Judge Royce Lamberth, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that the council has an organized structure, a “fixed” membership and a purpose — to “gather information or advice from parents” and “inform the department’s approach to educational policy” — that would qualify it as a formal government advisory group. In that case, it would have to post a public notice, announce meetings and have an official charter.

But he said he couldn’t make a final ruling for either side until he knows whether the members will give their own individual views or offer consensus opinions as a group.

“None of the documents in the record indicate what is supposed to happen at council meetings, and defendants represent that there is still no plan for what is supposed to happen,” he said.

For now, he has ordered both the plaintiffs in the case and the Biden administration to offer more details on that point. 

But even if Lambert allows the council to proceed without any changes, it may have less power than some parents originally hoped.

During an August hearing in the case, Chris Edelman, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, argued that the council doesn’t have to meet the requirements of the advisory committee law because it will act more as a “sounding board” for the department.

Some parent leaders appointed to the council thought they’d have more influence. 

“It is different from what I thought would happen,” said Matthew John Rodriguez, a Cuban immigrant in Schaumburg, Illinois, picked to represent the nonprofit National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement.

The department announced the parent council in June, and parent leaders tapped to participate thought they’d start meeting over the summer to prepare for the new school year. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said the council would “work together to serve the best interest of students and ensure they have the academic and mental health support they need to recover from the pandemic and thrive in the future.” But the plaintiffs — , , and argued that the department did not follow procedures in establishing the group and picked organizations only supportive of the Democrats’ agenda. 

Nicki Neily, president of Parents Defending Education — a conservative watchdog group opposed to teaching and curriculum focused on race and gender — characterized the judge’s comments as a partial victory. 

“We are gratified by the District Court’s decision that the council fulfills three of the four requirements of [the act], and are confident that the court-ordered discovery will clearly answer the one outstanding question, vindicating our position,” she said in a statement.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union — one of the organizations asked to appoint members to the council — said there’s “not enough to go on” to make a comment on Lamberth’s opinion. But she noted that the judge did rule that , a conservative nonprofit led by former Trump administration officials, doesn’t have enough “standing to challenge the council’s ideological balance” because it is not an education-focused organization.

Even if the council doesn’t get to officially advise the department, Rodriquez said that he still thinks the members will bring valuable perspectives. He has a 27-year-old son who received special education services and is raising a 12-year-old grandson who just entered junior high school. 

“Our experiences, stories and information we can provide might be able to guide [and] influence how they think,” he said “or frame things to make their decisions.”

The delay is significant, experts say, because points to a direct correlation between the closures and lost learning.

Of the nation’s 25 largest districts, those that were in remote learning for at least half of the 2020-21 school year have spent an average of roughly 15% of their relief funds from the American Rescue Plan. 

compiled by the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University shows that Los Angeles Unified, where schools stayed closed until April 2021, didn’t start spending any of its $2.5 billion until this fall. And the Chicago Public Schools, which reopened the same month, has spent just over 6% of almost $1.8 billion.

“What opportunities might we be missing for kids to catch up?” asked Jana Wilcox Lavin, CEO of Opportunity 180 in Las Vegas, where the Clark County School District never fully reopened that year. The nonprofit helped gather ideas from the community on how to use the funds, but the district has so far spent less than a quarter of it. Parents, she said, “can’t point to where they see that money showing up in the classroom.”

The dire consequences of school closures were reinforced last week when the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed sharp declines for 9-year-olds in reading and math since 2020.

From the moment the U.S. Department of Education began distributing $122 billion in relief funds in March 2021, officials emphasized the need to act swiftly to help students make up lost ground.

“It’s hard to argue with the importance of addressing lost instructional time for all students,” Roberto Rodriguez, the department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “We want to see these dollars put to work now.”

But some districts haven’t spent the first dollar, much less the minimum 20% specifically spelled out for academic recovery.

The sluggish pace has caught the attention of House Republicans, who last month sent Education Secretary Miguel Cardona asking how districts are using the funds to “remedy the acute learning losses brought on by prolonged school closures.” Experts expect the tempo to pick up this fall, but education groups are with the department to stretch the to the end of 2026.

The disconnect is frustrating for parents and local politicians seeking evidence the money is being used to boost student performance.

The reopened on time in the fall of 2020. But as in many urban districts, high percentages of Black and Hispanic families So far, the district has spent just 6.8% of its $804 million.

“We’re going to get to the end of the next two years and nothing is going to look different for the school system,” said Sue Deigaard, a Houston school board member. “We’re not, so far, demonstrating consistency of any result, nor do I even see the dollars being spent in a way that looks particularly strategic and targeted.”

She points to from the 2021-22 school year showing that third graders not only didn’t reach the district’s literacy goal, but performance actually dropped between winter and spring.

District leaders insist they’re not just sitting on their hands. Projects have been bogged down in supply chain delays and staff vacancies have been difficult to fill. Changes in leadership have also taken a toll: Among the 25 largest districts, 16 have lost at least one superintendent during the pandemic.

While superintendent turnover might not change a district’s spending plan, it can have a “cascading impact,” said David Rosenberg, a partner at Education Resource Strategies, which advises districts on budget issues. 

Staff vacancies and burnout can drag down even the “highest-functioning and most stable district teams,” he said. “Layer in superintendent turnover and potential turnover at the level below them and the work gets even more complicated.”

Houston, which superintendent Millard House II has led for about a year, is one district experiencing such churn. 

Click here to view full chart.

August Hamilton, special assistant to House, said he’s grateful for the federal funds. But he doesn’t hold out much hope students will make rapid gains.

“I think we have to understand that you have first graders who never went to pre-K, never went to kindergarten — a first grader who’s now being asked to take a [state] test in 3rd grade,” he said. “That is going to be the challenge of this work. It’s a long time to have virtual instruction.”

That’s one reason, he said, why the district moved $6.1 million in relief funds to aid the academic recovery of its neediest students this year. Officials said they no longer needed that money for masks and other COVID mitigation strategies.

‘Backfilling’ budgets

To pinpoint spending patterns, ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ reviewed relief fund data from the and checked it against state figures. Districts provided details on when they fully reopened five days a week in 2020-21 — if they did. And the , led by Brown University economist Emily Oster, offered additional data on the extent to which districts remained open, closed or in hybrid mode.

Districts generally haven’t made it easy to track how the money is being spent. Some states, like California,  how their districts are spending the 20% targeted specifically for learning loss. But most do not. 

New York state doesn’t post any information on relief fund spending. The Georgetown lab had to use a public records request to get any data, according to director Marguerite Roza. That showed that New York City, the nation’s largest school system, had spent none of its $4.8 billion. A spokesman for the district, which is tied up in  over its budget, declined to give an actual figure and called it a “moving number.” 

The halting pace ignores what researchers say is needed to lift performance in high-poverty districts that spent most of 2020-21 online. The authors of a May said districts need to spend all of their American Rescue Plan funds on extra instruction to help students recover — not just the 20% the law requires. The longer they wait, the authors wrote, the greater the “implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality.”

Districts closed the longest have also seen the most enrollment loss. On average, enrollment in those districts has fallen by 4.4%, according to from the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Because state funding is tied to enrollment, some are now “backfilling” budgets with relief dollars to make up for the losses, said Roza. In fact, she expects spending partly for that reason. 

“In the ones that were closed longer, it’s been harder to get kids to come back,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. She points to districts such as the Seattle Public Schools, which plugged federal funds into its last year, and the , which described its use of relief dollars as an effort to “ensure continuity of existing programs and services.” 

In Los Angeles, enrollment fell almost 6% this year and is expected to drop below a year from now. The district waited to dip into its $2.5 billion because it still all it received from the first two rounds of federal aid, said board member Tanya Ortiz-Franklin. 

Statewide, California schools were among the last to bring students back in person. Unlike some governors, California’s Gavin Newsom didn’t order schools to reopen. 

Click here to view full chart.

Several districts in the state never resumed in-person instruction that spring, and some have yet to spend any of their funds from the March 2021 bill. They include the Simi Valley Unified School District, where Ron Todo, associate superintendent of business and facilities, said the district is hanging on to its $13.8 million for now. The deadlines to spend the earlier relief funds are more pressing, and the newest grant, he said, has a “longer shelf life.” 

Roza has heard such explanations before. But Congress designed the third round of funding to be different from earlier relief bills: It appropriated almost twice as much as the other packages combined and specifically required districts to address learning loss.

Districts “should be well into” spending it by now, she said.

Under the legislation, districts have to obligate the funds by September 2024, and have through March 2026 to spend them. But Roza asked, “If the money was intended to get kids back on track, why wait two years?”

Education advocacy groups, like AASA, the School Superintendents Association, want the department to extend that deadline until the end of 2026. 

“I definitely have concerns about spending it all in time — not just for the practicality of getting it done,” Ortiz-Franklin said, “but also strategically to best serve our students’ short- and long-term academic and social-emotional recovery.”

Extending the timeline has political ramifications, Roza said during a recent .

“The accusation will be that we didn’t really need it, or at least if you needed it, you’re not even spending it on the kids that were impacted in the pandemic because they got older and they graduated,” she said. 

In Simi Valley, Todo said his district plans to use the funds this school year for additional elementary counselors, social workers and intervention teachers to help students who have fallen behind. But a plan to get math teachers to work an extra class period met with resistance. 

“We have teachers who have survived the pandemic, and they are too tired to be in the classroom an extra hour,” he said. Despite the exhaustion, Todo added, he sees a benefit to the current spending deadline: “When there is at least a healthy sense of urgency, we push ourselves a little harder.”

In federal court Wednesday, Chris Edelman, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, said it would likely be mid-September before the meets “to better understand how schools and students are coping as they adjust back to the classroom.”

And that’s only if Judge Royce Lamberth, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, allows the council to proceed without having to start from scratch. 

On Wednesday, Lamberth denied the plaintiffs’ request to put an immediate stop to the council’s activities, promising to rule before the group meets on whether it violated federal law. 

Under , there are three ways to establish a federal advisory committee — by statute, presidential order or through a federal agency. The agency involved has to place a notice in the Federal Register, appoint an administrator to the committee and establish a charter outlining the group’s purpose and how often it will meet. The department hasn’t taken those steps.

The department had planned to hold the first meeting with parent representatives this summer. Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, one of the groups involved, expected it in July.

After issuing an initial press release, the department put up a second that included an email to get updates on the council’s work. The notice said the council “meets to discuss how children are recovering,” prompting the plaintiffs, three conservative organizations, to argue the department was violating the law. To this date, however, there have not been any meetings.

The lawsuit, filed July 6, argues that the council violated the law’s requirement that groups giving agencies input on potential rules or legislation be “fairly balanced.” Cardona, they contend, chose organizations that would fall in line with the department’s agenda.

“The department chose organizations 
 based on their ability to develop camaraderie so that they would give good advice as a group,” said Christopher Mills, an attorney for the plaintiffs — the , a conservative nonprofit led by former Trump administration officials, , a political action committee in Loudoun County, Virginia, and , a watchdog group opposed to teaching and curriculum focused on race and gender.

But Edelman countered that the group will function more as a “sounding board” for the department, that membership will change over time and that the council won’t weigh in on specific policy.

In the initial announcement, Cardona described the council as an effort to ensure students “have the academic and mental health support they need to recover from the pandemic and thrive in the future.” For Cardona, who initially faced criticism for making public comments that emphasized the pandemic’s burden on educators, the council offers a chance for parents to have a more visible role as the department attempts to rebuild trust between schools and families.

“To have the leadership of the secretary’s office leaning in with good intentions is 
 an epic win for all parents across the country,” said Ashara Baker, a mother of a first grader at a Rochester, New York, charter school who was appointed to the council by the National Parents Union. As far as getting the group started, she said, “The sooner the better.”

She called the lawsuit “a distraction.”

Other committees challenged 

The department currently has , according to its website, including the President’s Advisory Commission on Hispanic Prosperity and the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Tuesday’s Federal Register, for example, included a meeting for the National Advisory Council on Indian Education.

Education officials aren’t the only members of the Biden administration who have faced challenges related to advisory committee membership. A former member of an Environmental Protection Agency committee , arguing that the agency removed industry representatives in an attempt to “sideline anyone who might dissent from the president’s climate-change agenda.” They argued that the committee wasn’t “fairly balanced” as the law requires.

In March, a district court judge denied the plaintiff’s request to stop the committee from meeting.

The Trump administration, however, had to disband a after a federal judge sided with an environmental advocacy group in a 2018 lawsuit. The plaintiffs argued that potential profiteers from the import of hides, heads and tusks from Africa stacked the committee.

The makeup of the education department’s parent council is a key focus of the current lawsuit. Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, expressed , calling the chosen groups “Biden fans” who are “glaringly out-of-step with the majority of frustrated parents who have been showing up in huge numbers to school board meetings across red and blue America.”

Sanzi and Rodrigues have over the Department of Justice’s warning last fall about against school officials and board members.

It’s unclear whether Parents Defending Education or Fight for Schools and Families wants to be part of the parent council. Sanzi told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ in an email that she didn’t think the group would address any parent concerns over curriculum.

But the groups on the list — including Fathers Incorporated, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Military Family Association — won’t necessarily determine what the parents have to say, said Patience Peabody, executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, which supports family engagement efforts, especially in the District of Columbia schools.

“The member organizations are among the many voices. They are the facilitators. They are bringing the real stories and voices to the table,” she said, adding that the council “only works if that happens.”

Baker, for example, is a charter school parent, but said a lot of families have children in both charter and traditional schools. After remote learning, she said her daughter is still “struggling with letters” and hasn’t begun to recognize entire words. Her charter school didn’t provide tutoring, so she paid for it herself. 

“Whether it’s a charter, or district or private school,” she said, “we’re all doing our best and doing what’s going to get our kids across the finish line.”

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday announced — a partnership with five leading organizations to bring information and research about out-of-school-time programs together into one “centralized, readily available location.” The department will seek applications from an outside organization for a $3-$4 million contract in next year’s budget to run the initiative. 

“We’re at a pivotal point In America’s recovery,” Cardona said during an event in Washington D.C. involving students, education officials and advocates. “If we can reopen school during a pandemic, we can make sure students have access to quality programs.”

The event coincided with National Summer Learning Week, but Cardona didn’t offer specific details on how districts already running this year’s summer programs can benefit.

Coming a week after Cardona joined with White House officials to announce a new effort to recruit 250,000 , the announcement is the latest from the administration to emphasize urgency in addressing learning loss and students’ disconnection from school during the pandemic. According to the department’s release, the effort builds on two decades of funding for afterschool and summer learning programs in low-income schools through the 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants.The department seeks $1.3 billion in the fiscal year 2023 budget for 21st Century funding, an increase of $50 million over 2021 and 2022.

“We know that our young people have lost contact with friends, teachers and mentors over the past two years,” Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, said in a statement. The organization is part of the effort, along with the Afterschool Alliance, the National Comprehensive Center, the National League of Cities and the National Summer Learning Association.

The new initiative can be helpful if it advises states how to use existing federal grant programs to pay for summer and afterschool when American Rescue Plan funding dries up, said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, a senior policy analyst at Education Reform Now. This week, the think tank released on how states are already using relief funds for summer school. 

Experts could also help states and districts evaluate which programs improve students’ academic performance and mental health outcomes so they can “phase out less effective programming,” he said.

But Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank that has tracked districts’ responses to the pandemic, said the additional funding seems small compared to the need to better understand what works. And it comes when the Institute for Education Sciences, the department’s research arm, already doesn’t have enough funding to meet the demand. 

“It feels a bit like a ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ moment for the feds,” she said. “Our students are facing extraordinary needs. Now is the time for a serious and strategic commitment of resources from the federal government for research and development.” 

The Center’s research also suggests districts are doing less this year, not more. Its showed a drop in districts planning summer programming, except for students with disabilities. And in June, the Afterschool Alliance released showing that just one in five afterschool providers has received relief funds.

Last summer, many districts also struggled to hire enough staff to meet the demand, despite pay incentives. And the Afterschool Alliance survey showed two-thirds of program leaders were worried they wouldn’t have enough staff this year. 

Even when districts plan to serve students with disabilities, they often end up cutting back. A Buffalo, New York-area district reduced for special education students because of staff shortages, and the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland shifted its program for about 175 students because of a lack of staff.

Some parents also question whether districts have done enough outside of the school year to move students back up to grade level. Alicia Aleman, who has three children in California’s Fresno Unified School District, enrolled them in last year’s summer program.

“They offer programs for math or science, but they’re only making cookies. They’re watching movies,” she said, adding that low-income families don’t have choices because they are working and “need someone to take care of the kids during the summer.” 

This year, she tried to sign up for a program through the city, but “all the spots are taken by the time the flyers go to the community.”

Fresno Unified, however, has significantly expanded summer programs with $40 million in state funding, boosting enrollment from about 4,000 at a limited number of sites last year to roughly 15,000 this year at every elementary school and middle school. The district is contracting with a range of nonprofit organizations and colleges to offer sports and arts camps, with tutoring built in. 

The funding “allows us to remove historical barriers [like] making kids get on the bus and go across town,” said Jeremy Ward, the district’s assistant superintendent for college and career readiness. “My biggest fear is that we consider this work as a flash in the pan — we influse money for a year or two and then we pull back.”

“We can’t mobilize fast enough,” said Robert Balfanz, an education professor running the new National Partnership for Student Success, housed at Johns Hopkins University. “There are still some lost opportunities.” 

But he said the effort’s connection to the White House and AmeriCorps — a national agency that recruits volunteers for community service — is central to overcoming staffing challenges that have plagued efforts by schools and nonprofit organizations to scale up tutoring efforts since the beginning of the pandemic. 

“Everybody has been trying to solve this in their own little microworld,” he said. 

Working with colleges, large employers like Starbucks and Target, and established nonprofit organizations serving youth, Balfanz said, should develop the Partnership into the national tutoring corps that experts have been recommending for several years. AmeriCorps will also spend $20 million to help organizations recruit and train tutors.

In March, President Joe Biden encouraged Americans to “sign up” as volunteers and mentors for students struggling to recover from school closures. The new initiative follows recent showing that learning declines among students were worse in districts slower to return to in-person learning. “What I’m asking for is a level of urgency unlike any level of urgency we’ve had,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said last week during the virtual announcement, joined by White House Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice. They stressed that districts should be using American Rescue Plan funds for academic recovery through high-quality tutoring, afterschool and summer programs — and if they aren’t, they should start. 

The law “requires that 20% be spent on learning loss. But it is increasingly clear that for many districts, that guesstimate was way too low,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, who has argued that districts make students’ academic progress their “north star” for allocating funds. 

Tennessee is among the states directing relief money toward tutoring. — which stands for Accelerating Literacy and Learning — began in the 2020-21 school year and now involves over 80 districts, which provide matching funds to participate. 

Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn said the state has learned lessons from implementation that could benefit the national effort. The state program, she said, contributed to recent showing that performance in English language arts among elementary students is back to pre-pandemic levels, with students making greater gains than they have in five years. Gaps in math due to learning loss are also shrinking. 

But at the district level, students performed better when tutoring was offered during the school day instead of before or after school, and when tutors were paid educators instead of volunteers. Some districts, she said, hire “surplus” educators who don’t yet have a classroom position, retired teachers and those still in teacher preparation programs.

“There is a general misunderstanding that you can just find a body, put them in a classroom and anybody can tutor,” Schwinn said. That’s one reason why she said it’s not “super realistic” to have a “meaningful” national program in place for fall.

Roza added that districts have already approved their budgets for the 2022-23 school year and changing them will require school board approval. 

As part of last week’s announcement, the Education Department launched showing how other states are using the funds. And building on efforts from and , also at Georgetown, the National Center for Education Statistics will track the extent to which schools are spending the money on tutoring and other academic enrichment programs.

“If your children aren’t getting the support they need, you will have the tools to make sure your principal or superintendent or mayor hear about it,” Cardona said. “Funding alone is not going to get it done. If anything, you could waste it. We could be looking back five years from now and saying, ‘Did we do everything we could have done?’ ”

In the American Rescue Plan, Congress set aside more than $1 billion each for summer and afterschool programs, and the department has encouraged districts to use relief funds to enlist community-based organizations to help students catch up and reconnect to school. 

With summer programs already in progress, Cardona urged districts to find a balance between engaging programs that interest students and ensuring that tutoring efforts are tightly connected to what students learn in school. 

Since 2020, the administration has urged districts to use relief funds to help students make up for lost learning over the summer. A new from Education Reform Now highlights how states have fared. It shows that 15 states require districts to join with outside groups to serve students over the summer. But just 10 states have requirements on how long such programs should be and how many hours they should devote to academic instruction.

Arkansas, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi and Washington, D.C. require programs to have one staff member for every 15 students, a ratio backed up by research. The report noted that state officials worry that adding dosage and staffing requirements would discourage programs from applying for grant funds in light of “widespread reporting” on vacancies, turnover and stressed-out staff. 

Locating the Partnership at Johns Hopkins, where Balfanz runs the Everyone Graduates Center and is a respected researcher on dropout prevention and improving school climate, increases the focus on using proven strategies. 

“This is not just somebody helping you with homework every third Sunday. What we need is really high-intensity tutoring. It’s multiple connections with your mentor in a week,” Balfanz said at last week’s event. “If you’re only showing up once every 21 days 
 you’re not there to give support in the moment when it’s needed. That’s really what turns the kid around when they know there’s someone there that has their back.”

Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance — one of the organizations involved in the Partnership — said working with AmeriCorps is also a “terrific way” to address the facing afterschool programs. 

Michael Smith, CEO of AmeriCorps, has the same expectations for school districts.

“We know that this partnership will lead to an increased pipeline of educators,” he said, noting City Year, Teach for America and the College Advising Corps as proven examples. “When young people are working in the schools, working next to children, they get a spark. They get ignited, and the data is showing us that they stay 
 in the education system.”

But first his staff had to respond to the “pandemic’s aftershocks,” including student learning gaps and parents’ loss of work. Now with 106 students — 99% of them Black and Latino — the school has leaned on a $1 million grant from the federal Charter Schools Program for new technology, curriculum materials and furniture.

Schools like Long’s could have a much harder time getting off the ground if the Biden administration’s plans to revamp the $440 million grant program become final. The U.S. Department of Education’s would give preference to charters that districts view as potential partners and discourage new applications in communities with voluntary integration efforts. And if districts are losing enrollment — as they are in D.C. — new charter schools might not be well-received. 

“As a Black male who leads a single-site school in Washington D.C., this is extremely concerning,” Long said. 

The rule could significantly alter a program that has given a boost to almost 4,100 existing charter schools — roughly 53%, according to the department. like KIPP and Success Academy Charter Schools are among the grantees.

Nina Rees, CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the funds help launch new charters, which typically don’t receive state and local funding until they begin admitting students. The program is especially important for “aspiring school leaders of color” who might not have financial backing from a foundation, she said. 

With nearly 65% of charters being single-site schools, Rees added, “these proposed regulations are a direct attack on new schools like this.”

Congress has taken note of the backlash. North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, ranking member of the House education committee, said in a statement that the “administration is manufacturing authority it doesn’t have to add unworkable requirements to these charter school grants.” On Monday, the department to comment on the rule from Wednesday to next Monday after six senators for more time. In a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, the department said the “administration recognizes that there is a place for high-quality public charter schools and supports continuing important investments.”

The debate comes amid a period of change and growth for the charter sector. Last school year, charters saw their largest jump in enrollment in six years — a 7% increase. Initial reports from states such as Alabama and Massachusetts show growth is continuing.

At the same time, Democrats have soured on charters in recent years after a long period in which they enjoyed bipartisan support. 

“The Biden administration breaks that tradition,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center. “It is clear that they looked around and decided that hewing closely to the wishes of their political patrons in the teachers unions was the way to go. Since they cannot kill us directly, they must resort to attacks on start-up funding.”

Advocates say the department didn’t consult with them before writing the regulation. North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr’s letter noted that the department turned down his staff’s request to meet. 

“It doesn’t feel like charter school leaders are a valued part of the process,” said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, which promotes efforts to create charters that are more racially balanced. As written, the regulations would “make it very challenging for even a diverse charter to get approval if enrollment is declining in a district,” she said.

She pointed to Prospect Schools in Brooklyn, New York, which opened in September 2020, and Atlas Public Schools in St. Louis, which opened last fall. Both designed their schools to reflect the make-up of their communities, but because enrollment is declining in their , the schools “would have had extreme difficulty in being approved” today, she said.

The department stressed that U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona spoke last year at the National Charter Schools Conference and has gathered input from charter leaders throughout the pandemic. 

One organization the department heard from was The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank that in 2019 for ways the program could promote integration. Halley Potter, a senior fellow at Century and a co-author of the report, said she had a call with the education department before the draft of the rule was issued March 14.

Her report cited showing that charters are more likely than district schools to have student bodies that are more than half Black or Hispanic. In some pockets of the country, however, charter schools are more likely to draw higher-income, white families away from district schools, contributing to racial segregation. Studies have borne this out in and .

Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, said in communities with long-standing integration efforts, charters often “operate as an exit strategy for white families who are resistant  — consciously or subconsciously — to more diverse environments.”

Potter called the department’s proposal an effort to make sure charter schools “fit in with the context of [their] local community.” 

“I really hope that we could see a broad base of charter supporters getting on board with this,” she said.

‘A lifeline’

The , begun in 1994 under the Clinton administration, is a competitive grant that provides funding for start-up expenses. Smaller networks have also used funds to add more schools. When Uplift Education, based in Texas, expanded from Dallas to Fort Worth, where it would serve another 2,000 to 3,000 students, the federal grant program supported planning, expanding staff and family engagement efforts, said Rich Harrison, formerly the network’s chief academic officer. 

Under the proposed rules, states applying for the funds would have to prove that there is “sufficient demand” for charters, including support from the local community and evidence that district schools have more students than they can serve. 

In districts with declining enrollment — a trend across most urban districts nationwide — new charters would face a tougher time getting approved, said Harrison, now CEO of Lighthouse Community Charter Schools in Oakland. 

“The anti-charter rhetoric in Oakland is at an all time high,” Harrison said, after the district voted in February to close seven schools. 

Community impact

Charter opponents argue that the grant program has been a vehicle for and financially benefiting for-profit entities. In a commentary for , Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, called the new requirements “sensible rules of the road” and downplayed the rule’s impact. 

In a comment to the department, she pointed, for example, to Torchlight Academy, a North Carolina school and grant recipient operated by for-profit Torchlight Academy Schools. The state voted in March to revoke the school’s charter, citing alleged that benefited the family operating the school. The charter is appealing the state’s decision, saying it has cut ties with the family.

The proposal would require schools receiving the grant funds to pledge that they won’t contract with a for-profit organization to assume most or all of the operation of the school. Grantees would also have to make those agreements public.

Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, said he appreciates the focus on transparency. But he and other charter advocates have problems with a requirement that states applying for the funds conduct a “community impact analysis.” Such a process would have to take “into account the student demographics of the schools from which students are, or would be, drawn to attend the charter school.” 

Rausch said local authorizers, not state officials, should be responsible for determining whether there is adequate demand for a charter school. He added that the department is sending a mixed message.

“You can’t simultaneously say that it’s a good thing to listen to communities and families and then federally impose specific kinds of schools on communities,” he said.

The education department would give preference to charter applications in which current and former educators are deeply involved in leadership and development of the schools. Another priority for the department is that districts and charter operators work together on issues such as joint teacher training or transportation. At least one district school would have to provide a letter in support of working with the charter. 

Rausch said that provision gives the districts leverage, adding that charter demand has increased because they “meet the needs of families” who feel their children aren’t being well-served in traditional schools.

“We are all in favor of collaborative efforts, but it’s got to go both ways,” he said. “We don’t want us versus them. That is old politics.”

When her husband recently retired after 22 years, Andujar began to rethink her own career path and recalled her years volunteering in her children’s schools. She became an educational assistant in a Spanish dual-immersion program in the Clarksville-Montgomery schools, northwest of Nashville.

“I wasn’t planning to become a teacher, but I noticed how a teacher could transform a student’s life,” she said.

Now she’s part of an effort to transform educator preparation with the nation’s first apprenticeship in teaching approved by the U.S. Department of Labor. A partnership between the school district and Austin-Peay State University, the is a “grow-your-own” model in which districts recruit candidates from within their communities and give them extensive on-the-job experience before they take over their own classrooms. With the nation’s teachers far less racially diverse than the public school students they instruct, many consider the approach an effective way to recruit more Black and Hispanic educators. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona highlighted grow-your-own programs in a visit to Tennessee State University last week. He was instrumental in getting Labor Secretary Martin Walsh’s support for the apprenticeship, according to Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn.

He visited Tennessee State University to learn more about its own with Metro Nashville Public Schools and told that it’s important to “make sure that teachers aren’t working three jobs to make ends meet.”

With the nation currently fixed on staffing shortages and the persistent challenges of hard-to-fill positions, efforts to strengthen the teacher “pipeline” are among policymakers. Over 20 years ago, a major study of a grow-your-own program for paraprofessionals showed that participants were more likely than new teachers to still be teaching after three years. But the model lacks long-term evidence of effectiveness. Experts say the federal government’s support — and potential funding — should help spread the concept.

“Let’s get rid of this idea of a first-year teacher,” Schwinn told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ last month when she announced the new Teacher Occupation Apprenticeship. 

By the time candidates finish the three-year program, she said they’ll not only have a bachelor’s degree and teacher certification but also experience working under the supervision of a master educator. While the concept isn’t new, funding for such programs has been inconsistent, according to a from New America, a center-left think tank. The American Rescue Plan offers a new source of support for the model, but that too will run out, Schwinn said.

Access to state and federal funding for apprenticeships, however “is a game changer,” Schwinn said. “It is that permanent, recurring source of funding.”

Putting ‘dreams on hold’

The awarded more than $130 million in grants to 15 states last year for apprenticeships to meet workforce needs across multiple industries. Becoming a with the labor department — which requires programs to meet specific quality standards — puts Tennessee’s program in position to receive funding that would cover both pay and the cost of education for participants, removing a barrier that often keeps lower-income and non-white candidates from pursuing teaching. 

For now, the state is using $20 million in federal relief funds to support 65 grow-your-own programs across the state, including the one in Clarksville-Montgomery, where Scottie Bonecutter is working in a first-grade classroom while earning a degree and certification in special education. 

She grew up in Clarksville, graduated from the district in 2006 and was doing the “whole traditional college thing” she said. Just as she began taking core courses to become a teacher, she got pregnant and had her first son.

“I ended up putting my dreams on hold,” she said. 

She became an educational assistant in the district in 2018. By the time she applied for the residency program last year, she felt more equipped to take advantage of her mentors’ expertise.

“Now that I’m an adult, I’m not scared to raise my hand and say, ‘I have a struggle with this,’” she said, adding that the supervising teachers “are willing to literally walk us through every single step of every single decision they make. They are willing to explain every single standard that we use in class.”

Sean Impeartice, the district’s chief academic officer, said sending candidates to college without the support to balance work, education and family life responsibilities is “educational malpractice.” He hires staff members to work as “facilitators,” who Bonecutter said, provide “emotional support, if you have a lot going on at home, at school or in any aspect of life.”

‘Improving practice’

But it’s a challenging time to become a teacher. Entering the field during the pandemic has been a “baptism by fire,” said Impeartice.

Because of staff shortages, some residents have already led classes on their own. Learning to teach for the first time in a remote arrangement was an additional hurdle. Andujar spent much of her first year in the program teaching Spanish grammar remotely.

“I highly dislike Zoom,” she said. “I’m not a techie person.”

Growing efforts among conservative lawmakers to restrict curriculum also feel out of “touch with the realities of being a teacher,” said Amaya Garcia, the deputy director of New America’s Pre-K to 12 program. 

That’s why incentives, such as full tuition and mentoring support, are important for addressing teacher shortages, she said, adding that recruiting paraprofessionals, like Andujar and Bonecutter, is a “logical and sound investment” for policymakers because many already have some college credit, classroom experience and often hail from the communities they’re serving. 

Apprenticeships generally receive . Governors of both parties have highlighted the model during this year.

But researchers don’t know enough about whether participants in grow-your-own programs stay in teaching or improve student learning, Garcia said. In 2001, the Wallace Foundation its $50 million Pathways to Teaching Careers program for paraprofessionals and other non-certified staff and found that 81 percent of participants remained in teaching for at least three years after completing the program, compared to 71 percent for new teachers in general.

There’s even less data on whether students in high school pathway programs ultimately enter and stay in teaching, even though such programs are growing in popularity.

Just last week, the Chicago Public Schools announced that it wants to expand the number of graduates it hires through its program from about 140 annually to over 500. 

One program that Garcia considers “” is the two-year Bilingual Teacher Fellow program in the Highline Public Schools, near Seattle — a partnership that began in 2016 with Western Washington University to address a specific need for bilingual teachers.

Sandra Ruiz Kim, formerly a manager in a dental office, was among the first to finish the program in 2018. Now a sixth-grade Spanish teacher at Glacier Middle School, she noticed a difference between those who completed the fellowship and those without such experience. 

“We were able — even as first-year teachers — to have meaningful conversations about improving practice,” she said, adding that the experience also gave her access to a network of colleagues, “which can be vital for career progression in an industry that often depends on professional relationships and word-of-mouth reputation.”

A recent showed that “homegrown” teachers — those who teach in the districts where they graduated — contribute to small improvements in student performance in English language arts.

That confirms why recruiting teachers from the community can be “an impactful strategy,” Garcia said, adding, “We’re going to be getting more proof points because we’re going to have more districts like Highline that have been doing this for several years.”

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona toured South Bend, Indiana’s Madison STEAM Academy in September, he made a quick impression on the district’s superintendent, C. Todd Cummings. 

Cummings remembers the secretary’s interest in COVID protocols, the facility’s STEM makerspace, and that he spoke Spanish to students at the bilingual school. By the time the visit ended, he came away feeling like he could pick up the phone and call Cardona if needed. 

“He’s done a lot to make the department more approachable,” Cummings said. “He understands running a district, but he also understands teachers in the classroom.”

Having one of their own helming the U.S. Department of Education has gone a long way toward mending the fractured relationship between district leaders and the agency that existed under Cardona’s predecessor. Betsy DeVos was the consummate outsider. She warred with unions, made comments that many teachers found , and attempted to direct relief funds meant for the public system to private schools. In contrast, when the former Connecticut state chief meets with superintendents and school leaders, “he’s talking shop” on everything from bell schedules to graduation rates, said Ronn Nozoe, head of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

But almost a year into Cardona’s tenure, and with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, his department has sometimes struggled to keep up. COVID-19 has thrust the agency into the public eye almost as much as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and, like the CDC, it has often come under fire for being slow to respond to a fast-changing virus. To some, Cardona’s camaraderie with educators helps explain why he has sometimes appeared reluctant to embrace another constituency, whose power and visibility has grown with the pandemic: parents. 

Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift, a nonprofit that trains parents to advocate for their children’s educational needs, said she hasn’t forgotten that parent leaders weren’t asked to speak at Cardona’s first virtual summit on reopening almost a year ago. 

“They know we’re here, and we’re just not accounted for,” she said, adding that parents “in those communities where this pandemic hit the hardest” should have had a voice. A June event focusing on equity didn’t feature parents either.

Cardona hasn’t ignored parents, and often reminds the public that his two teenage children, still attending public school in Meriden, Connecticut, have endured their own disruptions in learning. His first act as secretary was to write to parents and students acknowledging the hardships caused by the pandemic, and he has urged schools to rebuild trust with families.

More recently, when schools began to shift to remote learning because of the Omicron variant, Cardona told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, “Our parents have done enough.” That same week, the announcement of another round of grants to state came with Cardona’s statement that, “Meaningful parent engagement 
 has never been more important.”

But observers say his messages tend to emphasize over student recovery. When the department last month to use federal relief funds for teacher pay raises and hiring bonuses, Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, said “the balance feels a little off.”

The pandemic has mobilized many parents to take a more central role in their children’s education, and their frustration over extended school closures likely tipped the Virginia governor’s race in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, has tried to drive that point home. She regularly participates in “stakeholder” meetings with the department, and shares monthly parent survey data with Christian Rhodes, chief of staff for the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. But she described the department’s parent engagement efforts as a “box-checking exercise.”

“That’s not what this moment calls for. It calls for listening to people’s pain,” she said. “Parents expect to be engaged on a whole new level because we had to hold it down for [schools] while they weren’t there.”

‘Not a slow-moving moment’

Leaders in education said Cardona has shown skill in managing the mountain of challenges he faced when he entered the job: more than half of schools still not fully open, expectations that he quickly reverse the previous administration’s stance on students’ civil rights, and low morale among what Nozoe called the department’s “beat-down career staff.” Cardona, he added, is trying to rebuild an agency that DeVos shouldn’t even exist.

Cardona said his top priority has been helping schools reopen and stay that way. Others credit him with steering billions in federal aid to states and districts on a short timeline.

“They’ve made a huge amount of progress in a very, very difficult time,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the California State Board of Education and president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute, a think tank. She led President Joe Biden’s transition team for education and as the nominee.

She specifically noted his team’s work to get the American Rescue Plan funding for schools “out the door with guidance and support for how to spend it” and early efforts to make the CDC’s “wonky and mysterious” school reopening guidelines more accessible to educators. Recent confusion over whether the agency’s updated quarantine guidance applied to schools, however, drew fresh .

Some noted that communication from the department often hasn’t matched the urgency state and district leaders have experienced during the pandemic. 

In November, the department said it was OK to use relief funds to pay for alternate forms of for students in the face of a bus driver shortage. But that was a month after New York , a Democrat, asked for the guidance, and two months after Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker called in the to drive students to school. 

In mid-December, the department issued a on jumpstarting school accountability systems, but state officials started calling for that in September. 

“They are slow moving,” said Roza, “and it’s not a slow-moving moment in public education.”

In an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Cardona said the department responds with guidance when “we hear from the field.” He noted the staff’s efforts to host multiple webinars and respond to questions from educators, but acknowledged that guidance from the department has sometimes lagged. He vowed to do better. “We have to stay ahead of things, and we’re going to continue to improve communications.”

‘More influence’

As he nears his first year as a cabinet member, Cardona reflected on what the department has accomplished under his leadership. 

While Omicron has led to short-term closures of as many as 5,400 schools, according to a frequently updated , Cardona noted that in-person learning had hit of schools by early December. And he takes pride that the department is addressing problems with Public Service Loan Forgiveness — a federal program meant to encourage students to go into nonprofit and public sector jobs, like teaching, in exchange for debt relief. Under DeVos, the department denied most requests for relief, and borrowers complained that loan servicers gave on how to meet the program’s strict criteria. The department’s management of the program prompted the American Federation of Teachers . Since Cardona started, the department has wiped out roughly $12.7 billion in college debt, including almost $2 billion for the public service program.

“Not only are we providing some loan forgiveness, but we’re fixing the systems that led to the problems that we have now,” he said, adding that he wants to continue to “make higher education more accessible to more students without having to be tethered in debt for the rest of their lives.”

Before Cardona was confirmed, there was speculation he’d be overshadowed by Biden’s White House advisers, who included two former high-level education officials from the Obama administration. More recently, Rodrigues quipped that , president of the National Education Association, likely has more pull with the administration than Cardona.

Conservative pundits have sized him up as Rick Hess, director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, described him as “under-the-radar, except when he’s been waving the flag for partisan administration objectives.”

But those who support those objectives say Cardona has clout with the president. 

“I think with every passing day, he has more and more influence with the White House,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who first met Cardona when he was a teacher and now has a friendly competition with him over who has visited more states and schools over the past year. By late December, she’d hit 28 states; he’d made it to 25.

She said he advocated with the White House for changes to the loan forgiveness program and for putting teachers second in line to receive the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines, after health care workers.

Interestingly, given the coziness many of his critics assume Cardona enjoys with the unions, he has had trouble with the one representing employees in his own department. 

‘The huge political divide’

In early December, the Federal Labor Relations Authority found the department guilty of 14 violations of labor law — actions that date back to 2018 when the employee union’s collective bargaining rights. A of federal employees showed that morale within the department had declined far more than in any other agency. Those grievances have continued under Cardona, according to Cathie McQuiston, deputy general counsel with the American Federation of Government Employees.

The complaints involve inconsistent policies for working remotely, employee evaluation procedures and denying staff union representation when they have a dispute.

Under DeVos, the department was “paraded out as an example to other agencies of the kinds of things they should be doing in the Trump administration,” McQuiston said. “There has to be a political will to come in and say, ‘We’re not doing that anymore.’ At education, we struggle to get that commitment.”

According to a department spokesperson, efforts to resolve the complaints are ongoing and the agency is “committed to making sure it is a great place to work.” Both sides are scheduled to meet Thursday.

While addressing internal issues, Cardona was hit with a summer storm of public controversy over mask mandates and school equity initiatives. Superintendents were targeted with death threats, brawls broke out at school board meetings and school leaders tried to make sense of contradictory court rulings and mandates over masks.

“I wonder whether he anticipated the huge political divide over masks or no masks,” said Deborah Delisle, who served as assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration and is now president and CEO of ALL4Ed, a nonprofit education policy organization. 

In August, Cardona departed from his usual cordial tone to take a against states banning local districts from mandating masks. 

“Don’t be the reason why schools are interrupted,” he said at a , indirectly challenging the governors of Florida and Texas.

But unless Republicans pressed him during Congressional hearings, he avoided the fray over critical race theory — a legal argument that racism lies at the core of U.S. institutions to intentionally advantage white people — and even to the controversial 1619 Project and the work of author Ibram X. Kendi from a civics grant program.

“We don’t get involved in curriculum issues,” he said during a June budget hearing, but stressed his support for culturally relevant teaching. “When students see themselves in the curriculum, they are more likely to be engaged.”

Some observers suggest he could have done more. 

Hess, at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cardona could “perhaps carve out room for the serious center” by defending “a progressive vision” but denouncing some of the examples that critics have found so , such as asking students to label themselves as “oppressed” or “oppressor.”

But Julia Martin, legislative director at Brustein and Manasevit, a law firm specializing in education, said there was no political upside for Cardona to wade any deeper into those waters.

“These issues, by their nature, are local issues,” she said. “There’s no way in many of these instances to come out and make a principled statement that doesn’t bother some people.”

The typically controversy-averse Cardona is a departure from the activist chiefs who have occupied the department since the No Child Left Behind era. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cardona doesn’t have a presidential mandate to implement bold reforms. 

“We’re still in a crisis, versus coming out of a crisis back in 2009,” said John Bailey, a senior fellow at AEI. That’s when Arne Duncan became secretary under President Obama, with a far-reaching mission to incentivize states to embrace controversial reforms such as overhauling teacher evaluations and adopting Common Core standards.

Even if Cardona had such a mandate, Bailey said, the pandemic leaves him in the position of trying to provide a “rapid response during an unfolding crisis that continues to play out.”

If the pandemic doesn’t continue to steal most of Cardona’s focus, he said he hopes to shift attention in 2022 toward issues a little closer to his heart: “teaching and learning.”

As someone who attended a technical high school in his hometown of Meriden, Cardona wants to see “better pathways” for students to two- and four-year schools and the workforce, especially with the jobs that will be created as a result of the $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure bill passed in November.

“There’s funding 
 unlike we’ve seen in the 20 years that I’ve been in education,” he said. “We have an opportunity here to really lift our field 
 and to give our students opportunities that they’ve never had.”

Lead Image: Education Secretary Miguel Cardona testified during a Sept. 30 Senate education committee hearing on school reopening. (Greg Nash / Getty Images)

”I don’t think we should be considering remote options,” Cardona said Tuesday in an interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Our students deserve more, not less, and our parents have done enough to help balance school closures the first year of the pandemic.”

The secretary’s comments, however, come amid a sharp increase in schools already shifting to remote learning, either because of or . According to , which tracks schools’ response to the pandemic, there are 646 school closures this week, up from 356 last week. Following the holiday break, 421 closures are expected, but that’s still less than a fifth of the number of closures in August, when the Delta variant postponed the return of many students to in-person learning. 

Cardona’s comments amplified those made by the president in an afternoon news conference Tuesday.

“Today, we don’t have to shut down schools because of a case of COVID-19,” Biden said. He urged parents to vaccinate their children and said the best way to protect those under 5, not yet eligible for vaccines, is to ensure their family members and caregivers are fully vaccinated and have had a booster. “The science is clear and overwhelming,” he said. “We know how to keep our kids safe.”

The president announced several steps to increase COVID testing availability and expand capacity at hospitals. The administration will deliver 500,000 at-home tests to those who want them, starting in January, open more pop-up vaccination clinics, and make emergency response teams available to hospitals.

On Friday — the last day before the holiday break for many schools — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released two studies showing that test-to-stay procedures can prevent lost instructional days due to quarantine. Cardona said he didn’t have a hand in pushing for the announcement before the break, but that, “our teams talk regularly.”

“I was glad they were able to communicate it early enough,” he said. “As we’re thinking about 2022, we can use test-to-stay, as we’re thinking about how to utilize the [American Rescue Plan] funds, we can use test-to-stay to limit quarantine and keep our children in school.”

The secretary added that there’s room for improvement in providing up-to-date numbers on school closures. The National Center for Education Statistics produces data on the percentages of students attending school in-person or remotely, but are released monthly, compared to Burbio’s weekly update, and in the past, have frequently been months behind. The latest data, released last week, reflects in-person and remote learning as of Dec. 3.

“We’re going to continue to refine those systems, especially if there’s an increase in spread,” he said.

According to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which has tracked school closings and openings since the beginning of the pandemic, only eight states have provided schools with detailed guidance this school year on when they should consider closing. 

Cardona said it’s important to not only know what percentage of students are in school, but “what’s causing potential, short-term remote learning options or what they need in order to keep their schools open.”

Under the protocol — which many states and districts have had in place for months — unvaccinated students who are exposed to COVID-19 can remain in school if all students wear masks, don’t display any symptoms and test twice a week. 

Data suggests “that a school-based [test-to-stay] strategy in a large and diverse county did not increase school transmission risk and might greatly reduce loss of in-person school days,” according to an evaluation of a program in Los Angeles County, one of two studies released with the CDC’s statement. “Thus, schools might consider [test-to-stay] as an option for keeping quarantined students in school to continue in-person learning.”

With schools breaking for the holidays and rising concerns about the spread of the Omicron variant, observers said the announcement — now part of the CDC’s for schools — comes just in time. John Bailey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who publishes a daily newsletter on COVID-related research, called it “welcomed news” that helps schools prepare for the potential Omicron wave in January. But the agency also urged all eligible students to be vaccinated and get a booster shot, and said schools shouldn’t abandon other safety procedures, including social distancing, improving ventilation and handwashing. 

“It’s encouraging that test-to-stay strategies are proving effective both in limiting transmission of the virus and in ensuring that students can remain learning in school, so that entire classrooms or schools do not have to shut down when a case of COVID-19 is discovered in the school community,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

It’s unclear, however, how many students those shutdowns have affected. Bailey faulted the Department of Education for not issuing weekly reports on how many students are in quarantine and whether they’re receiving instruction.

“We should not be relying on third parties for that data,” he said. “An agency that is using civil rights authorities to enforce mask mandates should be curious about the civil rights of kids who are not being served in the midst of quarantines.”

The CDC’s two studies show that test-to-stay is significantly minimizing disruptions in learning.

Thirty-nine of Los Angeles County’s 78 school districts implemented test-to-stay. In those that didn’t follow the model, 4,322 students tested positive between Sept. 20 and the end of October, compared to 812 students in the districts that implemented the program.

In Lake County, Illinois, 90 schools implemented test-to-stay between early August and Oct. 29. Just 16 students out of a total 65,384 tested positive. The authors wrote that assuming students would have missed eight school days during a 10-day quarantine, the program â€œpreserved up to 8,152 in-person learning days” for students that were exposed.

Leah Perkinson, a manager at the Rockefeller Foundation, which has worked with districts to implement testing, called this “one of the happiest days for me throughout this whole entire pandemic” and said the announcement will likely prompt more districts to adopt the strategy. “Some people are only willing to move forward when the CDC releases guidance.”

The data, she added, could also inspire other settings, such as child care centers and camps, to see if they can implement test-to-stay.

One challenge, however, is that some rapid COVID tests are not picking up Omicron, according to , director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease. 

The two studies also noted complications that limit districts’ ability to implement the model, such as staffing shortages, the need for “robust contact identification and tracing” and a lack of support from parents. 

“Some schools reported a shortage of testing supplies, requiring [test-to-stay] participants to access off-site testing, which might have presented a barrier in low-resource school settings,” according to the second evaluation on Lake County, Illinois. “State and local public health and education agencies should strive to ensure that schools in low-resource areas have equitable access to staffing and testing supplies to implement [test-to-stay].”

The Biden administration Thursday stepped up efforts to get more students vaccinated as the school year begins, with the National PTA, pediatricians and sports organizations to reach reluctant families.

The effort includes incorporating vaccines into physical exams for school athletes, featuring pediatricians at back-to-school events and supplying schools with resources to host pop-up vaccine clinics, including sample text messages and letters. Saturday will kick off a “week of action” devoted to promoting the vaccine, with Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visiting a vaccine clinic in Topeka, Kansas, along with training sessions for parents, teachers and student organizations on how to promote vaccines.

“I remember last year. We were reopening schools and we didn’t have the science. We didn’t have the experience. We didn’t have the lessons learned,” Cardona said Wednesday in remarks after visiting a summer enrichment program at Graceland Park-O’Donnell Heights Elementary Middle School in Baltimore. “If you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet, do it now. This is our number one line of defense.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ Newsletter

On Thursday, Cardona  that he’ll also be monitoring how “politics are getting in the way” and whether some families aren’t sending their children to school because they feel it’s not safe without mask requirements.  “To me those are adult actions preventing students to their right of public education.”

That message comes as less than 40 percent of the nation’s 12- to 15-year-olds have been vaccinated, . And the rate among 16- and 17-year-olds is less than half. Vaccination rates are higher among white children than Black children. The administration, however, is not only facing resistance from some parents toward the vaccine, but is also seeing growing backlash against mask mandates, with some districts at odds with governors over the issue.

The dissent was clear last week during a virtual town hall for parents where Aaliyah Samuel, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attempted to answer parents’ questions about the vaccine.

Participants began flooding the chat field with critical comments about the vaccine, remote learning and masks. Others shot back with links to studies on vaccine and mask effectiveness.

In all caps, one person wrote: “Hesitancy comes from the lies and lack of information. Those that have been vaccinated are the ones that are getting infected yet again, creating new variants such as Delta strain.”

Another responded: “Trump paid for the vaccine and took it.”

Samuel eventually jumped in and shut down the chat function.

“This is not a place for negative comments to attack individuals. It is a place to share information,” she said. “And if you don’t believe in the information, that’s your choice, but we’re sharing the best of the information that we have.”

Thursday’s White House announcement didn’t mention the role of the teachers unions in getting more students vaccinated. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has been on her own this week to encourage parents to send their children to school this fall, while also advocating for a universal mask mandate.

In comments on SiriusXM POTUS’s “Laura Coates Show” this week, Weingarten called vaccines “the big game changer.” While restating her position that vaccine issues should be negotiated with local affiliates, she said on  that she is now more open to mandates for teachers.

“We want to persuade the holdouts,” she said. “But we’re looking at all the alternatives.”