Notably, however, these effects fluctuated over time. After consistently outperforming district schools for more than a decade, MIT researcher Geoffrey Kocks found that charters forfeited their relative advantage entirely between 2015 and 2019, only to bounce back during the pandemic. By 2022, charters statewide once again enjoyed a meaningful edge, though not one as great as they exhibited before the slowdown. 

The shifts depicted in could reframe perceptions of a school choice sector that has for . They also offer a more textured picture of how one of the most influential education initiatives of the 21st century has evolved during a period of major social and economic changes, including the COVID shock and a lengthy period of academic stagnation that has been felt around the country. 

“I found it really interesting to refresh our understanding of what’s taking place, and to see that these effects were not static,” said Kocks, a doctoral student working under the auspices of MIT’s . “It’s not some kind of fixed charter effect that’s going to be large no matter what.”

A half-decade slide

To track those effects over time, Kocks gathered data from admissions lotteries for 32 Massachusetts charter schools between 2002 and 2025. When charters receive more applications than they have seats, those lotteries determine which families are offered a place. They also create a natural experiment, effectively assigning otherwise-similar students to either charters or their local public school on a random basis. 

Prior lottery-based research — conducted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joshua Angrist, who helped oversee Kocks’s work at MIT — has demonstrated powerful gains accruing to students enrolled at urban charters embracing the so-called No Excuses model of high academic standards, rigorous behavioral codes, and supplemental instruction through tutoring and extended school days. But much of that literature was published during the Bush and Obama presidencies, with fewer follow-up studies through the 2020s.

Kocks broadly points to similar benefits. By combining the lottery outcomes with students’ academic records from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, he also estimated large improvements to learning in the charter sector. For each year of attendance at a charter middle or high school, he estimated that students’ scores on the state’s mandated MCAS exam rose by six percentile points in math and three points in reading. 

Composite scores on the SAT also rose by 11.5 points per year of exposure to a Massachusetts charter school — a phenomenon driven almost entirely by charters in Boston and a ring of communities in its immediate vicinity, which lifted SAT scores by 25.7 points annually. Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged children also experienced an especially large boost, ascending by an average of 8–11 points in math and 5–6 points in reading on the MCAS.

Yet those impressive results began a steady decline in 2013, eventually receding to the point that charter performance was statistically indistinguishable from that of neighborhood public schools. Again, the trends were highly place-specific, with steep declines in urban charters and much gentler ones elsewhere; SAT scores for Boston-area charter students fell by a disquieting 43.1 points per year of charter enrollment between 2015 and 2019. 

The latest lottery and testing data offers signs of a strong rebound. Boston charters have reversed most of the damage sustained during the late 2010s, with the average student in the 2020s actually outpacing the annual literacy gains seen from 2010 to 2014.That movement is variable, though, with top-performing schools pulling away from scuffling ones.

Jim Peyser, who served a long stint as Massachusetts secretary of education during the period included in the study, said he was glad to see Boston students bouncing back. But he described the recovery in the state capital as “a tale of two cities.”

“Some of the charter schools that fell off a lot between 2019 and 2021 have come back pretty strongly,” Peyser said. “But then you’ve got others that were struggling before COVID. They lost ground during the pandemic, and they haven’t necessarily recovered even back to where they were before.”

Searching for explanations

But what could have caused the mysterious, half-decade slide in relative charter performance?

Kocks first ruled out a set of possible explanations, including modifications to state tests (Massachusetts shuffled through several assessments during this time) and transformations to student demographics (which were mostly small). Instead, he detected two important changes to charter school personnel at a critical time.

First, he found that principals at Boston-area charter schools turned over somewhat faster than those employed by Boston Public Schools in each year from 2015 to 2018. Greater churn was also evident when examining charters in and around Boston against those scattered further afield; just 20% of Boston-area charters were still led by their original CEO as of 2017, compared with 60% in others across the state.

Even more suggestive was a long-running trend in teacher qualifications: Boston-area charters were initially more likely to hire teachers who majored in, or were specifically licensed to teach, their classroom subject. But between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of their teachers with domain-specific knowledge fell from 55% to 40%, while the share of those teachers stayed flat in non-Boston charters. 

Kocks noted that these findings did not represent causal proof. Yet several sources noted the potential importance of changes to Boston’s charter workforce around the time learning began to slip.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Orin Gutlerner led a teacher residency program at the highly regarded . During that time, he said there was no difficulty signing up would-be educators with sterling academic credentials. With unemployment still high in the wake of the Great Recession, and the education reform era approaching its zenith, he sometimes received 20 or more applications for each slot.

But as the labor market recovered, many young employees chafed at the long hours and tough expectations at No Excuses schools. Testing evidence was promising, but school leaders were concerned enough about burnout to consider changing their practices. Gutlerner cited the example of a charter that quietly abandoned a requirement that teachers make at least 10 check-in calls to families each week, reasoning that it didn’t rise to the importance of their other commitments.

“When we saw those strong academic results, and the teacher attrition, we said, ‘We need to go all the way in the other direction and be much more mindful of teacher sustainability,’ ” recalled Gutlerner, who now leads in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. “It’s not that that’s necessarily bad, but these things are very delicate balances, and it started to tip more in that direction.”

At the same time, Boston Public Schools was becoming more aggressive at recruiting high-level talent. In 2014, BPS that it had hired for 82% of its open positions by the end of June — a startling increase from just 9% the year before. 

Sarah Cohodes, a professor of education policy at the University of Michigan who has published a string of influential studies on Boston charter schools, observed that the district’s generous compensation package also helped draw job seekers away from alternatives like Match, Bridge Boston, and Uncommon Schools.

“The BPS salary scale gets you close to $100,000 in nine years,” she said. “So people wanted those jobs, and once BPS got it together in terms of hiring, that was much more appealing than the charters.”

‘Antiracist’ policies under scrutiny

Kocks’s paper does not directly address another prominent hypothesis for charters’ temporary swoon.

In for The Boston Globe, education advocate Steven Wilson asserted that a sector-wide embrace of “antiracist” policies led to the drop in achievement. The former charter leader — who was from the high-performing network he founded after authoring a blog post calling for more rigor in classrooms — last year making the same case in a national context.

The implementation of equity-focused initiatives, such as restorative justice or culturally responsive curricula, can be difficult to document over time. The MIT study did consider the possibility that Boston charters’ gradually decreasing rates of out-of-school suspension harmed learning, but ultimately showed that suspensions fell at BPS schools at the same time (albeit from a lower baseline). 

Gutlerner called Wilson’s views “a pretty narrow analysis,” while noting that increasing skepticism toward many aspects of school reform led to a reconsideration of discipline in some campuses. Charter teachers themselves suddenly became conversant on topics like the then-ubiquitous “,” spurring dissent within schools, he remembered.

“Instead of methodically evaluating and shifting practices and making improvements, there were some wholesale calls to just rip out the entire behavior management system,” he said. “Or to stop retaining students, ever.” 

Besides suspensions, a raft of stringent expectations and customs came to define many successful charters, such as silent hallway transitions and . The , and other moment-to-moment techniques used by school staff to keep instruction running smoothly, could have played a more important role than disciplinary penalties like suspension and detention, Gutlerner reflected. 

Peyser added that, as charter leaders became more distantly removed from the generation of founders who established the schools’ cultures, some of the organizations’ urgency and vision dissipated as well.

“That [turnover] is associated with a weakening of the ‘No-Excuses’ culture, which many of the schools had adopted,” he said. “That possibly led to a general relaxation of school culture, which had been so important to their success.”

Kocks said those historic observations, along with the drifting trajectory of learning outcomes at charter schools, indicated that much of their striking benefits could be contingent upon their own policies and implementation, along with conditions far outside their walls.

“What surprised me was seeing how unstable these effects were, both in terms of the decline and the eventual rebound,” he concluded. “That means that these inputs matter a lot, and we have the potential to make big changes in how effective schools are within a relatively short period of time.”

This year, at least six states enacted laws trying to reduce the number of students chronically absent from school.

The measures include requiring monitoring of absences and publicly releasing data, developing new guidance on the best ways to address the problem and increasing punishments for parents and guardians of chronically absent students.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school days in an academic year, which equates to about 18 days or two days per month.

A signed in March creates a student attendance monitoring system and requires the identification of at-risk students. Parents of students in grades 1-6 will receive a notice of violation after five truancies. If parents don’t meet with school officials to address the truancy, they could face a class B misdemeanor.

requires every school district and public charter school to compile data about the students who regularly attend class or are chronically absent, which will be made publicly available by the state’s Department of Education.

overhauls how the state defines and handles chronic absenteeism and truancy. Chronic absenteeism will remain categorized as 10% or more days of missed attendance. Truancy is classified as 20 or more unexcused absences within a school year.

If a student is considered truant and school-based interventions haven’t improved attendance, the law allows the state’s attorney to fine parents a maximum of $1,000 or to file a court petition against the parents.

Additionally, by July 2027, the state’s Agency of Education must develop a model policy on chronic absenteeism and truancy, including guidance on excusing absences, addressing absenteeism among students with disabilities and considering how bullying and hazing could impact a student’s attendance.

Under , a student transferring during the school year will have the number of unexcused absences reported to their next school, and any future unexcused absences will be added on a cumulative record. And it removes the five-hour limit on the amount of community service a judge may order for the parent or guardian of a student with five or more unexcused absences during a school year.

Under a sweeping K-12 education legislative enacted this year in Mississippi, the state is required to fund one attendance officer per 4,000 compulsory‑school‑aged children.

And a recent New Jersey law establishes a chronic absenteeism task force, which will develop recommendations on the best way to address the problem.

According to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, lawmakers filed this legislative session about chronic absenteeism.

Of the 44 states and Washington, D.C., that have released 2024-25 attendance data, most states showed improvement, FutureEd found. But Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Mexico and the district reported a rise in missed school days. And no state has fully returned to pre-pandemic levels, it said.

According to its most recent data, the U.S. Department of Education says the national rate of chronic absenteeism reached about 31% in 2021-22 and fell to 28% in 2022-23.

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

That’s why our newsroom recently launched a new on Instagram () spotlighting a handful of important articles, case studies, data analyses and solutions snapshots that might have gotten lost in the noise. (You can also get these kind of daily highlights delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for our national newsletter.)Ěý

From the new demands facing college students in this era of artificial intelligence to a leadership transition at America’s largest union, here are five stories you might have missed this week: 

1. Elementary Principals Are Getting a Crash Course in How Young Kids Learn Best

Young children need different conditions than older students to thrive. Some school leaders are adapting their practices to reflect that reality.

2. Princess Moss Elected NEA President With Votes From 50% of Assembly Members

The former music teacher, who previously served as the union’s vice president, narrowly avoided a run-off in July 5 election.

3. What Today’s College Students Need That Previous Generations Didn’t

College degrees don’t guarantee good jobs anymore, so students must build resumes and AI skills in high school and college, experts say.

4. A Restored Detroit Rail Station Looks to the Future, Offering Training for Teens

Michigan Central Station, long a symbol of decline and decay, is now an innovation hub with workshops and cutting edge equipment for youth.

5. Q&A — ‘Rehumaning’ Education: Banning Screens Is Only Part of the Solution

‘We don’t have to remove all tech,’ author Stephanie Malia Krauss says. ‘We need to remove toxic tech’ and bring back play and adequate sleep.

But for microschools, a growing segment of the private school market, the initial guidance from federal officials has left school leaders worried they could be left out.

The law says that students can use scholarships for expenses at a public, private or religious school. But many microschools operate outside of their state’s private school sector — as tutoring centers, homeschool groups and learning pods. Depending on state law, they may or may not be classified as private schools.

In his , Kevin Salinger, the deputy assistant secretary for tax policy, added that “a homeschool would be treated as a school if it is treated as a school under state law.”

His comments have left some microschool leaders scratching their heads.

Even if a state decides to opt in to the new program, “it is my concern that some will exclude microschools,” said Don Soifer, CEO of the National Microschooling Center, who is closely monitoring the issue.

To him, Congress’ intent was clear. The states that if a student is eligible to attend a public K-12 school, then they will qualify for a scholarship as long as their family’s income doesn’t exceed 300% of the area median income, a high bar. Florida, Ohio and Tennessee are among the states that plan to participate in the program but have microschools that don’t fall under the private school umbrella. Some who advocated for passage of the law say microschool leaders should stay tuned for more information.

“We think Treasury misspoke or is misinterpreting the statute,” said Jim Blew, a former Department of Education official who is working to implement the new program. “It’ll all be cleared up by the time they issue the rules for 2027.”

The Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.

‘In the hands of the states’ 

Under the program, which starts next year, taxpayers who donate to a nonprofit scholarship granting organization will get a dollar-for-dollar credit, up to $1,700. Opponents, including Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, want Congress to , and the teachers unions are to opt out. They note that Salinger, the Treasury official, said states won’t be able to “impose” restrictions on SGOs. They can’t, for example, only approve nonprofits that offer scholarships to public school kids and not approve those that serve students attending private schools.

Other Democrats, like former Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, have urged blue state governors to opt in. that the program “opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.”

Cecilia Retelle Zywicki, founder of LearningSpring, which is building a system for states to track SGOs and payments, expects the Trump administration to stay out of the debate over how states define a school.

“Details like this are going to remain in the hands of the states,” she said. “The Treasury has made it clear in actions and words that oversight and compliance will remain with the states.”

‘A bummer’

That means even in red states that already intend to participate, some students could be left out. 

“It’s a bummer because I know it would help the families,” said Tonya Kipe, who runs Kipe Academy in Winter Haven, Florida, as a nonprofit tutoring center out of a Methodist church. 

She’s among those microschool founders who prefer not to organize as a private school. In addition to the microschool, which serves 36 students, she offers afterschool tutoring and a monthly science workshop. Becoming a more formal private school, she said, might require them to find a different facility and add testing requirements

As a former second grade teacher and mother of two boys, she knows how students can have vastly different learning needs. Her older son, she said, is the “compliant one,” while her younger son wasn’t motivated by public school routines like earning points for reading books. She launched her own school in 2021 to break out of a “cookie cutter” approach to education. 

The families who signed up for her microschool were looking for the same thing.

“They like the flexibility of being able to just be here for academics from 8 to 11:30 and then join us for field trips if they want to,” she said. While many in her program already use Florida’s various private school choice options, she said the federal program could allow them to “double up” on tutoring, buy more supplies or add other supplemental programs.

Large microschool networks, like KaiPod Learning, are preparing for a patchwork approach across the country.

With locations in 21 states, KaiPod has 91 affiliated schools, about half of them private schools. The others operate as less-formal learning pods or co-ops, said CEO Amar Kumar. 

Kaipod will add about 40 more schools next school year, a third of them in Texas, where the state’s new Education Freedom Accounts program launches this fall. With that growth, he thinks the percentage of private schools in the network will likely climb to 65%.

Microschools, he said, are moving toward “more formalized structures” as public funding for private school choice expands. 

“Our view is that this is healthy for the microschool movement,” he said. “Families want flexibility and personalization, but they also want confidence that the school is stable, accountable and able to access available funding.”

With roughly 1,000 microschools , the Prenda network helped introduce the public to the model during the pandemic when sites began to pop up . While there are Prenda microschools in nearly every state, founder Kelly Smith said the organization has focused on expanding sites, like those in Texas, where they qualify as private schools and families can apply for public funds.

“Wealthy families already participate in microschools by paying out of pocket,” he said. But the federal program “has the potential of allowing lower and middle class families to send their kids to microschools.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

He said he was “baffled” that some states were saying no to additional federal funds.

“That is something governors almost never do,” he said.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative court said that West Virginia and Idaho did not break the law when they passed legislation prohibiting trans athletes from competing against biological women and girls. 

Becky-Pepper Jackson, a transgender 10th grader and track athlete in West Virginia, argued that such regulations are “unreasonable.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“We disagree,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh , bringing his perspective as a girls’ to the case. “Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable: Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”

Attorneys who represented Jackson and Boise State University transgender student Lindsay Hecox called the opinion a “heartbreaking ruling” and “deeply harmful.” The decision, however, doesn’t settle an ongoing legal debate over whether Title IX requires that participation in sports be based on biological sex determined at birth. 

“I’m not terribly surprised by the outcome, given the court’s opinions in the last year,” said Jenny Denny, a specializing in education and Title IX compliance. “I think we could read the writing on the wall.”

Last year, the court upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting gender affirming care for minors, and in April, conservatives sided with California parents who argued that districts should alert parents if their child wants to change their gender identity.

But she said the court’s opinion did not redefine Title IX to suit the administration. 

“Using a sports analogy, which is fitting for today, it’s not a slam dunk for the U.S. Department of Education,” she said. “I think we’ll see the Department of Education cherry pick some language from the opinion today, but it still doesn’t give a clear answer.”

The decision doesn’t prevent states like California from maintaining policies that allow trans athletes to compete in line with their gender identity. But it also means the administration will likely continue its to prevent trans-inclusive policies through and threats to strip federal education funds from districts. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon suggested as much in her comments on the ruling.

“This is a tremendous victory,” she said, “and we look forward to ensuring that every educational institution in America abides by the law of the land.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The department’s enforcement actions have been based on an President Donald Trump signed last year, but now officials will likely apply the court’s opinion to any future effort to rewrite the Title IX rule, said Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He frequently writes legal commentary for EdNext. 

He agreed that whether Title IX allows schools to include trans athletes in girls’ sports is still “an open question.”

Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel for the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, called the opinion a “huge win,” but added, “There’s more work to do.”

Congress, she said, needs to “do its job” and pass legislation that would apply to all states.

In a partial dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberals on the court, agreed with Kavanaugh on Title IX. But she said the majority should have sent Jackson’s case back to the lower courts for further “factual findings about the state of the scientific debate” under the equal protection claim. 

“A restrained approach, based on all relevant facts, is particularly necessary when the court is faced with a consequential decision of constitutional dimension,” she wrote.

While Jackson will likely not be able to compete in track this fall, Andrew Ortiz, senior policy attorney at the Transgender Law Center, said Tuesday’s decision won’t have a major impact. because there were already so few trans students participating in sports in the 28 states that tried to ban their participation. In those states, intramural sports and private schools, “could still be options,” he said. While the cases now go back to the lower courts, he expects the states to “pretty quickly” prevail in their efforts to enforce their laws.

‘Back of the pack’

As is often the pattern, the justices released opinions with the most nationwide impact at the end of their term, one in which Trump’s agenda, from immigration reform to voting laws, has . While Hecox and Jackson challenged the laws in their states before Trump took office, the administration took part in the case, arguing that states shouldn’t have to carve out a special exception for transgender athletes even if, as their attorneys argued, their physical advantages have been diminished by puberty blockers or drugs to suppress testosterone.

In fact, several months after the oral arguments, Michael R. Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, argued that the opposite is happening. In May, he that Jackson finished fourth in discus and first in shot put in a statewide track and field competition. 

“As a high-school sophomore, B.P.J. is not finishing ‘near the back of the back,’ “ , referencing the from Jackson’s legal team in the case. Jackson “is instead defeating every — or nearly every — female in the state in these events.”

But LGBTQ advocates, like the , argue that because transgender athletes represent such of students participating in sports, it’s misleading to say they are dominating competitions or “stealing” first place medals from women and girls. 

The debate continued at the appeals court level even while the Supreme Court deliberated in the West Virginia and Idaho cases.

In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit an advocacy group, , in their argument that a Minnesota policy is discriminatory because it allows trans athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

The court said that Trump’s executive order and the administration’s actions against states and districts didn’t settle the legal dispute over the issue. 

“The executive branch’s views on that question may guide its own enforcement approach,” wrote Raymond Gruender, a George W. Bush appointee. “But they cannot independently establish a ‘strong likelihood’ that [the athlete’s] participation violated Title IX or its implementing regulations.”

As Petersburg’s once-booming manufacturing base hollowed out, crime and residents’ health . Along the way, places for kids to be kids disappeared, and many of them stopped coming to school.

Over the last year, about a quarter of students haven’t shown up for at least 10 days of class, even as Virginia overall that had spiked because of the pandemic. While chronic absenteeism is high, state tests show students’ academic performance . Most campuses weren’t accredited until a few . The whole school division and its 4,500 students has essentially been for decades. 

It’s a cycle that seemed unbreakable. Yet for almost four years, something quite extraordinary has been happening here. 

“Petersburg has the worst outcomes of anyone on everything,” said Aimee Guidera, Virginia’s  secretary of education during former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s term. “That’s why we went in.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Guidera is referring to a 2022 encounter at a community meeting between Youngkin, a Republican, and Petersburg’s longtime Democratic mayor, Samuel Parham, which led to a yearslong relationship, . The partnership drew $447 million in state, federal and private sector investment to this city just south of Virginia’s capital, plus $2 billion in commitments to develop the area. It also helped fast track the city’s grant applications and approval for projects like , which will bring jobs and revenue, and supported small businesses , like the expansion of a Montessori-style childcare center.

In the schools, there is more before- and after-school childcare, more summer programs for kids and a new playground at the YMCA. There’s also more staff to help intervene when students and families are struggling, a new mentoring program for girls and more. 

Despite the intervention and attention, however, Petersburg schools are still floundering and remain under close watch by the state. But there is hope that as the city changes, its schools will keep changing too. 

Parent Lakeshia Tinsley, who leads the school division’s Parent Advisory Committee and can rattle off a list of concerns about the city schools, summed it up this way: “Petersburg has been on the move, slowly but surely.”

‘It’s all connected’

That’s quite different from how Tinsley felt when she first moved here, lured by Petersburg’s low cost of living. The schools were thought to be so bad, she recalled being told that she’d need to move again once her daughter grew to school-age. 

At the time, just one of the city’s four elementary schools offered childcare before and after hours — care that, for many parents, makes working full-time possible. 

In the early days of the partnership, Guidera said members of the community frequently complained about that lack of care, along with the dearth of summer camps and activities for kids in general. 

“You can’t just deal with crime without dealing with health, with poverty, with education,” Guidera said. “It’s all connected.”

In response, the commonwealth leveraged grants and federal dollars to expand care provided by the YMCA, before and after school at every city elementary school. 

For free. 

“Before, I was having to pay daycare at an actual daycare. That’s another bill that you have,” said Tinsley, who is now running for a seat on the Petersburg school board. “It’s more convenient to drop off at school,” she added, recalling that the bus taking children from the private childcare center to her daughter’s elementary school in the mornings sometimes ran late.

A related endeavor led to and giving kids a hand in designing it. 

Girls with Pearls

Those kinds of spaces to play and gather are essential for kids, said Wanda Stewart, who grew up in Petersburg during the boom times in the ’70s and ’80s.

“There were baseball games at the park, Little League games, city events in the parks for families,” she remembered. She attended college in North Carolina and later settled there with her husband. But phone calls home with nieces and nephews distressed her. 

The thriving city where Stewart grew up had gone.

Petersburg, a transportation hub that hugs the Appomattox River and a city , . The mall closed. So did the skating rink and movie theater. Even the bowling alley shut down. 

Family who remained wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Stewart, with her experience in dropout prevention, to use her talents supporting children back home in Petersburg. When a job running Petersburg’s opened up, she seized the opportunity to return.

And because of the Partnership for Petersburg, she had the chance to tell then-first lady Suzanne Youngkin about her organization, which works to keep kids in school, in part by taking stock of needs like food, clothing and mental health. Many Petersburg students’ parents or underemployed compared to those in other parts of Virginia and the country as a whole.

Stewart got Youngkin’s attention. The partnership three of Petersburg’s eight schools to hire its own CIS site coordinator. A dedicated staff member in school meant getting early warnings about students’ and families’ needs and handling them in real time.

Stewart also told Youngkin about “Girls with Pearls,” one facet of Communities in Schools she brought with her from North Carolina. Each participating student is paired with an adult mentor, who works with them on issues like leadership, self-care, etiquette and navigating conflict. The name comes from how the year ends: Selected girls at every Petersburg school are presented with a strand of pearls they’ve earned for their monthly sessions. 

Youngkin attended a sixth-grade center as a child in Texas and took a special interest in working with the Girls in Pearls at Blandford Academy, the Petersburg school for sixth graders. Sixth grade centers can : the year between the safe space of elementary school and the more daunting middle school years, when some students drop out. 

“I have a sweet spot for sixth-grade girls,” said Youngkin, who recruited members of her staff to mentor Blandford students.

Stewart said Communities in Schools staff and other school employees nominate girls they think would benefit from the monthly conversations and mentoring.

They are girls like Lakeshia Tinsley’s daughter, Serenity, and her classmate Zoey Williams, a fellow Blandford sixth grader who was Suzanne Youngkin’s mentee. At the group’s April gathering, Zoey and Youngkin chatted for a few minutes before getting into an ask-me-anything style conversation with a local OB/GYN who was there to explain menstruation. Many girls in Petersburg may be skipping school because they don’t have the menstrual supplies they need. The girls and their mentors filled 145 backpacks with pads and wipes — a two-month supply — so every Blandford girl would be outfitted with what they might need.

Before the Youngkins left the governor’s mansion in January, the girls got to visit. At the end of the school year, each received a strand of pearls as a parting gift. They were also given a journal and a binder filled with lessons to look back on. But “it’s not about gifts,” Youngkin said. “It’s about time.”

“I got to learn stuff I didn’t really know about,” Zoey said, citing sessions on anxiety and how to deal with emotions gone haywire. “I got to meet new people.”

‘Not … a finger snap’

Though the Partnership for Petersburg is over, and the Youngkins moved some 120 miles north, Youngkin said she plans to return when the next group of Girls with Pearls participants is selected in the fall. 

“It’s just sort of gotten to be what we do,” she said.

Like Tinsley, Stewart said she’s noticed positive differences in Petersburg, even if there’s a long way to go on the school system’s biggest concern, student performance in math and reading.

The school division offers a glimpse of the changes: Several schools are now accredited. The division has had , offering a sense of stability at the top, after running through several others in the last few years. Brown has for every student to be ready for college, the military or a career upon graduation.

But getting them to show up to school, every day, remains one of Brown’s top priorities. For example, absences are now tracked by a school division website , and Brown to the school that cuts down the most on absences every month. Still, chronic absenteeism remains above 20% at every Petersburg public school and is greater than 30% at a few. 

The school board and superintendent also adopted to guide how it will improve student achievement and hiring qualified teachers, among other goals. At the same time, , its first in 50 years. 

A Petersburg City Public Schools spokeswoman said neither the superintendent nor any of the division’s five board members would answer questions for this article.

Before- and after-school options grew because of the partnership. Girls with Pearls and the broader services afforded by Communities in Schools remain. But another effort directly tied to helping Petersburg students academically was short-lived.

Guidera helped hash out an agreement with the school division to bring in a surge of tutors, including students from nearby colleges, to work with students in person. Done right, it’s the kind of strategy can effectively address learning loss — “huge in Petersburg even before COVID,” she said — and something Virginia throughout the commonwealth. 

But the arrangement, started under a superintendent who has long since left, lasted just a single school year. Another tutoring program hasn’t gotten off the ground, though talks with the current schools chief are ongoing. 

Guidera also said the commonwealth’s oversight of schools in Petersburg, and elsewhere, was revamped so it is supportive, not punitive. “It’s not shaming and blaming. It’s very much focused on what works, and how do we use data … as a flashlight rather than as a hammer to identify what’s working, and learn from that.”

For Guidera, however, the truth is that Petersburg schools have not improved enough — “not as much as I want,” she said. But she recognizes it will take time: “It’s not going to be a finger snap.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Nevertheless, she thinks the intense investment of time and money was worthwhile.

“This is about partnership, community, relationships and building hope and using data.”

The Texas State Board of Education on Friday adopted new social studies standards for the elementary and middle grades that take an America-first approach to history and feature Christianity more prominently than other faiths. 

While standards for several high school courses were approved, the board postponed the final votes on U.S, Government, World History and World Geography. 

In a separate vote, the board adopted a that includes biblical stories like Daniel and the lion’s den and passages from scripture, like the 23rd Psalm and excerpts from the Book of Exodus.

The Texas State Board of Education will vote Friday on a set of that have drawn fire and fervor for espousing pro-American views and Christian values. 

If approved, the vote would typically mark the beginning of a long, and probably divisive, process to design curriculum based on the standards. But ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ has learned that Education Commissioner Mike Morath jumpstarted the process a year ago, signing a $67 million contract with a Tampa-based consulting firm for a series of social studies instructional materials. The standards, with topics like the spread of Christianity and the role of religious freedom in America’s founding, dovetail with the controversial Bluebonnet reading program adopted in 2024, which also came under fire for the perception that it promoted Christian nationalism. A required reading list, including some biblical passages, is also scheduled for a Friday.

The contract, with MGT Impact Solutions, wasn’t accessible to the public for a year because the Texas Education Agency failed to submit it to the state legislature, as required by law, until April.

In a state where the education chief holds over schools, some board members feel left in the dark.

“Of course, I had no idea,” Staci Childs, a Democrat, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“Those agreements should be public knowledge,” said Evelyn Brooks, a Republican. “There should be a considerable amount of transparency because we’re dealing with public money.”

Jake Kobersky, a spokesman for the agency, said MGT has been working from “publicly available drafts” of the new standards in preparation for the final approval. The contract wasn’t submitted to the legislature because officials “originally planned to award multiple contracts” and were still negotiating with other vendors, he said. He declined to state whether officials made additional awards, but said the agency followed the standard contracting process. State law doesn’t require the board to approve requests for proposals or contracts.

“The State Board of Education has no role in this solicitation,” he said.

The contract is the latest development in the state’s four-year quest to overhaul what students learn about history and government. In 2022, the board came close to . But like many red states, Texas had recently passed limiting classroom discussions on race and gender, and conservative groups argued the proposed standards were unpatriotic and violated the new law. The board voted to delay the revision until 2025. Now members have renewed the debate. call the standards “unbalanced” and say they lack diversity, while Republicans are pressuring the board not to dilute them with changes.

Kelsey Kling, a government relations specialist and policy analyst with Texas AFT, the teachers union, called the MGT contract “a little bit of a cart-before-the-horse scenario.”

“Is this whole vote by the State Board of Education simply a formality for a curriculum that’s already been in the works?” she asked. 

Supporters of the new standards, namely the powerful, right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, say they replace a vague in the current standards with a chronological study of history and would allow students to see how ideas and events build over time. 

But Democrats in and on have called for delaying Friday’s vote because the foundation paid the Texas Center at Schreiner University $70,000 to develop the standards. The center’s director, Donald Frazier, is a member of a on the rewrite. Robert Koons, a senior fellow at the foundation, is also an adviser.

“Given the scope and significance of this work, which impacts more than 5.5 million public school students across Texas, it is essential that the process remain transparent, objective, and free from undue influence,” wrote the five Democrats on the 15-member board.

Brian Phillips, spokesman for the think tank, called the Democrats’ demand

Critics, like the American Historical Association, say the draft standards exclude major events throughout history from Africa, the Middle East and Asian countries, and minimize the effects of racism and the contributions of women. In April, the board deleted a standard that would require students to learn about Muslims’ role in developing astronomy and algebra.

But conservatives, like state Sen. Mayes Middleton, called the statements “a clear victory for pro-America, pro-Texas education.”

Students, he wrote in a letter to the board, must “receive an honest understanding of the ideologies and threats that shape the modern world, including the evils of Sharia law, the realities of Islamification, and the documented threat of Islamic terrorism.”

Some in the state are frustrated with Morath’s outsized role, with support from Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP leaders, in directing what students learn. Critics say a top-down approach to curriculum is wrong for such a large, diverse state. 

State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat running to unseat Abbott in November, said that if she wins, one of her first moves would be to , who has served for 10 years. 

‘Political interests’ 

But the legislature in 2023 to enter into contracts with groups like MGT to develop open educational resources and pay districts up to $60 per student if they adopt them. Morath argues the state-owned materials will improve test scores and ground students in “classic works,” including the Bible, he told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ in 2024. 

That was the process the state followed when it originally purchased reading materials from Amplify, a curriculum provider, during the pandemic. Under an $84 million contract with Public Consulting Group, a Boston-based firm, the state made sweeping changes to the program, adding biblical passages like the Prodigal Son and the story of Queen Esther. PCG brought in conservative groups, like Hillsdale College and a media company founded by Mike Huckabee, now ambassador to Israel, to work on the materials. 

Some educators argue that Bluebonnet has of the world with lessons on figures like King Solomon and say critics have overreacted to the biblical material. 

The Amarillo Independent School District is among those using the Bluebonnet reading program. Jennifer Wilkerson, assistant superintendent, said she appreciates that the social studies lessons will cover some of the same topics. 

But the top-to-botton revision of the social studies standards, with a planned 2030-31 roll out, was bound to attract controversy and, if adopted, will require major shifts for teachers.

“Any time you do a complete overhaul of standards, it begins to be about political interests and not about what’s best for kids,” she said. She’s among the hundreds of educators, parents and advocates who have traveled to Austin to address the board. In April, she said, arguments over the standards “got so intense, that there were shouting matches happening outside of the boardroom.”

The temperature of the crowd was similar in 2024 when the board adopted Bluebonnet. And as with the MGT contract, board members were largely unaware the work was underway until the state unveiled drafts of the reading lessons. 

says that an agency can’t spend money on a contract over $10 million until it notifies the , which provides oversight of state government and develops budget recommendations. That notice is supposed to come within 15 days of when a contract is awarded. 

Whether the agency was still considering other bids “does not have an effect on determining when a contract is to be reported,” said Dushyanth Reddivari, assistant general counsel and the communications officer for the budget board. 

A Texas Education Agency shows that as of Tuesday, the state has paid MGT over $1.8 million on the contract since Nov. 19.

Worth over , MGT has a big footprint in Texas and is represented in the legislature by Daniel Hodge, a who previously served as Abbott’s . The company has multiple contracts with state agencies and universities for projects ranging from economic impact studies to software services. In K-12 education, the firm specializes in . 

MGT directed questions about the contract to the state agency.

The contract, which includes work on multiple subjects, listed several organizations as potential subcontractors, including TNTP, a New York City-based nonprofit, and Success Academy Charter Schools. Ann Powell, a spokeswoman for Success Academy, said the network, also in New York, is not involved and didn’t know it was named in the contract. 

Kathryn Zielony, a spokeswoman for TNTP, said there’s a potential the organization could work on the project, “but there is currently no finalized contract in place.”

Kobersky, the Texas Education Agency spokesman, said MGT is still in the “planning phase.”

But Rabbi Joshua Fixler, who has three children in the Houston schools, suggested one reason why supporters of the standards are adamant about the board rejecting any last-minute revisions is because the work is already under way. He spoke to the board on Monday with concerns about items related to Christianity in both the social studies standards and the reading list.

“If work is already happening behind the scenes using these proposed [standards] that haven’t even passed yet to build curriculum,” he said, “it would make sense that the message would be ‘Don’t change this.’ ”

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a member of the House education committee, filed three articles of impeachment against McMahon, noting the secretary’s “willful intent to unilaterally dismantle and eliminate the Department of Education.”

Bonamici a week ago, prompting a swift response from McMahon defending her track record.

“It speaks volumes that House Democrats think an impeachable offense is working to improve student outcomes and reduce the federal bureaucracy,” she .

The resolution accuses McMahon of compromising the ability of the department to fulfill its duties. That’s also the conclusion that the department’s Inspector General reached in released Wednesday detailing how the administration has slashed the agency’s staff by 40% and canceled billions of dollars in grants and contracts. 

McMahon has been forced to backtrack. The department currently has several job openings posted, including and .

Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment against multiple members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, including Health and Human Services Secretary and Defense Secretary . But historically the attempts have rarely succeeded. Two years ago, the House impeached Biden Homeland Security for what members said was a failure to stop migrants from crossing the border, but the Senate dismissed the two articles against him.  Before him, the last cabinet member to be impeached was William W. Belknap, secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant, on , in 1876. 

Critics of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first education secretary, called for her to and some groups advocating impeachment. But lawmakers never took formal steps to do so. A federal judge, however, held her in 2019 and fined her $100,000 when she continued student debt collections in violation of a court order. The department .

While some Republicans have also been critical of McMahon, Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the education committee, called the action “political theater.”

“Secretary McMahon is doing exactly what voters elected President Trump to do: rein in a bloated bureaucracy and put students, parents, and taxpayers first,” he said in a statement.

The effort is also largely “symbolic” and unlikely to succeed, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

“Symbolism can be important, and a case can be made for using this as a way to draw attention to the dismantling of the department,” he said.

The resolution says McMahon has “decimated” the agency and “created a culture of fear and chaos” that has harmed education programs.

Specifically, the articles of impeachment are:

1. Willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law

The text cites McMahon’s actions to transfer responsibilities, which under law rest with the Education Department, to other agencies. Just last week, she announced that the office overseeing special education would move to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights would transfer to the Justice Department.

2. False statements before Congress

The resolution accuses McMahon of lying to Congress during her confirmation hearing that she would follow the law in disbursing education funds appropriated by Congress. Instead, the text reads, she has defended the cancellation of several research contracts and discontinued grants for programs like community schools.

3. Breach of public trust

Again focusing on funding, the resolution states that the administration held up payments for services like migrant education and afterschool care and put “critical” K-12 programs at risk.

Bonamici said parents, especially those of students with disabilities are “distraught” over splitting up the department. “They are asking us to take action to stop these illegal transfers,” she said. “To them I say, ‘We hear you.’ “

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, suggested McMahon’s actions aren’t grounds for impeachment.

“The race to the bottom continues, in this case regarding the definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ ” he said. “This is just politics, but I can appreciate that Congressional Democrats don’t feel like they have any other recourse right now.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

That gave her an idea.

The staff at Legacy Prep built a three-week summer schedule around the theme of “Lights, Camera, Action,” blending drama, music and dance, culminating in a final performance. But between learning choreography and exploring careers related to content creation, students this month are spending three hours a day polishing the math and reading skills they’ll need for next school year.  

After three years of the program, Johnson sees more confidence in kids when they come back in the fall and considers it one of the reasons why Legacy Prep’s elementary school went from a D to on the state report card.

“Our test scores were in the tank,” she said. During summer school, “our kids have more time to talk to the teacher. They know what they need to focus on.”

It’s a model that prevents what’s known as the summer slide, not just at Legacy Prep, but at nearly 460 charter schools in seven cities. Standardized assessments show that over 39,000 students in gained, on average, nearly a month more learning in math and two and a half extra weeks in English language arts, according to a new study. While the growth is significant, the fact that the study found improvement across so many sites makes the findings stand out even more, said Geoffrey Borman, a researcher at Arizona State University who led the study.

“A key thing to keep in mind is the scale at which these impacts are being made,” he said. “We’re talking, in this case, about tens of thousands of students per year.”

In education research, he added, there are examples of small, “one-off efforts” that produced “groundbreaking impacts.” But those effects often fade when a program — high-dosage tutoring, for example — expands to more students and locations. 

Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spent $50 million to launch Summer Boost in 2022 to from academic decline during the pandemic. The program served over 16,000 students that year in New York City and has since spread to six more cities, including Baltimore, Nashville and San Antonio.

Students retained the skills and material they learned into the next school year, even though they often didn’t take follow-up tests, either i-Ready or NWEA’s MAP tests, until months after the summer program ended.

“These kids are going back to school better prepared to engage in instruction and benefit from it,” Borman said.

The study design didn’t include a comparison group, but the researchers looked at whether scores were higher than what they would have predicted if students hadn’t attended the program.

The positive effects in math are similar to what the when it studied summer learning programs in five urban districts, several years before the pandemic. The Rand sample, however, was much smaller, about 5,000 kids, and the researchers found no improvement in reading, attendance or social-emotional skills.

In another study, after the COVID-era school closures, a team from Harvard, NWEA and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research examined the use of federal relief funds for in 10 districts, serving nearly 450,000 students. Students gained two to three weeks of learning in math on MAP tests, but as with the Rand study, the researchers saw no impact on students’ reading skills. 

In the Arizona State study, Borman noted that because students often lose more math than reading skills when they’re out of school, a summer program can have a bigger impact in math. 

The expectation that sites prioritize phonics-based instruction, a shift that has picked up momentum since the pandemic, may help explain why students in Summer Boost made gains in reading when the earlier studies didn’t find impacts on literacy, said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser on the Summer Boost study. 

Small classes also contributed to the reading gains, Borman wrote. The results were weaker when class sizes exceeded 21 students.

Consistent student attendance, a rate of at least 70%, matters as well. It’s a principle Summer Boost reinforces by holding back 30% of the funding to sites until the program is over. Students exceeded the target with a 75% rate last year. 

“The more kids attend, clearly, the better they perform,” Borman said. “This is something that has been a problem with a lot of summer school programming in the past.”

‘The big question’ 

The findings clarify what it takes to run an effective summer learning program. But districts no longer have federal COVID funds to spend on summer school. Foundation funds, like those for Summer Boost, are limited.

“The big question is how to sustain summer learning programs now that the federal [relief] funding has lapsed,” Kane said. 

One source will likely be the new federal education tax credit, he said. Advocacy organizations like the Afterschool Alliance are to form scholarship-granting organizations that focus on public school students. 

In Alabama, districts are already required under state law to offer summer instruction for students who are significantly behind in and . But the $29,000 Legacy Prep received from the state would have only been enough to pay three teachers, Johnson said. Without the $200,000 Summer Boost grant from Bloomberg, she would have had to narrow the focus of the program to third graders who needed to pass the state reading test to advance to fourth grade. 

She found, however, that just reaching the proficiency level at the end of third grade doesn’t mean kids are strong enough readers and writers to tackle challenging material. The Bloomberg grant allowed the school to hire 12 teachers. 

On a Thursday morning earlier this month, the school was busy with activity as younger students worked on reading and math skills while middle schoolers danced to a hip-hop beat in the gym. After lunch, they switched. 

Using that’s specially designed for a compressed summer schedule, teacher JaMeshia Moore worked with rising first graders on words they should learn by sight. She wrote “because” on the board, carefully demonstrating where each lowercase letter should fit on the lined pages in their workbooks. In math, students worked out subtraction problems by hand, using small strips of paper that represent hundreds, tens and ones. 

Before opening enrollment to all Legacy Prep families, Johnson prioritizes students who are significantly behind and often need one-on-one instruction to catch up. The research showed that students who often fall below grade level — English learners, those from low-income families and kids with disabilities — benefitted the most from the program. They gained over four weeks of learning in math, compared to three and a half weeks for the overall sample. 

At Legacy Prep, the staff works just as hard to make sure students attend as they do during the regular school year. They call students if they’re absent, and for the first time this year, Johnson offered door-to-door bus service if students needed it. Some students come from as far as Huntsville, roughly an hour and a half away. 

Daniel Runner, a rising eighth grader, said he hoped to get some extra help on percentages, while Malaysia Speight said she didn’t have a lot of choice over whether to attend.

“My aunt said that me and my sister were not going to be sitting around in the house all summer,” she said. 

But she was drawn to the line up of activities, like learning how a storyboard illustrates the scenes that make up a film and the chance to work with professional musicians. The Summer Boost grant paid for the artists’ involvement as well as special T-shirts, a field trip to a local theater and a red carpet awards show. 

The academic and attendance requirements combined with the flexibility for schools to design an engaging program is why Bloomberg Philanthropies has seen a positive return on its investment, said Sunny Larson, who leads K-12 programs for the foundation.

“We really need to do everything we can to catch back up to where we need to be,” she said. “Beyond that, we didn’t want to be too prescriptive. We really wanted to leave a lot of flexibility, creativity and ingenuity up to those individual schools.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

On Thursday morning, Kenyan McDuffie , effectively clearing the way for Democrat Janeese Lewis George to become the city’s next mayor.

The Associated Press had not formally declared a victor as ballots continue to be counted under the District’s new ranked-choice voting system. But Lewis George maintained a substantial lead, and McDuffie acknowledged that the remaining votes were unlikely to change the outcome.

The result marks a significant turning point for a school system that has been governed by Mayor Muriel Bowser for more than a decade. For education advocates, Lewis George’s victory raises new questions about the future of a reform agenda that has driven notable gains in student achievement during that time. The Democratic nominee has proposed some changes to school governance — including an end to the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, as well as a move toward greater independence for the superintendent’s office — and her breakthrough suggests that voters are willing to embrace a broader shift in political leadership.

Correction appended June 16

The mayor’s race in Washington, D.C., technically won’t be settled until this fall. But on Tuesday night, the winner of the Democratic primary will assume presumptive leadership over a school system educating nearly 100,000 students.

That expectation is a function of sheer partisanship: Over 90% of local voters , opening a wide path for the party’s nominee to march to City Hall in November. But the road ahead for public education is much less certain. After nearly two decades of outstanding growth in both student enrollment and academic outcomes, as well as 12 years of leadership from a largely consensus-minded incumbent, the next mayor will need to provide answers to a range of new problems afflicting K–12 schools.

The District’s long economic expansion of the 2000s and 2010s, which drew into its orbit, finally stalled in the face of federal job cuts and a pandemic-fueled flight from the urban core. Combined with a decline in birth rates, the slump has caused the student rolls to go negative for the first time in recent memory — just as on the horizon. Even a promising recovery from post-COVID learning loss is imperiled by a collapse in daily attendance, with missing one-tenth of the school year or more.

The two leading candidates to succeed Mayor Muriel Bowser are widely seen as ideological opposites. Attorney Kenyan McDuffie has courted business groups with a moderate pitch to bring down crime and avoid overextending city finances. Janeese Lewis George, a city councilor and self-described democratic socialist, won over the Left with a huge proposal to offer subsidized to all Washington families.

The broader clash in visions — playing out in the national Democratic Party — is overshadowing a K–12 debate that could be more consequential in the long run. signal continuity with foundational policies enacted in the hard-charging reform period of the 2000s, including direct mayoral control over schools and holding teachers and schools accountable for student performance. Lewis George has issued a subtle challenge to that settlement, voicing a desire to grant education leaders more independence from the mayor’s office and scrap a framework.

The progressive favorite’s eagerness to break from the status quo secured the support of the Washington Teachers Union, which has long sought to de-emphasize teacher quality metrics and win more bargaining latitude for its members. WTU President Laura Fuchs, a frequent critic of the leadership of both District of Columbia Public Schools and D.C. charter schools, said teachers “worked very hard to minimize the harm” imposed by top-down reforms. Under Lewis George, she argued, educators would enjoy much better relations with city leaders.

“We do believe we will have a much friendlier and more listening ear” with Lewis George in power, Fuchs said, while adding that she did not believe the candidate would necessarily supply every item on the union’s wish list. “What Janeese represents, in so many ways, is that she takes us seriously and believes that we are partners.”

Neither of the two contenders could be reached for comment for this article. But the differences between them highlight a fissure in their party that has widened since the Obama-era peak of ambitious experimentation in public schools. Washington has seen some of the in student achievement of any American school district in this century, with student test scores climbing persistently during a time when they were stagnant almost everywhere else. But national Democrats have made little hay about the generational gains, which have attracted fewer boosters and national headlines than similar turnarounds in red states. 

Thomas Toch, director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd research institute and a defender of the District’s model of educational improvement, called the city’s approach “a beacon nationally” and warned against a change in direction.

“It is one of the most important reform success stories in the country, in part because the city has continued to do well by its students for a long time,” Toch said. “The leaders have sustained the reforms, and the reforms continue to make a difference for students.”

Michelle Rhee’s legacy

When Toch and others refer to “the reforms,” they are largely describing a package of policies that began in 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty overhauled school governance in what was then one of the lowest-performing urban districts in the country.

Virtually overnight, the governance of DCPS was transferred to Fenty himself, who also wielded substantial influence over a rapidly growing charter school sector. His hand-picked schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, soon rolled out a new evaluation system known as IMPACT, which ranked teachers based on their students’ test scores; top performers received hefty raises, while .

The groundswell seemed to crest in November 2008, with Rhee posing for in Time magazine and president-elect Barack Obama embracing a similar suite of K–12 recommendations in his national agenda. But Washingtonians grew weary of the pace of change, including the that received failing grades, and turned the mayor out of office.

But his successor, a reform critic who challenged Fenty , surprised many by opting away from a course correction. After another — particularly alienating to some parents in the wake of a — voters again soured on their leadership, selecting Muriel Bowser as the city’s mayor and reelecting her twice.

Part of Bowser’s success may lie in the public’s in local schools. While the tumult over the initial reforms quickly stirred anger, subsequent data on student learning has proven highly favorable.

Findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal exam commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card) show that D.C. fourth and eighth graders comparable to virtually any other major city between 2003 and 2019. A 2021 by the research group Mathematica estimated that Washington’s ascent through the 2010s was comparable to the massive leap made by New Orleans schools in the wake of the district’s post-Katrina restructuring.

While the pandemic pushed achievement downward for a time, local testing from the past few years shows that year-over-year academic progress since the COVID nadir preceding the public health emergency. The Education Scorecard, a data project led by scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford, that DCPS schools saw the fastest recovery of those in any city between 2022 and 2025.

Chelsea Coffin, and education policy specialist for the D.C. Policy Center, called the latest round of state assessments “a very good sign for D.C. students.”

“What we saw last school year were really large gains — even compared to what D.C. had been posting pre-pandemic — in both math and English, across almost all wards and most major subgroups,” Coffin said. “D.C. has a long way to go in terms of all students being on grade-level, but this new forward momentum is really exciting.”

David Grosso, a former city councilor who chaired the body’s education committee between 2015 and 2020, said in an interview that the stream of good news has mostly quieted the consternation that greeted Fenty and Rhee’s dramatic shakeup.

At the time of his election, Grosso recalled, “people were clamoring for success right off the bat. After five years of reform, they were asking, ‘Why aren’t our schools all better?’ The challenge was to explain to people that when you have 100 years of bad schools, you can’t turn it around in five years.”

Teacher evaluations under fire

But dissatisfaction has lingered among detractors of the reform regime, none more energetic than the Washington Teachers Union. 

Pointing to the District’s , which have exceeded 20 percent in some years, the WTU’s leaders lay the blame with IMPACT. Fuchs dismissed the evaluation system as “a tool of control,” saying that it mandated an overreliance on testing and made teachers fear for their livelihoods. 

“Any time they find the union finding a quote-unquote ‘loophole,’ so people could keep their jobs, they cut it off,” Fuchs remarked. “Anything that gives teachers a little bit of power or wiggle room, they cut it off.”

Indeed, refinements to IMPACT have been ongoing since its debut. led to over 20 instructors being ranked lower than they deserved in 2013, denying bonus payments to several and resulting in one mistaken termination. More recently, DCPS officials intended, in part, to combat perceptions that evaluations . 

Echoing some of these complaints, Lewis George has declared that she will end IMPACT if elected. In circulated by WTU, she claimed the system “undermines educators’ expertise and students’ joy of learning.” While committing to retain mayoral control, she has also suggested that she will transform Washington’s office of the superintendent into an independent agency — an idea that could lead to less direct oversight over student data and standards, .

Ongoing resistance from the union and its allies may help to illustrate the somewhat muted response to D.C.’s positive trajectory. While states like Mississippi and Louisiana have emerged as widely cited examples of educational success in deeply conservative locales, Democrats are less likely to harp on the consistent growth attained in the single bluest jurisdiction in the country. Toch said the critiques of progressives and unionized workers now make the story an awkward fit with the party’s national profile.

Still, he added, it would be a profound mistake to walk away from teacher ratings, even if IMPACT could potentially benefit from tweaks. The data organized through the rubric provided the “foundation” for many other workforce improvements realized in recent years, including the opening of new leadership opportunities for teachers receiving good ratings.

“It’s discouraging to hear someone even consider abandoning it,” Toch said. “How would you do pay-for-performance? How would you create a career ladder if you couldn’t distinguish between good teachers and bad teachers? That’s the problem we had in the District in the past, and it still exists in much of the country.”

Whether Lewis George or McDuffie ultimately claims the Democratic nomination, the next mayor will have to navigate structural challenges that go beyond old battles around reform. The city faces mounting budgetary shortfalls that threaten its ability to spend at the level to which both charter and district schools have become accustomed.

Funding for school renovations and new academic programs will likely need to wait until the District’s financial picture adapts to a post-COVID, post-Trump reality in which both businesses and the federal government have shrunk their local presence. Even the pay incentives provided through IMPACT add to the fiscal pressure.

Bisi Oydele is the CEO of Education Forward D.C., a reform-friendly advocacy group. While stressing the need to pursue retrenchment equally, among both DCPS and charter providers, he acknowledged that educators and families might have to prepare for leaner times.

“You can track the CFO revenue projections, and they’re not great,” Oyedele said. “D.C. spends about $2 billion on education per year, and that is obviously tied to revenues and economic forecasts.”

Grosso also noted the long set of issues that the mayor and city council will confront through the end of the decade, including the likely need for schools to tighten their belts and the immediate task of finding a replacement for outgoing Chancellor Lewis Ferebee, who announced his resignation last month. 

Amid that flurry of contingencies, he cautioned policymakers against pursuing “reform for reform’s sake.” While he had previously pursued some major policy changes through the Council — including one resembling Lewis George’s notion of making the superintendency more autonomous — such moves needed to be carefully studied before action was taken, he concluded.

“If I didn’t learn anything else in all the years I was making education policy, at least I learned this: If you make massive changes… and you don’t have a real understanding of what the outcome will be, then you shouldn’t make the change.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the first female mayor of Washington, D.C.

Mississippi continues to outperform most of the nation in education, according to a new report, but health outcomes for children remain dismal. 

The , published annually by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, shows the state’s education ranking has held steady at 16th nationwide. Unchanged since last year, this ranking on education is Mississippi’s highest score ever, according to the foundation’s rubric.

In other measures, though, Mississippi still struggles.

The report puts Mississippi at 49th for economic well-being, 50th for health and 49th for family and community. 

“When we think about children and families where the household head lacks a diploma, that’s tied to a chance of children living in poverty in that house,” said Ashley Parker Sheils, executive director of Children’s Foundation of Mississippi. “Every one of these indicators is an opportunity for us to work together to do better for the children of our state.”

Despite progress in categories that measure economic well-being and outcomes for families and communities, those rankings fell this year for Mississippi. States are ranked relative to each other. Other states also saw improvements, so Mississippi’s rankings fell slightly in those categories. The results put Mississippi at 50th in the country for overall child well-being compared to 48th last year. 

For the first time since the foundation began maintaining these child-centric data rankings in 1990, states received a comprehensive score in the Data Book, tracking a number of indicators from 2019 to 2024. Across the country, state education scores were the lowest of the four categories — education, health, economic well-being and family and community.

Louisiana and Mississippi were the only states to make progress in education during the five-year period, according to the KIDS COUNT data. The Data Book attributes the state’s success to investing in teacher training, strengthening early education infrastructure and passing the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. Experts say that helped raise reading proficiency among the state’s youngest students. 

“Mississippi’s continued progress is the result of effective work by our educators, supportive families throughout the years and strong policies,” said Lance Evans, state superintendent of education, in a press release about the KIDS COUNT data. “We are proud of this milestone and remain committed to building on it for Mississippi students.”

Chronic absenteeism, however, remains an issue across the country and in Mississippi. The Data Book notes that chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% of the school year or 18 school days, among Mississippi students is 27.6% — more than double what was reported immediately prior to the pandemic.

State leaders have increasingly expressed concern about the chronic absenteeism rates in Mississippi. Absenteeism is directly tied to student achievement, and small schools in high-poverty districts are especially impacted.

Despite the state’s performance in education, Mississippi is still dead last in child health outcomes and had one of the sharpest drops in child health outcomes since 2019, according to the report.

Sheils said the findings were bittersweet. Her organization helps produce a  for the data each year, which provides county-specific information for local communities.

“You see the numbers and you have that moment of, ‘Should we just pack up and go home?’ ” she said. “There’s definitely disappointment … We must improve and do better for our children.”

But over 40% of those planning to launch new schools in the coming years are Black, according to the latest national report on the growing sector of small, unconventional learning programs. Just 18% of current school founders are Black.

New leaders include Monette Mottenon, a retired educator who will open in Montgomery, Alabama, this summer. It’s a goal she’s had for 15 years, ever since realizing her middle schoolers would “bomb the test” because they could barely read.

“They knew the material, but they couldn’t understand what the questions were asking,” she said. When she learned more about microschools at a conference in Atlanta, she thought, “I have found my people.”

The National Microschooling Center’s annual update also shows that a slightly higher percentage of Asian and Hispanic leaders plan to open microschools. The latest analysis doesn’t include the racial and ethnic makeup of students served, but Don Soifer, the center’s CEO, plans to gather that data in the future. 

Microschools are “shifting to more closely reflect the communities in which they operate,” he said. One reason is because “leadership positions for educators of color are lacking in many communities and states.”

The report, based on a survey of 1,000 microschools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, also covers topics such as tuition, enrollment and government regulations. Here are some of the other top findings:

Half of all microschools receive more than a quarter of their tuition funds from state private school choice programs.

That’s a big increase over last year, when 38% of microschool leaders said their students use state school choice funds, like education savings accounts. Another 18% said they have students who use an ESA for a portion of tuition and pay the rest themselves.

Soifer attributed the jump to the proliferation of ESA programs like , which went into effect this school year, and the addition of more survey respondents in states with existing ESA programs.

Next year, the percentage could be even higher. Texas’ program launches this fall. In addition, during this year’s legislative season, a restriction on microschools participating in the state’s private school choice program. 

In South Carolina, however, some families are in limbo. The state has allowed one segment of homeschoolers, known as “unbundlers,” to receive ESA funds. These families often supplement homeschooling with a couple days a week in a microschool. But lawmakers are that would lock unbundlers out of the program. Some homeschool advocates, worried about government involvement in homeschooling, pushed for that provision in the law. 

Over 1,000 families are now “eagerly waiting and wondering” what the legislature will do, said Ryan Dellinger, director of education policy at the Palmetto Promise Institute, a school choice advocacy group. If the proposal passes, the unbundlers might be restricted to homeschooling only or “may need to scramble to get themselves on a waiting list and find a private school or a charter school” for the fall, he said. 

Future microschool leaders are heavily focused on nonacademic learning.

In a subsample of 199 “prelaunch” founders, 172 said their greatest hope for students is growth in nonacademic learning. Specific skills might depend on the school’s model, Soifer said, but would likely range from self-management and social awareness to resilience and workforce readiness. That category was followed by 163 who said students’ academic proficiency or mastery was their top goal. 

A from the center last December highlighted a few schools using online platforms, such as IXL and i-Ready, to track progress.

But the field still lacks independent comparisons between microschool students and their peers in traditional schools. Last year, the Rand Corp. said it was “nearly impossible” to measure the impact of attending a microschool on students’ academic outcomes. A lot of schools didn’t have enough assessment data to determine growth in reading and math over time.

1 in 5 microschools have been open at least six years.

The largest share, 45%, have been in operation for three to five years. While the movement exploded during the pandemic, the numbers show that the small programs are more than a short-term solution to a crisis. 

The Success Center, operating out of a former courthouse in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, began as a tutoring service and expanded to offer a microschool when COVID hit. Joining the state’s independent school association was a way to “avoid looking like we just put out a shingle,” said Alicia Dickerson, who co-founded the program with her husband Doug. 

The small schools can also form close relationships with families, which contribute to a longer lifespan for a program, Alicia said. According to the report, the majority of current microschool leaders, 70%, said they expect to operate for 10 years or more.

Those who have closed their microschools are staying in the business.

Microschools shut down for a variety of reasons. The lease on a facility might run out, or the founders’ children age out of the program, Soifer said. 

Some leaders lack the skills to run a business, said Allison Serafin, vice president of the Building Hope Impact Fund, which offers loans and financial tools to founders. Tasks like budgeting, invoicing and getting business insurance are time-consuming, she said, “but they make the business durable.”

But 78% of former microschool leaders said they’re still part of the movement.

With a background in management consulting, Sheila Banister didn’t struggle with the administrative aspects of the microschool she co-launched in the Huntsville, Alabama, area during the pandemic. But there were other rough patches.

“It’s definitely a challenge finding a teacher who is willing to teach in this type of environment because it’s so different from public school,” she said. The teacher they hired had experience in early childhood, but lacked the skills to teach higher-level math skills to older students. 

Banister’s expectations for the program also didn’t line up with those of the other parents who co-founded the school. 

“I think they wanted more of a co-op experience, not necessarily focused on academic growth,” Banister said.

They decided to discontinue the program at the end of this school year. But Banister said she still believes in the microschool approach. She leads the state’s affiliate of Love Your School, a nonprofit school choice advocacy organization that began in Arizona, and coaches prospective founders on administrative aspects of the business, like how to incorporate.

Like many former microschool leaders, she said opening another one is “not off the table.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Public microschools are bigger than private ones.

The median number of students attending private microschools is 20. But with more districts and charter schools launching small, individualized programs, this year’s report notes that the median enrollment figure for public microschools is 30. 

There’s growing interest from public school leaders in opening microschools. Some examples include in Middletown, New York, in the Hudson Valley region, and a new in the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank district in North Carolina. But Soifer said it’s too early to get an accurate count. 

The Eastern Hancock district, in a rural community outside Indianapolis, enrolled 62 students in Nature’s Gift Microschool this school year, with 140 students on a waitlist. Several more public microschools will launch across Indiana this fall, and Superintendent George Philhower said he’s “in discussions” about creating a multi-state collaborative.

The term microschool, he said, has more to do with a “mindset” that emphasizes personalization and flexibility than with a specific enrollment number.

93 hours per year — that’s the average amount of time microschool leaders spend on compliance issues.

Getting government approval, whether that’s obtaining a business license or passing an inspection, takes up about 20% of that time, the respondents said. Business permits, zoning and facility regulations, and fire or safety code requirements top the regulatory categories that microschool leaders would like to see eliminated.

While standardized test requirements and ESA reporting rules only apply to some microschools, 8% of founders said they would like to see these requirements go away. 

School choice advocates argue that state and local laws haven’t kept up with the . The Institute for Justice, for example, which has won major school choice cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, also provides legal assistance to microschool founders originally meant for traditional schools.  

of the movement say those rules exist to protect students and that if microschools receive ESA funds, the public should know how the money is spent and whether children are learning.

Some states have tried to make it easier for founders to open and operate. Because of a legislative change this year, microschools registered as private schools will be able to operate out of former churches, libraries or other community facilities without getting zoning changes or making facility improvements. 

But many other jurisdictions require extensive renovations to run a school during the week in the same church classrooms used for Sunday school, Serafin said. 

“Life safety is critical, no argument there,” she said. “But I’m not sure the International Building Code leaders or local planning commissions envisioned a world of 20- to 50-student schools.”

Newly released data from America’s longest-running measure of student learning have delivered a decidedly split verdict on the state of schools.

Math and reading scores from the “Long-Term Trends” edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federally administered test commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — offer some of the first proof of recovery from COVID-era learning loss, with the average 9-year-old improving by 4 points since 2022. Surprisingly, those gains were driven in large measure by struggling students, who enjoyed their first major leap in several decades. 

But 13-year-olds made no similar progress, with scores in both subjects flat or declining for virtually every demographic group. Average performance in reading for these students was no higher than in 1971, when the exam was first conducted.

The differing trajectories underline a critical split among U.S. pupils in 2026. The youngest test takers were still in preschool when COVID-19 emerged, and largely avoided the most severe educational consequences of the public health emergency. But today’s middle schoolers were second- and third-graders at the beginning of the pandemic, which led to several years of school closures and virtual instruction in many areas of the country. As this micro-generation of children proceeds through their K–12 careers, they bear the scars of that upheaval.

Kirsten Baesler, who leads the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, said she was “very excited” by the progress made by 9-year-olds, while adding that the prolonged stagnation experienced by teenagers was somewhat predictable.

“They were in some of their most formative years of both literacy and numeracy [at the onset of the pandemic], and it was a seismic event,” she said in an interview. “It’s going to take equally seismic effort to ensure that those students are coming back to where they need to be.”

Learning recession

Others placed the downturn on a timeline extending much earlier than 2020. John White, Louisiana’s former state superintendent for public instruction, argued that Wednesday’s revelations were consistent with earlier research showing that students transitioning from elementary to middle school have had “a particularly hard decade-plus.” A recent analysis from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford labeled the period since 2012, marked by declining achievement for all but the top students, as a “learning recession.”

“We have plenty of evidence that [a] learning recession in the middle grades predates the pandemic,” said White, now serving as CEO of the educational publisher Great Minds. “You can imagine two compounding problems: One, a general challenge in the success that American schools are having with adolescents, and two, a pandemic that hit this group of soon-to-be adolescents particularly squarely.”

Both core subjects showed signs of the division between younger and older students. 

After seeing a 4-point boost since the last version of the Long-Term Trends test, 9-year-olds have now caught up to their performance level in reading from before COVID. Their average score is now 10 points higher, on a 500-point scale, than in 1971 — if not a gargantuan leap, at least measurable upward movement. In math, while significantly lower than the pre-COVID status quo, average scores are 19 points higher than in the late 1970s.

Remarkably, growth over the past few years has been powered overwhelmingly by the students performing at the lowest levels. Nine-year-olds scoring at the 25th percentile (i.e., lower than three-quarters of their same-age peers) made strides of 7 points in math and 6 points in reading since 2022; those at the 10th percentile gained even more ground, ascending by 9 points in math and 8 points in reading. That momentum flies in the face of the defining pattern of the 2010s, when only the highest-performing NAEP participants posted significant gains.

By contrast, the average performance of 13-year-olds has remained flat since 2022, and is statistically worse than in 2020. Even among those scoring at the 75th and 90th percentiles in math have endured a significant dropoff during that time.

In 2012, 85% of test takers in the older age group exceeded 250 points in math, a benchmark signaling their ability to solve one-step word problems involving addition and subtraction; in the most recent iteration of the exam, only 70% met that standard. The share of 13-year-olds scoring 250 or higher in reading fell from 66% to just 58% over the same period.

There was little variation between NAEP participants of various demographic categories, with children from various racial and socioeconomic groups generally following the same trajectories. But one notable exception related to sex: While nine-year-olds surpassed their overall results from 2022, only boys made statistically significant gains, jumping by an average of 7 points in reading and 5 points in math. Girls improved by a single point in reading and 3 points in math. 

Drop in reading for pleasure

A few other secondary findings were drawn from a survey traditionally accompanying the exam, which generates thousands of student observations in order to construct a representative picture of their day-to-day experiences. Responses revealed that in-school attendance is still much lower than before the pandemic, with the proportion of 13-year-olds absent at least one day in the previous month climbing from 44% in 2012 to 61% in 2025. Meanwhile, the fraction of 9-year-olds saying they’d been assigned no homework the previous night rose from 19% to 39% over the past two decades.

Perhaps most striking of all, far fewer students reported that they routinely read in their downtime. Just 37% of 9-year-olds, and 14% of 13-year-olds, said they read for fun “almost every day” in 2025; those numbers peaked at 58% and 37%, respectively, over 30 years ago.

Education leadership consultant Julia Rafal-Baer is a member of the National Assessments Governing Board, the entity that helps design and administer NAEP. She observed that the reading results are indicative of a widespread and concerning decline in literacy that is likely linked to increased use of smartphones and social media.

“We’ve got to put real books back into kids’ hands,” Rafal-Baer said. “Libraries matter so much, and we’ve got to have adults helping kids to be curious.”

The importance of the Long-Term Trends exam, she continued, lay in its consistency over time: The test has presented students with similar content, in a paper-and-pencil format, for a half-century. Even amid the education community’s often-loud debates over curriculum and accountability, the same fundamental skills have been assessed and recorded. In her view, that makes this version of NAEP “the closest thing we have to a long-term memory of how kids are doing.”

“There have been periods of time when we really did see growth,” Rafal-Baer reflected. “We were climbing for decades, and then we peaked around 2012 and have dropped ever since.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Bringing the ‘clouds in’ 

For Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist who sat on the governing board from 2019 to 2023, the lengthy slide in student outcomes is the central phenomenon of K–12 schooling since the Obama administration. Even the apparent progress made by the youngest group of test takers has not dislodged his view that transformative changes are needed for the education system to turn things around.

“Every time we see a little bright spot about what 9-year-olds are doing, for example, people jump on it as though it’s a long-run trend,” Hanushek said. “It’s going to take a lot to convince me that we’re not still in a general downhill slide, even with some nice green shoots here and there.”

A longtime skeptic of various school improvement efforts, he noted the long list of policies adopted throughout the U.S. since NAEP debuted, from increasing per-pupil spending to reducing class sizes to heightening academic accountability requirements. While some growth had been achieved, particularly in math, his assessment of the situation was largely disappointing.

“I’m here to bring the clouds in,” he joked.

Beyond the immediate questions of student learning, some ambiguity even surrounds the future of the test itself. Baesler voiced some doubts about the validity of the Long-Term Trends assessment, noting that its testing format and some of its content could be seen as antiquated by today’s standards. The disjunction between some of the verbiage and expectations of the Ford administration and those of the Trump era may argue for an update, she continued.

At the outset of Trump’s second term, rumors circulated Washington of a forthcoming purge of NAEP exams, possibly to include Long-Term Trends. The assessment for 17-year-olds was, in fact, cancelled early last year.

“There is discussion being had” about the fate of the test going forward, Baesler said.

“There needs to be serious consideration whether we should continue the Long-Term Trends, whether it is valid and accurate.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the peak percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who read routinely for pleasure, as well as the date at which they reached that peak.

Like them, she’s part of a Latino family from East Tulsa and wanted to give back to the community she loved. She kept her word. The new charter middle school quickly performed among the best schools in Oklahoma with an A on the state report card. 

But on a recent sunny morning in May, she sat in a conference room in the former paper mill the school purchased and renovated and spoke words uttered by countless school leaders since 2020: “Then the pandemic happened.”

The school’s ranking fell. Chronic absenteeism spiked, and instead of being two or three grade levels behind academically, some students arrived as much as four years off track. Even as she worked to expand the network, Pollock that she would be able to fulfill her commitment to get kids in and through college. Students went to work to help their families during the crisis or cared for younger siblings.

“The mindset of school being a top priority had shifted,” she said.

But there are signs that recovery is now underway. All 74 seniors in last year’s graduating class were accepted to at least one four-year university, and the small network’s two middle schools for growth in reading and math from a national charter school organization. 

As the network prepares to take its next major step, opening an elementary school, Tulsa Honor Academy is “back on an upward trajectory,” Pollock said. “Our goal was to get back to a level of excellence, both in terms of academic growth and school culture.”

The new school will open as a Spanish-English dual language program. It’s something parents have wanted for a long time. Roughly half of the students Tulsa Honor Academy serves are not only first in their families to go to college, they’re also the first to graduate high school. 

That means some students’ “home language skills are not fully developed at home, and our kids also need to learn English,” she said. “By the time they get to middle school, they will be completely fluent in both languages.”

Teachers at the school already use strategies that build fluency and new vocabulary among English learners. On a morning in May, sixth grade science teacher Miguel Ramirez led a lesson on the nervous system. In their matching uniform sweatshirts and khaki pants, students read aloud definitions of terms like nucleus and dendrites and turned to a partner to repeat the material.

“Constantly hearing people say the words gets them to internalize it,” explained Justine McGovern, the school’s development director. 

The academy celebrates Latino culture by being the only one in Oklahoma, as far as Pollock knows, that offers full courses for elective credit in , cultural dances from Mexico. In authentic dresses that represent the regions of Mexico — white for Vera Cruz or vibrant colors for Chihuahua — the students perform all over Tulsa, and many compete nationally.

‘Unapologetically college prep’ 

Inspired by her mother, an engineer who moved from Mexico to Tulsa to pursue a career,  Pollock originally planned to become an immigration lawyer. At a time when there weren’t many Latinos in Tulsa, her mother advocated for a Spanish mass at a local church and started a free GED program.

But Pollock abandoned the idea of pursuing law to join Teach for America, and developed the drive to launch her own school while working in St. Louis and Chicago. 

From the beginning, Tulsa Honor Academy has been what she calls “unapologetically college prep.” College campus visits start as early as fifth grade. Juniors work on personal statements in class. They research different careers and share their insights with sophomores, and because navigating college life can be overwhelming, staff in the school’s college readiness office encourage alumni to return for one-on-one help.

“If we want more Black and brown, first-generation, low-income students to eventually become teachers, lawyers and doctors,” Pollock said, “then we need to make sure that they’re being educated to be able to go to and graduate from college.”

with hospitals, nonprofits and city agencies are another hallmark of the school’s model. After his semester interning with Reading Partners, a tutoring organization, Oscar Gutierrez was convinced that teaching wasn’t for him. 

“I don’t want to work in the education field whatsoever,” said Gutierrez, who graduated this year. 

The experience still gave him a glimpse of behind-the-scenes operations like scheduling and recruiting volunteers. It eased anxiety over finding his way around an unfamiliar place and interacting with people he hasn’t met.

“You had to talk to the kid,” said Gutierrez, who plans to study accounting at Tulsa Community College and then transfer to the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State University. “It teaches those communication skills and just being confident within yourself.”

Kimberly Perez, part of the first graduating class of 2023, landed an internship at Miller-Tippins, a leading construction firm in Tulsa. She learned how to prepare bids for projects and estimate the cost of materials. Now a rising senior on a full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State University, she’s already received job offers from companies in Dallas. 

She still remembers when Pollock visited her home in 2016, sat on the couch and promised her mother that Tulsa Honor Academy was a better option than the district middle school. She was in fifth grade at the charter at the time, but only reading at a first grade level. 

“I would come crying to my mom, like ‘I don’t want to be in that school,’ ” Kim said. Her mother considered pulling her out. “But Elsie said, ‘She just needs extra time.’”

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Those were the years that Pollock was still leading just one school. In 2019, the high school opened, housed in a trailer on the same property. In early 2020, just as schools shut down because of COVID, Tulsa Honor Academy of a building for the high school, an accomplishment in a sector where schools often face challenges securing facilities.

Financing for the project, however, required enrollment to grow, so Pollock and her board fast-tracked the opening of a second middle school in the fall of 2021 — three years early. The expansion to three schools, in some ways, marked a temporary setback. The challenge, Pollock said, was managing a major renovation while also responding to families’ needs in a community by the virus. 

“During the critical years of growth that other schools get to methodically establish network systems and structures,” she said, “we had to pivot and start to focus on surviving the pandemic.”

Student behavior worsened, turnover rates among staff increased, and the principal hired for Flores Middle quit just after the new school opened. 

Brent Bushey, CEO of Fuel OKC, a nonprofit that provides financial support to charter schools, has watched Pollock’s journey from the beginning and recognized where the network stumbled.

“They overextended, and that came through in the academic results,” he said. 

Since 2021-22, the original middle school hasn’t earned higher than a C. Flores, the second middle school, has been stuck at a D since it opened. But those are 2025’s scores, and Pollock is hopeful about where Tulsa Honor Academy is headed. Last year, Flores Middle saw the highest fall-to-spring growth in reading and the third highest in math on NWEA’s MAP assessments among the 60 schools that submitted data to , a national nonprofit formerly known as Building Excellent Schools. Tulsa Honor Academy Middle was second in both reading and math.

Overall, the high school earned a C from the state, but was graded a B for postsecondary opportunities, better than the state average 

Overcoming the pandemic hasn’t been the only crisis Pollock has had to weather. In March, a former middle school teacher following accusations he texted a 12-year-old student and inappropriately touched the child. The school fired him in January and released a of the steps taken to report the situation to police. According to Tulsa police, the investigation into whether other students were affected is ongoing.

‘Tipping point’

As she focuses on Tulsa Honor Academy’s growth, which is expected to reach nearly 1,800 students with the new elementary school, Pollock also has a larger goal of inspiring and supporting more Latino educators to start charter schools. She helped to launch , Latino Educators Advancing Leadership, a word that also means loyal in Spanish. 

She was the first and remains the only Latino charter school leader in the state. It’s both a point of pride and what she calls a “gross disservice” when the majority of students attending brick-and-mortar charter schools are Latino. She’s encouraged that another Latino leader, Robert Ruiz, will open a in Oklahoma City in 2027.

The biggest barrier, she said, is the lack of educational attainment among Latinos in Tulsa. data shows that less than 20% of Latino adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Pollock sees that void in her own work. Two years ago, she knew of four Latino charter school assistant principals in Oklahoma, two of them in her own schools.

“The tipping point is going to be once our scholars graduate from college and we can start hiring them back,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “My biggest dream is for one of our scholars to eventually sit in my seat.”

The routine offered a helpful reminder of why she’s stayed in the field for 26 years. 

“I look at where these babies have started. Some of them might have known two or three alphabet letters,” said Jarvis, who teaches in the Chickasha district, southwest of Oklahoma City. “Now, looking at their test scores, I’m sending six to first grade on a third grade reading level.”

But when she looks at her paycheck, she doesn’t get the same satisfaction.

Her take-home pay has increased about 17% since 2018, about half the rate of inflation. Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill last month raising teacher salaries by $2,000, but when Jarvis calculated the amount after taxes, it translates into less than $6 a day.

“I definitely don’t do it for the money,” she said, “but that was an eye-opener.” 

Eight years ago, she was part of a massive, nine-day teacher walkout that saw more than 30,000 educators descend on the state capitol to demand increases in education funding. Then-Gov. Mary Fallin had already signed a $6,100 raise, but teachers wanted $10,000 and increases in the education budget. They also saw raises in and .

But since that historic “Red for Ed” movement, teachers like Jarvis say the incremental progress is barely noticeable. Starting teacher pay in the state still hovers near the bottom in the country, while neighboring states have climbed in the rankings. Some districts say they’ll have to come up with to extend the $2,000 increase to non-teaching staff, and teachers are likely to return next year asking for more.

“We have to have substantial increases annually to catch up,” said Shawn Hime, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association and a former assistant state superintendent. He applauds lawmakers for increasing teacher pay 37% since 2018, but high numbers of teachers still either leave the field or for better pay. “We’re all in the same race, and we started a lap behind.”

Districts can pay higher salaries above the state scale, but there are limits. That’s because to avoid large gaps in funding between poor and wealthier communities, the state caps how much they can raise .

“If you’re an equity warrior, in theory, this is like the perfect funding formula,” said Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit focusing on school finance. But in a state that’s reluctant to increase taxes, she said, districts are often “forced to decide between hiring more people and giving pay raises.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

To deliver the 2018 salary increase, the legislature overcame a 75% supermajority threshold to increase taxes. But now, in an election year, some lawmakers who voted for it are “getting hammered” by their opponents as they seek higher office, said Hime, with the school board’s association. 

One of them is Charles McCall, the former House speaker and now a Republican candidate for governor. , Chip Keating, a challenger in the June August GOP primary, accuses McCall of passing “the largest tax increase in Oklahoma history. “That’s why taxes are too high.”

The state needs a long-term plan for funding education, Hime said, but lawmakers’ hands are tied because they can’t obligate money for future years. One former legislator has been arguing that point for years. 

“We have this year-to-year budgeting and that’s got to stop,” said Mark McBride, a Republican who chaired an education appropriations committee in the House. He recalled voting against a previous $2,000 pay raise prior to the walkout because he preferred to support a substantial hike over several years. Educators, he said, “got really irritated with me.”

‘Disrespect crept in’

Pay is not the only reason teachers in Oklahoma leave the classroom. Some advocates say mandates like making struggling readers repeat third grade will force more out.

“This is going to exacerbate our teacher shortage,” said Erika Wright, a community organizer for the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice and the founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition. “Who the hell wants to teach third grade now?” 

When former state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister was in office, she commissioned a of thousands of teachers who were currently certified but not teaching. While pay was a factor, nearly a quarter said their views rested on “the inability to make decisions related to instruction” and “burdensome standards and curriculum requirements.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Rhetoric that teachers found demeaning hasn’t helped either. Former state Superintendent Janet Barresi, Hofmeister’s predecessor, once said she wouldn’t let the “education establishment lose another generation of Oklahoma’s children.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

She was the first to remove an educators hall of fame display from the state Department of Education building, former Superintendent Ryan Walters repeated when he took office in 2023. He sought to from educators, publicly criticised them in videos from his car and instituted a to weed out applicants from states he deemed too liberal.

“Disrespect crept in,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “Job creep,” was another factor, he said, as teaching became more complex and behavior problems escalated. “It’s like screaming into the wind. I think many teachers felt that their voices weren’t heard.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; 

Lawmakers introduced this year to lower class sizes in the elementary grades, a frequent request from teachers, but it died in committee.

Some years, Jarvis, the Chickasha teacher, has had as many as 28 students in her class. This year, she had 21, but doesn’t have a classroom aide. With about eight more years until retirement, she feels more fortunate than some of her colleagues who work a second job at a nearby steakhouse because the tips are so good.

But she often puts off vacations and big-ticket purchases now that she’s paying health and car insurance for her two sons. Eight years ago, they demonstrated with her at the state capitol. 

“I remember sitting them down and explaining why we were going,” she said. Her youngest made a poster with the names of his teachers. “It was very meaningful to see the kids there.”

“We’re in the middle of an industrial revolution that’s bigger than the dot.com revolution, and the world is not prepared for it,” Weingarten told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “And our country’s leaders have a laissez-faire attitude about it. So I feel a huge responsibility to try and get it right.” 

Weingarten has proposed reshaping how U.S. public schools navigate AI in particular and technology more broadly, saying our kids are experiencing a crisis of attention and well-being — and that teachers are getting precious little guidance on how to help young people navigate these challenges.

Her proposal: Trim tech use, especially for younger kids, and teach all students how to think critically, communicate, collaborate and persist.“One of the worst things we’ve done in education was to call collaboration and communication ‘soft skills,’” she said, “because applied learning, problem solving, communication, collaboration, persistence — all of these — are the skills that any young adult is going to need in an AI world. In fact, these are the skills that are going to be much more competitive in an AI world.”

In a May 27 at the National Press Club in Washington, she proposed a near-ban on computer screens for students through second grade, including for assessments. She proposed banning student-facing AI in elementary schools, arguing that young children need to build foundational skills without algorithmic shortcuts. 

And she said that young people should not have access to “social companion” chatbots that simulate human relationships until age 16.

The speech makes Weingarten and AFT, the second-largest teachers union in the nation, new and potentially powerful supporters of a growing parent-powered movement to trim technology from U.S. classrooms, even as the union pushes to train thousands of teachers on how AI works. 

Weingarten proposed that schools redesign their offerings so that “active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning,” is the norm across all grade levels. She decried “drill-and-kill” rote instruction, saying that in an age when any fact is retrievable with a single prompt, the ability to apply knowledge, think critically, communicate and collaborate matters far more than memorization.

“To really prepare young people for complex challenges, our true goal is to have students who can work together and problem solve,” she said.

Weingarten noted that 31 states have now adopted some form of phone ban, and that several countries that were early adopters of education technology are pulling back. Sweden, she said, has returned to printed textbooks. Estonia, where research linked higher screen time in young children to weaker language skills, is calling for more human-to-human interaction. And Italy is re-emphasizing handwriting and traditional instruction.

Weingarten also called for establishing a rigorous new national safety and privacy standard for AI products sold to schools and creating an independently funded research consortium to study tech’s effects on children. And she proposed a new tax on Big Tech companies’ earnings to offset the environmental and societal costs of AI-driven disruption, including workers “being displaced by AI.”

In an interview Monday, Weingarten said AFT’s own $23 million AI academy, launched last year in New York City to help teachers understand and shape how AI enters their classrooms, exists in part to provide crucial guidance on how to understand the technology. Over the next five years, the National Academy for AI Instruction is expected to provide hands-on workshops for 400,000 educators, or one in 10 U.S. teachers, effectively reaching the more than 7.2 million students they teach. 

She said the institute’s mission and her new stance on tech aren’t incompatible.

“The AI Institute is really about teachers teaching teachers, and how the tech companies are not in control,” she said. “It is a people-first, safety-first focus.”

When she announced the academy in July, Weingarten said teachers face “huge challenges,” including navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely. “The question was whether we would be chasing it — or whether we would be trying to harness it.”

Nearly a year later, she said the institute now serves a crucial role in the absence of guidance from the Trump administration, which last week issued a U.S. Surgeon General’s urging families and schools to reduce children’s screen time. It suggested that schools limit school computers to computer labs, invest in physical textbooks and “prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities and social activities for all grade levels.”

In a media appearance last week, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools “need to embrace A.I., and to use it .”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Weingarten said it’s “crazy” that the U.S. Surgeon General’s office is offering more detailed recommendations than the Education Department. 

“When you actually have two-thirds of teachers in the United States having no idea how to use AI in schools, and when you have one-third saying there’s no formal guidance, and then you have the Education Secretary saying they should use it ‘appropriately,’ I mean, this is part of the problem,” she said. 

U.S. Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse said McMahon “has highlighted the many types of schools that are successfully and responsibly integrating AI in the classroom to help our nation’s students meet the challenges of today.”

Weingarten also took a swipe at Melania Trump’s recent tech-and-education event, in which the First Lady the White House alongside a humanoid robot to highlight the potential benefits of robots replacing teachers. The stunt, Weingarten said, “spoke volumes. So did the responses from teachers wondering how a robot was going to build trust with students or know when someone was having a bad day. There’s no algorithm for that. Students need their teachers — real human beings, not robots and not chatbots.”

Newhouse didn’t address Weingarten’s allegations about the administration’s leadership on AI, instead criticizing union priorities more broadly: “If there’s finally going to be an honest conversation about the damage done to American students, it should begin with the teachers unions’ enthusiastic support for a federal bureaucracy that has spent over $3 trillion only to watch student outcomes decline, along with their relentless push to keep schools shuttered during COVID,” Newhouse said. 

‘Kids are getting burned’

The effort to curb tech in schools comes on the heels of a similar one, led in large part by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, to limit cellphone use in schools.

Weingarten on Monday said she has steeped herself in research on educational technology and artificial intelligence. But it wasn’t until she spoke to Haidt last summer about young people’s worsening that she knew she had to draw a line. 

“What really drove me was the issues around attention,” she said. 

Haidt, author of the best-selling 2024 book The Anxious Generation, has said short-form videos and other social media tools have decimated our kids’ ability to pay attention in school, resulting in fewer books read, poorer basic skills and worsening mental health. A more recent book, The Digital Delusion, by the educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, argues that basic classroom technology has had a similar effect on skills.

In her speech, much of Weingarten’s criticism centered around increasingly widespread fears that our society is losing its way when it comes to young people’s technology use. She noted that more than half of 11-year-olds already carry smartphones, a figure that climbs to 95% among teenagers. Four in 10 teens report being online almost constantly, she said. “The pace of this tech revolution has been blisteringly fast, and kids are getting burned.”

She pointed to Haidt’s research linking heavy smartphone and social media use to rising rates of social isolation, anxiety and depression among young people, with academic consequences as well from the rollout of classroom technology. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which had been climbing steadily, have in many cases worsened after widespread digital adoption. Weingarten acknowledged that correlation is not causation, but said the pattern, appearing consistently across states, grade levels and subjects, deserves serious attention.

She also pointed to research showing that 88% of teachers in a survey reported that their students’ attention spans were shrinking, which she attributed in part to the instant-rewards of online platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. Cognitive scientist work, she said, suggests students are not incapable of focusing, but are increasingly unwilling to do so when schoolwork feels dull by comparison to their online lives.

But she cautioned that she’s not anti-tech.

“I’m not calling for an AI ban or a Chromebook bonfire,” she said. “What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. I’m wary of the dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and help to cushion the disruption to people’s lives.” 

Alex Kotran, the founder and CEO of , said Weingarten is “right where it counts” about limiting AI for younger students but giving teachers access to the tools. “It’s about getting the balance right,” he said. “And I really don’t talk to anybody that believes that we shouldn’t have some sort of balance.”

Kotran said he’d recently spoken at an National Education Association meeting and saw that, like AFT, they’re focused on understanding AI. “There’s this almost-meme, ‘Oh, the unions are getting in the way of AI transformation, AI readiness,’ and I really disagree with that fundamentally. The unions have a very sophisticated understanding of what really matters here.”

Weingarten’s push to give teachers a better understanding of AI makes sense as well, he said. “When teachers feel like they are the main characters of the story of AI transformation, their willingness to really lean in and learn, it’s a lot more. You see a lot more buy-in.”

More broadly, Kotran said, supporting active learning, project-based and career-connected learning is “what all the smartest people in the field,” including CEOs and labor economists, are recommending. “What everybody’s basically saying is that the skills that matter now are people who can just get shit done, who can work independently and proactively on projects, who can create and build. And so it’s really, really important to hear a union actually naming that.”

On Monday, Weingarten said parents are leading the way on this issue — and that schools risk being caught between parents who opt their children out of classroom technology and those who want to keep it. “How does a teacher in kindergarten work in a classroom where half the kids opt out of screens and half the kids are on screens?”

“Resting up from my vacay.”

“Netflix binge last night.”

Those were among the “lame excuses” for missing school that Oklahoma’s Union Public Schools featured during the 2024-25 school year, part of a humorous campaign intended to reduce chronic absenteeism.

Behind the comical posters, however, leaders were troubled by the data. During the 2022-23 school year, 29% of students missed at least 10% of the school year. At Union High School, the rate soared to 43%.

“I think there have been huge changes in behavior since COVID,” said Chris Payne, spokesman for the Tulsa-area district. He echoed what policy experts and school leaders nationwide have been saying since rates skyrocketed after schools fully reopened. “I think people reprioritized and decided, ‘You know, I’ve got things I need to take care of.’ ”

In addition to the attendance campaign, staff met with parents and visited students’ homes to find out why they were missing school. But starting in 2027, Oklahoma schools will no longer be judged on whether those chronic absenteeism rates go up or down. The legislature voted last year to remove the indicator from the state’s education accountability system as a factor that contributes to a school’s overall grade and can determine whether a school is labeled in need of improvement. 

Among , teachers and administrators, there’s a sense of relief.

“I’m not sure that it’s fair to evaluate schools based on something that we cannot control,” said Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City. Originally in favor of making chronic absenteeism a factor in schools’ A-F grades, he no longer thinks it’s a good way to assess schools.

Oklahoma’s most , for 2024-25, gives the state a D for the percentage of students with good attendance. Its chronic absenteeism rate of 19% is far from the worst in the nation, but it’s still 5 percentage points above the state’s pre-pandemic level of 14%. Data from shows the rate stands at about 21%. 

“It’s not just an Oklahoma thing,” Simpson said. “I’ve got colleagues and friends all over the country, and they’re fighting some of the same challenges.”

Oklahoma isn’t the first state to remove chronic absenteeism from its accountability system. Arkansas took it out in 2024 as part of . Illinois officials have recommended replacing chronic absenteeism with , and now reports broader attendance data rather than just chronic absenteeism.

‘States already had the data’

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires state accountability systems, and the report cards available to the public include indicators of academic performance, graduation rates, progress in learning English and an additional measure of student success. For that last metric, 38 states chose chronic absenteeism.

The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that it’s currently considering the state’s request to replace chronic absenteeism with a new measure, but so far, state officials haven’t said what that’s going to be. The challenge will be landing on a K-12 data point that is comparable across Oklahoma’s more than 500 districts, said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the Data Quality Campaign. The nonprofit has published reviews of state report cards since 2016.

Chronic absenteeism “was an inexpensive indicator to implement because states already had the data,” she said. Adopting a new measure, she said, could require districts to pay for changes to their student information systems and spend time training staff to collect and input the data. In addition, she said, it takes two years to ensure data is reliable enough to use in decisions about school ratings.

But the connections between chronic absenteeism and student achievement are backed by years of research. , for example, showed that a 1% increase in attendance was linked to a 1.5% jump in third graders passing the state reading test. showed that students who were chronically absent in middle school had lower math scores and were less likely to graduate on time than those who didn’t miss as much school. 

Kowalski said there’s plenty schools can do to improve attendance. Reducing bullying, increasing teacher retention and challenges, she said, can address some of the reasons students miss school.

Transportation surfaced as a barrier when the Union district surveyed parents, teachers and students on the issue. But teachers were far less likely than parents to say that reliable transportation would improve attendance — 25% compared to 47%. There were also stark differences between parents and students. Twenty-three percent of students said mental health reasons kept them home, while 12% of parents said that was a common explanation. 

Tulsa makes progress

Some communities in Oklahoma have adopted a tough posture toward parents whose children are frequently absent. Erik Johnson, a Republican district attorney in the southeastern part of the state, has prosecuted and jailed parents to force compliance with the law. 

Prior to the pandemic, Guthrie allowing police to fine parents for their kids’ truancy, but Simpson, the superintendent, said those measures didn’t “move the needle.”

In Tulsa, the state’s largest district, Board Member Stacey Woolley said she’s glad chronic absenteeism is no longer part of the grading formula because the indicator lowered schools’ scores. 

“At the same time, we have to continue to make it a priority,” she said. When leaders examine student data, they find that students who struggle are chronically absent, regardless of their socioeconomic status. 

The district’s work shows that reductions are possible. The rate has declined over the past two years from 44% to 37%, and have seen drops of at least 10% compared to last school year. 

Such efforts won’t go completely unrewarded. Under the to the Education Department, schools that lower chronic absenteeism could still score “bonus points” toward their grade but the indicator won’t be used in determining which schools are identified as needing improvement. 

By the end of the Union district’s campaign, chronic absenteeism had dropped by about 1.4%, well below the goal of 7%. Still, Payne said, the progress equated to 200 fewer chronically absent students. 

Leaders also realized something else: Students in the district’s career-tech programs, like aerospace and construction, had lower absenteeism rates than those in the general student population. Now, in response to local workforce shortages, the district has launched a healthcare career pathway as well. 

“I had students that didn’t really have a direction,” said Jason McMullen, who teaches aviation courses at the district’s Innovation Lab. “Then they see a helicopter land and that lightbulb goes off.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, some students at the lab learned how to secure safety wire to the nuts and bolts that hold planes together, while others patched holes in sheetrock. 

The change to the state’s accountability system, “doesn’t mean we’re going to quit working on it,” said Payne, the district’s spokesman. “The reality remains that if students are not present, they’re not going to perform and have success in school and life.”

To Lila Byock, one of two California moms suing Curriculum Associates over its product i-Ready, the advisory was the right move. Thousands of school districts use the program, with its animated alien characters, to give students practice in math and reading.

“Excessive classroom screen use is a public health crisis,” she said, adding that district leaders should “reduce the use of individual devices, reinvest in paper curricula and stop letting Big Ed Tech exploit our kids for profit.”

Districts like and , are already rethinking their use of i-Ready or in response to growing backlash from parents. , led by the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, could be one reason. The complaint argues that the company gained “virtually unfettered access” to children’s personal information, like birth date, gender, race and disability status, and shared it with “myriad third parties.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Curriculum Associates denies the accusations. 

“Curriculum Associates takes student data privacy extremely seriously, and the claims in this litigation are without merit,” a spokesperson told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “We do not sell student data, use it for advertising, or create commercial profiles of students. All use of student information is limited to supporting the educational services requested and authorized by schools and districts in compliance with applicable federal and state laws.”

Ed tech vendors rely on long-standing federal that says “schools may act as the parent’s agent,” provided the data they gather is for educational, not commercial, purposes. 

The lawyers taking ed tech companies to court are challenging that guidance. Linnette Attai, a data privacy consultant and founder of Playwell, LLC, said the complaint over i-Ready is based on “a lot of speculation,” but it has still put vendors and education leaders on alert.

“Curriculum Associates is facing significant legal bills, but also a public relations and customer retention issue. The industry is sitting up and taking notice,” she said. But she said the issues the complaints raise are “better suited for legislators and not a courtroom.”

‘Theories of consent’

Congress passed the in 1998, requiring online sites to verify parents’ approval before they collect, use or share information from children under 13. 

Last , the Federal Trade Commission’s FAQ on the law says that schools “can consent under COPPA to the collection of kids’ information on the parent’s behalf.”

But with that put students’ privacy at risk and that digital tools benefit kids, the attorneys representing parents like Byock hope to defeat that interpretation of the law. 

“These theories of consent that companies rely on in order to bypass actual consent from parents are all bogus,” said Andrew Liddell, one half of the husband-and-wife legal team behind the EdTech Law Center. “They have no basis in the law whatsoever.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The FTC updated its COPPA regulation in early 2025, but left the school consent issue alone. The agency, however, it was “concerned about the use of and other engagement techniques to keep kids online in ways that could harm their mental health.”

Last summer, the FTC submitted an in support of EdTech Law Center in a separate , an online learning platform used by more than 18 million students. The Liddells sued on behalf of three Kansas families who said the company uses “deceptive design techniques” to keep kids hooked and shares their data with a “host of private companies.” The families have asked for monetary damages.  

The law, the FTC wrote, does not create an “agency relationship between schools and the parents of school children.”

The Liddells say the brief is the most definitive statement yet that parents, not schools, have the final say over what data ed tech vendors can access. But the FTC hasn’t changed its existing guidance, and other student privacy experts say schools can continue to it.

A spokesperson for the FTC told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ it doesn’t “have anything to add to the amicus brief.”

‘The long game’

Meg Leta Jones, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University, said there is tension in Washington over this issue. On one hand, the administration is “trying to be pro-AI,” she said. First lady Melania Trump entered a White House education summit in April alongside a saying, “The future of A.I. is ‘personified,’ ” 

At the same time, Republicans support parental rights, and a few months earlier, a Senate committee held to examine the harms of ed tech.

“It’s hard to move when both of those things are happening,” Jones said. The lawsuits are important, she said, because they take the issue out of federal officials’ hands. “Clarity around this consent issue is what will come in the long game.”

Outside the courts, the litigation has inspired more parents to push for restrictions on i-Ready and other ed tech platforms. Parents in New York City’s District 4, on Manhattan’s East Side, noted the i-Ready lawsuit in a calling for screen time limits. 

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a mom of two who chairs the Community Education Council for District 4, has already opted her kids out of i-Ready and NWEA’s MAP tests. But she said she remains “a thousand percent” concerned about her 14-year-old’s use of programs like Google Classroom, IXL and JumpRope, a grading platform.

The resolution cited a recent finding 141 data breaches or “unauthorized data releases” between 2023 and 2025. The district, the New York comptroller’s office said, doesn’t have an “accurate inventory” of all of the software programs schools use or the privacy risks involved. 

“It’s like ed tech on steroids,” said Salas-Ramirez, also a neuroscientist who trains future doctors. “We don’t have the data to validate that these quote unquote tools, instruments or assessments provide us anything worthwhile.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

‘Administrative nightmare’

Ed tech experts say schools wouldn’t be able to function if vendors had to get consent directly from parents for all the online products students use in the classroom. 

It’s an “administrative nightmare” said Mark Williams, a California attorney who specializes in ed tech contracts and student privacy. “Throw that out the window; it doesn’t work.”

Vendors share data with third parties. That part isn’t in dispute. The question is if it’s being shared, as the FTC says, “for the use and benefit of the school” or falling into the hands of companies that use it for marketing or targeted ads based on students’ characteristics.  

A last year offered another look into what happens when kids click answers or type personal information into a program. The state board turned to , a nonprofit that tests software products, to investigate 100 apps commonly used in the state’s schools. 

The review found that over a third shared student information with advertisers. shared data with six advertisers. Others shared data with dozens of advertisers as well as with sites like Google and Microsoft.

The report stressed that the “presence of sharing alone does not necessarily constitute a contract violation.” Some sharing is necessary for an app to function properly, the authors wrote.

It’s “common sense” for a vendor to share data they collect to fix bugs or security flaws, said Steve Smith, executive director of , a global network of vendors and schools. But legally, it’s “a little bit of a stretch” for a company to create a new program with that information.

Vendors go too far when they share “incredibly sensitive student data” from a school monitoring app to develop a new product, said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center. Many schools use such programs to monitor for online threats or risks of self harm.

“The companies have everything the kid has done online, everything that they’ve written in the Google Drive,” she said. “You can think about that extremely personal information then being used to create a personalized learning platform that they sell back to schools.”

‘Pretty opaque’

Inspired by Utah’s work, Access4Learning is developing a tool that districts can use to track what vendors do with student information. Leaders expect to launch it later this year. 

But that might not satisfy the concerns of some parents leading the charge against ed tech. They often point out that such organizations or have received funding from some of the very companies the screen-free lobby opposes. The growing mistrust surfaced at last December that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held to discuss kids’ “excessive screen time.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“Ed tech is so devious that it’s created dozens of nonprofits cloaked as online safety organizations,” Lisa Cline, a Maryland parent who has advocated against screens in the Montgomery County Public Schools, said at the event. “Some of them are here today. Look closely. These guys are bankrolled by big tech and frankly, they mock the work that unpaid people like myself do to educate parents.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

While the lawsuits between parents and vendors could drag on for a while, districts should at least be transparent about the products they’re using, said Williams, the California attorney. 

Parents are allowing districts “to collect and give to a third party data that they would not otherwise be entitled to,” he said. In return, educators should explain what data they take and what they do with it. “Unfortunately, that process can be pretty opaque.”

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 collar 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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.

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

“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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

“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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč; 

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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

‘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.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;