Last year, WalletHub, , ranked the state 50th — just above New Mexico — on a mix of criteria including test scores, graduation and teacher certification rates. More recently, a University of Oklahoma researcher zoomed in on the , where the state places 48th overall in math and reading.

The unwelcome attention typically prompts a wave of finger-pointing from politicians and . 

Sometimes, teachers like Sarah Clifford.

A single mom of two who relocated from New York, she’s among the thousands in the state who entered the classroom without completing a teacher training program. In 2023, as a new teacher in the Edmond Public Schools outside Oklahoma City, she struggled to write lesson plans and hated teaching math, a subject she disliked as a child. Districts statewide have increasingly depended on emergency certified educators like her to fill vacancies. In 2023-24, the number topped 5,000, state data shows. Since 2022, the state has also allowed schools to hire , who may have no more than a high school diploma.

“We don’t want to demonize any person who is stepping up to be a teacher, regardless of the pathway,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “But the difference in preparation launches people successfully or unsuccessfully into careers.”

Duke’s program has been part of the solution. In 2024, the university received nearly $2.5 million in from the state for scholarships to help teachers like Clifford complete their certification programs and earn a master’s degree. She graduated with last December after spending nine months instruction so she could “help students feel confident and start to love something that’s hard.” Most of her third graders students who were “on watch” in math ended up on grade level by the end of the year.

“Our state doesn’t look like we’re doing well,” she said. “But if you go inside a classroom with people who have the passion and want to be there, those kids are thriving.”

The data on the state’s decline is undeniable. In the mid-’90s, the state ranked 17th in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. With the 2024 scores, the state had fallen to 48th.

In a , University of Oklahoma researcher Adam Tyner described how Oklahoma missed the “southern surge” that brought academic turnarounds to states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those states saw improvement after pouring millions of dollars into teacher training, strong curriculum and coaching.

Oklahoma’s results have also affected public opinion. Less than a third of Oklahomans graded their local schools an A or B in from the university’s Oklahoma Center for Education Policy. Two years ago, 41% gave their schools high marks.

At about $12,500, the state’s per-pupil spending is . One reason is because it takes a in the legislature to approve a tax increase. District budgets could take another hit if voters this fall approve on property taxes. 

“If it’s really hard to increase revenues, you have to take away things from other areas,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s going to be hard to improve outcomes, if you think that money matters.”

One possible off-ramp for parents is school choice. Many charter schools their local district schools, data shows, leading to push for expanding the charter sector.

This year, lawmakers took a dual approach to tackling the state’s education challenges. They gave teachers a $2,000 raise — but the is still well below neighboring Texas and Arkansas. Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed a increasing the minimum number of days in the school calendar from 166 to 173. That will make it harder for some districts with four-day weeks to maintain that schedule.

“We’ve lost a lot of instructional days,” said Education Secretary Dan Hamlin. “It’s not the only thing that matters; you need other things, too. But it is a component that’s meaningful.”

‘Art of teaching’

State data shows that 184 districts are in session for 166 days or less, which they can achieve through four-day weeks with longer days. 

shows four-day weeks don’t necessarily improve retention, but districts that don’t adopt them can to nearby ones that do. The model is generally popular with teachers, who trade off longer hours for three-day weekends.

Superintendent Rick Cobb’s experience in the Mid-Del School District, outside Oklahoma City, illustrates the problem. When he became superintendent in 2015, he was “alarmed” that the district had 20 emergency certified teachers, he said. Now 114 either have emergency certifications or are adjunct teachers, according to .

His district, which serves a blue color community near an Air Force base, never shifted to a four-day week. But others around Mid-Del did, luring away his teachers.

Knowledge of the subject matter generally isn’t a weak spot for emergency certified teachers, he said. But they often lack the skills to manage classrooms and modify lessons for students working at higher and lower levels.

“That’s the art of teaching,” he said.

Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City, has faced the same challenge. His district, where nearly 60% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, has lost teachers to districts with four-day weeks. But he never went that route because parents in his district depend on schools not just for education, but also for school meals. 

“If the parents go to work, who’s taking care of those kids? Who’s feeding them?” he asked. “I take that very seriously.”

The small, rural Jennings Public Schools, west of Tulsa, is among those that run four days. It received a waiver from the state to operate a 156-day calendar.

Superintendent Derrick Meador doesn’t struggle to find certified teachers. He had three job openings recently and about 10 applicants for each one. It was the first time in three years he’s had to hire a teacher. Families, he said, support the four-day week and don’t want to lose it. Fewer than 2% of students are chronically absent, and the district performs well academically.

“If we weren’t getting the results that we were, I would have ended it a long time ago,” Meador said. He doesn’t appreciate districts with four-day weeks getting for dragging the state down. “I don’t like being lumped in with other districts. We stand alone on our merits and should be judged accordingly.” 

He hopes the state will continue to allow waivers from the new 173-day requirement, but without it, Jennings will likely have to give up its four-day week.

‘Life experience’

It’s difficult to tie student outcomes to any one education policy, whether that’s the academic calendar or teacher certification. But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, said if performance is falling, teacher quality “is one of the very first things that I would look toward.”

Oklahoma is certainly not alone in lowering the bar to teach, especially since the pandemic. Goldhaber examined post-COVID outcomes for students in Massachusetts and found that those whose teachers had emergency licenses in math and science than their peers. 

In Texas, a third of teachers were unlicensed in 2023-24. aims to reverse that trend by gradually reducing the share of unlicensed teachers that districts can hire to 5% by 2029.

Oklahoma took a small step in that direction this year when it tightened restrictions on adjunct teachers, who are only required to have “distinguished qualifications in their field,” but not a college degree. Stitt signed that stops schools from hiring adjuncts to teach core content areas in K-5.

that educators with temporary or emergency certifications are more likely than those who are fully certified to leave the profession. But they often take positions that would otherwise be nearly impossible to fill. 

In the Union Public Schools, which serves southeast Tulsa and part of Broken Arrow, several teach at the district’s Innovation Lab, a hub for career and technical education courses. They include Jeremy Weber, a who teaches students the basics of aircraft maintenance. On a recent morning, he showed students how to use safety wire to secure nuts and bolts to parts of a plane.

“That life experience is pretty valuable,” said Kenneth Moore, the district’s executive director of secondary education.

Earlier this month, newly certified teachers with years of life and career experience gathered at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond to celebrate their graduation from the two-year alternative certification program. 

Grabbing refreshments at a pre-graduation reception and posing for pictures with their families and fellow graduates, they talked about wanting to reverse the stigma attached to teachers who take a nontraditional route to the classroom.

They included Cherice McDonald, a teacher in Oklahoma City schools who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, and is now being recruited to work as an assistant principal. 

Melanie Whitekiller Lawrence, a member of the Cherokee Nation, stayed home to raise her four kids before taking a job as a long-term substitute. When she took charge of a fourth grade class in Edmond, she said she “had no idea” there were academic standards in math and reading she was required to teach under state law. She’s come a long way since the days when a colleague in the classroom next door would supply her with ready-made lessons for the week.

Last fall, her colleagues at Chisholm Elementary chose her to represent their school as . 

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m more knowledgeable about current and best practices than my colleagues who have been teaching for a very long time,” she said at the reception. “We’re not just warm bodies.”

In the heart of the Bible Belt, a small Methodist college graduated its final class in May 2024, shutting its doors after 168 years.

Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama, was a Christian private liberal arts school that counted among its graduates members of Congress, famous musicians, Pulitzer Prize winners and the former executive editor of The New York Times. Yet it had been unable to endure years of financial losses.

About 15 minutes southeast, toward the Birmingham suburbs, the inaugural freshman class at Highlands College was finishing its first year that same spring. The private Christian school, which has just gotten permission from the state to award bachelor’s degrees, was born out of the nondenominational Church of the Highlands, the biggest religious congregation in the state and one of the largest in the nation. It claims across more than two dozen campuses in Alabama and Georgia.

Long-established, religiously affiliated small colleges such as Birmingham-Southern are battling the same existential pressures weighing on non-religious liberal arts colleges nationwide: declining enrollment, rising operational costs and a deepening skepticism of higher education among families who fear ideological influence on their children or question whether steep tuition and fees are worth it.

But a different model of Christian education is on the upswing: Some of the nation’s biggest megachurches are getting into the college business, prioritizing job training and church culture over traditional liberal arts. A franchise-style model from a Christian university in Florida has made it easier than ever for them to launch.

The new schools are attracting big donors and growing their enrollment through a built-in base of believers — and some are pushing to access public funding.

States including Florida, Georgia and Minnesota have opened their state financial assistance programs to religious colleges in recent years. The change mirrors a broader push already underway in K-12 education, where states have funneled to religious schools.

Many of these new colleges eschew the regional accrediting that’s standard for more established universities. Some pursue alternative accreditation from religious nonprofits that may or may not be recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.

That means students’ college credits may not transfer to other schools or to graduate programs. And the costs of non-accredited coursework aren’t eligible for federal financial assistance offered through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

Supporters of the megachurch-affiliated schools say they’re a good option for students who want practical training for specific jobs, generally in ministry or business. They say students benefit from being closely connected to their local faith community.

But some experts question whether the schools’ lack of traditional accreditation could limit students’ options after graduation, or whether their close ties to one church could have an outsized impact on the school’s accountability and transparency.

“Public funding is something that everybody should be concerned about, no matter your politics, no matter your religion,” said Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University in upstate New York who has written books on the history of Christian education in America.

“And I think it’s everyone’s business if there are schools that are restricting the chances of students in a way that students aren’t aware of what they’re getting into.”

Financial aid

Schools such as Highlands College are growing their physical footprints with big donations from heavy hitters. A from the Green family, whose patriarch David Green founded the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, funded Highlands’ first two residence halls.

In March, 3-year-old Austin Christian University — born out of Texas-based Celebration Church, which has more than 23,000 members — broke ground on thanks to a donation of the same size from Roger Bringmann, a vice president at California-based tech giant Nvidia.

The schools’ focus more closely aligns with many conservatives’ educational goals. Republicans in statehouses across the country have pushed to increase Christianity’s influence and presence in education, while President Donald Trump’s administration has proposed relaxing accreditation rules.

In last month, Republican state Attorney General James Uthmeier declared the state won’t enforce its constitutional ban on funding religious institutions, opening the door for state-funded scholarships for Christian colleges.

The newer Christian schools also may benefit from battles fought by their older counterparts.

Last year, agreed to allow religious colleges to participate in state-funded financial aid programs after a 64-year-old Christian college sued the state over its law that barred theological schools from public tuition assistance.

And after two century-old colleges filed suit in last year, a federal judge struck down a 2023 state law that barred religious colleges from a state-funded dual enrollment program that lets high school students enroll in college credit courses tuition-free.

“We’ve done lobbying at the state level, working with the state legislators to get access to things like in-state, need-based grants,” said Patrick Fitzgerald, a spokesperson for Southeastern University, in Lakeland, Florida, which has partnered with more than 200 churches across the country to help them launch colleges. “Depending on the need in each state and the availability of state funding, we try to access every scholarship dollar that we can for students.”

Many megachurch schools offer financial aid. But tuition and fees at more established church-affiliated schools can run into the mid-five figures — with their private college counterparts, but far above in-state tuition at big public universities.

At Highlands College, tuition, housing and fees total about . The school, which focuses on training for the ministry, says 100% of its students receive scholarships. In-state tuition, housing and fees at the University of Alabama cost . At Birmingham-Southern, the year it closed, those same costs totaled about .

But costs vary. At Elevation College, which plans to welcome its first class this fall and was launched by North Carolina megachurch Elevation Church, the tuition, housing and fees are about . VOUS College of Ministry in Miami, based at one of the fastest-growing megachurches in Florida, charges per year in tuition and fees, though that doesn’t include housing.

Single-church affiliations

Unlike more traditional schools that are affiliated with an entire denomination, these newer schools are often deeply entwined with the leadership at just one megachurch.

At Austin Christian, for example, the college president is Connor Champion, the son of Celebration Church’s founding pastors, Joe and Lori Champion.

Last year, Church of the Highlands founding pastor Chris Hodges from his role there to focus on being chancellor at Highlands College, and to become the church’s new head pastor.

Some critics say that when schools are closely tied to one church, rather than to an entire denomination, the church’s leadership and finances have an outsized impact on the school.

“You can end up with this insular, sometimes authoritarian power structure, which I don’t mean to say is unique to religious schools, but it is one of the hazards of this kind of institutional structure,” said Laats.

But having a college tied to a local church also can boost its credibility and accountability within that faith community, said Rick Ostrander, a longtime Christian college administrator who is currently the executive director for the Michigan Christian Study Center at the University of Michigan.

“There’s always the danger with new markets and new models that develop some bad actors or just some unhealthy situations,” Ostrander said, “but I think that’s less likely in this area than some other quote-unquote professional areas.”

Church franchise models

The Highlands model — practical, church-based job training paired with academic courses offered through an accredited partner university — is spreading, in part, thanks to a franchise-style approach from a Florida university that has made launching a church-based college easier than ever.

Southeastern University in central Florida is a private school affiliated with Assemblies of God, one of the world’s largest Pentecostal Christian denominations. Southeastern is accredited by a federally recognized regional accreditation body, and it’s one of the in the country, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

One reason for that growth is it has partnered with more than 200 churches, including some of the nation’s largest, to offer accredited Southeastern degrees through local startup colleges. Some of these church colleges, such as Highlands, have hundreds of students; some just a handful. Southeastern provides the academics while the church provides the practicum classes.

About a third of the 13,600 students at Southeastern are at schools affiliated with their network partner churches, said Fitzgerald, who is chief of staff for Kent Ingle, the president of Southeastern.

The university helps the church colleges line up curriculum and instructors, he said, and helps secure the necessary state approvals.

“We make sure that their courses are up to accreditation standards,” Fitzgerald said. “We make sure that the faculty they have are well-qualified, and we’re able to provide a stamp of approval on pretty much what they’re already doing, and so it’s a match made in heaven, if you will.”

By offering educational degrees, a church can create a pipeline of future staffers who are steeped in its culture, a priority for megachurches intent on preserving their brand.

And it gives churches additional workers who run conferences, staff events or manage social media, all for college credit rather than wages. That can be a boon for high-revenue megachurches that rely on an army of volunteers.

Fitzgerald said he’s not aware that Southeastern has ever said no to a church that approached it about becoming a partner site. Revenue from student tuition and fees is split between Southeastern and the church college.

Coming changes

One of Southeastern University’s biggest success stories has been Highlands College in Birmingham. The school began offering unaccredited ministry courses in 2011 before joining the Southeastern network in 2017.

In 2023, Highlands was awarded its own accreditation by the Association for Higher Education, a network of Christian schools that has been recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. It now offers more than half a dozen bachelor’s degree programs.

This fall, the college will launch and a bachelor’s degree in business leadership. The Dunn School of Business is named in honor of the former CEO of a faith-based investment group that has in a church-planting network co-founded by Chris Hodges, the chancellor of Highlands College.

In Texas, Austin Christian University is focused entirely on business education, offering a bachelor’s of business administration degree through its partnership with Southeastern. Tuition, fees and housing are $35,000 per year. In addition to academic classes, students attend weekly sessions with Christian business executives and can work with Christian entrepreneurs on business projects in a “startup accelerator” program.

The business focus could help protect the school from coming changes at the federal level.

The Trump administration has been working to overhaul higher education, including proposing that would require undergraduate programs to show their graduates earn more than the median earnings of similarly aged adults with only a high school diploma, or risk losing access to federal student loans and grants.

Some Christian higher ed organizations, such as the Association for Biblical Higher Education and the, worry these provisions would have a disproportionately negative effect on Christian institutions, particularly those that train for traditionally lower-paying ministry or church roles.

Fitzgerald of Southeastern said he isn’t concerned that the federal overhaul will harm the newest crop of church colleges.

“We believe that as students begin to really reevaluate the return on investment of higher education, we think that unique models for education like this one are the ones that are going to thrive and succeed,” Fitzgerald said.

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“We wouldn’t be able to function as an organization without him,” said Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney. “A lot of what students, teachers and our office staff do is centered around the use of technology and data systems. He is the backbone of all that.”

But now Gaffney doesn’t know how much longer she can rely on the federal dollars that pay his salary. The Rural Education Achievement Program is among the 17 funding sources that the Trump administration wants to roll into a . Congress approved $220 million for REAP this year, but under the president’s plan, governors and state education chiefs would decide whether rural districts would get extra money.

Monty Mayer, superintendent of the Velva Public Schools in North Dakota, about 20 miles southeast of Minot, used the $14,000 he received from the program this year to pay teaching assistants to work with students who were behind academically.

“Money rolled into a block grant would be swallowed up by the bigger schools as their needs are much greater than ours,” he said. That would leave “small rural schools looking to find answers in different places without a clear picture as to where those resources would come from.”

During with the Senate appropriations committee in late April, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced several questions from both Democrats and Republicans about the future of the program. She suggested that REAP was underutilized.

“A lot of rural schools do not have grant writers, cannot bring in the resources other states might have or other cities might have,” she said. “A lot of states never participated in any of the grant funding.”

Under a consolidated program, she said, all states would receive a portion of the block grant and officials would decide “how this money should be spent in their state, where the greatest needs are, whether that’s in rural communities.”

Officials with years of experience in rural education say that isn’t how REAP works. States or districts don’t write grant proposals for the funding, said Steven Johnson, superintendent of the Fort Ransom Public School District, which operates one elementary school in southeast North Dakota. Districts , based on size and location, receive an invitation to apply. And most do, Johnson said.

“It’s rarely about capacity or lack of grant-writing ability. If anything, what we’re seeing is the opposite,” he said. “Rural districts rely on REAP because it is simple, direct and does not require extensive administrative capacity.”

Abigail Swisher, who previously worked on the REAP program at the department, said where rural districts struggle is applying for large, competitive grant programs.

“Applying for competitive federal grants is time-consuming and complex. Larger districts are hiring grant writers who have the specialized expertise and who have time,” she said. “That’s exactly why we have the REAP program. It was designed by Congress to help fill that gap.”

There were efforts to help rural districts access those other programs, she said, but those ended with the new administration.

‘Testing and reporting standards’ 

Districts that for Small, Rural School Achievement funding, one of the two REAP programs, have fewer than 600 students and are located in an area their state defines as rural. Others, with 20% of students who live below the poverty line, qualify for the Rural and Low-Income School program, and some are eligible for both. This year, 17,873 were eligible for one or both programs.

Last week, Kirstin Baesler, the assistant secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, that they have considerable leeway to use federal funds for programs like tutoring or after-school programs. 

But Johnson said that flexibility was “one of the original core concepts behind REAP.” His district, for example, didn’t have enough poor students to qualify for Title I funding, but under existing law, he was able to use federal funds to provide students with reading and math tutoring.

Congress created REAP as part of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal accountability law that set strict expectations for school improvement, and reauthorized the program as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Despite their small size, rural districts were not exempt from NCLB’s mandates, Johnson said. 

“Small, rural schools were expected to meet the same testing and reporting standards as larger systems but often lacked the staffing and resources to do so,” he said.

A from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, showed that districts most commonly used the funds for technology, followed by staff training, compensation and expanding programs like STEM and arts for students. When Johnson asked other administrators across the country, they listed bullying prevention, special education assistants and support to help students graduate among the ways they use the funds.

“Rural districts piece together budgets with many smaller sources,” said Margaret Buckton, a school finance consultant in Iowa. Although REAP “isn’t a huge sum, when combined with other small grants, it likely makes a difference.”

Questions of ‘efficacy’

In her exchanges with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who has made rural schools a priority, McMahon questioned whether the program has a positive impact.

“Many of these programs have lost their efficacy and they really are not returning, giving the returns that we hope to see for rural schools,” McMahon said.

The Department of Education did not respond to questions about what data McMahon was referring to when she said the program wasn’t effective. But Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said because districts can use the funds in a variety of ways, the department looks primarily at compliance issues rather than impact on students.

“There is no single, consistent student outcome measure applied across grantees,” she said. “The program has not been the subject of a comprehensive federal evaluation in close to a decade, which makes any sweeping claim about effectiveness difficult to substantiate from the data.”

That was mostly a summary of the challenges facing rural schools, like transportation and teacher recruitment, and what the department was doing to support them.

The department also tracks whether districts comply with the rules for using the funds.

A in the Custer County, Colorado, district, for example, discovered an accounting error because a staff member entered data using hand-written notes. The same issue came up in Indiana’s in 2022. The department’s website doesn’t list any reports conducted since McMahon took office.

The administration pitched the same block grant idea last year, and Congress ultimately rejected it. With the appropriations process likely to drag out for months, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will be more receptive this year. 

But for rural districts like Sackets Harbor, the site of an important naval base during the war of 1812, the continued uncertainty over federal funding is “unnerving,” said Gaffney, the superintendent. 

The district’s annual , in which students fanned out across the historic town for service projects, like gardening and polishing headstones, is popular with local residents. The school board asked voters to approve a nearly 8% tax increase, which they did. But with increases in English learners and students with disabilities, Gaffney said the district is still under “a great deal of financial pressure.”

“That is precisely why every dollar matters to us, including REAP funding,” she said. “These resources are vital in helping us maintain programs, services and opportunities for our students.”

Last Thursday, that would have allowed public school teachers, among other public-sector employees, to form unions and negotiate over their wages and working conditions throughout Virginia. At present, those workers can organize only ; those number fewer than 20 of the state’s 133 city- or county-level governments.

Many of the governor’s supporters in labor were outraged by the decision, of a key constituency. One of the largest unions in the state, the Virginia Education Association, almost a full year before last fall’s election, putting their membership of more than 40,000 teachers and school personnel behind a high-profile effort to retake the governor’s mansion from Republican control. 

VEA President Carol Bauer referenced her organization’s efforts in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, calling the veto “a great disappointment.”

“Our members campaigned for Gov. Spanberger on the promise that she supported workers, supported affordability, and supported collective bargaining, and we were hopeful,” Bauer said. “We had every indication she was going to sign a collective bargaining bill.”

But the Democratic-led proposal to allow statewide bargaining put Spanberger in the challenging position of weighing workers’ rights — an after the Trump administration terminated thousands of federal employees in early 2025 — against her mandate to reduce costs for taxpayers and local governments, . If inflation and interest rates continue to rise , other Democratic leaders could soon face similar considerations.

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But one of the bill’s main detractors said her veto was a necessary corrective.

Derrick Max, president of Virginia’s conservative , called the legislation an overreach that would weaken local control over public services. While some of the bluest communities in the state for their workforces, including those in Richmond and the suburban counties around Washington, D.C., other Democratic-led jurisdictions have demurred over concerns about financial implications, he said.

“The biggest problem is that [HB 1263] took local governments out of the decision on whether or not to allow collective bargaining,” Max wrote in an email. “At a time when affordability is the top priority, passing a bill that would likely lead to massive increases in costs was not wise.”

Local officials made throughout the spring while attempting to put the brakes on the bill, arguing that compelling them to bargain with teachers, firefighters, and other public employees would significantly budgeting. By the time of the legislature’s vote, across the state had issued statements in opposition to the adoption of the law. 

It is difficult to estimate a price tag for the policy, the costs of which will ultimately depend on the outcome of negotiations between workers and school boards. The Virginia Commission on Local Government, a state agency created to assist towns, cities and counties, issued a report indicating that some jurisdictions could face recurring expenses totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  

Yet activists in the VEA and other unions that a guaranteed right to negotiate over pay and working conditions was critical to closing wage gaps in the teaching profession, protecting workers from retaliation for seeking to organize, and limiting staff turnover that has proven deleterious to student achievement. 

It also situated the fight playing out in the state’s House of Delegates within the broader struggle to win greater power for labor and end Virginia’s long-running reputation as a state hostile to public-sector unions. Educators only gained limited bargaining rights , after Democrats took unified control over state government for the first time in a generation; prior to that breakthrough, Virginia was one of just three states that expressly banned the practice.

Local teachers rushed to swell the ranks of unions in the aftermath, forming large new organizations in just a few years. The in the state’s largest county was hailed by the national American Federation of Teachers as “the largest U.S. public sector union victory in 25 years.”

In her bid to reclaim the governorship after the single term of Republican Glenn Youngkin, Spanberger on the organizing power of labor, vowing to “stand up for Virginia’s workers” after the mass layoffs precipitated by the Trump administration. Yet she also walked a careful line in campaign pronouncements, the idea of fully repealing the state’s right-to-work statute even as she acknowledged that it would “disappoint” some of her supporters. 

As Democrats in Richmond came closer to passing the statewide expansion, the governor asked the legislature to consider amendments that would delay its implementation until 2030 to allow local governments to prepare for the adjustment. Those proposed changes were ultimately not taken up.

Balancing the demands of her coalition may be particularly important as Spanberger considers her political future. She was elected only last fall in to show a substantial Democratic recovery from the doldrums of the 2024 presidential contest, and within weeks of her inauguration, to give the official response to President Trump’s State of the Union address — a plum reserved for fast risers.

Since then, the governor has been embroiled in a highly controversial push to re-draw Virginia’s congressional districts, boosting her profile and enraging her opponents at the same time. showed that her favorability ratings have suffered in recent months.

Though it is too early to speculate on the state of the 2028 primary field, any Democrat with ambitions to lead their party will need to court teachers’ unions, whose millions of members and generous campaign contributions help deliver victory in primary campaigns and general elections alike. Governors thought to be considering a run, including Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, significant in their respective states. In Wisconsin, the controversial Act 10 law barring teachers from negotiating over compensation is thought to be in serious legal jeopardy now that Democrats control the state’s Supreme Court.

Michael Hartney, a political scientist at Boston College who studies the political power of teachers’ unions, said that Spanberger’s veto may reflect political calculation as much as principle. Unlike those in other states, governors in Virginia cannot serve consecutive terms, meaning that frustrating her labor allies won’t cost her reelection in a few years’ time, he wrote in an email.

“For Spanberger, the move allows her to cultivate an image as a centrist, ‘abundance’-oriented Democrat rather than a reflexive ally of public-sector unions — a potentially valuable distinction if she wants to occupy that moderate lane within the party,” Hartney observed.

For her part, Bauer said that she hoped to persuade Spanberger that her organization’s priorities should be central to the Democratic agenda in the months and years to come. 

“We will be organizing,” she said. “Our action didn’t start with this bill, and it’s not going to end with this bill.”

At the helm since 2019, an unusually long tenure for an , Ferebee led DCPS through the pandemic and leaves at a time of historic increases in student performance. Last week, researchers for the Education Scorecard as the district that had made the greatest gains in both math and reading since the pandemic.

“High quality instructional materials have always been a part of the way that I thought about improving student achievement,” said Ferebee, who previously led the Indianapolis Public Schools and began his career as a teacher and principal in North Carolina. “This is a remarkable opportunity to take that to scale nationally.”

Under Ferebee’s leadership, D.C. schools have experienced “meaningful progress,” according to a by the D.C. Policy Center. has risen to 52,000, up from the pre-pandemic level of 49,000, even as other urban districts suffered continued declines. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, fourth graders improved 10 points in math, for large cities. While the district continues to battle high — nearly 38% in 2024-25 — it implemented a that has contributed to a rebound. In an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, Ferebee said he expects the district to “build on that momentum and contribute nationally to the whole recovery narrative.” 

He will remain with DCPS until June 18 and assume his new role the following week. With D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser for re-election, a new mayor will choose his replacement.

The leader of a parent advocacy group in the district said Ferebee has always considered parents’ input, something she hopes the future mayor will consider when looking for a new chancellor.

“This is the most stable period of leadership that we’ve seen in the district in quite a while,” said Maya Martin Cadogan, executive director of Parents Amplifying Voices in Education. “In a city where so many of our families have housing instability and economic instability, to have stability in our school system has been really critical.”

As the successor to EdReports’ founder Eric Hirsch, Ferebee will join the organization at a time of change. It recently began reviewing pre-K curriculum and adopted through 2029 that aims to produce more timely reviews and information about the research behind curriculum products. Dana Nerenberg, EdReports board chair, called Ferebee “the right fit in all the right ways.”

Hirsch, who announced his resignation last year, launched the nonprofit in 2015 to help point districts toward materials aligned to the Common Core standards that the majority of states still follow. Experts said independent reviews were needed at the time as an alternative to curriculum publishers’ promotional materials. Many district and state leaders continue to base their curriculum purchasing decisions on whether a product gets the coveted green rating from EdReports.

But with the growing emphasis on the role of curriculum in driving student achievement, some critics said the organization didn’t adapt quickly enough. Reviews, they argued, didn’t emphasize phonics-based, foundational skills and gave lower, yellow ratings for reading they helped students improve. EdReports has since revised its criteria to emphasize the science of reading.

Kareem Weaver, founder of FULCRUM, an Oakland-based literacy advocacy group, said Ferebee faces a huge responsibility.

“The shifts that the education field is demanding have become a matter of civil rights. Including evidence of results in their reviews is no small thing,” he said. “Parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, kids want to know, ‘Does this stuff work?’ ”

He called Ferebee “a good choice” because he has “his feet planted in the ground as a system leader.”

Ferebee replaced former Chancellor Antwan Wilson, who following a scandal involving his daughter’s transfer into a sought-after high school with a long waitlist. found that his predecessor, Kaya Henderson, gave the children of some government officials special treatment in the school lottery process. 

But her resignation in 2016 was unrelated to that issue, and during her nearly six years in charge, the district saw increasing enrollment and graduation rates. 

“They have this history of long-time superintendents who have built on the work of each other,” said Ray Hart, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools. 

Cadogan, who leads the parent advocacy group, pointed to the expansion of dual enrollment programs and the , which trains teachers in evidence-based literacy practices, as examples of innovations she wants the new mayor to continue. 

But significant challenges remain. In scores on reading, 37.6% of students performed in the proficient range, the highest point since the test began. But less than 30% of Black students scored at that level. The difference in performance between poor and more affluent students is even larger. The next leader will also inherit an with the federal government to improve services for students with disabilities, especially transportation. 

“Parents are really proud of the progress we’ve made,” Cadogan said, “but there are still so many gaps between our students.”

On Nov. 5, 2024, men and women around the U.S. headed to the polls to decide a race hyped as a battle of the sexes.

By evening’s end, Kamala Harris’ quest to punch through and become America’s first female president lay in shambles. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s undisputed since 2015, would return to the White House. And voters, especially the youngest ones, were themselves divided starkly on lines of gender.

As in each of the three previous federal elections, women’s support for the Democratic ticket considerably exceeded men’s. But the gulf separating Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 was historically wide: According to , a data and analytics company that contracts with progressive organizations, Harris won the backing of 63% of women and just 46% of men.

The 17-point gap cleaving through Generation Z was not only bigger than that of every other age group; it was comfortably the largest Catalist had measured across four presidential cycles. of Trump’s approval conducted corroborated the same trend the following year, showing disparities between the men and women of Gen Z that eclipsed smaller splits among Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers.

Jennifer Benz, a political scientist who leads the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, said findings like that were consistent across surveys she administered prior to the Trump-Harris contest, as well as exit polling conducted at the end of the campaign. Men and women for roughly a half-century, but it was unusual for newly minted voters to lead the way, she added.

“What’s been notable about this younger generation is that the gender divide is already shaping up now, as opposed to when they age into the more typical partisan patterns we’ve seen over recent years,” Benz said.

While Gen Z’s gender gap is a relatively new phenomenon, its features can already be seen in K–12 schools. They spring from the rancorous gender politics of the 2020s, which have left girls repelled by Trump’s policies and boys disaffected by Democrats’ seeming indifference to their concerns. 

As the youngest “Zoomers” enter high school this year, they appear to be accelerating toward the political — and often social — estrangement already evident among their older brothers and sisters. Their stories, based on interviews with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and supported by the insights of educators and public opinion researchers, offer a rare snapshot of that polarization as it takes shape. In America’s college dorms and high school homerooms, young adults are , occupying separate online spaces and even demonstrating an aversion to dating.

Sarah Campbell, a high school teacher in Brunswick, Maine, said she’d noticed a pronounced change in her social studies classroom. Earlier in her career, students broadly approached discussions of politics and public policy with open minds. But over the past 10 years, a growing number have entered those conversations “already aligned with certain ideas.”

“I’ve had girls talk about things like safety, rights or future opportunities in very real, personal ways, and in the same conversation, boys are questioning whether those issues are still relevant,” Campbell wrote in an email. “They’re not just disagreeing, they’re experiencing these issues from completely different realities.”

‘Feminism rooted in me’

Those distinct worldviews may have origins stretching long before adolescence. Celeste Lay, a professor at Tulane University who studies how young people acquire political beliefs, noted that their beginnings overlap with children’s early attempts to fashion adult identities for themselves. 

“At the same time young people are going through political socialization, they’re also going through gender socialization,” she said. “So as they’re developing their politics, they’re learning what it means to be a boy or a girl and what society says those concepts mean.” 

In , Lay and several co-authors used survey data from more than 1,500 children to determine when they start to examine the world through the lens of partisanship. They discovered that kids as young as six are already tottering down the path to the ballot box, and nearly half the study’s participants affiliated with a party by the age of 12. 

A high school senior named Lily was once such a novice partisan. Raised in South Lyon, Michigan, along the outskirts of Metro Detroit, she was encouraged by liberal-minded parents to take an interest in U.S. history and current events. When she was eight, the Democrats nominated the first woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket. After that, her course was set. 

“This sense of feminism rooted in me because my parents were letting me educate myself,” Lily recalled. “When Hillary Clinton was up against Trump, I was like, ‘There’s never been a female president! I have to support her.’”

A decade after that formative electoral heartbreak, she spoke to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ while taking part in the , a for-profit summer program offering learning experiences in a range of fields. Alongside a few dozen others with similarly arcane interests in bicameralism and campaign finance, Lily — whose last name has been withheld to allow her and her peers to speak freely about political matters — spent nine days last July at the Georgetown University campus. In between sessions role-playing as U.S. congressmen, the group made field trips to walk the halls of the Capitol in person.

Lily and her fellow government enthusiasts might reasonably be called some of the most civically engaged high schoolers in the nation. But countless girls her age followed a similar trajectory to both political consciousness and the political left. 

In the years spanning the Clinton and Biden administrations, the youngest female voters steadily warmed to the label of “liberal” ( ideological category). By 2023, Gallup research shows, the proportion of women aged 18–29 who described themselves as liberal had leapt from 28% to 40%, while liberal men of the same age stalled at 25% over the same period. 

The evolution was not merely rhetorical. Teenage and 20-something women adopted on the environment, abortion, gun rights, marijuana access, the Israel-Palestine conflict and an array of other cultural issues. Today, the women of Gen Z are commonly regarded as voter demographic. 

Marie Sarnacki, an English and history instructor in South Lyon, contrasted recent waves of female students with those in her own graduating class of 2009. While stipulating that she spoke only for herself, Sarnacki added that girls in 2026 had far fewer reservations about voicing feminist beliefs on some of the most pressing questions of the day. 

“I don’t know if they would give themselves the label, but it’s safe to say they’re more open about their concern for reproductive rights or supporting classmates who are gay,” she said.

The elephant in the room

Sarnacki believes that the ideological shift she has witnessed throughout 11 years in the classroom can be substantially explained by a corresponding development unfolding on the Right. 

Trump’s presidencies, each achieved through , have repeatedly pushed debates around sexism and women’s rights to the center of the national agenda, she argued. From the Women’s March to the #MeToo-inflected Kavanaugh hearings, the stunning demise of Roe v. Wade, and the president’s demeaning comments about various female antagonists, the Trump era may have hastened a leftward drift that was already in progress.

Daniel Cox, director of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI)’s , agreed with Sarnacki. While women have lately gained or even in some professional and educational spheres, he continued, many of the most “momentous cultural events” of the last 10 years led them to the conclusion that their rights were imperiled.

“They were doing really well in higher education and high schools in terms of AP courses and graduation rates, and tons of statistics suggest that young women were comparatively doing better than men,” Cox said. “But when they looked around politics and the culture, they were upset about a lot of things and became politically active.” 

Public opinion research provides clear signs that their dissatisfaction remains high during the second Trump presidency — and is equally vivid among those too young to participate in elections. revealed that, within a representative panel of children aged 13–17, girls were vastly more negative than boys in their assessments of Trump (-38 from females versus -7 favorability from male respondents) and the GOP (-16 from girls and +2 from boys), while also much warmer toward the Democratic Party (+13 from girls and -5 from boys).

Trump’s macho stylings and media omnipresence play a crucial role in expanding the rift. Lily remarked that he has become an inescapable figure, whether in school or on social media. If anything, the president’s ubiquity was actually heightened by his reelection defeat in 2020, which lengthened his time in the spotlight.

“He’s so loud, with all the scandalous things he’s done,” she said. “You can avoid the news, but you can’t avoid him.”

Another participant in the NSLC’s Georgetown session was Cate, a junior enrolled at a small private school in Louisville, Kentucky. Like Lily, she said she was motivated by societal injustice to become involved in politics. Her father is gay, and his experiences were part of what spurred her to activism. 

But whether engaged in private discussions with friends or public outreach through her school’s Human Rights Club, Cate felt frustrated by her male classmates’ lack of interest in the politics of Kentucky or the wider world.

She expressed particular disappointment with boys in her school who, she suspected, held views similar to hers but would not voice them out of fear of losing face with friends who “idolize” Trump’s brash manner. The gush of on platforms like TikTok helped foster a hero worship that was difficult to puncture.

It was understandable that young men would seek to emulate a powerful personality, Cate said, specifically citing the 2024 assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The moment after that attack, when the then-candidate rose to his feet and exhorted his audience to “fight,” has become a centerpiece of at teenage boys, she said. Yet his influence heightened a dynamic in which “empathy is seen by this generation of men as weak, feminine.” 

“It gets into all this misogyny,” she lamented. “But women, who don’t care about that and can be empathetic loudly, are more able to share their political opinions.”

‘Where am I in this equation?’

Girls were not alone in observing the stridency of gender conflict. Nor were self-described progressives the only ones to complain about its occasionally personal nature. 

Nathan, a junior from the prosperous suburban enclave of Westfield, New Jersey, struck a note of bemusement when describing an of the online right: left-leaning white women, a category encompassing many of the students he’d met that week at Georgetown. 

“There’s a stereotype that liberal white women are self-hating,” he said. “And supposedly it’s not feminine, and it’s not attractive, and it’s not manly if you support it.”

Voluble and direct, Nathan described himself as a “right-winger,” one of the few participating in the program. But he professed no admiration for political harangues mingled with sexism, and he objected to the treatment suffered by some of his gay classmates at home, who he said were frequently mocked in private. 

Instead, along with several other male students, he spent much of an hour-long conversation with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ lampooning the fixation of social authorities — including his school’s leaders — with identity politics. A multitude of perceived sins drew their attention, including the proliferation of various “heritage months” across the school calendar and the alleged maligning of the Founding Fathers in history curricula. The most annoying of these were dismissed as “virtue signalling.” 

Many politically engaged young men share Nathan’s perspective on the newfound prominence of equity-focused language and policies. 

This is, in fact, a key distinction between male and female Zoomers. According to , Gen Z men and their Millennial counterparts were only about half as likely as women to “closely follow” news coverage of social issues. And while the rising salience of such causes, including LGBT rights and abortion, have clearly played a role in politically activating many American women, they do not appear to have galvanized men to support Democratic candidates.

Catalist’s overview of the election results shows that both men and women became more likely to vote Republican between 2020 and 2024, but the gender gap across all ages was principally driven by men abandoning the Democratic Party. 

Monty, a junior from deep-blue San Diego, said that students attending his private high school were “extremely left,” and typically surrounded by friends and family members of the same mindset. A strong impulse to activism also pervaded the halls, he added, attracting a number of his peers to Pride marches and No Kings rallies over the past year.

As Monty described it, the somewhat airless ideology of his school mirrored that of the larger progressive movement: Just as he’d periodically felt isolated during a long stretch of school assemblies commemorating the historic contributions of women and minority groups, a groundswell of “stranded people” were successfully targeted by the Trump campaign .

“You have all these other groups represented, and then you have a generation of these young white males saying, ‘Okay, where am I in this equation? Because I’m not Black, I’m not a woman, I’m not LGBTQ, and I don’t know where I’m going to fit into this,’” Monty said.

Rachel Janfaza is an independent researcher who writes the newsletter , which aims to surface the attitudes of Gen Z for a national audience by convening focus groups and listening sessions around the United States. In an interview, she said Democrats had “fumbled” in 2024 with a critical group of potential male supporters.

“I don’t think the Republican Party necessarily set out to attract young men from the start, but the Democratic Party being so coded as being friendly to women made it hard for young men to see themselves in that party,” Janfaza said. “A lot of the men I spoke to who voted for Trump in 2024 felt like they were still not being messaged to by the Democratic Party.”

‘This system doesn’t benefit us’

Part of the difficulty in communicating to Gen Z is the fact that, beneath the level of partisan affiliation, perceptions of society and gender often differ significantly. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in the respective views of men and women toward feminism, a cause that has since the 1960s. Women have always been more keen than men to accept the label of “feminist,” but showed that over half of male Millennials said the term fit them personally; that figure was actually higher than the proportion of women from preceding generations who agreed with the description.

Yet far fewer of the youngest male respondents agreed. Zoomer men were only as likely as those in Gen X — a group more than twice their age — to call themselves feminists. Between that striking reversion and the leap in self-described feminism among younger women, Gen Z saw the widest gender gap on the issue of any age cohort. 

In the same survey, 23% of Gen Z men said they had experienced gender-based discrimination, a nearly fourfold increase over the oldest men included in the sample. Women are also increasingly likely to express this belief, with half of all Gen Z females saying they’d been discriminated against (compared with just 38% of Boomer women). 

Some fear that such sharp departures on fundamental questions will foment mutual resentment. Nathan, the New Jersey high schooler, said that boys his age were becoming embittered by a lack of recognition from the political left. In particular, he said that white males could be alienated from the Democratic Party in the same way that African Americans in the 20th century. 

“I think a similar situation is happening with young white men,” Nathan said. “They’re like, ‘This system, this establishment, doesn’t benefit us in any way. We have no stake in maintaining it.'” 

Meanwhile, dramatic developments in the political realm can leave residue in the social one. The interpersonal relations of men and women are under greater strain than at any time in the past few decades, epitomized by exploring romantic relationships. While almost 90% of high school seniors reported that they’d gone out on at least one date in 1987, according to a recent poll by the Institute for Family Studies, only about half said the same in 2024. 

Competing partisanship seems to be at least partially responsible for the decline. In a by NPR and PBS News, 60% of Zoomers agreed that it was “important to date or marry someone who shared your political views”; by contrast, 62% of respondents aged 60 or older said that politics didn’t carry much weight in matters of the heart. A published last year on the American dating scene found that fully three-quarters of single women with a college degree said they would think twice before dating a Trump supporter.

Campbell, the Maine social studies teacher, said she had seen both sides of the dichotomy in her high school class. Girls are increasingly hesitant to pair off, or even socialize, with male classmates. Boys jokingly attack one another as “simps” — a slang term for men desperate for the attention of women — and have become “much more likely to push back” in class discussions of gender differences.

“There is almost a defensiveness in their attitude, as if I am trying to tell them they aren’t important and girls are,” Campbell wrote. “It is genuinely a shift that is concerning to me.”

Lily, who now attends high school in State College, Pennsylvania, didn’t address her dating life. But she opined that the apparently right-wing outlook expressed by some boys may simply reflect their wish to fit in — an instinct with which she sympathized.

“The same way we find ourselves in social situations where we’re pressured to join some clique, that’s present in our political positions too,” she said. “And guys experience that too. I just think they’re better at hiding it.”

What comes next?

Neither students, teachers, nor researchers could guess whether the gender gap would reverse with time or continue to grow.

In his sixth year in office, young women haven’t relented in their loathing for Donald Trump. In fact, it might be said that American women and the Democratic Party have , both measurably more feminist, more liberal, and more credentialed than they were a generation ago. According to Gallup data, is now a college-educated woman.

On the other hand, it is far from clear whether a sufficiently large number of today’s high school boys will reverse course and embrace the Democratic candidate in 2028. A of the semi-annual Yale Youth Poll showed that 68% of voters aged 18–22 disapprove of Trump’s performance in office, a four-point increase since the previous fall; still, men in that age range actually became less favorable toward the Democrats during that same five-month span.

If national Republicans hope that disenchantment brings them an army of converts, they may find themselves disappointed. AEI’s Cox said the evidence from most polling and election results shows only that young men have become hostile toward Democrats — not that they have become doctrinaire conservatives.

“I’m not even sure they like the Republicans that much, honestly,” Cox said. “It’s not so much that they’re attracted to the whole GOP agenda — it’s that, between the two parties, they’re looking at which one seems more receptive to the concerns they have.”

Asher, visiting NLSC’s summer program from Pennsylvania’s solid-blue Delaware County, said he would have voted for the Democratic ticket in 2024 had he been old enough. The measured junior particularly came to admire Tim Walz after he was selected as Harris’s vice-presidential pick. 

Yet he critiqued the way in which the party sought to woo men as “pandering,” including launched to rally “White Dudes for Harris,” and Walz’s . (The Minnesota governor later disclosed that he saw his ability to “” as one of his major contributions to the campaign.) 

Nathan recalled an episode that saw Walz join Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in streamed on the popular service Twitch. “They had the most artificial attempts to win over men,” he marveled. “Tim Walz and AOC playing video games, and you could tell they weren’t actually playing. No one related to that!”

Asher — happy to number himself among the relatively scarce white dudes for Harris, albeit one without a vote — said he hadn’t personally felt excluded from political debates with left-leaning classmates, but acknowledged that such conversations sometimes hinged on participants’ personal “credibility” to speak on specific issues. 

“I have seen that happen with people: ‘You don’t have female genitals, so you don’t get to have an opinion about abortion,’” he said.

The Up and Up’s Janfaza said that similar complaints are a hallmark of her listening sessions with college undergraduates. Many feel as though their sentiments, goals and desires are so diffuse that they are “talking past each other.” 

“When I ask young men and women, ‘Do you see a gender divide in your community?’ they are so quick to tell me that they feel men and women are on different playing fields,” she said. “This isn’t fun for anyone.” 

Testing experts at the Education Department had been laid off and the board in charge of the program . But now, expansion is coming in the form of additional results that could give the public more information about how students in their states are performing.

The National Assessment Governing Board approved a new testing schedule Friday that allows for state-level results in 12th grade math and reading, eighth and 12th grade civics and eighth grade science. 

The vote was 16 to 3.

NAGB, which sets policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has long aspired to add more granular results, said Executive Director Lesley Muldoon.

“That’s what helps drive actual policy action at the state level,” she said. 

The would take effect in 2028 for eighth grade civics and 12th grade math and reading. The eighth grade science test would be administered in 2029 and 12th graders would take a civics exam in 2032. Participation is optional, but NAGB wants to know states’ intentions by this summer.

The governing board isn’t alone in wanting NAEP to be more useful to state policymakers. In its on the future of the American workforce, the Bipartisan Policy Center, led by former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, called for more state-level data in the same three areas and a shorter, six-month timeline between the assessment and the release of the results.

Some observers say the board’s vote underscores the importance of NAEP.

“This suggests an acknowledgment that standardized testing, and comparable data across states, still matters,” said Dale Chu, an education consultant who frequently writes about assessment. 

At the same time, in its fiscal year 2027 budget, the administration is requesting less for the program than Congress has appropriated in recent years, $137 million compared with $193 million.

Muldoon told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that if Congress maintains $193 million for the program, no additional money would be needed to expand testing at the state level. But if all 50 states want to participate, they might need more resources. 

‘We got busy’

The response from states, she said, has been positive, but she doesn’t expect all to sign up. 

Board Member Julia Rafal-Baer, who voted against the plan, said while she agreed with the science and civics schedule, she’s concerned about whether enough states would participate in the 12^th grade assessments. The announcement, she said, would also come in the midst of a “charged environment.” 

“You can see it bubbling up now — public trust around testing, technology, AI, screens and student data,” she said during the meeting. “In this room, we understand all the differences. Parents right now do not understand the differences.”  

Others noted that with 39 governors’ races this year, those who show interest now might be out of office by the time they have to formally commit. But Board Member Ron Reynolds, formerly head of a California private school organization, said the elections shouldn’t affect the board’s decision.

“I think we would cross a dangerous line if we began to anticipate what the political environment might be at a specific time and then make decisions in advance that might foreclose an opportunity to assess and report,” he said.

States would need to identify a sample ranging from 1,200 to 2,000 students in each of the categories for which they want new results. 

Tennessee Rep. Mark White, a Republican and current NAGB chair, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that his state is among those that would likely “jump on the opportunity” to see how the state’s students are performing in science, civics and in their senior year.

“Tennessee realized that our K-12 standards were not adequate in 2011 when we compared our performance to NAEP data,” he said. “We got busy.”

In 2013, the state was the in the nation, and this week as a top performer in post-pandemic academic recovery.

Angélica Infante Green, Rhode Island’s education commissioner, wants her state to participate in all of the assessments, but is particularly enthusiastic about state-level civics . The state passed in 2021 requiring students to demonstrate proficiency in civics to graduate.

“It’s important, based on where we are as a country,” she said. “If our students don’t know how the government works and how our democracy works, that poses a challenge.”

Chu said he wouldn’t be surprised if Mike Morath, state chief in Texas, or Indiana Education Secretary Katie Jenner also take “a keen interest,” but predicted that “in many other places the reaction would amount to little more than a shrug.”

Former Florida Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. after the 2024 fourth and eighth grade results were released. The state saw a sharp decline in reading scores, which he attributed to a sample of schools that he said was not representative of the state overall and included two of the lowest-performing schools. He also blamed the shift that year on the switch to a digital test on school district devices. 

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether the state might participate. 

‘Powerful source of information’

Chu and others, however, question whether state-level data on 12th graders would be that useful. 

“Low student motivation has long been a cloud hanging over 12th grade,” he said. “I’m not sure bringing those results to the state level adds much unless that issue is addressed.”

Muldoon disagreed that motivation is a challenge, but said that getting a large enough national sample of 12th graders can be. Seniors, she said, are sometimes off campus for internships or college trips. 

Some states, like Nevada, require students to take the ACT for graduation. But Jhone Ebert, superintendent of the Clark County School District, and former state chief, said a college entrance exam might not be the best way to measure the skills of students planning to go straight into the workforce. NAEP, she said, would offer a fuller view of students’ skills.

“Not everybody’s going to college,” said Ebert, also on the board. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be successful participants in our society.”

National results from 2024’s 12th graders were discouraging. Twenty-two percent tested at the proficient level in math, a 2 percentage point decline since 2019. In reading, 35% were proficient, also a drop. As with fourth and eighth graders in recent years, the percentage of high school seniors scoring at the below basic level increased. But those results don’t tell states anything about their specific strengths and weaknesses. 

State-level data could be a “really powerful source of information,” Muldoon said. “There is no other nationally representative assessment of high school students’ achievement.” 

‘Blue and red states’

The same is true for civics. The last NAEP civics test was in 2022, and just in eighth grade. Average scores on the 300-point scale fell by two points, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test, which measures students’ knowledge of government, the founding documents and politics. 

Twelfth grade results in civics haven’t been available since 2010. The 2032 civics test in 12th grade will also be an updated version. Patrick Kelly, chair of NAGB’s assessment development committee, told the members Friday that while the “bones are good,” the design of the civics assessment is old.

The last time the test was updated, “our president of the United States was playing ,” he said. 

Shawn Healy, chief policy and advocacy officer at iCivics, a nonprofit that provides civics lesson plans and online games, called the state-level results and the update “a big win for our field.”

The results, he said, will offer insight into the success of civics education policies at the state level, such as requiring a dedicated course or completion of student projects, or offering diplomas that recognize achievements. This year, he’s tracked 240 civics education bills in 40 states.

“That speaks to the interest in this issue across blue and red states,” he said.

In science, 2029 won’t be the first time state results will be available. Most states voluntarily . But now, under a new design, the questions will more closely match what states expect eighth graders to know in science, said Christine Cunningham, senior vice president of STEM learning at the Museum of Science in Boston and a NAGB member. Large school systems,  those in the Trial Urban District Assessment group, would also be able to opt in to that science exam. Currently, only national data is available for those subjects and grades.

“At a time when science and engineering are having such a profound impact on our lives, it’s important to understand how our students are doing,” she said. “Education leaders continue to see value in expanding opportunities for state-level reporting beyond reading and math.” 

The disquieting findings come from the latest release of the , a data project spearheaded by scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford. Rolled out in 2022, the collaborative initially aimed to chart how quickly schools bounced back from the disruption of remote learning. Now in its fifth year, the research team has turned their perspective backward in time to examine events leading up to the academic crash.

Among those developments, the newest dispatch devotes special attention to two: the rollback of school accountability policies that were the hallmark of the federal No Child Left Behind law, and the spread of social media to younger children. While acknowledging a lack of firm causal evidence, the authors argue that the parallel trends helped precipitate a downward spiral in student outcomes.

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics at Harvard and one of the Scorecard’s creators, said that taking a longer perspective on student achievement illustrates not merely the enormity of the loss, but also the impressive progress that preceded it. 

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal exam often referred to as ) show that fourth- and eighth-graders steadily grew more proficient in core academic subjects from 1990 through 2015, absorbing the equivalent of two grade levels in math knowledge during that time. Kane said it was all the more frustrating to see those gains, which he stacked against the most important public policy successes of the last half-century, substantially unwound over the last decade.

“If you had told me in 1990 that we would see that kind of rise in fourth- and eighth-grade math, I’d have said you were crazy,” Kane reflected. “And yet it happened, and nobody celebrated.” 

The post-pandemic era has seen a number of experts explore the beginnings of the K–12 downturn, which first became evident through NAEP data near the end of the Obama presidency. Those have that learning losses started well before 2020, while shining less light on possible explanations. Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the Scorecard was laudable in its ambition to “tell the whole story,” even in the absence of dispositive proof.

“This paper is, by far, the most comprehensive effort to explore the two main hypotheses for what’s gone wrong in education over the last decade-plus,” he said.

What remains uncertain is the path forward for schools and communities that have seen a generation of students learn less successfully than the one preceding it. Kane and his collaborators recommend a reorientation in federal research priorities to study the impact of social media use, as well as wide-ranging responses to the problem of chronic absenteeism. In the meantime, their release includes a set of local case studies showing where districts have led meaningful improvements in the last few years. Among them are a number of major urban school systems not historically numbered among the nation’s top performers, such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama and Compton, California.

But the silver linings of the 2020s may be obscured by the grim chronicle of the 2010s. 

Doug Lemov is a former teacher whose book, , has become a reference text for educators around the world. Reviewing the report’s conclusions, he said he hoped it would help both the public and the education policy world reach a fuller understanding of the challenges converging in American classrooms — a long list encompassing technology and accountability policy, but also a broader collapse in the authority of schools, he added.

“All of these social changes have happened together, they’ve been disastrous for schools, and their effects tend to narrowly be blamed on ‘the pandemic,’” Lemov said. “But the causes are bigger.”

The end of NCLB

If part of that blame can be laid at the feet of the federal government, as Kane and his co-authors contend, it can be traced back to 2011.

That was the year when the Obama administration to avoid penalties for failing to meet the conditions of the decade-old NLCB, which had boldly mandated that 100 percent of K–12 pupils attain proficiency in math and reading by the end of the 2013–14 school year. 

While student performance in both subjects had , no state could meet that timeline; NCLB’s ever-rising standards meant that fell short of their academic goals by 2011. In a bargain struck with Obama’s Department of Education, states could seek relief from federal accountability requirements to adopt new academic standards, overhaul their teacher evaluation systems, and meet a few other requirements. In all, over 40 states had applied for and received the waivers.

As the Scorecard authors document, education leaders used their newly earned flexibility to ease off their scrutiny of the lowest-performing schools in their states; by 2014, under 10 percent of schools were flagged for missing learning benchmarks, a massive decline from just a few years earlier. 

In consequence, not only were fewer teachers, principals and superintendents explicitly prodded to boost student learning — under NCLB, schools faced an escalating set of sanctions, including the prospect of permanent closure, for persistent ineffectiveness — public awareness of academic underperformance also fell dramatically. Through an archival search of major news outlets, the Scorecard researchers discovered that the annual number of media references to federal accountability categories and penalties fell by 97 percent after 2017. By that time, NCLB had been replaced entirely by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which ratcheted down expectations on states to an even greater extent.

Polikoff recalled that, prior to the changes of the 2010s, even his affluent home district in suburban Chicago was leery of federal interventions. But such communities were largely able to relax after being granted waivers.  

“The waivers, and then ESSA, fundamentally changed the level of pressure and scrutiny on a big chunk of schools — in particular, these middle-to-high-performing schools that clearly know they’re not going to be at the bottom of the distribution.”

The second major factor identified in the paper is the rapid rise of social media use among school-aged children. According to , the portion of U.S. teenagers saying that they were online “almost constantly” jumped to 46 percent by 2022.

While the effects of this shift are debated, a growing body of psychological research has pointed over the last few years to a link between internet use, social media saturation, and poor youth mental health. While stipulating that the connection cannot be assumed to be causal, Kane and his coauthors note that the students who posted the lowest scores on the international PISA exam were also the likeliest to report high social media use.

Laws restricting smartphone use inside of schools have spread rapidly in the past few years, though published studies have shown little corresponding signs of academic improvement. One widely cited paper, released earlier this month by Stanford professor Thomas Dee, delivered a split verdict: After two years of implementation, students forced to hand over their phones each day exhibited better psychological well-being, but their showing on state assessments was mostly unaffected.

David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester who conducted some of the earliest research into schoolwide bans, has found they yield modest academic benefits in their early stages. In an email, he wrote that he was unsurprised to see social media use specifically called out  in the Scorecard report. But he also noted that most kids enjoy free access to digital technology outside the classroom. 

“To the extent that reducing cellphone use will reduce classroom distraction, that seems like a good thing. But there are many ways for students to access these distractions even in the face of cellphone bans,” Figlio said. “Home use, with its attendant sleep disruption and crowding out of homework, study, etc., is certainly still present.”

‘Top national priority’

The few existing studies probing the correlation between student achievement and social media’s sudden ubiquity paint only a suggestive, if incomplete, picture, Kane conceded, adding that the broadening of that inquiry “ought to be a top national priority.” 

That could be a job for a reconstituted Institute for Education Sciences, the Washington agency charged with supporting education research. About 90 percent of the IES workforce was terminated in the early months of the Trump presidency, but some re-staffing has taken place since. More recently, the Department of Education commissioned a blueprint for the rebuilding of its empirical arm, including a recommendation that federal officials narrow their focus to a set of key issues facing schools.

Kane remarked that the phenomena identified in the latest Scorecard release would make an excellent start. University-based experts couldn’t summon the same resources or urgency as the U.S. government, he concluded.

“If you leave it up to the research community to come to consensus on the science of reading, or the effects of cellphone bans, or the effects of social media, you’re going to be waiting decades,” he said. “So somebody needs to be convening people, looking for conflicting findings, and trying to reconcile them.” 

In the meantime, the report identified 108 districts that have posted sizable gains in both math and reading — and nearly 450 that have seen large improvements in at least one of the two subjects — since 2022. While some are listed among the most privileged school systems in the country, a number of large and relatively unsung urban districts have already returned to pre-COVID learning rates.

Among them is Washington, D.C., where reading achievement for students in grades 3–8 now exceeds the level set in 2018 by the equivalent of almost half of one grade level. A case study assembled by Kane and his colleagues identifies specific steps taken by the district’s leaders to bring about that progress, including the development of and for undergoing specialized literacy training.

The Scorecard team recommends that education leaders deploy their own staff to rapidly improving districts to learn from their success. With time, they conclude, cities like Washington could become K–12 exemplars in the same way that Mississippi has set a template for states with its reading reforms. 

Figlio said there was promise in the idea, but added a note of caution.

“It’s hard to go to a school district, see that they are doing ten different things, and know which of these things is actually leading to the improvements,” he wrote. “By all means, we should study districts that seem to be beating the odds, but we need to make sure that the lessons learned are durable and transportable rather than anecdotes or circumstantial evidence.”

Lemov said that the most important lessons might be gleaned from years past. Since the reform era, he lamented, states have been all too happy to overlook poor results from their schools — and the schools themselves have been loath to set higher expectations for themselves or their students. The effects can be measured in lost learning opportunities, he said, but also teacher burnout from working in increasingly chaotic disciplinary environments.

“All of the things we did really well — only in unwinding them have we realized how much progress we were actually making. Which is tragic, but it suggests that we could wind them back up if we wanted to.”

A similar split was present in the vast architecture of special education offered through Individualized Education Programs — though in that case, the dynamic was reversed, with IEP recipients much more likely to come from low-income families than well-off ones.

Nick Ainsworth, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author, said his interest in the topic was stoked during the COVID era, when evaluations for special education fell dramatically in schools around the country. While studying trends leading up to the pandemic, however, he and his colleagues noticed how differently rich and poor households access the federal government’s two biggest sources of disability services.

“We looked across the income distribution and started to see these large differences,” Ainsworth said. “We had some hypotheses about what that would look like with respect to 504 plans, but we did not expect to see those differences favoring high-income students.”

Those findings may have come as a surprise to the research team, but they validate long-held suspicions among education observers that 504-mandated aid — considered less comprehensive than those provided by IEPs, but subject to fewer legal requirements — are directed disproportionately toward the affluent. 

In 2019, a pair of investigations by and revealed that school districts with higher average incomes enrolled conspicuously larger numbers of students with 504 plans. Eligible pupils are typically given extra time to complete assignments and tests, raising concerns that some parents exploited the program to gain unneeded academic perks for their kids.

Such cynicism is perhaps inevitable amid the furious competition waged for top scores and coveted admissions slots. And the jostling for position doesn’t even relent with the arrival of college acceptance letters: at America’s most prestigious universities now say they experience conditions like anxiety and ADHD, which can confer special accommodations. But experts say it is unclear whether the system is being gamed, or if its design simply leaves needier children underserved. 

Ainsworth and his colleagues created the study by gathering academic records for millions of Oregon students between the 2008–09 and 2018–19 school years, then over the same period. The combined data allowed them to see not only which students were classified as needing IEP vs. 504 services, but which specific disability they reported.

In all, one-quarter of the most disadvantaged students had an IEP, a portion more than three times greater than that of the very wealthiest students. Meanwhile, nearly twice as many students from families near the top of the income scale were assigned a 504 plan than those near the bottom (2.9 percent vs. 1.5 percent).

Paul Morgan, a professor at the University of Albany whose work focuses on disability classification, said those patterns reflected important distinctions in how the two offerings are used. 

IEPs provide specialized instruction geared toward each student’s learning goals, sometimes including placement outside general education classrooms. By contrast, 504 plans only require schools to make the requisite modification to give students equal access to learning opportunities. Their looser eligibility standards may allow parents with the resources and wherewithal to access support on behalf of children who aren’t obvious candidates for IEPs, Morgan remarked.

“These are benefits that don’t come with a lot of costs. Your child is typically not leaving the classroom,” he said. “They might be seen as beneficial without much downside in terms of tradeoffs.”

The laws’ tradeoffs

To a large degree, the tradeoffs families face when choosing between an IEP and a 504 plan are shaped by the laws governing each policy. Differences in those statutes mean that many don’t perceive a choice at all. 

IEPs were created by the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, which lists — from deaf-blindness to traumatic brain injury — that make children eligible for special education. Congress disburses annual grants to states ( in FY 2025) that pay for the provisions included in each student’s IEP. 

The calculation is different with 504 plans, which are not attached to any federal funding. Under the eponymous Section 504 of the , the plans establish students’ rights to reasonable accommodations for a much broader array of conditions. Yet in the absence of a federal subsidy, the assistance provided usually takes the form of cost-free interventions like extra testing time, preferential classroom seating, and even reduced homework burdens.

Schools are to find and evaluate children who may be disabled, but in practice, many are never referred for services. Christopher Cleveland, an assistant professor of education at Brown University and one of Ainsworth’s coauthors, said the incentives for schools to initiate the 504 process are “probably less clear.”

“Many school leaders feel that they’re in a high-pressure situation to figure out the resources of special education versus local, in-state dollars,” Cleveland added. “Whereas the 504 plan decisions seem like they’re more subject to advocacy on the part of families.”

The parents best equipped to wrangle the needed paperwork and prod school staffers toward a resolution are those with sufficient time, mental bandwidth, and experience dealing with bureaucracies. Since the outcome of 504 evaluations can hinge on diagnoses for disorders like social anxiety or attention deficit, it also helps to be able to afford the kind of expensive neuropsychological evaluations that insurance doesn’t always cover.

Miriam Nunberg is a former attorney for the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights who now works as in New York City. She said parents are obliged to be proactive in seeking accommodations, especially for high achievers whose performance at school tends to conceal learning difficulties. For guidance, they can turn to a cottage industry of lawyers, professional advocates, tutors, and clinical evaluators.

While each of them bill at healthy rates, the expense could be unavoidable in New York. As in many other jurisdictions, disability evaluations conducted through the school district have in the past due to staffing shortages.

“When kids are pulling As and Bs, school staff generally aren’t referring them to assessments, whether for 504s or IEPs,” Nunberg said. “So it really has to come from the family — and that’s where you need to have the ability to educate yourself, or hire someone to help you with it.”

Help on the SAT

Still, the mere fact that financially comfortable families are well positioned to hire that help doesn’t reveal anything about their motives. 

Ben Lovett, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said he thought the “valuable” study’s finding that poorer students are likelier to be assigned IEPs was plausible because poverty and disability . On the other hand, he wrote in an email, the overrepresentation of 504s at the high end of the income scale was “harder to understand.”

Some combination of three factors had to explain what was going on, Lovett continued: Either moneyed parents are pushing schools to issue 504 plans that are not educationally necessary; their children are particularly susceptible to conditions, such as mood or anxiety disorders, that aren’t usually addressed through special education; or the families of the neediest learners are more challenged than others in navigating the system. 

“Only additional research that audits 504 plans and investigates the evidence of disability for each student can really determine the degree to which these three factors explain the disparities,” he wrote.

One suggestive detail is that the socioeconomic divide estimated in Ainsworth’s paper actually grew slightly as students entered middle and high school, when academic demands escalate. The lure of extra time on college exams could be a powerful inducement to grab any available edge.

A , published in March by Princeton doctoral candidate Tiffany Liu, discovered a measurable uptick in 504 plan enrollments in 2017 after the College Board began a policy of automatically honoring test takers’ school-based accommodations when they took the SAT. The increase was sharpest in wealthier schools.

Nunberg agreed that the elevated academic stakes of high school likely motivated some parents to have their sons and daughters evaluated for disabilities — especially after seeing them underperform on, or become anxious about, tests like the PSAT. But while conceding that some parents in New York always search for unwarranted advantages, she argued that it was more common to encounter intelligent kids juggling real problems of focus and executive function.

“What I see much more often are kids who are brilliant and have a lot of pressure put on them by their parents, or themselves, or the system at large, and who are literally staying up all night to achieve high grades,” she lamented.

The University of Albany’s Morgan said he believed there was substantial unmet need for disability services in K–12 schools. What’s more, he concluded, it was “not unreasonable” to think that people would use the methods at their disposal to push their offspring to the top of the pile.

“I imagine there is abuse or manipulation of the system, including by parents who view it as a way for their child to get additional support. Especially for some selective colleges, things have gotten so extremely cutthroat that you’d want to give your kid any benefit you could.”

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It may come as a surprise to Californians who know the state has consistently ranked low in how much it spends on students compared to other states: California’s ranking has soared to the 13th-highest in the nation for how much it funds education per student.

03That’s not all. California’s equity ranking — comparing how fairly it distributes money to districts in high-poverty communities — rose to the second-highest in the nation, capturing the impact of the state’s equity-focused funding formula for schools, known statewide as the Local Control Funding Formula.

These are just some of the findings of , a report from the Education Law Center, a national education advocacy organization that has been ranking states since 2019.

Many Californians have long complained about the state’s dismal ranking in public education funding. But it turns out that some of what is repeated is outdated. The report’s findings led EdSource to take a closer look at its data and what they can tell us about whether decisions California voters and policymakers have made are leading to better outcomes for all students.

California’s rise in student funding

California’s average per-student funding is $19,894, as of 2022-23. That California rose from 28th in per-student funding in 2021-22 to 13th in 2022-23, the latest year for which comparisons are available, reflects a unique set of circumstances: California rebounded quickly from a short Covid-19 recession, producing higher revenues led by high-tech stocks, while education spending in many states, still mired in the recession, declined.

Other factors helped boost California’s ranking. The state responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with about $30 billion in one-time funding over four years. That included billions of dollars for summer school, learning-loss recovery, the phase-in of transitional kindergarten, as well as money to hold districts financially harmless from chronic absences.

Yes, California is the most populous state and has vast riches. Still, no other state provided funding on this scale in the aftermath of Covid-19; it roughly matched California’s share of record-level federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief aid.

Even before the Covid-19 education funding bump, California’s per-student funding had been steadily increasing over the past dozen years, from when its ranking was near the bottom of states amid the Great Recession.

How bad was it then? In 2010-11, the Golden State ranked 50th, behind only Utah in spending, according to , which preceded the law center’s reporting using similar metrics.

Then, in 2012, threatened with further cuts to education, state voters approved a temporary income tax increase on the wealthiest Californians and renewed it in 2016. (In November, state voters will be asked to make the tax permanent.) California began to climb the per-student funding ranking: By 2017, it rose to 37th, just behind Kentucky, putting it close to Texas and Mississippi and lagging far behind Northeastern states, according to ELC’s first report in 2019.

Study shows California distributes its funding equitably

Comparing public school funding among states is complex. States’ tax structures, per-capita economic output and poverty rates differ, as do their funding formulas for assisting higher-poverty school districts.

A state’s average per-pupil funding tells only part of the story, particularly in California, where a district’s funding is tied, through the Local Control Funding Formula, to the proportion of low-income students, English learners and foster and homeless children. Districts in the bottom quintile receive nearly $6,000 less per enrolled student than the highest-funded districts in California in 2024-25.

In its report, in addition to looking at funding levels per student across states, the law center has looked at two other factors:

• Equity: how well funding is redistributed to low-income and high-needs districts
• Effort: how much a state makes education funding a priority relative to its capacity, measured by the percentage of state gross domestic product (GDP) spent on public education

Benefiting from rising overall per-pupil funding, California has moved to the forefront in efforts to distribute funds to districts where they are most needed. On the law center’s measurement of funding equity, California rose from 6th place to 2nd, behind only Utah. In 2017, it ranked 9th.

The funding distribution measure, said Education Law Center researcher Danielle Farrie, “is meant to show … if states provide greater funding in higher-poverty districts versus lower-poverty ones.”

California’s equity ranking increased steadily as it phased in the Local Control Funding Formula, enacted in 2013.

A greater funding advantage for lower-income districts yields a greater score. The law center’s report shows high-poverty school districts in California receiving 42% more funding than districts with the least poverty received an A ranking. In contrast, its neighbor to the north, Oregon, earned an F: its higher-poverty districts received 18% less funding than higher-income ones.

Some states have comparatively high funding, but are rated poorly on funding distribution. Illinois, for example, gets an “A” on per-pupil funding, ranking 8th among states, but a “D” on distribution, ranking 35th. Connecticut is the sharpest example of this pattern, near the top in per-pupil funding — but at the very bottom in funding equity, because districts’ funding relies on local property taxes, favoring high-property-value suburbs over poorer urban districts.

“Two things can be true: You can have an equitable funding formula on the books, but have inequitable funding,” said Farrie. Having a big investment in education “doesn’t mean that it’s distributed equally.”

Not a top state priority by ‘effort’ metric

Let’s look at “effort.”

California’s rise in the ranks for funding effort (the percentage of the state’s GDP going toward public school spending) is partly attributable to other states’ decline. Many states, according to Farrie, have “decided to cut income taxes and corporate taxes,” so that “effort is down because they’re not capitalizing on new economic activity.”

As California’s rank rose in “effort” from 35th nationally in 2016-17 to 20th in 2022-23, the percentage of GDP spent on public education in the state only increased from 3.08% to 3.23% during that time.

And unlike most states, California’s tax receipts soared from the boom in high-tech profits following the pandemic, and K-12 benefited.

Nonetheless, in the latest report, California ranks lower in per-student funding than some other states viewed as its peers, including those with large urban areas and a high cost of living. New York, for example, spent 4.4%, and Illinois spent 4.3% of their GDP on education. The Golden State did not rank as low as states toward the bottom, however, such as Texas with 2.6% and Florida with 2.1%, both getting an “F” grade, compared with California’s “C.”

As a relatively high-cost, , California’s 20th-place ranking in effort indicates a capacity to increase funding for K-12 education either by raising revenue or shifting spending priorities. Two key contrasting measures of education funding — teacher pay and the average number of students per teacher — underscore the limits of California’s funding.

Tops in teacher pay, but also tops in cost of living

During the past decade, as its per-student funding rose, California surpassed New York in paying teachers the highest salary: $101,084 in 2023-24 compared with New York’s $95,615 (unadjusted for inflation). California’s average starting teacher pay of $58,409 was the second-highest, according to the . The numbers exclude benefits, including state and local contributions to retirement and medical coverage, which add about a third to the average salary.

But higher educator salaries have been undermined by a spiraling cost of living in California that erodes the value of those pay increases. Adjusting teacher pay for the state’s cost of living, using a formula that factors in housing costs, shows an erosion of more than $10,000, larger than any other state, including New York.

Class sizes in California remain among the largest

Class sizes historically have been large in California. Although the ratio has improved in the past five years, California’s class size remains among the highest in the nation. Its teacher-student ratio is similar to states with much lower education spending â€” only Nevada, Utah and Arizona have a higher ratio — and California’s 2025 rate of 21 students per teacher is almost double New York’s teacher-student ratio of 11.

Paying teachers well to attract and retain them is a challenge in a high-cost state. Reducing class sizes to the national average in California would require a substantial increase in funding. New York manages to do both by spending $29,440 per student in 2022-23, the most in the nation and $10,000 more per student than California.

“It is painful,” he said, “and some of you have moved two to three times to find a school for your child.”

His passion for the issue was one of the reasons he wanted to chair the education committee when Republicans took control of the Senate in 2024. That same year, he issued pointing to the nation’s sagging performance in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and advocated for more phonics-based instruction. His staff is now working on a far-reaching literacy bill that would ensure federal funds are spent on the programs that follow the science of reading.

But Cassidy might not be in Congress to see the culmination of his efforts. In his race for re-election, he faces three primary challengers, including Rep. Julie Letlow, who, unlike Cassidy, has secured President Donald Trump’s endorsement. 

Louisiana Treasurer John Fleming and Mark Spencer, who calls himself a “guns and Bible conservative” are also on the ballot May 16, but the real race is between Cassidy, Fleming and Letlow. the vote could be close.

“This is a three-way race and anything can happen,” said Robert Hogan, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. It’s rare for an incumbent senator to lose in a primary. The last one was moderate Republican of Indiana in 2012. At this point, Hogan said, there’s no guarantee Cassidy will even get to a runoff.

The first sign that Cassidy’s bid for a third term was in trouble came when he voted in 2021 to of inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6 that year. “The country is more important than any one person,” he said in a brief statement at the time. As Trump eyed his return to the White House, Louisiana lawmakers in 2024 changed the election law so that only registered party members or those who are unaffiliated can vote in a party’s primary. Previously, open primaries allowed Cassidy to pick up support from voters on the left. 

The move, Hogan said, was meant to squeeze out so-called RINOS, or Republicans-in-name-only. To MAGA Republicans, Bill Cassidy hasn’t been loyal enough. 

Gov. Jeff Landry, who , has complained that Cassidy supported “liberal Obama judges” and listened to “Never Trumpers.” While Cassidy, a physician, voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, he continues to express disagreement with Kennedy’s statements that cast doubt on vaccine safety.

“Life is lived forward, and so what I have to do is do my best to reassure the American people that vaccines are safe,” he last fall without answering whether he regretted voting in favor of the secretary’s nomination. The two clashed again over vaccine research when Kennedy testified before the committee. Those who support Kennedy’s positions on public health issues are .

‘The same language’

On other issues, the incumbent continues to voice his allegiance to Trump’s agenda. He launched an investigation into Massachusetts over allowing a trans female to compete on a girls’ track team. The president “signed an executive order to restore fairness for women and girls. I’m demanding that states comply,” he posted on X.

Following Trump’s State of the Union address in February, all the ways he has “worked with President Trump.” But to Trump, it appears, the vote to impeach is all that matters.

“This administration is completely blinded by their need for retribution at any cost,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, who has been pushing for updating federal policy on literacy. Cassidy, she said, is “100% principally aligned” with what Education Secretary Linda McMahon wants to accomplish, but the administration “doesn’t think very strategically around those things.”

Three years ago, Rodrigues didn’t consider Cassidy an ally. 

He was among the five GOP senators in late 2022 who objected to her involvement in a parent council launched by former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. The organizations chosen to participate, they argued, were “liberal advocacy groups” out to “nationalize our education systems.” 

But Rodrigues and Cassidy found common ground on solving the nation’s literacy crisis. He has greeted busloads of parents that the advocacy organization has brought to Capitol Hill over the years to share their stories. 

“It was almost like he connected with his people,” she said, “because they all spoke the same language.”

Letlow, first elected to the House in 2020, has also focused on parents’ concerns. she backed in 2023 aimed to give parents more say over curriculum and library materials, require schools to notify parents about violent incidents at schools and increase transparency into district budgets. The bill passed the House, but never received a vote in the Senate.

A former university administrator, Letlow supports Trump’s plan to . But her stance on diversity, equity and inclusion before she entered politics gave Cassidy a reason to question whether she’s sufficiently loyal to Trump.

Conservative news outlets dug up a of Letlow interviewing to be president of the University of Louisiana at Monroe in which she said it was “shameful” that the institution didn’t have more women faculty members. While she didn’t get the job, she said establishing a DEI office would have been one of her first moves. 

She has since , saying that DEI efforts were “hijacked by the radical left and turned into indoctrination.”

Fleming, a former Congressman and then Trump adviser, as a “proven MAGA conservative” who didn’t “cut and run” from the administration after Jan. 6.

The Louisiana Senate seat is considered safe for Republicans. Whoever emerges as the party’s nominee is expected to win the general election in November. But neither Letlow nor Fleming would be in line to chair the education committee. 

If Cassidy loses and the GOP stays in control of the Senate, that job would likely go to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, said David Cleary, a former Republican education staffer for the Senate and now a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm. 

Those with more seniority than her would be highly unlikely to give up their current leadership posts, Cleary said. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky chairs the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, if she wins re-election in November, “would never” leave her position as chair of the appropriations committee, he said.

Murkowski, considered a GOP moderate, to shutter the Education Department. In March, she with Cassidy to make it easier for students to find funds for college. 

But the window to get a literacy bill passed could close if Cassidy doesn’t return to the Senate next year, said Rodrigues with the National Parents Union. “It’s going to be kind of back to the drawing board.”

The appeal, published last fall, was unexpected in part because Duncan — who served in the Obama cabinet from 2009 to 2016 after a well-regarded stint as CEO of Chicago Public Schools — spends much less of his time opining on national K–12 politics than he did a decade ago. His daily focus is now directed at reducing gun violence through the work of , a nonprofit he helped found in the city where he was raised.

But even more surprising was the substance of Duncan’s broadside, which pitched the Education Freedom Tax Credit to Democratic officeholders and voters as a “no-brainer” tool to give struggling students a chance to receive a better education. The $1,700 scholarships, available beginning in January, are federally funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and can only be accessed in states that opt in. 

Among Democratic governors, only one has given his assent to the program thus far, and Senate Democrats have already introduced legislation before it even takes effect. But while he remains a passionate critic of President Trump, whom he calls a would-be autocrat, Duncan sees potential in the kind of school choice offering that his party has spent decades opposing. He believes the magnitude of post-COVID learning loss, disproportionately borne by children already facing huge disadvantages, necessitates the philosophical shift. 

The argument is part of a broader critique of Democrats’ education stances over the last decade, which have veered significantly from the model of accountability-based education reform that Duncan practiced in both Chicago and Washington. Like fellow Chicagoan and Obama administration veteran , he believes his party has largely conceded the issue of K–12 schools to Republicans and allowed students to suffer in the partisan crossfire. In March, he signed on as a senior fellow at the advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform. 

“We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids,” he told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Kevin Mahnken. “I’m deeply troubled by what’s happening to kids, and by what’s happening to us because we’ve lost any vision for education.”

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ: Your op-ed last fall encouraged Democrats to participate in the Education Freedom Tax Credit. That seemed like your first major intervention on national K–12 issues in a while. What was behind that decision?

Arne Duncan: I don’t actually think it was that dramatic. I’ve been out there — maybe not writing, but doing four or five panels at the ASU+GSV conference every year, and traveling to speak. My day job is gun violence in Chicago, so I’m not doing this all day, every day, but I didn’t see the op-ed in that way.

It was striking that you expressed a view that very few other Democrats hold. I’m only aware of one Democratic governor, Jared Polis of Colorado, who has opted into the program.

Let me try to speak to that by saying a couple of things. 

First, I was personally impacted by ICE here in Chicago. seeing horrific abuses, including things I’ve never seen before. I try to fight gun violence and gang violence every day here — last year, we were lucky to have the safest year here in 60 years — but I’ve never seen a gang in Chicago as well-armed and well-financed and violent as ICE. What they did to innocent people, citizens and non-citizens, was unbelievable.

So if I have a choice between sending a tax dollar to fund ICE to attack our people, or keep it in my state to help a child get more summer school, or tutoring, or whatever it may be, that’s not a close decision for me. That’s as plainly as I can put it: One hundred times out of 100, I would rather help kids struggling in my home state to catch up and have a chance to be successful in life, instead of sending another dollar to D.C. to fund ICE to come attack us.

But in the op-ed, you didn’t just make an argument to keep away as much revenue as possible from the Trump administration. You see a positive good flowing from this federal program providing more money for kids’ educational costs, right?

One hundred percent. There’s no loss of funds from our state’s taxpayers, it’s all additive. I don’t have the math in front of me right now, but hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions of dollars. And that’s if only 20% or 30% of people took advantage of the program, which is a conservative estimate.

Pre-pandemic, we had tens of millions of kids who were way too far behind. Coming out of the pandemic, it’s gotten even more catastrophic. You saw last year’s NAEP results, which were devastating, but I just don’t see the sense of urgency out there. I don’t see people pulling their hair out and asking, ‘What more can we do to help kids catch up?’ If I have a chance to help the kids who are farthest behind, and to do it now, it’s a moral obligation: Let’s help these kids who are so incredibly far behind before we lose them. 

I don’t want to lose that generation of talent, not for our economy and not for our democracy, but that’s what we’re in danger of. I think the chronic absenteeism rate in Chicago is 41%; just think of four out of 10 kids missing a month or more of school every year! What are we going to do, just say that school is optional? 

I’m trying to help you understand how simple this is to me, and what an obvious moral choice it is. To say to all of these kids, ‘I have a chance to give you more money for summer school, or afterschool, but I’m going to send it all to Trump’ — are you fucking kidding me? It’s inconceivable.

What would you say to people who say this policy will inevitably undermine public schools, or who fear that private schools receiving public funding could discriminate against gay or trans kids? These are of these programs.

Of course, you need all kinds of guardrails. There’s no free lunch with public money, and there needs to be accountability. If school admissions are discriminatory, that’s a nonstarter. 

But in every state, 90-plus percent of kids go to public schools, and they’re going to remain in public schools. This is a program to supplement what they get because we’re not giving them enough. I’m trying to give them longer days, Saturday school, summer school. Our dosage of education ain’t working because it’s insufficient for what they need to build a better life. Obviously, governors can and should put parameters on use so that organizations that discriminate against students or families can’t receive the money. It’s not that hard.

Have you personally recommended to Gov. Pritzker that Illinois participate in the program?

He’s been an amazing partner working on violence in Chicago, but I haven’t had that conversation with him. 

I’m happy to talk to current governors, but we have 38 gubernatorial elections this year. With a nonexistent Department of Education, and dysfunction in D.C., all the action is at the state level now. Whether it’s sitting governors, or candidates, or people thinking about running, I’m happy to share my perspective. There are a lot of other perspectives they should hear, but there’s a huge opportunity here.

What’s the downside risk on education for Democratic officeholders and candidates right now? 

There are three reasons I’m concerned. First, overall student performance is devastatingly low, as I’ve mentioned. Second, going into the last election, Republicans were . It’s inconceivable to me, but education was a losing issue for Democrats. And that election was so close, you could argue that our party’s lack of leadership on education helped to give the presidency to Trump. Had we been winning on education in those states, maybe that would have been just enough to tip the election our way. 

Finally, the only bright spots on NAEP are coming from red states. To me, that’s an embarrassment. How is it possible that the states showing the most progress on student results are all red states? We should be deeply ashamed. I’m watching all of this and feeling like we’re lost. 

In education, you need four things: You need goals, you need strategies to achieve your goals, you need metrics to measure them and you need public transparency and accountability. If you asked anyone on our side what our goals are, our strategies or metrics, we don’t have any of those things. We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids. So if you ask why I’m speaking out more, that’s why. I’m deeply troubled by what’s happening to kids, and by what’s happening to us because we’ve lost any vision for education.

There is good evidence that the polling outlook has improved for Democrats since 2023, when that swing state polling was conducted. How big a disadvantage do you really think education will be for the party? Is this an issue that voters will care about more than, say, the economy?

I’ve been blessed to work for two political leaders, Mayor Daley in Chicago and Barack Obama. I know how lucky that was. Both of them ran on education, both talked about it every day, and both put their time and resources and reputation on the line to improve education. To me, it’s not a coincidence that they were wildly popular politicians.

If the other side is selling fear and culture wars, and we’re selling nothing, we’re conceding the issue. Everyone’s worried about their kids right now, everyone’s worried about the economy, and everyone’s worried about democracy. For me, high-quality education for everybody is the answer to all of that. I look at those two extraordinarily successful politicians, and you couldn’t talk about their legacy without mentioning education. Good policy helped them politically.

So it’s a mistake to not run on education, not lead with it, not learn from those examples of politicians who put their sweat, blood, and tears into the issue. It was the right thing for the city of Chicago and the country, and guess what? It was also good for them politically.

And you don’t see Democrats emulating them?

That’s what I’m telling you! We have no goals. I can’t be more explicit about the fact that we don’t have an education agenda, and that is incredibly troubling to me. You can quote me on that.

We need those four things I just mentioned, and we need to run on education. It’s the right thing for our kids, and it’s the right thing for our communities and local economies to have graduates instead of having dropouts. We need to own this. The fact that we’ve conceded that education leadership to Republicans, who are selling crap and pitting people against each other — that’s just untenable to me.

It seems as though the GOP is pursuing the same goal it’s had for many decades — private school choice — but the Democrats have kind of let go of the rope with respect to questions like academic standards, accountability and forms of public school choice like charter schools.

I’d disagree with you on the Republican side because I think it’s more insidious than that. They’re pushing hate and divisiveness, like attacking trans athletes. This is not neutral territory. They are pitting people against each other because it’s a winning strategy for them to divide and conquer. They’re attacking the most vulnerable by gutting the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department, which fights for the kids who are the most abused and traumatized. 

I hate that that’s a winner politically, but it is. But I don’t want to wrestle in the mud with them and fight those battles. I want to create a plan to help all kids and tell parents that we care desperately about their future, that we want them to have access to education beyond high school. Let’s have these conversations and be honest about it. 

I’m out talking with parents all the time, and it resonates when you’re speaking to them. Parents don’t care about systems. They care about their kid, their school, their classrooms, and that’s what we’ve got to speak to them about.

Do you think it’s possible to swerve around the cultural fights? As you mention, some of these social controversies — the inclusion of trans athletes, but also things like accelerated learning in places like San Francisco — are quite important to people, and they seem to leave Democrats wrong-footed. I don’t think those issues can be ignored.

I’m worried about 100% of kids. The trans athlete issue affects, what, 0.0001% of kids? It’s insignificant, but somehow it becomes a good political issue for Republicans. Which I hate because, again, it’s attacking the most vulnerable. I just want to put out a proactive agenda that says that we care about 100% of kids, we’re not happy with reading scores now, we’re not happy with chronic absenteeism and we’re not doing enough. 

We have to be honest with parents because parents are smart: ‘We want to help every child find their path, and we need to partner better with you because you’re always going to be kids’ first and most important teachers. How can parents and teachers and students come together and do things differently?’ And, to go back to the first issue we talked about: ‘By the way, here’s some additional money to help your students! What would it take for them to learn biology in the summer?’

You think that conversation wouldn’t resonate? You think it wouldn’t get parents to say, ‘These guys actually care about me and my family?’ We can do this. We have to do it.

Do you find it notable that on education right now may well be a fellow Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel? What do you make of his reemergence as a potential presidential candidate?

We all come at this in different ways. I’ve done a couple things with him, and we agree on some things and disagree on others. But what I appreciate about him — whether he runs for president or not, and I know he’s looking at it — is that he’s . I just want everybody, Republican or Democrat, talking about this. 

Rahm sees there’s a void there, a gap, and he knows how important it is. Like Mayor Daley, he ran Chicago, and they both know that you can’t have a great city without a great public education system — just like you can’t have a great country without a great public education system. He’s lived this, and I appreciate him elevating the issue in ways that many others don’t. 

I’m much less interested in the specific policies in schools because I’ve traveled the country, and what works in Montana might be very different from what works in Mississippi or West Virginia. What I want is for governors, congressmen, senators, and presidential candidates to run saying that education is what they care about, and that they’ll hold themselves accountable to that. That would be nirvana for me.

When President Trump returned to the White House, you expressed serious fears about his plans for the Education Department. A year later, would you say those fears have been realized?

It’s pathetic. It’s so sad.

Last year, I was on a flight going to speak at [the education conference] ASU+GSV. When I got off the plane, my phone is blowing up with messages saying, ‘You’re not going to believe it, but Linda McMahon is talking about steak sauce. She’s talking about A1.’ [In a discussion of innovation in schools, the education secretary the abbreviation for artificial intelligence with the name of the popular condiment.] I had to walk into a session that afternoon thinking about that.

Think about someone leading the Education Department who is so divorced from what’s going on in the world that they literally don’t know what AI is. It was in her notes, and she literally didn’t know. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so revealing about what Trump thinks. Trump aspires to be an autocratic leader. What every autocratic leader needs to do is attack and dismantle education. Whether it’s the assault on higher education or the gutting of the Department of Education, what is most scary to autocratic leaders is to have people who can think critically and discern information from misinformation. There’s nothing he’s done that is of any surprise.

This is much bigger than just dismantling the Department of Education, which is horrible in its own right. It’s part of a strategy of attacking education, and it’s what [outgoing prime minister Viktor] Orban did in Hungary. So it’s important that your readers understand that what’s at stake is not just about this department and that department. The way authoritarian leaders win is by becoming the only source of truth.

Why did slave masters kill slaves that learned how to read? Because they knew that reading is powerful. It’s the same throughline here: Why is Trump going after education? Because he knows knowledge is power.

Given the ongoing series of political controversies in your hometown, are you concerned about school governance in Chicago?

Yes. When I was superintendent, I answered to seven board members who were appointed by the mayor. They now have 21 board members, and I don’t know anyone in life who ever wanted 21 bosses. That’s a few too many.

I worry that it’s been set up for failure. They’re working through it, but I can’t think of a major, high-functioning company with 21 bosses who each have their own constituents. As the district recently went through a CEO search, I talked to some very high-quality people across the country, and none of them were interested because of the governance. So it’s scaring away talent.

A private meeting between the Senate education committee and Education Secretary Linda McMahon was canceled Wednesday after Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, a Democrat, invited the press to listen in. “I was unwilling to accept the notion that the discussion of matters of this magnitude, that matter so much to Virginians, could only be behind closed doors,” he told reporters.

He said he was willing to back down if the secretary would commit to appearing before the committee within the next six weeks. In December, Democrats to participate in a hearing to discuss efforts to shut down the Department of Education, but that hasn’t happened. Following passage of the 2026 budget in January, Congress asked to meet regularly with officials for updates on the interagency agreements with other agencies, but Kaine added that he’s unaware if those have taken place.

“In my view,” he said, “the secretary and other leaders have pursued a strategy that is unlawful in taking programs within the Department of Education that are statutory in nature and sort of willy nilly ending them, shrinking them or handing them over to other agencies.”

In , GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee, said “Democrats will not dictate the terms of today’s meeting and have lost the chance to speak to the Secretary today.”

McMahon hasn’t appeared before the committee since her confirmation hearing over a year ago. On X, : “It’s disappointing that instead of a productive conversation about the state of our nation’s students and the steps we’re taking at the Department of Education to reverse this trend and break up the bureaucracy, this became about producing another media clip for MSNBC.”

It was only three months ago that Congress the Trump administration’s last attempt to slash education spending and roll an array of programs into a block grant.

From the reception that some members of the Senate Appropriations Committee gave U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday, it appeared not much has changed. 

Both Republicans and Democrats grilled the secretary over the Trump administration’s plan to cut funding for rural schools and programs that help low-income students enter and complete college. 

Consolidating $220 million for rural education with 16 other programs — including literacy grants, education for homeless students and afterschool programs — into a $2 billion Make Education Great Again grant program would “undermine the goals of helping our K through 12 schools,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the committee, told McMahon. “Protecting rural schools and rural communities has always been one of my top priorities.” 

Throughout the two-hour hearing, McMahon defended the president’s $76.5 billion , saying that although “it is a reduction,” the block grant proposal — a long time goal for conservatives — would give states more say over how to spend federal dollars. The so-called MEGA grant program will prioritize reading and math, McMahon said, and “unleash momentous opportunity for every child to realize their God-given potential.”

The budget would maintain funding for Title I, serving high-poverty schools, at $18.4 million, and boost spending for students with disabilities by over $500 million. 

But the proposal includes a 35% cut to the Office for Civil Rights and eliminates some programs completely. Those include $428 million in services for migrant children and what is known as TRIO, a batch of programs that prepare students for higher education as early as middle school. 

“I oppose the administration’s proposal to … eliminate a program that enjoys robust support and has made such a difference in the lives of children,” Collins said, noting that three of her staff members would not have attended college without TRIO.

She was among the six Republicans and six Democrats who sent McMahon earlier this month objecting to how the department has altered two of the TRIO grants to direct students toward the workforce instead of college. 

“College is not the only solution for everyone,” McMahon told the members.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, cited data showing that low-income, high school students who participate in Upward Bound are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 24 than their peers who don’t participate. 

“The stats from these programs are pretty damn impressive,” he said. 

Even Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who has authored that would eliminate the Education Department, called TRIO a “sensitive area” and urged McMahon to consider the committee’s concerns. 

Other Republicans praised the secretary for continuing efforts to shut down the department in the face of extensive criticism.

“You are so cool, literally and figuratively,” said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana. “They call you names, and you just ignore them.”

‘50 years of progress’

To some Democrats, McMahon has also turned her back on parents who don’t want to see special education offloaded to another agency. The secretary said her team still hasn’t decided what would happen to programs that fall under the Individuals with Disabilities Act. Some might go to the Department of Labor, while others could go to the Department of Health and Human Services, she said.

“I’ve gotten a petition from thousands of parents, educators, advocates who are concerned that will really undermine 50 years of progress in making sure the rights of children and students with disabilities are met,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking member of the committee.

Both Murray and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut clashed with McMahon over the way her staff has handled civil rights enforcement. 

“How do you defend that not a single child in Connecticut got a positive resolution from the Department of Education for their discrimination claims?” Murphy asked her. “Seventy of them had disability claims.”

While he’s not on the committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent, released a calling McMahon’s OCR “the least productive in over a decade.” The document notes that the office reached “zero resolution agreements for students facing serious traumatic incidents including sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion, restraint, racial harassment and discriminatory school discipline.”

He cited a January government watchdog report showing that putting OCR staff on paid leave last year, after she tried to fire them, cost taxpayers at least $38 million. 

McMahon insisted that the administration was ramping up efforts to address such complaints and seemed confused that the president calls for a $49 million cut to OCR, bringing the budget to $91 million.

“That’s a floor number,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll have the ability to increase that number.”

She ordered OCR staff on leave to return in December to address a backlog of cases, and is supervisors and attorneys for regional offices. An internal memo, shared with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, shows the regional directors would go to Denver, Seattle and the D.C. offices. But according to an OCR attorney, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, there have been “lots of departures” among those McMahon brought back. 

‘Overdue for a debate’

Some who watched the exchanges between McMahon and the committee Tuesday were struck by the level of bipartisanship over the TRIO program.

“It shows the kind of Congressional support these programs have built up over many years, and the strong constituencies they have behind them,” said Maureen Tracey-Mooney, associate director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank. Previously, she led K-12 policy development for the Biden White House.

She added that the programs that McMahon aims to wrap into the MEGA program “focus on the most vulnerable student groups.” 

Those would include students who need after-school care and are currently served by the 21st Century Community Learn Centers program. 

“What do you do once they leave the classroom when they’re so young and they can’t obviously take care of themselves at home?” asked Republican Sen. Shelley Capito of West Virginia.

McMahon responded that it would be up to states to decide whether after-school programs are a priority for them.“We’re certainly overdue for a debate about how to best support our nation’s students,” Tracey-Mooney said. “But I think we are unlikely to see a rigorous engagement in Congress with these ideas through the budget process.”

A circulated by researchers at Brown University revealed that, following a spate of immigration raids and arrests that began with Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, absences among foreign-born students in one northeastern school district rose by almost 40 percent. Notably, the trend took the form of a lasting negative impact in day-to-day attendance rather than a temporary drop in the wake of particular enforcement actions. 

Andrew Camp, a research associate at Brown’s Annenberg Institute and the paper’s lead author, said he was surprised to discover that the consequences of political change were so durable, extending through the end of the 2024–25 academic year. The lingering increase in absenteeism would likely require more work from educators and administrators to draw children back to schools, he added.

“If this just happens the day after an event, you might say, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do, and throw up your hands,’” Camp said. “But if it happens even when there’s nothing going on in the community, that indicates that it might be a more persistent problem that requires a more considered outreach effort.”

The results dovetail with those of other recent research, each pointing to clear and immediate downward pressure on attendance resulting from in immigration enforcement. That push has seen personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement school buildings, though they have detained family members .

A study released last summer pointed to similar developments in California’s Central Valley, over the past year. The author, Stanford University economist Thomas Dee, said the observations of the Brown team support his own findings and underscore “the serious academic harm that ongoing immigration raids inflict on students and schools.”

“Obviously, increased absenteeism implies lost learning time,” Dee wrote in an email. “However, I also view the impact of immigration raids on student attendance as a leading indicator for other downstream effects, such as lost learning and stress-induced mental-health challenges.”

The mid-sized urban setting examined in Camp’s work (pseudonymized as “Liberty City” to preserve the privacy of residents and district employees) differs from the agricultural region Dee focused on, but mirrors some of its demographic features. Approximately 40 percent of the community’s population was born outside the United States, and roughly two-thirds identify as Hispanic or Latino.

The authors employed an unusual strategy to conduct their study, collaborating closely with both the Liberty City school system and a local immigrant advocacy organization. From the former, they received information on thousands of students’ birthplaces that was originally collected when they enrolled in school; from the latter, a detailed log of immigration enforcement actions, including arrests, recorded in the community beginning last January.

Camp argued that using countries of origin to track students potentially targeted by immigration sweeps was less “blunt” than other methods. Some foreign-born pupils may not perceive much risk from increased enforcement activity, he acknowledged, either because they live in the U.S. legally or they feel their families are likely to evade the scrutiny of federal authorities. But alternative proxies for immigration status, such as English Learner status, are themselves imperfect measures of vulnerability — earlier research has repeatedly shown that of English Learners around the country are U.S. citizens.

Comparing attendance figures from 2024–25 to the same numbers from the previous school year, Camp and his colleagues found that Liberty City students born outside the U.S. became much more likely to miss school once President Trump took office. While foreign-born students were, somewhat surprisingly, slightly more likely to be marked “present” than their U.S.-born classmates in 2023–24, that gap disappears from the data the next year. In total, foreign-born students’ likelihood of being absent on any given school day rose by over one-third, from 5.9 percent to 8.1 percent.

Two further nuances stood out from the overall picture. First, attendance declined to a considerably lesser extent among the youngest learners: The effects on children enrolled in pre-kindergarten and elementary school largely fell below the benchmark of statistical significance, but the absence rate of high school juniors jumped by six points on average. The contrast indicates that older, more independent students may have started skipping school on their own initiative, even as parents largely continued dropping their kids off.

Additionally, the team observed that the attendance phenomenon was not primarily driven by “acute” reactions to enforcement actions like raids. Absences ticked upward by only 0.6 percentage points on days when such events took place within Liberty City, and they were not significantly higher the next day. In other words, the baseline level of school attendance was consistently lower throughout the winter and spring, not just when fears of imminent actions were triggered.

What’s more, the 37 percent boost to absences was seen in a jurisdiction that is broadly welcoming to immigrant families. Liberty City officials convened public meetings to allay residents’ fears after Trump was reelected in November 2024, and the district does not share information on students’ immigration status with ICE. That implies that attendance could deteriorate further in less supportive environments.

“As these events are ongoing, the district is being so active about calling home and communicating, ‘We know there’s been an arrest in the community, but it’s not a raid, and they’re not going after you or your kids,’” Camp said. “So if anything, I would guess these effects are a bit of an understatement of effects that we might see in Nebraska or Arkansas.”

Viri Carrizales, founder and CEO of the advocacy group ImmSchools, remarked the paper’s findings are in line with what she has heard from districts and charter networks, some of which have reported attendance drops of 20 percent. To reverse the damage, she said in an email, school leaders needed to establish “protocols and policies that clearly protect students’ constitutional rights.”

“Protecting access to education is not optional; it is a legal and moral responsibility that schools must uphold for every child,” Carrizales wrote. “A school can no longer be a school when its classrooms are filled with empty seats.”

On Monday, the justices rejected a in which parents Jeff and January Littlejohn alleged that a Leon County middle school violated their rights by supporting their child’s gender transition from female to male without their knowledge. The decision comes after the justices declined to hear two similar cases, one from last week and another from in March. 

For now, their decision means that the court might end its term without taking up one of the most contentious issues in education — the debate over whether state and district policies that aim to protect the privacy of LGBTQ students violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing of their children. 

In March, the conservative majority sided with California parents who argued that districts should proactively inform parents if their child wants to change their gender identity. But in that case, they only reinstated a lower court decision to temporarily block schools from keeping such information private. They have yet to address the substance of the arguments on either side of the issue.

“This does require a full briefing and a full decision on the merits,” said Katie Cosgrove, counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative law firm representing a that recently asked the Supreme Court to hear another case related to parental notification. “The court needs to make some clear clarifications on this parental rights issue.”

The court’s decision comes as the House is expected to vote this week on that would require schools to alert parents if students ask to change their preferred names or pronouns as well as the sex-based facilities they use. Those in favor of parental notification say districts have kept parents locked out of one of the most consequential decisions in their children’s lives. 

But advocates for LGBTQ students, , say students questioning their gender identity face of violence, poor mental health and unstable housing if they’re not ready to be open with their families.

In her dissent in , the other California case, Justice Lynn Kagan, one of the three liberals on the court, also argued that the justices should have let the lawsuit run its course in the Ninth Circuit. The conservative majority, she wrote, was “impatient.” 

“The court resolves the issues raised through shortcut procedures on the emergency docket even though it has had — for months now — the option of doing so the regular way, on our merits docket,” she wrote. 

The newest case on that list is the Rocklin Unified School District’s lawsuit against California’s Public Employment Relations Board. In 2023, the district, north of Sacramento, began requiring schools to notify parents if their child wants to use a name or pronoun for facilities that doesn’t align with their sex at birth.

The board, on behalf of the teachers union, filed an unfair labor charge against the district, saying that the policy essentially changed the terms of teachers’ employment and should have been negotiated. The union won in a state appeals court and the California Supreme Court declined to hear the case. That’s when Liberty Justice Center asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in.

Cosgrove called the lawsuit a “a super interesting intersection of parental rights and the union and administrative board overstepping its authority.”

‘They sought to help the child’

But most of these cases have been brought by parents.

It took the court several months to decide whether to take the Littlejohns’ case. The justices rescheduled it for their conference days 10 times after initial briefs were submitted last fall. 

The dispute with Florida’s Leon County district, which encompasses Tallahassee, began in 2020. The Littlejohns told Deerlake Middle School that their child, A.G., was being treated by a therapist for gender confusion, and to continue treating the student as a girl. But A.G. asked the school counselor to use the name “J” and “them” pronouns. The lawsuit states that school officials continued to support A.G.’s social transition, including holding a meeting to create a “support plan,” without the Littlejohns’ knowledge.

In multiple filings in the case, the district says that once the Littlejohns objected, school officials gave them the plan and invited them to be present at all future meetings with the student.

The parents sued the district in 2021, but lower courts ruled for the district and dismissed the case. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, considered one of the most conservative circuits in the federal court system, the educators’ actions did not “shock the conscience,” in a legal sense.

“Defendants did not act with intent to injure,” the court said. “To the contrary, they sought to help the child.”

Meanwhile, for the Trump administration, became a symbol of the fight against such district policies. She was among President Donald Trump’s special guests when he addressed Congress in 2025, and she’s a at Do No Harm, a nonprofit that opposes gender-affirming healthcare, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.

The district argued that the case was moot.

Since the Littlejohns sued, Florida, like , passed a parental rights bill that says schools can’t “infringe” on parents’ fundamental rights. As a result, the district revised its policy to say that school staff can’t “intentionally withhold information from parents unless a reasonably prudent person would believe that disclosure would result in abuse, abandonment, or neglect.” 

Brian Dittmeier, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, said that because of the Florida law, a similar dispute probably wouldn’t happen today. He added, however, that “these issues have to be sorted out at the local level.”

“A single federal standard,” he said “is not going to resolve the tension that we see between some families and schools on this issue.”

That’s why she’s grateful that her 11th grader Kai can explore a career field at her high school in the Tomball Independent School District, outside Houston. Kai is in the legal studies program, which meets daily at the Tomball Innovation Center, a 70-acre facility that houses programs like aviation maintenance, cybersecurity and app design.

“For her to just get her feet wet and see if it’s something that she might want to do for the rest of her life is awesome,” Davis said. “You don’t want to go into something in college and then all of a sudden not understand what it is you’re getting into.”

Programs like Tomball’s are helping to keep some families in public schools at a time of rapidly expanding private school options, according to from Tyton Partners, a consulting firm that focuses on the education sector. Enrollment in the district has climbed from 10,000 to nearly 24,000 students over the past decade, even as many others in the Houston metro area have . The report attributes such increases to career-connected high schools that not only reflect student interests, but that are popular with both kids and parents. 

“Everyone’s looking to create fun, interesting new programs. In fact, there are probably too many of them,” said Adam Newman, Tyton founder and managing partner. Instead, districts should focus on making sure a “critical mass” of students participate in high school redesign initiatives for those programs to “remain compelling for parents” and attract growth, he said.

A survey of 250 high school administrators showed that more than half of districts and charters with high participation in redesigned programs saw enrollment growth between 2022 and 2025. Those with minimal participation continued to see enrollment decline.

But that hasn’t been the problem in Tomball. The demand to enroll in classes at the facility, a for an oilfield services company, is so great, the district holds a lottery to admit students. With an actual courtroom on site, Kai, who attended a classical Christian school for K-5, has been able to observe traffic court. She’s learning how to prepare oral arguments and properly cite case law. 

“They teach you about how to think like a lawyer,” she said. “I feel like I’ll definitely have a leg up once I get to college.”

Other students can earn a pilot’s license when they graduate or leave with an industry certification in fields like animal science or graphic design. Those in the , an early college model, will complete an associates degree along with a high school diploma. 

With HCA Healthcare nearby and building a branch of its pharmaceutical business in Houston, Tiffani Wooten, assistant director of the Tomball Economic Development Corp., said P-TECH helps “fast track” kids into in-demand careers. 

Health care is a “huge growing industry that we’re going to have to continue to filter kids in,” she said. She describes her role as a “connector” who works with the district to “bring the industry to the table.”

Christian Lehr, managing director at Tyton, said the district views “career-connected pathways as a core enrollment and value proposition strategy,” instead of as an add-on.

‘Enrollment pressure’

The report is a departure for Tyton, which has focused most of its analyses in recent years on efforts to disrupt the public education system. In 2022, it released survey data showing a one-year, 9% drop in families saying their children were enrolled in a traditional district school. Charters, private schools and homeschooling saw increases over that same time period.

In a deeper look at school choice, Tyton researchers reported in 2024 that improving their children’s mental health was the main reason why parents considered leaving the traditional system for alternatives like online programs and private schools.

This year, the team “turned the lens back to the public system because many of them are grappling with enrollment pressure,” Lehr said. With AI changing the workplace, they’re also thinking about the “shift from a college-for-all, No Child Left Behind mentality.” 

There are plenty of reasons to rethink education for teens, said Celina Pierrottet, who leads a high school transformation project with the National Association of State Boards of Education. 

In a from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, less than half of students said their schoolwork was challenging in a positive way or matched what they do best. Forty-six percent of 12- to 27-year-olds, including those in K-12, said they weren’t having any engaging experiences at school. Chronic absenteeism also remains higher than it was before the pandemic.

“There are a lot of warning signs flashing that high schools need to change,” Pierrottet said. 

‘A long journey’

The Tyton project, funded by the Walton Family Foundation, also includes brief case studies of districts and charter networks to identify some common redesign elements, like getting input from students on what they want and relying on outside groups, including employers and nonprofits, to execute the programs. 

The pattern revealed itself in Arizona, where over 100,000 students participate in the state’s universal private school choice program. Enrollment in the , outside Tucson, has increased 4.3% since 2022. While new housing development in the area has contributed to growth, enrollment increases have outpaced that of the high school-aged population. 

The Tyton report also features the Anaheim Union High School District in California, which used to remake secondary schools and re-engage students. District leaders took the focus off testing and designed courses like biotech chemistry that link academic content with job skills.  

One school launched a community gardening project that’s used for instruction across the curriculum. But getting the community to notice can be “a long journey,” Lehr said. The Anaheim district has been at its redesign work for a decade. 

In a state where public school enrollment is expected to through the end of the decade, the Anaheim district has seen a slight decline since 2022.

“The key question is whether execution holds,” Lehr said. “If it does, we’d expect stabilization and ultimately growth over the next five years.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Last fall, U.S. Department of Education officials that transferring major K-12 programs to the Department of Labor would be “more difficult” than its earlier move of career-and-technical education programs to that agency.

They’re not even going to try this year. 

To the relief of state leaders and education advocates, the department told education chiefs Friday that they would continue to access millions of dollars in Title I and other “formula” grants under the Every Student Succeeds Act through the system that’s already familiar to state staff. 

“We have heard your concerns,” Kirstin Baesler, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told chiefs on Friday. The pause on handing that responsibility over to the Labor Department means districts won’t need to worry about funds arriving in time to plan for next school year — a situation that caught schools off guard last summer when the administration held up funding for a month.

Sticking with the Education Department’s system, Baesler wrote, would give everyone involved “more time to collaborate on procedures, processes and training to ensure states are set up to successfully receive and draw down formula funds.” 

In recent weeks Education Secretary Linda McMahon and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer have jointly announced four smaller grant competitions related to , school leadership, and charter schools. Those funds will flow through a Labor Department grant platform. But some observers suggest the department’s decision to hang on to its largest K-12 program is an acknowledgement that the transition hasn’t been smooth. Title I serves roughly 25 million students.

“That’s an important milestone to miss and a sign that the partnership has been rocky and poorly executed,” said Braden Goetz, a senior policy adviser at New America, a left-of-center think tank. He previously directed the policy and research team focusing on career, technical and adult education at the Education Department, the first office to be transferred to the Labor Department.

State officials reported numerous complications last year in trying to access CTE funds, like error messages in the system. The Illinois State Department of Education waited several weeks to get its funding and spokeswoman Lindsay Record said communication from the Department of Labor often came “with little notice and without the benefit of the Department of Education’s expertise in overseeing education programs.”  

States don’t want a repeat of that situation when they try to pull down roughly $28 billion in funds this summer. 

Competitive grants, like the ones McMahon and Chavez-DeRemer recently announced, are one thing. But Title I and other formula programs for all states “are a different, and much larger and more essential, responsibility altogether,” said Amy Loyd, president and CEO of All4Ed, an advocacy group. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education was another agency that experienced difficulties using the Labor Department’s system last year. Spokesman Victor Morente said Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green appreciates Baesler allowing “additional time for preparedness” with the formula funds, but added that “further clarity on how the new interagency plans will be implemented is absolutely necessary to avoid disruption and confusion related to funding concerns.”

Along with state officials, staff within the Education Department “persistently communicated” to leaders that moving to Labor’s grant system “would cause significant problems for states and students,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of the union representing department employees. 

Baesler said she would discuss the matter further with chiefs when she meets with them virtually May 7.

House committee vote

Congress also expressed concerns last year with the batch of “interagency agreements” McMahon has initiated as she works to eliminate the department. Members warned that the actions would “create inefficiencies” and “cause delays and administrative challenges.”

The agreements are illegal according to a group of states and districts that have the dismantling of the department. But on Tuesday, the House education committee took the first step toward writing those agreements into law. 

The Republican majority passed a bill that formally moves adult education programs to the Labor Department. Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who chairs the committee, said the move makes it easier for adults to “move from basic skills to training to employment within a more coordinated system.”

Goetz disagreed. In , he said taking the program out of the Education Department changes it into “a funnel to low-wage jobs” and turns it over to those without expertise in reading and math.

Even so, aside from Baesler’s Friday announcement, he doesn’t expect the administration to slow down its work to distribute education programs to other agencies. Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation this week, following that she used Labor funds for personal trips and had an affair with an employee, could even accelerate the process, he said.

Savannah Newhouse, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, dismissed the idea that Chavez-DeRemer’s actions got in the way of carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the department. 

“Suggesting one departure would affect these partnerships misunderstands how they’re structured,” she said. “These partnerships are with agencies best equipped to manage federal education programs without disruption.”

Still, she appreciated the reason the Carter administration summoned her father to the nation’s capital. , a prominent researcher who focused on school integration, was part of a team tasked with creating a new cabinet-level education agency. 

was to bring all of the various education programs scattered across multiple departments under one roof.

“I remember the sense of fervor and purpose that surrounded the work that they were doing,” she said. 

Almost 50 years later, Miles leads Education Resource Strategies, an organization that helps districts make sense of regulations tied to department funds. She’s quite familiar with complaints that those rules are confusing and can make spending money difficult, but the grumbling hasn’t changed her view about the department’s original mission. 

“Part of the federal role,” she said, “is to be a safeguard for the nation in the stewardship of those dollars.”

Such requirements are at the center of a long-running debate over the department’s existence. With her most recent announcement that the Treasury Department would , Education Secretary Linda McMahon is reversing history and redistributing her department’s major responsibilities across the federal government. K-12 programs are going to the Labor Department, while the Department of Health and Human Services is expected to absorb special education.

Like President Donald Trump, McMahon dismisses her staff’s oversight functions as unnecessarily burdensome and says parceling out the department’s functions will . Washington should “get out of the way,” she said in January when she granted Iowa a waiver to blend some federal funds into a block grant.

But others say those rules ensure that schools spend the money the way Congress intended. 

“The more flexibility you have, the more you run the risk that people may take advantage of that flexibility,” said Vic Klatt, who worked at the department during George H.W. Bush’s administration and then spent several years working on education policy for House Republicans. 

‘Just very loose’

During a , McMahon defended her actions and described the Education Department as a mere “pass-through” agency for funds Congress appropriates. Before the department was established, programs like Title I for low-income students and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “were handled very well,” she said.  

But that wasn’t what civil rights advocates found when they took an extensive look at how districts spent the funds. An often-cited example from their report was how the Claiborne Parish schools in Louisiana used Title I funds, meant to improve achievement among educationally “deprived children,” to build two Olympic-sized swimming pools at Black schools.

A school in Oakland, California, used the money for an exercise program to “prevent heart trouble” and increase the “flow of blood to the brain,” the report found. When parents asked if the funds might be better used to teach their kids to read, school officials told them that the P.E. program would improve the students’ reading skills.

“It was just very loose,” said Nora Gordon, a Georgetown University professor who has written extensively about the history of Title I. “They weren’t breaking the law at the time, but they were violating the spirit of the law.”

Title I was meant to be supplemental. Districts had to “sign an assurance” that they wouldn’t cut their own spending when they received Title I funds, the report said, but there were no penalties for doing so. Audits uncovered numerous examples of districts using Title I to pay for general expenses that should have been covered with state and local funds, like building classrooms and stocking libraries with books at Black schools. 

When Congress amended the Elementary and Secondary Education Act , members wrote a “supplement, not supplant” provision into the law — three words that have generated immense confusion through the years. The rule has prompted countless “guidance” documents that can be equally confusing and spawned a cottage industry of consultants and lawyers who advise districts how to avoid mistakes. 

The department, for example, presumes that districts are supplanting if they used state or local funds to cover an expense in the previous year or if they’re spending federal funds on something the state mandates, like teacher training in the science of reading. 

Some argue that the department has gone so overboard with requirements for documentation that states and districts worry more about compliance than whether the students those programs are meant to help are making any progress. 

In 2006, an Office of the Inspector General review found almost 588 requirements related to the No Child Left Behind Act — so many that a manual describing states’ and districts’ responsibilities only included about 60% of them. The Inspector General questioned whether all those rules were necessary. 

“Sure, there is flexibility in how you spend federal dollars,” said JoLynn Berge, deputy superintendent and chief financial officer at the Northshore School District near Seattle. “But you really have to be this high-level expert to understand how to comply with the rules.”

Lucky for Northshore, she is. She previously oversaw district finances for the Seattle Public Schools and before that, worked for the Washington state superintendent’s office, where she monitored districts’ use of federal dollars. She sees value in the push for flexible block grants instead of holding funds for different programs “in these little buckets,” each with their own rules. 

“You have to trust that people are going to do things right,” she said. There will always be “bad actors,” she said. “But that’s what you have auditors for.”

For some district leaders, procurement rules — those governing how districts purchase everything from tutoring services to software programs — are a common frustration. To use federal funds, like those for kids with disabilities, a district has to conduct a bidding process.

But that timeline can stretch out for weeks and cause delays in students getting the help they need, said Jay Toland, chief financial officer for the Cumberland, North Carolina, district.

“Sometimes we might have to do something on the fly with exceptional children,” he said, like hiring a speech pathologist. ”We’re still providing those services; we just have to find another funding source.”

‘Ržą˛ő°ě-˛šąšąđ°ů˛őąđ’

According to McMahon, states and districts should have more say over how they spend federal dollars. During the extended government shutdown last fall, her team took to social media to mock the department’s oversight role.

“We might be away from our desks attending strategic assessments, creating more red tape and doing nothing to improve student outcomes,” said the post, signed “bureaucratically yours.” 

But the Education Department isn’t the only agency that asks districts to complete tedious administrative tasks, and many of those will stay in place whether the department exists or not. 

The requirement that school staff document they spend on a federal grant, for example, comes from the Office of Management and Budget. 

States are known for layering their own rules on top of the federal guidelines. Jeremy Vidito, chief financial officer for the Detroit schools, previously worked in California and Louisiana, but called Michigan “the most restrictive place” he’s worked when it comes to spending federal dollars. 

“They must approve all travel and conferences in advance. They approve service vendors and materials,” he said. “At this point, we know what they will and won’t approve, so we don’t try to do anything creative.”

The public also has expectations for how districts spend that money. 

The law requires districts to spend Title I in schools with poverty rates of 75% or higher, and they can direct funds to schools with much lower poverty rates if they have some left over. Berge, in the Northshore district, described it as “peanut buttering” the funds around to keep everyone happy. Legally, leaders could concentrate that money in just the poorest schools, but pushback from the community would be intense. 

“The federal government doesn’t prohibit you from doing that. You’re just dealing with local politics,” said Marguerite Roza, who directs the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and advises districts nationwide on budget and spending issues. 

With achievement gaps wider since the pandemic, and low-performing students continuing to lose ground, she challenges districts to rethink how they spend Title I. But district officials, she said, are a “risk-averse” group and tend to stick with spending plans that state officials and auditors have signed off on in the past. 

In conversation with a group of districts last fall, she proposed that they use all of their Title I funds to pay non-teaching staff members, like instructional coaches and assistant principals, to work as tutors for low-income students. One leader from a midsized Midwestern district said the idea wouldn’t work because Title I instructors must be certified teachers. Roza reminded her that tutoring isn’t core instruction. 

“So this was actually a non-issue,” she said. 

California provides another example of how districts can get locked into misconceptions about what’s allowed. In 2012, advocates for arts education found that districts were reluctant to use Title I funds for the arts even though the U.S. Department of Education encouraged it. A “culture of ‘fear of reprisal’ seemed to permeate the Title I world,” . 

It took a letter from the state education department and extra assurance from a federal official to convince districts it was OK. Klatt, the retired Congressional staffer, is among those who predict that even if some federal rules disappear, district leaders will likely still manage those funds like nothing has changed.

“It’s hard to break that mold,” he said.

But there’s another reason, experts say, why those spending federal dollars might not be able to tell much difference between this administration and those that came before. Other than granting the Iowa waiver, which observers say was not a significant change, McMahon has mostly reiterated what the law already allows. 

In January, she released a letter highlighting the way schools can use Title I funds for improvements (on the books since 1978) and blend federal grants with state and local funds (added in 1994). She’s made similar announcements about “existing” flexibilities related to , transferred to the Labor Department last year. 

If anything, Klatt doesn’t buy McMahon’s argument that moving K-12 programs there is a way to lighten the bureaucratic load. After all, it’s the agency that enforces strict rules related to and . 

“Almost everybody at the Labor Department,” he said, “is involved in some kind of regulatory activity.” 

He co-sponsored this year that would give parents an ed-tech “right of refusal.” A former English teacher, he was never a fan of the shift toward every student having their own laptop. Technology, he said, isn’t making students any smarter.

“In fact, we know it’s making them dumber,” he said, expressing a view shared by parents across the country, especially those with students in the elementary grades. 

When his fellow lawmaker Rep. Leanne Harple read the bill, she imagined how tough it might be for teachers to accommodate such requests. An English teacher herself, she also speaks from experience. Her students do research online, where the information is more up to date than in books and academic journals. A 2024 American Federation of Teachers showed 83% of teachers use technology in the classroom daily.

The bill “would create, in some cases, a lot more work,” she said. For every assignment, teachers would “have to create an alternative that’s completely analog.”

Their opposing views on the topic reflect a growing national debate. Parents who advocated for bell-to-bell cellphone bans are now targeting Chromebooks and other ed tech. Influenced by researchers like Jonathan Haidt and Jared Cooney Horvath, who argue that cellphones and classroom technology have harmed students’ development, they’ve mobilized in Facebook groups. They’re demanding pencil-and-paper assignments and asking teachers to excuse their kids from computer-based math and reading apps. Their pleas have sparked pushback from districts that for years have relied on technology for everything from curriculum to testing.

“In August, almost no one was talking about this, and now I’m having no other conversations,” said Kelly Clancy, a mom of three in South Brooklyn, New York, who also serves on her local community education council. “There’s a sea change in parents realizing that they don’t want their kids in front of screens.”

She’s among those challenging the New York City schools’ use of digital programs. She refused to let teachers enter her kids’ work into , an AI tool from the curriculum company HMH that generates feedback on student writing. But when she tried to opt her children out of i-Ready, a widely used testing program from the company Curriculum Associates, she met resistance. The tests are a “baseline component” of the district’s assessment system, David Pretto, superintendent of District 20, wrote in an email. Her school’s principal, he said, “is not in the position to exclude your child from universal screening.”

Clancy didn’t take no for an answer. 

“We will get legal advice if necessary, but my children will not complete these,” she wrote back.

In a statement, the district said any tool using student data “must undergo a rigorous … review process to meet strict privacy, security and compliance standards before it is approved for use.” Officials urged parents to contact local schools with their concerns.

Across the country, the Seattle Public Schools has advised staff that “families may not opt out of district-adopted digital curriculum,” but a spokesperson for the district told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ that “this is an evolving landscape,” and “we will continue to review and update the guidance as needed.”

Parents in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District are also determined to keep their students off Chromebooks at school. 

“They’re saying we can’t, but we’ll find a way,” Yair Lev, a parent of two, said after a last month in which Superintendent Frank Ranelli said opting out wasn’t possible because the curriculum is computer-based.

Teachers, Lev said, are caught in the middle. He collected from five teachers, who said students often access gaming sites and YouTube during class, and even make video calls to students in other classrooms.

“There should be clear districtwide policies and parameters for when laptops should and should not be used, rather than leaving major decisions to classroom-by-classroom discretion,” one wrote.

Not ‘our best moment’

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said he’s not opposed to technology. He consults for cardiology startups using AI and has taken the lead on AI use in his division at the hospital. But he and his wife realized that “kids are being exposed to a lot of screens, and we decided to try to reduce it at home.”

In some ways, he represents many of the parents pushing for tech opt outs. His children are young, and they’re starting school at a time when Haidt, a social psychologist, that cellphones and social media have harmed children’s mental health. Lev’s kids are also beginning their education after the pandemic, when parents are demanding more say over what’s taking place in the classroom and data breaches have compromised student privacy.

“The image of technology in schools that’s seared into every parent’s mind is the lockdown version of technology. It wasn’t our best moment,” said Joseph South, chief innovation officer at the International Society for Technology in Education, which merged in 2023 with ASCD, a major curriculum organization. 

Until the pandemic, Elyssa East, a New York City mom, was raising her son screen-free. That became impossible during school closures. Around the same time, she learned that he had some learning difficulties and would “really fall apart when it came to any instruction on the screen.”

Online math programs like Zearn and IXL made him feel “defeated,” she said, because they were assigned for remediation. 

“Here is this technology that’s supposed to help him, but it makes him feel even worse than a human teacher would,” East said. 

She eventually switched him to a private school. She has opted him out of math apps and he writes on an old electric typewriter.

​​”He likes that a lot,” she said. Compared to a laptop, “it’s a totally different experience.”

‘Caught in the crossfire’

Some teachers have no problem with .

Dylan Kane, a seventh grade math teacher in Lake County, Colorado, near Aspen, went . Students, he wrote, are more focused, are completing more work and spend less time “fussing with logistics,” like connecting to the internet or forgetting their Chromebook at home.

Like many parents, he was influenced by Horvath’s . In his 2025 book, the cognitive neuroscientist argues that the widespread use of classroom technology has left students distracted and unable to retain information.  

But prior to January, Kane never had a parent request to opt their child out of using computers or specific software. Even during parent-teacher conferences this spring, his decision to ditch Chromebooks in class never came up.

“I work in a small, rural town that’s relatively low-income, not a lot of college-educated parents. I think much of the tech backlash from parents is coming from the more-online, higher-educated folks,” he said. He thinks trying to accommodate individual parents’ objections would be tricky. “Teachers could be caught in the crossfire because they have to deal with district-mandated online programs and then potentially parent opt-outs.” 

South at ISTE+ASCD said he’s heard plenty of “horror stories” about technology, like apps dominated by advertising and students spending class time “shooting aliens” on the screen. But those examples are often due to teachers using a program that was never vetted by their district or “some random kid who found a workaround,” he said.

He and Richard Culatta, the organization’s CEO, added that moving through state legislatures that limit screen time don’t necessarily address parents’ other concerns like cyberbullying, protecting student data or improving the overall quality of instruction. 

Many of the bills require paper worksheets to be used instead of technology, said Culatta, who quipped that he often feels like he’s in a “time warp.” 

“There’s no quality indicator,” he said. “You could literally take any garbage worksheet and it would be fine.”

‘Rapid innovation’

Opt-out requests have forced districts to be more thoughtful about how they use technology. 

The Worcester Public Schools in central Massachusetts is like a lot of districts. It went through “a period of rapid innovation and tech acquisition” prior to the pandemic to make sure “teachers and students had the tools needed to be future-ready,” said Sarah Kyriazis, director of the district’s Office of Innovation. 

Schools added even more ed tech tools during COVID lockdowns for remote and hybrid learning. Now some parents are questioning those decisions at a time of “national concern about data, privacy, security and screen time,” she said. 

The district’s school committee has so far to allow parents to opt out of ed tech programs. But Kyriazis is collecting feedback from teachers on the apps they feel are most important for instruction. The goal, she said, is to whittle down the amount of data sent through online platforms to third-party vendors. Principals and teachers, she said, should be able to “speak with parents about each app and its purpose in the classroom.” 

Further west, the Northampton, Massachusetts, district is accommodating opt-out requests from about 12 parents. To do so, teachers must come up with activities that allow students to learn from the same curriculum as their peers “without using the disputed programs,” said Superintendent Portia Bonner. 

Laura Carney Erny, who has a second grader in the district, hasn’t tried to opt her son out of tech yet, but she’s thinking about it for third grade. Even learning which programs the school used took “months of back-and-forth emails” with teachers and administrators, she said.

Parents say they don’t want to further complicate the lives of teachers, especially those who lack classroom aides. Northampton lost in 2024 who were paid with temporary COVID relief funds. 

“I don’t blame teachers for relying on tech because it’s an easy thing to do,” she said. “Some of these programs help keep the kids in their seats.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, former teacher Kate Brody is among those who have opted their children out of practice sessions on i-Ready, now the subject of a over student privacy. She decided the program was a problem when her first grader couldn’t tear himself away from the screen to use the bathroom and started having accidents. 

“I used to teach full time,” she said. “I definitely don’t want to create a world where we’re asking teachers to do multiple lesson plans and monitor half the class on the computer and do analog lessons for the other half.” 

It’s unfair to teachers to field opt-out requests every year, she said. That’s why, as a board member for Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group of parents and educators, she backs a that calls for limits on the use of technology for all students, especially in the early grades. The board will vote on the plan April 21.

“Right now,” she said, “it’s the Wild West.”

As of last month, more than 2,400 claims were pending in the overseen by a judge in California. More than 10,000 individual cases and nearly 800 school district claims were pending across . And more than 40 have filed or joined lawsuits against the companies.

The lawsuits allege that the platforms were deliberately engineered to maximize addictive use among children and teenagers, and that the companies knowingly designed them to drive young people’s prolonged engagement, despite mounting evidence that they can be harmful.

Their recommendation algorithms amplify harmful material, the lawsuits allege. And weak age-verification systems have allowed underaged users broad access. The companies that run the platforms knew about these risks, they say, but failed to warn users and families about the mental health risks, often revealed by their own research. 

The companies have disputed these claims, maintaining that their platforms include safety tools. But one of them, Meta, which runs Facebook, acknowledged that the lawsuits could be costly, this year with the Securities and Exchange Commission warning investors that the lawsuits and mass arbitration demands could “significantly impact” its finances.

That could happen soon. In late March, two landmark verdicts came down within 24 hours of each other: On March 25, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing that harmed a 20-year-old woman who started using them as a child. The jury awarded her $6 million. The companies that run Snapchat and TikTok were also named as defendants, but reached undisclosed settlements before trial.

A day earlier, a New Mexico jury for failing to protect kids from child exploitation and ordered it to pay $375 million for consumer-protection violations. “You add it all up and it could be hundreds of billions of dollars,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently.

As with the tobacco and opioid lawsuits, one major question is emerging: Where will the money go? Will the proceeds benefit children, or will they end up simply padding states’ and school districts’ budgetary bottom lines?

To answer this, ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ turned to Elizabeth Gaines, founder and CEO of the , a nonprofit focused on helping governments and communities figure out how to pay for programs and services that support children and youth. The organization doesn’t run the actual programs, but helps leaders and policymakers build sustainable funding systems to establish and keep these programs going, such as early childhood education, afterschool programs and mental health services.

It specializes in so-called “strategic public financing,” which pushes communities to examine how much they spend on children, how much they actually need and where they can find or generate more funding for, in Gaines’s words, “deeper investments” for kids. 

A lifelong child advocate, Gaines has worked in the field for 30 years, from think tanks to state-level advocacy. She founded the funding project eight years ago. “I looked around and realized that no one at the national level was really focusing on the public financing of child and youth development and programs and services writ large,” she said.

The project now tracks more than 300 federal, state and local funding streams that support children and youth from cradle to career.

Gaines began her career in her home state of Missouri, where she worked on ensuring one key goal: that proceeds from the 1998 benefited children. 

Spoiler alert: They didn’t. A budget shortfall prompted lawmakers to redirect millions from the settlement into the state’s general fund. Gaines now admits, “We did not get involved early enough in that process to really be able to shape the outcome of those dollars.”

Nearly 30 years later, with thousands of cases focused squarely on the harms of social media, she is working to build a coalition of groups that can persuade governors, lawmakers, educators and attorneys general to keep the focus on uplifting kids, not filling budget holes. The coming legal settlements, she said, are payback for that harm. “And [when] they pay back in, it needs to go back into the public good.”

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Greg Toppo recently sat down with Gaines for a wide-ranging conversation on her work and the “game-changing” potential of the social media payouts.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

First let’s talk about the tobacco payouts. You were in Missouri at the time. As you look back on that now, what were the mistakes?

The tobacco settlement was the Wild West. I remember we had $20 million that the governor and the legislature had committed, and they were like, “Yes, we’re going to put that towards positive youth development — and it’s going to be huge!” Back then, that was big dollars for Missouri. And then there was a little budget crisis, and the governor withheld those dollars. It was like, “Oh, sorry.” But that was happening all over the country at that time. There are some states that did a good job of setting tobacco settlement dollars aside and having a real method to how they dispersed them, but for the most part, those dollars went into the general fund and never really tracked in any significant way. 

What about the opioid settlements?

They’ve gotten better, and I think we’ve been really guided by in the opioid settlement, which was like, “Here are the 10 things that these dollars are intended to be used for.” And so states have taken that, some of them more seriously than others, as the funds roll out. 

So let’s assign a number, a score of one through 10 to the tobacco settlements in terms of where the money went. 

Writ large, that’s so hard. I mean, anecdotally, because I haven’t done a full research study, my sense is probably three out of 10. States weren’t putting funds towards something that was prevention-oriented or reinvesting in the community. 

I want to make sure I understand what the Children’s Funding Project does. I know what your objective is. I wonder: Do you have any leverage, or is this all just advisory? Are you on the outside looking in, saying, “Hey, governors, you should do this”? Or do you have power to make these things happen?

We have no real hard power in this. What we are attempting to do is go around and get regulations in place. And what we really need is to then replace that with deep investments in young people. We’re narrowing in on the attorneys general who are going to be at the table, because they’re leads among the states in the suits, making sure that they understand that it’s not just a settlement to punish the companies and then wherever those dollars go, so be it. There’s a safety aspect that they’re working on: Protect young people, change the platforms, make sure we’re not having faulty products like we’ve had. 

But then there’s a youth justice component to this too.  And people just haven’t gotten there yet. So I think we’re just ahead, honestly, of where zeitgeist is on this, and when we do get it in front of people, they’re like, “Yes, that’s where the money needs to go.” We’ve got a former attorney general who’s advising us on how the A.G. world works because it’s new to our field.

So no, we are not involved in the suits directly, and that’s intentional. That’s somebody else’s job. Our job, as the people who care about funding for kids, is to focus on making sure that money goes to the right place.

So let’s talk about that. What are the things we should be buying with it?

Spokane, Washington, has this thing that they started out of their schools called . Basically what this buys is some joy and some curiosity and some investment in things for a group of young people that have kind of had a rough decade. It’s not been awesome to be a young person. And so this is to say, “You want to learn to play the trumpet? You want to learn to code? You want to learn to build trails out in the woods? Whatever it is that’s speaking to you as a young person, we want to put an infrastructure in place that actually allows you to go and explore that.” And so they’re doing it in Spokane, which is great. 

You talk about a “rough decade” for young people. It sounds like you want to offer them opportunities that maybe even their predecessors, their parents, didn’t have. 

I will just say this: There are special cases where young people have gotten to do it. I ran youth programs 30 years ago. The program that I ran became one of the very first . And there are people who I hired that work there to this day who are incredibly talented youth workers, who now for generations have been saving young people and really helping them find their calling. And to have young people in relationships with talented adults who know how to do that — and other talented young people, what we call “near peers,” who can provide that kind of guidance — is something we’ve never had.

21st Century Community Learning Centers have basically been since years ago. It’s kind of crazy to think that we’ve never invested more than a billion dollars in that as a country.

If you went to an attorney general, and they said, “Just lay it all out for me,” what are the possibilities? Obviously there is a constituency that will say, “Just give the schools more money.” Just make classes smaller, improve buildings, put in HVAC, and on and on and on. Pump money into the system. Do you find yourselves in opposition to that?

They should, just as a matter of course, pay for HVAC systems for our schools, and so using this special pot of money to do that is not going to have the intended impact that we want to have. And given the direct link between the harms related to youth mental health and what we know about investing in prevention and upstream opportunities,  this is a chance to really make a significant investment in those kinds of things. So the coalition that we’re building is really trying to bring together the people not only that are in the comprehensive afterschool funding community, but into sports and play, outdoor education, arts, civic engagement leadership, youth in service types of activities. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s always been underfunded. This is a chance to quadruple down on it.

Quadruple down? 

Well, I’ll just go ahead and admit it’s going to be more than that. 

You’re talking about the harms of social media, and obviously thinking of ways to to remedy that. Who are the people you would work with to make some of these things happen?  

Let me be clear: We are really trying to coalesce any organization. Largely they’re community based organizations. There’s the names that people know: the Boys and Girls Clubs and the Y’s, but there’s also really organically grown, community based organizations that, in many cases, are the most effective at reaching young people that are hard to reach in the places where they are. And those folks have always just done that work and found ways to do it, but have been deeply underfunded. And so if I was the boss of social media litigation, I would say investing in those homegrown, local organizations would be a really powerful thing to do. We’re trying to bring all of those folks to one table, and then there’s going to have to be state-by-state approaches. 

Could you envision a landscape where offering funding to public schools is in opposition to the Girl Scouts or the Campfire Girls or Boys and Girls Clubs?  

Certainly that could happen. But our intent is to make this like what they’ve done in Spokane. That’s superintendent-led. I think the schools are going to have to get that this is an opportunity to really do some things that they get pressured to focus on, when really they have a job to do already and they can’t seem to layer the social-emotional well-being of young people on top of what they’re trying to do. 

I was talking to somebody today about something totally unrelated, and they used the term “human flourishing.” That sounds kind of like what you’re talking about.

Yeah. I mean, listen: With the onset of AI and the way that the world is shifting, I think there’s going to be a huge need that becomes so clear for folks about just the value of being human and how we raise good humans. It’s going to become increasingly important.

You talked about attorneys general. Are there any who you feel are leading the way?

You probably saw [New Mexico Attorney General] , the New Mexico case, which is not actually part of the larger case, . [A jury in March found that Meta had failed to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook.] It was the first one at the state level out of the gate that has gotten an early verdict. And it was pretty powerful. He was only looking at one set of harms related to child exploitation. So just on that one harm alone, they said was owed. And then if you extrapolate that to all the other harms, it’s significant. Certainly Kentucky’s, A.G., Colorado’s, California’s. But it’s a truly bipartisan group of A.G.s that are leading on this. 

These strike me as not just life-changing numbers but just system-changing numbers. I mean this has a potential to really just change how we even consider what’s possible. 

That’s the point, and that’s, I think, why people get very excited about this as a solution, as a chance to really dream and to get young people excited and engaged. “Game-changing” is how we’ve been describing it to the field. And we’ve got to stop thinking about just like, “Let’s fight for those little afterschool dollars that we’ve had all this time.” No, this is about a bigger play.

In February, the telehealth company , including clinicians who worked directly with students and families, leaving about 500 employees. 

The company lost one of its biggest customers, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, last year. It shortened its contract with the Chicago Public Schools because of “challenges securing funding,” a spokeswoman said. And several districts across the country have also either ended their business with Hazel or have contracts that expire later this year. 

they are “restructuring” the company to put it in a better position as it pursues more stable sources of funding, like billing Medicaid and private insurance, now that the federal relief funds some districts used have expired. Company spokeswoman Emilie Fetterley said no additional layoffs are expected “at this time” and that many states and districts plan to renew their contracts. 

But according to internal memos, by a news outlet covering mental health, CEO Iyah Romm said the company was losing “too much money” to meet its goals. Since the expiration of the Los Angeles contract, the company has even, at times, absorbed the cost of services, Fetterley said. 

Some say the company faces a difficult road ahead.

There is a “massive need” to address student mental health and behavior issues, said Adam Newman, co-founder of Tyton Partners, a consulting firm focused on the education sector. Until the relief funds ran out, “there were enough dollars in the system for schools and districts to find ways to underwrite these types of programs. But the risk has always been: What’s the durable funding model?”

In Missouri, the Ferguson-Florissant district, outside St. Louis, ended its business with Hazel last year.

“They were great to work with,” said spokeswoman Onye Hollomon. Hazel served about 2,000 students in the district, which used COVID relief funds to pay for the program. “Once that phased out, we had to make that cut.”

Los Angeles spent more than $28 million in one year to make Hazel available to the county’s 80 districts, according to GovSpend, a data company tracking payments to government agencies. It funded its deal with the company by tapping a $389 million . Between March 2022 and May 2024, 804 schools in the county referred 9,337 students for services, according to data Hazel provided to the county. Of those, 4,162 students received at least one visit, with students participating in an average of six visits. Fetterley said once a student is referred to Hazel, parents don’t always follow through with a visit or may seek help elsewhere.

In addition to taking a loss on services for some students since last year, Hazel has relied on billing insurance, including Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, and contracts with individual districts. Leaders are currently negotiating contracts with districts for next school year. 

Hazel is also one of eight providers approved for a new program that allows 700 districts throughout California to be reimbursed for services by Medi-Cal or private insurers. It participates in a similar in Iowa, and in Nevada, the Clark County School District uses Medicaid funds to pay for Hazel services, but that ends in June. A spokesperson said the board has not yet decided whether to renew it.

‘Made their mark’

Telehealth programs, delivered through schools, were expanding long before the pandemic. They offer families convenient access to a remote doctor or therapist while preventing students from missing school for appointments that often turn into full-day absences. Hazel Health, founded in 2015 by health care executive Josh Golomb, was part of that growth. 

“Telehealth providers have made their mark in school-based health care,” said Nirmita Panchal, a senior policy manager at KFF, a nonprofit focusing on health policy. “They eliminate transportation barriers, where students may not be able to physically get to a provider.”

During the pandemic, when learning and work suddenly went virtual, telehealth programs for schools . of school-based health centers showed that during the 2020-21 school year, more than 80% of respondents offered telehealth services, up from 19% in 2016-17. 

The financial landscape has since changed. A lot of districts are now cutting budgets to close deficits. GovSpend, which doesn’t capture all district spending, shows a decline in payments to , a similar company, since 2023, while , another virtual mental health provider, saw a more stable influx of funds from 2024 to 2025. 

Among providers, however, Hazel Health stands out. The company, which serves 6,000 schools in 21 states, initially focused on primary health care, with physicians prescribing over-the-counter medications for routine symptoms like stomach pain or headaches. In 2021, the company broadened its model to provide mental health services and respond to “rising unmet student needs and limited access to care,” Fetterley said. 

In Florida’s Duval County schools, Brittany Beimourtusting reached out to Hazel last school year when she was going through a divorce. Her middle child, she said, was having trouble adjusting.

“It was a single-parent household all of a sudden, and I thought, ‘How am I supposed to get him to get help because I think he could use therapy,’ ” she said. The provider, she said, met with him about five times and helped him open up about what he was feeling. “It was definitely worth it.”

But when Superintendent Christopher Bernier looked for ways to save the district some money last year, a $1.4 million payment to Hazel was on the list.

‘A connected system’ 

Four years ago, the startup’s future looked bright.

It attracted over $50 million from investors, including Fiore Ventures, founded by Walton family heiress Carrie Walton Penner. As recently as last year, Hazel was still eyeing growth. It made two acquisitions, including , which offers family therapy, to further expand mental health services. 

“Together, we are building a connected system that supports children from their classrooms to their kitchen tables,” wrote Andrew Post, then ąá˛šłúąđąô’s president, in October. But he has since resigned, writing this month that it was time to turn to the “next chapter” in his career.

ąá˛šłúąđąô’s was supposed to run through the end of 2027. Now it will end on June 30. Still, district officials said the layoffs have had no impact on the services students receive. In a pilot program that began in March 2025, the district made mental health services available to 84 high schools. As of January, 420 students had taken advantage of the program, the district said.

In December, Destiny Singleton, the honorary student member of the Chicago Board of Education, told members that students don’t always feel comfortable talking to school counselors about personal issues because those staff members are often focused on academic performance and preparing for college. That’s why talking to an outsider can be helpful. But she added that students at the district’s larger high schools are often unaware that Hazel is even an option.

Some Chicago parents, however, are wary of Hazel and say families don’t always know what they’ve agreed to when they consent to allowing their child to meet with a Hazel provider. In to Chicago district leaders last year, student privacy advocates said they were concerned about whether Hazel properly secures students’ private information. 

The company’s acquisition of Little Otter, , raises red flags because Rebecca Egger, its CEO, formerly worked for Palantir, a federal contractor known for using AI to assist the Department of Homeland Security in its . 

In a response to Chicago officials, Romm, the CEO, wrote that Hazel does not “sell, share, or use student data for any commercial purpose,” and that it “does not have any relationship with Palantir, commercial or strategic.”

Fetterley, the company spokeswoman, also said Hazel is in the early stages of rolling out chatbots to “simplify administrative tasks like scheduling for parents and clinicians,” but that AI will never be a “substitute for our human providers.”

Even so, some districts see a much higher demand for in-person rather than virtual clinicians. In Broward County, Florida, where Hazel provides medical services, but not mental health support, 179 students completed a telehealth visit between August and December last year, according to district data. Over that same time period, more than 134,000 students visited a school clinic.

“Parents want nurses,” Cynthia Dominique, chair of the District Advisory Council and a parent in the district, told the school board in March. As a nurse practitioner, she questioned how a provider working remotely can diagnose and treat most common symptoms, like congestion or a sore throat.

“I can’t ask the registrar from the front desk, ‘Can you look in the kid’s mouth and tell me what you see?’ ” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “They don’t know what they’re looking for.”

For district leaders, however, ąá˛šłúąđąô’s ability to keep kids from missing school provided an effective selling point.

During a 2023 meeting, Duval County School Board Member Darryl Willie said the program had saved the district 4,000 “classroom hours” during the 2021-22 school year.

“We’re talking about making sure we’re focused on reading, writing and math,” he said. “The only way we can do that is if students are in school, in classrooms, sitting in seats.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Over the past few decades, that has generated a growing tension among parents and educators, who have begun questioning the .

But a new kind of funding scheme may turn that dynamic on its head: A finds that a different approach to buying classroom technology may not only be workable but, in many cases, produces results that traditional contracts don’t. Called outcomes based contracting, the model ties what companies get paid, at least in part, to whether students actually learn.

The findings, from the nonprofit groups and the , also come as school budgets are tightening after COVID relief funds dried up and district leaders find themselves under growing pressure to justify spending. 

The report examined a group of school districts piloting an outcomes based model. It finds that the arrangement offers a new way to determine whether tech is actually working for kids, since it dictates that a portion of vendors’ payments depends on meeting a set of agreed-upon student benchmarks. If students don’t reach them, vendors don’t collect the full contract amount. 

But the model also builds in a layer of shared accountability: Districts must commit to making sure students use the tools at the levels, or “dosage,” necessary to produce results.

Brittany Miller, the center’s executive director, said that forces everyone to take implementation seriously.

“What this model does is it tells everybody across the ecosystem: ‘Prioritize this,’” she said. “You have to get to this level of implementation integrity, which translates into dosage, in order to actually have a meaningful experience for a student.”

Kids ‘not getting the dosage they need’

Before looking at whether a tech product improves student outcomes, Miller said, there’s a more basic question that districts rarely ask: Are students using these tools at all?

The answer is often, “No.” 

The report found that more than 65% of purchased ed tech licenses typically go unused, with school districts paying full price for products that sit idle. But districts participating in the outcomes based pilot met dosage requirements for as many as 95% of students. Overall usage rates were typically 10 times higher than under traditional contracts.

“We talk a lot about dosage, and kids not getting the dosage that they need,” Miller said. “And that, to me, is a proxy for being a responsible consumer of tech: Are our kids actually using it in a way that will drive outcomes?”

Miller said part of what drives the usage shift is that both districts and vendors share a direct financial stake in students actually using the products. Under the model, if a student falls behind on usage, the district must find out why and get that student back on track. If they don’t, there’s a record of that and the district is on the hook for payments, even if the student’s achievement didn’t improve. 

It’s only fair in cases like these, she said. “The provider wasn’t able to prove that their product worked because kids didn’t actually use it.”

Beyond usage statistics, the report found that districts in the pilot reported greater instructional coherence. Technology was being used with more intention tied to specific learning goals rather than as a general add-on to existing lessons. And teachers were more deliberate about how they integrated tech into their instruction.

Miller, who formerly led large-scale tutoring implementation in Denver Public Schools, said she has sat in classrooms and watched students working with these products, typically supplemental literacy and math tools. She said many of them can make a difference, but only if used properly. 

“We’re talking about technology that has the ability to help students pronounce words correctly, support their fluency and break down words for them,” she said. “In mathematics, we’re talking about students using technology to really try different ways of solving problems and getting them exactly what they need in the moment.”

The report also found that tech companies benefited from the model in unexpected ways: Because outcomes based contracts require detailed, real-time data on how students are using a product, companies got access to information about their tools’ effectiveness that most standard contracts never generate.

Fewer tools, better results

Perhaps most counterintuitively, the report found, districts that rely on outcomes based contracting actually end up buying fewer tech products.

That’s because the process of building such a contract requires district leaders to clearly define what problem they’re trying to solve, what success looks like and whether a given product is actually the right tool for the job. That level of scrutiny, said Miller, produces a kind of natural audit.

“We’ve seen in a lot of districts as they’ve taken this on, the number of ed tech tools they’re purchasing just [goes] way down at the district level,” she said.

In one district, Miller said, officials found they’d purchased licenses for more than 1,000 tools. As they examined the list they said, “If there is not a clear reason and purpose that we’re using this in the classroom that’s actually driving student learning, then we’re not going to pay for that tool anymore.”

She added, “It just shifts the mindset of the system to really say, ‘Let’s look at what we’re purchasing more carefully, figure out what is and isn’t working, and start to cut down on the noise.”

The center, based at the , grew out of research conducted at Harvard University’s under economist Tom Kane, who in 2021 a small group of tutoring providers and school districts to examine whether outcomes based contracting — already used in healthcare and workforce development — could be adapted for K-12 education. 

The project eventually moved to the foundation, with Denver among the early participants. Miller was a district leader at the time and got involved in the work that Denver was piloting on tutoring. 

As of February, Miller’s center had worked with 87 education institutions ranging from school districts to state education agencies and tracked results for more than 63,000 students.

In addition, six states — California, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Indiana and Louisiana — have launched initiatives around the model. Together they represent more than 28% of total U.S. K-12 education spending, constituting a potentially fundamental shift in how schools spend money. That shift, Miller said, could have a huge impact on children’s achievement if educators are asking the right questions. 

“There’s a student at the end of the day that’s being served by this,” she said. “How are you really humanizing their lived experience in the classroom and making sure that they’re achieving the outcomes that we know they’re able to?”

“These support systems are what students really rely on,” one girl told the board. “As someone who struggles a lot with being overwhelmed and anxious, sometimes I just need someone to talk to.”

The layoffs will help reduce an $8.6 million budget deficit, due in part to the loss of 350 students. 

Sarah Neville, a board member in the Boston-area district, knows one reason enrollment is down. Under federal law, districts can’t ask whether students are U.S. citizens, but almost 90% of the 5,700-students are Latino and 47% are English learners. The state education agency estimates that the population of English learners in Massachusetts schools has since 2024. Officials from Chelsea and other metro-area districts say as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted raids in last fall.

“We’re low hanging fruit for ICE because so many of our folks are undocumented,” Neville said. “When they say, ‘We’re going to go target Boston,’ you find the vans actually hanging out in Chelsea.”

The district is among several across the country now confronting the financial impact of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Whether students are absent from school, families have been detained, or they’ve left the district or the country on their own, the empty desks add up.

Districts no longer have federal COVID relief funds to fall back on, and many already saw steep enrollment declines during the pandemic. The Chelsea board is one of asking the legislature for one-time grants to help address the shortfall. With fixed costs like payroll and contracts with vendors, a sharp drop in enrollment “creates chaos,” Neville said.

In Texas, officials from , and several districts in the are among those who say the immigration crackdown has contributed to further enrollment loss and, with it, potential drops in state funding. 

Districts’ heightened concerns over finances come as conservatives increasingly argue that American taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill to educate undocumented students in the first place. 

During a heated , members of a House judiciary subcommittee argued that the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn , a landmark 1982 ruling in a Texas case that guaranteed children a right to a public education, regardless of citizenship status.

“The financial costs of Plyler are undoubtedly staggering, clearly representing a significant burden on localities,” said Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who chaired the hearing. “But it isn’t just fiscal costs we should be worried about. Our nation’s classrooms routinely deal with illegal alien students, many of whom know little to no English and may struggle with other learning disabilities.”

Pointing to Census Bureau figures, a from the subcommittee estimated that educating non-citizen students in U.S. schools costs about $68 billion a year. But during the hearing, Democrats highlighted of providing students access to education, like $633 billion paid in state and local income taxes and contributions to the U.S. economy worth more than $2.7 trillion.

The witnesses included James Rogers, senior counselor with the conservative America First Legal Foundation, who called the Plyler opinion ”egregiously wrong from the start” and an example of judicial overreach. He predicted that the current conservative majority on the court would overturn it if given the opportunity. Republicans in like have proposed legislation to collect students’ immigration status. If one of those bills passes, opponents are expected to challenge it in court.

But Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said that excluding undocumented students from school or charging tuition would mean “only certain classes of children whose parents can afford to pay are entitled to the blessings of liberty and the hope of a better future.” 

Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, warned that at a time when chronic absenteeism remains above pre-pandemic levels, non-citizen children wouldn’t be the only ones out of school if the court overturned Plyler.

“It will extend beyond the families to peers and ultimately it will be impossible to enforce truancy laws,” he said. “Any child who doesn’t want to be in school will know to simply say ‘I’m undocumented.’ ”

The ‘bottom line’

For now, most Texas districts want to hang on to as many students as possible.

“When you’re a rural school district, every kid has a big impact on your bottom line,” said Kevin Brown, executive director of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “When you lose five or 10 kids, you have to cut programming. You can’t cut teachers, so you have to start looking for other ways to do it.”

He expects to see a request during next year’s legislative session to allow for some “transition period” before funding drops, but “whether something passes is another question.”

In California, where state funding is based on districts’ average daily attendance, Gov. Gavin Newsom last October that would have added immigration enforcement as one of the emergencies that triggers a waiver of the funding rule. The change was unnecessary, he said.

In Minnesota, districts are still hoping for some relief. On their behalf, a national nonprofit to temporarily suspend a state law that requires districts to drop students from the rolls if they’ve been absent for 15 straight days. The legislation allows exemptions for emergencies.

, in which the Trump administration deployed roughly 4,000 ICE agents to the Minneapolis area, “no doubt qualifies as a calamity that would trigger application of the exemption,” leaders of the National Center for Youth Law wrote to state House and Senate leaders last month. 

Fridley Public Schools, outside Minneapolis, has lost 20 students because of the 15-day rule. 

“Some of our children have been in an apartment for 14 weeks and haven’t been able to leave,” Superintendent Brenda Lewis said on a recent webinar. 

Roughly 100 more have left since the surge, possibly taking advantage of the state’s open enrollment policy to relocate to other districts. The loss means a $1 million hit to the district’s $51 million budget. The district also missed out on $131,000 in meal reimbursements from the federal government because low-income students weren’t in school to eat breakfast and lunch, Lewis said. 

Fridley’s enrollment would have been down another 400 students if the district hadn’t quickly implemented a virtual learning program, Lewis said. But federal agents used the device distribution process to apprehend those they suspected to be undocumented, she said. 

“We had ICE agents arresting people because they knew they were coming for the Chromebooks,” said Lewis, whose district is part of against the Trump administration over its policy of allowing immigration enforcement near schools and other “sensitive” locations. “ICE agents will board your buses. They’ll board your vans. They’ll pull the vehicle over and start interviewing children about immigration status. By interviewing, I mean interrogating.”

‘In-your-face presence’

The Trump administration recently such actions in an effort to end a government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security. Julie Sugarman, who studies immigration policy affecting K-12 schools at the Migration Policy Institute, said a “less-aggressive” approach near school grounds would likely lead some missing students to return. 

“The in-your-face presence absolutely is causing people to stay home,” she said.

The Chicago Public Schools last fall saw steep declines in attendance that coincided with , according to by Kids First Chicago, an advocacy group, and the Coalition for Authentic Community Engagement, representing multiple nonprofits. On Sept. 29, the Monday after enforcement activity began, nearly 14,000 students at schools serving high percentages of Latino students were absent, the report showed. 

The district uses enrollment counts from the early part of the school year to make budget and staffing decisions. If students missed school on those days, or if the district eventually dropped students out for extended periods, those absences could affect funding, explained Hal Woods, chief of policy at Kids First Chicago.

District leaders can only estimate how many undocumented students are entering, or leaving, their schools, and that’s a problem, Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, said in testimony before the House subcommittee. She blamed that warned districts against asking for students’ or parents’ citizenship status for enrollment purposes. 

While many English learners are U.S. citizens, she called out districts under state takeover, like and nearby , which have English learner populations above 30%, according to the state. “Illegal students,” she said, are impacting schools as a whole. 

“Teachers are being forced to … do Google Translate on their phones,” she said. “All of these things obviously impact the total education system, and the taxpayers are left holding the bag.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said immigration enforcement affects all students. He pointed to Willmar, Minnesota, about 150 miles west of the Twin Cities and the site of a Jennie-O turkey plant that employs many . It’s the town where ICE agents in a Mexican restaurant and then returned to detain the owners and a dishwasher. 

In December, as rumors of an ICE raid spread, hundreds of kids, including white students, stayed out of school, Superintendent Bill Adams . 

“I remember walking in the hallways going, ‘Holy God, where are all the kids?’” said a district employee who declined to speak for attribution due to the sensitivity of the topic. “It was eerie.”

In October, Adams said enrollment in the 4,400-student district was down by over 170 students, amounting to a loss of more than $4 million. To make up for some of that gap, the district is it used to teach independent living skills, like cooking and doing the laundry, to older students with disabilities. 

“It’s just hit our community really bad,” the employee said.  

Just over a year ago, IES — the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, charged with deepening America’s understanding of how schools perform and what students learn — was rocked by a wave of layoffs as Education Secretary Linda McMahon her own agency. The education chapter of Project 2025, a policy wish-list assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, advised that the Institute’s statistical office be moved to the Census Bureau. 

The picture looks somewhat sunnier as winter turns to spring, with Republicans in Congress from significant cuts and . In a recent interview, Lindsey Burke — the author of the Project 2025 recommendations on schooling, now serving as deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department — referred to IES as of the Education Department.

Most striking of all was the publication last month of by Amber Northern, a prominent education researcher and commentator appointed last year as a special advisor to McMahon. While critical of the Institute for its numerous areas of focus and the sometimes-plodding pace of its data releases, Northern’s overview represents a long-term vision for federal support of research that directly answers the needs of educators. McMahon and Acting IES Director Matthew Soldner , suggesting that its prescriptions would find a receptive audience in the administration.

But some insiders said that any attempt to improve the functions of the Institute would depend on a meaningful rebuilding of its capacity, including a move to restore agency staff to something approximating their numbers before last year’s DOGE cuts. What’s more, some tweaks to IES workings and grantmaking would require changes in law that would be impossible without bipartisan cooperation in Congress. That leaves open the question of whether there remains a constituency for the kind of large-scale, public-sector research endeavors that have long received the backing of both Democrats and Republicans.

Northern declined to comment for this story. But her recommendations — broadly, that IES limit its focus to a smaller number of national education challenges, reorient its work toward the practical concerns of schools, and foster cooperation among states to scale up their most promising policies — amplify some broadly shared views of where federal data collection needs to go. 

Sara Schapiro, executive director of the advocacy coalition , noted that her group’s recent made some of the same points, as did from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Not only are many of those ideas the subject of broad agreement, she added; they can also be implemented at the discretion of the Institute’s leadership, with no input from lawmakers necessary.

“One of the recommendations was a smaller set of research priorities — IES can just do that,” Schapiro said. “They can require better dissemination [of research] from grantees. They can do some of the rapid-cycle grants we’ve called for and this report calls for. And they can also review and change some of the NCES data collections.” 

Yet any statutory changes would face major headwinds in an era of intense polarization and divided political attention. In 2023, Democrat Sen. Bernie Sanders and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy that would have reauthorized the Education Sciences Reform Act, the law that established IES in 2002. It never received a Senate vote, demonstrating to Schapiro that any legislative efforts would be “extraordinarily hard.” 

“We weren’t able to get it over the finish line during the Biden administration, with an easier congressional landscape,” she acknowledged.

David Cleary, a former high-level Republican staffer who helped pass major education laws across more than two decades working in Congress, wrote in an email that the most promising potential revamp might lie in the of Trump administration official Jim O’Neill to lead the National Science Foundation. An interagency agreement between NSF and IES could allow the two organizations to pool resources and expertise going forward. (Two such agreements between the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Beyond such administrative wrangling, however, Cleary said the education policy community needed to “buckle down and do hard things well instead of doing easy things poorly.” He cited the recent momentum of state-led literacy initiatives, galvanized partly through their partnership with federally funded research labs, as an example for lawmakers to follow. 

“The challenge is getting staff and members to think a little more dispassionately about what needs to be researched and funded,” Cleary wrote. “Instead of letting every question be asked, every project funded, every idea pursued, we should model after the successful endeavors on the science of reading.”

Veteran research administrator Cara Jackson, who worked at a private research organization that collaborated with IES until losing her job last year, said she agreed with portions of Northern’s critique, noting the long wait times that contractors anticipated when receiving feedback from the Institute’s various offices and stakeholders. She argued that greater transparency in the research process, including a dashboard allowing the public to track the time and money expended on each project, would foster more “mutual accountability” on all sides.

Nevertheless, it was a “strange sequence” to call for reforms after largely dismantling the Institute’s workforce, Jackson continued. Well-intentioned proposals to award funding and release data on a faster timetable would likely falter if not enough employees existed to simply push money out the door to grantees and contractors. 

“There were people there who were already acting on these ideas and could have been doing that all this time,” Jackson observed. “Now you’re going to have to hire people to do it. It takes forever to hire government employees, and we haven’t made the job any more attractive by letting go of all these people.”

Atlanta

In a once-thriving neighborhood in the southeast part of Atlanta, Lakewood Elementary served families who came to work at the General Motors assembly plant, a sprawling 100-acre landmark that became a path toward economic mobility for entry-level workers. At its height in the late 1970s, the plant employed as many as 5,700 people. 

But by the early ‘90s, when Gloria Hawkins-Wynn moved into the community, signs of decline were evident. The last Chevy Caprice rolled off the assembly line in 1990, and a popular antique market at the now-defunct Lakewood Fairgrounds shut down in 2006. The closure of the elementary school two years earlier further contributed to neighborhood blight, turning the abandoned structure into a hotspot for criminal activity.

“We get prostitution. We get drug dealing. We get drive-by shootings,” Hawkins-Wynn told four years ago. A neighborhood representative, she urged city leaders to turn the eyesore over to a developer. 

Former students begged the city to save the school, home to some of their earliest : Dick and Jane books, dances in the auditorium, a principal named Mr. Hinkle. Still visible on the school’s deserted playground is a faded map of the United States.

“Please don’t demolish it,” wrote one woman. Walking to Lakewood with her mother, who died when she was 7, is a cherished memory. 

Now the old school is one of several in Atlanta It’s a transformation that is increasingly taking place across the country as city leaders and developers look to give new life to vacant buildings once bustling with students and teachers.

In 2024, nearly 2,000 apartments were built in former schools across the U.S., a record high and four times the number a year earlier, according to from RentCafe, a property search website. School-to-apartment conversions are now the fastest growing segment of a niche industry devoted to makeovers of historic spaces. 

As student enrollment nationwide and more districts, including Atlanta, make the painful decision to close schools, the Lakewood project offers a glimpse of what’s to come: Seventy-four school conversion projects are already underway across the country, RentCafe’s data shows. With enrollment loss in traditional schools , districts will be left with even more surplus properties. 

Renovating existing structures “offers a way to help those buildings continue on as community assets,” said Patrice Frey, president and CEO of RePurpose Capital, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

For the first time since the Great Depression, renovation projects, including historic preservation, surpassed new construction in 2022, according to the . Supply chain gridlock and “the rapid escalation of materials costs” likely contributed to the shift, Frey said.

The pandemic also played a part as parents chose charter schools or uprooted to other districts and states to find in-person learning. The rapid expansion of private school choice has also contributed to enrollment declines, school consolidations and closures.

Data from the Brookings Institution showed that between the 2018-19 and 2021-22 school years, 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their students. Many districts delayed closures in response to parents and generations of former students who pleaded with leaders to keep the neighborhood institutions open. Some districts, , are still putting it off.

But maintaining underenrolled schools, especially those with just a couple hundred students, can be a financial drain. The , and districts are among those that have recently announced or discussed closures. That means they’ll eventually have to decide what to do with the buildings.

An earlier Atlanta project, completed in 1999, offers a preview of what’s in store for Lakewood and many other former schools. was redeveloped into Bass Lofts, a three-story structure that sits in a bohemian neighborhood known for vintage clothing stores, dive bars and record shops. Mallory Brooks, a photographer, moved into one of the units 10 years ago after relocating from Florida.

“It was the first place I looked at, and I was definitely smitten,” she said. Stepping through the main entrance, “you are transported immediately to being in a school.” 

Old lockers, welded shut, line the ground floor hallways, and a large Depression-era mural of women dancing sits above the stage in the auditorium. While rows of seats remain intact, some tenants also use the space to store their bikes. Brooks appreciates how sunlight pours through the 10-foot-high windows — “I’ve been able to basically create a greenhouse in my apartment,” she said. But regulating the temperature is difficult, and she looks forward to HVAC upgrades. 

‘Legacy residents’

Lakewood Elementary is one of eight sites that the Atlanta Public Schools is now repurposing through an agreement with the Atlanta Urban Development Corp., a nonprofit arm of the city’s housing authority that renovates historic properties into mixed-income residences. The plan, part of to increase affordable housing, includes giving teachers the first choice of apartments. That was important to Cynthia Briscoe Brown, a former Atlanta Board of Education member whose last vote in December was to . 

“Seventy percent of APS employees do not live within the city limits of Atlanta,” she said. “One of the board’s priorities in developing these properties is to make it possible for our employees to not have to drive so far before their work day.” 

A lawyer with experience in real estate, she took an interest in the dilapidated properties when she was first elected in 2013. But she also has personal ties to the site where Peeples Street Elementary, one of the eight former schools, once stood. Her father, Woodson Briscoe, attended the school, which sat just down the street from the boarding house, run by an aunt, where the family lived. 

“This was the Depression. They were a young couple with a family, and they couldn’t afford their own house,” she said. Today, as in the neighborhood climb, with some homes priced well over $500,000, families are facing the same problem. “The West End is gentrifying to a point where a lot of legacy residents are having trouble staying.” 

‘A pall over neighborhoods’ 

Peeples Street closed in 1982. has been gone for 30 years, torn down after a fire left little worth saving.

But some shuttered schools can sit vacant for decades, attracting crime and casting “a pall over neighborhoods,” Alyn Turner, a sociologist with Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, told a group of Atlanta leaders in February. 

In a hotel east of downtown, they gathered in a dining room to discuss ways to lessen the negative impacts of the upcoming closures on both students and the neighborhoods where they live.

Turner cited a showing that between 2005 and 2013, 12 urban districts, including Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh, sold, leased or repurposed 267 school properties, but still had more than 300 on the market. 

School closures “tend to concentrate in communities that have already experienced displacement and disinvestment,” she said. “People can experience a closure as yet another signal of neighborhood decline.”

In Gary, Indiana, a rising number of 911 calls near abandoned schools — an almost 600% increase between 2022 and 2024. They found fires, hundreds of requests for extra police patrols and 26 reports of “shots fired.”  In 2015, a was found dead in Emerson High School, a Four years later, three teenagers fatally shot a woman and in an emptied-out elementary school.

Like any abandoned building, a boarded-up old school can “provide cover” for criminals, according to at Arizona State University. Run-down, vacant structures can even escalate criminal behavior, they write, sending a message that no one owns or cares about the property.

Maintaining former school buildings until they’re sold or repurposed can make the neighborhood feel safer, Turner told the Atlanta group. But like Briscoe Brown, some participants said they worry about the opposite effect — gentrification that leaves some lower-income families behind.

“How can you help the people who are still there?” asked Femi Johnson, a senior director at Achieve Atlanta, a nonprofit that focuses on college access. “Can it be a food bank? Can it be a community health center?”

In her hometown of Philadelphia, she saw the former Edward Bok Vocational School, part of a wave of closures in 2013, transformed into an event space with , a destination she felt didn’t serve the community’s needs.

Developers are drawn to former schools because of their historic architectural features, like wide hallways and stairwells. The former Monsignor Coyle High School in Taunton, Massachusetts, now , boasts “soaring ceilings” and original windows. 

Tax credits for historic preservation can offset some of the costs of modernization, but come with restrictions on what developers can change and which “character-defining features,” like a gymnasium, must go untouched, said Pittsburgh developer Rick Belloli.

In 2022, his company, Q Development, Mt. Alvernia, a former Sisters of St. Francis convent and all-girls school north of Pittsburgh. He described the massive, 333-room main building, the Motherhouse, as “a gloriously spectacular historic building” with cast iron stairways and arched ceilings. But he’s still navigating the approval process, and some developers, he said, avoid former schools because of those hurdles. 

‘Choice properties’

Like Coyle and Mt. Alvernia, many of the school-to-apartment conversions are concentrated in the northeast and midwest. Columbus, Ohio, ranked first on of cities with the most school conversion projects. 

Next on the list is Cleveland, where the former Martin Luther King Jr. High School, in the predominantly Black , was among those affected by more recent enrollment loss. In 2020, the district , which had dropped to less than 350 students, and a Maryland-based developer for $880,000.

Exploring one of Cleveland’s abandoned high school’s

Last fall, knowing the building might be demolished, former students gathered to reflect and grab what mementos they could. Some cut strings off the basketball hoops, said Ronald Crosby, who attended in the late 1980s. Others took old library cards and team jerseys. 

Ronald’s sister Johnetta Crosby has fond memories of the school. “We had teachers that took their time to make sure you learned,” she said. “If you didn’t have anything to wear, they made sure you did. If you couldn’t afford to eat lunch, they fed you anyway.”

D’Angelo Dixon, who graduated in 2018, felt more conflicted. “Black stuff” leaked from the ceiling, he remembered, and academically, he felt behind friends who attended other schools. 

“Once I went to college, I felt like I didn’t know anything,” he said. But he credited the school’s career-tech program with inspiring him to work in health care. He’s now a nursing assistant. At the alumni gathering last year, he headed for the art room to grab a ceiling tile he painted with his nickname, Delo — part of a senior class assignment.

Some alumni hoped the developer, Kareem Abdus-Salaam, would save the building but that’s not part of his vision for the new residential community, a mix of apartments, townhomes and retail space.

“I really want to just level the whole site and bring it up, almost like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he said. He expects to break ground this spring. “There are so many abandoned schools in this country that are sitting on choice properties.”

He does, however, intend to make use of the large stones that still border one corner of the property by crushing them into gravel for a quarter-mile walking trail that will wind through the development. Along that pathway, he plans to erect signposts with historical photos of the school so former students “can have some feeling of yesteryear.” 

In Atlanta, the partnership between the school district and the city gives officials a say in what the developers preserve. They’ll integrate the original Lakewood Elementary building into the overall design. 

With a strip of commercial properties on the corner, including a popular restaurant and coffee shop, Hawkins-Wynn, who still lives a few blocks away, hopes the redevelopment will spur even more investment in the neighborhood.

On a recent afternoon, the transition was obvious, but so were the obstacles in its path. As she walked the perimeter of the property, a construction crew put up plywood on a new home across the street. A few lots down, trash and discarded mattresses piled up on the curb.

“This is why we need redevelopment,” she said, pointing to the debris. “It’s still shady around here, but it’s changing like you won’t believe.”