At an event to promote , the California Democrat revealed that he “cannot read a speech” and feels he hasn’t overcome dyslexia even after a decades-long struggle. His learning disability has in his home state, but Newsom’s phrasing would soon lead to a flurry of headlines.

“I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you,” he told the Atlanta audience. “I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy.”

A raft of conservative influencers and media figures seized on the remark to accuse Newsom, currently in the 2028 Democratic primary field, of insulting his African American supporters by association with his own reading challenges. (Black residents make up a plurality of Atlantans, though the crowd Newsom addresses was reportedly .) South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, an African American Republican and close ally of President Trump, for stereotyping their own voters as academically underachieving. 

The tempest soon passed, with the governor dismissing the criticism as “MAGA-manufactured outrage.” Yet the episode stood out as a wobbly foray from a Democratic star into the evolving discussion around literacy education. 

Over the past few years, lawmakers in over a dozen states around what experts call the science of reading, a long-running corpus of research reflecting what is known about how people learn to recognize and use written language. Many of the early leaders in that movement have been Republican-controlled states like Mississippi and Louisiana, generating widespread plaudits for the so-called Southern Surge in standardized test scores. But the problems surrounding early literacy is one that voters around the U.S. recognize, with achievement in the subject still mired in a post-COVID slump.

With Democrats preparing for both a slew of gubernatorial campaigns this fall and a race for the presidential nomination next year, a question remains over how to address reading within the wider portfolio of K–12 education priorities. Most blue states, including California, have taken action on the science of reading, but some voices on the left have also been skeptical of the academic progress made in the South and elsewhere. With his personal background and national profile, Newsom could make the issue his hallmark. Some political observers are waiting for him and others to step into the spotlight.  

John White, the former state superintendent of Louisiana and a longtime voice for reading reforms, said he was puzzled by the apparent reluctance of leaders in both parties to put their achievements in that area front and center. He struggled to name a politician who has built a brand predominantly around the science of reading.

“Literacy is a complicated issue, not like cutting taxes or landing a new corporate headquarters,” White argued. “If you don’t articulate what’s been accomplished, and you don’t place big political stakes on it, there’s no political gains to be reaped from it.”

Linda Diamond, a former teacher and veteran advocate for evidence-based reading instruction in California, said she believed that lawmakers in most blue states have woken up to the need for improved reading legislation. The mission now, she added, was for presidential contenders like Newsom to preach that gospel from a national pulpit.

“I think the message to convey to Democrats is to take this up, make it a winning issue,” she said, acknowledging what she called her governor’s “unfortunate turn of phrase.” 

“Sure, look at the Republican states that have done so well on reading. But don’t let the myopia of thinking that it’s only Republicans distract from the fact that the greatest harm [of literacy failures] is being done to children in poverty.”

‘We need to see action’

Local Democrats’ legislative agenda on K–12 schools has been fairly busy over the last few years. 

In 2023, Newsom signed a bill to mandate dyslexia screenings for children between kindergarten and second grade, making California the 40th state to adopt such legislation. The legislature last year, passing a law that will provide elementary school teachers training in the science of reading and mandate the use of teaching materials that reinforce that pedagogy.

But those steps were taken only after years of intra-Democratic battles in Sacramento. The state as a laggard when it comes to literacy reforms, and previous bills had been sunk by a coalition of advocacy groups for English learners and the California Teachers Association. That faction argued that universal dyslexia screening would over-identify students with the disability and that mandates for evidence-based teaching would threaten educators’ autonomy.

Megan Potente, head of the nonprofit group Decoding Dyslexia’s California branch, said she was heartened by the recent legislative activity and considered Newsom an inspiration to children diagnosed with the condition. Still, she added, the party needed to speak more loudly on the issue — both in California and elsewhere.

“The topic has been elevated, as it needs to be, but we need to see action,” Potente said. “I hope that the Democratic Party can uplift it and not ignore the successes of other states, as they’ve done so far, and really hone in on how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved.”

At least one prominent Democrat has questioned whether blue states have anything to learn from those that have pursued strategies based explicitly on the science of reading. While running her winning campaign for governor of New Jersey, then-Democratic Rep. Mikkie Sherill seen in Louisiana and Mississippi, calling schools there “some of the worst in the entire nation.” 

The bad feelings run both ways, with Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves to send Newsom assistance from his state’s core of reading tutors after the book forum last week.

It’s possible that Newsom’s personal experience with dyslexia could give him credibility in speaking for the interests of the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to read. Reeves’s predecessor as governor, Phil Bryant, cited his own early setbacks in the subject as the reason he pursued a lengthy slate of new reading laws in 2013. But in the wave of partisan brickbats against Newsom, some have even whether he truly is dyslexic, pointing to alleged inconsistencies in previous recountings of when he was assessed. 

In his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom describes grappling with the condition “one of the struggles of [his] life, writing that his difficulty spelling in childhood could cause him to “run out of the room screaming that I didn’t know what was wrong with my brain.”

White called Newsom’s frankness about his diagnosis a “double-edged sword” in the context of U.S. politics. Though he hoped it could lead to bipartisan cooperation with others who have focused on dyslexia awareness — including of Louisiana — he warned that the needs of dyslexic children could be “lost in the partisan swirl.”

“While the issue will benefit from the attention, it is almost inevitable that it will be wrapped up in questions of veracity and identity politics and ugliness,” he concluded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Compelling evidence’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It doesn’t feel one-sided’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thaw in the culture war?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These tensions escalated last year when a teacher disagreed with the superintendent’s decision to follow the advice of the school district’s lawyer and honor a transgender student’s request not to share their transition with their parents. The teacher went public and the results were swift and intense.

Hundreds of people descended on the next school board meeting. A local talk radio host said the superintendent wanted to “indoctrinate their children and … make them become gay and transgender.” Community members verbally accosted the schools chief in public saying, “You’re gonna go to hell. You never read the Bible.” 

The fiscal consequences were also considerable, forcing the district to divert funds from planned professional development. Ultimately, five educators left their jobs in response to the spreading unrest.

This small community’s turmoil is one of many accounts included in a new , which tries for the first time to put a dollar amount on the costs of the culture war conflicts that have consumed school districts over the past several years. The researchers estimate that the nation’s public schools spent approximately $3.2 billion in 2023-24 dealing with divisive public debates over race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal fees, security, public relations and employee hours responding to misinformation, disinformation and public records requests. 

And although the researchers said their figures don’t account for the emotional and social toll on educators and students, their numbers do include a significant and related expense: staff turnover.  

“There are many different costs that are really consequential and are undermining the ability of educators to support student learning and well-being,” said John Rogers, a professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and the report’s lead author.

Data from the report comes from a national survey of 467 superintendents across 46 states conducted during summer 2024, followed by interviews with 42 superintendents across 12 states. Of those interviewed, 12 had taken the survey and reported moderate or high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 hadn’t taken the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were categorized as having either high, moderate, or low levels of conflict based on a series of questions about the nature of conflict related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency of and topics associated with personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff and the financial and human resource costs.

Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, was named specifically in the report in relation to board members they supported and other far-right groups accusing a western school district of indoctrinating students around sexual health issues. That superintendent cited having to spend roughly $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. Superintendents and school board members being attacked as pedophiles, groomers or sexual predators was a common refrain in the report.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence over school board elections is seen as waning even if battles over curriculum content and library books are still being waged.

Of the districts surveyed, roughly one-third experienced low levels of conflict, just over one-third experienced moderate levels and just under one-third experienced high levels. About 2.5% of superintendents reported no conflict. Overall, Rogers said those surveyed “look a lot like superintendents from the entirety of the (national) pool” in terms of their race, gender and whether they lead urban, rural or suburban districts.

Half of the schools chiefs reported that they experienced at least one instance of harassment in the 2023-24 school year. One in 10 said violent threats were directed toward them and 11% experienced property vandalism.

In order to calculate the overall fiscal costs, researchers asked superintendents about direct expenditures during the 2023-24 school year that were above and beyond what they previously would have spent for resources such as legal services or security; indirect costs, such as redeployed staff time; and employee turnover costs. 

To determine the cost of redeployed staff time, researchers took the number of hours that superintendents reported across these different activities and assigned them a dollar figure based on average district administrator wages from the . For each staff member that left the district, researchers assigned a dollar figure related to recruitment and new staff training based on research out of the .

Rogers noted that “there’s a certain imprecision” when it comes to calculating the cost of staff turnover because “you’re asking superintendents to draw upon the knowledge that they have to make this determination” of why educators and administrators left their positions. Follow-up interviews, he added, helped to bolster the reliability of these figures.

The researchers, who also include Rachel White of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Shand of American University and Joseph Kahne of the University of California, Riverside, estimated that in their entirety, the conflict-related costs were more than enough to expand the national school breakfast program by 40% or hire “an additional counselor or psychologist for every public high school in the United States.”

Beyond the dollar figures, when speaking with superintendents, Rogers said he was particularly struck by the ways in which violent threats were playing out and how frequently it appeared there was a “concerted effort to disrupt, to foment conflict for the sake of fomenting conflict.”

For example, he heard from a number of superintendents whose districts spent an immense amount of time fulfilling public records requests they felt had been filed in bad faith. Once the materials were compiled, they often went unused, Rogers said.

The lasting implications of these in-district battles — beyond the fiscal costs — still remain unknown and appear to be shifting with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the History of Education at The University of Pennsylvania, recently on his previous work around the culture wars’ impact on history teachers, writing, “It seems like I might have exaggerated them.” 

But, he noted in an interview with ����Ӱ�� this week, the effects on other educators and administrators are ongoing. Within the culture wars, he’s noticed less of a focus on race and critical race theory and more on gender and sexuality, hypothesizing that this may mean history teachers feel a lesser impact than English teachers, who might be more likely to teach directly about gender.

His sees the report as a reflection of the country’s “brittle and abusive” political culture. 

“This is the school politics chapter of a much broader story about the way that politics is conducted in America,” he said.

It appears that even as some of these more divisive players move on or are voted out, their political agendas may persist. That’s been the case in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, one of the most closely watched regions for these debates. 

According to recent New York Times , despite Democrats sweeping the last school board election, not all contested books have been returned to school library shelves nor have teachers been allowed to display identity markers, like rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the Moms for Liberty-backed candidates were ousted, their presence is still felt. 

The results come from a that polled 1,518 parents of K-12 public school students conducted by the National Parents Union between May 7-11. 

“We can point to the fact that parents still feel good about schools,” said founding president and ����Ӱ�� contributor Keri Rodrigues “[and] still feel good about teachers … There’s a lot of bright spots around the fact that parents are still fully invested in public education and that — contrary to what we might be hearing from the voucher folks — that there’s no fear of parents completely walking away from America’s public education system and moving towards ‘do-it-yourself’ methods.” 

Vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools, have in the last several years. At the same time, more parents are experimenting with alternative schooling methods, including homeschooling and microschools. 

The majority of parents (72%) also expressed confidence in their kids’ principals and schools for meeting overall expectations. 

But, according to the survey — dubbed “The Parent Report Card” — as parents considered the outer echelons of the education system, their confidence began to wane. Just over half rated their superintendents and school boards favorably, a figure that continued to drop for state governors (45%), U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona (32%) and President Joe Biden (33%). That last number is lower than the president’s overall 37% approval rating among respondents nationwide, according to a Reuters/Ipsos released June 28.

Rodrigues said this is evidence of the disconnect between families and those in power at the state and federal level. 

“I always encourage [elected officials] to go back and listen to the people who are experiencing what is going on in classrooms: our young people,” Rodrigues said. “If you have a problem with parent and family engagement, talk to the parents and families. They will tell you why they’re not engaged. [You] need to do the work, too.”

There has been a significant gap — averaging 31 percentage points — between parents’ favorable views of their own child’s education and Americans’ more critical take on U.S. education at large since at least 1999, according to almost 25 years of The most recent data from last year’s survey saw the second-largest gap to date: 40 points, second only to the 42-point divide in 2000.  

Megan Brenan, senior researcher at Gallup, credits this almost-record setting number to underlying parisian divides, with Republicans expressing the lowest satisfaction with the public education system at large (25%) to date. This also marked the largest gap in history between Democrat and Republican satisfaction, with a 19 percentage point difference. 

“We’re seeing the biggest partisan gaps on a whole lot of measures right now,” she said, reflecting America’s deep polarization. 

According to last year’s Gallup survey, only 36% of Americans are satisfied with K-12 education quality, matching a record low in 2000. Despite this, parents remain mostly pleased with the education their oldest child is receiving, with just over three-quarters reporting they are completely or somewhat satisfied, numbers that reflect historical averages. The vast majority of parents also support their children’s teachers, with the majority rating their performance as excellent (36%) or good (37%).

“This is kind of a pattern that we see over a number of measures where Americans are much more likely to rate national measures lower than their own,” Brenan said. “So we see this with crime: that people say, ‘Oh, crime in the U.S. is at a high, but my neighborhood is fine.’ We see it with their own congressmen. It’s very much like, ‘I hate Congress but my congressman deserves to be re-elected.’ And if you look at the trend in education, then you also see this is something which has held up throughout …. I think it’s just [that] they can relate more to their own personal situation than they can to the national picture.”

One reason why may be that schools are often the centers of communities, said Joshua Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University. 

“That’s where you start to see this point of personal contact that matters to people in terms of what they want to protect,” he continued. “When it’s framed as this large, bureaucratic, nebulous system, then that’s where I think you see these negative results. But [it’s different] when you’re talking about your community, your kids, your football team, maybe your employer or your spouse’s employer.”

When thinking about the role these views on education might play in November’s presidential election, though, Brenan, the Gallup researcher, argued that there are a number of other issues eclipsing education in voters’ minds. 

“The fact that they’re personally satisfied with their own children’s education might have something to do with that,” she said, adding, “I think education is always there as an issue kind of in the background. And unless these other matters — like immigration and the economy — are solved before election day, I’m not sure this is the year that education is going to get its due.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to the National Parents Union and to ����Ӱ��.

“By every metric,” she said — skipping past the word “nearly” in — “Massachusetts has the best schools in the country.” 

If the lawmakers and civil servants packing the State House didn’t burst into applause, it was partly because they were hearing old news. For years, Healey and her predecessors have touted the excellence of the Massachusetts school system before local and national audiences, citing math and English scores since the early 1990s. By the late Obama era, its path of ascent was held up as a template for . 

The audience also understood, however, that Healey wasn’t calling for a victory lap. Rather, she warned of a serious threat: thousands of children deficient in literacy skills thanks to schools using what she called “disproven, out-of-date” methods. While disadvantaged students face the greatest risk of falling behind, revealed last year that questionable curricula are in use in some of the wealthiest and best-regarded school districts in Massachusetts.

The governor quickly moved into a pitch for her , which will offer resources and incentives to local educators to revamp their early literacy programs in accordance with scientific evidence. But the proposal, and the academic drift underlying it, reveal worries about where Massachusetts finds itself after three decades of energetic policymaking and school improvement.

As even the state’s biggest boosters concede, however, those reforms stopped yielding the same results in the years leading up to the pandemic. Since COVID, already-significant achievement gaps between rich and poor students have , with test scores levels seen in 2019. Ed Lambert, a former state representative who now leads the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, said that local leaders had been too slow in recent years to embrace the kind of experimentation that fueled the state’s remarkable rise.

 “Often, holding that mantle of ‘first in the nation’ has led to a level of complacency that isn’t serving us well,” Lambert said.

Even more alarming, in the eyes of education officials, is the possible reversal of some of the hallmarks of Massachusetts’s brand of K–12 reform. Activists have begun a spirited push to eliminate the use of the MCAS, the state’s standardized test, as a high school graduation assessment; in late May, leaders of the effort announced that twice the number of signatures necessary to place their initiative on the November ballot. The campaign is being led by New England’s largest union, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has transformed itself over the last 10 years into a progressive heavyweight.

Harvard professor Paul Reville, who previously served as a top policy advisor to former Gov. Deval Patrick, observed that Massachusetts was caught between its celebrated past and a murky future. If the state is to remain a national exemplar, he said, it will have to change the way it pursues change. 

“Massachusetts reflects a national uncertainty about where we go next, post-reform and post-COVID,” Reville said. “It’s an era of chronic absenteeism and declining confidence in public education generally, and Massachusetts demonstrates the symptoms of that as vividly as any other state.”

MCAS viewed as ‘roadblock’

No single development will influence the path ahead more than the clash over MCAS.

The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System was developed as the result of the landmark Education Reform Act of 1993, considered the Big Bang of recent K–12 history in the state. The legislation , but its central achievement was to vastly increase the role of the state government in overseeing schools.  

Nearly a decade before Congress took up the No Child Left Behind Act, that meant students in elementary, middle, and high school would sit for the MCAS each year; that their performance would be monitored and reported to families; and that schools would be held accountable for the results. In addition, tenth graders would need to pass the test in order to graduate high school. 

Federal law caught up with Massachusetts with the passage of NCLB. But according to , it remains one of only nine states to administer a graduation exam, down from a high of 27 in the 1990s. Education authorities in New York recently recommended going forward, while legislators in Florida considered abandoning the existing requirement that students pass tests in Algebra I and tenth-grade English before graduating. 

The same process may well play out in Massachusetts. Defenders of the exam insist that discarding it will allow the state’s 316 school districts to adopt a patchwork of separate, weaker standards — concerns that were loudly amplified by members that reviewed the ballot question this spring. 

In one of the panel’s meetings, Reville and Lambert both testified in favor of retaining the tenth-grade MCAS requirement. Among those speaking in opposition was Kirsten Frazier, a high school teacher who works with English learners in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester. 

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Frazier said that her students — many of them recent arrivals to the United States — often fail the MCAS on their first attempt. Though they are given several opportunities to retake it, each comes at the cost of desperately needed instructional time, she added.

“This test, especially when you have the pressure of not graduating if you don’t pass, creates a massive roadblock,” Frazier said. 

Members of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have responded that each year fail to graduate due solely to their test scores. Ninety-five percent of upperclassmen pass by their second try, state data show.

What’s more, an analysis by Brown University economist John Papay is correlated with real-world outcomes like college enrollment and career earnings. Paul Toner, a former president of the MTA who now serves on the city council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, argued both that the MCAS should be more regularly updated and that it stood head and shoulders above other state tests.

“If you talk to anyone in the assessment game around the country, they will tell you that MCAS is the best of the state assessment systems,” Toner said. “Is it perfect? No. But it’s the best.”

Yet the exam’s longtime detractors believe that high schoolers should be assessed through other means. Glenn Koocher, head of the , said that while passing MCAS was ultimately “not that hard,” its use as a graduation requirement made it more of a cudgel than a meaningful standard of achievement.

“Very few kids ultimately don’t graduate,” Koocher said. “But the MCAS is just there as a symbol of, ‘Here’s what happens if you don’t do what we tell you.’ And I find little value in it.” 

A ‘more progressive’ union

Much of the Massachusetts political establishment has already come forward in opposition to the November ballot initiative, including . On the other side stands the 117,000 members of the MTA. 

The union — known under Toner’s leadership for being willing to cooperate with reform-friendly policies around teacher evaluation and charter school expansion — swerved toward with the election of new leadership in 2014. 

the most notable advances of the education reform era, MTA organizers earned national attention in 2016 by helping defeat a ballot measure that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools. In a campaign , the organization proved it could summon enormous resources and substantially swing public opinion to its cause. 

That reputation has been solidified with more policy victories in the years since, including a push for a . Along with its parent union, the National Education Association, to a campaign that raised taxes locally on incomes over $1 million, a change that is projected to raise billions in future state revenues.

But the organization’s growing profile has been accompanied by political missteps. Current MTA President Max Page, who was elected in 2022 to “raise more hell to win greater justice,” was soon derided after opining before the state board of education was “tied to the capitalist class and its need for profit.” 

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Teachers Association declined to provide a comment for this story.

Frazier, a member of her local MTA affiliate, said she appreciated the statewide union becoming “more progressive” over the last decade.

“We basically ended up with activist leadership,” said Frazier. “Those of us who have always wanted to be activists now actually feel like we can be.”

Committed education reformers are less enthused. James Peyser, who served as secretary of education under former Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, said that if the MTA succeeds in jettisoning the MCAS, it could be the first step in an “unwinding” of accountability and school improvement.

“If you have no real assessment system to determine how students are doing, and you have no accountability for meeting standards, and you have no authority for the state to take action when schools aren’t adequately serving their students, then the Education Reform Act is a dead letter,” he said.

Promising strides on literacy

As much as the battles over reform implicate the recent past, many believe Gov. Healey’s overhaul of literacy instruction could deliver a promising way forward.

The proposal was triggered in part by the revelation last fall that use curricular materials that have fallen out of favor with reading experts for . Some still rely, or have only recently transitioned away from, the Units of Study curriculum, which was in an expert report four years ago. 

Statewide achievement in early literacy also points to major shortcomings since the pandemic. from the 2022 MCAS, less than half of all third graders scored proficient in reading, including just 26 percent of students from low-income families, 15 percent of students with disabilities and 11 percent of English learners.

Literacy Launch, Healey’s , would include $30 million over the next five years to help districts transition to curricula more aligned with the science of reading, along with providing technical assistance from the state’s education department and tightening certification rules to require that teacher training programs provide more instruction about how children learn to read.

The program, included in the governor’s 2025 budget proposal, is virtually assured of passage. But a parallel effort in the legislature, that schools use only reading curricula that have been approved by state authorities, has been met with stout opposition from district leaders and teachers’ unions alike. 

have passed such laws over the last decade, some explicitly prohibiting the use of low-quality instructional materials, but Massachusetts lawmakers have thus far demurred. A February letter signed by almost 50 local superintendents protested that the bill under consideration would abrogate local control over schools.

Lambert, of the Business Alliance, said he found the legislature’s failure to act “just confounding,” particularly in light of public support for such a measure. A found that over 80 percent of parents believed that schools should “probably” or “definitely” be required to use evidence-based teaching materials. 

“A lot of the same people who will tell you that society needs to believe in science don’t necessarily believe that when it comes to literacy and choosing a curriculum that works,” Lambert said.

The absence of a strong literacy law pointed to a more general failure to keep up with policy developments that have been road-tested in other places, he argued. While states like Tennessee have invested heavily in programs to target struggling students with tutoring, Massachusetts — the home of the Match Charter Public High School, and spawned imitators around the country — hasn’t launched a similar effort. that local resources devoted to gifted and talented education, including a statewide office that was shuttered in the early 1990s, also lag those elsewhere.

While arguing that state authorities should, as a rule, avoid meddling in local decisions about curriculum, Peyser said the importance of early reading made it an exception.

“The reality is that we’re 30 years into education reform, and at the third- or fourth-grade level, the reading proficiency levels are not a whole lot better than they used to be,” Peyser said. “It’s such a foundational skill that, unless you solve that problem, it’s an uphill struggle to do anything you want to do.”

But research suggests that both men might be wise to play their cards close to the vest. According to , presidents who weighed in on education policy debates between 2009 and 2021 — such as COVID-era school closures or the adoption of Common Core — tended to polarize the public much more than galvanize them. Only when endorsing proposals that cut directly against the traditional position of their parties do they succeed in generating overall public support, the authors write. 

The findings seem to counsel caution in an election year, particularly with attitudes on national politics diverging as widely and consistently as they have in the history of polling. They also raise challenging questions about whether federal leadership on K–12 schools can be viable in the absence of the bipartisan consensus that largely favored school reform in the 1990s and 2000s. If not, state-level actors like governors and legislators may be left in the driver’s seat for the foreseeable future.

David Houston, a professor of education policy at George Mason University and the paper’s lead author, said the gulf separating Democrats and Republicans on education questions resembles some of the biggest divides in the American cultural landscape.  

“We really disagree on a lot of education issues, and that trend has accelerated over the last decade,” he said. “The difference in positive evaluations of teachers’ unions is of approximately the same magnitude as the partisan gap on legal abortion under any circumstances.”

If the politics of education has taken on some of the acrimony surrounding other issues, it represents a break with historical patterns. Schools have traditionally been insulated from national trends by their unique governance structure, with elected boards attracting little public attention as they decide questions of funding and curriculum. When presidents have entered the fray — as in the case of school desegregation in the 1950s, or the push to pass the No Child Left Behind law in the early 2000s — they have encountered resistance, but seldom failed entirely.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, agreed that the past decade has brought heightened partisanship. Yet he also voiced hope that future presidents, perhaps including some now occupying state-level office, could notch greater education policy successes than Washington has seen recently.

“I could imagine having national leaders who were charismatic and had powerful views about the role of federal education policy again,” said Polikoff. “We just don’t have them currently, and we didn’t have them in the previous administration.”

The Obama exception

To estimate the influence of high-profile politicians like the current and former presidents, Houston built his study on public opinion research dating back to 2007.

The annual , developed and administered by researchers at Harvard, is one of the only measures that regularly surveys the public on their attitudes toward education topics. The paper relies on responses drawn from five separate editions of the poll, which included questions on topics like school choice, merit pay for teachers, and allowing illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition to attend public universities. (Houston, who formerly served as Education Next’s survey director, has previously used similar data to show that general opinions on schools with time.)

“I look at questions that have been asked in the exact same way, or nearly the exact same way, over the course of at least 10 years,” he said. “Regardless of the imperfections of the survey questions — and every survey question has imperfections — those are true over time, so we can capture trends.”

Before giving their own views of 18 policy proposals, a random assortment of participants were first primed by hearing the incumbent president’s opinions on them. Because respondents included Democrats, Republicans, and independents, Houston was able to measure their reaction to hearing that a highly visible figure of either the same or opposing party had opined on a particular policy.

The overall result of receiving a partisan cue — effectively becoming aware of the president’s endorsement, regardless of one’s own political preferences — was statistically insignificant, moving respondents’ attitudes by just .02 points on a five-point scale. But that average accounts for larger effects that moved Democrats and Republicans in opposite directions: If someone learned that a president of his own party favored a specific education policy, they warmed to it by an average of .37 points. If a president of the opposite party was revealed to favor a policy, whether school vouchers or universal pre-K, the respondent moved away from that proposal by .32 points. 

In other words, voters carefully weigh what high-profile figures like U.S. presidents say about schools. But their pronouncements tend to be counterproductive, splitting the public along partisan lines. 
Recent history offers some support for the paper’s hypothesis. For example, multiple studies of school districts’ behavior during the pandemic found that their local partisanship, much more so than the prevalence of COVID in the surrounding area, was highly associated with whether they heeded President Trump’s 2020 exhortation to open schools for in-person learning.

Notably, one subset of results actually showed the opposite effect, bringing both sides somewhat closer to one another. When a president backs policies that are not traditionally associated with their party and its backers — the key example being Barack Obama, whose endorsement of charter schools, merit pay and higher academic standards were revealed to partisans in three separate polls — it actually depolarizes responses: Democrats moved .28 points toward the previously unfavored proposals, while Republicans moved in the opposite direction by .14 points.

Charles Barone, the vice president of K–12 policy for the pressure group Democrats for Education Reform, said his own observations of voters during the Obama era largely dovetailed with the study’s conclusions. 

“Obama’s support for education reform, and particularly charter schools, did help with Democrats,” Barone said. “We saw higher poll numbers among Democrats on issues like charters after Obama came out in favor of them.”

Elusive common ground

Education observers generally agreed that polarization around schools has clearly escalated since the Obama administration, and that many everyday voters rely heavily on their party leaders to form judgments on policy initiatives they’re unfamiliar with. 

But while Polikoff agreed that the receding center ground represented a “huge problem” for those attempting to improve the way schools deliver education, he added that President Biden’s most recent predecessors might have been particularly good at exercising partisan energies.

“You wouldn’t necessarily want to extrapolate from these two presidents to all of them,” he said. “Obama and Trump, if nothing else, were very visible and almost ubiquitous in ways that other presidents might not be — and that state and local leaders, who are actually influencing these policies — are not.”

State leadership may provide some cause for optimism as well. While rancorous fights over school closures and contentious classroom material have won headlines in recent years, long-awaited support from both parties has also led to efforts to incorporate the science of reading in early literacy instruction. And in further illustration of Houston’s findings, a slew of Republican governors have taken the opportunity to lift teacher salaries, winning popular approval in part by embracing a stance that is most often associated with Democrats.

Margaret Spellings, formerly the U.S. Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush, now serves as the CEO of the Washington-based . An enthusiastic proponent of No Child Left Behind-style education reform, she said she was struck by the “vacuum of federal leadership and cohesion” that now prevails in Washington.

In her office, she said, she still keeps mementos of the law’s passage, which was supported by mammoth margins in both the U.S. House and Senate. That occurred during the administration of a much more unifying president — Bush was riding sky-high approval ratings in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and NCLB was seen as a major bipartisan compromise — but the victory reflected what political will and energy could accomplish, she added

“I wish someone would tell me what the Biden K–12 policy is,” Spellings said. “There is none. And the Trump administration was just about vouchers. But I haven’t given up on bipartisanship, period, or I wouldn’t be doing the job I’m doing.”

Four Southern states schedule off-cycle races the year before a presidential campaign. Two, and , are deep-red bastions where incumbent governors are considered mild favorites to win reelection. In a third, Louisiana, the Republican favorite already in an October “jungle primary,” automatically advancing to the governorship.

But Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin still has two years left in his term, offers something different: a true battleground whose outcome could serve as a bellwether for the national mood. And in few other states have education debates played such a prominent role in recent political history.

Youngkin’s victory in 2021, snapping his party’s long losing streak in statewide contests, was widely attributed to over their children’s experiences in school, combined with lingering anger over pandemic-related health measures. It also served notice that Democrats, long favored by the public as stewards of schools, take their advantage on education for granted.

Local authorities, too, have awoken to the reality of abysmal post-COVID academic achievement. Results from standardized tests show that Virginia children by the prolonged closure of K–12 schools and transition to virtual learning, and reports of have only heightened concerns further. Following the release of another round of poor student scores, Youngkin recently laid out for learning recovery centered on tutoring and literacy reforms. 

How that recovery will be carried out, and whether conservatives may venture into the bolder experiments with school choice that have been attempted in other Southern states, hinges significantly on the outcome of Tuesday’s elections. 

Control over the State Assembly will be decided by just a handful of swing seats, but the range of possibilities for governance is huge. If Democrats maintain their 22-18 lead in the state Senate — and perhaps win a majority in the House of Delegates, where Republicans currently hold a four-seat edge — they will retain the ability to check Youngkin’s ambitions and escape the rightward thrust that has brought expanded school choice and anti-critical race theory legislation to states like Florida. But if the governor’s party is able to capture both chambers, he could ride his conservative record and electoral victories to an enviable perch in the Republican presidential primary. 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said public polling revealed a Virginia electorate that is generally contented with the state of public schools. Still, he added, a successful agenda of school improvement could make a national figure of Youngkin, already by Republicans seeking alternatives to a third Trump nomination.

“I think more people are going to be voting on the hot-button social issues than on the specifics of the governor’s plan for learning recovery,” Farnsworth said. “But if the governor is able to proceed along the lines he’s outlined, and if that reverses test score declines, it would be a very powerful message for his political future.” 

‘Such a meltdown’

Such a reversal could be a tall order given the depth of Virginia’s Virginia’s academic crash during the pandemic. 

Signs of the decline mounted over several years, but last fall, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal exam commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card) provided the starkest evidence yet. 11 points in math and 10 points in reading between 2019 and 2022 — substantially more than the national average. In both subjects, the state’s average score fell from the ranks of the national leaders to the middle of the pack.

As researchers gathered more detailed information, they revealed even uglier findings. Shortly after the calamitous NAEP release, Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon and Harvard economist Tom Kane released the , a database using the federal scores to quantify learning loss at the district level across 29 states. The tool showed that five of the 10 districts that experienced the worst reading setbacks were located in Virginia; even worse, the state accounted for an astonishing nine out of the 10 districts that fell the most in math. Students in two of the state’s biggest cities, Richmond and Newport News, lost well over 1.5 grade levels during their time in remote instruction. Those districts, along with many others nationwide where learning loss was especially acute, were already afflicted with high rates of poverty and academic underperformance when COVID hit.

The damage cannot be attributed to a single factor, though the prior research of both Kane and Brown University economist Emily Oster found strong links between meaningful drops in achievement and the length of time that students spent away from brick-and-mortar schools. According to co-authored by Oster, the average Virginia district spent just 9.2 percent of the 2020–21 school year in full-time, in-person instruction.

The apparently pernicious effects of Zoom classrooms don’t explain how other states, such as California, also endured lengthy school closures without their students’ performance tumbling as far as those in Virginia. But state Sen. Chap Petersen is convinced of the connection, complaining in an interview that schools “were shut down for so long, and with so little scientific basis.”

A centrist Democrat representing Fairfax, just a few miles south of Washington, D.C., Petersen to reopen schools in 2021 and later to end school mask mandates. Petersen lost his primary in June , an upset some observers have attributed to his stance on pandemic-era policies. He stands by the position nonetheless.

“The COVID-19 situation was such a meltdown that it kind of stood everything on its head,” Petersen said. “It was a violation of the Virginia Constitution because we’re required to make a public school system available to kids. For a year, we had no actual school system.”

Yet the public is still not clamoring for wholesale changes to K–12 policy. Polls show that while most Virginians rate education in the upcoming elections, they generally give high marks to their local schools. Rather than looking to state officials for emergency intervention, a sizable plurality in a recent survey said that Youngkin over schools. 

For his own part, the governor argues that parents are kept in the dark about the true state of school quality. Citing research from the reform-oriented Collaborative for Student Success, he has complained of an “honesty gap” resulting from the for proficiency on Virginia’s state exams, along with for school accreditation. 

The Virginia Board of Education is now of its accreditation process, which measures students’ test scores, attendance and college readiness with an aim toward placing failing schools on a path to improvement. In spite of the huge dip in student achievement during the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of schools received full accreditation in 2022, leading the board’s president to observe in a recent meeting that the system “does not seem to be measuring schools well relative to student performance.”

Christopher Gareis, an education professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in classroom assessment, said that more transparency was needed in how the state communicated with the public about school quality. Likening Virginia’s approach to school accountability to that of U.S. News & World Report, he said state authorities had historically found it “all too easy to tinker with the system” without making their work legible to voters.

“It’s a really sophisticated methodology that sometimes changes,” Gareis said. “By and large, the public’s not saying, ‘What changed here? I’ll go become a psychometrician so I can figure it out.’ All they know is that a given school is scored 50 or 25 or 225. That’s a real challenge.”

The Youngkin trajectory

Though not on the ballot himself, Youngkin has worked to keep schools at the center of the legislative campaign, hosting around the state this summer. Tacking away somewhat from the disputes over social issues that the open discussions largely focused on protecting kids from exposure to drugs and social media.

In September, the governor unveiled his , which incentivizes Virginia’s 132 school districts to spur learning growth by establishing tutoring programs, hiring specialized reading instructors and addressing chronic absenteeism. Financial support for the strategy comes from a recently enacted two-year budget, which includes in new school funding. But that the state is exceeding its budgetary authority in requiring districts to submit spending plans to the Virginia Department of Education before money can be dispersed, suggesting that a legal fight could be in the offing. 

Thus far, learning recovery hasn’t featured heavily in either of the parties’ campaign themes. Democratic candidates have made education-based appeals around select issues — incumbent Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg, running for a Republican-held Senate seat in suburban Richmond, showing a high school class conducting an active shooter drill — but are mostly attacking the GOP on its post-Roe efforts to . 

Petersen, whose Northern Virginia senate district has taken on a socially liberal bent in recent years, said his party’s supporters have become less animated by education as the region and more single people. In previous decades, he argued, the school closures of 2020–21 would have triggered a bigger backlash. 

“I was the guy who fought to reopen schools, and I considered that my strength,” Petersen said. “I ran on those issues, and they didn’t motivate Democratic voters.”

Chris Saxman, a Republican who served in the House of Delegates between 2002 and 2010, said the nature of the cycle made it difficult for schools to receive their share of the spotlight. Unlike in 2021, when school-related controversies acted as an “accelerant” to Youngkin’s rise in the gubernatorial race, this fall’s elections only feature legislative candidates. What’s more, in a polarized environment with swing seats (out of 140 being contested), most competitive races were unfolding in areas where voters might be leery of promises of education reform.

“This year, only a few of the districts are in play, and they’re swing districts,” Saxman said. “You can’t go heavy against public education in swing, suburban districts, where people pay high taxes for what they see as good schools.”

Much will depend on whether voter turnout resembles the electorate of 2020, when President Biden handily captured the state’s presidential vote, or that of 2021, when Youngkin won an upset as an outsider candidate. According to from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, Democrats could fall well short of the president’s 10-point victory margin while still preventing Republicans from winning a Richmond “trifecta” (control over the governorship and both chambers of the House of Delegates). 

Another stint of divided government, with Democrats maintaining control of the Senate and/or erasing the Republicans’ narrow House majority, would ensure that the governor would “accomplish very little over the next two years,” the University of Mary Washington’s Farnsworth observed. Aside from pushing forward with ALL IN VA (most communities failed to offer their spending plans before the state’s recommended Oct. 16 deadline, with some and challenges in staffing tutoring initiatives), the administration to make districts comply with its guidance on the treatment of transgender students in school. A newly formed Chronic Absenteeism Task Force has .

On the other hand, a Republican breakthrough — the party would need to hold the House and flip two Senate seats to notch a 20-20 split, with Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears serving as tiebreaker — would open up entirely different possibilities. Over his first two years in office, Youngkin has sought to broaden access to school choice and innovation through an expansion of “lab schools” (somewhat akin to university-sponsored charter schools), only to see funding for the idea in the upper chamber. In a state with , a renewed push next year could change circumstances on the ground quickly, though a separate campaign to would still face an uphill climb.

More than policy victories, unified GOP control in Virginia would send a chill through Democrats just 12 months from a presidential election. The state has gone blue in every such race since 2008, but Youngkin has managed a successful balancing act halfway through his governorship. showed him enjoying a 54-38 approval rating, trouncing President Biden’s rating in what should be a redoubt of the Democrats’ victory coalition. 

Jumping into the presidential race this deep into the cycle would daunt most contenders. But Youngkin, among conservative donors, could easily manage the start-up costs of a campaign, leaving many to speculate that a strong showing on Election Day could set the stage for the governor’s late entry.

“Everything I see indicates that he’s going to make some foray,” into the Republican primary, Saxman said. “Whether they gain a functioning majority in the Senate and do something about school choice, which would make him more nationally vibrant to compete for the presidency, is [a big] question.” 

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education and sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this story. 

But after spending most of a school year in a role at the center of America’s education culture wars, the high school senior said he’s used his first-hand experiences to be a voice of “moderation” on the seven-member board.

In the face of extremist views, he counters with a dose of reality: “Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on,” he’ll offer. “Only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective.”

In Boise, Rajbhandari’s election win has put in motion a chain reaction of efforts to elevate student voices. The school board now includes a brand new youth advisory council and the district this year administered a first-ever mental health survey to take account of the struggles its students are experiencing.

Meanwhile, the teen has also helped usher along a Climate Action Plan the board is implementing — a measure he had long pushed for as a climate activist with the in his days before holding elected office.

����Ӱ�� caught up with the young politician, who’s juggling the responsibilities of senior year alongside oversight of his roughly 23,200-student district, for a Zoom conversation that ranged from his efforts with the nonprofit to facing off against counterprotesters wielding AR-15s.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: It’s been the better part of the school year that you’ve been on the Boise school board. What has stood out to you most so far?

Shiva Rajbhandari: Coming into the school board, I thought this was really the end-all be-all of problem solving. But there’s such a big team that works across our district to write good policy and to propose a strong budget and to make sure that we’re hiring the top staff to keep our schools running. Learning about the incredible people across our district has been really rewarding. 

Also learning how slow change is sometimes. Coming into this role was this transition from being an activist and really calling the shots. Like, we would meet on a Thursday and have a protest organized by Saturday. Those things were very quick. 

Now, there’s a lot more accountability — to our patrons [constituents], to our students — so things happen slower. But it’s neat to consider all aspects of the solution and think critically about how we can best prepare students for college, career and citizenship while maintaining the integrity of our district and the faith of our patrons.

That must be an interesting transition, from activist to school board member. So what are some of the issues you’re working on now where the pace of change has felt slower?

One thing I’m really excited about is establishing a permanent student position on the school board. We’ve been talking about it since January and before that, I was talking with trustees, talking with staff, about how we could shape this policy. [It’s gone to several committees including our student advisory committee and] now we’re waiting until September to take it back to the Governance Committee for review and then hopefully passing. So that’s one example.

Another example would be our district sustainability commitments. This [issue] is why I ran for the school board initially. I led this campaign with my fellow students across our district to establish a clean energy commitment and a long-term sustainability plan for our schools. We’d seen districts across the country move quickly and then our district was slow and deliberate about it. But ultimately, our efforts did lead to the passage of this commitment on clean energy by our school board. 

Some things just take a lot of time, like reviewing all the carbon emissions of our district. And then [the question of] what does the long-term plan look like that saves our taxpayers money. That’s going to take probably another year or two to craft that plan and get that through. 

Going back to the effort to get a permanent youth board member, in your view why is youth voice so important in school decisions?

Students are the primary stakeholders in our education. And yet, our school boards are elected by people who are over 18, the majority of whom are no longer in K-12. They tend to be parents or grandparents or community members, but really only students can provide that on-the-ground perspective of what’s going on in our schools. I think having students on school boards is about bringing in a perspective that is vital to policymaking.

In addition, elevating students to positions of leadership empowers an entire generation of students within your district. Because when students understand that their voices are being taken seriously, that more than anything allows students to achieve their education goals. 

How have your friends and peers reacted to your role on the board? Are they telling you things to bring up in meetings?

Absolutely. Our whole district is getting so much more engagement with students and it’s helped us think outside the box about how to engage students in policymaking. 

For example, we did a districtwide mental health survey. That’s something we’ve never done before and we found out 30% of our students have had depression or suicidal ideation. We identified stress and social isolation as key contributing factors we really want to tackle. But that’s something our district has never done before, not because our district didn’t value student voices, but I don’t think we understood how incorporating student input could help our district. 

We also put together a student advisory committee [to the school board] and we have peer feedback groups. We’ve seen so many more students attending our board meetings, asking questions of our board, bringing ideas forward. 

It’s a simple thing to have [a student] up there on the dais, but it really opens the floodgates for transformative change within a system that is often really rigid.

I saw that you made YouTube previews of the last few meetings. Was that an effort to make the board more accessible to your peers?

Yeah. I think there’s really this misunderstanding of what the board does, and how folks can give input. And so the goal of the video is to communicate to students, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on at our board meeting.’ Everybody should be able to participate.

Going back to when you won your seat, that was a victory over an incumbent who had an endorsement from a far-right group. How have you navigated extremism in the campaign and in your term on the board?

Our state is split ideologically between the far right and the really far right. And there’s this hate group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a policy think tank, whose stated goal is to in our state. And so we’ve seen that come up time and time again with allegations of indoctrination or grooming in our schools. Now we’re seeing the third iteration of that, which is vouchers in the name of school choice, giving public dollars to private and potentially religious institutions with limited accountability.

I think the perspective that I’ve brought is one of moderation. Regardless of what Tucker Carlson says is going on in Idaho schools, here’s what’s actually going on. And here’s what students actually need. No one is scared about a [female-identifying person with male genitalia] going to the girl’s bathroom. What folks are scared about is their friends committing suicide, because we don’t have the mental health resources or the resiliency factors that we need. 

It’s bringing an ounce of reality back to these ideological conversations. I’m super lucky that, in our district, the problems we have with extremists aren’t nearly as bad as in the rest of the state. 

Your time on the board isn’t the first time you’ve interfaced with right-wing activists. Can you tell me the backstory there?

Yeah, gosh. It’s funny, I think nationally, when people hear about Idaho, it’s like, ‘Oh, my gosh, people are running around with guns.’ And living in Idaho, it’s almost like a fact of life, you organize a protest and folks show up with AR-15s.

The first time I interacted with the group I think you’re referring to, the , I was in ninth grade. We were organizing a protest on Capitol Boulevard and it was 70 kids who got together with signs and we blocked the street, we were playing music and it was honestly a fun day. These folks showed up with AR-15s to our rally. Not only that, but then a ton of cops showed up and they all were friends with the [counterprotesters] who weren’t even from Boise.

Then last year, a student brought a gun to Boise High, the school I’m at now, and he was suspended and not allowed to walk at graduation. This same group . 

The threat of extremism and militarism is very real in Boise. But we’re not afraid of them. We’ve been through so much. I think that takes away the power when people aren’t afraid of you. 

I know we’re jumping from one hot-button issue to the next, but I also wanted to ask about book bans. I saw there’s some state legislation proposed schools for ‘harmful’ books. And there have been several Idaho districts, not Boise, that have enacted bans. So I’m curious how that’s come up in your time on the board?

What’s a little humorous to me about the whole book ban thing is, it’s not parents and it’s not students asking for books to be banned. It’s generally random people who have heard something. And so, for example, in the nearby city of Meridian, there was this group that tried to get 200 books banned from the school library and I think they just pulled the list off the internet because half of the books weren’t even in the Meridian library. 

To me, I will never support any kind of book bans ever because I think free access to information is the cornerstone of democracy.

The narrative that’s being missed is that book bans, frankly, are disempowering to students. It’s alleging that students don’t have the agency to know what they should read. Schools are a resource, they’re a tool for students to learn and engage and ensuring that there’s open access to information is critical to that.

You wrote a recent about efforts to reduce youth voting, which seems like a big issue for you also because I saw you co-lead the organization BABE VOTE. Can you tell me about that?

BABE VOTE is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, voter advocacy organization promoting voter registration among young people. We just got the data back and Idaho is the between 2018 and 2022. So the efforts that we’re doing are working and it’s really exciting. 

The [Idaho] House and Senate both just passed a bill banning the use of student IDs at the polls, which for many students, that’s their only form of ID, especially college students. 

As soon as the governor signs this bill, we’re actually going to be and protecting the right to vote. So it’s that kind of stuff, knocking on doors, registering people and reminding people, ‘Hey, there’s an election,’ and then protecting the right to vote in the legislature and across the state.

What’s it been like to juggle all this work alongside senior year?

It’s been a little bit crazy. Honestly, being on a school board is [manageable]. Any student can do it. People try to make it something that it’s not.

Senior year, you have so many opportunities and it’s such a wide world. Sometimes it’s hard to get up for first period everyday. But just keeping a Google Calendar and checking in with my friends and making sure that I’m taking time for myself. Also remembering that I don’t have to do everything right; I have this whole team of folks who have supported me in my election on board and support this climate activism work.

One of the things that’s kind of taking a beating has been my track practice. Sometimes it’s hard to get to my practices.

What events do you compete in?

I run the mile and the 800 [meters].

And do you know what your plans are for next year, both in terms of school and whether you’ll maintain the position on the board?

Yeah, I’ll stay on the board. I made a commitment. All meetings we can mostly do virtually, but I will be leaving the state for college. And I want to study public policy and maybe go become a lawyer or something. [Rajbhandari has been accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill, Whitman College and Stanford University and is still deciding where to attend. He was elected to a two-year term.]

And last, who’s one teacher who made the biggest impression on you and why?

Well, there are so many. My teachers were the best teachers ever. One teacher, Monica Church, she was my Student Council teacher and capstone teacher sophomore year. She’s just been such a mentor and a guiding force in my life. Whenever I have a problem or something I want to talk about, she’s the first person I call.

I remember one time in my capstone class, I was running for [student body] vice president and I was a sophomore, so no one had ever done that before, and I was talking about ‘Hey, the election’s tomorrow. Everyone, make sure you go vote.’ And one of my friends, who is kind of a contrarian, goes, ‘Why would you ever vote for Shiva?’ Then Ms. Church was like, ‘Well, I would vote for Shiva. And one thing I’ve learned in the last eight months has been never bet against him.’

Now that’s a source of [motivation]. Whenever I’m like, ‘This is hard,’ I remember Monica Church, someone I respect more than anyone, said, ‘Never bet against Shiva.’ 

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.

On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1, a law expanding Florida’s private school voucher program and authorizing public schools to enroll students on a part-time basis. At the bill signing in Miami,  the legislation represented “the largest expansion of education choice not only in the history of this state, but in the history of these United States.”

Families in Florida could soon gain an important new freedom under state law — the opportunity to mix and match public and private or home schooling. 

Already a reality in several states, part-time public enrollment would allow private and homeschool students to essentially pick and choose among classes at nearby schools, whether traditional or charter. Participation by those schools would be voluntary, and they would be compensated proportionally for the additional pupils taught. 

The change is included in a larger school choice bill, the debate over which is expected to dominate Tallahassee’s 2023 legislative session. Most of the discussion around that proposal focuses on its central provision, voucher-like “education savings accounts” to every family in the state. Coming amid a red-state rush toward more educational options, the legislation would make Florida one of the nation’s friendliest states for school choice.

Unlike the ESA expansion, a move toward part-time public enrollment wouldn’t carry . But it could deliver its own, more subtle, shock to K-12 education in the state. Demand for alternative schooling arrangements swelled during the pandemic, and while , thousands of families seem to have permanently parted ways with public school systems. In Florida alone, over 150,000 students received their schooling primarily at home during the 2021-22 academic year — over the preceding five years — and experts believe that additional support from the state could push still more to explore new options.

“Part-time enrollment is something families are very interested in,” said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit research and consulting group. “If it’s embraced more by states and local districts, you could see more families decide to get off the fence and move to a more flexible learning environment for their kids.”

Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Florida-based advocacy group ExcelinEd, observed that “mindsets changed” during the pandemic, as a sizable number of parents experienced both disappointment with the performance of American schools and a growing sense of confidence in their own ability to venture outside of traditional public offerings. While many aren’t ready to make a year-round commitment to homeschooling, for instance, they might be willing to split the difference with their local districts. 

“I think a lot of families got that taste of greater involvement in their children’s education and realized, ‘I can do this, I enjoy it, and I want to be a part of it,’” Levesque said. 

No mandate for now

The idea may be unfamiliar even to some education policy veterans, but part-time enrollment is already a feature of the K-12 landscape around the country.

identified 12 states that expressly allow part-time enrollment, ranging from deep-blue Illinois to bright-red Idaho. But availability and comprehensiveness vary, with only six states defining access to part-time schooling as a student right. States also differ in how much public schools can be paid for accepting part-time students, as well as how many courses can be offered on a part-time basis. 

The legislative language of Florida’s statute, known as , does not include a mandate for school or district participation in the initiative, merely specifying that “any public school in this state, including a charter school, may enroll a student on a part-time basis.” Levesque — also serving as the executive director of ExcelinEd’s sister group Foundation for Florida’s Future, which advocated — said the door is still open for legislators to revisit a possible requirement in the years to come.

“I like to start by making things permissive, and then you let the innovators go after it,” Levesque observed. “Districts or schools that really want to take advantage of the flexibility can pave the way and they show the others what can be done.”

Part-time enrollment has parallels to another policy that caught on quickly over the last decade: Tebow Laws, which permit homeschoolers to take part in their local schools’ sports and other extracurricular activities. Named after former University of Florida quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, the measures , though they remain controversial in some. (Kansas, which passed a form of part-time enrollment last year, related to participation in high school sports, while legislators in Virginia have similar proposals in recent years.) 

Survey evidence that a significant portion of homeschoolers may already spend a few hours per week in an institutional school, a practice sometimes referred to as “flexischooling” or “hybrid homeschooling.” That phenomenon gained traction over the last few years as more families either willingly embraced, or resigned themselves to, the sporadic availability of in-person learning.

“[The pandemic] has further called into question the model that attending school means showing up for six or seven hours in a building every day,” said Robert Kunzman, an education professor at Indiana University and the managing director of the International Center for Home Education Research. “Certainly the pandemic has accelerated the sense that this is not only something that is possible, but is desirable and beneficial.”

Opportunities for districts

For schools, part-time enrollment offers an enticing opportunity to boost their own head counts after multiple years of declining K-12 enrollment. More than 1 million students left their district schools in 2020 and 2021, often as a result of frustrations related to school closures and online learning. 

Better still, fuller classrooms come with more public funding. Florida’s proposed law would reimburse districts for the part-time students they enroll. If, say, a private school student chose to take AP biology at a nearby public school, the state would fund the school for one-sixth of a full-time student (based on the benchmark that a full-time student takes six courses); if she also enrolled in a Latin course with space available, the funding would increase proportionally to one-third that of a full-time student. 

But logistical challenges remain. Any part-time students would need transportation to and from school buildings, potentially on irregular schedules — a serious complication in Florida, where are already experiencing severe shortages of bus drivers. (As part of the state’s Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, eligible families up to $750 to offset the cost of school transportation.) Transcripts and other student data would theoretically need to be shared between schools and families as well, Bellwether’s Spurrier said, to say nothing of the difficulty of tracking the whereabouts of various students within campuses.

“Absent policy supports on some of those concerns, [interest in part-time enrollment] might not be to the scale that you might expect given the desire we’ve seen parents express for new models of learning,” Spurrier said.

That desire is clear. In commissioned by the advocacy group EdChoice, a narrow plurality of parents said they would prefer for their children to study at home between one and four days of the week. An additional 15% said they would rather opt for full-time homeschooling, representing a clear majority in favor of an à la carte approach of some fashion. Those attitudes mirror a broader swing identified in , which showed a nine-point increase (to 54% from 45%) in public approval for homeschooling over the past five years.

And as COVID spurred more families to experiment with alternative educational models — from learning pods to microschools — the demographics of the homeschooling movement have also shifted. A population that once disproportionately attracted religious and right-leaning families has become somewhat more diverse, Kunzman noted, and likely more open to cooperating with local educators and school authorities on a class-to-class and year-to-year basis.

“It’s now less of an absolute, ideological commitment to homeschooling and more, ‘What do I perceive as best for my child for this coming year?’”

Fully enacted, the initiative would include a massive pay raise for teachers that would move the minimum salary from 48th in the nation to fourth; an infusion of resources to literacy instruction, including 120 new reading coaches; a strike against the teaching of critical race theory in classrooms; and a statewide rollout of education savings accounts over the next three years. 

The plan is still only a loose proposal that has not been released as formal legislation. But those elements would make it a transformative bill in Arkansas, where student achievement was profoundly discouraging even before the pandemic. Tom Newell, vice president of government affairs for the reform-oriented advocacy group , said the so-called LEARNS (Literacy, Empowerment, Accountability, Readiness, Networking, and Safety) program held the potential to “expand and improve learning opportunities across the state.”

“Arkansas LEARNS will expand and improve learning opportunities across the state,” Newell said in a statement.“This landmark legislative proposal is a chance to modernize learning, empowering families to choose and customize the education that’s best for their child.”

The package holds significant political promise as well. Already recognizable from her service in the Trump administration, Huckabee Sanders’s rise was assured even before she was selected to deliver the nationally televised response last week to President Biden’s State of the Union Address. But her focus on schools — and especially the strategic decision to combine the additional K–12 funding with broadened educational options — offers insight into the GOP’s policy and messaging strategy just months after a disappointing midterm performance.  

Olivia Gardner, the director of education policy for Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, agreed that the “huge undertaking” promised by Huckabee Sanders would inevitably help shape the legacy of a governorship that is still only weeks old.

“She talked about how she wanted education to be the hallmark of her administration, and I think this demonstrates that that is definitely going to be the case,” Gardner remarked.

Boosting teacher pay

While experts differ on the potential impact of the LEARNS plan, none dispute that student outcomes in Arkansas are in dire need of improvement. 

According to the release of 2022 results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal standardized test known colloquially as the Nation’s Report Card, reading scores in Arkansas are the ninth-worst of any state. Performance in math was even worse. In both subjects, students lost considerable ground during the pandemic for in-person learning.  

Though the dismal achievement can be pinned on multiple factors — including — local and national experts have increasingly pointed to a deficient supply of skilled teachers. Over the last decade, enrollment in Arkansas’s teacher preparatory programs , leading some districts in the state’s more impoverished counties to request waivers that would allow them to hire applicants without teaching licenses. 

A from the nonprofit advocacy group TNTP found that roughly 4 percent of Arkansas teachers were uncertified, more than double the national average. In 30 districts, uncertified employees made up 10 percent or more of the teaching workforce. 

Gema Zamarro Rodriguez, an economist at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform, said she believed the pay bump included in LEARNS could make the profession substantially more attractive. That increase — effectively lifting the starting teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000 — would improve the earnings of nearly half of all Arkansas teachers. 

What’s more, “those teachers are not uniformly concentrated in the state; they are mostly concentrated in …shortage areas” in and around the state’s Delta region, Zamarro said. “I think increasing salaries could be positive, and it’s really going to affect the areas that need it more.”

Gov. Huckabee Sanders is pushing for several other workforce incentives, including the addition of 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. But those inducements are paired with more controversial measures. The administration has thus far been short on details, but a proposed $10,000 bonus for “good teachers” seems to open the door to a merit pay system that could prove unpopular with rank-and-file instructors. 

Another change would be much less ambiguous in its effects: the repeal of , a law that requires schools to provide notice and due process to teachers before termination of their employment. Zamarro said the law’s elimination, along with of pay-for-performance schemes in school settings, gave her some pause about the plan’s possible consequences for attracting and retaining teachers.

“I think the overall increase in pay is positive, but there are some other components in there that I worry might have the opposite effect.”

Division on ‘education freedom’

But the policy shift that will draw the most scrutiny is the governor’s effort to extend school choice to every Arkansas family through the provision of what her administration has dubbed “education freedom accounts.” 

Typically referred to as education savings accounts, the school choice vehicle disburses some portion of the state’s per-pupil allotment to parents for their use, whether for private school tuition, tutoring, or other instructional costs. A clutch of Republican governors have pushed to establish ESA programs already this year, and Arizona’s universal eligibility is seen as the “holy grail” in conservative policy circles. 

Arkansas already features for private school choice: a direct voucher program that enrolls about 700 students with disabilities, as well as a tax-credit scholarship for low-income students to offset the cost of private tuition. The new accounts — which should be one of the most expensive items in a package estimated to cost $300 million — would be reserved only for needy families in 2023–24 before becoming available to all students by 2025–26. 

The potential shock to education finances, which could draw both students and funding from traditional schools, has already drawn criticism. Gardner, whose organization has warning public officials against “[creating] inequity with our public education dollars,” said they would likely not lend their backing to any legislation that included an ESA plank.

“We may be supportive of other things in the bill, but because of this ‘education freedom’ component, we couldn’t be supportive overall,” Gardner said. “It’s just going to be so detrimental to our public schools that we feel it’s important to stand up against the bill.” 

In one of the reddest states in the country, GOP opposition would be necessary to sink the idea. But that might not be as unlikely as it sounds: In 2021, a bill that would have widened access to the existing voucher system , with Republicans accounting for most of the “no” votes. One legislator, Republican Rep. Jim Wooten, said the legislation could act as the “final nail driven in public education in this state.”

In an email, Wooten said that, if passed, the new omnibus proposal “will forever change the landscape of education in Arkansas — at the expense of public education. Every dollar lost to school choice is a dollar lost to educating…over 400,000 deserving students.”

Some found it notable that the school choice provisions were linked to a roundly popular pay increase for teachers. With federal COVID aid swelling budgets, red-state governors have increasingly been willing to court teachers with raises, even as they simultaneously pursue contentious policies like vouchers or classroom content restrictions. The LEARNS plan includes a thus-far unspecified ban on what is sometimes called critical race theory, and at the press conference announcing its arrival, Huckabee Sanders vowed to “never subject our kids to indoctrination.” 

Other Republicans road-tested the approach, including Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, who just last month. But the Republican archetype for this strategy has been Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who committed significant new funding to public education over the last few years while clashing with educators over curriculum, parental rights, and the participation of transgender students in girls’ sports. 

Newly appointed Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva after a long stint in Florida, where he helped carry out DeSantis’s vision for public education. In about the LEARNS plan with Little Rock news station KTHV, he argued that if an overwhelming number of students used their “freedom accounts” to switch to private schools, “we need to have a hard, serious conversation about why parents are choosing other options.” 

The University of Arkansas’s Zamarro said that the poor performance of the state’s schools demanded action, but that the sheer scale of the governor’s reforms also called for careful evaluation.

“This is a state that needs to move forward and do something for kids. But how these things are going to be implemented will be key. I’m not sure there’s another state that has done so many of these things at once, so it’s going to be very important to track what is happening and whether it’s working.”

Foremost among them: expanding career and technical education.

Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the conservative , scoured the websites of all 72 major-party candidates in 2022’s gubernatorial races. In all, he found 27 education issues supported by at least one candidate.

The data suggest clear partisan divides: Among Democrats, the top two issues mentioned were increasing K-12 funding and expanding Pre-K. Among Republicans, it was school choice and curricular reform.

But one issue rounded out the top three among both Democrats and Republicans: CTE. Along with greater funding, it was mentioned more frequently than any other topic. In all, 30 candidates, or 42%, featured it on their websites.

Higher funding held a distant fourth place for Republicans, far below CTE. An equal percentage of GOP candidates — 22% — expressed support for charter schools and better reading instruction.

Smarick, a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents who has also served as chair of the state’s Higher Education Commission and president of its State Board of Education, said he wasn’t surprised to find CTE hold such a prominent place.

“So many people have pushed for so long for a ‘college for all’ mentality, which was good and important, that now a lot of elected officials are saying we also have to do something on certificates and certifications and apprenticeships” and other career-driven outcomes.

He also noted that many college-going students don’t end up with a four-year degree. “So state legislators and governors have to think in terms of ‘How do we serve all of these adults?’”

The findings resonate with those of a survey released earlier this month that found Americans now want K-12 education to focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is already signaling that CTE is a priority: Last week he previewed the administration’s “Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success” initiative, which seeks to overhaul secondary education with an eye toward granting students the skills and credentials necessary to enter college or the workforce after 12th grade. 

Designed in concert with First Lady Jill Biden as well as the secretaries of commerce and labor, it urges colleges to offer dual-enrollment coursework to high school juniors.

The National Student Clearinghouse has estimated that the number of students with “some college, no credential” in 2020 grew to , roughly the .

It may be a surprise, then, that while 28% of Democratic candidates in Smarick’s analysis mentioned expanding community college, not a single Republican did.

Big differences between incumbents, challengers

Smarick also broke out mentions between incumbents and challengers, finding that non-incumbent Democrats discussed several issues that no incumbent did: One in four articulated what he called an “anti-school choice position,” and more than one in five argued for less school testing. 

He theorized that perhaps these challengers “believed taking these positions would help them win primaries and garner support of teachers’ unions.”

Likewise, 38% of Republican non-incumbents expressed support for charter schools, while not a single Republican incumbent did. Non-incumbents were about twice as likely as incumbents to say they supported school choice more generally (81% to 40%). Smarick suggested that this is because these non-incumbents, like their Democratic counterparts, were also focused on winning primaries and earning the support of base voters who support more ideological causes.

Incumbents, he said, zeroed in on more practical day-to-day issues like early childhood and funding and, in red states, expanding the number of choices available to families. “It just seems like once you’ve been in office for a while, a lot of these incumbents realize that lots of families like their traditional public schools and they want to make sure that they’re well-funded.”

That may especially be true of schools in the “COVID era,” he said, which need extra funding so students can recover academically. 

More broadly, Smarick said, public opinion polls consistently show that the public “likes the idea of well-funded schools. So it’s not really a surprise that incumbents, including Republicans, put that on their list of things that they want to make sure they accomplish.”

Harvard University education scholar Martin West, a co-author of the annual public opinion survey on school issues, said the differences between incumbents and non-incumbents are “fascinating” and suggest that “the experience of running a state school system, or perhaps the responsibility of having run one, has a moderating effect on candidates’ views.”

He also noted that the striking differences in positions taken by Democrat and Republican candidates are consistent with the most recent EdNext findings showing greater partisan polarization overall.

Blue state, red state, swing state divides

When it came to the states candidates were vying to lead, Democratic nominees didn’t offer many surprises: Those in blue states supported traditional “higher-dollar” initiatives such as expanding pre-K and community college, and raising K-12 funding levels and teacher pay. And while blue-state Democrats talked about investments in community college and university systems, swing-state Democrats were much more likely to discuss CTE.

As for Republicans, red-state GOP candidates were actually less likely to advocate for more red-meat Republican positions such as a parents’ bill of rights or measures to block so-called critical race theory in the classroom. Just one in five GOP nominees in red states advocated for these policies, fewer than in blue or swing states.

Perhaps most striking: In blue states, more than half of GOP nominees took a pro-charter position, but in red states, not a single GOP nominee did. They were also four times more likely to advocate for more K-12 funding than their blue-state GOP counterparts.

Smarick said that perhaps red-state GOP nominees saw less of a need than their blue-state counterparts to fret about instructional crises in schools — or that perhaps their states’ public schools perform well enough to lessen the need to advocate for school-choice and charter reforms.

But it may also suggest a kind of “remarkable” generational change around charter schools, he said.

“If we go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, lots of Republican candidates were more willing to talk about charter schools than school choice,” Smarick said. “Now it seems to have flipped.”

And since many of those pro-school-choice Republicans won their races, he said, “in red states, we’re going to see the tax credits, more ESA [Education Savings Account] stuff. And this is different than it was, certainly, a generation ago.”

Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Republicans in Smarick’s analysis talked about supporting school choice, while just one Democrat, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, mentioned it.

When it came to how these issues played out, Smarick found a few surprises: Increasing K-12 funding was a “top-five” issue among winners in blue, swing, and red states.

Matt Hogan, a partner at the Democratic polling firm , said he wasn’t surprised. He said Impact’s polling has consistently shown that increasing K-12 funding “is very popular and its continued popularity is consistent with voters’ desire a focus on bread-and-butter issues when it comes to education, rather than engaging in culture war fights.” 

For Democrats, Harvard’s West noted, the push for more K-12 funding was paired with expanding Pre-K and community college, two investments “with which K-12 funding will have to compete.” That may help to explain why states that switch from Republican to Democratic control have traditionally on K-12 schools, he said.

In the end, what might be most significant in Smarick’s findings is what’s not mentioned: teacher shortages. They got “minimal attention” from candidates, with just three of 72 even mentioning the issue.

“I kept looking through these websites, expecting half or three-quarters of candidates to talk about it, and they just didn’t,” Smarick said.

Though the issue was , “It was the dog that didn’t bark” on candidates’ websites. “Which makes you think maybe we ought to take a look at what’s happening in states as opposed to just following national narratives about education policy.”

Teachers said they had to skip over classic texts like To Kill a Mockingbird and avoid historical figures like famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass out of concern for parental complaints and possible legal blowback. One high school science teacher who the study quoted anonymously described an atmosphere of “fear and paranoia” around simply covering the content laid out within state standards.

The , which was published by the Rand Corporation on Wednesday, surveyed over 8,000 educators from across the country. It asked whether officials had passed policies limiting the teaching of topics related to race and gender and, if so, how those rules had impacted their instructional decisions.

Confusion was so widespread, researchers found, that roughly one-quarter of teachers said they didn’t know whether they were subject to restrictions. Among teachers working in states that had enacted classroom censorship bills, less than a third actually knew that the laws were in place.

“At times there is that confusion about, ‘What am I allowed to say in the classroom, what am I not allowed to say?’ ” lead researcher Ashley Woo explained.

In Florida, where the state’s censorship bill also extends to higher education and the workplace, and where Gov. Ron DeSantis recently a forthcoming Advanced Placement course on African American studies, the state Department of Education rejected the idea that their law might be unclear to teachers.

“If educators are confused about what can and cannot be taught in Florida schools, the blame lies solely on media activists and union clowns who purposefully sow confusion and mislead the public,” spokesperson Alex Lanfranconi wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

Classroom censorship bills began to proliferate in 2021 as right-wing politicians advocated that schools overstepped in the measures they enacted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. As some districts added more books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors to their curricula and educated staff about how racism operates in society, predominantly white parents in many districts pushed back on the changes, calling them critical race theory.

Critical race theory is an academic framework used to examine systematic racism and is taught mostly in graduate school rather than K-12 classrooms. The term has become a GOP catch-all for lessons related to race. Americans largely support teachings that address racism, but support wanes drastically when the critical race theory label is applied, shows.

Since 2021, legislation has been proposed in 42 states to curtail race- and gender-related teachings. In 18 states, the measures have passed into law, according to an . In at least six states, the rules include penalties for educators or schools that do not comply.

Terrance Anfield teaches English as a second language in Kennesaw, Georgia, where a state law bans teachers from covering “divisive concepts.” 

“The very concepts that will allow the development of our students to become well-rounded, inclusive members of society are being omitted from the classroom for fear of offending the wrong person or committee. This should not be an issue that has involved the districts of Georgia because CRT is typically taught at the collegiate level,” he wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

In the aftermath of those changes, 1 in 4 teachers nationally said their school or district leaders told them to limit discussions of political or social issues in class, a previous found in August.

The non-partisan think tank’s most recent report now shows that a similar proportion of teachers, 24%, have altered their curricular materials in response to the controversy — regardless of whether or not they live in states that have classroom censorship laws on the books. Even in states with no rules limiting teachings on race and gender, 22% of instructors said the nationwide pushback influenced their selection of books and worksheets. 

“The limitations are not just originating from state policies, they’re also coming from other places,” said Woo, the Rand researcher, explaining that educators frequently reported re-designing their offerings because of complaints from parents or “implicit” and “unspoken” messages from district leaders directing them to sanitize lessons.

Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, emphasized that parents do have a right to transparency over what their students are learning. But at the same time, districts should avoid policies that have a “chilling effect” on educators, which can make schools “not a healthy place for learning,” he said.

In the face of pushback, some teachers still expressed resistance to censorship policies. The survey included a free response section completed by about 1,450 educators. Nearly 1 in 5 said they are continuing to include lessons related to race and gender, and made no mention of efforts to make the teachings less contentious. 

“My students are more important than any board policy. If I get in trouble, then it would be worth it,” one educator wrote.

In a profession whose stress levels are , navigating the supercharged climate has made educators’ jobs “even more difficult and less attractive,” in the words of one survey respondent, who teaches elementary school.

School staff may have their hands tied, caught between what is legal and what they think is right. A middle school science teacher said the school’s LGBTQ students are “knowingly suffering and there is nothing I can do about it without risking my job.”

In some cases, districts now require teachers to search for new classroom materials, go through cumbersome approval processes for new curricula or even run lessons by parents before leading them in the classroom, Woo explained. All those steps represent more work for teachers at a time when staff shortages already plague many states and districts across the country, she said.

“All of these things are potentially adding more to teachers’ plates in a time when we know teachers have already experienced a lot of stress,” she said.

Moms for Liberty, a national organization that supports school board candidates pushing for limitations on race- and gender-related lessons, did not respond to requests for comment on whether these policies could worsen teacher burnout.

To district leaders, Woo said, one clear takeaway from the study should be that educators need additional support to comply with a changing legal and political landscape.

“Teachers cannot and should not have to shoulder these challenges on their own.”

Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock was re-elected to the U.S. Senate with 51% of the Georgia vote, besting his GOP challenger Herschel Walker. Warnock became the state’s first Black U.S. Senator after winning a special election in 2020, and now becomes Georgia’s first Black U.S. Senator elected to a full six-year term. Skye Oduaran covered the race and published a Dec. 7 with Scholastic Kids Press.

Skye Oduaran was reading a Scholastic Magazine in fifth grade when she noticed a section inviting youth to apply for positions as kid reporters with the magazine. It intrigued her, so she sent in an application.

Fast forward six months and the Atlanta 12-year-old now has zig-zagged across her state, scoring interviews with a sitting and a , among others, as a reporter for . She met former President Barack Obama on the campaign trail and is now angling for an interview. In November, she reported from the White House — the first time a youth with press credentials had ever done so, Secret Service members told her.

Many of the budding journalist’s stories focus on education, schools and other youth-centered topics.

“I like to write articles to bring awareness to issues that impact kids,” said Oduaran, who attends Kennedy Road Middle School.

It doesn’t hurt that Oduaran lives in Georgia, a state that has been at the white hot center of American politics for the past several years and will now host a runoff Tuesday in the U.S. Senate race. In-person early voting has been exceptionally strong in the contest between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, with voters already casting their ballot. Oduaran has been out speaking to many of them. State law in Georgia requires winning candidates to surpass 50% of the vote, but on Nov. 8, neither Warnock nor Walker hit that threshold.

While Republicans in January will take control of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats maintained control of the Senate. A Warnock win would give the party additional breathing room in that chamber, breaking a 50-50 split that afforded West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin extensive nay-saying power over the last two years.

Knowing the 12-year-old reporter would be busy on voting day, ����Ӱ�� caught up with Oduaran a few days prior. Her mom, Erica Oduaran, sat next to the young journalist as we spoke over Zoom about the inspiration behind her work, her advice to the national press corps and her plans to return to the White House someday — only not as a reporter.

This conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: You have been all over the state reporting. How has that been?

Skye Oduaran: It’s been very exciting. I’ve met a lot of candidates who are running for different positions. It’s been very fun. I’ve learned a lot about how politics works in the state and how candidates become elected to their positions.

When you think about these last weeks and months, what are some of the moments that stand out most?

Well, I met [former President] Barack Obama at a campaign rally in College Park, Georgia. I enjoyed that. And I’m thinking about reaching out to his campaign to see if I can get an interview with him. 

I’ve also met Stacey Abrams on the campaign trail when she was campaigning to become governor. And I had an opportunity to exchange a question with Brian Kemp at his Kemp for Farmers campaign rally. 

Also, Sen. Raphael Warnock, I had an interview with him. And I asked him about what he plans to do with education in the state of Georgia and how that can help other states.

There aren’t many 11-year-olds who can say that. 

I just turned 12. 

Happy birthday. When was your birthday?

Nov. 9.

The day after Election Day. Happy belated. Well, there aren’t many 12-year-olds who have done all those things. When you’re in those interviews, what’s going through your head? How do you come up with your questions?

How I come up with questions is I think about how these candidates can impact education and things that impact kids around the state and in the country. And once I know how it can impact kids, I come up with questions that suit that perspective.

You have a unique perspective as someone who’s still in K-12 education. How does that inform your reporting?

I would say, for instance, last week on Monday, I went to the White House to report on the . According to the Secret Service, that was the first time that they had a kid with press credentials coming to report an event. Apparently, before that, they only had adults.

First of all, congratulations on that. But second, how is your coverage different because you’re a young person?

It is different because it’s writing from a perspective that impacts kids. Scholastic Kids Press is where you report by kids, for kids. And when a kid writes, they are addressing what a lot of other kids think of because they are in the same age group and they have the same perspective.

I like to write articles to bring awareness to issues that impact kids so that they can change what is going on.

Now we’re just a few days away from the runoff. Based on the conversations you’ve had in the election cycle, what’s on the minds of Georgia voters right now?

I’d say a lot of Georgia voters that I talked to, they talk about how the election is very close, for the reason of the polls being very close. 

A lot of voters told me that instead of voting for the party line, they want to choose who they think is best for the state. So not choosing based on party, but they are looking at the candidates and what they stand for.

Fast forward to Tuesday, what’s your plan for coverage on voting day?

My plan is to go to different polling stations and ask voters questions. For instance, I’m going to be asking them … [if they] voted with the party line or across party lines. And asking them why did they feel the election was important, and why they decided to vote. 

Today, I’m going to go to a campaign rally with Barack Obama again. I intend to meet him and ask him for an interview later. So I’m going to use information from that to also put it into my article. 

My article is going to include what voters say at the polling stations, the Obama event, the trial when Sen. Raphael Warnock sued the state of Georgia [over ] and also early voting on Saturday, [Nov.] 26.

How does your reporting work dovetail with school attendance? Do you get excused absences or are you doing all this outside school time?

My reporting works very well with school. My skills from reporting improve my academic performance and my learning in school — particularly in areas such as social studies, [English language arts] and math — help my understanding of numbers, politics, economics and how to best communicate these to others. 

I conduct my reporting before and after school, as well as on weekends. There was only one occasion where I had to use an excused absence to conduct my reporting. My mother picked me up early so that I could cover a campaign event with Gov. Brian Kemp in Moultrie, Georgia that required several hours of driving to get there. On the same day, I also covered the campaign event of Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams in Jonesboro, Georgia. These were the only events that necessitated an excused absence from school. 

For the runoff election on Tuesday, I will be in school. In Georgia, schools are open on election days. I intend to go to the polls before school on Tuesday to interview voters and then return to the polls to continue reporting after school finishes.

To rewind a little bit on your own story, how did you initially get interested in journalism?

I’ve always enjoyed writing. And one day in fifth grade, I was reading a Scholastic Magazine to complete an assignment and I saw that there was a section that said that they were looking for kids to apply to become Scholastic reporters. The articles inside of the newspaper were all written by kids who were my age. 

I said that next year, I should try to apply for the position to report on events because I wanted to bring awareness to issues that I believe are important.

That was about six months ago.

And now, boom, you’re reporting on the runoff, talking to senators all that. How does that feel?

It feels amazing. And it’s also fun.

You’ve not wasted any time.

Erica Oduaran, Skye’s mother, chiming in: She got the position at the end of September. So essentially, the beginning of October is when she started being a kid reporter.

Skye, you really hit the ground running. It sounds like a key goal for you is interviewing former President Barack Obama. Obviously an interview with a former president is phenomenal as a journalist. But what made you set your sights on that particular goal?

Well, I have decided that I would like to interview Barack Obama someday. This is because he is doing a lot of good things for our country and I would like to bring awareness to that. I also want to interview Michelle Obama, because I see that she is also doing a lot of things to help kids and families around the country. 

Who in the world is your biggest role model?

Michelle Obama, because she encouraged kids staying fit and active. And she and her husband, they started the program (the White House education agenda that directed federal money toward more rigorous standards and testing, accountability and turning around low-performing schools) as well as a lot of other things that helped to improve education in our country.

Are there any teachers you’ve had who stand out to you for making a big impact on your path?

My parents. My mother and my father, they homeschooled my brother and my sister and me [through third grade].

They taught me everything. Mommy has a Ph.D. She is amazing at math and science and she makes it very interesting. My father also has a Ph.D and he is amazing at social studies, history and reading. And he also loves to teach them in amazing ways. So that’s why they’re my favorite teachers.

They cover all the subjects between them. 

Yes. 

You’ve covered a lot of education issues. I read your piece on the . What drew you to those topics?

Well, at school, a lot of kids talk about how they see education as a very top priority. I’ve interviewed a lot of kids, too, and they say that education is most important to them. 

So I decided that if I started writing about it, I can make education [politics] more accessible to them. A lot of the candidates want to make sure education’s more accessible for kids around the country, too, and so I decided to write about it.

What do you think adult journalists could better understand about how to cover youth issues?

I would say, for instance, I went to the White House last week on Monday. And a lot of the reporters were really only focused on getting the top story. There was a lot of pushing and shoving to get to the front where they could see the event, some even got on ladders, so that blocked the view of other reporters. 

So is maybe what you’re saying they could be a little nicer?

Yes.

Do you have any advice for other young folks who might be looking to get into journalism, but not know how?

I would say that they should be curious. They should observe the world around them. And they should have fun. And they should find issues that they think are important to them and see how they can use it to impact kids their age.

How is the kind of learning you do when you’re out in the field covering, for example, a campaign rally different from the kind of learning you do in the classroom?

I’ve learned that when you interview someone, you need to look them straight in the eyes. You must ask them the question very directly. You get straight down to the point of the question and you must enunciate it. I’ve also learned a lot about how journalism works and how you write your articles so that they attract the audience of who you are trying to get the attention of.

Taking those things in mind, what do you think should be different about the current education system?

I would suggest that there are teachers who are certified to teach their certain subjects, so students are engaged and are understanding the subject.

And also teachers could maybe do an activity with students to get students engaged and make sure that not only do they understand it, but they’re having fun with it. 

For you, what’s next?

I’ve started my own school newspaper [the Kennedy Road Cougar Column] and I’d like to extend that to other schools in my school system. I also intend to stay in Scholastic until I’m 14 because you can stay in Scholastic until you are 14. I’ve heard of another reporting company for teenagers, so when I turn 15, I would like to do it. And on top of that, I would also like to start my own newspaper for Georgia.

I also intend to, after I graduate from high school, go to college. And I will go to law school afterwards and I will become a lawyer. And I will become a judge because you have to become a lawyer before becoming a judge. And then I’m going to run for president of the United States in 2048.

Wow, awesome.

Yes. I’ve also started my campaign right now where I printed stickers that say for people to vote for me in 2048. My mother’s going to go get them right now so I can show them to you.

Long game for 2048. You’re getting an early start.

Twenty-six years. It’s really not that long.

These post-election crosscurrents were the topic of a webinar sponsored by ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, featuring Andy Rotherham, a member of the Virginia State School Board and ����Ӱ��’s Board of Directors; journalist and author Anya Kamenetz; Michael Hartney of the Hoover Institute; George Parker, former educator, teachers union president and adviser to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; and 74 Senior Writer Kevin Mahnken. The event was moderated by PPI’s Tressa Pankovits.

Read ����Ӱ��’s election coverage:

• Second-Highest Youth Midterm Voter Turnout in 3 Decades, Early Estimates Show
  
• DeSantis Solidifies Control of Florida Ed Policy With Pickup of 6 School Board Seats
  
• Wisconsin Re-Elects Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Derails Push for School Vouchers
  
• Easily Winning 2nd Term, Oklahoma Gov. Stitt Plans to Move Forward on School Vouchers
  
• Read all of ����Ӱ��’s 2022 election coverage here.

Thurmond will guide California’s K-12 schools through a period of academic recovery and curricula reform in math and reading, along with Governor Gavin Newsom and the state legislature. 

The results come as no surprise given Thurmond’s lead in the June primaries that left the Democratic party-backed candidate just 5 points shy of the majority needed to avoid Tuesday’s runoff altogether.

His office has received criticism for lengthy school closures — California’s students learned virtually for over a year, raising concerns about .  

And though the four-year post is nonpartisan, the education and culture issues that divide Democrats and Republicans seemed to drive modest support for conservative opponent Christensen, who ran on a pledge to put parents at the helm of policy.

Christensen, a policy director for a conservative think tank and former Republican staffer in the State Senate, also advocated to expand school choice and continually criticized the “” California Teachers Association and hard-fought curriculum. His campaign raised $159,000 compared to the nearly $5 million by Thurmond. 

Expanding access to mental healthcare, high quality tutoring, free meals, teachers’ professional development and implicit bias training, and STEM learning opportunities were headed into Tuesday’s vote. 

Thurmond, who has served as California’s top schools official since 2019, has held various elected posts for 16 years including posts on Richmond’s city council, West Contra Costa County Unified school board, and California’s state assembly. 

Incumbent Superintendent Tony Thurmond might have avoided campaigning entirely, in fact, if he’d picked up just a few extra points of support in the June primary. Instead, he settled for 46 percent of the vote — just a few points shy of the majority threshold to avoid a runoff — and the mantle of clear favorite heading into the fall. Thurmond’s opponent in the nonpartisan election, education advocate Lance Christensen, finished 34 points and more than two million votes behind him in the last round.

In terms of competitiveness, the contest is a shadow of previous campaigns. In both 2014 and 2018, the state’s competing education factions spent tens of millions of dollars trying to win the superintendency and influence state policy on school choice and accountability. The spirited electioneering came in spite of the fact that the office’s formal functions are quite limited, and authority over K-12 schools is split with the governor, state assembly, and the California State Board of Education. 

Those were intra-Democratic elections fought between philanthropy-backed education reformers and an organized labor movement headlined by the powerful California Teachers Association, featuring serious clashes on issues like the expansion of charter schools. This cycle pits Thurmond, the slight victor over the reformers’ favored candidate in 2018, against Christensen, an obscure former Republican staffer in the state assembly the teachers’ union and to bring private school choice to the deep-blue state. And while the next superintendent will confront significant educational challenges, from pandemic-related learning loss to curricular reforms around math and English, the debate over the future of education policy has largely remained quiet.

Instead, with the reform movement (and money) appearing to sit on the sidelines, and that has similarly proven incapable of generating voter interest, Thurmond’s progressive message is widely expected to carry the day. Tom Loveless, a veteran education policy analyst who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, called Thurmond a “Teflon candidate” who, though criticized for his leadership style and the state’s lengthy school closures during COVID, is likely to sail to a second term.

“He’s had all kinds of controversy in his office, and yet no serious opposition arose in terms of the election,” Loveless said. “It just doesn’t seem to be affecting his electoral prospects.”

Prolonged school closures

Thurmond’s tenure has been marked by the usual degree of criticism directed at a high-profile policymaker in the nation’s largest state. Complaints of low morale and hostile management in the California Department of Education, the 2,700-employee agency that the superintendent leads, . The office also for hiring a personal friend of Thurmond’s to serve as superintendent of equity, despite the fact that he lived and held a job in Philadelphia at the time.

Representatives of the state education department declined to comment on this article.

Those spats, while damaging, were inevitably overshadowed by the emergence of COVID-19 and its massive disruptions to schooling in 2020 and 2021. 

Beginning in March 2020, thousands of schools in California remained closed for in-person instruction for over a year. The approach reflected Gov. Newsom’s toward suppressing the spread of the virus, which also saw lockdowns of small businesses throughout the state. But as in other areas, it alienated a vocal segment of the public who worried that the long months of virtual learning were adversely affecting kids. 

Federal data collected during the middle of the pandemic indicated that California was with the highest percentages of shuttered schools. And while reopening policies varied by district, by the end of the 2020-21 school year, that roughly half of the state’s nearly six million public school students were still learning from home. Public frustrations with the slow pace of reopening — along with pandemic-related mobility that forced some to flee the state — has led to a sizable drop in the number of children enrolled in California schools. 

It also contributed to an unexpected recall campaign launched against the governor last fall. That vote ended with a strong Newsom win, proving that the backlash against the state’s COVID policies was limited in its political impact. And indeed, that majorities of both adults and K-12 parents generally approve of how Newsom handled the K-12 school system. But the same polling also finds that faith in K-12 schools has dropped around the state. Paired with the trend toward disenrollment, those responses suggest growing dissatisfaction with the course of public education in California.

Megan Bacigalupi is an Oakland mother and the executive director of CA Parent Power, an activist group. A Democrat-turned-independent, she has criticized Thurmond for not militating more energetically in favor of earlier school reopenings and greater resources for struggling students. Still, she added, the role of superintendent is principally advisory, and Gov. Newsom held more power to influence policy over the last few years.

“Tony Thurmond had a bully pulpit and should have used it during school closures to advocate for students and families,” Bacigalupi said. “But the person who was most responsible for our schools being closed was Gavin Newsom, not Tony Thurmond. Gavin Newsom has, and had, a lot more power than Tony Thurmond does.”

‘Moving the goalposts’

With just weeks before Election Day, the academic effects of the pandemic reentered the spotlight with the release of both California’s state test results and those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal measure sometimes called “the Nation’s Report Card”). 

Both exams showed significant losses in student performance on math and reading, but the NAEP scores surprised some — particularly those who worried about the state’s prolonged closures — by indicating modest drops compared with other parts of the country. In , the governor’s office trumpeted the findings as showing that California “performed better than most other states” at mitigating learning loss during the pandemic. 

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford, objected to that framing, arguing that analysis of California’s pandemic performance had to be mindful of the ways in which COVID reshaped K-12 enrollment across the state. Hundreds of thousands of disproportionately disadvantaged students, if not more, may have left the state in the last few years, potentially biasing the results upward, he remarked.

“You’d expect that test score declines would be attenuated simply because some of the most educationally vulnerable students are no longer in those schools,” Dee said. “So there’s something I find kind of unseemly about celebrating that. When you move the goalposts, maybe you shouldn’t be doing an end-zone dance.”

More controversially, the release of state standardized test results, which revealed similarly disheartening achievement losses, were until after the election — a break with the traditional release calendar. Thurmond’s office backtracked after sustaining public criticism, but ultimately opted to release the scores on the same day that the more sanguine NAEP scores came out. 

The cloud of pandemic learning loss hangs over the larger question of where California schools are headed. With his docket mostly overtaken by educational crises the last two years, much of the Thurmond education agenda has been shunted to the side. Notably, however, the superintendent for $200 million in state funding this year to hire graduate students pursuing careers as school social workers and mental health clinicians.

Thurmond’s preferred policy strategy has been to  on key K-12 issues, from the digital divide to the achievement gap, which have generated proposals for action in the coming years. Some members of those bodies have praised Thurmond for adopting a collaborative approach to surfacing new ideas. But Bacigalupi, who has been particularly critical of California’s efforts to improve reading, said that multiple years of “government by task force” had managed to earn some good press while failing to do much of significance. For example, a touted reading panel declined to recommend the adoption of research-based approaches to instruction (focusing heavily on phonics and sometimes referred to as “the science of reading”), instead opting to deliver books to children’s homes.

“To me, school closures were awful — they harmed kids — but I’m now actually more concerned about what’s not happening on issues like early literacy,” said Bacigalupi, who has not endorsed a candidate in the race.

The next four years will be critical — not just in terms of an academic turnaround from COVID, but also to render a near-term verdict on whether a systemic jump in school quality can be accomplished in California. Thurmond has for his second term, including $250 million in proposed spending on new literacy strategies (roughly $42 for each K-12 student in the state), new investments in universal school meals and free preschool, and additional mental health supports. During a virtual event hosted Wednesday by the California Reading Coalition, he announced that he would hire a statewide literacy director “steeped in best practices for how to help our children learn.” 

Christensen, who spent years as a Republican staffer in Sacramento before helping to lead education initiatives for the conservative California Policy Center, has launched of inaction against the department, vowing to shake up the state’s education governance by devolving more power to local districts. He even helped draft a longshot proposal to create education savings accounts, which would offer parents thousands of dollars to pay for schooling costs outside traditional public schools. The proposal, already adopted by conservative activists in more right-leaning states, never stood a serious chance of enactment in solidly blue California.

In the end, Loveless noted, the conservative challenger likely had too much ground to make up before Election Day. What’s more, he added, the complicated structure of education responsibility in state government — in which the governor calls the shots, usually in consultation with an education advisor and the legislature, while the state superintendent occupies something like a cheerleader position — did not signal much possibility of meaningful policy changes coming from the department. 

“The division of labor has never really been made clear to the public, in terms of if you’re unhappy with schools, whose feet do you hold to the fire? The answer is, it’s a centipede.”

����Ӱ��’s senior writer Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.

Today we partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project to organize a webinar in search of answers — a one-hour school board conversation about the politics driving the movement for educational equity.

The livestreamed conversation featured 74 Senior Writer Kevin Mahnken and elected school board members from some key battleground states: Ray A. Freeman of the Warrensville Heights (Ohio) City School District; Beatriz Lebron of the Rochester (New York) Public Schools Board of Education; Ty G. Jones of the Lancaster (Texas) Public Schools Board of Education; and Erika Mitchell of the Atlanta Public Schools Board of Education. PPI’s Curtis Valentine will moderate. 

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EDlection 2022

Read some of ����Ӱ��’s recent coverage of the 2022 issues, candidates and races that could shape education for years to come

• Turnout: More Parents Motivated to Vote in Midterms, Poll Finds
• Campaign Strategy: Heading into Midterms, GOP Finds All School Politics is Local
• Georgia: School Choice Blurring Party Lines in State Superintendent Race as Teachers’ Union Aims to Take Down Democrat
• Florida: In Reelection Bid, DeSantis Keeps Eye on Schools — and 2024

����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute recently convened an expert panel discussion about the upcoming election, particularly as it applies to the question of education priorities and parent voice. 

Curtis Valentine of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project tossed questions to T. Willard Fair of the National Urban League of Miami; Alisha Thomas Searcy, Democratic nominee for Georgia state superintendent; Christy Moreno of the National Parents Union; and PPI President Will Marshall.

Explore recent coverage of the intersection of education and politics from ����Ӱ��: 

• ‘Like a Gut Punch’: Advocates Reel as Manchin Compromise Abandons Pre-K

• Rash of New Polls Raises Red Flags for Democrats on Education

• Ed Dept. Launches ‘Unprecedented’ Parent Council

• Young Republicans, Old Democrats: Poll Points to Stark Generation Gaps on School Choice, Teachers’ Unions

In a recent breakdown, 74 Senior Writer Kevin Mahnken notes the polls “were released by interest groups representing opposite ends of the center-left public policy spectrum … but both point to an electorate that is increasingly skeptical of the Democratic education brand and open to Republican counter-proposals.” 

In particular, Mahnken observes, “Forty-seven percent [of respondents] said they trusted Republicans to handle public education today, compared with just 43 percent who trusted Democrats. And the numbers grew worse among parents, who favored Republicans by nine points.” 

Watch Mahnken’s video explainer of the findings — and click here to read his full coverage.

Maryland offers a rare enticement to Democrats in a year of ebbing popular support and forbidding electoral prospects — perhaps the party’s best chance to flip control over any state government. Popular Republican Gov. Larry Hogan is term-limited, spurring a parade of hopefuls to pile into the race before the primaries on July 19.

Among the 10 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination is John King, one of the most recognizable names in American education policy. A former teacher, charter school founder, and state superintendent of New York, King gained national prominence when then-President Obama named him U.S. secretary of education in 2016. After a stint in the world of , he launched his campaign last April with a heavy emphasis on his background in schools.

At the outset, King’s candidacy looked like the perfect meeting of man and moment: As governor, he could lean on decades of leadership experience to help pull Maryland schools out of the post-COVID doldrums. Even more importantly, his fluency in K-12 issues might prove especially useful now that the state has begun implementation of the , a colossal reform to education finance and accountability that has been gestating for years. It is hoped that the billions of dollars of new education funding included in the plan could set the course for systemic improvement in learning for all students.

In the year since his announcement, however, King’s candidacy hasn’t caught fire. With less than two months to go before the primary, that he lags behind competitors with greater local visibility and more to spend. A packed Democratic field has made it difficult for any favorite to emerge, and local prognosticators wide-open, but the former education secretary has struggled to brand himself in an environment where schools are off the front burner. Paradoxically, the very presence of the Blueprint reforms — which the next governor, Democrat or Republican, will be bound to enact — may be blunting what should be King’s advantage as a well-known authority on education. 

“Education is not an issue, for all practical purposes,” argued Kalman “Buzzy” Hettleman, a two-time Baltimore school board member and former Maryland Secretary of Human Resources. “The Democratic candidates are mostly all progressive…and there are no real differences of any sort among them. The Blueprint has sort of preempted education from being a significant issue.”

For his own part, King maintains that his brand of progressive leadership will win over Democratic voters and that the task of changing Maryland schools will require the expertise that he alone brings to the race.

“The Blueprint will lead to greater investment in our high-needs schools, expansion of pre-K, expansion of high-quality career and technical education, making all of our high-poverty schools community schools with wraparound services,” King said in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “There’s a ton of potential, but we need a governor who will actually follow through on that Blueprint, and that’s one of the core commitments of our campaign.”

But Kurt Schmoke, the president of the University of Baltimore and a former three-term mayor of the state’s largest city, wondered aloud whether any candidate could “make schools the focal point of the campaign.”

“Education is a governing issue, not a campaign issue,” Schmoke said. “That’s John’s problem.”

‘The Blueprint is now the agenda’

Few experts are as familiar with the needs of local schools as David Hornbeck, who served as state superintendent from 1976 to 1988 and now leads the nonprofit . The group was founded specifically to draw attention to the recommendations of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education, which eventually became the basis of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.

That panel (known locally as the Kirwan Commission after its chairman, former University of Maryland chancellor Brit Kirwan) was assembled in 2016 by the Maryland General Assembly to recommend necessary improvements to an education system that many saw as and . — that academic performance was generally unimpressive, significant achievement gaps divided students by race and class, and the state wasn’t meeting its financial obligations to poor children — were as unflattering as its proposed remedies were ambitious. 

“I consider the Blueprint to be one of the most dramatic, comprehensive, systemic pieces of education legislation ever in the United States,” said Hornbeck, who compared its significance to the advent of the first “common schools” in the early 19th century. “It has that potential, and whoever the next governor is has the challenge of making that happen and the opportunity to take Maryland not only straight to the top of performance in the United States but to compete favorably in the global context,” he added.

In legislative form, the Blueprint earmarks nearly $4 billion in state and local funding to lift the salaries of school staff, dramatically expand access to pre-kindergarten for three- and four-year-olds, improve career and technical education offerings, and provide supplemental support for schools and districts that enroll disproportionate numbers of students from low-income families. It also established a new regulatory body, the seven-member Accountability and Implementation Board, to evaluate schools’ progress and enforce new performance requirements, overruling the state department of education when necessary.

But it faced a rocky path to enactment. Gov. Hogan, who has pushed for tax cuts and waged several high-profile budget battles with the overwhelmingly Democratic General Assembly, when asked during his 2018 reelection campaign how he would raise the necessary revenue to fund the Kirwan initiatives. He controversially vetoed the Blueprint when it was passed in 2020, and even after the veto was overridden, critics complained that he in his 2022 budget; while its members have begun their work, they have resorted to drawing funds from newly-legalized sports betting revenues.

Hornbeck said that even after a half-decade of deliberation and legislating around the work of the Kirwan Commission, implementation would be “far harder than passing the bill itself.” The next governor, no matter their own positions or prior qualifications, will need to devote his administration to the tough challenge of holding districts’ feet to the fire and keeping the spotlight pointed on school improvement.  

“The worst thing that can happen, in my view, is for people to dust off their hands, say, ‘Well, we’ve handled that,’ and move on to something else,” Hornbeck said. “Yes, the Blueprint is now the agenda, it has hopefully taken the education policy question off the table, but it has not neutralized it by any means. If anything, it has defined the opportunity of leadership in this area.”

With opportunity comes political cost: specifically, the candidates’ ability to gain attention with their own policy proposals. Arguably no candidate is affected more than King, who might have otherwise staked out a niche as the education candidate. 

Schools form a thread running through King’s biography, the site of two generations of service to community and a proofpoint of what an energetic public sector can achieve. The son of a guidance counselor and a school principal, the former cabinet secretary was orphaned by the age of 12. He has that he might have ended up “dead or in prison” but for the influence of great teachers.

“Both my parents passed away when I was a kid, and schools saved my life,” King said. “I share that story in the context of making the case that government can be a transformative, positive force: We can have a pragmatic, progressive vision that moves the state forward, with government being that force for good in people’s lives.” 

But with the Blueprint flattening the distinctions between candidates in an already crowded field, it’s an open question whether Democratic voters are looking for a nominee with K-12 experience. A found that 17 percent of Maryland residents said they wanted the state government to prioritize education; but amid in Baltimore and the Washington, D.C., suburbs, an even greater number said they wanted more focus on public safety.

“There are many well-known, established candidates who have been on the political scene in Maryland for a very long time,” said Matt Gallagher, president of the Baltimore-focused , a local philanthropy. “And while public education is always one of the dominant issues of any campaign, particularly in Maryland, I would say that for a very significant part of this campaign…it probably hasn’t received the same level of attention as it has in prior cycles.”

A crowded field

Roughly 6 weeks remain in a campaign that has seen little polling during the course of the primary. And while several candidates, including King, have their statewide advertising purchases, most of the existing public opinion data indicates that the former education secretary has significant ground to make up.

The  found Comptroller Peter Franchot — a relative moderate who some believe would give the Democrats their best chance in a cycle that favors Republicans — leading all candidates with just 20 percent. He was followed by Wes Moore, a bestselling author who also founded a nonprofit to help high school graduates transition to college. Tom Perez, a former U.S. Labor Secretary and Democratic National Committee chair, held third place, and King was even further behind, winning over just 4 percent of the remaining respondents. A significant plurality of respondents to the survey, which was conducted jointly by the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore, were undecided.

Those figures, from one of the only independent polls conducted thus far, generally reflect the candidates’ relative positioning in other surveys. But they do clash somewhat with the contents of an internal King polling memo , which found King tied with Moore at 16 percent and behind only Franchot. That memo was produced by the Democratic polling firm , and has been  as a sign of growing momentum behind their cause

Party support is divided as starkly as Democratic voters. Perez, a longtime resident of heavily populated Montgomery County, has swept the endorsements of many of its Democratic leaders. Rushern Baker — the fourth-place candidate in the Sun poll and a well-known veteran of the 2018 gubernatorial campaign — is predictably popular in Prince George’s County, where he once served as county executive. Moore has the backing of the Maryland State Educators’ Association, 2018 nominee Benjamin Jealous, and even U.S. House Majority Leader (and Maryland native) Steny Hoyer; he is also a powerhouse fundraiser.

Gallagher, who previously served as chief of staff to Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley, noted that candidates who can boast long-running relationships with Democratic voters are likely favored.

“When you think about the voting block that Prince George’s and Montgomery County represent — and the fact that they’re going to be divided up by some pretty known quantities — it makes it tough to break through as a first-time candidate,” Gallagher said. “Lateral entry in statewide politics is very difficult, particularly when you’re trying to overcome other candidates whom hundreds of thousands of people have voted for before.”

Schmoke, who mulled several statewide runs after his tenure as Baltimore mayor, said that the time remaining before Democrats choose a nominee would be sufficient for King to make up ground — but only if he had an advertising budget to match.

“If he doesn’t have the resources, having a very low name recognition…is truly a problem,” warned Schmoke, who has yet to endorse any candidate but employed Moore as a mayoral intern in the late 1990s. “But if he can raise the money to do the media buys, he can become competitive.”

There is reason to think that the primary electorate is still substantially up for grabs. According to an April poll conducted on behalf of For the People MD, a political action committee supporting King, said they’d given the nomination battle little or no thought thus far. Meanwhile, almost two-thirds who said they preferred any candidate indicated that they were open to voting for someone else.

King said that he was the only candidate who had stumped in every Maryland county and that his field operation represented “the strongest grassroots campaign in this race.” He added that he patterned his own run after the successful candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who campaigned as an outsider in 2006 and became only the second African American ever elected governor of a U.S. state.

“If you look at that Patrick campaign, what he did was meet-and-greets, every day, to build that grassroots movement,” King said. “He’d been a federal official before, hadn’t been involved in Massachusetts state politics, but he built a grassroots movement around a set of ideas for how to move the state forward. That’s what we’re doing in Maryland.”

But Hettleman warned that Baker, Moore, and Perez were all dynamic, non-white candidates who brought their own political skills and organizational advantages to the table. 

“Each of those guys is formidable, and each comes with something of a constituency. John King is known only to education folks like me. He has no real, on-the-ground experience in Maryland, and I doubt if all the money in the world would change the dynamics. But he doesn’t have that either.”

]]> /article/new-research-points-to-loudoun-county-effect-when-parents-clash-over-ideology-kids-school-performance-suffers/ Thu, 05 May 2022 11:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=588847 Since the 2020 election, schools have emerged as some of the most contentious venues for American cultural discourse, with debates over the teaching of race, human sexuality, and U.S. history erupting into yelling matches and viral confrontations.

The political impact is increasingly seen in state and local elections, where school board members have faced a historic spate of recall attempts and gubernatorial candidates are familiarizing themselves with the tenets of critical race theory. But new research also suggests that adult disputes can have a measurable effect on how kids learn.

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In a study of student test scores, a political scientist reveals damage to math achievement following high-profile controversies around cultural issues in school districts. Fairly modest on average, the effects resulting from debates specifically focused on race and evolution are somewhat larger, and they may result from the strain imposed on educators by enervating fights over competing values.

Study author Vlad Kogan, a professor at Ohio State University, informally referred to the phenomenon as the “Loudoun County effect” — a reference that emerged last year in one of Virginia’s largest districts.

“Almost by definition, the more attention these [controversies] get, the less attention student learning receives,” said Kogan. “We could just be seeing the natural result of that: When adults are focused on other stuff, it’s the student learning that falls through the cracks.”

that Americans are, on balance, satisfied with the performance of their local schools since the beginning of the pandemic. But public discontentment has also repeatedly flared around issues like the inclusion of trans athletes in girls’ athletics, while experts have simultaneously documented steep learning loss resulting from COVID-related school closures.

The study, which has not yet undergone peer review, examines the outcomes of specific episodes featured in the , a publicly available inventory of culturally inflected disputes in K-12 schools. The database, maintained by the libertarian Cato Institute, details nearly 3,000 local controversies relating to “basic rights, moral values, or individual identities.” Those controversies appear in the Battle Map on the basis of local news coverage, and each case is grouped into one of nine broad categories, including sexuality, religion, race and ethnicity, and freedom of expression. 

To assess the academic impact of those incidents, Kogan relied on math and English test score data provided by the . A widely used research tool, SEDA allows comparisons between student performance in roughly 13,000 school districts around the country by indexing different state standardized test results to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

In all, Kogan gathered a sample of approximately 520 local controversies between 2010 and 2018, dropping from the sample any districts that saw more than one controversy over that span and any larger-scale controversies likely to affect all districts within a state. He then compared the trajectory of their academic performance before and after the high-profile battles against a group of control districts that did not experience similar uproars.

The results were mixed: Compared with the control group, school districts that experienced cultural controversies did not see a drop in English scores measured between the third and eighth grades. But math scores among those students did decline in the aftermath of such controversies by an average of .018 standard deviations. (A “standard deviation” is the statistical unit most often used to measure effects in education research; an effect of that size would generally be considered small.)

In the context of the SEDA data — which finds that student math scores increase by an annual average .39 standard deviations between third and eighth grade — that relative downward movement accounts for about 5 percent of a full year’s growth in the subject.

Digging deeper into the results, Kogan also found that the overall math slippage following was driven overwhelmingly by cultural controversies in two of the nine Battle Map categories: race and human origins (including disagreements over the teaching of evolution versus intelligent design), for which the negative impact was three to four times larger. Students of different socioeconomic backgrounds were equally affected, meaning that the scale of local achievement gaps was unaltered by political fights.

Disquietingly, even if political attention dissipates, the apparent academic setbacks don’t disappear quickly. Math achievement still showed evidence of decline in the affected school districts even four years later. 

Serotkin said it was “absolutely true” that his district had seen markedly higher attrition over the past two years, but argued that its cause couldn’t be known in an environment as chaotic as the pandemic.

“I have no idea whether that [turnover] is a result of the national political controversies that Loudoun has become a part of, or whether it’s just because of COVID.”

Dan Domenech, the longtime executive director of the American Association of School Superintendents, said that the most plausible cause for lower scores could simply be that a distracted local education establishment is necessarily a less effective one. Fractured goodwill and divided attention might lead to students getting the short end of the stick in terms of both oversight and learning resources.

“With functional school boards and administration, you can see that they’re providing teachers with the necessary materials — the technology, the books, the teacher training,” he argued. “The parallel to that on the negative side would be that if the board is in turmoil and involved in these culture wars, perhaps they’re not providing teachers with the resources that they need.”

Even so, Domenech pronounced himself skeptical of such a direct connection between controversy in school governance and results in the classroom. 

“From a political point of view, I’d love to be able to say, ‘Stop your fighting — you’re affecting kids’ learning.’ It would be great to be able to say that, but they’re going to ask, ‘Well, how’s that happening?’ And that’s a question I’d have a hard time answering.”

Kogan conceded that the effects measured in the study are comparatively slight, but added that test scores themselves are only the clearest outward manifestation of how political strife affects teaching and learning.

“There’s probably other dimensions of the school environment that are really important to students but that we can’t measure through test scores. So in some ways, this is just the iceberg tip of the underlying dynamics in the districts. The fact that test scores are dropping in non-trivial amounts suggests that there are changes in how the districts are run that really filter down to the classroom level.”

]]> /watch-live-at-1-p-m-et-today-a-conversation-about-joe-biden-charters-and-the-future-of-school-choice/ Thu, 28 Apr 2022 15:30:00 +0000 /?p=588454 Updated April 29

If the Biden Administration has its way, big changes could be in store for the nation’s charter schools.

Charter advocates say the proposed rules would make it harder to get new charters off the ground. What this means for school choice was front and center as ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute presented an April 28 panel discussion: “Tell Them We Are Rising: Parental Choice in America.”

Here’s a full replay of the conversation: 

The panel featured insights from Atasha James, CEO of Legends Public Charter School; Ebony Lee, of Charter School Growth Fund; Dr. Howard Fuller, Professor Emeritus at Marquette University; and Earl Martin Phalen, CEO of Phalen Leadership Academies. Curtis Valentine, co-director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project, moderated the conversation.

See more of our recent school choice and policy coverage below:

• Charter Schools: Charter Backers Blast Ed Dept. Proposal That Could Curb Sector’s Growth
  
• 74 Interview: Co-Founders of Nashville’s First New Charter School in 5 Years on Offering Dual Language to All Families
  
• Michigan: In Her Home State, Betsy DeVos is Closer than Ever to Realizing Her Dream of Private School Choice
  
• Public Opinion: Young Republicans, Old Democrats: Exclusive Poll Points to Stark Generation Gaps on School Choice, Teachers’ Unions
  
• Politics: Pushing for ‘School Choice,’ U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz Splits With Gov. Greg Abbott in His Endorsements for Texas House Runoffs

]]> /article/young-republicans-old-democrats-exclusive-poll-points-to-stark-generation-gaps-on-school-choice-teachers-unions/ Mon, 04 Apr 2022 11:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=587340 After years of conflict over COVID mitigation, controversial classroom subjects, and inclusion of trans athletes, education politics have seldom seemed more polarized between competing ideological extremes than they do in 2022. 

But according to public opinion data released Monday, Democrats and Republicans are actually internally divided by significant generation gaps in their attitudes toward certain aspects of education. Younger Democrats are much more likely to favor school choice than their older counterparts, pollsters found, while Millennial and Generation Z Republicans look more favorably on teachers’ unions than Baby Boomers.

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The polling was administered in March by the research group SocialSphere on behalf of Murmuration, a reform-oriented nonprofit. Roughly seven months ahead of a midterm election cycle that could shake up control of Congress and state governments, its findings strongly suggest that voters of all backgrounds see public education as a crucial issue after two years of COVID-related tumult. 

SocialSphere founder John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics and a former advisor to the Biden presidential campaign, said that he and his colleagues had detected significant, generational cleavages within the parties across a host of focus groups conducted with respondents from around the country.

“The new generations of voters, who have already played a significant role in the 2018 and 2020 elections, leave their partisanship at home when they go to vote and engage with schools,” Della Volpe said. “The old framework that has governed education politics really is not relevant in 2022.”

With a sample of nearly 7,000 registered voters, the research combines and weights a single national poll with additional surveys in nine states and Washington, D.C. Several — California, Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and Georgia — are holding gubernatorial elections this fall, while the nation’s capital will choose its mayor. 

shows President Biden’s party facing tough odds in November, with discontentment around the economy and foreign affairs driving voters toward a typical midterm flip; those trends were crystallized in last year’s surprising breakthrough by Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race after focusing intensely on pandemic school closures and the backlash against equity politics in schools. 

But when asked which party’s education values aligned most closely with their own, just 34 percent of SocialSphere respondents chose the GOP, compared with 44 percent who sided with Democrats. Another 22 percent said they were unsure. In state-level polls, Democrats were favored on education among voters in California (where they led on the issue by a 19-point margin), Colorado (17 points), Georgia (seven points), New Jersey (26 points), Texas (10 points), and Washington, D.C. (66 points); Republicans held an advantage in Louisiana and Missouri (both by five-point margins), while responses were within the margin of error in both Indiana and Tennessee.

Perhaps more notable than the clash between the parties are the fissures within each. The controversy over critical race theory in K-12 classrooms has acted as the main dividing line between left and right during the Biden era, with outraged parents in multiple states launching dozens of recall efforts against school board members over the teaching of controversial topics like race, gender, and sexuality. Some political experts see the emergence of anti-CRT activist groups like Moms for Liberty as reflecting a populist wave that could both deliver Republican victories this fall and change curricula in classrooms going forward.

Surprisingly, the issue may split Republicans more on the basis of age than it unites them in ideology. Asked whether school districts should teach “all aspects of American history,” including the legacy of slavery and racism, 59 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans said yes, while 28 percent favored banning such lessons. Among Republicans in the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, just 44 percent supported teaching about these subjects, while 46 percent said the practice should be banned if it made white students uncomfortable. The resulting gap between the party’s oldest and youngest voters stands at 33 percentage points. 

Those findings jibe with those of other national polls, which have generally shown widespread support for teaching about the persistence of racism throughout U.S. history. , however, that responses to the issue can vary greatly depending on how questions are phrased.

Teachers’ unions, typically viewed with suspicion on the right, engendered similarly disparate responses. Millennial and Gen Z Republicans gave local unions a favorability rating of plus-15 percent (44 percent favorable versus 29 percent unfavorable), while members of Generation X rated them minus-10 (32 percent favorable versus 42 percent unfavorable.) But those over the age of 57, falling into the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, were much more hostile (25 percent favorable versus 55 percent unfavorable.) While political perceptions can change as young people come to be more aligned with the positions of their favored political party, Della Volpe argued that “nothing in this data” suggests that the views of younger Republican voters will come to resemble those of their parents and grandparents.

Age gaps were apparent on the left as well. The idea of school choice — defined for respondents by SocialSphere as “​​the freedom to choose the educational environment that serves [one’s] children best, regardless of financial ability or home address” — received support from 61 percent of the youngest Democratic voters, but just 38 percent of the oldest. Overall, Democrats above the age of 57 viewed school choice slightly unfavorably (38 percent support versus 44 percent opposition). By contrast, the national Democratic Party has spent much of the last decade distancing itself from alternatives to traditional public schools, which it largely embraced under Presidents Clinton and Obama. Democratic officials at the state and local levels have attempted to curb the growth of charter schools, while the party’s 2020 platform called for “measures to increase accountability” from the sector.

Della Volpe, who recently about the political emergence of Generation Z, said that his past surveys of people in their 20s revealed a cohort that prizes choice and agency above all.

“We see a group that is less supportive of school choice, and they’re aging out of the electorate,” he said. “They’re being replaced by others who value choice, specifically when it comes to their children.”

Pandemic fallout

More broadly, the SocialSphere data indicates that voters across partisan, racial, and gender demographics count public education among the most important political issues of the day. Fifty-two percent of all respondents rated K-12 schools as “very important,” with majorities in all but three state-level surveys saying likewise. That represents a larger share than those rating immigration, climate change, and the protection of traditional values very important, though somewhat lower than inflation (73 percent), the economy (73 percent), health care (67 percent), crime (61 percent), and foreign policy (56 percent). 

Somewhat larger shares of African Americans and Hispanics characterized education as very important (60 percent and 58 percent, respectively) than whites (49 percent). But when asked whether Americans “need to do more as a nation” to ensure that all children receive a high-quality education, the margins among members of different racial groups were virtually identical. Some 60 percent of Republicans agreed with that sentiment, along with 72 percent of Democrats.

The poll’s results also indicate significant, though possibly divergent, support for changes to the U.S. education system. Fifty-three percent of voters, and 55 percent of parents of school-aged children, agreed that the post-COVID recovery was “the time to begin working on the big ideas and changes necessary to improve education,” while 38 percent of voters said they’d prefer to “get back to normal.” But while Democrats agreed on the need for new reforms by a 60-31 split, only a slight plurality of Republicans did (49-43). 

Emma Bloomberg, the founder of Murmuration, said in an interview that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were likely behind the public’s willingness to embrace new approaches. Dissatisfaction with schools’ performance, especially with regard to lengthy closures, may have convinced parents that extensive new measures would need to be taken to help their children catch up from two years of lost learning.

“I can’t think what else it could have been, other than this pandemic offering a window into those classrooms — there’s nothing like actually seeing how your kids are or aren’t learning — and then the bungled reopening by so many districts…has just left families feeling like the school system didn’t prioritize their children,” said Bloomberg.

Bloomberg said she was heartened to see bipartisan willingness to expend greater national resources in pursuit of a better K-12 system, adding that she hoped younger partisans would vote their beliefs in the coming months. The eldest daughter of one of America’s most prominent advocates for school choice, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, she said that Millennials’ relative detachment from political orthodoxy could make them “more reasonable and attuned to the impacts of policies on communities” — if they actually made it to the ballot box.

“Young voters get a lot of hype, and it’s always ‘Will they or won’t they turn out?’ This moment really does feel like…an opportunity to engage younger generations. If they believe deeply in the importance of a high-functioning public education system, that gives me hope not only for this cycle, but certainly for the cycles ahead.”

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