Co-founder and CEO of , a Nashville-based nonprofit that works with teachers to provide high-quality resources and instructional support, she got curious about AI after seeing the tool in action. 

It’s designed to help students read texts closely, and it did it in a way that was “very different than any tech I had seen,” Freitag recalled. It made her think that AI “may be a horse of a different color. It may be really, actually a step forward in capabilities.” But she wanted to look past the hype. 

A former assistant commissioner of curriculum and instruction in Tennessee, Freitag got the idea to take a closer look at the full spectrum of AI tools. “I wanted to see it as a mom. I wanted to see it as an educator, and I wanted to see it to be a good partner to our schools.”

So she and a colleague last January began a six-month investigation that would eventually take them to 16 school systems in seven states. They sat with students as they worked through AI-enabled lessons, watched teachers teach with AI, and interviewed more than 100 teachers, school system leaders and ed-tech CEOs.

The results of their first foray are : Instruction Partners on Monday released the initial findings in what it is calling its AI in Action Learning Tour — a year-long effort to observe how actual students and teachers use AI. 

The report looks at 20 student-facing AI products already in classrooms, broken down into three categories: general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini; education-focused platforms such as Brisk Teaching, Google Classroom, MagicSchool and Playlab, and targeted instructional tools built around a specific instructional jobs — they include Amira Learning, Khanmigo and Quill.

“AI is definitely not a single category,” Freitag said. “We saw a huge range of products designed to do a huge range of things.”

They framed their inquiry around two questions: 

1. How does it compare to paper-pencil instruction?
2. How does it compare to the best possible learning experience in that subject?

Freitag and her colleague found a decidedly mixed bag, with a few key surprises.

“I saw tools that held a higher bar for learning than we see in paper pencil instruction and did more to tailor the questions and the feedback for kids to the specific sort of responses they were giving than a teacher could possibly do all at the same time,” she said. “So I really walk away thinking there’s a lot of good here that we need to leverage — and a lot of bad here we need to mitigate.”

They found that general-purpose chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT pose the biggest threat to student thinking, while the platforms — Brisk, MagicSchool and the like — produced different results, depending on how teachers used them.

The targeted tools, such as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo and Quill, a writing app, produced the most consistent and strongest learning experiences, they found.

And teachers told them they’re frustrated by apps kids can easily game — in one case, students found that by simply hitting the “Refresh” button on a computer, they could complete an assignment by answering the same question repeatedly instead of the lesson’s full list of questions. Many students also learned that they could simply Google an answer and paste it into their lessons. 

In another case, an app gave students detailed feedback on their writing — “I thought the feedback was really good and useful and actionable,” Freitag said. But she watched in horror as students simply ignored it and began rewriting without consulting it.

In another instance, she sat with a student as he worked on writing a book based on characters he liked, focused on letter sounds he needed to practice. “He created the book, and he said, ‘Now it’s your turn. Let’s create a book for you.’ And I was like, ‘But are we going to read your book?’ And I realized he was just making books without reading them.” 

The boy, she said, simply liked making the books.

“As someone trying to make sense of where AI has a role to play or not, I think seeing how kids are actually using products matters much more than understanding what they’re designed to do,” Freitag said. “And there are many cases where what I saw in action was quite different than what I expected to see based on the product demo.”

In fact, many of the apps that give students the ability to work together shone in Freitag’s review. By contrast, several apps designed for solo use turned out to be “boring” to many students, who spent perhaps 10 minutes engaged. “By minute 42 of the lesson, they are just tuned out.”

In many cases, she said, the same product produced dramatically different results — and gave kids different experiences — depending on whether teachers built in clear routines and actively monitored dashboards in real time.

In one instance, a teacher taught a lesson with a math app that allowed her to display four students’ solutions to a problem side-by-side on a Smartboard, allowing students to evaluate the solutions. “I was stunned by how much kids learned from looking at each other’s work in that way,” Freitag said. Even with just a little feedback, it was effective. “When it was used socially, it really created a ton of learning opportunity for kids.”

The apps that worked did something that teachers couldn’t do alone, such as offering instant feedback or a quick analysis of an entire group’s work. Those, she said, “were the products where I was like, ‘Wow, this is extending what a teacher could do.’”

But the report emphasizes that AI shouldn’t cut teachers out of the equation. They still have a vital role to play and AI should never be seen as replacing teachers. “My take is that the future is hybrid,” Freitag said. “Teachers have a key and lead role, and there’s tech that gives them an assist.”

In fact, one of the most promising AI innovations is its ability to identify where students are struggling with foundational skills — and where they need more practice. But forcing students to practice those skills in isolation could be counterproductive. “If we help kids practice a bunch of reading skills without actually paying attention to the text or the knowledge that they need to access that text,” Freitag said, “we’re not going to see reading scores improve.”

She also worries about AI’s near-miraculous ability to re-level reading passages with a single click, one of the most popular features of most reading tools. While it can help slower readers understand a text, that releveling can become “a permanent lower setting” rather than a bridge back to grade level.

Arman Jaffer, CEO of Brisk Teaching, one of the apps reviewed, said his philosophy is that releveling “should be used to increase entry points to high-quality instructional material,” but not to limit how far students can go.

“AI is something that’s incredibly powerful that can help you do things like relevel,” he said. “You can make the entire internet accessible to your students, but at the same time, a teacher who might not have the best instructional practices might be using it to hold back students.”

Jaffer said the findings underscore the need for coaching and professional development for teachers as AI emerges in the classroom. “I think every AI company, every technology company, every vendor, truly needs to be a partner to their district or their school or their organization.”

Peter Gault, CEO of Quill, an AI-powered writing app that was also reviewed, said Freitag and her partner watched students using the app in New Jersey and worked hard to unpack how it worked. “I was really impressed with how much due diligence they did. They really went under the hood to understand what works and why it works.”

The duo, he said “did the most thorough deep dive of anyone who has looked at our AI.”

Alex Sarlin, co-host of the podcast, called the new report “amazing work,” noting that Freitag spoke not just with teachers and students but with tech CEOs. “She’s talking to all sides of the equation,” he said. 

The time she and her colleague spent in classrooms is key, Sarlin said. “That gives a much richer picture of how AI is actually being used in the classroom than we usually see, and certainly more than we see in mainstream coverage, which tends to be very surface level and a little panicky.”

This fall, Freitag’s team has grown to three people — they’ll soon look at 30 more products and report on them this winter. And Instruction Partners plans to work with Stanford’s AI in Education Lab to independently vet impact claims by winter 2027. The new report notes that just seven of the 20 products have independent studies examining outcomes across student subgroups.

For her part, Freitag said teachers are hungry for clear guidance around AI. “We work with instructional leaders across the country, and they said, ‘We are getting inundated with sales pitches, and we are getting inundated with calls now to “Ban it all,” and we don’t really understand where there’s value in this.’ So that helped me see that the debate about AI in schools is moving faster than real information.”

Tulsa, Oklahoma

With her long, wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, the young mom sat alone outside courtroom 6 at the Tulsa County Family Center for Juvenile Justic, checking her phone and anxiously waiting for a court official to call her name for an eviction hearing.

“I’ve never been through this,” Courtney said in early May. Her two kids, ages 5 and 6, were staying with her mother out of town while she tried to catch up on rent or find another place to live. It was the best for the children, she said, but “they want to be with me.”

Between losing one job and starting another, she feared she’d still come up short of the  $1,004 she owed.

She didn’t have much time.

In Oklahoma, the eviction process moves faster than the ability of most renters to respond. State law gives tenants five days to pay their debt or move out. A tenant has to appear in court just three days after a summons arrives. 

Tulsa has one of the worst eviction rates in the country — the as of a decade ago. Since then, the rate has grown from 8% to . Last school year, landlords filed evictions affecting more than 600 children in the state’s largest district, the Tulsa Public Schools. 

Her kids’ schools, Courtney said, didn’t ask why she withdrew them with a month left in the school year.

That’s hardly surprising, experts say.

“[Parents are] looking for, ‘How do I find a place where my kids are going to sleep?’ ” said Eric Hallett, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. “They’re not thinking ‘What can a lawyer do for me?’ or even ‘What can Tulsa Public Schools do for me?’ ”

But in a state with one of the in the nation, that’s something the district is trying to change. Since 2020, leaders have worked with ImpactTulsa, a nonprofit, to prevent disruption in kids’ education and quickly direct parents under threat of eviction to resources like legal aid and rental assistance. When a student’s address appears in an eviction filing, the parent receives an email from the district offering help.

The alert is a promising example of schools being “first responders” in a housing emergency, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization focused on students experiencing homelessness. Tulsa’s system has caught the attention of organizations doing similar work from Dallas to Dayton, Ohio. But the resources available to families fall far short of the demand, and the threat of eviction itself can be so traumatic that parents are often too overwhelmed to respond.

“There is a culture of defeat,” said Ana Barros, the director of collaboration and partnerships for ImpactTulsa. If the eviction seems like a “done deal, why would I reach out for help?” 

Roughly nationally are caught up in evictions each year, with households headed by single Black mothers . Housing instability lands the heaviest on families with young from a Stanford University survey shows that nearly 30% of parents with children under 6 were worried about being evicted in the next month and 8% had already received an eviction notice. A federal program provides homeless students with educational and transportation services. But families who are evicted don’t immediately qualify for the same support, and the damage to students’ learning is clear.

“The gaps in children’s education are huge,” said Emily Turner, an attorney who is part of ImpactTulsa’s eviction prevention team. Missing days and weeks of school because of an eviction raises concerns about kids’ safety, she said, and the more they miss, the harder it is to come back. “They feel behind or they feel scared or they feel like this isn’t my space anymore.”

In the Oklahoma City schools, 65% of students whose families received were chronically absent, almost as many as those who were actually evicted, according to , part of Mental Health Association Oklahoma. On state assessments, students with an eviction notice or judgment had 25% lower proficiency rates in math compared to their peers. In reading, the academic impact was more than twice as much — 56% lower. 

“We have slipped to the bottom in education rankings,” said state Rep. Amanda Clinton, a Democrat who this year to give tenants facing eviction access to free mediation before a judge heard their case. The bill passed the House, but died in the Senate. She agrees with Republicans that the state should focus on turning around its dismal performance in . “But we cannot be serious about improving student outcomes unless we get serious about keeping kids in the classroom to start with.”

At Kerr Elementary, on the east side of Tulsa, Principal Jennifer Thomas sees the academic impact of evictions every morning. Students with unstable housing are frequently absent, and when they do come to school, they often arrive at least an hour late and hungry. 

“We have students who have been at four different schools within a month,” she said. As with Courtney’s kids, Thomas said it’s not unusual for grandparents to provide backup, but that adds to the learning disruption. “Grandma doesn’t know where the school is, or Grandma’s not used to having to get the kids up at 7:30.” 

Lawmakers took up the issue last year and worked to pass a bipartisan bill that would have given tenants a few more days to show up in court — a rare development in such a deep red state. But Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, . With a background in , including rental homes in Florida, he argued that the extension would be too “burdensome” for landlords. This year, a died in committee. 

“This is a very, very landlord-friendly state,” said Delia Kimbrel, the director of research and policy at ImpactTulsa. “The scales are really stacked up against the family.”

‘Human realities’

landlords are the most likely to evict, . Those include Vesta Realty, which owned Barcelona Apartments, the Spanish-style complex at a busy intersection in southeast Tulsa that filed the case against Courtney.

Hannah Remick, a former administrative assistant for the company, who herself from one of its 40 complexes, estimates that Vesta filed about 25 evictions a week. Whether tenants have kids doesn’t make landlords any less likely to force them out, she said.

“They would just say ‘units.’ They wouldn’t think about who is living in that unit,” she said. The process, she said, is “very separated from the human realities of what’s going on there.”

When ImpactTulsa identified management companies evicting families with school-aged kids, some of the affected properties had and code violations that had gone for months. In 2024, one mom of a kindergartner told reporters she was to the media about a lack of hot water and cockroaches in her apartment. 

Poor living conditions for renters are not unique to Tulsa. A showed that 13% of renters moved in the past two years because their home needed repairs. Five percent said they were either evicted or trying to avoid eviction.

Remick described as “one of the worst,” with workers instructed to layer coats of Kilz primer over walls with mold. Courtney told ����Ӱ�� she had six work orders pending, including one for a leaky water heater, when she was evicted. Because an eviction can prevent a tenant from getting another lease and affect future employment, she asked ����Ӱ�� not to use her last name. 

The company’s financial condition was likely one reason for the backlog of repairs. Vesta’s owner, Marc Kulick, is facing . In February, Fannie Mae, the mortgage lender, against the company, and in July, as a result of litigation, a , YSA Investments, took ownership of multiple Vesta properties, including Barcelona. Vesta was also among the Tulsa landlords that fell months behind on .

“We all got letters on our doors saying they were going to charge for water,” Courtney said, even though that cost is supposed to be part of the rent. 

According to a city official, the company caught up with water bills, and Vesta issued a statement saying that because of a pending “ownership dispute,” all questions about conditions, staffing or maintenance at Barcelona should go to the current operator. 

YSA spokesman Parker Detweiler said his company is “doing everything humanly possible within the law to get living conditions where they should be.”

Sherri Daley, executive director of the Tulsa Apartment Association, said while it’s important to address the “underlying causes of housing instability,” landlords have to worry about their bottom line.

“Property owners and managers typically focus on the lease obligations, payment history, and compliance with the rental agreement rather than whether a household includes school-aged children,” she said. One of the arguments against extending the eviction timeline was that it would hurt small, independent landlords. “Even one missed payment can create a ripple effect, leading to deferred maintenance and other financial pressures for the owner.”

Tenants falling behind on rent can sometimes avoid an eviction if they communicate with their landlords, said Amy Coldren, who launched Shelterwell in Oklahoma City in 2023.  As part of its eviction prevention work, the organization provides nonprofits and schools with a free, tenant education program called . It covers topics like how to understand a lease and manage a budget.

Coldren said one of the first women she met after starting Shelterwell was facing eviction because her children, who had previously been in foster care, were considered unauthorized occupants.

“I’m a former foster parent, so I know the work that she did to get her children back,” she said. “A simple solution would have been for her to have a conversation with her landlord and put her kids on the lease.”

‘A sensitive manner’

ImpactTulsa’s work began with a disturbing realization.

Property owners  are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods as schools with the highest . That’s what the organization found when it began scraping the eviction court docket six years ago for addresses that match those of district students.

Between 2020 and 2023, Kimbrel identified eviction filings affecting roughly 4,400 Tulsa students. The disruption wasn’t brief. A year after a district family’s eviction showed up on their radar, nearly three-fourths of those students were still chronically absent. 

“That just slapped everybody in the face,” she said. 

But even the most sophisticated of district data systems can’t stop families from being displaced. The district’s homeless education staff last school year emailed all 621 families identified through the alert system, said BreAnna Shine, director of student engagement. Less than 100 ultimately received support through the district. Most didn’t respond. They might have landed somewhere else, ignored the message or resolved the issue with their landlord.

The other half of the system is a resource hub in one of the district’s most heavily impacted clusters of schools, East Central. The schools on that side of town draw from apartments like Eastgate, which filed eviction notices during that 2020-23 period affecting 47 students at Cooper Elementary and 26 students at East Central High School, Kimbrel’s analysis showed.

The hub at East Central Middle is two offices near the front entrance where Angeles Gonzalez, a family “navigator” with Tulsa Responds, and Turner, an attorney for the YWCA, meet privately with parents to triage their immediate needs — items like rental assistance, a free hotspot or food stamps. But district staff initially wrestled with whether they even wanted to know which families had been evicted. 

“It’s a sensitive matter,” said Stephanie Andrews, executive director of student and family support services. It’s uncomfortable to contact a parent who might not want anyone to know they’ve hit such a low point. “It’s not been without some bumps.” 

The district can guide a family to a nonprofit offering short-term rental assistance or temporary housing, but that often means they end up on a waiting list for services. Restore Hope, a nonprofit, spends about $100,000 a month in rental assistance, but those funds only cover about 30% of the eviction cases, said Josh Geppelt, executive director. Plus, to qualify, applicants have to show they have “means to maintain the rent after we do the assist.”

Living in limbo during that application process, while also bouncing from one living situation to the next, is draining, said Aspen Allen, a mother of three.

“You’re waiting for them to call you, and if nobody answers, they move to the next person,” she said. 

She leaned on the district last fall for clothes and backpacks for her kids in between leaving a rental home with plumbing problems, spending time in a run by a local church and moving into Parkview Terrace on the west side of town, a public housing development known for . It’s the same complex where she’s currently waiting for a subsidized apartment. 

“I haven’t been able to have my own spot for my kids to be happy, go to school, go on vacation and just have a good life,” said Allen, who works as a DoorDasher and was waiting to hear back about a part-time FedEx position. “I’m trying to keep them in school, not missing any days, which is very difficult at times.”

‘They grab what they can’

Inspired by Tulsa’s example, nonprofit leaders in other cities nonetheless face the same obstacles in trying to serve families with scarce resources. 

“There is no system,” said Aqua Porter, executive director of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative in New York. “There are just things that people have to navigate through, and they are not connected.”

Most of those other nonprofits have something Oklahoma does not — a longer timeline between eviction notices and court appearances.  In New York, for example, nonprofits have roughly 30 days from an eviction filing to help families find legal aid, point them toward sources of financial support and encourage them to attend their first court appearance.

Because Oklahoma’s system is designed to get renters with delinquent payments out as soon as possible, it’s often too late to prevent eviction. Those with nowhere to go may stay in the apartment after they’re evicted until they’re forced out by the sheriff’s department, said Melissa Vowell, a homeless education program specialist for the Tulsa Public Schools.

They usually have about an hour to collect belongings. 

“If it’s a sheriff’s eviction, they grab what they can in the time a sheriff will allow,” she said.

Their next stop might be Vowell’s office, which connects to a storeroom packed with school uniforms, socks and underwear, and personal hygiene products.

She also maintains a detailed spreadsheet filled with organizations offering food, transportation and housing. One nonprofit on the list is , tucked into a serene, wooded area west of downtown. Out of a small white cottage, Executive Director Tina Massey runs an eviction diversion program that provides one-time payments of up to $1,000 for those who have fallen behind on rent. Massey estimates that the program reached close to 90 district families last school year.  For those who lose their housing, a shelter on the same property offers fully furnished apartments for up to three months.

Brooklyn Cloud found Family Promise on Facebook last year while living in a Mazda SUV with two daughters, one in preschool and another in second grade. After an eviction from Harmony Glen, a 74-unit complex owned by a , they spent six months sleeping under the lights in Walmart and QuikTrip parking lots. 

“I didn’t even know a 7-year-old could get depressed,” Cloud said. “Her grades started to slip, lack of appetite. She wanted to sleep all the time.”

While staying in one of the apartments, Cloud and her husband paid off the eviction and saved for a new home. Their oldest now “has her own space.” 

“She’s more bubbly and her personality is back,” she said. “She’s not so down-in-the-dumps and snappy.”

‘Legal first aid’

Most parents in a crisis like Cloud’s don’t even show up to court. 

“They can’t get time off work or child care,” said Hallett, the legal aid attorney.

That was clear the day Courtney’s case appeared on the docket. Of the 89 eviction filings before Judge Tammy Bruce, who hears about 13,000 eviction cases a year, less than half of the tenants showed up. 

If they do appear, they’re unlikely to have . In nearly every case, Judge Bruce told them they could either meet with their landlord’s representative or see if they qualified for legal aid. Court documents show Courtney represented herself, while a Vesta employee appeared for the company.

Courtney was evicted two weeks later. Attempts to reach her by phone and text since then were unsuccessful.

Last year, Hallett began asking tenants if they have children in the Tulsa schools. It’s his contribution to the district’s effort to identify more families. 

On the district side, about 40 teachers at East Central MIddle learned how to offer “legal first aid,” like helping parents construct timelines of the events that led up to eviction. Missed or partial payments, maintenance issues reported, and messages to landlords and property managers are important to document because when apartments change ownership, new managers don’t always honor previous attempts to pay. 

Barros, with ImpactTulsa, expected some resistance from staff to the training. She’s a former social studies teacher at East Central Middle.

“Teachers are like ‘Whoa, that’s not my job. You’re adding something else to my plate,’ ” she said. But schools play a unique role in eviction prevention, she said. “Kids are legally required to be here. So let’s take advantage of that.”

The urban system, just off one of Los Angeles’ major freeways, was headed for state takeover and had a 58% graduation rate. When the opening was posted, “I thought, ‘Compton, I don’t want to be in Compton,’ ” Brawley said.

But Brawley saw a “pocket of success” at some elementary schools that he could build on. Accepting the job in 2012, he instituted a set of routines, like in-school tutoring and frequent multiplication practice. Weekly quizzes let teachers know precisely which students need extra help.

Fourteen years later, the district, with a 91% poverty rate, is one of the nation’s .

“If you go back 15, 20 years ago, Compton was not the place where most parents would have kept their kids,” he said. In fact, it was the first district in California where families tried to convert a low-performing elementary school into a charter under a . “Now, we see a reversal.”

The district is also one of only 78, out of the nation’s 500 largest, that has maintained consistent leadership at the top since the pandemic, according to a from ILO Group, a consulting firm. At the state level, all but seven have changed education chiefs at least once, with more turnover coming once new governors take office next year.

As in Compton, ILO’s data shows, students are better off when district leaders stay longer.

In those with no leadership changes between 2019 and 2025, kids performed better in reading and math — showing at least a month of extra learning — than those in districts with turnover. In women-led districts, the advantage was nearly two extra months of learning in math, based on the Stanford Education Data Archive, a comparable measure of student learning across states. 

“Stability really matters within a community,” said Julia Rafal-Baer, the ILO Group’s CEO. In those with high turnover, the kids who were in kindergarten at the start of the pandemic have likely seen multiple reading programs “or their parents were asked to start one more strategic planning process. It gets old.”

Other districts in the top 500, sometimes embroiled in controversy, have experienced multiple leadership changes since the pandemic. , for example, is on its fourth chief since 2020. Former Superintendent Devon Horton was on charges that he assaulted his wife in front of his two children. 

The East Baton Rouge district in Louisiana is also on its fourth superintendent since 2020, with current leader Lamont Cole facing charges for bribery and money laundering stemming from his time as a . He denies the accusations, and board members say they support him. But they’ve also tightened up . 

Overall, ILO’s latest review shows that churn is down for the first time since the pandemic. Last year, it appeared that districts had reached a “new normal,” with turnover ranging from 20% to 23% for five years straight. But this year, among the top 500, it has dropped to 17%, which is closer to the typical pre-COVID levels of reported by AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

Rafal-Baer cautioned that while the “carousel of leadership seems to have slowed down,” the results are just a snapshot. “This isn’t a return to normal so much as the system finally catching its breath.”

The decline in turnover, she added, could point to the current financial constraints on districts as they adjust to the end of federal relief funds and ongoing declines in enrollment.

“These searches are very expensive,” she said. A recently spent about $48,000 to find a new leader, while the Clark County district’s search in 2024 . “There may be less of a desire to tell your community, when you’re cutting assistant principals, that you’re now going to spend money on a search firm.” 

A ‘flashpoint’

Rachel White, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and founder of a on school superintendents, suggested the pandemic years were an anomaly. School board fights over COVID-related closures, masks and culture war issues “were obviously quite volatile,” she said, and in multiple districts, led to superintendents being abruptly dismissed. 

That was “hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime flashpoint,” she said. “Maybe school boards … are less likely to do away with the superintendent who they disagree with ideologically on one thing.” 

Her own research on superintendent turnover echoes connections ILO made between student learning and consistent leadership. While studies prior to the pandemic showed of turnover on student outcomes, “chronic instability” can hit neediest students the hardest, White said. 

According to a new , she found that students in high-poverty districts with repeated leadership turnover were about two months of learning behind in math and six weeks behind in reading compared with those in systems with the same leader since 2019.

Leaders who stay in a district longer are more likely to transfer knowledge throughout the organization, she said, and often build up trust with the public.

“The longer a superintendent stays, the more people believe they are committed to that community,” she said. “You can take some risks. It’s really important to be able to say, ‘Hey, this might not work out, but I think there’s potentially some return on investment here.’ ” 

Policy experts like to talk about “durable” learning and success for schools. , a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that not only is leadership churn “one of the greatest threats to durability,” but that school boards need superintendents who view instruction as the chief priority, not just one of many initiatives.

Brawley, who was a science teacher and principal in other districts before moving into leadership, has such a “strong convictions” about improving math and reading, White said, that he’s been able to keep the district moving forward despite other political issues that superintendents often navigate. 

“There’s a real belief that these students are brilliant and they just need the right resources and a stable teacher workforce,” she said. 

His methods aren’t popular with everyone. The Compton teachers union president has on testing. But Cecilia McDuffie, principal of Foster Elementary, said the emphasis on data, combined with practices implemented at all schools, has helped her students rise from the bottom.

On a recent morning, a week after school started, Foster students spent time responding to the writing prompt: What do you like about your teacher? Leaders increased their focus on writing — and significantly cut back on screen time —  after observing that students couldn’t recall what had been taught. 

“We know that writing elicits a connection,” Brawley said. “If you don’t write it down, you’re not really learning it.” 

Foster was not a “pocket of success” when Brawley arrived in Compton. In 2014, less than a quarter of students met or exceeded state standards in reading and math. Last school year, 77% of students scored that high in those subjects, and 73% reached that level in science, nearly hitting the goal of 75%.

McDuffie said that Brawley has created systems that will outlast him.

“If he were to leave tomorrow, I would know that I always need to have a plan. I need to always refine my plan based on data,” she said. “And I need to start all my interventions early. You can’t wait until March.”

While ILO’s data captures the pandemic period, some districts, like Bridgeport, Connecticut, have experienced frequent turnover across a much longer period. Since 2005, the district has had eight superintendents, and former leader Carmela Levy-David left in late 2024 after a near-unanimous from the teachers union. Each transition “carries some costs,” said Joseph Sokolovic, vice-chair of the board. 

“New leaders often bring new priorities, and different approaches to implement those priorities,” he said. “Community and board relationships must be rebuilt. Trust must be earned again.”

But he said it’s important to put the instability in context. Two turnovers occurred while the district was . The district also has one of the highest-poverty rates in the state, and spends than wealthier districts like Greenwich, which has seen even in the past 20 years. 

“No superintendent, regardless of talent, can eliminate concentrated poverty or erase decades of economic neglect,” Sokolovic said. With the district currently conducting another search, he said the district needs “a leader willing to commit for the long term, someone who understands the complexities of an urban district and is willing to confront difficult issues directly.”

‘Route to the superintendency’

School boards should also look for instructional expertise, said Rafal-Baer.

A women-owned organization, ILO Group keeps close track of where women are becoming district chiefs and their routes to the position. shows that women are twice as likely as men to have an academic post, like curriculum specialist, on their resume. But just a handful of current superintendents came from a position leading curriculum and instruction.

“Given where student outcomes stand right now, you would expect the academics seat to be the surest route to the superintendency. It turns out to be one of the rarest,” she said. “Boards keep saying instruction is the priority. Their hiring says otherwise.”

Overall, 34% of superintendents in the top 500 districts are women, a 1 percentage point increase since last year and a 6-point jump since 2019. Fifty-one of the nation’s women superintendents are also a first of some kind in their districts — first woman superintendent, first Black woman or first Latina superintendent. California has the most, with 11 leaders who fit one of those descriptions, while Texas has six.

In 2018, when the Aldine Independent School District, near Houston, was looking for a new superintendent, two of the board members wanted a Hispanic leader. With a 73% Hispanic population, Superintendent LaTonya Goffney, who is Black, understood why. 

“I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “But I’ve been intentional about building relationships and connecting with the community.”

As another one of the 78 districts that has kept the same leader since the pandemic, more than neighboring districts to bounce back from academic declines. Too many inexperienced teachers was one reason, an . But the board gave Goffney more time and in 2022 through next year.

The district in state accountability rankings, but the number of F-rated schools has fallen from 21 since 2023, and the district’s overall score increased this year from .

Still, in a state where districts with low-performing schools are increasingly , Goffney feels constant pressure to show steady progress. As enrollment begins to decline in the state, the district sees competition not just from charter schools and a new private school choice program, but from neighboring districts trying to “cherry pick” Aldine’s students, she said.

“My focus, she said, “is on making sure that Aldine is the best choice.”

On Wednesday, she abruptly stepped down, just as roughly 100 staff members from the office handling the day-to-day management of those programs move from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services. 

“Acting Assistant Secretary Rogers is returning to her home state of Florida to take on a great opportunity and be closer to her family,” Savannah Newhouse, Education Department press secretary, said in an email. “We thank her for all of her hard work and dedication to bettering education and employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities.” 

Rogers, who oversees the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, joined the department after leading Florida’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. She stepped in to implement the department’s effort to give HHS more control over services for students with disabilities. With HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s comments about people with autism, parents have been strongly opposed to the move. He has linked autism to and environmental toxins and suggested children with autism won’t grow up to live .

As the mother of a son with autism, she said she could relate to parents’ worries and tried to project calm in the face of what she called “false and misleading information spreading online” about the potential impact of the handover to HHS.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “is an educational law, not a medical law,” she said in a . “This partnership does not and cannot change that. Your child’s rights to a free, appropriate public education remain fully protected.”

But she from most advocacy organizations, who are concerned that the move, part of President Donald Trump’s long-range plan to eliminate the Education Department, would create confusion for districts and families. The department did not respond to questions about who would replace her. 

On Wednesday, the department from Erin McHugh. deputy director of the Office of Special Education Programs, who shared a report from the office’s August conference in Arlington, Virginia. The agreement with HHS, she wrote, will increase “access to critical wraparound services and the use of research to inform early intervention and special education practices.”

But members of Congress are also skeptical and have taken steps to prevent the transfer. In late July, the Senate education committee advanced a bipartisan bill that would keep oversight of K-12 and services for students with disabilities at the Education Department. So far, it’s not scheduled for a full Senate vote. Last week, House members introduced a , but Republican leaders haven’t scheduled a mark-up. 

Meanwhile, the process of “detailing” education staff to other agencies as part of has accelerated. 

Along with OSERS relocating to HHS this week, several teams from the Office of Civil Rights will move next week to the Department of Justice. That follows the relocation of career and technical education staff to the Department of Labor last year and more than 60 employees from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education who joined them last month.

In addition, some Education Department offices are moving to other government spaces so the can take over the Lyndon B. Johnson building. Throughout the process, the union representing Education Department employees, has argued that the interagency agreements are illegal and inefficient.

“These moves to new facilities and the interagency agreements only make it harder for federal workers to do their jobs on behalf of the American public,” Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, said in a statement Tuesday. “This is an insult to the tens of millions of students and families who rely on Education Department services and the taxpayers who count on federal oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.”

Rogers’ resignation came as a surprise to some advocates who want to ensure there is no disruption in services.

“Having the OSERS leader step down during this transition from the Department of Education to HHS adds chaos and uncertainty, raising concerns among educators, families and advocates,” said Chad Rummel, CEO of the Council for Exceptional Children. “Department of Education staff should be focusing on supporting educators, strengthening special education, and improving outcomes for students with disabilities, rather than getting bogged down in reporting structures, internal agreements and unclear priorities.”

The Council of Administrators of Special Education, the professional organization for district special education officials, was also unaware of Rogers’ departure. The group said it “ hopes her successor is appointed quickly and has the experience and deep expertise needed to administer education programs for students with disabilities.”

A former health industry reporter, Singer sees parallels between Silicon Valley’s campaign for coding, among other measures, and Big Pharma’s influence on medicine, noting huge school investments over the past few years by Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others.

“Never has so much market power lined up behind a single curriculum cause,” she writes.

As a result, a movement that could have helped build data science or other less glamorous, evidence-based reforms has in many cases ended up offering students “only half an education in computing, the rosy upbeat half that casts tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators.” 

In one chapter, Singer examines a 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science course developed by Apple that teaches students how to code in Swift, Apple’s programming language for building iPhone apps. It’s as if schools embraced a “Raytheon-branded AP physics course or DuPont chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course,” she writes.

Singer finds both problematic and promising moves by tech over the past decade or more. While she calls out the nonprofit for skewing the idea of computer science to coding that often helps serve corporate interests, she lauds its founder, Iran-born entrepreneur , for making coding appealing and fun to millions of young people, telling ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo that U.S. public schools likely wouldn’t offer computer science at this scale if not for Partovi.

“I don’t know anybody else that’s been able to do that,” she says. “I think that did change the world.”

Ahead of the book’s release on Tuesday, Toppo and Singer talked about her findings and the lessons that the tech industry is now taking into the fight to get into schools. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The book spends a lot of time with Partovi and Code.org. Would you say it is basically a positive influence?

Natasha Singer: Code.org catalyzed computer science in schools. They also partnered with a lot of big tech companies and brought in commercial things — the Hour of Code has the lessons and Elsa the lessons and the Microsoft lessons and the Code Your Own lessons, and so it also brought in a kind of commercialism that I have questions about. I don’t think we would have computer science at this scale in schools if not for Code.org.

One of the key takeaways of this book is that there are other ways to do computer science in schools. In fact, if there’s a hero, it’s , who says Code.org and other groups are mostly just getting middle-class white boys interested in coding. Can you tell us about her? 

Jane Margolis is an incredible researcher. She grew up in Berkeley, Calif., during the ’60s, and she went to UC Berkeley. She was a Vietnam War protester and then she was a labor activist. She worked for the telephone company — at the time, it was Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, and there she saw these gender biases at work because she worked as an operator, the person who sat at the switchboard with all those wires plugging in calls. Male employees were allowed to be linemen, and they would go outside and climb these telephone poles and install phones, and she was trying to unionize the women to say that job should be open to everyone. Her view was that women need to have technical skills and equal opportunity to technical careers. Eventually, she goes to Harvard and gets a Ph.D in education, and she’s looking at gender disparities. Harvard has this government department, and it was inhospitable to women, and so she did her thesis about why boys were shouting down girls and pushing girls out of political science. 

She starts in computer science in the ’90s at Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon, as you know, is at the forefront of computer science education and robotics and computer vision. They were one of the first to start a dedicated college of computer science, as opposed to a major. But a couple of years in, they realize that only 7% of the people majoring in computer science are girls, and they can’t figure out why. 

, who’s the associate dean at Carnegie Mellon, hires Margolis, and together they do a study looking at why it is that women are not going into computer science and are dropping out. And they find there are all these factors, one of which is that families are buying personal computers. She found by interviewing male and female students that the boys would be like, “Oh yeah, my dad or my uncle went to Radio Shack and brought home this TRS-80 computer and put it in my room, so I fooled around and learned to code, and then my neighbor came over — he’s a software engineer.” So by the time the boys show up at Carnegie Mellon, many of them have already taken computer science in high school. They know what they’re doing. And some girls have no experience, so they’re already feeling behind by Day One. 

It wasn’t just that girls were left out. It’s that when girls tried to take computer science in high school, often the guidance counselors would say to them, “Oh, you don’t really want to do this,” or “You’re not going to do well,” or “It’s going to hurt your grade-point average.” There were all kinds of socio-cultural things going on — sexism and a whole bunch of other stuff that dissuaded girls. 

And so they wrote this report at Carnegie Mellon, and they did all kinds of things to attract girls to computer science. There had been a requirement that if you wanted to major in computer science, you had to have taken it in high school. But of course, girls were dissuaded from taking it in high school. So one of the things that Carnegie Mellon did, they looked at other students who might have been good at math or sciences but didn’t necessarily take computer science, or who were leaders in their schools — perseverance qualities that make you good at computer science. Within a few years, the percentage of girls taking computer science shot up. 

And then Jane Margolis was like, “O.K., we now understand how to get more girls in computer science, but the percentage of African-American students, Latino students, lower-income students is even worse. She then becomes a researcher at UCLA. She works with Los Angeles public schools. They find similar problems of Black and brown and low-income students being dissuaded from taking computer science. So they come up with a course to make computer science more welcoming. 

Her whole idea is that if you do not grow up with a computer in your house, or you don’t know how to code, and you show up to computer science class and the first thing is computer programming, and the second thing is computer programming, and the tenth thing is computer programming, you may be turned off before you even know what it is.

So they created a class to explain to students who were first-timers: How does the internet work? How does a computer work? What is a motherboard? What is a central processing unit? And how are you using tech in your life? And do you know how an email gets to you? How are platforms — at the time it was more like and Facebook — shaping your life as a student? And then eventually, when they learn a whole bunch of stuff about how the technology works and why it’s interesting, then they start programming. 

And it’s not programming for programming’s sake. They made wearable computers — they had wristbands that had LED lights so they could make creative patterns. They could spell out their name, these wristbands, but they had to use computing to make it work. They had to program the designs. They made a lot of progress with this course, not just in Los Angeles but in Chicago. It was called Exploring Computer Science, and it began to grow slowly. 

Then the tech industry comes along and says, “We have this crisis: We need more programmers and software engineers, and every kid needs to learn to code.” And a lot of those courses were programming-centric, and I have to say some of them also included social aspects such as the ethical use of computing. But this notion that we live in a world surrounded by machines and it’s crucial for young people to understand how these things work in order to have agency and navigate them, that’s the idea that Jane Margolis was arguing for 20 years ago.

I want to ask about this story from 2015 that you tell about the course, which brought together the National Science Foundation, Code.org, Apple, and others. Can you briefly tell that story?

There was a leader at the National Science Foundation named . She was running a program called . And she was charged with broadening participation at the university level — that is, getting more women and African-American students and Latino students and students with disabilities and Native American students and others in computer science, because they’ve been historically marginalized. And she’s watching what Jane Margolis and others are doing in Los Angeles and around the country. And she realizes that the problem starts before kids get to college. 

So she gives millions of dollars to universities to develop different AP courses. The kind of course she envisioned to broaden participation in computer science didn’t exist at universities because universities took hardcore first-semester computer science that was designed to weed out people, and so she funded different universities, including UT Austin and the University of Washington and Trinity College, to develop more like Computer Science Zero, an online course that would look similar to what Jane Margolis was doing. It would teach you how the internet worked, it would teach you some data science, it would teach you some programming, it would teach you to think about the social impacts of technology. It would be a new AP course called Computer Science Principles, and you could take it as the intro. And then if you liked it you would go on and take AP Computer Science, which was much more rigorous and much more programming oriented.

So she convinces the College Board that they need to do this. And then, from Jan Cuny’s point of view, out of nowhere, The College Board announces that it’s partnered with Code.org to launch , a Code.org course, and then they announce that they have endorsed specific curriculum, including the Code.org one, but they later endorsed an AP Computer Science course from , which teaches kids to code in , Apple’s programming language for iPhone apps, and they also endorse a Microsoft course called . And Jan Cuny — NSF has funded a lot of this — is really stunned because nobody had told her beforehand that the College Board was going to . But also: Why weren’t they endorsing the ones that she funded? 

So she called The College Board and was like, “You’ve got to endorse all these courses then.” And by the way, the [AP] course was a smash success. Hundreds of thousands of kids took it. It was an introduction to computing that was broad for a lot of kids who didn’t know what it was. It did diversify who was taking computer science, although it’s still very skewed toward boys. 

But her point was that if you are trying to make a broad course that tries to get more kids of different backgrounds into computer science, Apple products skew to higher-resourced schools and higher-resourced kids. I read some of the Apple textbook, and there are lines like, “You can use this to make an app for your iPhone or even your Apple Watch.” This Apple course assumes that you have an Apple Watch. And Jan Cuny was like, “That’s not what we were doing when we were trying to broaden participation in computer science.”

I went back to the College Board, and they said, “When you’re broadening participation in computer science, you have to broaden it to everybody, and there are schools that do have MacBooks, and so maybe this course will work for them, whereas other courses won’t. It’s an array; you don’t have to use this one. You can use all of them or different ones.”

But for me, there are anomalies with having companies operate in schools, and the AP Apple curriculum and AP Microsoft curriculum show the unusual ways that tech companies influence schools that many other industries do not.

Fast-forward to 2026: Now we’re dealing with AI, and obviously tech is reading from a similar playbook. But it feels somehow different to me. I mean, we’ve had social media trials and , and these tech bros aren’t the white-hatted heroes we used to think they were. Does this moment seem different to you?

This moment is different, but also similar. We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against , against , that there’s this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them.

And then when we talk about the social media trials and the big verdicts against Meta, both the one with dozens of states where Meta now has to pay $17 billion, but also the one earlier in the summer where New Mexico got in a judgment against Meta, those companies are no longer our darlings. And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids’ compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there’s a different climate. And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say “We’ve partnered with OpenAI.” “We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School,” or “We’ve partnered with Microsoft, and we’re going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot.” It’s amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data’s going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don’t learn anything.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we’re in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn’t we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we’ve learned about the push for all the other things that came before? 

I visited this school in Newark where two teachers had launched an AI literacy class because they were worried their high school seniors were going to graduate into a world with AI and not know anything about it. I went to the first class, and the teacher said, “We need to be honest with you. You’re the first kids we’re gonna do this class with. We don’t know how to teach this. We don’t know what you want to learn. And a year from now, this is gonna look completely different.” And there was this kind of honesty and humbleness: We, the teachers, are in it together with you, the students, and we’re gonna learn how AI works. 

They learned rigorous stuff, and they also learned to make stuff with AI. They weren’t just critical of AI, but they did it together. And if kids found something interesting, they went with that. And it’s a really hard thing for schools to know that we actually need to prepare kids about AI because they’re using it already, but in fact, we don’t know what to do yet, and this is going to rapidly change. That’s a really big challenge.

I was heartened by the chapters near the end where you go into classrooms. People are really embracing a new way to do this stuff.  

You know, I feel optimistic and upbeat about this new generation of teachers that want to equip students with broad critical thinking skills — and that involves both learning how the tech works and learning to use the tech and make stuff with AI, but also to understand the provenance of these AI tools and to understand that we have companies with more power than most countries, and we’ve never had that before. They are setting the rules we live by. So you have to understand how the tools are steering us.

But the “techlash” took a turn last week when seven families in a Philadelphia suburb sued their school district in federal court for not allowing families to opt their children out of using the internet.

The 8,500-student Lower Merion School District adopted a Aug. 17 that limits the use of devices in elementary school and doesn’t assign laptops or iPads to students until they’re in fifth grade. 

The policy tries to strike a balance between recognizing that “families have different perspectives on student access to technology,” while still “maximizing the educational value of technology resources.” But in June, the board repealed a that allowed  parents to refuse internet-connected devices for their kids. 

Citing research on the addictive nature of online sites and the harmful effects of social media, the parents accuse the district, Superintendent Frank Ranelli and seven board members of creating “an environment that is unhealthy, unsafe and invasive for students.” The complaint argues that the policy denies parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s “upbringing and education” and puts kids at risk of accessing online pornography and violent videos. One child, according to the lawsuit, began “compulsively playing an online poker game on his school device.”

In a statement, the district said it “denies the allegations and will respond further through the judicial process.” But officials also noted that not all of the parents have students in the district. Of the seven families bringing the lawsuit, just three have students still enrolled. The rest have children described as “eligible to attend” this fall. One family enrolled their kids in a private school, according to the complaint.

An ‘unusual lawsuit’

The case is the latest move by the EdTech Law Center, led by a husband and wife legal team in Texas, to force districts to significantly restrict internet use. Andrew and Julie Liddell, who are working with a representing the parents, also have several active cases against ed tech vendors, including , an online learning platform, and  , a student information system. In a statement, Andrew Liddell said he believes the case “is the first of its kind.” It’s not typical, experts say, for disputes between parents and districts over tech use to end up in court. 

“This is an unusual lawsuit,” said Stacy Hawthorne, board chair for the Consortium for School Networking, a professional organization. It’s difficult, she said, to bring a constitutional challenge over a school board’s policymaking authority. “Courts generally have not given individual families a veto over a district’s instructional or technology policies.”

The lawsuit comes about a week after Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a CNN interview that to request something different if they think an ed tech tool, especially one using artificial intelligence, is not right for their child. 

In response to parents’ concerns and warnings from researchers about the effects of too much screen time, several states are . Last week, New York lawmakers that would make paper-and-pencil tasks the predominant means of instruction in elementary classrooms. 

Kelly Clancy, a Brooklyn mom of three who serves on a local community education council in the New York City Public Schools, said parents are “really excited” about the bill and that advocacy groups “are planning a major statewide push.” But she thinks most parents are more interested in seeing districts adopt strict screen time policies rather than opting out. 

“Parents want to trust their kids’ schools to put learning first,” she said. “No one wants to reach the point of litigation.” 

Ed tech organizations and the have called for limiting overuse while thoroughly vetting programs to ensure they improve learning.

“Nothing should replace that one-on-one teacher interaction with students,” McMahon said during her CNN spot. “Are we looking at it as recreational screen time or are we looking at it as tutorial screen time? There is a right balance to be used in the classroom.” 

Hawthorne, chair of the Consortium for School Networking, said she doesn’t expect similar lawsuits to become common, and that most disputes over screen time, privacy and AI “will continue to play out through school board deliberations, elections and state policymaking.” 

But she urged districts to take parents’ concerns seriously and to explain how their use of technology supports learning and protects kids online.

‘Teacher-led education’

The debate between Lower Merion district leaders and parents flared up in the spring when, according to the complaint, device use “had grown intolerable to many parents.” 

Yair Lev, the lead plaintiff, has two children at Cynwyd Elementary in the district and helped organize Pencils Over Pixels to advocate in favor of maintaining the opt-out policy. When Ranelli, the superintendent, and local school administrators began telling parents they couldn’t opt out, the conflict escalated.

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, sent numerous emails to board members asking them not to “eliminate parent protections.”

In a July message, he described an earlier conversation in which he said the superintendent told him that parents who object to Chromebooks and online curriculum “were welcome to leave the public school district and go to private school.”

at previous meetings by some parents demanding to opt their children out of using devices, the district ultimately moved the final vote on the policy to Zoom and allowed no public comments. The district is also adopting a new program that allows both to monitor device use.

In a statement shared with ����Ӱ��, Lev said he has no plans to pull his kids out of the district.

“We are not willing to sacrifice the public schools and community we love,” he said. “We simply seek to preserve our right as parents to choose a teacher-led education for our children without mandatory technology requirements.”

Now he’s likely to be the next state superintendent after defeating teacher and conservative pastor James Taylor in the Republican runoff Tuesday. 

“I thought to myself, ‘If we lose, at least it edifies the work that you’re doing. You’ll have a much more grounded perspective,’ ” he told ����Ӱ�� in an interview.

He’ll face the Democratic candidate Jennettie Marshall, a pastor and former Tulsa Public Schools board member, in November. But in such a conservative state, Franklin is expected to be the frontrunner. 

With strong support from pro-public school networks, Franklin’s primary win represents a clear departure from the state’s last elected state superintendent, conservative firebrand Ryan Walters. The former history teacher pushed Bibles in classrooms, threatened to revoke teachers’ licenses for teaching topics some view as divisive and filled his calendar with appearances on conservative talk shows. Critics said he neglected the state’s education system. 

Franklin, a moderate Republican, has more than 40 years in education as a teacher, administrator and associate superintendent at Tulsa Tech, an independent district offering career training to high school students and adults. As a former member of the state’s now-defunct virtual charter school board, he voted against allowing the state to open the nation’s first religious charter school, separating himself from Walters and other officials who battled unsuccessfully all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to establish the school. With the state now trying to improve its poor educational rankings, where it is nearly last in the nation, one political expert said Franklin seemed “like the safer choice.”

“Ryan Walters is pretty fresh in a lot of folks’ memories across the state, including Republicans,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. As an inductee into the state’s Educator Hall of Fame, Franklin, he said “is kind of a known quantity in the education space.”

Franklin stepped into the race after Rob Miller, former superintendent of the Bixby Public Schools and an outspoken critic of Walters, withdrew . Teacher groups quickly shifted their support to Franklin, who along with Taylor, edged out five other candidates in the June primary, including state Sen. Adam Pugh.

Walters, who had been expected to run for governor, left his job a year early and now runs an organization that encourages teachers to opt out of their unions. Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Lindel Fields, a retired career and technical education administrator, to complete the term and has since appointed him as education secretary. 

Fields some of Walters’ policies, like requiring classrooms to have Bibles and expecting applicants for teaching positions from blue states to take an , a conservative media company. The multiple choice test covered civics and history topics, but also included ideological questions about parental rights and gender issues.

Education advocates see Franklin as one who can further mend the relationship between school districts and the department.

“Franklin is hands down the most qualified person that we’ve ever seen run for this position in the history of the state,” said Erika Wright, founder of and now a community organizer with the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

Taylor, meanwhile, appealed to many of the same groups that helped Walters win in 2022, like the . He for more Christianity in the classroom and teaching students “the word of God” through historical documents. 

He proposed to under countywide school boards as a way to save money, but Franklin warned that such an approach would take away local control.

The state’s Republican party ahead of the runoff. It has historically remained neutral until the nominees are named. Some in the party criticized the move as an attempt to influence voters ahead of the runoff.

Taylor said his job as a history and government teacher in the Little Axe Public Schools, outside Oklahoma City, would give him the insight he needed to lead the state education department. But some called his success as an educator into question after records showed that he taught in an Advanced Placement U.S. Government class took the exam. He only taught the class once in 2024.

After his defeat Tuesday night, Taylor posted on , “I exit this race with zero regrets.”

‘Pockets of excellence’

Franklin faced his own controversy during the campaign, a 2014 incident in which he accidentally with disabilities at a camp he co-founded in 1986. The issue came to light when the child’s mother warned not to vote for Franklin and accused him of having “explosive anger issues.”

In a statement, Franklin, a former special education teacher, explained that he was trying to get control of a child who had become aggressive. When he grabbed the boy, he left scratches behind his ears. 

“I’ve worked with thousands of individuals with special needs,” he told ����Ӱ��. “I’ve had to intervene a lot with young people. Sometimes it just doesn’t go according to script.”

The camp’s director confirmed that he was trying to de-escalate a situation and said the camp’s leaders took appropriate action.

Whoever wins in November will oversee implementation of a that requires struggling readers in the early grades to be held back or receive extra help. Third graders not proficient in reading would be required to repeat the grade unless they qualify for an exemption. This year’s state test scores show that about 24% of students reached the proficiency level, a slight drop from last year.

“Oklahomans expect both candidates in the general election for state superintendent to make the case for how they will lead the successful implementation of our state’s landmark reading reforms,” said Dave Bond, vice president for advocacy at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank. “Those reforms passed our state legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support earlier this year, and our next state superintendent has a mandate to approach them with a no-excuses focus on student success.”

Franklin or Marshall will also inherit a system in which districts often rely on emergency certified teachers to staff classrooms. 

Franklin said it’s important to look for “pockets of excellence” in the state where schools are outperforming in reading outcomes even though they serve a higher-poverty population. He suggested establishing regional support centers to make expertise more readily available to districts.

But “we just don’t have enough trained educators in front of young people,” he said. Turnover rates are higher among teachers with emergency credentials. “We’re just kind of spinning our wheels, trying to train people and get them up to speed.”

The state, he said, should consider tax breaks for teachers, like it has for . 

Marshall, the Democratic candidate, has also made teacher recruitment and retention a part of her platform, and has said that serving on the school board in Tulsa, the state’s largest district, to lead the state education agency. She said she would focus on being a smart steward of state funds and that a lack of resources “is one of the main reasons that we’re struggling.” 

Her diverse career includes 17 years with the Department of Corrections as a parole officer and three years as a child welfare investigator.

Like Franklin, Marshall has pledged to keep policies focused on core academics and not politically divisive topics that put children and teachers in the middle of polarizing debates.

But the future state chief may have to work with a governor who, during , said the state has “541 school districts that are run by liberal, left-leaning radical socialists.”

Businessman and former state senator narrowly defeated Attorney General Gentner Drummond in the GOP runoff Tuesday. Endorsed by President Donald Trump, he’s called for partisan school board elections as a way to tip districts toward more conservative policies. He’ll face Democrat Cyndi Munson, minority leader in the state House, in the general election.

Governors appoint the state school board, which the future superintendent will have to work with to implement any new policies. Carlson, with the University of Oklahoma, said Mazzei doesn’t have much of a “political track record.”

“We really don’t know what we’re getting,” he said.

Mazzei has promised to appoint a state literacy director, but Marshall sees a potential conflict with that arrangement. 

“That person is going to usurp the authority of the department and there’s going to be a whole new battle,” she said. “That’s why education is hurting; there are too many irrelevant distractions.” 

But Wright, with Appleseed, said Franklin is capable of navigating political differences as they arise. 

“If there’s anyone that can bridge that divide,” she said, “it’s Dr. Franklin.”

Lightning McQueen from “Cars,” Nemo the clownfish and the Parr family from “The Incredibles” are among the animated personalities starring in the agency’s social media posts in recent months. 

“KA-CHOW! The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is coming to DC!” a department staffer posted July 23, using McQueen’s well-known catchphrase to promote the event that took over the streets of the nation’s capital last weekend. 

Disney fans on Facebook were quick to catch that the department had replaced the cartoon car’s number, 95, with 47 to represent President Donald Trump. Racing enthusiasts corrected the team for using a NASCAR-type vehicle to publicize an IndyCar event. But others jumped on the potential legal issues involved in the government’s use of copyrighted material.

“Does Disney know you’re using the likeness of Lightning McQueen in this way??” one Facebook commenter asked.

Disney is just one of several entertainment giants whose characters have inspired the department’s posts over the past several months. Sometimes, as in the “Cars” example, the messages have nothing to do with education. In other instances, the department clearly used the characters to promote its agenda. 

Last December, it employed kind and sensitive to plug its signature policy goal: getting rid of the agency. “Franklin knows the Department of Education doesn’t do any educating,” the post on X read. Similarly, twice this month, appeared on the department’s social media feed in support of what Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls her “final mission,” closing the department. 

Following a Monday, the White House used the same tactic, turning The Magic School Bus, a popular children’s book series, into The Magic Deportation Bus. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and former Democratic candidate for Congress, suggested the altered image, which showed main character Ms. Frizzle transporting passengers in handcuffs, was offensive.

“The entire right-wing education reform network was at the White House yesterday — will a single person denounce a back-to-school message based on a bus full of children in chains?” he . 

Agency officials did not respond to multiple requests from ����Ӱ�� seeking to find out whether it had permission to use the images or how the re-creations might meet the standards for fair use. But one First Amendment scholar said she doubts officials sought approval from Disney, Nickelodeon, Scholastic or any of the other businesses that own the rights to the characters.

“This administration doesn’t ask for permission; it thinks that doing so is weak,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard Law School with expertise in legal issues affecting the .

The company is known for frequently to protect its content. In one example, it joined Warner Brothers, Discovery and Universal Pictures last year to sue a Chinese AI image generator for . It once sued three for painting Disney characters on their walls.

The fact that the Education Department’s use of its characters hasn’t sparked the same response suggests that “the administration’s tactics of seeking vengeance and punishing disagreement are factors weighing against legal action,” Tushnet said. 

Disney might also have more important legal matters to contend with.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission over the agency’s review of its broadcast licenses in eight markets, including New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company argues that the Trump administration is trying to control what hosts say on “The View,” a morning show, and retaliate for late night talk show host calling first lady Melania Trump an “expectant widow.”

At press time Tuesday, the department released a statement making light of the controversy.

“It’s always great to see the 74 writing a hard-hitting piece about social media posts — and not the fact that 3 in 10 students are not proficient in reading or math, 1 in 10 students may be a victim of sexual misconduct prior to graduation, or chronic absenteeism rates skyrocketing across the nation,” wrote Ellen Keast, a department spokeswoman. “Those are just three-story ideas for you that parents, local leaders, and educators are tracking across the country, not an irrelevant opinion about high-performing social media posts.”

Inspiring ‘generations of children’

Most of the companies that ����Ӱ�� contacted for reaction did not respond. But Peanuts Worldwide, which manages copyright and licensing for Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the  gang, said in an email that the department’s meme showing the characters reading books around the iconic red doghouse was “almost certainly an unauthorized reinterpretation.” 

“Peanuts does not take a political stance,” the statement said. 

The production company that owns , however, is suing the Department of the Interior. The complaint says the agency used the version of “O Tannenbaum” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on its social media accounts without permission.

The Snoopy doghouse image was seemingly innocuous, promoting literacy as the “foundation for a lifetime of success.” But the Super Mario image, like the use of Franklin, delivered a clearly partisan message. The Franklin post about shuttering the department came about a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted an image that reimagined the gentle turtle as hanging out of a helicopter and firing a machine gun toward a boat. “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists,” the imitation book cover said.

Kids Can Press, which owns the rights to Franklin, .

“Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy and inclusivity,” the Canada-based children’s publisher said. “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.”

But the publisher chose to stay quiet on the Education Department’s use.

“We would prefer not to be involved,” spokeswoman Michaela Cornell told ����Ӱ��.

Since the December Franklin post, roughly two dozen others have employed movie or book characters. One of the latest, published after the Monday White House event, features Sesame Street’s Elmo in a red Make Education Great Again hat.

Respecting boundaries

At the Education Department, career staffers have historically been diligent about adhering to copyright laws, said Hussien Salama, a Democratic political appointee who served as a video producer at the department under former Secretary Miguel Cardona. 

He recalled an instance in which Sally Harris, managing director of digital media and creative services at the department, warned him against using a CNN clip that featured Cardona unless he had “express permission, written down” from the network.

Harris, he said, worked to establish a “firewall,” in which the secretary’s account was used for more political messaging, like one about being “bullied for who they are,” while the official department account stayed more neutral. The political team, he added, understood that the career staff would still be there after the administration changed.

“One of the most frustrating things in the world is to leave the department, having done all of this stuff to try to respect these boundaries, and see it all thrown in the garbage,” he said. 

Under Cardona, the department frequently posted messages about supporting LGBTQ students and forgiving student loans, policies on which the Biden and Trump administrations sharply disagree. But the memes didn’t use well-known characters to convey those policy statements and often featured drawings created by an in-house graphic designer, Salama said. 

He said he “100%” suspects political appointees who work for McMahon are posting the copyrighted material. 

Meanwhile, Harris and the career staffers are likely “cringing every moment they see blatant copyright violations posted on the Department of Education’s social media channels,” Salama said. “We had arguments about splitting hairs on fair use news clippings, not using Disney characters to endorse a political agenda.” 

There are situations in which using copyrighted material is allowable under the law. But legal experts couldn’t say for sure whether the department’s depiction of the characters, from the to , would apply.

The fact that the government isn’t making a profit off the posts would “favor fair use,” said Tushnet, the Harvard law professor. In Hegseth’s case, she added, the secretary could argue that his Franklin meme was . 

The Education Department, however, hasn’t altered characters enough to fit that standard, said Matthew Sag, a copyright expert at Emory University. 

“Most things that end up being bound to be fair use are transformative,” he said. “They take something that was used for one purpose and use it in a very different purpose.”

Teacher appreciation

One policy expert defended the department’s use of the material and expressed support for their underlying messages. The “Finding Nemo” post, for example, shows Nemo and his father Marlin with the slogan, “Parents know best.”

“Families matter for student success, and reading and math scores are at or near historical lows,”  said Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

In response to its “Parents know best,” memes, a few expressed agreement or touted homeschooling as better than public schools. With the “Finding Nemo” post, one person , “Parents do know what is best. No school should keep secrets from parents.” But most noted that in the Pixar story, Marlin lost Nemo because he was overprotective.

The department also used a series of fictional educators to mark Teacher Appreciation Week in May. They included Ms. Fowl, from Nickelodeon’s “Jimmy Neutron,” known for making bird-like noises, and Elizabeth Hoover, from “The Simpsons.” Under the heading, “Teachers are mentors,” Hoover, often described as jaded after decades on the job, is depicted with a red MEGA (Make Education Great Again) book under her arm. In a separate post, Mrs. Puff, the teacher from SpongeBob SquarePants, was shown .

The posts drew widespread criticism from real teachers.

“I think we are being trolled,” one commenter . 

Stephanie Toliver, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, saw the choices of characters “who are often well-meaning but marred by burnout, incompetence, eccentricity and paranoia” as a not-so-subtle dig at the profession.

“If we appreciate teachers the way McMahon has, we won’t have many left,” .

Journalist John Ortved, a , offered a different take on Hoover. 

“Initially, she was written as a stand-in for ‘teachers’ in the public school system, who are exhausted or beaten down and perhaps just uncaring about their jobs,” he said. “But she’s there every day, in the world of the Simpsons, for the past 35 years. In some ways it’s a testament to the commitment of these people.”

There’s no way to know whether the staffer behind the Hoover post perceived the character that way. But one education policy expert said it doesn’t matter.

Neal McCluskey, formerly with the libertarian Cato Institute, supports shutting down the department. Still, he that the government should “stop paying for people at the department to create social media memes. Which would, of course, make it smaller.”

McCluskey, now with Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics, said he hasn’t considered the copyright issues, but said, “If they’re belt-tightening, people who make cutesy tweets seem kind of nonessential, especially for a department that shouldn’t exist.”

Two recent studies seek to provide an answer, assembling compelling evidence of public opinion but arriving at separate conclusions. One shows that firsthand experience with school choice makes people more likely to support its expansion, particularly if they were skeptical of the policy at first. Another indicates that greater proximity to charter schools once made Democrats more likely to favor them, but that the relatively good feelings disappeared over the last decade.

While not diametrically opposed, the two findings heighten the ambiguity surrounding the public’s reception of K–12 education. Parents continue to rate their community’s schools highly, while eagerly making use of alternative options when given the chance. Meanwhile, Democrats have shown early signs of a split on federal initiatives to bolster parental choices, including by directing federal funds to private schools.

Michael Henderson, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, said his paper on charter schools pointed to the challenge of attracting buy-in for new programs or services. This is doubly true when most voters and taxpayers do not directly access them.

“It’s either going to mean that you need to get the vast majority of people directly participating in the policy — something like Social Security — or you have to build a broad base of support in response to the policy,” he observed.

gathers data on charter enrollment in U.S. school districts from 2005 to 2021 — a period marked, especially at the outset, by rapid growth in the sector. He then added nearly a decade’s worth of geographically targeted responses from the Education Next poll, which ran continuously through 2022, to determine whether subjects tended to like charters more as their enrollment grew in the surrounding areas.

Overall, he finds, proximity to higher numbers of charter schools and students did not have an impact on public views. But that average masked an interesting partisan trend. Democrats’ opinions of charters slightly improved as their student enrollment rose, while Republicans’ views headed downward. As a town or city’s share of students attending charter schools rose from 0 percent to 20 percent, average Democratic support rose from a 3.2 (on a five-point scale) to a 3.4. Average Republican support dipped from 3.4 to 3.1 during the same period.

In other words, charter schools have the potential to be a depolarizing issue, bringing the views of left and right into closer alignment. 

Henderson added a caveat, however. The partisan gap decreased during the earlier part of the period, from 2014 to 2016, while seeing no change from 2020 to 2021. In other words, whatever lifted Democrats’ favorability toward public schools of choice appears to have petered out toward the end of the 2010s.

Henderson said the changing views might reveal something about how people form political assessments generally. Most people are only hazy on the details of charter schooling, meaning that they are somewhat more likely to take their cues from leaders of their political party. As each side hardened their stances on school choice during the first Trump administration, with elected Democrats voicing more hesitancy around charters, a message was likely sent to voters as well.

“On the whole, we don’t see expanding polarization,” Henderson said. “But we do see the earlier depolarization going away, which is consistent with the idea that people are attuned more to the political discourse than to the policy itself.”

David Houston, a professor of education policy at George Mason University, has studied the ways in which parties sometimes inadvertently divide the public simply by discussing K–12 questions. In an interview, he noted that the shift in opinion coincided with the Democratic Party’s Trump-era pivot away from charter schools and toward priorities like universal pre-K, which carry less divisive potential.

During the Biden presidency, Houston remarked, “you don’t have a whole lot of elite opinion leadership on K–12 education issues, at least on the ones that had united leaders of both parties for a couple of decades beforehand. And in the absence of that elite consensus, you start to see partisan polarization among the general public as well.”

The power of precedent

But , also released this spring, points to positive and lasting results from more direct contact with school choice.

James Shuls, a professor at Florida State University, examined survey responses from families that had experienced choice in a variety of forms — including charter schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, homeschooling, and open enrollment — and compared them with those of respondents who had not. He and his co-authors discovered that participants with personal experience expressed greater support for expanding educational choice. The effect was statistically significant for all types of choice except ESAs.

“The paper confirms what school choice advocates have long thought intuitively,” Shuls wrote in an email. “School choice is the type of reform that builds a constituency over time.”

The researchers also conducted a separate experiment, randomly prompting some survey participants with the information that various school choice policies already existed in places familiar to them — open enrollment in Colorado, as well as voucher-like programs in Florida, Arizona, Sweden, and Ireland.

Those “real-world” cues led to increased support, particularly among those who initially said they opposed the spread of school choice. Self-described liberals’ likelihood of approving more choice measures increased by 14 percentage points after hearing about Sweden’s national subsidy for private school tuition.

But an opposing pattern emerged at the same time. Conservatives actually became six points less favorable toward choice after receiving the same information. And both liberals and Democrats notably soured on the idea (by eight points and five points, respectively) after hearing it couched in the example of Florida.

Shuls said the experiment showed the power of precedent. The Democratic governors of Colorado and New York have said they will opt into a newly passed federal school choice tax credit, which will provide money for parents to spend on a variety of educational expenses — including private school tuition. More blue and purple states could follow once the Trump administration on how the funds can be used. 

If people in Democratic-leaning states could be shown that vouchers or ESAs are not “some crazy right-wing plot,” Shuls said, it might generate a groundswell.

“If choice begets more choice, as our study suggests,” he wrote, “the expansion of choice programs in blue states will likely lead to greater support for school choice among blue voters.”

A note of caution

Yet there is reason to interpret the results of each paper with a degree of caution.

Families who make the decision to apply for a voucher are likely more open to private school choice than those who don’t take the opportunity; their rising appreciation for the policy may  have been baked in already. A similar point might be made of the subjects in Henderson’s study, since they were living in a community that elected to permit charter schools to begin with. 

“It’s not altogether surprising that you would see higher rates of support among folks who opted into these programs,” said Houston. “If you had asked me that research question, what they found is what I would have expected them to find.”

What’s more, polling on education has proven to be highly sensitive to the details of individual programs, and even the wording used to describe them. A by Paul DiPerna, a researcher at the advocacy group EdChoice, showed that education savings accounts attracted much greater backing when they were characterized as universal. Support for “school vouchers” specifically fell among Democrats and independents after 2023. 

Shuls and his collaborators stipulate that their study does not establish that school choice caused parents to become more supportive. But neither does it support the idea that families generally become disillusioned after using such programs, he added.

Henderson sees the two papers as complementary, with his own research focusing on the indirect political consequences of policy expansion. Even if someone living in a charter-dense community never visits the campus, for example, she might hear about it from neighbors or view its billboards along the side of the highway. Political signals from each party clearly influence their response even further.

“They’re related projects,” Henderson said. “You’re going to be concerned about people who directly participate, but you’re also going to be concerned about people who don’t directly participate, but might be exposed in other ways.” 

Just as the technology has rewired the relationship between young writers-in-training and their teachers, it has also changed how student journalists and their editors work together — or, in some cases, don’t. 

And AI has created headaches for these journalists that mirror those afflicting their professional peers, with school newsrooms struggling to figure out how to respond.

As with their schools more broadly, student newsrooms have spent these years deploying surveillance software and, in many cases, drafting zero-tolerance policies for AI. Different newsrooms have developed different answers to the same basic question: How much do we trust teenagers to not let a chatbot do their work? 

����Ӱ�� spoke recently to three student journalists from three very different newsrooms about their experiences:

• Cid Frydman, a rising senior at Berkeley High School in California, who writes for the ;
• Veronica Mollod, a rising senior and current events editor at , the student newspaper at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y.;
• Tova Weiss, a recent high school graduate in Ann Arbor, Mich., who has split her time between Pioneer High School and . Weiss has written and edited for the and , a publication written by and for Jewish teens.

Here are eight-and-a-half ways — including one counterintuitive, not-for-attribution observation — in which AI is changing their realities:

1. In a few schools, AI has overturned the culture of newspapers.

Frydman, the Berkeley student, said strict AI use policies at her publication have bred resentment among student writers. 

“I think a lot of the people higher up on my paper, and in journalism in general, don’t have a lot of trust in writers anymore, especially with so many AI resources that are out there,” she said. 

Editors are “very harsh on writers” over worries that they’ll use AI, keeping strict controls over documents, she said. They’ll poke around writers’ search histories and analyze their typing speed and word choices, matching drafts to previous work. 

“It’s very strict when you put it all together,” Frydman said. “They don’t have a lot of faith in our ability to actually produce real journalism, and so just assume the worst automatically, which can be a little frustrating when you’re just trying to do your best as a writer.”

At the Berkeley High newspaper, staffers have been let go over suspected AI use. 

Frydman sees the high cost of such heavy-handed policies: “We’re here because we love journalism,” she said. “We’re here to write about things that we’re hopefully passionate about, and the heavy approach of ‘There’s no tolerance whatsoever,’ and not even giving writers the grace and the trust to make their own decisions and do this work on their own — just minding it and monitoring it so heavily, I think it’s very discouraging.”

More broadly, getting caught using AI to write academic assignments carries weighty consequences, she said. You’re unable to get a letter of recommendation from any teacher, Frydman said. 

And a single infraction travels fast: Get caught using AI once, she said, and teachers will tell all of their colleagues “to watch out because this student has used AI before — they might use it in your class.”

2. AI is changing how — and how much — students write.

Frydman said she’s adopting what’s basically a minimalist approach to writing these days, holding back details so she doesn’t draw suspicion from editors or teachers. 

Though she doesn’t use AI for writing, she said, “A lot of times, I find myself sort of slimming down my writing to not go so into detail on things because it’ll be suspected to be something that’s not original. You don’t have a lot of room to be creative in this process, so it’s definitely been a little challenging.”

Ann Arbor’s Weiss said she’s also seeing many young journalists “adjust their writing voice” to avoid being flagged as relying on AI. Many students, she said, now intentionally add typos to their writing to support its legitimacy. “It’s absolutely devastating to watch how many people are intentionally damaging or diminishing the quality and authenticity of their work,” she said. 

At Berkeley High, school-issued Chromebooks are locked down to block access to ChatGPT, Claude and other major AI tools outright — and any attempt to reach them gets flagged. “It notifies the teacher through this program that we have called Go Guardian, which is embedded into a lot of the Chromebooks, where they can sort of see what you’re doing and be able to call you out on it,” Frydman said.

3. A few newsrooms are writing AI policies.

At Youth Environmental Press Team, where Weiss is an editor, staffers have been talking “in pretty much every director’s meeting” about the implications and problems surrounding AI. “We are an environmental publication, which means a lot of us are very climate-conscious.”

The environmental impacts of AI data centers are a cause of great concern, Weiss said.

After fielding a wave of questions from reporters, the publication developed formal guidelines rather than instituting an outright ban on AI. “It was always very clear for us that we would not publish or even entertain the idea of publishing anything that was written by a chatbot or any kind of generative AI,” Weiss said. But they soon got queries from reporters asking if they could use AI for outlining, for formatting statistics, for interview transcriptions and the like.

The policy that emerged prohibits AI-written and AI-edited work, including work that heavily uses tools like Grammarly. But transcription services and basic spell-check are still allowed. 

The organization, she said, wants to make writing “as accessible as possible so people can have their work published — but not if that means it’s not really their work, and especially not if that’s at the cost of the environment.” 

4. Other newsrooms rely on experience and vibes.

Weiss helped craft the formal AI policy at the environmental journal. At jGirls+ Magazine, by contrast, she said there’s no written policy. But in practice the standard is clear: Submissions and even staff applications that appear to be AI-generated are not accepted. In one case, she recalled, an obviously AI-written editorial board application — with a stiff style that lacked personal voice — tested with an AI detector as 100% AI, “which was really something none of us had expected.”

Weiss said AI detectors should be used only “when there is already prior reason to suspect something might have been AI generated” — a student with a track record of misusing AI, for instance, or because something just simply reads a little “off.”

5. In most cases, AI detectors are widely seen as unreliable.

Weiss described a tiered system in the environmental outlet’s workflow, with writers operating on an “honor system” but with student editors flagging “sketchy” pieces such as those that are missing statistical sources or those that quote dubious ones — or writing that doesn’t sound like a typical teenager’s.

“The thing about student voices is typically each writer has a distinctive style of writing,” she said. “We’re high schoolers: We have typos, we make mistakes in there. And if we’re finding something that’s void of personal style or just generally reads in a way that doesn’t seem like it was written by a student, we’re going to look into that further.” 

But she and others worry that using an AI detector could unfairly flag strong writing as suspicious simply because it’s polished — a phenomenon that happens more than you’d think in many schools, Weiss suggested.

AI detectors aren’t really reliable, said Frydman, the Berkeley senior, “so even if you write something really well, it’ll just automatically assume that it might be AI and your writing will get flagged, which has happened to a lot of my friends.” 

6. A few simple rules can keep AI from taking over, journalists say.

Mollod, the New York City journalist, said a somewhat arcane editing rule at her publication basically serves to help keep AI-generated content at bay: At Common Sense, every article is required to include a quote from a student in each grade level — a structural feature that makes it hard for AI to intrude, since students typically remember what they’ve said to a reporter. 

7. In a few cases, teachers are using AI more than students.

The journalists described several instances in which teachers, not students, were the ones turning to AI, relying on the technology to formulate lesson plans, create assignments and grade them.

One student who asked not to be quoted directly spoke of a teacher who “will just copy and paste straight off of Chat GPT or Claude, and just give us assignments that are so clearly AI that it’s ridiculous.”

Others rely on it for grading assignments, which “leads to a lot of people getting unfair grades, because AI can mess up,” said the student.

The more teachers rely on the technology, “the easier it is to just forget that you’re there for a reason, you’re trying to do your job for a reason — and AI should not be teaching kids Spanish or English or math or anything like that. It can’t reproduce real thinking. So it’s definitely a little dystopian.”

8. For many students, refusing AI isn’t a school rule. It’s personal.

Weiss, the Ann Arbor writer, said she has never used Open AI’s popular ChatGPT, due to environmental concerns over data centers as well as personal concerns over AI more broadly. “It just does not align with my morals at all,” she said. 

But casual AI use has become normalized among many of her peers, she said, with students openly saying, sometimes within earshot of teachers, that they ran an assignment through a chatbot the night before it was due.

The best way to fight AI, she said, is basically to boycott it. “The strongest way anyone can combat artificial intelligence is just by refusing to have anything to do with it,” she said.

While AI-generated writing more broadly can damage the way that people learn and is worth thinking about, Mollod said, she’s not sure that it has gotten to the point where “just everyone is just cheating, and no one’s really actually taking their work seriously.”

She reads the coverage and believes most people who don’t spend time in schools overestimate how much teens use AI. “People not in school are like, ‘Well, I didn’t have this great tool. If I had it, I wouldn’t have done anything,’” she said. But relying on the technology, which showed up in the middle of her eighth-grade year, isn’t yet common practice for most students she knows. 

Whether future students will warm to it more isn’t yet clear, Mollod said.

Weiss, the Michigan student, said her work — especially at the environmental publication — has taken on a new significance in the age of AI, pushing to celebrate and highlight “authentic youth journalism and youth narrative” in the face of encroaching technology. “In my view,” she said, “demonstrating our talents as humans and as youth is a form of silent protest against AI by proving that artificial intelligence isn’t necessary to produce professional-quality journalism.”

Bonus: Non-AI cheating abides. 

On background, one of the students said she thought a lot of the news coverage about AI cheating, while serious, simply misses the point. The old-fashioned kind of cheating, for now, remains much more common. In 2026, students are still relying on copying each other’s homework, just as generations before them did. 

“Mostly it’s just, like, circles of people, where there’ll be a math class and five people do the homework — and the other 20 got it from this person, [who] got it from this person, [who] got it from this person — which has always kind of been going on.”

As superintendent of Desert Sands Unified in California’s Coachella Valley, Kelly May-Vollmar has a hard time naming a system that’s not somehow connected to the district’s broadband network.

Parents can check a school bus tracking app to make sure their child arrived on time. Cafeteria staff don’t use cash registers; kids’ meal accounts are linked to the cloud. Even grounds crews depend on external wireless access points to maintain the fields and landscaping at the district’s 34 schools.

“They’re running our sprinkler systems off iPads,” May-Vollmar said.

Her district is like the across the country that apply each year for discounts on broadband service through a federal program called E-Rate. High-poverty districts like Desert Sands save up to 90% of the cost of connecting their schools and classrooms to the internet.

But the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program Congress created 30 years ago, has launched a “top-to-bottom” evaluation that has leaders of the nation’s school districts on edge. The FCC is collecting views on how the program should be reformed or even whether it should be abandoned altogether because it “has fulfilled” its mission. In addition to asking whether the benefit should be restricted to rural districts, the agency links E-Rate to present-day concerns over screen time. Oct. 13 and replies are due Nov. 12.

The proposal is “aimed at empowering parents and ensuring that our E-Rate program produces the great educational outcomes stakeholders have intended,” FCC Chairman in early June when he announced the review. In , the far-right Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, Carr said because of advancements in technology, decisions about the program “should be made with an eye to right-sizing the federal government’s existing broadband initiatives.”

The review process has left ed tech leaders both confused and ready to fight.

“They’re asking us to comment on a potential rulemaking and they haven’t told us what the rules would be,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, a leading ed tech professional organization. He called the initial the FCC released “so extraordinarily broad and comprehensive” that they’re too overwhelming for the average district leader to address. “We’re going to have to be very loud and noisy as a community to our members of Congress and to governors to say ‘Hands off the E-Rate.’ ” 

As in Desert Sands, districts depend on internet access for a lot more than classroom instruction, including taking attendance and managing payroll. But it’s how students use the internet at school that has taken over the discussion about updating the program.

“Historically, underserved students lacked access to computers and technology, and efforts were made to ‘close the digital divide,’ “ said Emily Cherkin, a Seattle-based consultant and leading figure in the battle against “big tech.” In 2026, she said, “the pendulum has swung too far.”

In January, she , saying that children’s access to the internet has led to “catastrophic” impacts on their mental health, learning and development. In response to those concerns, some states are . Parents are demanding the chance to of apps and learning platforms, and others, including Cherkin, are suing and publishers, accusing them of and .  

‘A connectivity program’

Groups like the Consortium for School Networking have called for a balanced approach before the valid concerns over kids’ time online threatens the loss of a program that saves schools and libraries over $2.5 billion each year. 

The discounts apply to high-speed internet service as well as Wi-Fi access points, routers and switches. Desert Sands, for example, is currently upgrading such equipment district-wide — a $1 million project that is only costing the district $200,000 because of the discount. But E-Rate benefits don’t extend to devices for students, digital content or software licenses. 

E-Rate “is a connectivity program,” Krueger said. “It’s not an education program.” 

Last week, CoSN released highlighting examples of “purposeful” technology use and stressed that there’s a difference between a student scrolling social media during the school day and another working with a classmate on a multimedia project. 

“The goal is not simply to reduce or increase screen time,” the report says. “The goal is to ensure that every use of technology has a clear instructional purpose.”

But Cherkin is skeptical of what she calls the industry’s “.” As long as students are spending time on a device, she wrote that it doesn’t matter whether they have high-quality materials. Her years as a former middle school English teacher in Seattle private schools, from 2003 to 2015, helped to shape her views on technology. Schools had computer labs and a dedicated technology teacher, a model she’d like to see reinstated. That arrangement evolved into reserving a cart with laptops that she would bring to her classroom when needed.

The turning point, she said, was when she started uploading grades into a digital portal.

“Instead of coming to talk to me directly and having a conversation about what they might need to do to improve … they were instead directed to a digital platform that had a number or letter grade, which told them very little overall,” she said. “I saw it devaluing the experience of learning to be a student who could self-advocate.”

Parents, whom she described as “highly anxious,” constantly checked the portal and emailed her about why their children didn’t get an A or were missing a grade. Despite her concerns over the internet’s impact on students, she still supports the argument that access should be universally available. 

‘Pulling out the rug’

For Krueger and others who fought to increase access for students in schools and homes, this moment feels like a giant step backward. As founder of EducationSuperhighway, a nonprofit, Evan Marwell advocated for a fiber connection to every school in the nation, reaching . 

“There are a lot of good uses of technology in classrooms,” he said. “Pulling out the rug from teachers and students on all those good uses would be, in my opinion, a big mistake.” 

During the pandemic, his organization pivoted to signing up low-income families for discounted high-speed service at home so students wouldn’t have to sit in McDonalds’ parking lots to pick up Wi-Fi to do homework.

Last fall, in its first move toward rolling back federal broadband initiatives, the FCC at-home and school bus Wi-Fi access from the program, features that were added during the Biden administration. The move, Carr said in , would end what he called “illegal funding” of young kids’ unsupervised screen time.

Sen. Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who wrote the E-Rate program as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act said in that the decision would “leave low-income, rural and marginalized communities disconnected.” 

The FCC asks whether E-Rate should be “limited or sunset,” considering the nearly universal access in schools. But Kevin Taglang, an executive editor with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, a nonprofit, that high-poverty districts receiving the largest discounts serve more than 16 million students. In Desert Sands, those kids have parents who work at the resorts, golf courses and restaurants across Palm Springs.

“Any eligibility change that removes these schools from the program, or substantially reduces their discount levels, would fall hardest on the students and districts least able to absorb the loss,” he wrote.

Preventing fraud

Conservatives first tried to end E-Rate through a 2023 lawsuit. Consumers Research, a nonprofit, argued that the FCC’s arrangement with the Universal Service Administrative Company, the private entity that , was illegal and gave too much power to a federal agency. But in a 6-3 decision last year, the U.S. Supreme Court .

The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, highlighted E-Rate in a , saying that out of five government programs evaluated, it was the only one following all nine recommended practices for preventing fraud, waste and abuse. That was a big improvement over a , which flagged the program for “several key fraud risks.” 

Krueger, with CoSN, said some improvements to E-Rate are needed, like more “serious funding” for cybersecurity. 

“Having broadband that is at risk for cyber attacks isn’t helpful,” he said. 

Between July 2023 and December 2024, 82% of schools experienced some type of cyber incident, such as a ransomware attack, a data breach or a phishing attempt, according to last year from the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. When the FCC opened up a $200 million E-Rate cybersecurity pilot program in 2024, the demand was huge. The agency totaling $3.7 billion. 

Krueger, however, questions whether the FCC is the right agency to determine whether Wi-Fi access is harming students’ learning. That, he said, should be the responsibility of the Office of Educational Technology, which the Trump administration gutted last year when it eliminated roughly half of the Department of Education’s staff.

At a late July gathering in Washington, Amber Davis, chief of staff in the Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, told advocates from about 22 states that there is still an ed tech office at the agency, according to CoSN Chair Stacy Hawthorne. The attendees, Hawthorne said, joked that it may only exist on paper. 

The department did not respond to questions about the makeup of the office. But on Thursday it issued that tries to redirect the debate over ed tech away from screen time. Ed tech “should not be evaluated solely by the amount of time students spend using it,” it said, adding that district spending on technology should be “guided by evidence of effectiveness.”

The July event was one of several likely to occur over the next couple months as leaders advocate to preserve E-Rate. With this year’s application period already complete, the FCC on July 29 that the program still exists and that its “notice of potential rulemaking” won’t immediately result in a loss of funding. 

If the administration scales back or discontinues E-Rate, district leaders say they’ll have to make up the difference somehow. LaTonya Goffney, superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District, near Houston, said with 86% of her district’s budget tied up in personnel, she would have to cut staff or programs to replace the more than $2 million saved each year from discounts.

“The utilities, the transportation — all of those things we can’t eliminate,” she said. “We still have to provide those for our students.”

In Desert Sands, May-Vollmar added that because E-Rate requires , the cost of broadband service for schools would likely increase if the program is gone. For her, unlimited Wi-Fi in the classroom replicates the real-world for students. 

“You and I don’t schedule time to go to a computer lab,” she said. “At work, if I say ‘Everybody, go get your computer,’ we have that ability. I want that ability in the classroom, too.”

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. —  can conjure a familiar scene: adults crammed into child-size chairs, listening to teachers run through a list of students’ achievements and struggles.

For many families, they can also mean frustration. Today’s school conferences are sometimes 15 to 20 minutes, with little time for parents to ask their own questions. Adults may arrive with their own baggage about their time in school. They may be worried about being judged or dreading what a teacher may say about their child. 

For teachers, conferences can mean pressure to give a snapshot of a child’s progress, with the next opportunity to connect months away — if at all.

The conference may be brief, but it can set the tone for a family’s relationship and partnership with the teacher. Parents, teachers and school administrators have these tips to make the conference productive and help build a stronger connection between home and school.

Communicate early and figure out what works

Schools typically offer several early opportunities for parents and teachers to connect, from meet-the-teacher events and  nights to open houses. By the time conferences are on the calendar, parents and teachers should already be communicating.

But sometimes it can take weeks, or even months, to hear from your child’s teacher, who must establish relationships with dozens of families. Don’t wait, say parents and teachers alike. Take the initiative and reach out yourself.

“Do you want to set your child up for success? It’s a yes or no. And if it’s a yes, then you have to be very involved,” said Bell White, a Houston mother of two.

When her son Lennox, now 8, was in preschool, four teachers came and went during the school year. White quickly learned how important it was to stay engaged with the school.

Since then, she has introduced herself to each of her son’s teachers at the first opportunity, even if virtually. She tells them how she prefers to communicate — whether over email, phone or via a school app — and when she’s most reachable. 

Technology can make it easier for parents with multiple children or busy schedules to stay connected and for teachers to send quick messages or reminders. But with , some parents say it helps to establish a preferred way to communicate.

Early in the relationship, parents and teachers should focus on building trust, said J.B. Robinson, a clinical psychologist and dean of students at National University in San Diego. Positive interactions are like putting money into a relationship bank that can be drawn on when challenges arise, he said. For parents, that can mean showing interest in the classroom and recognizing the effort that goes into creating a positive learning environment. Teachers can similarly begin with questions about the individual child, rather than immediately moving into classroom expectations or academic performance.

Whatever the nature of your first communication with a teacher, try not to worry that you’re bothering the teacher. Your child’s growth is the priority, and communicating with you is part of the teacher’s job.

Make the time count

Parent-teacher conferences are designed to address students’ academic and social progress, identify concerns and discuss what comes next, but there may not be time to cover everything parents or teachers want to discuss.

“The teacher and the parent need to go in with realistic expectations as to what can actually be accomplished in one parent-teacher conference and see that more as a starting point for a conversation,” said Robinson, the psychologist.

The meetings can also be ripe for tension. Teachers may be having dozens of back-to-back conferences, while parents may arrive with weeks’ worth of questions, all seemingly valid. Depending on the school and the child’s grade, some teachers follow a set agenda, with presentation slides, packets or lists of topics to cover.

Emily Henderson, who teaches first and second grade at BASIS Charter School in Flagstaff, Arizona, says her conversations are mostly individualized, with some focusing more on academics and others on social-emotional needs.

“We use parent-teacher conferences to really talk about strengths, talk about weaknesses of students, and then come up with a plan together to address those concerns or address those needs,” Henderson said.

Given time constraints, parents should come with just a few thoughtful questions, teachers say. But remember this is a starting point. It’s totally reasonable to set up another conference later in the year, even if your school doesn’t have one scheduled. Or you can continue the conversation online or over the phone.

What to do if your kid is present

Some schools recommend that students join the conference, and in other cases, a parent may want to bring them along — or need to, if they lack child care. For younger students, teachers recommend asking in advance whether they should attend, if that is an option. If you do plan to bring the student or younger siblings, let the teacher know ahead of time so they can prepare for a more engaging meeting or set up a few distractions.

If younger students are present, it is up to administrators and teachers to engage them and speak directly to them, said Kellie Hintze, head of school at BASIS Flagstaff.

“When I have younger students at a meeting, we typically have a mini meeting with the student and the parent,” she said. “Then we can dive a little deeper or have those long, drawn-out conversations that a student wouldn’t want to be a part of or be able to focus through.”

Older students have more agency over their learning and are better positioned to contribute to discussions about their progress, challenges and possible next steps, experts say.

“We’re doing students a disservice when we’re not teaching them how to advocate, when we are not teaching them those communication skills, to have the tough conversations when they need to be had,” said Kendrick Friendly, who is a high school assistant principal with Denver Public Schools. “This is a safe space for those conversations to happen.”

Questions to consider

Parents don’t need to arrive with a long list of questions. A few thoughtful ones can help clarify what a teacher considers success, what they are seeing in the classroom, what support is available and how to stay connected throughout the year.

Consider asking:

1. How do you prefer to communicate with parents, and how often should we check in?

2. What does success look like for my child this year?

3. How do you identify when a student is falling behind, and who should I speak with about getting additional support?

4. What are you noticing about my child that I might not see at home?

Leave with a plan

Parent-teacher conferences do not resolve every concern, but they should identify next steps, whether those are regular check-ins, strategies for improved behavior or additional resources, such as tutors, specialized instruction or extracurricular activities.

Before leaving, make sure everyone knows what happens next, who is responsible for it and when you’ll check back in. Don’t be afraid to request another conference later in the year. Remember: Your child’s growth is the priority, and it will take everyone in the room to get there.

This story was originally published by The Associated Press

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s  for working with philanthropies, a  of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

According to the latest jobs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, K-12 schools lost 50,000 workers from June to July. The numbers for May were also revised down by another 47,000.

These are seasonally adjusted numbers. Each year, public schools “lose” about 1 million employees who come off the payrolls in the summer months, only to add those workers back in the fall. But the latest numbers suggest that the 2026 decline is a bit larger than normal.

Because of these summer patterns, I like to look at the non-seasonally adjusted numbers. The graph below shows that trend over the last few years. Each line represents one calendar year. The 2020 line is in red. You can see the big drop-off in March when schools shut down for COVID. They no longer needed as many bus drivers and lunch staff, etc. But each year since then payrolls have grown (follow the gray lines upwards).

Now look at the 2026 line, in green. It was trending slightly above 2025 in the spring, but it now sits below the 2025 line. As of July, with no seasonal adjustment, public schools employed about 29,000 fewer workers than they did at this time last year.

Now, these are preliminary figures subject to revisions. But they represent the first year-over-year declines that we’ve seen since the pandemic.

The decline so far is not large in percentage terms. We’re talking about a decline of 0.4%, and this represents total workers, not full-time equivalents. School districts typically adjust around the margins first, reducing part-time positions or cutting hours before eliminating full-time jobs. These also don’t represent increases in layoffs—those remain stable. Instead, this is mostly about a slowdown in hiring.

This shouldn’t be entirely surprising. School districts have spent the last two years warning about the end of federal pandemic aid and slower state revenue growth. For a while, many districts have been able to avoid workforce reductions. These latest employment numbers suggest that budget pressures may finally be showing up in the national data.

The other education sectors did not have as big of a change. As I’ve written , the number of state education employees (public higher education) peaked more than a year ago. As a sector, it is down about 25,000 employees from a year ago, a decline of 1.1%.

The private childcare sector is down about 5,000 workers from a year ago, a decline of 0.4%.

Whether the latest numbers mark the beginning of a sustained decline or just a temporary pause will become clearer over time. But the years of uninterrupted staffing growth may be ending.

Joe Biden that he will soon release a memoir of his time in office. That volume follows on the heels of Jill Biden’s , which triggered controversy when some Democrats was attempting to gloss her husband’s delayed decision to not to seek reelection. And recent polls have toward the former president, with voters favorably comparing his economic record to his successor’s.

So far, however, only one published retrospective has provided deep insight into the education legacy of the Biden White House. Written by New School Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the account appears as a chapter in , an essay collection featuring contributions from over a dozen historians. 

The author of , Petrzela examines President Biden’s K–12 efforts within the longer context of a political life stretching back to the 1970s. At the outset of that half-century career, the 30-something senator was billed as a different kind of Democrat, and doubtful about the benefits of directing more money to schools. 

That early record stood in contrast with the first few years of his presidency. In early 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a gargantuan spending bill, while also backing off from the education reform goals of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Neither that local schools move away from virtual learning as the COVID pandemic wound down. Perhaps the boldest executive move on education came in the form of a failed bid to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt. 

After four years, the result was a muddle, Petrzela concludes. The increasingly embattled president advanced some ambitious K–12 priorities, from massive ESSER expenditures to a revision of Title IX around LGBT rights in schools. But his education initiatives largely unfolded far from public attention, and the absence of assertive messaging allowed .

In an interview with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Petrzela spoke about the recurrence of cultural conflicts in schools, the public’s COVID-era frustrations with Biden’s party, and why the president seemed to dart left on education and other issues.

“During Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader,” she said. “He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: You do a great job examining the Biden administration’s education priorities in the light of Joe Biden’s early political career, which began during the busing controversies of the 1970s. Was there anything about that period that surprised you during your research?

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: I knew something of Joe Biden’s political evolution. But when I went back to the primary sources, I was actually surprised at about Great Society programs, and about this abiding faith — which others in his party had — that Big Government could fix really thorny social issues. 

When you already know that his presidential administration oversaw this huge outlay of money called the American Rescue Plan, and that his whole career was really about expanding federal spending in education, it was really something else to read . I’m paraphrasing, but he was essentially saying that America can’t spend its way out of its problems, and that Democrats shouldn’t see government spending through rose-colored lenses.

Biden’s reputation for being a new kind of Democrat — implicitly contrasted with the Great Society consensus, as you say — is ironic because, once he became president, the predecessor he was most often compared with . So he seems to finally end up in the same place he departed from.

If you think about what happened in both parties across the intervening decades, you really see the lines harden in terms of who’s onboard with expanding government spending and who comes down against it as the root of all evil. 

But early in the 1970s, the jury was still out on how this would fall. You had hardcore right-wingers in the John Birch Society, who thought that the New Deal was one step away from socialism. But it still wasn’t totally clear that the Great Society would establish the political architecture of the Democratic Party until today, or that the Republicans would define themselves against it. For that reason, it would be increasingly untenable for Democrats in the mainstream of the party to resist it in the way that Biden raised those questions early on.

So in the scope of that long political history, his trajectory makes perfect sense. But it’s still jarring to look at the primary sources and see how that shift happened.

Conservatives seemed to acculturate themselves to the New Deal in ways they never did to the liberalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The movement has usually pushed to shrink the government, even if Medicare was here to stay.

And we thought the Department of Education was here to stay! One of the things we teach in the history of education is how Ronald Reagan vowed to get rid of the department, and instead, under his administration, it was expanded. That’s a moment that is often used by political historians to show the enduring power of these agencies, and how they have a kind of permanence to them. But under Trump II, we’re seeing that they’re not so permanent.

But that move isn’t just a Trump-era relic. The era of big Washington-led initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the commitment to education reform that they embodied, petered out during President Obama’s second term. In retrospect, the Biden administration seems like the first glimpse of a post-reform Democratic Party. 

I agree with that. But the big turning point we’ve got to think about, especially in terms of what my chapter was responding to, was COVID. More than the end of NCLB, COVID redraws the lines of politics and discourse around education. 

Prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t say education was off to the side — because we’re always fighting about education — but there was a lot of stuff that came into being, largely through Democrats during the Great Society and its aftermath, that people were not fundamentally questioning. Everyone wants their kids to read and write at school, and they want special education to be available at their kids’ schools. 

I’m a cultural historian, so I’m not trying to underplay the conflict that existed, but in 2020 and beyond, you have a series of converging circumstances that really put schools at the center of lots of people’s concerns about what’s going wrong in society. And it’s very easy to point at the Democrats as the villains who created those circumstances.

You point to a handful of major education pillars of the Biden education agenda, all grouped under the general theme of equity: Close to $200 billion in federal funding to states and districts to cope with the pandemic, and an overhaul of Title IX, but no real action on NCLB-style accountability and no immediate pressure on schools to reopen for in-person learning. Would you agree that these pillars largely reflected the growing influence and importance of teachers’ unions in Democratic politics?

That’s very accurate. You see the disappearance of the accountability agenda, which, to be clear, had some major problems. But there was a combination of a long-term push to loosen accountability, often led by the heads of unions, with the move to keep schools closed. And added to that was an emphasis on social justice content that a lot of people would say is both politically biased and irrelevant to fundamental academic skills. 

At the same time, due to the school closures, a lot of parents had a much closer perspective on what their children were learning or not learning. That made it a complete powder keg, and one that seemed to have been created by Democrats — particularly because of the role of unions at the heart of things.

During the 2020 primaries, you might have predicted that a Biden education platform would resemble that of President Obama, to whom he closely tied himself. But right after becoming the nominee, he’s naming an education task force with two teachers’ union heads and no notable figures from the party’s reform wing. I’m wondering whether a decision like that reflects coalitional politics, Biden’s authentic beliefs, or some combination of the two.

Early in his career, Biden really cared about education and made it a big part of his politics. Jill Biden is obviously an educator, which may have contributed to that. So it’s kind of a surprise that he turned away from it in some ways, to the extent that I don’t think there really was a coherent educational agenda under the Biden administration. Democrats, in general, were really struggling with the issue, so who’s going to step in to create a unified agenda? It’s going to be the teachers’ unions, and they make it their agenda. 

In the article, I give the unions credit for some things. In other places, I think they’re totally off-base. There are a lot of different interest groups that find a way into policy conversations through union advocacy, and not all of those union priorities are working to improve education or to make Democrats look particularly good on education. 

And all of this is part of why you saw the Biden administration not really saying much about schools. You could say they were actually doing a lot, especially with the American Rescue Plan, but they’re not saying much. It’s a passive or surreptitious cession of power, and not a lot of control over messaging. If you think about it through the left-right perspective, it did allow the parts of the left that were aligned with unions to have a ton of latitude. But it also allowed the right to paint the Bidens as the vanguard of this radical leftist takeover of America. That’s totally unfair and over the top, but the administration didn’t do much to resist that characterization.

How much do you think these developments were accelerated by the first Trump term? Following the deep resistance to the views and policies of Betsy DeVos, it would have been really hard for President Biden to enter office in 2021 as an unreconstructed advocate for high-quality charter schools, for example.

Just think of how the discourse moved around education policy during that time. It really accelerated throughout the Biden administration because they didn’t do anything to change course. There was such a push-back against standardized tests, accountability, and charter schools, and a determination to attack “white supremacy culture” — with that term used to encapsulate all of these ideas that had been central to the education reform movement, from hard work to punctuality. There was no way Biden could come back and align himself with that agenda.

I think this gets at why Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate after she’d been so critical of his views on school busing. I’m not saying he was insincere in making that selection, but it was an important political move to show, in a very efficient way, how he’d changed his tune on education and race.

The exchange between those two during the Democratic primary debate, on an issue that was last relevant to national politics in the 1970s, seems even more significant in retrospect than it was at the time. Are there themes from that era of liberal politics that dovetail with similar debates today? 

Yeah, it’s bizarre in some ways that policies from 50 years ago can play such a central role in politics today. But and its aftermath — both the boldness of that idea and its unfulfilled legacy — kind of remains the central fulcrum point of educational politics, especially as it relates to race. 

When the LBJ was in office, there was an ongoing debate on the left about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. The Great Society, I would say, still came from the opportunity side of that spectrum. It’s shifting through the ’60s, but you had a lot of mainstream Democrats talking explicitly about opening the doors to opportunity. 

On the other hand, you’re just starting to see commitments to differential funding to achieve equal outcomes. Even though Title I exists by that point, it’s not as much a part of the discourse as today, when there’s so much talk about equity — and not just that, but lots of arguments that equality of opportunity, or meritocracy, or a level playing field, are just fantasies. That’s not how people were talking about these issues at the beginning of Biden’s career, even as they were creating the infrastructure for equity-centric policies.

I’m reminded that, in his Senate career, Biden was a kind of bellwether of the Democratic mainstream, always managing to . Maybe the simplest explanation for his migration on schools is that, rather than any kind of personal conviction, he moved with the party away from what had become an uncomfortable position in the 2010s.

I think so. 

I’m going to sound pretty critical saying this, but during Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader. He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit. Particularly on education, which was at the center of the intense political discord of that moment, he wasn’t really staking a claim to move the discourse in a new direction. 

And that was in spite of the fact that these were big policies: the American Rescue Plan, which was a very big piece of spending, the equity agenda, the focus on racial justice, the willingness to put union leaders front and center. In the article, I highlight the moment when Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle [presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, respectively] were brought as kids were still learning from home. As a parent, I remember that felt like a huge slap in the face.

You also write a little about the “,” which has seen college-educated voters move left and non-college-educated voters trend rightward. I wonder if that phenomenon has seen both sides polarize against the kind of liberalism Biden represented.

Biden found himself in a difficult position during his presidency. It was the culmination of his political career, but it came at a very awkward moment for someone of his age and background and beliefs. The last 10–15 years have just been a very strange moment in thinking about the Democratic Party’s positions on all these things. Particularly for a lifer like Biden, who cares about party, it’s very hard to navigate all of that.

I’m critical of Biden in this article because I wish he’d done some things quite differently. But I also think he was in a very hard position, and playing it safe on education might have been an understandable move politically. 

Another objection that many parents raised during the COVID period was that schools were slipping political content into classroom lessons, particularly around “culture war” issues. Where did that come from?

Issues like sexuality, morality, and race are not necessarily about schools. But they are often framed through curricular or educational sites, with the school — I use that term generally, but it could be teachers, administrators, or whatever — being the promoter of radical, leftwing, elitist values. Schools and educators are very often characterized as out of touch with everyday people.

That is a remarkable thing. Public schools are a bedrock, free institution that most American kids go through, and it takes a lot of skill to present them as being in the thrall of an elitist project. But Democrats, and the cultural left more broadly, have sometimes made it too easy to paint that picture, and a lot of that has to do with the effect of education schools. There’s a lot of good work that comes out of ed schools, but it’s another institution that is way too easy to caricature as peddling wild, progressive thought about children that is immoral, probably un-American, and taking over U.S. schools. 

This distrust of schools has been a long-running divide in U.S. politics. And sometimes, some of these critics are right! I wrote my first book about culture wars in America, focusing a lot on sex education. And if you’re asking me, I think rightwing people who believe you should never talk about sexuality in school are wrong. It’s actually important to educate kids about these things. 

But they were making pretty good points sometimes, like when they pointed out that a lot of teachers of this newfangled sex education curriculum had no training themselves. It was true; there was no training at that time. People wanted to know what their kids were being taught, and they thought it was inappropriate for a teacher to be able to go off-script about these intimate things. Those are all legitimate questions to raise.

But it was easy to take those legitimate concerns and spin them into much larger, unfounded claims, like the idea that sex education was a Communist plot to turn children into sex slaves. That was something that got national coverage, and it’s not so different today from the “groomer” discourse that we hear about all the time: Radical, leftwing indoctrinators are grooming your kids.

And of course, some of this stuff does exist because the teaching force is massive, and we have a media environment that spreads all this stuff. But the idea that most teachers are like this, or that you should pull your kids out of public school, is crazy.

Does it surprise you that this suspicion of public schools has been such a consistent narrative for President Trump? As you mentioned, there’s nothing necessarily new about this distrust in the history of American politics, but it seems odd that a populist movement would position itself against the schools that 90 percent of American kids attend.

You’re right that it’s not a new thing, but there is something different about this moment of right-left polarization around education.

You could point to a lot of parallels with today’s education politics in the ’60s and ’70s. But what’s different about that time is that both right and left were fighting over public schools. They both want to control this institution that they acknowledge is really important for American society. So there’s a question of who will win and take over.

That’s basically gone right now. You have people on the right — Trump, but also lots of bloggers and podcasters and various other folks in rightwing media — saying that “government schools,” as they call them, are completely ideologically unsound and a systemic overreach of government power. Their view is that you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for these things, and you shouldn’t have to send your kids somewhere where government appointees will have control over them eight hours a day.

The solution that a lot of those folks offer is, yes, under the banner of privatization. But it’s not in the Mitt Romney way, or even the broadly understood way of advocating for private schools. There’s also been a big boom in homeschooling, and there’s a growing sense that education is a family responsibility for people to educate their own kids.

The way that is presented by Trump and other followers, is not to say, “Let’s find a way to get your kids an elite private school education.” It’s more like, “This is a time for the family to take control of raising their kids again, not outsourcing it to government bureaucrats, who are either lazy or scheming and nefarious.”

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, Inc, led by former Democratic Congressman Peter Deutsch, the Statewide Charter School Board in March, saying that Oklahoma’s law requiring charter schools to be nonsectarian qualifies as religious discrimination. 

“Many parents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, want the kind of rigorous, faith-based education Ben Gamla would provide,” said Daniel Chen, an attorney with Becket, a nonprofit law firm focusing on religious liberty. 

The earliest the virtual school could open would be the fall of 2027. 

Ben Gamla is the second religious charter school that has tried to open in Oklahoma, where Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and former state Superintendent Ryan Walters encouraged the first online Catholic charter school. Last year, a lawsuit over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a 4-4 tie deadlocked over the question of whether charter schools are private and can, therefore, explicitly teach religion. That leaves the question unanswered, say supporters of religious charter schools. Similar efforts in other states, including Tennessee and California, mean there are many routes for returning the issue to the high court.

In the Ben Gamla case, U.S. District Judge David Russell, for the Western District of Oklahoma, will consider two issues. In addition to asking the court to allow the school to open while the case proceeds, Ben Gamla’s organizers also want the court to block Oklahoma families, now “intervenors” in the case, from accessing information about the school, like proposed admission and student conduct policies.

“Intervenors are going on a fishing expedition, seeking sensitive information about schoolchildren, donors and the like,” Chen said.

But attorneys representing the families, , say any planning documents should be publicly available.

“To what extent will those policies discriminate against students or employees based on religion or sexual orientation or gender identity?” asked Alex Luchenitser, vice president and associate legal director for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “How religiously coercive will school operations be?” 

In June, Russell granted requests from two groups of parents to intervene in the case. They argue that the school would force taxpayers to subsidize religion. Because the charter school board is not opposed to the Ben Gamla school in theory and even welcomed the lawsuit, that leaves the parents, including those whose children attend charter schools, as “the only litigants seeking to defend the constitutionality” of the state law, he wrote.

The judge is expected to rule in a few weeks, but Luchenitser said he could issue a decision on the documents sooner.

Luchenitser is also Americans United’s lead attorney on a federal case in Tennessee in which , a proposed “Christ-centered” charter school in Knoxville, is suing the Knox County Schools because the district wouldn’t allow the organizers to submit a charter application. 

U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr., for the Eastern District of Tennessee, has set a trial date in that case for the week of Jan. 12. As in Oklahoma, the judge allowed a group of community members to intervene in the case when the school board said it wouldn’t take a position on Wilberforce’s legal argument. The organization says that while the state supports families who want a religious education for their children through its education savings account program, it shows “hostility” toward religious charter schools.

‘Not freestanding’

In Colorado, a over a Christian “contract” school, similar to a charter, was another potential test case for faith-based public schools, But the 30-student Riverstone Academy shut down permanently at the end of last school year after health and safety violations as its facility. The state legislature also , making the school ineligible for funding. 

In a fourth case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled earlier this year that a homeschool program in California that operates under the umbrella of the Blue Ridge Academy charter school is still a public school, and, therefore, can’t practice religion. Parents and grandparents sued the state when officials said using public funds to purchase religious curriculum materials would violate state law. 

Liberty Justice Center, the conservative law firm representing the families, has until Aug. 20 to to the Supreme Court. 

But while supporters of religious charter schools plan their legal strategy for getting the issue back before the conservative justices, some advocates are sharpening arguments saying that charters are, without question, public schools.

According to a from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, these schools of choice “are not freestanding private institutions.” They exist only because of state action and operate with public resources.

Kevin Welner, an education and law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, called the paper a “valiant effort,” but one unlikely to sway the court the next time they hear a case over religious charter schools. 

The only reason the St. Isidore case ended in a tie is because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself. While she didn’t give a reason, Barrett is close friends with a law professor who advised the school’s founders. That won’t happen a second time, and given that Barrett typically sides with those wanting on religious expression. Welner said he’s convinced that the Alliance “will lose that argument.”

Along with Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and Preston Green of the University of Connecticut, in a policy paper that if the court ultimately rules that charter schools are private entities, such schools will not only be able to practice religion, but potentially ignore other “basic laws governing public schools,” like open meetings requirements and conflict-of-interest rules.

To prevent that possibility, the three recommend that states should have districts govern charters instead of independent nonprofit boards. This change, they said, would make charters “unambiguously governmental entities” that are “fully subject to constitutional requirements and civil rights laws.”

Watching Florida

Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the Alliance, rejected the idea, saying their proposal “would open the door to more regulation that will basically turn charters into district schools.” The Alliance and other choice advocacy groups, like the , favor charter laws that allow for a variety of authorizers, including nonprofits.  

Meanwhile, in Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued stating that the First Amendment doesn’t prevent states from “encouraging” religion and that excluding religious groups from opening charter schools violates the Constitution. 

So far, the Alliance hasn’t seen any religious groups trying to launch charters based on Uthmeier’s statements, Coleman said.

“But it doesn’t mean we won’t,” she said. 

After all, Deutsch represented Florida in the House from 1993 to 2005 and that’s where he built a successful network of secular charter schools that teach Hebrew language and culture. In 2023, he told ����Ӱ�� that if he had known education savings accounts and private school choice programs were about to take off, he would have founded a “Jewish voucher school.”

“We know there are people in Florida who are interested in advancing this issue,” Coleman said. “We are expecting that Florida could be the next state with an active case.”

NEWNAN, Ga. — Arnco-Sargent Elementary sits in a wooded area on a two-lane road about 50 miles south of Atlanta. Across the street is a child care center. A Baptist church is less than a mile away. 

But if developers get their way, the school’s newest neighbor could be a sprawling data center campus housing the networking infrastructure needed to help power Americans’ reliance on the internet, and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Families, some who have lived in the area for generations, are opposed, concerned about traffic, noise, water-quality and other adverse effects. In April, the rezoned 832 rural acres to accommodate the industrial development. Project Sail, as it’s called, could be under construction for the next 10 years.  

“I have a first grader. He’ll be in high school by the time it’s even finished,” said Laura Beth, whose tree-lined property backs up to the proposed site. “This will be his whole childhood.” 

She chairs , which is to stop the project, while also leading a petition drive to get a referendum against it on the ballot. The battle is one of several nationwide in which the rapid expansion of these “hyperscale” centers is colliding with the daily lives of public school families and staff. Americans depend on data centers to work, shop and learn. Despite the recent backlash to ed tech, one research firm estimates that the global in education will grow to over $136 billion by 2035. 

As demand surges, tech companies look for land that is relatively close to customers and existing electricity and water sources. 

“The closer data is stored to the people and systems relying on it, the faster it loads — a benefit that touches everything from healthcare to the classroom technology students and teachers use every day,” said Dan Diorio, executive vice president of state policy and government affairs at the Data Center Coalition, a membership organization. 

But with concerns about energy use and environmental impacts, local governments — and — have on new data centers, and opponents say officials should restrict building near schools and residential neighborhoods. 

“I would like to say our situation’s unique,” Beth said. “It hurts me that it’s not.”

Nationally, 1,878 public schools sit within a mile of at least one data center or a future facility that is approved for construction, according to researchers at Brown University. Shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��, the analysis of and National Center for Education Statistics data shows that California has by far the largest number of schools close to data centers or buildings-in-progress: 602, representing 32% of the nation’s total.

Ahmed Saeed, an assistant professor in computer science at Georgia Tech, explained that the infrastructure data centers rely on is more widely available near “population centers.” But because dense urban areas don’t have enough affordable land, developers often gravitate to suburban and exurban areas. 

“As the number of data centers continues to grow, it becomes increasingly likely that some will be located near schools and residential neighborhoods,” he said.

The latest , fueled by advancements in AI, is fairly recent, so researchers know little about the long-term effects of attending school near a facility. The Brown team, however, will soon release research showing that math scores are lower among students whose schools are closer to a data center. Companies say they take measures to minimize disruption, like planting trees to absorb sound, and some argue the downsides . 

‘This buzzing noise’

District leaders are among those who say data centers pose too many risks to ignore. 

“AI is not going anywhere,” said Marcia Andrews, a school board member in Palm Beach, Florida. “My biggest concern is that these data centers should be far enough away that it doesn’t harm the community, it doesn’t harm the schools.”

The Palm Beach County commission agreed. In July, members , a 202-acre near the Arden subdivision that would have been “just a football field away,” from Saddle View Elementary School, Andrews said. The vote, however, leaves the door open for the developers to revise and resubmit their plans in the future. Andrews, whose district includes Saddle View, grew curious about the site when she saw crews widening the roads and planting palm trees. 

“People across the country are waking up now saying, ‘My gosh, we never dreamed that we would hear this buzzing noise 24/7,’ ” she said.

One frequent complaint against data centers is the sound coming from cooling systems, fans and generators. In , a resident likened it to a jet engine. Another in , known for having the of data centers in the world, said the inescapable humming makes him “want to curse.”

A from a former NASA safety manager and planning commissioner in Prince William County, Virginia, predicted that classroom noise from data centers near schools would likely exceed recommended levels. A separate in the state found that the sound is “generally quieter than a lawn mower or nearby conversation,” said Diorio, with the Data Center Coalition. But opponents there often share from a mother at Chris Yung Elementary who said her child wouldn’t go outside for recess because of the sound. 

Many data centers use , which would be like “a bunch of semi trucks idling right next to the school,” said Jessica Owens, the director of data at Science for Georgia, a nonprofit. “Would you want your child in a facility next to a place that’s emitting pollutants, especially in the South when we have heat waves that exacerbate those pollutants?”

Noise, she added, would impact a school within a mile, but they also create “heat islands” that can extend up to six miles. 

The closest Project Sail building would be about 1,000 feet from Arnco-Sargent Elementary “with setbacks, tree buffers, berms and other screening incorporated into the design,” said  Mattie Sorrentino, a spokeswoman for Prologis, the company behind the Coweta County project. The site is “well-suited” for the data center because of its close proximity to Plant Yates, a Georgia Power facility. 

The company “will meet or exceed every requirement,” she said. “Our goal is to keep the project out of sight as much as possible.”

‘Impact on achievement’

Even if students can’t see a data center from the playground, their learning may be at risk.

In a forthcoming paper, Brown University researchers will show that students who attend school within a mile of a data center have lower math scores than those who are farther away.

“You can rule out all other factors,” said Samantha Kane, a research associate and part of the university’s Sustainable Education Research Initiative. “It’s actually the proximity to the data center and the potential pollution coming from the data center that is having the impact on achievement and not other things about the region.”

Critics often as one way data centers put a strain on local resources. Early estimates said Project Sail would use 6 to 9 million gallons per day. Now Prologis says it would draw up to roughly 300,000 gallons a day from the Chattahoochee River, and some comparisons from 2023 show data centers use far less water than , like golf courses.

To reduce dependence on the local water supply, Project Sail would use what’s called a “closed-loop” cooling system. But there are . To keep the hardware inside from overheating, those mechanisms are “blowing hot air into the area and increasing the temperature” as much as , Owens said. If there’s already a heat wave, kids might get less recess time outside. The soaring temperatures also on the power grid as residents, businesses and schools crank up the air conditioning to stay comfortable. 

In Virginia this summer, officials in Henrico County, , asked the school system to help cut energy costs that are expected to increase by $5 million. District spokeswoman Eileen Cox said the system, with 81 schools and more than 50,000 students, already takes a “proactive approach” to conserve electricity, like setting thermostats higher and operating a four-day work week during the summer.

The state, however, just enacted a new on data centers to offset some of the decline in revenue from tax breaks. from state and local taxes also make Georgia a preferred site for the industry. At this point, how many data centers are operating or proposed in Georgia, but Arnco-Sargent isn’t the only school in the state near land eyed by developers.

Closer to Atlanta, residents in Lovejoy are petitioning against a facility that would potentially sit between Michelle Obama STEM Academy and Eddie White Middle Academy.  

The site plan envisions about 3.5 million square feet and 15 buildings of data center space on at least 400 acres, said Clayton County , who has scheduled a community meeting for this Saturday. 

The community, she said, “naturally has serious, legitimate questions about the cumulative, long-term impacts.”

Traffic concerns

Schools in the vicinity of these facilities can feel the effects even before sites are operational. An elementary school in northeast Louisiana last year to protect students from the thousands of cement trucks and 18-wheelers traveling every day to what is expected to be . There were at least three truck crashes last year, and one smashed into the school’s gate. 

For Project Sail, Prologis agreed to some road improvements as a condition for the rezoning. Sorrentino said construction trucks would be routed away from the school and that when finished, the project would “generate limited traffic.”

But families are still worried. The intersection that parents and school bus drivers navigate for drop off and pick up every day doesn’t have a traffic light. 

The school has a long history in the community. Now 70 years old, Arnco-Sargent consolidated two older schools that used to serve children from local mill villages. But in 1996, the area’s leading textile company went bankrupt, families moved away and the area, Beth said, has never prospered like other parts of Coweta County. Nearly 60% of the school’s students live in poverty. 

“These people are just trying to make a living,” she said. Compared to those who the Palm Beach project, Arnco-Sargent parents perhaps have been less outspoken. “They don’t have time to go to a meeting at 6:00 on a Tuesday. They’re working and have young kids.” 

But Beth is hopeful. At the first signature-gathering event, as residents waited to sign the petition. The organizers have nearly reached their goal of 14,000 signatures 

“I feel that this is what it took for the county to listen,” she said.

A Senate committee advanced legislation Thursday aimed at undoing the Trump administration’s efforts to split apart the U.S. Department of Education. The bill delivers the plan the biggest rebuke since Education Secretary Linda McMahon began shifting offices to other agencies last year.

The education committee’s would keep oversight of K-12 and services for students with disabilities at the department. It would also keep the Office of Postsecondary Education out of the Department of Labor and the Office of Indian Education from moving to the Department of the Interior.

The legislation leaves “landmark education programs,” like Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “at the Department of Education where Congress specifically put them and where they belong,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, who along with GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, co-sponsored the bill with Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat. 

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee, voted no on the bill, saying that he’s open to moving some programs, but opposes giving the Department of Health and Human Services responsibility for special education. That move treats “students with disabilities as patients to diagnose rather than learners to educate,” he said, adding that he doubts that any Education Department staff transferred there would be “empowered and prioritized” to do their jobs.

Despite the bipartisan support for leaving much of the department intact, nine members, all Republicans, voted against it. “Many of us have long believed that the federal footprint in education is much larger than it needs to be,” said Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Following the vote, McMahon and six other Trump cabinet members saying there are “misconceptions” about the agreements and they just need more time to prove they’ll work. They have already “demonstrated measurable results by driving stronger grant competitions, streamlining government operations and producing better outcomes for Americans,” they wrote.

Political observers have said since the beginning that the administration’s plan to eliminate the department doesn’t stand a chance of passing the Senate, and Thursday was evidence of that. The legislation, however, still needs to pass the full Senate and is a sharp contrast to the package of 10 bills the House education committee moved earlier this month formalizing the movement of most key programs out of the department. While House Republicans call the arrangements “reform,” the actions have prompted Rep. Suzanne Bonamici to launch an impeachment effort against McMahon. The Oregon Democrat says the agreements are illegal and that the Republicans’ bills are an attempt “to cover for the unlawful actions already taken.” 

Even if the House passes those 10 bills, it’s highly unlikely they would ever get votes in the Senate, said David Cleary, a principal with The Group, a Washington lobbying firm and a former Republican education staffer for the Senate.

The Senate bill, he added, might not go any further either. It’s possible, he said, that Collins and Murkowski could attach it as an amendment to the for defense spending that Republicans are trying to pass through a process known as reconciliation. But even then, it might fail, Cleary said.

During that July 15 markup in the House, Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia said that the proposals don’t do anything to fulfill McMahon’s promise to “return education to the states.”

“You’re just moving people around Washington D.C.,” he said.

On Thursday, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington pressed the department to disclose how much the moves are costing taxpayers.

The Senate bill includes her amendment requiring McMahon to provide Congress with quarterly reports on how much the department is spending to implement the agreements. The department, so far, has spent $1 million to move just one relatively small office running to the Department of Labor, and the administration is asking for an to hire more staff to help with the transition.

“If you’re proud of this deal, show us the price tag,” Murray said. “What do you have to hide?”

Murray also offered separate amendments to reverse all of the agreements, including relocating the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, but those didn’t pass the committee. Collins said she’s in favor of letting the Justice Department take over education civil rights investigations because she said OCR has failed to address anti-semitism on college campuses.

But Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat, said the move won’t improve conditions for Jewish students because the administration has downsized the civil rights workforce. 

“We are at a 12-year low in terms of the number of cases that are being resolved,” he said. DOJ is “just out of the business of trying to investigate serious instances of civil rights abuse.”

Of all the interagency agreements, placing special education within HHS has received the most attention. One advocacy group supports the change, arguing that the shift would offer families more resources when their children transition out of the K-12 system. Out of the , HHS already runs federally funded programs for adults with disabilities.

“Too many students leave school without a clear path to a meaningful career, education or training path,” Rachel Barkley, director of Able Americans, wrote in . 

But overall, have been highly unpopular. Over 700 organizations have signed saying that moving special education to HHS and civil rights to the Department of Justice undermines a “coordinated and cohesive approach” to addressing discrimination complaints. 

Shifting oversight, some advocates say, not only separates special education from OCR, but also from the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education, which McMahon transferred to the Department of Labor.

“These are education programs,” Bonamici said during the July 15 House markup. “K-12 is education; it is not job training.” 

On a recent call with reporters, led by Murray, one parent explained that when her older son was diagnosed with a disability, she immediately wondered if he would ever go to college. Both of Lanya Elsa’s sons have Usher syndrome, a genetic disease that affects hearing and vision.

Conner, now 26, graduated college and works for Alaska Airlines. Dalton, 18, graduated this year with a 4.0 GPA from Bellevue High School in Washington. She attributed their success to the Department of Education’s “specialized expertise.”

“That future was not guaranteed for them,” said Elsa, also a special education researcher and teacher. “It was made possible by families, educators, specialists, … federally funded deafblind programs and civil rights protections that believed my sons belonged.”

The (S.4689) would strengthen the federal government’s oversight of the science of reading through amendments to the , which currently provides $194 million to aid literacy instruction in 23 states. 

“Capable students are dropping out of high school simply because they were never taught to read,” said U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chairman Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. “This legislation aims to address the national literacy crisis by strengthening evidence-based literacy instruction … and empowering states, local communities and parents with more resources.”

After the bill’s 20-2 passage out of the Senate HELP Committee, it now heads to the floor for a full senate vote. Other bills, including one that would explicitly identify dyslexia as a learning disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also passed Thursday.

The READ Act closely mirrors and expands on a similar bill that unanimously passed the House of Representative’s Education Committee in March, but has not yet been taken up for a full House vote.

Both the Senate and House bill aim to define the science of reading in federal law as instruction that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness and also builds vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, oral language and writing skills. 

A report released earlier this year found nearly a third of teachers still used “discredited” methods to teach kids how to read and aren’t fully committed to the science of reading. Both bills, however, would reject the use of federal funds for other teaching methods, such as three-cueing, where students are asked to figure out unfamiliar words through context clues or pictures.

The READ Act further includes proposals for prioritizing federal support for the bottom 10% of underperforming states and shifting funding of individual literacy projects to more systematic widespread efforts like requirements for early literacy screening.

It also has language that calls for teacher preparation program audits, expands professional development opportunities and creates new requirements for states to provide more detailed annual reports with the number of students receiving intervention, the number of teachers receiving professional development and the number of districts using high-quality learning materials aligned with the science of reading if they’re receiving the grant.

Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the National Parents Union, said the bill’s passage out of committee is the result of years of advocacy from families.

“This is a bill that codifies the fact that the sky is blue,” Rodrigues said. “We’re just very excited that folks are seeing the importance of this, and we’re able to finally get [lawmakers] to show they can prioritize kids, they can be swayed based on evidence, they can actually make good decisions for kids and frankly do the right thing in what is a very difficult political climate.”

Lawmakers on Thursday also considered the (S.3010), another piece of legislation that would affect students who are learning to read.

The 21st Century Dyslexia Act proposed to add and explicitly define dyslexia as a disability covered under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — requiring schools to provide accommodations and other services needed for dyslexic students to be successful in the classroom.

Under IDEA, students with “” are protected, but Cassidy argued that making dyslexia a disability category — similar to what was done with — would “increase screening, identification and the number of students receiving appropriate accommodations.”

“When reading scores haven’t moved and 20% of readers are dyslexic — and therefore learn to read differently — we either choose or choose not to do something positive for these students,” Cassidy said. “If we’re serious about addressing the inexcusably low literacy rates, we must pass this bill.”

More than a dozen organizations, including The Reading League, National Center for Learning Disabilities and International Dyslexia Association , with concerns it would undermine support and confuse states.

In a written statement, the organizations also argued the legislation could be harmful because it used an outdated definition of dyslexia from the early 2000s. A new definition, which removed old IQ-discrepancy requirements, was from the International Dyslexia Association.

Democratic lawmakers, such as Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, brought up the challenges Thursday. 

“There are 27 states, including Indiana, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, that effectively ban the use of this definition. Congress banned the use of this definition in the 2004 version of the IDEA,” Murphy said. “When you define dyslexia as relational between intelligence and reading ability, … many students with dyslexia … are judged to have lower intelligence levels. They don’t get services because you essentially have to show that there is a substantial difference between your reading ability and your assessed level of intelligence.”

Murphy recommended to “convene a national conversation on this issue of the definition,” and for the federal government “to provide a higher level of technical assistance to states as they seek to get services out to people with disabilities,” before the bill ultimately passed 12-10.

By 2030, the Foundation pledges to foster higher levels of math achievement; an increase in the number of first-generation college-goers; significantly improved pass rates for college freshmen; and a 25 percent jump in college credits successfully transferred between institutions. The campaign’s overarching mission is to galvanize 10 million people to earn valuable academic or professional credentials over the next few decades.  

The reset comes a little over a year after the massive philanthropy, a global player in education, development, and public health, announced to its dissolution in 2045. Approximately $200 billion in assets must be dispensed across the organization’s portfolio ahead of that still-distant deadline, which will bring an end to a half-century of giving.

Central to the organization’s vision will be the integration of artificial intelligence into instruction and college advising. A recent flood of AI tools, such as tutoring chatbots, has offered some hope of a leap forward in academic performance. But growing numbers of teachers relying on that technology, and a relative absence of standards of safety or effectiveness, suggest that results could be inconsistent over the next few years.

Allan Golston, president of the Foundation’s U.S. Program, told ����Ӱ�� that his aspiration was to bring together educators and innovators to generate guidance on the best uses of AI and move the field closer to something like quality control.

“We’re concerned about the proliferation of tools out there, where teachers and school leaders and district leaders don’t have the information they need to discern which ones to use or not to use,” said Golston.

In the spring of 2024, roughly one-third of teachers said that they’d employed AI in their work at least once. A year later, that proportion had almost doubled. Yet in the same Gallup survey that reported the latter figure, 68 percent of respondents said they’d received no training to proceed, and just 19 percent were employed at schools with a formal AI policy. Last July, the U.S. Department of Education published outlining responsible uses for AI, including the development of tutoring applications.

While much of the public attention around AI has been directed toward products accessed by students — which depend, in most cases, on children’s willingness to actually participate — the Gates announcement specifically mentions teacher-facing functions intended to help individualize instruction to learners at different levels of understanding.

Golston cited as an example the , developed by the company Kiddom and piloted among roughly 180 teachers in New York City. Using short quizzes administered at the end of the school day, Atlas provided regular status reports on each student’s grasp of different math concepts; compared with demographically similar peers learning the same curriculum, middle schoolers using the program on the tests over time.

While the timely data was important, Golston argued that there was additional value in simplifying teachers’ jobs: Instead of having to toggle between their core curricula, supplemental learning materials, and a separate assessment interface, they could access all of it through one source.

“The burden of trying to make meaning out of all those inputs — which are critical to providing a quality education — rests on the teacher right now,” he said. “We think it’s possible to have AI do that behind the scenes and give teachers the information they need to be outstanding teachers for every single student.” 

AI advisors

Boosting math performance has been the centerpiece of the Gates Foundation’s K–12 strategy since its leaders made a $1.1 billion investment in curriculum development and teacher training in 2022. That priority was restated in the organization’s announcement Wednesday, which proposed to substantially increase the number of pupils completing Algebra 1 by the ninth grade.

Algebra has been an object of focus for over a decade in the world of math education, seen as a gateway to the advanced skills needed for a career in STEM fields. Other Gates commitments also focused on what the organization characterized as vital pivot points where students often find themselves at risk of falling behind.

One is the deployment of AI assistance to college advisors — especially those in comparatively low-capacity high schools, where some are charged with advising 400 or more children each year. High schoolers who don’t enjoy access to advisors or guidance counselors may be more likely to struggle with some of the procedural steps necessary to enroll in college.

New AI agents could help keep track of which students have completed applications or filled out FAFSA forms, allowing humans to offer more personal services and perspective, Golston said. That may mean prodding an admitted student to buy their textbooks, or encouraging an academically high-performing applicant to pursue dual-enrollment courses that earn college credit.

Carly Robinson, a Stanford University researcher whose work touches on both AI and the bonds between students and educators, agreed that easing the paperwork burden might allow advisors to focus on “the parts of the job that actually benefits from a human relationship.”

“A huge share of their time goes to red tape rather than actually working with kids,” Robinson wrote in an email. “If AI can absorb that logistical load, you’re not replacing the counselor. You’re directing them to be able to do more of the important work with students.”

The Foundation’s other targets — including a redesign of first-year college classes to reduce the number of freshmen withdrawing from STEM coursework, and steps to facilitate the transfer of college credits — also clearly reflect “high-leverage areas where effective interventions can ripple out to millions of students,” Robinson continued.

In a notable development, the updated blueprint places an institutional emphasis firmly on secondary and post-secondary success, with an ultimate ambition of doubling the rate of growth in 18–34-year-olds who such as a college degree or professional license. While the Foundation has spent widely since the late 1990s, its most publicized education interventions have tended to focus on the K–12 sphere, from an early push for to subsequent efforts around teacher evaluation systems and the .

Golston, who will be leaving his position at the end of August, said the organization’s strategic shift did not portend a retreat from younger students and that preparing middle and high schoolers for Algebra necessitated the development of rigorous and complementary math curricula from kindergarten onward. 

What role artificial intelligence may play in that endeavor, if any, is unknowable. Acknowledging the incredible pace of evolution in frontier technology, Golston noted that the next few years could uncover entirely new applications for AI inside and outside the classroom.

“That might be tutoring in Calculus 1, if a student needs help at 10 p.m. when they’re studying and there’s no teacher or teaching assistant available,” he said. “It can also help students who have credits from across multiple systems to understand how those credits come together to get them on the path to a degree.”

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

But unlike other states with millions of eligible students, like Texas, Florida and New York, California hasn’t opted into the new Treasury Department program, and so far, there’s no sign it will. 

That’s one takeaway from by advocates showing the number of students in each state who would qualify for the funding under the Education Freedom Tax Credit. Overall, 51.7 million children in public, private and charter schools could potentially receive a taxpayer-funded scholarship, according to the analysis from the American Federation for Children, the leading advocacy group behind the legislation. Past estimates have shown how much scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs, might each year and what the tax credit might cost the federal government in . But author Patrick Graff, a senior fellow at the organization, said it was important to look at the program from another angle. 

“Who are the kids that would actually benefit from these programs, and who are the families that would receive services that they otherwise wouldn’t receive?” he asked. Founded by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the federation has historically championed private school choice. 

But with public school students able to receive funds for tutoring and other supplemental programs, Graff expects district superintendents “especially in states where there are going to be budget crunches to strongly call on leaders” to participate, if not next year, then in 2028.

To calculate the number of eligible students, Graff used Census Bureau estimates and survey data. K-12 students qualify if their household income doesn’t exceed 300% of the area median income. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, that’s almost $500,000. In Perry County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in the nation, the family income limit would be $125,500. 

The report also notes that close to 800,000 homeschooled students would be left out of the program even though they meet family income requirements. Under current guidance, those children would only be eligible if their states classify homeschoolers as private school students. Unless the Treasury Department provides further clarification on the issue, that means some homeschoolers who use microschools would also be excluded. 

‘Complete mystery’

So far, 31 states have opted in by submitting paperwork with the IRS or indicating that they will. New York and Colorado are the only two Democratic-led states that plan to participate.

In California, school choice advocates are frustrated. 

“It’s a complete mystery why Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn’t made the easiest no-brainer decision and opted into the program already,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of the conservative California Policy Center and a former Republican candidate for state superintendent.

But the governor, who President Donald Trump and criticizes his policies, has been silent on the issue. A spokeswoman for the governor declined to comment about the program. 

Congressman Kevin Kiley, an independent from the Sacramento area, Newsom to opt in before he leaves office in January. A state legislator, Republican Assemblyman Josh Hoover has also introduced encouraging the governor to participate. 

Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary in the Biden administration, is leading in to succeed Newsom, but his focuses on early-childhood education and lowering class sizes. Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate, and would be more likely to opt into the tax credit.

‘Benefits for public schools’

Starting next year, the program, also known as the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, allows taxpayers who donate up to $1,700 annually to a nonprofit SGO to deduct that same amount from what they owe in taxes. States will have to submit a list of approved SGOs, and according to , won’t be able to set additional requirements on those organizations, like only approving nonprofits that intend to serve students in public or private schools.

To help prepare district leaders, AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and Education Resource Strategies launched a last week. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and outspoken critic of publicly funded vouchers, said the guidance will help districts and nonprofits that intend to serve public school students catch up with what has traditionally been a private sector model.

“There’s nothing like this with respect to the benefits for public schools,” said Cowen, who doesn’t want districts to miss out on new funding. His views on the program changed when the final version of the law, part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, made participation optional and limited what donors could contribute. “I think public school students are going to be by far the biggest beneficiaries.” 

By early next year, he expects the number of states opting in to reach 40, but he doesn’t think the American Federation for Children’s analysis will prompt any action from undecided governors. 

In fact, he thinks Democrats are turned off by Tommy Schultz, CEO of the federation, for opting in over from the teachers unions and Education Secretary Linda McMahon promoting the program. In June, she participated in aimed at getting Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro to sign up.

On one hand, governors “understand there’s substantial revenue for public schools involved in this,” Cowen said. But the same Trump administration, he added, in Minnesota earlier this year and is from California and Minnesota as it conducts a review. “It’s really hard for them to look at the program and say ‘Well, this is a good faith effort.’ ”

In court documents, the administration has also clean energy grants to states that didn’t vote for Trump in 2024. Those larger political issues are getting in the way, Cowen said. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said she won’t opt into the tax credit program because she the administration, and recently called it a “tax scheme” that would benefit private schools.

Critics, like the left-leaning Century Foundation, argue that the new source of funds will support private and religious schools that LGBTQ students and those with disabilities. As the number of private schools increases in anticipation of the new program, students will likely be able to use the scholarships at schools that receive . 

In a , Jack Schneider, director of the Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and journalist Jennifer Berkshire called the program “a Trojan horse designed to bring the chaos of privatization into Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts,” and warned Gov. Maura Healey against it.

Taking the opposite view, Charles Barone, senior director of the National Parents Union’s Center for Innovation, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill to opt in, calling the policy “a potential tool for expanding opportunity within the public system.”

Because taxpayers can donate to SGOs in any state, Graff, with the American Federation for Children, predicts that it will be especially hard for states in the northeast to resist.

“They’re pretty quickly being surrounded by states that are signaling their intent to opt in,” he said. In addition to New York, New Hampshire will participate. “That’s giving a few of those other governors a little more permission to step out on this issue.” 

In AP Chemistry, the share of students scoring a 3, 4 or 5 (generally interpreted as a passing grade on , which are scored on a 1-5 scale) increased from 54% in 2022 to 75.1% in 2023. In AP United States Government and Politics, that proportion grew even more, from 49.2% to 73% from year to year. By , roughly 100,000 more students hit the passing threshold on AP U.S. History in 2024 than in 2023.

The change came — the nonprofit education organization that owns and administers both AP and the SAT — to adopt a new scoring methodology intended to tamp down volatility in results. The organization’s leadership said the new procedures brought their standards into better alignment with those of universities themselves, making the AP a more reliable indicator of students’ readiness for college-level work. Since scores of 3 or above are generally accepted for college credit, there needs to be a close equivalency between high ratings on the 42 AP subject tests and what is expected by postsecondary institutions.

Yet some critics say the surge in higher marks shows that the tests have simply been made easier to pass. The most prominent, Harvard political scientist Paul Peterson, pointedly accused the College Board of “dumbing down” its hallmark products in a recent of published by the journal Education Next. 

Peterson said the shift might be seen as a reflection of grade inflation at the college level, adding that, after a long period , it could be seen as “appropriate” for a test taker to now earn a 4 with a performance that previously would have merited a 3. 

On the other hand, he faulted the College Board for stirring confusion over what American students actually know — and for not being more forthcoming about changes in their methods.

“The College Board wants to say, ‘We haven’t changed our standards, and we’re the one reliable benchmark out there that everyone should pay attention to,’ ” Peterson told ����Ӱ��. “But at the same time, they’ve modified the way they score the material.”

Trevor Packer, the College Board’s senior vice president for AP and instruction, rejected that characterization. Passing rates have risen precipitously because the old grading process, reliant on small panels of college instructors, dramatically understated high schoolers’ actual readiness for college, he said.

For a number of tests, Packer wrote in an email, “prior panels had established artificially stringent standards that produced pass rates well below the historical AP standard.” 

Much could depend on whether states and colleges accept that explanation. Dozens of states to sit for the exams, and about the same number for passing scores. What’s more, governors and local education leaders and participation rates as in their states.

Tom Loveless, a veteran K–12 researcher who formerly headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the upsurge in AP grading is particularly incongruous with the results of virtually all other standardized testing from the last half-decade, which have shown significant drops in academic achievement coinciding with the emergence of COVID-19 and subsequent closure of schools to in-person learning. 

“They started this [change in scoring] during the pandemic, and no one in their right mind thinks the scores went up during the pandemic,” Loveless said. “Yet the AP tests are defying what every other test is telling us.” 

The ‘Great Recalibration’

Peterson’s analysis, based on the College Board’s scores on each subject test, shows that the phenomenon produced startling effects immediately.

Student grades across a selection of AP’s — Biology, Chemistry, English Language and Composition, English Literature and Composition, Human Geography, U.S. Government and Politics, U.S. History, World History and Psychology — leapt at both the middle and top of the distribution. 

The fraction of students rated 3 or higher in those subjects rose from 52% in 2021 to 71% in 2025, while those scoring a 4 or a 5 ( as as either “well-qualified” or “extremely well-qualified” for college coursework) increased from 28% to 45%. The progress was not obviously the consequence of a more selective pool of participants; in fact, the total number of test takers grew by over 10% during those four years.

The sharp ascent accompanied called “evidence-based standard setting,” which incorporate input from hundreds of college faculty members about the performance expectations for their undergraduate courses. In the aftermath of that changeover, far more high schoolers were deemed capable of passing such courses than in years prior.

Packer, who has led AP for over 20 years, vigorously defends what critics call as a necessary step to smooth out inconsistencies in scoring that had plagued the program. In , he said the boost to scores under EBSS was actually much smaller than the annual changes generated by the earlier system — citing as an example a group of biology teachers whose 2013 update “subjectively reduced” the number of students earning 5s by approximately three-quarters.

That example comes with a caveat, however: Far from a sudden jolt, the 2013 compression in biology grades followed an overhaul to the course curriculum that was previewed . At the time, that university professors considered the new exam “the gold standard of college-level Biology.”

In an email, College Board spokeswoman Sara Sympson said that the biology panel had erred in aligning their cut scores (the minimum score to attain a given mark, such as a 3) with the course’s new content and expectations.

“The redesigned course was excellent; the standard-setting was not,” Sympson wrote.

Perhaps more pressing is the fact that little of the College Board’s recent data support claims of wild swings in student performance from one year to the next. Of the nine tests that were initially converted to the EBSS rubric, most had seen only modest scoring increases or decreases in the two decades before the pandemic. 

Between 2002 and 2019, the biggest year-over-year change in the share of students earning a passing grade on any of those tests was 12.3 percentage points (in AP Biology, after the 2013 redesign). By comparison, in the first year after EBSS’s adoption, the proportion of students who scored a 3 or above grew by an average of 17.4 points across all of the nine subjects. In virtually every case, the new system quickly lifted the number of passing grades to their highest level in recent memory. 

One noticeable example of scoring inconsistency occurred in 2022, when the pass rate for AP English Literature and Composition number skyrocketed by 34 points over the previous year. In an email, the College Board listed that explosion as an impetus to move away from its existing scoring process. 

Its description was somewhat ambiguous, however, specifying that the increase did not result from “the full EBSS methodology.” 

When publicizing the increase four years ago, to both the efforts of AP teachers and “an accumulation of powerful data from colleges” — wording that strongly echoes of the EBSS process, which it says “collects input from hundreds of experts and assembles fine-grained student performance data for analysis.” This suggests the evolution toward new criteria may have already been underway that year, at least in part. 

A question of rigor

Packer has repeatedly explained the changes in a number of venues — including by authoring in which he dismissed as “entirely false” the notion that the rigor of AP exams has been diluted.

In doing so, he addressed a secondary question that is decidedly murkier than the issue of cut scores. Over the last decade, some students and educators have questioned whether alterations to content and formatting may also be driving the growth in high scores. 

Most prominent among them is John Moscatiello, a career teacher and tutor who founded his own . In with Peterson in May, he said that the English Literature and Composition test now features shorter, simpler literary passages for student response than were common in the early 2000s. A of the items’ textual complexity reveals a substantial deterioration in difficulty over the last two decades, Moscatiello has argued. 

Tweaks at the margins may subtly impact how high schoolers experience the assessments. The College Board (a slight deduction in points for wrong answers, as opposed to leaving a question blank) in 2010, added in the U.S. History exam’s analytical reasoning section and recently in its virtual testing platforms.

Still, the cumulative effect of these shifts is difficult to know with any precision. 

Two years ago, when the AP history exams lowered the citation quota for their document-based questions (i.e., the number of sources that students are asked to reference in response to an essay prompt) from six to four, Steve Heimler that the decision would make a high score “much easier” to achieve. 

The Georgia-based tutor, who once specialized in homeschool instruction, on YouTube and TikTok during the COVID era by dispensing tips to nudge his viewers’ point total upward. Many of his almost 1.3 million subscribers laud Heimler for guiding them to a better score, but notwithstanding the occasional adjustment from the College Board, Heimler believes that AP’s materials have lost little of their academic challenge.

In an email, he said he found it unlikely that the organization would deliberately water down their own assessments.

“I suppose it’s possible that they have modified their equations to result in higher scores, but I’m skeptical of that explanation since colleges rely on certain standards of rigor in AP exams in order to award credit,” Heimler wrote. “I assume they’d soon dissolve their partnerships with the College Board if it was clear that the scores were artificially inflated.”

Calls for greater transparency

Some colleges already curtail students’ ability to substitute their AP scores for credit.

A from the Progressive Policy Institute found that, among the 153 most competitive postsecondary institutions in the United States, half restrict the amount of AP credits students can receive. Over 80% limit the applicability of AP credits in at least one subject area, and 10 schools — among them Dartmouth, Brown and CalTech — do not accept AP credit at all.

But those are fairly exceptional cases, and across the country, the vast majority of colleges honor AP scores of 3 or above. In part, this is because they are made to: Thirty-seven states actually require their public universities to award AP credits. 

Many of the same states for economically disadvantaged students to sit for the tests, which come with a $99 fee. Their investment in the program therefore imposes multiple demands on local taxpayers — both of which could become more tenuous if lawmakers and education leaders come to believe that the academic value of the exams and courses have been debased.

Richard P. Phelps, a longtime observer of K–12 policy and the founder of the , has previously criticized the College Board’s financial and organizational structure. But in an email, he was sparing in his criticism of the so-called Great Recalibration, which he called a reasonable effort to make sure that AP coursework did not hold high school juniors to a loftier standard than college freshmen. 

Where Phelps did critique the Advanced Placement program was in its aggressive approach to public affairs. The College Board’s , he wrote, has “successfully constrained many public colleges’ freedom to adjust their course credit policies.” 

“They must award course credit for certain AP exam scores even if they no longer believe those scores merit it,” Phelps lamented. 

The prestige of AP clearly maintains a hold on the public, as evidenced by the growing numbers of students enrolling in its courses. Over 1.3 million pupils took at least one AP test in 2025, and about 80% of public high schoolers attend a school in which five or more AP courses are available. And political leaders in states like and have recently hailed “record-high” AP scores and course participation rates. 

But calls for transparency will likely grow. One early sign of skepticism emerged in February, when the boards overseeing admissions and academic policy throughout the University of California noted several concerns about AP scoring in to the system’s academic senate. The authors recommended that UC faculty carefully study “specific parameters … within EBSS that may be responsible for a sharp increase in pass rates” and, if needed, reconsider their criteria for admissions, course placement and course credit.

To date, the College Board has only released addressing the controversy. More technical reports, including psychometric analyses from EBSS’s originators and historical scoring data from different AP iterations, haven’t been made public.

Loveless said that the College Board likely had defensible reasons for rolling out the policies that began in 2022. But what he called the absence of clarity in the organization’s actions “raised suspicion,” he continued.

“They probably have data to justify a lot of what’s going on. The problem is they just haven’t released it,” he said. “They need to do a lot more explaining of what they did.”

For decades, he said, Washington politicians gave young people “nothing but debt,” he said.

“The government is finally giving money back to our children,” he told the crowd at Wheeler High School in Cobb County, inviting families who have opened accounts to join him on stage with their children.

The event brought together several cabinet members who joined the president in urging families to open Trump Accounts. Before Trump took the stage in the school’s large gymnasium, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Treasurer Brandon Beach, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Kelly Loeffler, a former Georgia senator who now serves as head of the Small Business Administration, all described the child savings policy as transformational.

McMahon called it “one of the largest generational investments in upward mobility that our country has ever made.”

Under the savings initiative, which went live July 4, the administration will give $1,000 deposits to children born during the president’s term if their parents open a Trump Account. Over seven million children are already enrolled in the program, Bessent told the crowd. 

The child savings account program was included in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Parents and others can contribute to the tax-deferred account until the child turns 18 and converts it into a traditional individual retirement account. 

Philanthropists Michael and Susan Dell expanded on the government’s contribution last year when they to provide an extra $250 for 25 million children 10 and under living in ZIP codes with median incomes below $150,000. Other donors have since made contributions, some for specific states. 

Chris Woods, a financial adviser and Cobb district parent, told ����Ӱ�� that he thinks the policy is a wise move.

“There are a lot of ways to save for children’s college and their future,” he said. “The difference is you’re getting funds from the government.”

But Eli Speer, a recent high school graduate and Trump supporter, said the program isn’t “fiscally conservative.”

“We have to prioritize shaving down the debt, cutting red tape,” he said.

The agreed, calling Trump Accounts a “government welfare program” that further complicates the tax system and might not be a better investment opportunity than existing options. Others question whether the families who would benefit the most from the program are even aware of it. An showed that higher-earning adults and those who already have at least $5,000 in savings were more likely to know about the program.

Bessent, however, pushed back on criticisms that the policy will favor wealthier families. Of the families who have already opened accounts for their kids, he said 86% earn household incomes of $200,000 or less.

“Trump Accounts are reaching the very people they were designed to serve,” he said. “President Trump is creating assets for the American people, not more debt and broken promises.”

Despite the strong turnout Wednesday, Cobb County is not actually “Trump country,” as several speakers called it. Trump lost Cobb all three times he ran for president. The district, however, is led by a majority Republican board. 

“The school board is the last bastion of Republican control that Cobb County has,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, a co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a watchdog group that this week about whether district resources were being used to support what was in part a political rally. District staff handled several logistics for the event, organizing refreshments and helping with security.

“It clearly wasn’t to advocate for public education, our students or to share all that’s great about our schools,” she said. “It was to serve the Republican Party.”

Several students also gathered in a Kroger parking lot a few miles away to protest the president coming to one of their high schools.

Some of Trump’s policies haven’t been popular at the school, where the majority of students are Black and Hispanic. In late January, Wheeler students were among the hundreds across Cobb County schools who walked out to protest immigration enforcement activities nationwide.

“I don’t love the fact that we are using a public school to promote a partisan political agenda,” said Edward Kim, a Wheeler graduate.

Multiple candidates running for statewide office had a chance to make campaign pitches Wednesday.

State Sen. Brian Strickland, candidate for attorney general, said families are relocating to Georgia to leave blue states that supported former President Biden’s agenda.

“In November, we have a big decision to make,” he said. “We have to get this right.” 

Trump also told the attendees to vote for Rep. Mike Collins, who didn’t attend because of votes in Congress. Collins will face Democratic Sen. John Ossoff in November. Ossoff, he said, will “bankrupt your families.”

Rick Jackson, GOP candidate for governor also greeted the crowd and joined Trump on the platform. While he touted his expertise as a businessman as the solution to Democrats’ “affordability crisis,” he also spoke at length about Trump Accounts.

As someone who grew up in foster care, he applauded first lady Melania Trump’s initiative, in which states can open accounts for children in foster care.

“This is more than just an account. It’s a message,” he said about Trump Accounts. “You are seen, and you are valued.” 

Many attendees said they just wanted a chance to see a sitting president in person. Melissa Moeller, who has two children in Cobb schools, learned about it because her 10^th grader’s marching band practice was relocated from Wheeler because of the event. 

It didn’t bother her, however, that the school’s landscaping was spruced up for the official visit.

“They’re doing that anyway. With the president coming anywhere, I’m ok with a little pomp and circumstance,” she said. “Will it ever happen again? I don’t know.”

As Texas schools face at least $600 million in federal funding cuts, multiple mental health programs, particularly those implemented in response to the pandemic and mass shootings, are at risk of losing funding.

School programs focused on chronic absenteeism, mental wellness and crisis services that were created in response to the Uvalde school shooting, as well as social workers and counselors, could all be on the chopping block.

Texas schools rely heavily on federal funding to support mental health programs. Data shows that two federal programs that are of being cut or account for 86% of the school mental health funding for more than 2,500 campuses statewide, according to Mental Health America of Greater Houston.

Bracing also for the impending expiration of COVID-19 relief funding, school districts and advocacy groups this legislative session had pushed for more money through a dedicated funding source for school mental health, but lawmakers did not approve it.

Currently, such funding is combined with school safety in the so-called school safety allotment in the state school funding formula, and school districts tend to prioritize the allotment on school security.

“I don’t want to get into a situation where I am asking, do I hire a police officer or do I hire a counselor? I want them both,” said Adrian Johnson, superintendent for the Hearne school district.

The funding cuts and lack of progress on getting a statewide dedicated funding stream for mental health comes at a time when . The special legislative session starts July 21, but Gov. Greg Abbott has not assigned school mental health as a directive to lawmakers.

The funding crisis

Created in response to Uvalde, the federal helps fund two grant programs in Texas, the and the . The former implements mental health training and support in 60 high-needs districts and the latter helps 98 public school districts with case management tools that identify struggling students, as well as mental health personnel.

Almost three years later, the Safer Communities Act is losing over $1 billion spread across the country. Funds that were supposed to last until 2027 are expected to dry up by the end of this year.

This cut puts programs like , which deploys evidence-based mental health resources in three Central Texas school districts, at risk. The state homed in on those school districts because of their higher rates of community impacts from the pandemic and high rates of population growth.

The cut to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is just one in a series of proposed changes to federal funding for public education that will impact how mental health is addressed in schools.

According to an analysis from the , the freezing of five other federal programs that support public schools are expected to result in the withholding of approximately $600 million from Texas, more than 16.1% of the state’s federal K-12 funding. These funds have been used for a variety of services such as English language instruction and literacy, but also after school programs and summer programs focused on mental wellness.

Medicaid and CHIP are also facing cuts in the federal spending bill passed earlier this month, and both provide each year to school districts and local mental health authorities, enabling them to hire and retain mental health providers, offer preventive mental health screenings, and support students with disabilities using specialized services.

Separately, COVID-19 funds are set to expire this year , forcing some smaller schools to lay off staff or find alternative ways to keep the social workers and counselors hired during the pandemic.

The confluence of these cuts come as Texas lawmakers missed opportunities to properly fund school mental health this year.

During the legislative session that ended in June, Texas lawmakers agreed on a robust that adds $8.5 billion to the state’s public school system. However, most of it has been earmarked for teacher pay; with roughly $250 million being set aside for school support staff and mental health support staff are not necessarily included in the pay raise.

Over 70% of the schools that sustainable funding for school-based mental health staff and professional school counselors was the main barrier to having adequate resources to address student mental health needs, according to a survey of 2,690 schools by the .

“We are hopeful that this will translate to more dollars for mental health. But without any legislation currently earmarking those dollars, that is not a guarantee,” Rebecca Fowler, the director of public policy and government affairs at Mental Health America of Greater Houston, said about the new school funding.

In 2023, wrote to the Texas Legislature, urging the creation and funding of a separate “student mental health allotment” because programs were not reaching enough students.

Only 13% of schools used the school safety allotment for mental health supports, according to the

by Rep. , D-Dallas, attempted to secure dedicated mental health funds, but it did not pass this year.

“Uncertainty around different funding streams makes it hard to navigate these conversations about the future of mental health and young people,” said Kate Murphy, director of child protection policy for Texans Care for Children.

Changing conversations

After the devastating school shootings in Uvalde and Santa Fe compelled lawmakers to prioritize mental health, such support has waned in the last few years. Mental health advocates have pointed the blame at the culture war happening in the Capitol, namely that lawmakers have suggested mental health programs in schools are diagnosing children and reinforcing LGBTQ identities without parental consent.

For example, by Sen. , R-Brenham, would have required parental consent for any psychological or psychiatric examination, testing, or treatment conducted on a student by a school employee. The bill had eight senators as sponsors, and although it died in the less conservative Texas House, it demonstrates the shift in the legislative conversation surrounding school mental health.

“I don’t think there is a uniform understanding of the role of behavioral health in public schools. Who should be providing support? When should support happen?” Seth Winick, director of the , said.

Johnson, the Hearne superintendent, said he understands parents’ concerns but says schools are the best place to address mental health issues for Texas families who might not have the income or time to schedule mental health services. Until a better solution is proposed, school mental health needs support, he said.

“We have students pre-K through 12 sitting in the school system for 180 plus days a year, and we should take advantage of that by not only giving them a strong educational foundation but a strong mental health foundation,” he said.

What does the future hold?

Without federal funding support, school districts will have to get creative in addressing mental wellness within their walls.

Johnson said his school district is focusing on partnerships not only with local mental health authorities and health agencies, but also with other school districts. He said his district shares staff and cut costs by joining in on a special education cooperative with four other districts and can be modeled in other parts of the state.

“We have 700 kids, a neighboring district might have 600 kids, and another district may have 150; we have to learn to work together to help lower some of the costs during these budget cuts.”

Collaboration is necessary, Johnson said, but even that is at risk under current funding restrictions.

Some schools are unable to expand partnerships with programs like , which directly works with students to provide mental health support and address chronic absenteeism.

“CIS is currently serving two campuses in our district, but we would definitely expand to have CIS serve all of our campuses if we had a state funded allotment that would help the district provide the matching funding that is needed to partner with CIS,” Chris Smith, superintendent of the Brownfield school district, said. “We just don’t have the funding available.”

Rural and smaller schools also face laying off social workers and psychologists hired during the pandemic and eliminating programs to ensure they can retain teachers through raises instead.

“We are adopting a budget this year that’s probably going to have a $2 million deficit. We are dedicated to making sure mental health services are available and luckily have been able to sustain through partnerships, but it has been tough times with the economy, and schools are struggling to keep up with costs,” Smith said.

The endless loop of putting mental health on the back burner until tragedy hits is unsustainable, according to education advocates, who say it’s time for funding dedicated to school mental health.

“I would like to have funding similar to what they said with police officers. You have to have a police officer on every campus, but that costs money yearly, and they provide. We should be doing the same with social workers and psychologists,” Johnson said.

This first appeared on .

But now, some offices that handled the hundreds of inquiries that pour in each month — from parents, reporters and watchdog groups — have either been eliminated or have no remaining employees, according to a by the agency’s inspector general.

A FOIA group within the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, for example, had eight employees before President Donald Trump took charge in January 2025. After staff reductions, none remained, the report showed. 

Those cuts have further jammed an already clogged system. A review by ����Ӱ�� of publicly available shows that out of the more than 4,900 requests the Education Department has received since February 2025, only 3% have been granted in full or in part as of last week. The department doesn’t carry the largest backlog of requests, according to . But its own annual , released earlier this year, said it was unable to reduce a backlog that makes up over 86% of pending requests. 

Officials blamed their lack of responsiveness on an increase in requests, the department’s downsizing and the 43-day government shutdown last year. Experts, including a former FOIA official, say the administration’s push to eliminate the department has especially hampered the public’s ability to understand the inner workings of the agency.

“The people who remain at the Department of Education are either not subject matter experts in the relevant issue or they’re massively overworked trying desperately to do the jobs of all of their departed coworkers,” said Jill Siegelbaum, who spent 15 years as the agency’s senior FOIA attorney. 

With the department offloading key offices to other agencies, hunting down records could become even more difficult, she said. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will take responsibility for special education, has also .

“No one is going to have any idea what agency has which responsive records,” said Siegelbaum, now a partner with Sligo Law Group. “All of this adds up to a nightmare for FOIA requesters.”

Those include parents whose children aren’t receiving the services they’re entitled to, news outlets covering fast-moving stories in their local schools and student loan borrowers trying to make sense of what they owe after all the changes to in recent years.

The requests frequently become .

In one example, a reporter from the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts asked for civil rights data from the local school district in 2021. The request is still pending, but the reporter has since moved on, according to the outlet’s executive editor.

In early 2023, Callie Oettinger, a special education advocate in Virginia, requested documents from the Office for Civil Rights related to its oversight of Fairfax County Public Schools during the pandemic. After an OCR investigation, to make up for the services students with disabilities didn’t receive during school closures. 

Oettinger wanted to ensure OCR was holding the district accountable, but two years later, she hasn’t received a response. She recently talked to a mom who is still trying to get services for her child as part of that agreement. 

“We’re six years past COVID,” she said. “Kids needed help years ago.” 

In March 2025, ����Ӱ�� asked for submissions to the department’s short-lived tip line for examples of diversity, equity and inclusion activity in public schools. The department had to shut down the portal as the result of litigation, but the request is still pending. In all, ����Ӱ�� has submitted 20 requests since the current administration took office. Seventeen have not been processed and three cases were closed because they were duplicates. A separate request to the Office of Inspector General was fulfilled within four weeks. 

FOIA wasn’t meant for “historical purposes,” said Jon Maier, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a public disclosure statute that’s designed to get information into the hands of the American public.” 

The left-leaning watchdog group sued seeking records from the Department of Government Efficiency, which oversaw widespread layoffs and cancelled contracts. Requesters can sue if they haven’t received a response in 20-30 days. The department’s current wait time for simple requests , but many take much longer.

“That these preposterous delays are acceptable goes directly against the purpose of FOIA,” Maier said. The backlog is only likely to grow. “When the government isn’t telling you what it’s doing there will only be more FOIA requests.”

‘Ignoring FOIA officers’

In addition to tallying the staff cuts, the inspector general’s office hoped to evaluate the agency’s ability to process requests. But the department refused to turn over all the information its internal watchdog requested and declined to “permit unrestricted access to its staff,” said Catherine Grant, a spokeswoman for that office. “We were unable to make definitive determinations in several areas, including major activities,” like FOIA requests.

In the largest share of open cases, roughly 41% of them, a FOIA officer has sent the request to the office that is likely to have the records, but is still waiting, often months later, for a response.

Lauren Harper, an expert on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wasn’t surprised. 

If the department is “stonewalling the inspector general’s office, it’s an extremely safe bet that they’re absolutely ignoring FOIA officers who are asking for information,” she said. 

The logs also show:

• Since February 2025, 37% of FOIA requests have been closed, but the majority of those were either withdrawn or were invalid requests to begin with. 

• During the current Trump administration’s first 16 months in office, the department received an average of 295 requests per month. During that same window under President Joe Biden, from February 2021 through May 2022, the department received an average of 185 requests a month. 

• Many requests submitted during the Biden administration and even Trump’s first term still haven’t been processed. For fiscal year 2023, 23% are stuck in that “request for docs sent” category. 

‘Find funding elsewhere’

Problems with the federal government’s FOIA system are longstanding. The law, which turned 60 on July 4, has always been “underfunded,” Siegelbaum said. 

“Congress doesn’t appropriate funding for FOIA, so you have to find funding elsewhere,” she said. “Sometimes it has to struggle to get attention, to get the appropriate resources, both in terms of money and staff at the Department of Education.”

Comparing the handling of FOIA requests from one administration to the next isn’t a simple math problem. Each new team inherits requests that were still pending when the department changed hands. Clearing out the backlog was a priority for Mitchell Zais, former deputy education secretary during Trump’s first term.

“As I recall, we were able to hire some temporary staff,” he said in an email. “As a consequence, we made significant progress, but not as much as I would have liked.”

In 2024, the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, where Zais is a board member, analyzed the department’s FOIA logs, concluding that the response rate was higher during the first three years of Trump’s first term than during the same period under Biden, 67% to 48%. 

The analysis also showed that during Zais’ tenure, the department was quicker to respond to liberal groups it disagreed with, like American Oversight and the Center for American Progress, than the Biden administration was to conservative advocates and think tanks, including Parents Defending Education and the America First Policy Institute.

Zais suggested that while he was there, some requests “were made with an eye toward harassing the department … rather than generally seeking information that could be legitimately used for any positive purpose.”

But Harper, at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, that whether or liberal groups are flooding the system, the onus is on the government to respond in a more timely manner. The current administration, she said, has been especially hostile toward releasing information, and staff working on FOIA requests have been among the first to go at agencies the administration is “interested in eliminating.”

Last year, the administration put in the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave before shutting down the agency entirely. Trump has the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which for releasing a memo about .

In addition to mass firings at the Education Department, active litigation contributes to the growing backlog of requests, officials said. According to its FOIA report, the agency is facing 57 FOIA-related lawsuits, which have “negatively impacted the department’s ability to keep pace with other requests.” Last week, civil rights groups filed two more FOIA-related lawsuits, one about the department’s failure to release data on cases and another seeking .

ProPublica in February for failing to release information including civil rights investigations. In April, the to the complaint, acknowledged it received the requests and said its search for records is “ongoing.”

‘Proactively’ posting records

Harper gave the department credit for posting up-to-date FOIA logs, something other agencies haven’t always done. The department, however, between December 2023 and mid-2025.

Officials reported that they’ve taken actions to improve turnaround times on requests, like training staff across the agency and “proactively” posting frequently requested records. These include student loan data and a list of involving accusations of antisemitism.

As McMahon moves forward with splitting up the department, spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse said the agency is “complying with all applicable laws and looks forward to restoring excellence in American education through these critical partnerships.”

, agencies that are “reorganizing, terminating or transferring offices or functions” have to work with the National Archives and Records Administration and the receiving agency to ensure records don’t get lost in the process. 

“This all requires a lot of communication,” Harper said. She emphasized that the National Archives hasn’t been spared from or . “Restructuring has not happened on the scale that it’s happening now. It’s truly a perfect storm.”

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.”