergency use mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
  • “Shortly after [Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] vote, , which allows immunization campaigns to begin.”
  • Epidemiologist summarized the meetings.
• But: (Associated Press/NBC News)

State of Affairs

Another Summer Wave

• and continue to rise.

• : “Recent analysis of the data shows the number of children under age 18 with confirmed COVID-19 at hospital admission increased nearly five-fold from 237 new admissions the week ending June 17 to 1,175 in the week ending Sept. 9.”
• “June had the lowest level of pediatric COVID-19 hospital admissions since data collection began in 2020.”

Variants Fueling the Latest Wave

• The main variants driving cases are and , both XBB variant descendants that share a mutation known as F456L, which appears to be helping them spread more than other virus siblings. 

• “The Biden administration [this week] that it is providing $600 million in funding to produce new at-home COVID-19 tests and is — aiming to prevent possible shortages during a rise in coronavirus cases that has typically come during colder months.”

More Key Insights

• Schools Grapple With COVID Safety Amid Late Summer Surge:

• CDC Director Mandy K. Cohen in the NYT: ““

• Anti-Vaccine Movement on the Rise:
• How Long Should You Wait?: with a good summary about when to get vaccinated after an infection and the latest on mixing-and-matching shots.
  
• Chronic Absenteeism: Via the and
• A Generation at Risk: Published by the Building Bridges Initiative, the is the product of a partnership between

… And on a Lighter Note

• The Best of America: When Jaylan Gray’s mom died, he quit school to care for his brother. Shortly after, their house was in need of repair, that’s when a nonprofit stepped in to fix their home.

• Bear Cubs Getting in a Hammock:

Living the Good Life: A dog making

This Week’s Top Story

• : “Many American parents would be shocked to know where their kids were actually achieving. Nationally, 90% of parents think their children are reading and doing math at or above grade level. In fact, 26% of eighth graders are proficient or above in math and 31% are proficient or above in English, according to Learning Heroes, an organization that collects data and creates resources to improve parent-teacher relationships.”
• “There are two reasons for the staggering mismatch between what teachers know and what parents think. The first is that many report cards do not measure just achievement, or what a child knows, but a basket of items including attendance, effort, homework completion and behavior.”
• “The second reason parents are in the dark about their children’s performance is that teachers are neither trained nor given ample time to have honest conversations with them. They rightly fear that they will be blamed, not believed, or not supported by their principals if they tell parents exactly where their children are performing.”

Key Insights 

• : “What’s troubling about this variant, scientists say, is that it contains more than 30 mutations on the spike protein, which is what helps the virus enter cells and cause an infection. This means it might be able to evade current vaccines and previous infections more easily, and it likely won’t be a great match with the fall booster expected to be approved soon.”
• “What’s unknown is how transmissible the variant is and whether it will spread widely or fizzle out like many other variants. Another important, outstanding question is whether it causes more severe disease.”
• “, the CDC said scientists are evaluating the effectiveness of the fall COVID-19 booster, expected to roll out in September, and the new variant.”
• .

• : “If students can’t catch up, the learning loss may impact their future earnings and even become a drag on the U.S. economy.”
• ” ‘I hate to be so doom and gloom about it,’ said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research and policy analysis organization. ‘But this is very serious. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment for kids affected by COVID.’ ”
• “First, school districts did not use all of their funds to address learning loss specifically.”
• “Also, reversing the learning loss is easier said than done. Some school districts are facing a variety of challenges including staff shortages. And many school leaders say that political polarization around LGBTQ+ issues, critical race theory and COVID-19 has disrupted schooling, according to a report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND.”

• on new reports from and .
• The report from Education Resource Strategies identifies risk factors that indicate the likely severity of a district’s post-ESSER fiscal situation:
  • Districts that saw an enormous leap in per-pupil revenue likely faced more hurdles to spending that money quickly and wisely than districts that got only a small sum per student.
  • Districts that invested federal relief funds in recurring expenses like increased teacher salaries or new staff positions will have to find new funding sources to cover those investments or risk needing to cut them.
  • Districts seeing increases in state aid or local tax revenue will have an easier time filling ESSER-shaped budget holes than districts in states that have kept education funding flat amid high inflation.
  • Some states and localities allow districts to maintain funding reserves from state and local sources that they can use for emergency situations, like the sudden loss of federal relief aid. Those districts have a financial cushion that their counterparts in states that restrict how districts can spend excess money won’t have.
  • Districts that have been slow to invest their ESSER allocations could be tempted to hastily allocate funds to recurring or unwise expenses that come back to haunt them.

• : “Policymakers should pursue opportunities to allocate additional funding toward in-school day, high-impact tutoring, in time for the 2025 fiscal year. In tandem, policymakers could streamline policies to provide clarity and guidance for local system and school leaders’ use of federal funding.”
• “State and district system leaders should consider carry-forward dollars in federal funding streams that may have grown with the availability of ESSER. Tutoring programs could be further prioritized by using state and district set-asides across these funding streams.”
• “School leaders should use their Title I allocations to support their students’ learning needs by leveraging tutoring as an evidence-based intervention.”

• reports on a new
• “Teachers are leaving the classroom at higher rates, and the pool of candidates is not big enough to replace them.”
• “Tuan Nguyen, a Kansas State University education professor, last year set out with two colleagues to collect statewide data on teacher shortages. They counted more than 36,500 vacancies in 37 states and D.C. for the 2021-22 school year. Updated data found that teacher shortages had grown 35% among that group, to more than 49,000 vacancies.”

Gen Z’s Declining College Interest Persists — Even Among Middle Schoolers

• ����Ӱ�� on a new
• “Two in five Gen Z students agreed with the statement: ‘The pandemic has made me less interested in pursuing higher education.’ ”
• “That attitude has translated into an 8% decline in college enrollment from 2019 to 2022, showing how attending college is no longer a given for Gen Z.”
• “YPulse found Gen Z students were more likely to choose Google and YouTube over a teacher when asked: ‘If you wanted to learn something new, what resources would you use?’ ”

Fueled by Teacher Shortages, ‘Zoom-in-a-Room’ Makes a Comeback

• Via ����Ӱ��: “Live, online instruction in school has long linked students to subjects they couldn’t otherwise take, like A.P. Calculus or Latin. But as districts struggle to fill teaching vacancies, they are increasingly turning to companies like Proximity to teach core subjects.”
• “Districts are spending thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars on virtual teachers, according to ����Ӱ��’s review of purchase orders. … The practice — derided at the height of the pandemic as “Zoom-in-a-room” — is raising eyebrows as students return to school and continue to grapple with the lingering effects of remote learning.”

• : “Step 1: Assume all students are going to use the technology.”
• “There is a lot of confusion and panic, but also a fair bit of curiosity and excitement. Mainly, educators want to know: How do we actually use this stuff to help students learn, rather than just try to catch them cheating?”
• “Second, schools should stop relying on A.I. detector programs to catch cheaters.”
• “My third piece of advice … is that teachers should focus less on warning students about the shortcomings of generative A.I. than on figuring out what the technology does well.”
• “My last piece of advice for schools that are flummoxed by generative A.I. is this: Treat this year — the first full academic year of the post-ChatGPT era — as a learning experience, and don’t expect to get everything right.”

…On a Lighter Note

WIIIII: .

Bear Cubs: .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• Via : “Our analysis shows that nationwide, an estimated 17 million students have more than half a year of pandemic-related learning delay, 16 million students who need mental health support are not receiving it and 15 million students are chronically absent.”
• “Several states and districts have seen accelerated rates of learning recovery after adopting high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and aligned professional development; providing high-quality, high-intensity tutoring; and extending the school year through summer or intensive-learning academies.”
• High-quality materials “paired with high-quality aligned professional development have demonstrated effectiveness in raising students’ state assessment scores.”
• “A more realistic and sustainable approach may be to embed practices into future budgets. Extending the recovery period from one year to two, providing an additional year of HQIM and aligned professional development for teachers, could address 83% of students with pandemic-related learning delays.”

Key Insights 

• Via the and : Over a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, leading to an estimated 6.5 million more chronically absent students. Absences were more prevalent among Latino, Black and low-income students.
• “In seven states, the rate of chronically absent kids doubled for the 2021-22 school year, from 2018-19, before the pandemic. Absences worsened in every state with available data — notably, the analysis found growth in chronic absenteeism did not correlate strongly with state COVID rates.”

• : “In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work and ultimately how we structure our education system.”
• “Prompts can also be constructed to get these AI systems to perform complex and multi-step operations. For example, let’s say a teacher wants to create an adaptive tutoring program — for any subject, any grade, in any language — that customizes the examples for students based on their interests. She wants each lesson to culminate in a short-response or multiple-choice quiz. If the student answers the questions correctly, the AI tutor should move on to the next lesson. If the student responds incorrectly, the AI should explain the concept again, but using simpler language.”
• “AI might tackle some of the administrative tasks that keep teachers from investing more time with their peers or students.”
• “AI’s ability to conduct human-like conversations opens up possibilities for or instructional assistants that can help .”
• “ with both educators and classmates.”
• “While past technologies have not lived up to hyped expectations, AI is not merely a continuation of the past; it is a leap into a new era of machine intelligence that we are only beginning to grasp. While the immediate implementation of these systems is imperfect, the swift pace of improvement holds promising prospects.”

• “A new by the Economic Innovation Group, shared first with Axios, quantifies the reasons some of America’s biggest cities are struggling to rebuild their economies post-pandemic.”
• “It also shows a surge in income that arrived in many rural and exurban places and in popular vacation destinations.”
• “Not only did residents leave the biggest cities, but those who left disproportionately had high incomes, meaning the hit to those local economies was larger than migration numbers alone would imply.”
• “In San Francisco, out-migration caused a 20% drop in adjusted gross income from 2020 to 2021 as a share of the taxable income of those who stayed put. In Manhattan, that drop was 13%, and in Boston, 11%.”
• “Income flows out of urban areas and towards these growth regions appears to have been driven by upper-income households; in growing counties, in-migrants were on average higher earners than out-migrants, while in shrinking counties, out-migrants earned more than newcomers.”

• on a new : “More than a third of the national public school enrollment decline since COVID-19 pandemic cannot be attributed to switches to private school or homeschooling, or to a shrinking population of school-aged children, according to new research.”
• “It’s likely that many of the students who are unaccounted for — generally schools’ youngest learners — opted to skip kindergarten altogether, a move that could have long-term consequences for their academic achievement.”
• “ ‘Because such demographic changes are likely to be durable, districts that lost enrollment due to such factors are unlikely to see their enrollment rebound substantially,’ the report says.”

• : “A … from researchers at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers reviews all current literature on athletes, sudden cardiac arrest and myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccines, and finds that athletes engaged in intensive activity are not at increased risk for heart complications following vaccination.”
• “An Australian study of more than 4 million young adults showed no increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest for those with recent COVID-19 infections or vaccination.”

• : “This study synthesizes 33 articles on the implementation of tutoring, defined as one-to-one or small-group instruction in which a human tutor supports students grades K-12 in an academic subject, to better understand the facilitators and barriers to program success.” 
• “We find that policies influenced tutoring implementation through the allocation of federal funding and stipulation of program design.”
• “Successful implementation hinged on the support of school leaders with the power to direct school funding, space and time. Tutoring setting and schedule, recruitment and training, and curriculum influenced whether students are able to access quality tutoring and instruction.”

U.S. Department of Education Announces Key K-12 Cybersecurity Resilience Efforts

• and ����Ӱ��: The department announced K-12 cybersecurity resilience efforts including the establishment of a Government Coordinating Council, as well as the release of the department’s three K-12 Digital Infrastructure briefs, including , and .

• : “The … effect of years of remote learning during the pandemic is gumming up workplaces around the country. It is one reason professional service jobs are going unfilled and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S. Labor Department.”
• “The shortcomings run the gamut from general knowledge, including how to make change at a register, to soft skills such as working with others. Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.”
• “Army recruits aren’t communicating within their squads as well as they did before the pandemic, instructors say. Scores on recruiting exams fell 9% since the pandemic and prompted the Army to create a new testing boot camp to help recruits pass, a requirement for gaining admission to the military.”

• : “The Playbook is intended to serve as a tool for states to further impactful policy solutions that strengthen youth mental health.” The central topics are:
  • Addressing prevention and building resilience
  • Increasing awareness and reducing stigma
  • Ensuring access and affordability of quality treatment and care
  • Training and supporting caregivers and educators

…On a Lighter NoteRun to the Ball:

This Week’s Top Story

• : A research brief on national end-of-school-year reading data for K-3 students revealed that while schools across the country have made progress in reading scores among earlier elementary grades (K-2), gains among third graders remains comparatively slow.
• “ compared to the 2021-22 school years, with the greatest gains among Black and Hispanic students. At the same time, third graders exhibited the least improvement from two years ago and no improvement from the prior year’s third-grade cohort. The slower improvements in grade 3 suggest a persistent impact on the cohort of students most affected by lost instructional time during the pandemic.”

Key Insights

• : “A  of 31 studies published through December 2022 reveals that persistent symptoms three months after confirmed COVID-19 infections, or ‘long COVID,’ affect 16% of children and adolescents.”
• The most common persistent symptoms seen in the studies were sore throat, persistent fever, sleep disturbance, fatigue and muscle weakness.

• on a new
• “For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1% were 34% more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1% were more than twice as likely to get in.”
• “The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.”
• “ ‘What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,’ said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.”

Education’s Long COVID Continues

• Via Lindsay Dworkin in ����Ӱ��: “Researchers Karyn Lewis and Megan Kuhfeld analyzed test score data from approximately 6.7 million students in grades 3 to 8 in 20,000 public schools who took MAP Growth reading and math assessments last academic year.”
• “They found that, in nearly all grades, achievement gains last year fell short of pre-pandemic trends. Because students are behind where they were before the pandemic, they would need to make greater-than-ordinary progress to get back on track. NWEA data show that isn’t happening; over the course of the 2022-23 school year, older students’ movement toward full recovery stalled.”
• “NWEA researchers now estimate that on average, students will require interventions and support equivalent to 4.1 months of additional schooling to catch up to pre-COVID levels in reading and 4.5 months in math.”

• “A University College London-led team finds a very low risk of pediatric intensive care unit admission and death from COVID-19 and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) during the first two years of the pandemic, with the highest risk among children with complex medical problems and neurodisabilities.”
• “We must now look beyond counts of pediatric COVID-19 cases to understand, measure and reduce the deleterious indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children — and at a time when many have declared the COVID-19 pandemic ‘over,’ our efforts to overcome these secondary pandemic effects have only just begun,” they wrote.

• Registered Republicans experienced a “significantly higher” rate of excess deaths than Democrats in Florida and Ohio in the months after COVID-19 vaccines were made widely available, .
• “The study looked at deaths in both Florida and Ohio during the first 22 months of the pandemic and found the overall excess death rate of Republican voters was 15% higher than that of Democrats. “
• .

• : “By 2030, activities that account for up to 30% of hours currently worked across the U.S. economy could be automated — a trend accelerated by generative AI.”
• “An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.”
• “By 2030, we further estimate a 23% increase in the demand for STEM jobs.”
• “People in the two lowest-wage quintiles (those earning less than $30,800 a year and those earning $30,800 to $38,200 a year) are up to 10 and 14 times more likely, respectively, to need to change occupations by the end of this decade than the highest earners.”

… And on a Lighter Note 

Two For One:

This Week’s Top Story

• “The story is this. When COVID arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into COVID partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.”
  
• “This is one of the revelations of ‘,’ by 34 experts, published in April by PublicAffairs.”
  
• “Probably the most explosive and long-lasting fight was over school closings, but those fights didn’t take off in earnest until September 2020 at the earliest. According to a database maintained by Education Week, all but nine states ordered their schools closed for the remainder of the academic year in spring 2020. Of the nine that didn’t, three with Democratic governors, including California, and four with Republican governors, including Florida, recommended it. Two controlled by Republicans left the question up to local school districts.”

‘Education’s Long COVID’: Recovery Stalled for Most Students, Data Show

• Via ����Ӱ��: “​​Pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most of the nation’s students, new data shows, and upper elementary and middle school students actually lost ground this year in reading and math.” 

• “On average, students need four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels, according to the results from NWEA, a K-12 assessment provider. This fall’s ninth graders need far more — roughly a full extra school year.”
  
• .

• : “Efforts to develop the next generation of COVID vaccines are running up against bureaucratic hassles and regulatory uncertainty, scientists say, obstacles that could make it harder to curb the spread of the coronavirus and arm the United States against future pandemics.”
  
• “Project NextGen, conceived with COVID deaths at their lowest level, has neither Warp Speed’s vast money nor the mandate to purchase shots in bulk.”

• : “Dire warnings of teacher shortages are nothing new, especially during the pandemic, and are sometimes overblown. But a confluence of warning signs suggest that the country is at a post-pandemic inflection point.”
  
  • “More teachers left the classroom last year, new data confirms”
    
  • “Teacher morale has dropped sharply since the pandemic”
    
  • “Fewer people want to become teachers”
    
  • “Some schools and subjects have longed faced major shortages — and continue to”

$190 Billion Later, Reason to Worry Relief Funds Won’t Curb COVID’s Academic Crisis

• Via ����Ӱ��: A “10-month examination by ����Ӱ�� shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have barely tapped monies advocates say are critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic.” 

• “With just over a year left to allocate the funds, the question isn’t only if districts will hit the September 2024 deadline, but whether the unprecedented windfall will leave students better off.”

• The catch: “Districts have not made it easy to answer those questions.” 

• : “Beginning Sept. 30, 2023, states will face a steep dropoff in federal child care investment. Without congressional action, this cliff will have dire consequences. More than 3 million children are projected to lose access to child care nationwide. Seventy-thousand child care programs are likely to close.”
  
• “In addition, we project that millions of parents will be impacted, with many leaving the workforce or reducing their hours, costing families $9 billion each year in lost earnings.”

• : Recently, “The New York Times the pandemic is over. We are in a very different place. And, I understand the desire for a ‘thank goodness that’s done’ mindset. And I hope COVID-19 isn’t always on top of your mind.”
  
• But: “COVID-19 is increasing; don’t be surprised to hear more people getting infected around you. I already am. This isn’t enough reason to change my personal behaviors, but that time may come this fall.”

… And on a Lighter Note

This Week’s Top Story 

How Billions in COVID-19 Relief Aid Was Stolen or Wasted

• : “An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. Combined, the loss represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.”
• “How could so much be stolen? … In short, [investigators and outside experts] say, the grift was just way too easy.”
• “Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Those programs were designed to help small businesses and unemployed workers survive the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic.”

The Big Three

• : “We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or virtual learning) in the 2020-21 school year on students’ pass rates on standardized tests in grades 3 to 8 across 11 states.”
• : “School districts with in-person learning had smaller declines than those with remote or hybrid learning models.”

• : “In this interim analysis of children aged 5 years and younger, safety surveillance of more than 245 000 COVID-19 mRNA vaccine doses over nine months did not detect a safety signal for any outcome during the 21 days after vaccination. Importantly, no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis occurred after vaccination.” 

• : “Parents of young children have long been among the most susceptible groups for vaccine hesitancy, since most shots are administered to infants who are often vulnerable to deadly diseases. Online anti-vaccine rhetoric often appeals specifically to mothers, calling on them to ‘protect’ their children from the shots.”
• Heather Simpson, a mother in Dallas, started Back to the Vax, an organization that “aims to counter that [anti-vax] narrative by supporting parents, educating doctors and creating online resources. The organization recommends parents call a doctor instead of searching for answers online, and also advises doctors on communicating with parents who are on the fence about vaccines.”

COVID-19 Research

• “An expert panel of the FDA on Thursday , unanimously recommending that they target an Omicron strain known as XBB that’s responsible for nearly every infection in the U.S.”
• and . And more via .
• : “Pfizer said it could distribute reformulated doses as early as the end of July, depending on the strain selected. Moderna said it expects to begin shipping updated doses, pending FDA approval, ‘by the end of the summer.’ Novavax said it could have updated doses available in the fall.”

• on a new : “MIT researchers asked undergraduate students to test whether chatbots ‘could be prompted to assist non-experts in causing a pandemic.’ “
• “Within an hour, the chatbots suggested four potential pandemic pathogens.”
• “Our results demonstrate that artificial intelligence can exacerbate catastrophic biological risks. Highly intelligent students without any relevant technical background in the life sciences can use … chatbots to walk them through the process of identifying and acquiring publicly known potential pandemic pathogens. This represents a major international security vulnerability.”

City & State News

California: federal COVID relief despite deep, widespread learning loss.

Kansas: : ‘I have kids that legitimately cannot read.’

Minnesota: to help cover $97 million gap in proposed budget.

Viewpoints

Educators Beware: As Budget Cuts Loom, Now Is NOT the Time to Quit Your Job: Via Katherine Silberstein and Marguerite Roza in ����Ӱ��. “In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.”

How COVID Changed High School Seniors’ Plans About College and Their Future Careers: . “Of this year’s graduating class, who were ninth graders when the health crisis began, more than 40% of students changed their thinking about their college major or future career because of COVID, according to new .”

The Pandemic Wiped Out Decades of Progress for Preschoolers. It’s Time to Get Them Back On Track: .

…And on a Lighter Note

Swearing, Dippin Dots and an Economics Lesson in Inflation: .

School’s out for the Summer: .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• , based on a from Harry Patrinos at the World Bank 
• “Patrinos looks at 11 factors potentially increasing or mitigating learning loss, which is defined using test score data via country-specific instruments that were standardized for comparison.”
• “There is a clear link between school closure duration and learning loss. Closures as part of government-imposed lockdowns averaged 21 weeks’ duration and resulted in an average learning loss of 0.23 standard deviations across the countries studied (representing two-thirds of the world’s population). Testing for mitigating factors or other means to explain learning loss produced no significant findings, meaning that school closures appear to be directly responsible for student learning loss.”
• “Patrinos finds that each additional week of school closure increased learning loss by a further 1% of a standard deviation.”
• “In short: The longer schools stayed closed, the less students learned, no matter what else was done to blunt the losses.”

The Big Three

• : “A published [June 1]  in JAMA Network Open suggests that 70.4% of nearly 850,000 U.S. household COVID-19 transmissions originated with a child.”
• “Of all household transmissions, 70.4% began with a child, with the proportion fluctuating weekly between 36.9% and 87.5%.”
• “Once U.S. schools reopened in fall 2020, children contributed more to inferred within-household transmission when they were in school, and less during summer and winter breaks, a pattern consistent for two consecutive school years.”

• : “While most schools have since deployed various forms of interventions and some have spent more on academic recovery than others, there are ample signs that the money has not been spent in a way that has substantially helped all of the nation’s students lagging behind.”
• “Robin Lake, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the impact of the funding has been a ‘bit of a black box,’ and she expected to see different recovery rates across districts.”
• “Early reports show that schools have had difficulty setting up academic recovery programs.”

• “Areas high on the list for reduction are much more classroom-focused: summer learning programs (30%), computing devices, such as Chromebooks (29%) and tutoring (26%).”
• “Relatively large districts, meaning those with 10,000 or more students, are relatively likely to scale back tutoring (33% said they would), as were those with enrollments of between 2,500 and 9,999 students (34%), as opposed to those from systems with fewer than 2,500 students (20%).”
• “The survey also reveals that K-12 officials from suburban districts are much less likely to scale back stimulus-funded programs focused on student mental health/wellness resources (9% indicated they would) compared to those from districts in rural areas or towns (20%) and urban areas (28%).”
• “Relatively few of those surveyed see core academic subjects as likely to receive cuts, such as elementary English/language arts (just 17%), science (13%), elementary math (12%) and social-studies (11%).”

Federal Updates

Institute for Education Statistics: Director Mark Schneider on education research and the future of schools.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Dr. Deborah L. Birx: “.”

Debt Ceiling: .

Education Department: New Office of Educational Technology and Digital Promise report:

City & State News

California: . What’s keeping them from the classroom?

Colorado: The state Board of Education voted unanimously to select .

Missouri: .

New Jersey: this year, district says.

Pennsylvania: in Pennsylvania, new study finds.

• .

COVID-19 Research

• : “ of Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine safety among more than 3 million U.S. children aged 5 to 17 years flagged just 2 of 20 health outcomes among 12- to 17-year-olds — myocarditis and pericarditis, which were rare.”
• “ ‘Myocarditis or pericarditis is a rare event, with an average incidence of 39.4 cases per million doses administered in children aged 5 to 17 years within seven days after BNT162b2 [Pfizer] COVID-19 vaccination,’ the authors wrote. Previous studies have noted that the incidence of the two conditions is much higher after COVID-19 infection.”

• : “SARS-CoV-2 is nosediving across all metrics in all regions of the U.S.: hospitalizations, deaths, emergency room departments, and wastewater. Wastewater is still higher than in 2020 and 2021, though.”
• “We’ve been hitting new lows in death counts, too. In fact, excess deaths are hovering at only ~1% above pre-pandemic rates (at the height of the pandemic we were at 47%). In other words, things are looking good right now.”
• “Up until now, the CDC recommended that we ‘improve ventilation’ to reduce transmission. But by how much? Well, for the first time, CDC set minimum ventilation targets for indoor spaces: five air changes per hour. This may sound like boring news, but it’s huge for public health. Not just for viruses but health overall. While this standard isn’t mandatory, you should follow up with your business, school, place of worship, etc., to ensure it’s being met now.”

Viewpoints and Analyses

Moving from “Reform” to “Rethinking”

• : “The COVID-19 pandemic stressed and stretched schooling in unprecedented ways. Routines that had been in place for generations came to a crashing halt.”
• “During the pandemic, new routines took hold. Parents expressed frustration and an appetite for new options. The visibility into the curriculum and students’ work that came with remote learning led many parents to become newly engaged. … The pandemic fueled an explosion in homeschooling, greater familiarity with virtual learning and unprecedented declines in district enrollments.”
• “From my research and work with educators, I’ve learned that leaders who want to … meet this moment as open-minded ‘rethinkers’ rather than self-assured reformers, should take to heart five habits.”
  • Ask why … a lot!
  • Be precise and specific.
  • Be deliberate.
  • Know that new problems may call for new solutions.
  • Reject change for change’s sake.

5 Steps Districts Can Take to Prepare for a Big Financial Reckoning: 

• , the former chief financial officer for the District of Columbia Public Schools, shares five things districts should consider doing to keep students and their successes at the center of discussions about budget reductions:
  • Inventory district-funded programs, then examine student data.
  • Engage in strategic abandonment discussions.
  • Set your district’s priorities and create (or update) your five-year financial plan.
  • Budget for equity.
  • Innovate and experiment with new school models or staffing approaches.
    

The Pandemic Is Over, But the Education Emergency Continues

• “There is a divide between the reality of student learning loss and parents’ perceptions of learning loss.”
• “Learning loss is related not only to what happened in schools, but also to what happened in communities.”
• “Learning loss will become permanent unless learning time — student time on task — is increased.”
  

…And on a Lighter Note

• The Oscar for Best Drama Goes to: . Make sure to wait until the end.

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

• “Babies and toddlers are being diagnosed with speech and language delays in greater numbers, part of developmental and academic setbacks for children of all ages after the pandemic. Children born during or slightly before the pandemic are more likely to have problems communicating compared with those born earlier, studies show. Speech therapists and doctors are struggling to meet the increased need for evaluation and treatment.”
• “In an analysis of nearly 2.5 million children younger than 5 years old, researchers … found that for each year of age, first-time speech delay diagnoses increased by an average of 1.6 times between 2018-19 and 2021-22. The highest increase was among 1-year-olds, the researchers said.”
• “Young children with delayed speech should get treatment as early as possible because children with communication problems tend to have more difficulty in school later on, speech and language experts said.”

The Big Three

Detroit Schools Got $1.3 Billion in COVID Relief. It Might Not Be Enough

• “With more than half the money already out the door, less than 1% has gone toward bringing students back to classrooms, according to officials, despite two-thirds of the district’s 53,400 students last year missing school at a threshold researchers say puts them academically at risk.”
• “Detroit is using COVID stimulus money to cover $700 million worth of expenses it typically pays for with its general fund, leaving the saved cash in its reserves with no spending deadline. The size of its general fund has swollen over 500% since stimulus funds began flowing and will be drawn down over the next five years, the district said.”

• “High-poverty school districts (46%) are much more likely to say they plan to spend remaining stimulus aid on addressing learning loss in elementary-grades math than are low-poverty school systems (29%).”
• “District and school leaders from high-poverty school systems will put a greater priority on learning recovery in secondary-grades math (40%) than will their peers in low-poverty systems (25%).”
• “K-12 officials from school districts in the Southern U.S. (46%) and Western states (36%) are significantly more likely to spend remaining stimulus money on learning recovery in elementary math than are those based in the Midwest (24%) and Northeast (21%).”

• “Americans are much more confident in routine childhood vaccines than COVID-19 shots, but support for vaccine requirements in schools has slipped from pre-pandemic levels, according to a new .”
• “What [Pew researchers] found: 88% of Americans believe the benefits of childhood vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella outweigh the risks, compared to 62% who have the same views about COVID-19 vaccines.”
• .

Federal Updates

Department of Health and Human Services: Announced “.” Innovative, community-led solutions to advance the mental health of children and youth. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• to help protect people from respiratory infections, with a goal of at least five air changes each hour and upgraded filters.
• for K-12 Schools and Early Care and Education Programs to Support Safe In-Person Learning”

COVID-19 Research

• “Now entering its fourth year, the COVID-19 pandemic remains one of the most significant threats to global public health, at a cost of more than 6.5 million lives lost and trillions of dollars in lost economic output to date.”
• “In addition to direct effects of the pandemic, resultant economic, human security, political and national security implications of COVID-19 continue to strain recovery efforts, presenting both known and unforeseen challenges that probably will ripple through society and the global economy during the next year and for years to come.”
• “Countries globally remain vulnerable to the emergence or introduction of a novel pathogen that could cause a devastating new pandemic.”
• “The [intelligence community] continues to investigate how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, first infected humans, maintaining a Community of Interest across agencies.”

• “A new nationwide French comparing outcomes for patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) for either influenza or COVID-19 due to acute respiratory failure shows that . The study was published yesterday in the Journal of Infection.”

City & State News

Kansas: .

New York: during the first half of the school year.

Rhode Island: “The Barrington School Committee has .”

• “Brittany DiOrio, Stephanie Hines and Kerri Thurber will each receive a payment of $33,333, a spokesperson for the school district announced. … Additionally, they will receive back pay: $65,000 for Hines, $128,000 for Thurber and $150,000 for DiOrio. The three teachers’ legal counsel will receive $50,000 in attorney’s fees.”

Utah: .

Viewpoints and Resources

: Via FutureEd with 86 pages of promising solutions. 

With New Grants, 5 States Could Lead the Way to Widespread, Effective Tutoring: Via Kevin Huffman

: Via Chalkbeat

: Via EdChoice and MorningConsult

: NYT essay by the members of Biden-Harris Transition COVID Advisory Board

: Via McKinsey

… And on a Lighter Note

Big Sports Weekend:

• .

• New world record for the : 856 feet.

• .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

In this week’s episode, Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner talk about one of the biggest things to come out of the pandemic: the groundswell movement from parents and others to finally teach children how to read in line with the best evidence from the science of reading. And they express misgivings of whether a legislative approach that bans certain teaching approaches will ultimately help each and every student learn — and ponder the downsides of such an approach.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Horn: Hey Diane. I’ve been thinking and hopefully I’m not jumping into this thought prematurely, given we still have a couple of podcasts left in this season, but I can’t believe that the school year is nearing its end. You must have a lot of mixed emotions right now.

Tavenner: Well, it’s definitely not too early, Michael, and this is the season in the year when it feels as if it’s already over because we’re planning for next year, even though this one isn’t finished yet and it always feels that way. It’s a little bit weird for me this time around since, as you know, I don’t have another school year in my current role. And so yeah, I’m feeling, I use the feelings app, how we feel, and so I’m trying to think of the right adjectives here. I’m feeling a little bit unmoored.

Horn: That’s a good one.

Tavenner: Feeling exhilarated, I would say by watching Summit’s new leaders really plan for the future and also thinking about what I’m going to be doing. So it’s super interesting, Michael, because pair that with the fact that we started this podcast in a time of incredible uncertainty and as it turns out at the start of the pandemic, although we didn’t realize just how long that would actually be, we thought it would be a lot shorter. And we started this podcast because we both believe that the disruption caused by all that was happening in the world created a real opportunity for all of us to rethink schools in a much more profound way than we had been up to that point. But both of us were, and continue to be striving for more urgency I would say, and boldness in the redesign of schools.

And I think that’s why we’ve continued having conversations and it’s why this season we’ve been toggling between getting really into the weeds about how innovation actually happens in schools and zooming out to the sort of hot topics and issues that are either driving or impeding that change. And I’m pretty sure that one of those hot topics has been nagging you for a bit. I know we’ve been talking about it for a while and so I think today might be the day. Let’s hear it. What do you want to talk about?

Horn: All right, well let’s do it. I’ve been thinking a lot about the so-called reading wars, and this is a topic that plays a big role frankly in the school interruptions and upheavals of the past few years. And it’s something we have mentioned before in the show, but I wanted to dive a bit deeper into it, but from a slightly different angle, from I think where a lot of the coverage has been if you’re game.

Tavenner: Well, yeah, so I won’t bury the headline, Michael. I’m totally game to talk about reading, always game to talk about reading and learning to read and how we teach reading. And quite frankly, everything about reading. I love reading. And in fact, I grew up in a preschool that was literally in my house where tons of kids learned to read and later because… I became a reading teacher during the summers when I wasn’t teaching in my schools. And so the only part of this topic that I don’t like is the “reading wars” title and quite frankly, it’s just because I’m just tired of having wars in education of any sort and especially when there really shouldn’t be anything to fight about when it comes to reading. And so if you promise we can have a scene conversation that doesn’t paint this as a war, let’s do it.

Horn: Well, I love to do that and I’m glad we’re going to dig in and I will unfortunately frame it a few more times as reading wars, although your point is a very good one. But in essence there has been this tug of war that has gone on for years between… and I’m going to generalize here, two camps, broadly speaking, there’s one that wants students to learn how to decode written words on the page through learning phonics and phonemes and the like. And historically they were labeled the “phonics people,” but more recently they’ve been called the science of reading people because they aren’t just about phonics Diane, as you know, although that is a critical piece, phonics is just one piece of this branch of learning how to read and the science of reading is often thought more of a rope where you’re braiding together a variety of strands. So you’ve got phonics, yes, but you’ve also got things like phonological awareness decoding and the like as part of a branch of this rope that’s thought of as word recognition.

And then on the other branch you have language comprehension, which are things like background knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, and the like. And there’s actually been some really recent new research. This is timely, this conversation just showcasing how important background knowledge is and when you weave these strands together, you get someone who’s able to read and comprehend. Now you as the reading teacher, you’re probably sort of saying you’re simplifying at the moment, but that’s basically the gist of it.

Tavenner: It is.

Horn: And so that’s one sort of camp if you will. On the other side, you’ve had the folks who were historically labeled the whole language people, but they were those who wanted to make sure reading was joyful and interesting and they used methods like three queuing, which essentially asks readers to figure out words based on context and nearby images and the like. Now there’s a deeper commentary here I think about how we as adults probably shouldn’t assume that things that we as adults have automated into long-term memory may be boring to kids. They’re genuinely interested in cracking the codes of how adults do work and they want to get their reps in to perfect it. That’s not boring to them.

But I actually don’t want to go there per se because for a long time I’d argue Diane, that the research has actually been pretty clear that the so-called “science of reading camp” is the vastly superior way to learn how to read, and the “whole language camp,” what’s also been called “balanced literacy” in some quarters because of the approach of one of the acolytes behind the method, it doesn’t actually teach kids how to decode and read and it is short-changing them. And the adherence to that whole language method has been almost criminal in terms of how it’s shortchanged millions of kids.

And this isn’t new, to be clear, Diane, it was clear to me reading the research on this stuff when I got into education before 2010. And as I’ve spent time in schools, it’s been equally clear to me over the 2010s if you will, that there were an egregious number of classrooms using things like Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study or Fountas & Pinnell’s Guided Reading and the like. Which to be clear, those resources have not been based on the evidence of how individuals learn to read.

Tavenner: First of all, I think you did a nice job of summarizing even at the high level, but I think what you’ve just shared is why I blocked the title “reading wars.” If this were an actual war or let’s take something a little bit less violent, a sports contest of some sort, the game is over. If you check the scoreboard, the learning science phonics team, they won a long time ago. The only thing I would add to your high level summary is that what muddies the water a bit about this is some people are able to learn to read without a phonics or science-based approach, if you will. And as a result, people point to those children or those people as evidence of efficacy of the whole language approach, which is why it’s important to highlight that what the evidence shows is that vastly more people are able to learn to read as children when given the phonics based approach versus the whole language method, which makes phonics a far superior choice for a public education system.

Because as a public education system that spends on average, and I’m going to be conservative here, about $12,000 per student per year, there is no question that with reading as perhaps I would argue the number one goal of the early grades of school, every kid should be able to read by third grade. And that just isn’t the case in America. We still have over a third of our students who are not proficient at reading by the time they’re entering fourth grade. And as we both know, everything from that point on and in education and learning is dependent upon one’s ability to read, which is why people get really, really fired up about this topic because we have the science, we have the money, we have the school time. Why in the world can’t all of our children read? It’s insane.

Horn: And your point is a really important one also on the nuance about the percentage who learn, frankly not through a whole language approach, but it just seems exposure to books of learning how to read and estimates vary. Somewhere between 30 and 40% can learn that way. I actually will circle back to that nuance because I frankly hate the one-size-fits-all way that we think that there’s somehow a best way to educate kids and it sort of plays into the problems I would argue more broadly with education research in our conversations. But even in this conversation, the whole language approach still I think would not make the grade. But like we said, none of this is new per se.

What became new, and this starts to root us in the pandemic is… well, a few years before the pandemic, 2017, Emily Hanford, an NPR reporter, started investigating how children learn to read and she authored a series of pieces and then ultimately put together an incredible podcast series called that brought to light, not just that teachers had been effectively duped and ed schools had been complicit, but also sort of how this all had happened, that these tons of classrooms were not using what the science was showing.

And then we had the pandemic and parents who had been growing concerned about their children not learning to read, got a firsthand view just into how their kids were being taught in Zoom and so forth, or better said, not taught to read. And they started going to school boards and then groups like the National Parents Union really rose up and started to hold superintendent’s feet to the fire. And I think it’s fair to say that those efforts, Emily Hanford plus the parents have really started changing the conversation in much of the country around how to teach reading in line with the current evidence.

Tavenner: Yeah, Michael and it’s not only the conversation, but there’s real action that is happening, which sometimes we hear a lot of talk but we don’t see action. And what we’re seeing on this front is a variety of moves being made in response to what feels like this sort of sustained and growing pressure from the public for something different in their schools.

Horn: Yeah, and this is where I want to start to go, but we should be clear, we still have a long way to go. There’s still millions of kids being taught using those materials I referenced earlier but we’re seeing progress, you’re right. Now there’s been a lot of work to train teachers using a variety of programs to undo what the ed schools have taught or didn’t teach them and I think we actually have to go farther because there are a lot of a adolescents, as you know, that don’t know how to read as a result of those misguided teachings. So much so that I think middle and high school teachers, frankly, they probably need to learn some of the science of reading as well so that they can teach it in certain cases. And of course some of the tools will be different. They’ll be age appropriate for teens and the like but I think that in many cases they’re going to have to help some of those adolescents build these skills to learn how to read so that they can learn all the other material that they’re trying to work through.

Tavenner: One of the things I find interesting about what you’re describing Michael, is how, in some ways what is going on… it just sounds a bit like leadership 101 as we’ve often… to digress from the reading part a little and to zoom out to the process, as we’ve talked about education in America, it’s totally decentralized. We’ve repeated that theme multiple times. The federal government actually has very few tools and relatively little power over what happens in states, counties, districts, and ultimately in school buildings and classrooms. And so unlike in other countries like Singapore or China where a federal mandate is handed down and literally the entire system turns on a dime to do whatever is being mandated, in the U.S., there isn’t ever a common initiative or priority.

And I guess the theory was that the federal secretary of education and department could perhaps provide that type of leadership, at least from a inspirational or bully pulpit type perspective but I’m not sure they ever have. And as things get increasingly politically polarized, they just can’t because someone’s always going to oppose them just to oppose them. And so I find it fascinating that a persistent journalist and parent advocates are somehow in some ways creating enough sustained public pressure to perhaps create a national priority around reading and every child that might drive meaningful action. It’s just really interesting to watch.

Horn: Yeah, I completely agree and I’m aware that two episodes in a row now, we’re doing a lot of sort of throat clearing before I get to the point but I want to make sure folks are clear about where we’re going because what you just described I think is an absolute great thing and I have some concerns, and it’s because it’s not just frankly that the state departments of education are reacting and now finally doing something and making significant changes. We’re also seeing state legislatures make some significant changes. And again, I want to be clear, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper by a variety of authors, Clare Halloran, Claire Hug, Rebecca Jack and Emily Oster who everyone knows quite well, I suspect, they identified something really interesting. So the pop quiz for you is, Diane, do you know the only two states to have fully recovered their pandemic learning losses in reading?

Tavenner: Yep. Well, setting aside my disdain for the concept of learning loss, but putting in from my passion for reading, Michael, I do know this answer, but I honestly think it’s a bit of a rhetorical question for me and I don’t want to steal your thunder because this is honestly a bit surprising. So take it away.

Horn: And agree with you, learning losses is not the best phrase, but I think it’s the one that’s understood. So the two states that have rebounded fully are Mississippi and South Carolina. I’m going to let that sit in there for a moment. Mississippi and South Carolina, and they are perhaps not coincidentally in my view, the two states that in 2013 and 2014 passed science of reading laws. So now what we’re seeing Diane is that more states are putting in those laws, not just regulations or guidance to districts, but actual laws to restrict or mandate certain curriculum. And this is happening in a variety of ways throughout the country. There’s been a high profile to do around this. For example, in Ohio, the governor there really went to the mat on ending the teaching of reading instruction that doesn’t follow the best evidence on how to teach reading. And then unbelievably, the teacher’s unions there pushed back against them.

Horn: It’s still ongoing as we record this and in Connecticut, the teacher’s unions have also pushed back. So it is a swirl right now there. But the question I want to think through with you is this, is enacting policies to ban certain discredited teaching methodologies or mandating the ones where the evidence is strong. Is that a good idea?

Tavenner: Whew. It’s important to stay here for a beat because you just said some really important things I don’t want to skip over and I want to be really clear and start by just apologizing for my sarcasm around the gap closing. Look, I deeply admire what Mississippi and South Carolina have done in terms of serving their students just full stop. And I’m a bit more familiar with the work in Mississippi and in my view, it’s not surprising to see the results that they’re getting. They have had excellent student-centered leadership aligned with an honesty about where they were in terms of their outcomes and student performance and a vision for where they wanted to go. And they’ve done the hard work to align things and make real progress. And so I don’t want to take anything away from those efforts. And I also don’t want to just attribute it to legislation either because there was a whole bunch of other stuff going on there that lined up with it, but maybe legislation was the igniting factor.

And then you made the other comments about teacher union opposition in Ohio and Connecticut, and they’re completely relevant because how many times have we seen federal and state policies designed to support students completely fail in their objectives when they have what I will call the classroom door slammed on them and in their face by teachers who aren’t alike? And this takes us back to the title of reading wars. Like it or not, there are a lot of teachers in the U.S. who are not teaching a phonics-based approach or a science-based approach to reading. And that’s just a fact. And we need to say that that’s why we are where we are. And ultimately this is the thing that will have to change if we want every child in America to read. And I feel very confident that state’s policies alone aren’t going to magically change that, they will not magically get teachers to do these things. So now I’m just going to do a hard pivot and I think be nervous with you on top of all of it, I get very, very, very nervous about state policies mandating curriculum.

Horn: Yeah, and we’ve talked about this before, of course, back in Season 3, we had a couple episodes that we’ll link to, early on in the season about who decides what curriculum gets taught and some of the food fights around banning certain books and materials and such. And we were both skeptical then that having legislators weigh in on these sorts of things was a good idea. So we are nothing if not consistent I suppose, but here I’ll acknowledge it’s trickier because there’s been so much harm done to so many students, kids have really been screwed. And so I am sympathetic to folks like the National Parents Union or ExcelinEd that are going around pushing hard for laws to mandate the “science of reading.” If your kids are the ones that have been failed by the system, I think you’ll do anything, almost, to reverse this and put an end to it. And there are some great intentions behind it. And I found the arguments by the teachers unions against the practice really troubling to be candid, Diane.

Tavenner: Yeah, this is such an important point and there are others I know you will uncover, but this one deserves a moment. I would argue that one of the biggest challenges we have in our education system right now, and quite frankly in our country, Michael, is that people are so angry and frustrated and righteous about how government is doing things wrong, that they feel the only solution is to vote in sort of their people and put them in government and then to have those people mandate the views that they hold and their perspectives and their approaches and their beliefs in law. And I agree, this can feel tempting when kids have been so misserved and continue to be misserved. And when there are people in powerful government positions making decisions that we believe are doing harm to children, it’s natural to want to just replace them with someone who will just make the decision that we want them to make, that we believe in, and the type of legislation we’re talking about, which dictates very specific content to be taught or very specific methods to be used is autocratic.

There’s just no way around it. And it requires penalties to enforce these approaches and it inevitably will be legally challenged and subverted. And my point being is it leads to war, it leads to the title of this whole thing. And perhaps the biggest barrier to our schools serving our children is the adults and the adults being at war with one another. I know this isn’t the only reason to be uncomfortable with state level legislation, that’s this level of prescription, but I just think it’s worth us all pausing and asking ourselves if we feel comfortable with the idea that government can mandate exactly what is taught and how it is taught in every classroom, knowing that the people in government change and they’re not always going to align with your personal views and values. So I just think that that’s something we should all be thinking about.

Horn: No, and I think it’s a really good set of points, Diane, and that we should hold seriously and people who want to legislate or mandate or regulate whatever thing should hold that… four years later, there’s going to be someone else there and they’re going to do the exact opposite and we create this pendulum that’s I think very unhealthy for society. And I think on top of that, when you mandate specific curricula or ban certain content, you have one other set of problems that I’ll add on top of the ones that you just listed, which I think are all correct. And it’s this, which is science is not a static field. By definition, science is a learning process. We observe phenomena in the world, we do our best as humans to categorize them and then we do research to figure out what correlates with what, we create theories from hypotheses we’ve tested.

And then ideally, we all too often don’t do this because of our egos, but we observe anomalies to our theories which allows us to make them better. And these anomalies are the things that our theories can’t explain. And by using them over time, we move to understanding causality, like what factors actually cause the outcomes we desire, and then we can really start to strengthen the theory when we start to understand how different conditions or circumstances call for different approaches or actions because they’re different in some fundamental way. And you sort of highlighted this, that there’s a group of students who learn more, it seems through exposure than direct instruction. It seems that they don’t get harmed by direct instruction on phonics, but they can learn to read through exposure to books and words. Todd Rose actually talked to us about this in season one when he said that they’re essentially broadly speaking three dominant pathways to teaching reading based on a learner’s profile.

But here’s the thing, science is dynamic and so theoretically legislation can be as well, you just described how it could change, but in reality, as we know, it takes a long time for legislators to catch up with what’s emerging. I’m going to step outside of K-12 for a moment. We had the reauthorization there, the Every Student Succeeds Act, it’s now called in 2015, that was way overdue. Higher ed, I think the last time it was reauthorized was 2008 and we’re way overdue. So in these polarized times, legislation can be stultifying and very, very static, which is the opposite of that dynamic nature of science. And so I’m just not a huge fan of creating blunt policies frankly, as a matter of principle, that inhibits schools from taking the right steps for each child as their understanding on the ground improves and we see what each individual needs to make progress.

Tavenner: Michael, this is a totally different reason to dislike the legislative mandate, but I would argue an equally important one. It flies in the face of continuous improvement, which is something we talk about all the time here. And legislation by definition is slow. It was designed that way. And what we need to be doing in schools right now is moving fast to continuously improve. And it’s crazy to think that a policy that will likely never go away because they just don’t go away and probably won’t be changed for many, many years can stay relevant given how fast things can and should move in terms of what we’re learning about learning, it doesn’t make sense.

Horn: Yeah, I think that’s right. And frankly with AI and stuff like that, the insights we might gather could even just magnify significantly over the years ahead. So I think that leaves us with the question of what do we do? And I like the moves where states and commissioners of education in Mississippi have undertaken these multi-year efforts to really work with their educators on the latest in the science and improve the understanding on the ground of the evidence about how to teach reading. I love that they’re focused on implementation and operationalizing not just curriculum but building capacity really. And I love when districts put a firm stance on the ground that we’re not going to teach the junk that hasn’t worked anymore.

Tavenner: I really like these moves as well, Michael. And I think they are attuned to the reality of the situation. If school leaders and teachers do not understand and believe that teaching, a science-based approach to reading will first enable all of their students to read and second make them better teachers and schools, then they’re not going to change their practice. It’s just not going to happen. And so rather than fighting them, we need to respectfully meet them where they are and figure out how to change their hearts, minds and practices.

And I will say on the other side, teachers unions and teachers themselves can’t be a obstructionist about this, which I’m sad to say they often are. There are these longstanding sayings and approaches among teachers that I learned as a teacher like this too shall pass and just close your door and teach, which represent far too many teacher mindsets about an unwillingness to be on an improvement journey or in any way change their practice. And that mindset that what I do is good and right and it can’t be improved unless I decide it, it’s just not acceptable. And I think that we have to figure out ways to change that.

Horn: Yeah, and then they should be modeling learning for their students also. To go back to the policy perspective then more broadly rather than mandating the inputs, I would love policy that focused on outcomes, as in policy that should be very clear what you said earlier, which is that all students should master how to read and they can’t move fully on until they do. I quite like in concept anyway, what Florida did back in the day with a clear, can you read mastery bar for moving on after third grade, and my recollection is that didn’t stand, didn’t pass muster. And I do think in today’s worlds there are other ways you could do that. You can keep a child with their peers while still making sure they’re learning at the level right for them, and we don’t let them pass those, such a critical subject is basic reading, meaning decoding, fluency and so forth without real demonstrated mastery.

And we should put some real teeth into this and I’d like to see some real choice alongside it so that families who are trapped in options that aren’t working have other options and can create some accountability on the system so that they can go to places where their children can make meaningful progress. And I guess my theory, at least for the policy, Diane, is that if we’re strict on the outcomes, reading in this case, then we can free up schools to figure out the best ways to serve the individual students so long as the departments of education and elsewhere in the ecosystem are really building capacity in lockstep with the science of what we’re learning but I love your take on this.

Tavenner: OK, well I wasn’t with you and then I was with you and then maybe I wasn’t which is to say good policy is ridiculously hard to write and I’m very respectful of that fact. My fear, which comes from deep personal experience about a policy that makes reading absolute in that it turns into finding flaws in kids and doing harm to them versus incentivizing adults to do whatever it takes to find the ways that all kids can meet that reading bar because they sound so good on paper but in practice it’s been a pretty horrible to a ton of kids. That said, I’m with you in believing that we should all get clear and aligned on what I truly think is the most obvious, literally the number one most clear objective of public education and that is that every child should be a proficient reader before they are 10.

So what I like about what you’re saying is let’s all decide that that’s going to be true, period. Every child in America is going to read and then give more freedom for how that happens. And I say that cautiously because we know we want the freedom to be within science, but with clarity that failure is not an option. And now you know why I’m not a policymaker because can you imagine a build titled like failure is not an option, create your own pathway there.

Horn: We’ll have a different course on naming policies I guess for both of us. But I guess my last reflection off that is maybe that’s one of the reasons why giving families more choice is the accountability measure that maybe I’m most comfortable with against that backdrop, because it’s a less heavy-handed way or a less one size fits all way of creating that accountability alongside clear reports of here’s how your kid is doing and progressing on the path to mastery of reading. We have to be clear not to blame or label but to empower. And I think that’s the big focus where we’ll both be aligned is my guess.

Tavenner: Most certainly. The day I get a clear report on an assessment, I will jump for joy. We could spend a whole episode on that, but for now I think we might leave it there. But let’s turn to what are you reading, watching, listening to lately, Michael, as we wrap up?

Horn: Yeah, so I’ve got to read a couple books that are in pre-print on education stuff that have been fun, but I’m going to go a different direction. My wife and I went to the movie theater the other day. We were the only two people in the theater. It was so sad. And we watched the movie Air, which is the story of Michael Jordan signing with Nike back in the day. And such great actors and particularly actress. I’m a huge Viola Davis fan, but I will say the movie was good not great, Diane, but I enjoyed the time nonetheless. What about you?

Tavenner: Your time and your private screening, it sounds like. Well, Michael, at the risk of being way too trendy, which is uncomfortable territory for me because I’m never there. We have started watching The Diplomat on Netflix and while we’re only two episodes in, I do see what all of the chatter is about and why everyone says you must watch this. It’s quite compelling and a really good watch. So highly recommended.
Horn: Awesome. Well once we get through Lasso that’s next step on our queue, so we will be right with you Diane. And with that, thanks to all of you for tuning in for this conversation and we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

Even before COVID, 9 in 10 middle schoolers in the shrinking city were below proficient in math and reading, many school buildings were structurally unsound and gaping budget deficits had landed the school system under the fiscal control of the state for the better part of the last two decades.

When relief funds began flowing, the challenges were great — a year of school closures and high absence rates had set students even further behind — but so were the means. The district scored nearly , over $23,000, as any other large system nationwide, thanks to a funding formula weighted for students living in poverty. Detroit has a median household income of $34,762, according to , and a childhood poverty rate roughly three times higher than the national average.

It was a test of the full power of federal relief dollars: Could $1.3 billion help get one of the nation’s most embattled school systems back on track?

Fast-forward two years and experts question whether the influx has delivered the needed boost to students. With more than half the money already out the door, has gone toward bringing students back to classrooms, according to officials, despite two-thirds of the district’s 53,400 students last year missing school at a threshold researchers say puts them academically at risk. And the superintendent in March announced to come in June.

Meanwhile, the district is using $700 million of the relief cash on expenditures it normally pays for through its general fund, stockpiling money in its reserves for district-wide facilities upgrades over the next five or more years — a creative way to skirt the September 2024 deadline on the use-it-or-lose-it federal funds.

It would be “impossible” to complete the more than one thousand facility projects the district has planned in just a few years, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told ����Ӱ�� in an email. “Our students deserve to have roofs that do not leak or schools that do not close because outdated boilers break down.”

Taken together, the Detroit spending decisions paint a picture of both the promise and the pitfalls of schools’ handling of stimulus money. And they serve as a sobering reminder of what researchers have emphasized for over a year: relief cash alone likely will not be enough to offset the damage wrought by the pandemic.

Nearly a year behind 

The scale of recovery efforts in Detroit and elsewhere falls short of the magnitude of learning losses, worries Harvard University education professor Thomas Kane, who researches COVID’s impact on education.

Comparing 2019 test scores to those in 2022, he calculates that students in Detroit fell nearly a year behind where they were previously. But he estimates the district’s key interventions — summer school for roughly 9,000 students and high-impact tutoring for about the same number — are only enough to spur about a fifth of the needed gains to get youth back on track.

“This is common in districts around the country,” the education economist said. “They can list the interventions that they’re fielding … but they’re not doing the math on the effect sizes that they should be expecting from those things.”

He suggests a quick sanity check: If students are a year back in their learning, catching them up will cost, at minimum, a district’s typical yearly operating budget. In Detroit, that would mean devoting roughly two-thirds of all relief dollars to academic recovery — a level the district is far from approaching.

District spokesperson Chrystal Wilson pointed out that the district is continuing to scale up small-group and one-on-one literacy and math help for struggling students. COVID money helped expand the effort initially, but now it’s built into the district budget so the support doesn’t disappear when relief funds dry up, the superintendent said. 

As a result, a higher share of Detroit’s lowest-scoring students are on track to make a year’s worth of growth in reading and math this year than pre-pandemic, Wilson said.

Stacey Young is a Detroit mother of six, including three youngsters at Davison Elementary-Middle School. Last year, the school advertised tutoring and all three children attended, but the program enrolled more than a dozen students per teacher, she said, and her kids’ grades, which had suffered on the heels of virtual learning, did not improve. This year, her youngest son continues to struggle in math.

“On his report card, they said, ‘You need to seek some support,’” Young said. But the school had “nothing to offer” in terms of additional learning options, she said.

Superintendent Vitti recognizes the problem, but explained hiring staff for afterschool programming has posed a challenge.

“Our teachers are burnt out after the school day,” he said.

The students who remain the furthest behind in their learning also tend to be the ones who have had continued attendance challenges, he added, meaning the learning recovery efforts laid out by the district often miss the students who need them most.

“The issue here is not funding. The issues here are student access, quality human capital and the ability to scale human capital,” Vitti said.

Bernita Bradley, a parent advocate in Detroit with the National Parents Union, is frustrated that the district has also cut back on summer enrichment programs. After opening summer learning to all interested students in 2022, the school system will offer programming this summer.

“There’s so much that’s needed for our children to catch up,” Bradley said. “This is the time for families to be getting more support … as opposed to canceling something.”

Fixing neglected facilities

It’s a delicate balance between shorter- and longer-term stimulus investments, because Detroiters — Young and Bradley included — acknowledge campuses across the city are sorely in need of repairs. The scale of efforts like tutoring or summer school are constrained in part because upgrades to buildings represent the single-biggest line item in Detroit’s COVID relief spending plan.

Capital improvements have long been on hold in the district because for most of the last two decades a state-appointed emergency manager controlled its purse, making budget cuts to close a longstanding deficit, explained Sarah Reckhow, associate professor at Michigan State University.

“An easy way to cut was simply to not spend money maintaining buildings,” she said.

It created a backlog of roughly a in needed upgrades to fix issues like leaky roofs and moldy buildings, Vitti told NBC in 2019. Michigan is among the bottom five states nationwide for equitable school funding, according to a from The Education Trust-Midwest, meaning the challenged district would have had to increase taxes on Detroiters to make facilities upgrades.

When the $1.3 billion COVID windfall hit, the district carved off $700 million to finally address conditions that many deemed shameful.

It’s a tactic common across high-poverty districts, which are more likely to have unmet infrastructure needs. School systems serving mostly low-income students have been far more likely than affluent districts to spend emergency relief dollars on facilities or transportation, a February found — meaning less cash leftover for academic support.

But from a fiscal perspective, it’s a prudent choice, said Elizabeth Moje, professor of education at the University of Michigan. Detroit’s schools need “massive renovations,” she said, and because the expenses don’t recur, the investment won’t contribute to future budgetary issues when federal funds dry up.

Still, doing so requires creative accounting as the construction projects will extend years beyond the deadline for spending relief money, said Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank. Detroit is using COVID stimulus money to cover $700 million worth of expenses it typically pays for with its general fund, leaving the saved cash in its reserves with no spending deadline. The size of its general fund has swollen over 500% since stimulus funds began flowing and will be drawn down over the next five years, the district said.

“There’s a lot of that budget jiu-jitsu going on,” Jordan said.

Some 21 states, including Michigan, place no limit on the amount of money districts can keep in their reserves, allowing them to stockpile extra funds past the federal deadline so long as they first substitute COVID money for allowable expenses typically paid out of their general fund. 

Meanwhile, a recently announced round of layoffs in Detroit was an even more bitter pill knowing so much cash is waiting unspent, educators said.

Daniella Borum is a college transition advisor at the Detroit School of Arts who was told in early April that her position, which she’s held since 2019, would be terminated. Now she wonders who will help the high schoolers on her campus through the stressors not only of preparing for higher education, but of navigating daily life.

“It doesn’t have to be Ms. Borum here as a college advisor, but the kids need [someone],” she said. “They need support services, period.” 

Re-engaging students

A key component of COVID catch-up, in Detroit and nationwide, has been luring students back to classrooms. Student attendance took a major hit in the pandemic’s wake and chronic absenteeism, which researchers typically define as missing at least 10% of school days, reached unprecedented levels across the country’s largest districts — 69% last year in Detroit.

The district deployed staff to knock on the doors of families whose children were absent, seeing if there were ways they could help get those students to class.

“Families wanted their children coming back,” said Gwendolyn Jachim, a Detroit elementary school teacher who signed up to knock on doors in the summer of 2021. Still the conversations were difficult, and many parents remained unconvinced. She recalls virus-wary parents who, after the nearby Flint, Michigan, water crisis left , said they didn’t trust the government on public health matters.

For its youngest students, the district also ran summer boot camps to help children prepare for the transition into kindergarten. Detroit educator Kristy Kitchen co-led a cohort of a dozen youngsters in six weeks of programming, including weekly field trips. While the program’s past iterations had sometimes required teachers to purchase supplies themselves, educators last summer were flush with markers, science experiments and backpacks for students, she said.

“It was a very good opportunity for the kids,” Kitchen said. “They’ve had kindergarten boot camp prior to that year, but they didn’t have all those resources that we had.”

The two campaigns, door knocking and kindergarten boot camp, together amounted to roughly $1.8 million, according to figures provided by the district — less than 1% of its total stimulus allotment.

This year’s chronic absenteeism rates have dipped slightly to 60%, which the district attributes to its efforts. Still, 6 in 10 youth are missing class at a level that researchers say puts their education in peril. 

Using stimulus funds, the district also invested in several fan-favorite activities aimed at boosting morale and engagement. The city paid thousands to vendors like Chuck E. Cheese, Top Golf, Video Game Mobile, Dave & Buster’s and Zap Zone Extreme, according to spending records obtained by ����Ӱ�� through a Freedom of Information request. Some $47,000 went to field trips to Blake’s Orchard & Cider Mill, which Detroit Federation of Teachers President Lakia Wilson said is an annual tradition.

“These are city kids, so it’s good that they get to go out … picking their own apples, seeing pumpkins grow in a patch,” Wilson said. “You can’t live in Michigan and not go to the apple orchard.”

Contracts come under scrutiny

In a district with a past history of , Detroit’s emergency relief spending has not been without its share of expenses some saw as questionable.

For its tutoring contract worth over $3 million, the district chose a vendor led by Superintendent Vitti’s wife, Rachel Vitti, ex-director of the literacy nonprofit . Leaders disclosed the relationship when they discussed the contract in 2021 and said the provider was chosen because of its strong track record. Still, amid pushback, Rachel Vitti last summer from her role leading the nonprofit.

And the district’s $68 million COVID testing contract received scrutiny for a price tag twice as high as the nearby University of Michigan’s, which used the same provider and served a comparable number of students.

The contracts “cannot be compared apples to apples,” Rebecca Throop, a spokesperson for testing provider LynxDX Inc., said in an email. Detroit schools requested a higher number of tests and the university hired staff independently to assist collecting samples, she said.

LynxDX Inc. is now a to the Detroit Public Schools Community District, listed as providing support at the $20,000 to $99,999 level.

“As a company, we recognize the importance of giving back to the communities we serve and where our employees live,” Throop said.

But zooming out beyond individual contracts, Reckhow, at Michigan State, sees the Detroit school district’s position as inherently difficult. The $1.3 billion is a lot of money, she acknowledges, but doesn’t think the time-limited boost can erase all the problems of the last decades.

“There’s the assumption that you get a one-time infusion of money and you recover,” she said. “But when you’re talking about a district where the needs are as high (as Detroit’s) and where the pre-existing issues of inequality were already enormously pronounced, the timeframe of these relief dollars is just not really up to the task.”

This Week’s Top Story

• Tom Kane and Sean Reardon in
• “Math, reading and history scores from the past three years show that students learned far less during the pandemic than was typical in previous years. By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.”
• “Our detailed geographic data reveals what national tests do not: The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.”
• “The pandemic left students in low-income and predominantly minority communities even further behind their peers in richer, whiter districts than they were.”
• “In the hardest-hit communities — where students fell behind by more than one and a half years in math … schools would have had to teach 150% of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row just to catch up.”

The Big Three

• /
• : “The decision was made on the advice of a panel of independent experts, the so-called COVID-19 emergency committee. … Though a couple of members of the committee were reportedly hesitant about the move, the majority agreed COVID no longer meets the criteria of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”

• “The WHO Emergency Committee believes three things: COVID-19 is not unusual and unexpected; cross-border transmission can’t (and won’t) be stopped; COVID-19 does not require a coordinated international response.”
• “This doesn’t mean the end of a pandemic.”

• “Reversing [the learning loss] crisis will require a historic investment. The good news is, that’s just what states and school districts have gotten from Congress: approximately $190 billion from coronavirus rescue plans.”
• “High-dosage tutoring, done correctly, could compensate [for COVID learning loss], giving kids as much as an additional year of growth every year it’s implemented.”
• “High-dosage tutoring is essential to make up for the learning loss COVID-19 has wrought. It could also help ensure future students don’t lose so much to begin with.”

• Via : “To help crystallize the events of the past three years, a team of 34 experts from public health, global health, science, academia and industry — called the — spent two years examining the nation’s response. [In April] they published a book on their investigation, .”
• “Group members held ‘listening sessions’ with nearly 300 people, and in the absence of a federal commission on the topic, they felt a duty to speak out about what they found.” 
• via USA Today

Federal Updates

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to Step Down June 30. ;

Department of Health and Human Services: fact sheet

• “We know so many people continue to be affected by COVID-19, particularly seniors, people who are immunocompromised and people with disabilities. That is why our response to the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, remains a public health priority. To ensure an orderly transition, we have been working for months so that we can continue to meet the needs of those affected by COVID-19.”
• Related:

Surgeon General: Released a facing our country, the destructive impacts it has on our collective health and the extraordinary healing power of our relationships. ;

National Center for Education Statistics: : 2022 NAEP Civics Assessment. ; ����Ӱ��

Education Department:

COVID-19 Research

Some Messages More Likely to Sway Parents to Vaccinate Kids Against COVID

• on new
• “A survey of 898 parents found that more were very likely to vaccinate their children against COVID-19 after reading messages indicating that other trusted parents have done so or that the vaccine is safe, but not when the messages said the vaccine is well-tolerated.”

How Well Does Masking Work? And Other Pandemic Questions We Need to Answer

• : “We should be systematically studying pandemic mitigation efforts in order to ‌learn which interventions are effective and how best to employ them. ‌Just as important: We should ‌‌do so with the understanding that the absence of evidence of effectiveness is not the same as having evidence of ineffectiveness.”

City & State News 

Ohio: “The state legislature recently expanded its , which provides qualifying families with a $1,000 credit per child for enrichment and educational activities.”

Tennessee: Penny Schwinn, influential state education chief, to step down.

Texas: Burbio analyzed 2022-23 enrollments in Texas. “ that have announced 2022-23 enrollments to date.”

Virginia: to parents of school-age children for tutoring in different subjects.

Viewpoints

Post-Pandemic, It’s Time for a Bold Overhaul of U.S. Public Education

• : “Education leaders must be brave and stand up and admit publicly and repeatedly that this system just isn’t working and discuss what is needed to improve it. Policymakers must revamp our education system’s faulty design and the failed policies that prevent us from trying new approaches.”
• “We believe that this can be achieved by making the future of learning more personalized, focused on the needs of individual learners, with success measured by progress and proficiency instead of point-in-time test scores.”

Teen Survey

• Via EdChoice and Morning Consult. ;
• Teens indicate their lives have improved in many areas since the height of the pandemic. They continue to feel better about their relationships with their close friends and immediate family since the pandemic. Stress and anxiety remain challenges.
• Less than 1 in 3 teens feel their school is handling mental health effectively.

How States Can Support Ongoing Academic Recovery

• Give parents clear, accessible information on their children’s progress and needs.
• Support the development of individualized learning plans for students.
• Provide individualized catch-up opportunities.

… And on a Lighter Note

Thank You Kaya: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

But despite initial momentum, three now-familiar letters stopped the bill in its tracks: C-R-T.

A mostly unknown conservative scholar writing in the that month claimed the bill would “allow the Biden administration to push Critical Race Theory (CRT) on every public school in the country,” calling the Republican co-sponsors “naive” victims of a hidden leftist agenda. Critical race theory, which posits that racism permeates American institutions, has become right-wing shorthand for any classroom discussion of race.

Cornyn, who proposed the legislation and is the former GOP majority whip, dismissed the allegations, that “the false, hysterical claims are untrue and worthy of a Russian active measures campaign, not a serious discussion of our bill.”

But truthful or not, the criticisms spread like wildfire. The National Review op-ed racked up thousands of interactions on social media and, within 24 hours, and , groups that support what’s known as “,” had published dire reports pulling directly from the article. 

Then, just days later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis mimicked the message, stating in a press release the $1 billion federal civics bill would “award grants to indoctrinate students with ideologies like Critical Race Theory.”

Soon after, far-right Breitbart News ran an whose headline pulled word-for-word from the National Review editorial and targeted Cornyn as the bill’s key backer. took to social media urging their followers to call their lawmakers opposing what they described as “” sponsored by RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only.

The senators’ “Civics Secures Democracy Act” went no further.

How did this firestorm start and who wrote the op-ed that lit the match?

The story begins years prior and revolves around Stanley Kurtz, a little-noticed power player shaping the right’s recent offensives in the education culture wars.

An enemy of ‘action civics’

Though his writings are regularly shared by GOP heavy hitters including , groups like and sitting , Kurtz has flown mostly under the radar.

“Nobody’s talking about his role at all,” said Jeremy Young, a senior manager for the free expression advocacy group, PEN America.

Kurtz, a 69-year-old former university instructor and longtime conservative commentator, has spearheaded a quiet but influential campaign to cleanse classrooms of what he calls “.”

“He certainly has a fairly large megaphone among conservatives,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

In Young’s estimation, only two figures have had a wider national influence on anti-CRT legislation than Kurtz: Christopher Rufo, the man who brought the lightning-rod term into the right’s vernacular, and Russell Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America, who has fought to add teeth to the bills. 

But Kurtz has made his mark in a niche way. 

He “goes after specific things like civics education that are not as central for some of the other [figures],” Young said.

At least eight bills proposed in five states have pulled from Kurtz’s 2021 “” model legislation, according to a PEN America , making the scholar one of the key thought leaders driving the recent surge in classroom censorship bills. And his advocacy in Texas led to the 2021 passage of an unprecedented state law banning assignments that involve “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local lawmakers.

At the core of Kurtz’s activism is a central idea: That hands-on civics lessons, such as students writing to their legislators, will lead to “ and political action in support of progressive policy positions.”

The scholar, who draws a roughly $172,000 yearly salary from a think tank and lists an apartment address in Washington D.C.’s affluent Forest Hills neighborhood in tax records, declined a phone interview, saying he “prefer[s] to comment by email.” In written messages, he explained he believes hands-on civics projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.”

“Any sort of political protest or lobbying done by students is subject to undue pressure from the biases of teachers, peers and non-profits working with schools. Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said.

Kurtz’s arguments amount to a fabricated “boogeyman,” said Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor. 

Nonetheless, the idea that “frothing-at-the-mouth Democratic teachers [could] create little warrior bands of students to go out and fight their political wars for them” has become a captivating concern for some on the right, Black said, largely thanks to Kurtz.

It’s a worry that traces back to 2017 when the National Association of Scholars’s David Randall, who told ����Ӱ�� he’s a “personal friend” of Kurtz’s, published a warning of the proliferation of a “New Civics” that teaches students “a good citizen is a radical activist.”

At issue for Kurtz was a type of programming known as “action civics” popularized by the nonprofit Generation Citizen. In the approach, celebrated by , students learn to navigate local government by picking an issue they care about, studying it and presenting their findings to officials. 

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

����Ӱ�� reviewed over three dozen student projects from Texas and found that the vast majority dealt with apolitical local issues, such as reducing texting while driving in school zones. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin did lean left, such as on gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

McCluskey, at the Cato Institute, has documented over in public schooling for more than a decade and said he has yet to see “compelling evidence” that liberal bias in civics classes has become a widespread problem. A 74 review of McCluskey’s tracker revealed that only a handful of incidents concerned civics.

Accurate or not, Kurtz’s depiction of “woke civics” is now being felt in America’s classrooms. 

A bill with ‘wonderful’ uptake

When the scholar penned his in 2021, which said students should be banned from receiving class credit for “lobbying” or “advocacy” at the federal, state or local level, lawmakers and advocates across the country pounced. The response was thanks, in part, to impeccable timing: Kurtz published just a few months before policies to restrict lessons related to race and gender began to crop up in dozens of state legislatures nationwide.

The Manhattan Institute, where Rufo now works, included the bill’s anti-lobbying provisions in its own that author James Copland said he presented at the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, an annual forum to swap right-wing law-making proposals.

And Linda Bennett, a recently retired GOP South Carolina state representative, introduced a by the exact same name as Kurtz’s “Partisanship Out of Civics Act.”

“No need to reinvent the wheel if somebody’s got it right,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Bennett insisted that her office had become flooded with young students, coerced by their educators, demanding that she “please support allowing teachers to teach critical race theory.” But neither she nor Copland could name a specific school or teacher that had distorted their civics lessons in such a way or influenced students to take an activist stance.

In Texas, where a piece of Kurtz’s model legislation on civics became law, the result was an unprecedented restriction on students’ civic engagement. Legislators tucked a clause into the eighth page of their classroom censorship bill outlawing all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials.

In the two years since passage, Texas educators say they have been forced to abandon time-honored assignments such as having students attend a school board meeting or advocate for local causes like a stop sign at an intersection near campus.

“There are all sorts of other civics education that’s getting rolled up here,” PEN America’s Young said, adding that it’s a byproduct of what he calls “shockingly vague” legislation.

Sarai Paez, a recent high school graduate from a suburb outside Austin, said the new law is “a step backwards.” Students in her ninth-grade civics class passed a 2018 city ordinance calling for youth representation in their local government — advocacy that would now be outlawed. 

“There’s no need to take away something that has affected … a group of people in a positive way,” she said.

Though Kurtz said by email he has “a policy of not commenting on any consultations by office holders or policy experts,” Texas state Rep. Steve Toth, the bill’s Republican sponsor, acknowledged to that he “conferred” with Kurtz in drafting the legislation.

Toth and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP sponsor in the other chamber, did not respond to requests for comment.

In Ohio and South Dakota, where proposed legislation also pulled from Kurtz’s bill, on behalf of the policies in 2021 and 2022, respectively, though neither proposal passed.

Randall, research director at the National Association of Scholars, where Kurtz published the model legislation, said he’s been quite pleased with the bill’s uptake.

“If you had asked me when this was published, ‘Would you be happy if, several years from now, it had been turned into law in Texas?’ … I would have said that was a wonderful result.”

Money trail

Kurtz and the right-wing lawmakers and advocates who have helped translate his policy agenda into practice are linked by more than just shared philosophy. They’re also connected by money.

His employer, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank “dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy,” has a dozen funders in common with the Manhattan Institute, tax filings reveal, including mega-donors like the Charles Koch Foundation.

Copland, at the Manhattan Institute, said he did not consult with Kurtz while putting together his anti-CRT model legislation, but acknowledged some of his colleagues may have.

Toth, in Texas, also receives campaign funds from the Koch Foundation. And Gov. DeSantis, in Florida, shares at least one donor, Fidelity Investments, in common with Kurtz’s think tank. 

On more than one occasion, the issues Kurtz speaks out on have soon found their way to DeSantis’s bully pulpit. The governor recently doubled down on civics education rooted in “” and his rejection earlier this year of the College Board’s AP African American Studies curriculum came just a few months after Kurtz began . Kurtz named two authors specifically in his September article, Robin Kelley and Kimberlé Crenshaw, who the Florida Department of Education later objected to.

Education department press secretary Cassie Palelis said Florida’s concerns with the course were the “result of a thorough review,” and that its correspondence with the College Board had begun in early 2022. When asked whether officials referenced Kurtz’s work during that process and, if so, what role it played, Palelis did not address the question.

Kurtz’s work drew one of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s more sizable recent donations, according to the most recently available tax records. In 2019, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation donated $150,000 to support one of his projects. The foundation funds a variety of causes including instilling “ in the next generation of citizens.”

The Ethics and Public Policy Center did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the overlapping web of donors, Young, who has tracked the nationwide spread of anti-CRT laws, does not see a coordinated campaign.

“There are some people who look at this and sort of see a conspiracy,” he said. “I just see a bunch of people talking to each other who have aligned interests.”

Lawmakers tend to pull from legislation circulating in other states and “it just snowballs,” he added. 

As for the Kurtz model legislation, its influence continues to spread. Randall, at the National Association of Scholars, which shares nine funders in common with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the organization’s work in advancing the bill continues, particularly at the local level.

In January, a district outside of Colorado Springs to adopt a new “Birthright” social studies curriculum developed by Randall’s Civics Alliance that bans awarding course credit for service learning or action civics.

“We are in it for the long haul,” Randall said. “Our mission is to inspire as many Americans as possible to join this work.”

Disclosure: The Stand Together Trust, which was founded by Charles Koch, provides financial support to ����Ӱ��, which also participates in the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

Since state legislators in 2021 passed a ban on lessons teaching that any one group is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,” one unprecedented provision tucked into the bill has triggered a massive fallout for civics education statewide.

A brief clause on Page 8 of the legislation outlawed all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials. Educators could no longer ask students to get involved in the political process, even if they let youth decide for themselves what side of an issue to advocate for — short-circuiting the training young Texans receive to participate in democracy itself.

Zamora-Garcia’s 2017 project to add student advisors to the City Council, and others like it involving research and meetings with elected representatives, would stand in direct violation.

Since 2021, have passed laws restricting teachings on race and gender. But Texas is the only one nationwide to suppress students’ interactions with elected officials in class projects, according to researchers at the free expression advocacy group .

Practically overnight, a growing movement to engage Texas students in real-world civics lessons evaporated. Teachers canceled time-honored assignments, districts reversed expansion plans with a celebrated civics education provider and a bill promoting student civics projects that received bipartisan support in 2019 was suddenly dead in the water.

“By the time we got to 2021, civics was the latest weapon in the culture wars,” state Rep. James Talarico, sponsor of that now-defunct , told ����Ӱ��.

Texas does require high schoolers to take a semester of government and a semester of economics, and is one of nationwide that mandates at least a semester of civics. But students told ����Ӱ�� the courses typically rely on book learning and memorization.

Talarico, a former middle school teacher and the Texas legislature’s youngest member, came into office during a statewide surge in momentum to deepen civics education. A out of the University of Texas highlighted dismal levels of political participation — the state was 44th in voter registration and 47th in voter turnout — and Democrats and Republicans alike were motivated to reverse the trend. Meanwhile, academic research found lessons directly involving students in government could . 

So when the freshman legislator proposed that all high schoolers in the state learn civics with a project-based component addressing “,” colleagues on both sides of the aisle stamped their approval as the bill sailed through the House. Although the legislation then stalled in the Senate, Talarico said he came away “very optimistic” the policy would become law next session.

But in the two years before the next legislative session, he watched as the political tides turned. Flashpoint issues like George Floyd’s murder and the Jan. 6  insurrection brought on a “disagreement over democracy itself,” he said. And when his conservative colleagues passed a 2021 bill limiting school lessons on race and gender, he mourned as a few brief clauses dashed all his hopes for project-based civics.

“Students are now banned from advocating for something like a stop sign in front of their school,” Talarico said.

A battle over civics

The sections of the 2021 law limiting civic engagement pull directly from authored by the conservative scholar Stanley Kurtz, whose seek to link an approach called “action civics” — what he calls “” — with leftist activism and critical race theory.  Critical race theory is a scholarly framework examining how racism is embedded in America’s legal and social institutions, but became a right-wing catch-all term for teachings on race in early 2021. 

Kurtz the practice is a form of political “indoctrination” under the “deceptively soothing” heading of civics, a cause long celebrated on both the right and the left. 

The action civics model was popularized by the nonprofit and is used in over a thousand classrooms across at least eight states. It teaches students about government by having them pick a local issue, research it and present their findings to officials.

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

Generation Citizen’s method has been studied by several academic researchers who found participants experienced and like history and English.

Kurtz, however, contends the projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.” 

“Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said in an email to ����Ӱ��.

Civics experts, however, argued otherwise.

The notion that “it’s activism happening in classrooms … that’s just so far from the truth,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Boston.

Rep. Steve Toth and Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP lawmakers who sponsored the 2021 anti-CRT legislation, did not respond to requests for comment.

����Ӱ�� reviewed over three dozen action civics projects in Texas from before the 2021 legislation and found that the vast majority dealt with hyperlocal, nonpartisan issues.

Students most often took up causes like bullying, youth vaping, movie nights in the park or bringing back student newspapers. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin could be considered progressive, including projects dealing with gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

Under the 2021 law, all of those projects now must avoid contact with elected officials. The restrictions have resulted in initiatives more contained to schools themselves like advocacy for less-crowded hallways or longer lunch periods, educators said.

“This particular legislation … ties [students’] hands as to how involved they can get while in high school,” said Armando Orduña, the Houston executive director of .

His own political awakening, he said, came three decades ago growing up in Texas when a teacher assigned him 10 hours of volunteering on a political campaign of his choice. He opted to work on the 1991 Houston mayoral campaign of Sylvester Turner, then a young state representative who lost his bid that year but went on to become the city’s mayor in 2016.

“Back then, the attitude was how to fight teenage apathy regarding politics and now it’s quite the other way around,” Orduña said. Now politicians are working to “tamp down the next generation of leaders.”

Young progressives have become a in American politics, fueling recent electoral wins in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Chicago mayoral race and a base-rousing standoff in the Tennessee legislature. In the eyes of some members of the GOP, their activism is seen as a threat.

‘Everything got turned upside down’

Though some project-based civics lessons in Texas continue with a pared-down scope, others have disappeared altogether.

One school district north of Dallas decided “out of an abundance of caution” to reverse years of precedent and stop offering course credit to students involved in a well-regarded national civic engagement program, first reported.

And Generation Citizen, too, has seen its footprint in Texas dwindle. 

After a 2017 launch in the state, the organization underwent several years of steady growth, with more than a half dozen districts using its programming or curricula. At the time, districts in San Antonio, north Texas, the Rio Grande Valley and several rural regions had expressed interest in beginning programming, former regional director Meredith Stefos Norris said. She spent most of her days criss-crossing the sprawling state meeting with interested school leaders. Austin schools expanded their contract with the nonprofit to $58,000, according to records ����Ӱ�� obtained from the district through a Freedom of Information request. And Dallas said it wanted to bring Generation Citizen programming to every high schooler in its 153,000-student district, Norris said.

“It felt at the time that we were just going to keep going and keep growing and there was no reason that we weren’t going to be a statewide organization,” the former Texas director said.

Then came the 2021 legislative session and “everything got turned upside down,” said Megan Brandon, Generation Citizen’s current Texas program director. It zapped their efforts and districts backed out of partnerships.

The organization now primarily works with just three Texas districts, including an updated contract with Austin schools for $3,000 — a tiny sliver of the sum from a few years prior. The other two are Bastrop Independent School District and Elgin Independent School District.

Meanwhile, across the state’s northern border in Oklahoma, where Generation Citizen also operates, lawmakers passed a classroom censorship bill around issues of race and gender, but one that did not limit students’ contact with elected officials. The organization has been able to maintain all its programs while “following the letter of the law,” Oklahoma director Amy Curran said.

“This isn’t organizing about big culture wars, national stuff,” she said. “This is, literally, the sidewalks are unsafe around our school.”

Brandon, a former social studies teacher herself, grieves not just for the Texas branch of her organization, where the nature of the projects are similar, but for the youth in her state. Her former students in Bastrop ISD outside Austin, most of whom did not have parents who attended college, never had access to civic engagement opportunities before her class, she said.

“Students in Texas need civics more than students in many other states,” she said. “It feels like we’re going backwards in time.”

Opportunity cost

Zamora-Garcia remembers striding to the dais of the Bastrop City Council in 2017 with seven of his peers — the boys clad in too-big blazers and bow ties, the girls in dresses and laced-up heels. For a project they began in Brandon’s civics class, the team sought to boost youth voices in their local government. After meeting with officials, researching models and drawing up bylaws, the students eventually made history by passing a in the Austin suburb to add student advisors to the City Council.

“It made me feel more important and more involved, actually being able to have a voice that can make a change,” said Zamora-Garcia, now a junior at Texas State University studying business. 

The course activated his potential in class and in the community, he said. Before the experience, school had felt more like being a “cog in a machine,” he said. 

Mabel Zhu, who took the same class two years later, said the experience was “life-changing,” igniting her passion for civic engagement for years to come.

After the class, she began working with a local nonprofit, then organized a youth summit bringing awareness to the issues of mental health and substance abuse. She eventually joined the Youth Advisory Council that Zamora-Garcia and his classmates helped launch and worked with the Cultural Arts Board to put up a new mural that will define her city’s downtown space for years to come. A waving flag on the painting proclaims, “The future is ours!”

“Without [the class], I wouldn’t have been able to make such an impact within my community,” Zhu said.

The loss of such opportunities are what Rep. Talarico calls the unseen “opportunity cost” of the culture wars. 

“What are we missing out on that we could be doing if we weren’t playing political games with our students’ education?” the Democratic lawmaker asked.

Many students in Texas either learn how to engage with the political system in school or not at all, teachers said. Kyle Olson, an educator at an East Austin high school that serves predominantly immigrant families, taught his students that, as constituents, they could write letters to their elected representatives.

“They didn’t know that that was even something that was possible,” he said. 

Neutering those lessons flies in the face of American democracy itself, argues Alexander Pope, who leads the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Maryland’s Salisbury University.

“Part of the job that schools have in this country is to help prepare people for democracy,” he said. “The idea that, in a representative democracy, you’re going to literally ban … people from writing their elected representatives is just backward.”

The risk, believes ​​Tufts’s Kawashima-Ginsberg, is that a generation of Texans may grow up with a stunted sense of citizenship.

“It’s going to really damage their idea of what democracy is,” she said.

This Week’s Top Story

• : “This study extends research evidence to additional student outcomes — absences, course grades and grade retention — and to examine how pandemic effects are distributed across students.”
• “Using a combination of descriptive and regression analyses, we find negative average impacts on all outcomes.” 
• “Effects are also largest in middle school for most outcomes and are typically larger among historically marginalized groups of students.”

Top Three

• “Scent-trained dogs detected COVID-19 infection with 83% sensitivity and 90% specificity in nearly 3,900 screenings at California K-12 schools in spring 2022, according to a .” More via .
• ” ‘While modifications are needed before widespread implementation, and could be used for other pathogens,’ [researchers] concluded.”

• : “[Last week] in Pediatrics the safety data of the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT-162b2) COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents ages 12 to 17 years. After one year, very few serious adverse events were reported, and instances of myocarditis (inflammation of heart muscle) were lower than initially reported.”
• “The authors conclude that the vaccine is safe for this age group, noting that the risk of cardiac disease after COVID-19 infection may be two- to sixfold higher than after vaccination.”

• : “AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and The Jed Foundation this week announced the initiative, called , that aims to provide school districts across the country with a framework of best practices, expert support and data-driven guidance about how to best support students’ mental health and prevent suicide.”
• “The organization’s guidance for high schools focuses on seven overarching themes: developing life skills, promoting social connectedness, encouraging help-seeking behaviors, improving recognition of signs of distress, access to mental health care, establishing crisis management procedures and promoting the importance of keeping lethal and dangerous items away from children.”
• Related: Despite ‘crisis,’ states and districts slow to spend $1B in mental health funds

Federal Updates

White House: . A potential replacement could be senior adviser Neera Tanden.

Education Department: .

Institute of Education Sciences: Director Mark Schneider shares his priorities.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: . .

City & State News

California: than before pandemic.

Michigan: as COVID funding comes to an end.

New York: “Enrollment in New York City’s public schools, the country’s largest school district, , according to a fiscal watchdog funded by the city.”

North Carolina: “A of North Carolina test results from the 2021-22 school year shows that students made significant strides from the previous year in recovering instructional time lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Ohio: .

COVID-19 Research

• “A of U.S. counties suggests that communities with schools that switched from remote to in-person instruction in fall 2020 four to eight weeks later than those that remained virtual.”
• “The magnitude of school contribution to community transmission found in this study must be interpreted in the context of the potential benefits of in-person instruction models on the academic, social, mental health and physical outcomes of many students.” 
• “The implications for future public health preparedness include consideration of the relatively small and manageable magnitude of school contribution to community transmission that may present a tolerable risk for the resumption of in-person education, with sufficient mitigation measures.”

• “Based on the , the [World Health Organization] on April 20 said it elevated XBB.1.16 from a variant under monitoring to a variant of interest.”
• “. XBB.1.16 doesn’t seem to come with additional health risks compared to XBB.1.5, but it may become dominant in some countries owing to its growth advantage and immune escape properties.”

In-Depth

• : “Thirteen of the nation’s 20 largest districts have added teletherapy since the pandemic began.”
• “ ‘It’s not for everybody, but for those students and parents who want that, it’s been fantastic,’ said JaMaiia Bond, who oversees student mental health services for Compton’s schools in California, which started offering teletherapy through Hazel Health this school year.”

• : “The movement, under the banner of ‘the science of reading,’ is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.”
• “Ohio, California and Georgia are the latest states to push for reform, adding to almost 20 states that have made moves in the last two years. Under pressure, school districts are scrapping their old reading programs.”

Bill Gates Talks Learning Recovery, AI and His Big Bet on Math

• Via ����Ӱ��: “There is a gigantic upside in improving our public education system, both economically and in terms of equity,” Gates said. “But the country’s not falling apart as much as you might think.”
• “The shortcomings of the U.S. education system are clear in terms of the inequity you end up with: the kind of jobs, salaries, mobility you’d like to see in society. Education is the great enabler of mobility, and we’re falling short on that.”
• “I think the predictions that this is going to hurt us in the long run are true, and we’d be further ahead if we were running our education system as well as we’d like to.”

…And on a Lighter Note

She Literally Did a Cartwheel: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

New Campaign Tries to Convince Parents Their Kids Have Fallen Behind

• “The advertising campaign will target the six cities — Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Sacramento County in California and Washington, D.C. — with displays of side-by-side data showing the percentage of students proficient in math or English in that city and the percentage of parents who think their child is at or above grade level in that subject.”
• “A — a nonprofit focused on ensuring parents have accurate information about students’ progress — found that 92% of parents believe their children are at grade level and doing fine in the classroom despite evidence that a majority of students are struggling.”
• More here:

The Big Three

What We Know So Far: Post COVID-19 Test Score Recovery

• : NBER paper from Clare Halloran, Claire Hug, Rebecca Jack and Emily Oster.
• “We use state test score data to analyze patterns of test score recovery over the 2021-22 school year.”
• “On average, we find that 20% of test score losses are recovered in English language arts (ELA) by 2022, compared to 37% in math.” 
• “These recovery rates do not significantly vary across demographic characteristics, baseline achievement rates, in-person schooling rates in the pandemic school year or category-based measures of recovery funding allocations.”
• Related: , led by Oster, is seeking input from education professionals, researchers and journalists who work with state assessment data, via a . The purpose of this is to better understand how the data are being used and to better understand areas for growth. 

Six Budget Considerations for Districts as ESSER Fiscal Cliff Looms

• “With the last federal COVID-19 relief fund deadline approaching in 18 months, district financial teams should prepare for financial stress over the next two years that could be worse than the last recession, according to Marguerite Roza, an education finance researcher and director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.”
• “While most district leaders don’t yet have a game plan, budgeting decisions made by districts later this spring — as well as earlier decision-making, like where they invested ESSER funds — will determine how well they are able to weather the storm.”
• .

National COVID Emergency Ends

• President Joe Biden has .
• However: “The law Biden signed Monday — along with the Trump-era Title 42 border policy.”

COVID-19 Research

School Closures During COVID-19: An Overview of Systematic Reviews

• : “Both school closures and in-school mitigations were associated with reduced COVID-19 transmission, morbidity and mortality in the community. School closures were also associated with reduced learning, increased anxiety and increased obesity in pupils.”

Scientists Continue to Debate COVID-19 Origins

• : “Chinese researchers who isolated three live SARS-CoV-2 viruses and viral DNA from environmental samples at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, say the findings , according to a published today in Nature.”

City & State News

Florida: .

• “An analysis that was the basis of a highly criticized recommendation from Florida’s surgeon general cautioning young men against getting the COVID-19 vaccine omitted information that showed catching the virus could increase the risk of a cardiac-related death much more than getting the mRNA shot, according to drafts of the analysis obtained by the .”

Tennessee: A state law could in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic.

California: during spring break in Los Angeles Unified.

These 15 states could take the biggest hit as ESSER funds expire: on a new .

Viewpoints

America’s Teens Are in Crisis. States Race to Respond

• : “Responding to clamoring from parents, and dreadful stories of youth suicide and hospitalizations, leaders in both parties convey an increasing sense of urgency to address epidemic levels of teenage anxiety, depression, loneliness and lashing out.”
• Related: Teen mental health crisis pushes more school districts to sue social media giants, via ����Ӱ��

Rewrite Attendance Laws to Promote Learning, Not Seat Time

• : “Two depressing developments of the past couple years have given birth to a radical idea: Let’s rethink state ‘compulsory attendance’ laws so that they’re phrased in terms of kids learning rather than years in school.”
• First: “Evidence that lots of students are not availing themselves of high-dose tutoring when it’s available, no matter how much they need and would benefit from it, and they’re not signing up for summer school, either.”
• Second: “The growing number of districts and schools that are moving to four-day weeks, ostensibly to deal with budget woes and teacher shortages, ease burn-out and forestall quitting.”
• “Maybe, finally, today we’ve reached an inflection point where, with the help of better assessments, lots of 24/7 technology and much greater concern with ‘readiness,’ we should ease off the focus on time and refocus instead on mastery.”
• Related analysis via ����Ӱ��: Students in 4-day-a-week schools can suffer COVID-level learning losses

…And on a Lighter Note

It’s Officially Spring:

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

This Week’s Top Story

Awash in Federal Money, State Lawmakers Tackle Worsening Youth Mental Health

• Via Stateline
• New York City: “Mayor Eric Adams announced a broad mental health agenda that includes a youth suicide prevention program.”
• North Carolina: “Gov. Roy Cooper declared that the state would spend $7.7 million to provide suicide prevention training for university and community college personnel, create a mental health hotline for students and develop resiliency training for faculty, staff and students.”
• New Jersey: “Gov. Phil Murphy unveiled a $14 million mental health grant program that targets K-12 schools with the greatest need.”
• Rhode Island: “Gov. Daniel McKee introduced a $7.2 million program to train K-12 school employees to detect mental illness and suicide risk, respond to it and connect students and families to community social services.”
• “Last year, Illinois, Iowa and Maryland launched programs to provide mental health training for school personnel.”
• “And Arizona, California and South Carolina raised Medicaid reimbursement rates to incentivize behavioral health providers to provide services in schools.”
• Related: California .

The Big Three

• “It may look like the pandemic is over; stadiums are open again, crowds are everywhere, and hardly a mask in sight. But COVID hurt a lot of things you can’t easily see, especially in schools. 
• Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada: “I feel like I just need to stand on a mountaintop and just yell, ‘Take this seriously! Everything is at stake right now!’ “
• ” ‘There’s a whole cohort of young people who are not going to get the kind of education that’s going to allow them to get the best jobs,’ Canada said. ‘It’s going to cost lots of kids tens of thousands of dollars over their earnings, or some, hundreds of thousands of dollars.’ “

COVID Exploited Political Divisions Along With Racial and Health Disparities

• on a new in The Lancet. More via .
• “For deaths, they found a fourfold difference in rates across states, with fatalities lowest in Hawaii and New Hampshire and highest in Arizona and Washington, D.C.”
• “Overall, they found that states with higher poverty, lower levels of education, less access to quality health care and less trust in others had disproportionately higher rates of COVID infections and deaths.”

Education Department Approves Extensions for ESSER Spending

• directed to districts, known as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief I, said James Lane, senior adviser in the Office of the Secretary, in an email to K-12 Dive.”
• “The seven states, along with the District of Columbia, that requested and received approval to extend districts’ ESSER I spending timeline now have until March 30, 2024, or 14 months beyond Jan. 28, 2023, to draw down those funds.”
• The states are Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.

Federal Updates

White House Disbanding Its COVID-19 Team in May: .

Food and Drug Administration Authorizes Pfizer Bivalent COVID Booster for Kids 6 Months Through Age 4: In amending the emergency use authorization, the FDA said the .

City & State News

New Budget Numbers: from New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, plus Seattle, from Burbio.

Connecticut: “Gov. Ned Lamont and Education Commissioner Charlene M. Russell Tucker today that the Connecticut State Department of Education is preparing to launch the — a new statewide program for students in grades 6 to 9 that will provide intensive tutoring in mathematics to accelerate learning and address learning loss resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Illinois: Wednesday but still promised to increase funds for pandemic recovery, migrant students and other needs in the coming school year’s budget.

Michigan:

New Mexico

• Online tutoring company
• In rare move, New Mexico adds weeks’ worth of extra K-12 class time

COVID-19 Research

Do We Need a Spring COVID-19 Booster?

• “If you’re immunocompromised and/or an older adult with a comorbidity (and it’s been six months since an infection or last booster), a spring booster may be a good idea to stay ahead of the virus.”
• “Will it be official U.S. policy? We don’t know. There are rumors of FDA conversations happening behind closed doors. Hopefully, we will have an answer soon. But, as you can tell, it’s not a straightforward call.”

COVID Origins 

• Advisers to the World Health Organization have urged China to after new findings were briefly shared on an international database used to track pathogens.
• New York Times: “An international team of virus experts said … that they had , adding evidence to the case that the worst pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.”
• Vox: “.”

Viewpoints

Most Americans Doubt Their Children Will Be Better Off

• on a new
• The poll shows “shows growing skepticism about the value of a college degree and record-low levels of overall happiness.”

Schools Bought Tech to Accelerate Learning. Is It Working?

• “With federal COVID-relief funding, schools purchased tech tools to help students make up for the unfinished learning that happened during the most critical period of the pandemic. 
• “While there are digital tools that are pushing the envelope on learning acceleration, there are other ed tech tools that claim to accelerate learning but aren’t actually aligned with the principles of learning acceleration, said Bailey Cato Czupryk, the senior vice president of learning, impact and design for TNTP, a nonprofit that consults with districts on teacher training, instructional strategy and other education issues.”
• “Zearn … is an example many experts pointed to. A analyzing the impact of the Nebraska education department’s statewide partnership with Zearn found that elementary and middle school students who consistently used Zearn had 2.5 times the growth in their state assessment scores than students who did not use Zearn.”

• “The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the mobile phone. .”

… And on a Lighter Note

The Look-a-Like Cam: — wait for the end.

Happy National Puppy Day: .

For even more COVID policy and education news, .

Disclosure: John Bailey is an adviser to the Walton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to .

Funding for high-dosage tutoring, a strategy researchers say could be the way to help students re-gain missed learning, appears likely to be left out of New York state’s 2024 budget.

In a response to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed $227 billion spending plan, lawmakers formally rejected a clause that would have devoted $250 million for school districts’ tutoring efforts. Though negotiations are ongoing over the finalized budget, which is due April 1, neither chamber endorsed the tutoring measure, indicating its chances of success may be slim.

The money will still reach schools as part of a total $24 billion distributed via , a state funding formula that prioritizes high-needs districts. But school systems will have no obligation to spend the funds on tutoring.

The move was largely overshadowed by the legislature’s simultaneous , an action state legislators also delivered within their response to the governor’s budget. But while the charter debate has grabbed headlines, the scope of the tutoring decision may perhaps be farther-reaching, as experts warn COVID learning losses could if not addressed immediately.

Just days before the news from Albany, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released a that found New York’s fourth graders had lost twice as much ground in reading and math from 2019 to 2022 on national tests as the national average. New York’s fourth-grade math learning loss was estimated to equal 30 weeks of learning delays, or nearly an entire school year. DiNapoli school leaders to “act quickly” to remedy the stark declines.

Michael Duffy is the president of the , a New York-based organization that brings tutors into public school classrooms for one-on-one or small-group lessons. The legislature’s recent rejection of the governor’s tutoring proposal is a “missed opportunity,” he said.

“I think that those dollars would have been a really important way to help level the playing field,” Duffy said, explaining that the private market typically renders one-on-one tutoring accessible only to the well-off. 

Schools in New York and across the country are armed with billions of dollars in COVID relief money, much of which they are required to spend on learning recovery efforts such as tutoring. Yet across the country, just a fraction of students are actually accessing tutoring via their school district — in many large systems, . 

Empire State districts received a total of $14 billion and had spent approximately 40% of their stimulus allotment as of Jan. 31, . Funds are set to expire in September 2024.

In addition to federal money, New York is also boosting its state aid to schools by $2.7 billion above this year’s level. The total $24 billion in Foundation Aid will mark the first time in the 15-year history of the formula that it has been fully funded, a key Hochul campaign promise.

“Gov. Hochul’s Executive Budget makes transformative investments to make New York more affordable, more livable and safer, and she looks forward to working with the legislature on a final budget that meets the needs of all New Yorkers,” a governor’s spokesperson wrote in an email.

The governor’s office declined to comment on why the legislature blocked the tutoring proposal or whether the governor would propose any alternative learning acceleration policies in its place. 

State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie did not respond to requests for comment.

Robert Lowry, communications director for New York’s Council of School Superintendents, said his organization opposed the tutoring measure.

“It was not a well-thought-out proposal,” he said, explaining that many school leaders support tutoring and other academic recovery efforts, but fear they might face staffing challenges that could leave funds unspent if too narrowly earmarked. He also criticized the state’s emphasis on tutoring from grades 3-8 without serving younger or older students and the move to add requirements to aid originally intended to provide unrestricted funds.

Even without a state mandate, over twice as many superintendents reported that they are investing in extra academic help for their students, according to carried out by the Council, Lowry said.

Tutoring “may be a promising model,” Lowry acknowledged. But the proposal from Hochul was too “rigidly constructed,” he said.

Ashara Baker, the National Parent Union’s New York state director, countered that setting aside money for tutoring is necessary in the face of what she says are inconsistent academic recovery efforts across districts.

“​​Families have lost trust in school leaders to be transparent about how much they’re willing to invest in getting our kids on track. This dedicated fund will ensure districts will all be accountable in investing in tutoring,” Baker said in an emailed statement.

Despite any efforts to recoup academic losses, observers still fear a continued dip in student learning. The New York Board of Regents recently announced it would be for “proficiency” on state tests, citing last year’s lower scores as a “new normal.” In Schenectady, an extreme case, no eighth grader scored proficient on the math test last year.

Eliandra West runs , a company that works with schools to help students with disabilities. Tutoring, the educator said, has been the tactic that’s triggered the best results for the struggling students she serves.

“One-on-one sessions have been the most instrumental [approach] in guiding students to find their voice in the learning process,” she said.

It’s what Duffy, at the GO Foundation, has also seen — and why he’s disappointed by lawmakers’ move to cut the statewide tutoring proposal.

“Every kid benefits from the attention of a tutor,” he said. “It is the future of education.”