Kids were grieving for the first time – more than Baldwin Union Free School District counselors, teachers and administrators had ever realized. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen — or maybe we weren’t attuned to before — the number of students who have lost a parent for one reason or another,” said Shari Camhi, the New York district’s superintendent, reflecting on the 2023-24 school year. ”We see a lot of cancer. We’ve seen just a lot of death.”

Baldwin is far from the only district tasked with supporting grieving students. As of spring 2022, nearly 250,000 children across the country lost a parent or caregiver to COVID alone.  

Perhaps, as Camhi conceded, it’s always been like this. Perhaps kids have been grieving quietly. And now, only after concerted efforts to boost family connections and prioritize students’ emotional well-being, were they opening up. 

Now, Baldwin was ready to support them: By the time counselors flagged the stories they’d been hearing from kids, a new, free wellness center had just been built – the home base from where they could launch bereavement groups. 

Their creation illuminates the thread that unites Baldwin’s wellness initiatives: family relationships. Camhi says the approach is old-school, a throwback to a time decades ago, before cell phones pushed kids into introversion and became a hotbed for bullying, when neighbors really knew each other and what was going on in their lives. 

After all, most schools do not monitor family deaths, information only discerned through building “rapport and trust,” said Gina Curcio, health, wellness, and community director for the district on Long Island.  

Serving kids across all grades, homed at the middle school with a separate entrance for privacy, the wellness center is open late each weeknight, staffed by child therapists and psychologists. Established through a partnership with PM Pediatrics and a 4-year grant from former House Representative Kathleen Rice, it opened in the fall of 2023 without common hiccups districts often face, like having to take on hiring hard-to-staff behavioral health positions. 

In the calm-colored space adorned with student artwork, bean bags and infographics about how the mind works, two peer bereavement groups hosted 11 children for six, weekly sessions during the school year; another ran this summer, with children meeting for 90 minutes weekly grouped by age. 

Beyond the stages of grief, they have learned coping skills through mindfulness, art and music therapy, and forged friendships with peers they had no idea were dealing with similar feelings. All things previously out of reach due to a combination of stigma, financial strain, and not having a comparable resource in their community. 

The bereavement space and “transition” groups they inspired, for kids making the leap into pre-K, 6th and 9th grade, and college, are just some of the many initiatives Baldwin has taken in recent years to address childrens’ emotional and physical well-being, which impacts their ability to show up at school ready to learn and feel safe.  

“We still suspend kids for doing things that make it unsafe for other kids
 [but] we will reduce the suspension in exchange for weekly counseling for students, because we believe that if you are exhibiting behavior that way – something’s going on,” Camhi added. 

In ways big and small, Baldwin looks for ways to forge strong connections between children and their community. 

At game days this summer, parents were pushed to participate with their kids – no electronics allowed. By third grade, all students have had lessons on wellness tools, like grounding and breathing techniques to manage and express hard emotions. Each year high school seniors in AP Photography interview second graders about their dreams, their hopes and faces printed and exhibited around campus, in a local hospital and family courthouse. 

As national reports emerge that only 29 and 37% of Black and low-income families report their child’s school offers counseling and other support services compared to 52 and 59% of their white, more affluent peers, Baldwin’s wellness center and connection with families provides a strong contrast.  

From January through March this year, the wellness center hosted over 600 sessions for the predominantly Black and Latino district – ranging from peer conflicts — which psychologists say have been more difficult for children to navigate after pandemic isolation— to divorce, cyberbullying and symptoms of anxiety and depression. 

In groups and in individual therapy, often art-based, kids have learned how to set goals, compromise, and practice role-playing interactions with mean people or conflicts with friends. 

“I think you can make me happy again,” one six year old told a clinician, who had started sessions by saying they were sad and “depressed.”

Having the wellness services available to families on-campus, without the hassle of waitlists or insurance run-arounds, has been a game changer for families – even in times of extreme uncertainty. 

Last school year, one Lenox Elementary School mother got a call that her ten year old blurted out in class that he wanted to kill himself. 

“It stopped me in my tracks,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, recalling immediately leaving work to hug her son and talk with the school social worker. She learned he felt behind and left out socially, and knew he was quicker to outbursts than her other children, but did not know he had been hiding suicidal thoughts because he didn’t want to make her sad. 

The Jamaican family, whose name has been withheld for privacy, became one of the first served at the wellness center. Initially scared to start, with an image in mind of being forced to talk on a couch to a stranger, her son changed tune after the first of about 20 therapy sessions where he used drawing as a way to express harder emotions.

“I love it. It’s not like the movies. It’s nice.”

Today he is sleeping better, has fewer intrusive thoughts, knows now how to notice and talk through bad feelings when they arise. He brought some of the tools home, like Legos, plush toys, drawings and stickers. Within his friendships, he’s not taking things as personally, or overreacting.

In 2019, in the district where more than a quarter are considered low-income, the graduation rate was 95%. By 2023, it grew to 99% – . The number likely has something to do with Baldwin’s emphasis on how students feel while at school – reflecting whether kids feel connected to each other, their work, and the place. 

like drug use and violence. 

In a first grade classroom just before the end of the school year, a group of Baldwin elementary students sat crossed legged, intently listening to each other recap one wellness skill that they “loved or learned” from the year. Together they held a “breathing ball” – taking a low, deep breath as they picture a ball filling up with air in their hands, expanding and contracting slowly. 

One said quietly when he got upset at home, he recalled the “sound bowl” – metal, sometimes filled with water, that when hit with wood released a calming frequency – and would feel better. 

The wellness educator encouraged him to craft or visualize his own version at home, urging: “remember, you can go anywhere in your imagination.” 

Schools won’t change the schedule, they redeploy would-be tutors as aides making copies, etc. It’s troubling. And headlines like  and  and  also aren’t helping.   

So what happens next?  

In a March column in ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, Kevin Huffman warned: “I worry that policymakers will pretend high-dosage tutoring is happening at scale and then, when student outcomes do not measurably improve, declare that it hasn’t worked.” 

So what’s the answer for scaling up at quality? Proven good models need to become great, so when they scale and inevitably dilute, they “merely” retreat back to: good. We must make it easier to be a good or great tutor.  And that requires unusual “within program” research and development. In an essay published , the Overdeck Foundation’s Pete Lavorini made that very case, noting there are “a number of exciting innovations underway to lessen the implementation burden without sacrificing effectiveness, by adjusting the high-impact tutoring ‘formula.’ ”

Let me describe what tutor innovation looks like in real life. First, you need decent scale. When I started Match Tutoring in 2004, we had 45 tutors (living literally inside the school, on our ). My friend, economist Matt Kraft, wrote in The74 how measuring that program’s impact launched his career studying tutoring. But 45 people is just not enough educators to easily A/B test “what works for individual tutors.”  

Last year, I met a math educator, Manan Khurma, who founded a math tutoring company in India called Cuemath, with 3,300 tutors. I asked whether I could, with a few colleagues, (carefully) try new ideas, to see what works for his thousands students across the world? Manan said yes, he was interested in anything empirically valid that made tutoring better.  

Scale, check.  

Second, you need a “problem of practice.” We zoomed in on a common problem, familiar to many educators: student talk!  Some kids, especially if confused, are reluctant to speak up, to share what they’re thinking. Common Core and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics both emphasize the need for math discourse, but teacher training in this area hasn’t led to kids speaking up more.  

How to change this?  

My colleague Carol Yu wondered if a Fitbit type device — a “Talk Meter” — might help, or would it annoy kids, or teachers?

We started small, enlisting a few kids and tutors to try a prototype. An AI bot would patrol a tutorial, and then, roughly 20 minutes into a tutorial, a little box would pop up on the screen. It told teacher and student what the talk ratio was, just like a Fitbit offers your step count when you glance at it. If either party was talking too much, they’d adjust.  

The early signals were promising! So we ran a rigorous randomized control trial with 742 Cuemath teachers, and enlisted some research help, from Stanford’s Dora Demszky. This is often a third step: Enlist a scholar to bolster your measurement efforts.  

The results were strong. In a forthcoming journal article, Dr. Demszky will describe the full experiment, but the punchline is student reasoning increased by 24%, and the talk ratio converged on 50-50 between kid and tutor — exactly what we wanted. Tutors asked better questions, and “built” on what kids said.  Both students and tutors liked the Talk Meter (it led to lighthearted, warm interactions as well). Introverts particularly improved.    

Fourth, you can layer experiments on top of one another. One we’re trying now is whether one-on-one coaching would build on TalkMeter success.  

Should other programs build their own TalkMeters or tutor coaching efforts? That’s not our claim (though when I shared the TalkMeter result with friends leading other prominent tutoring organizations, several said “OMG — we should do this.”) There’s a key distinction that matters for scale. A technology intervention like TalkMeter is context specific. And a human intervention like coaching is talent specific.

I learned that lesson 14 years ago. We launched a teacher coaching program in New Orleans, with a wonderful educator named Erica. I enlisted Matt Kraft to measure it. He found large gains for teachers. Then we added coaches. The impact was diluted — a finding he wrote about .  

The point here is that high quality experiments, often in partnership with scholars, can help specific program models vault to greatness, as a way to counteract inevitable dilution at scale.   

While we co-sign on the Guryan/Ludwig desire to “push” schools to do hard things, we also should make hard things easier, to have “good” impact by combining “great programs” with “merely solid” execution. (Of course, nothing can overcome shoddy execution).  

That’s the only way this high-dosage tutoring movement will survive and expand. 

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Scott Esserman, a parent and former classroom teacher who was endorsed by the union, held a strong lead Thursday night in the race for an at-large seat representing the entire city. In a crowded field of five candidates, he had garnered more than 39% of the vote.

Current school board President Carrie Olson had a commanding lead — 69% of the vote — over her challenger in District 3, which spans central-east Denver. Olson is a former Denver teacher who was endorsed by the union. She is the only incumbent running for reelection.

The races were tighter in southwest District 2 and northeast District 4, with union-backed candidates Xóchitl “Sochi” Gaytán and Michelle Quattlebaum holding leads in their districts as well. The District 2 race was particularly tight, though Gaytán’s lead over opponent Karolina Villagrana widened from 64 votes Tuesday night to 486 votes Thursday.

Denver elections officials said Thursday night there were 44,690 ballots left to count and that counting would continue Friday. A large number of ballots — 35,000 — were dropped off during the last three hours of voting Tuesday, which is extending the time it takes to tally all the votes, officials said.

Union-backed members have held a majority of seats on the seven-member Denver school board since in 2019. Before then, Denver had been a national exemplar of education reform and cooperation with charter schools.

Reached Tuesday night, Esserman said that although the union-backed candidates were outspent by pro-reform groups pushing for a different slate, the election results so far were “a testament to the kind of change people are ready to see” in Denver Public Schools.

“The vast majority of voters and members of our community are interested in seeing us do what’s best for students, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

In the past two years, the union-backed board has undone or halted many reforms put in place by previous boards.

For instance, the board voted to reopen two comprehensive high schools — and — that previous boards had dismantled. Current board members also the controversial school ratings system that previous boards used to justify closing low-scoring schools in an attempt to improve academic achievement. The union opposes such closures.

The union also opposes the expansion of independent charter schools. The union-backed board attempted to delay the opening of a new DSST charter high school, but the State Board of Education that decision.

The union has spent big to hold on to its board majority, but supporters of education reform have spent even bigger to try to win back control. They say the union-backed board hasn’t focused enough on academics, especially during the pandemic.

As of last Monday, state campaign finance reports show independent expenditure committees associated with reform groups had spent more than $1.07 million in support of three candidates: Villagrana, Vernon Jones Jr., and Gene Fashaw. Such committees can spend unlimited amounts of money in elections but cannot coordinate with candidates.

Meanwhile, reports show the Denver teachers union had given more than $157,000 directly to four candidates: Esserman, Olson, GaytĂĄn, and Quattlebaum. The statewide teachers union gave at least another $75,000. Independent expenditure committees funded by teachers unions had spent more than $184,000 in support of those candidates, reports show.

Esserman had raised more money — $106,650 — than any other school board candidate in Colorado, even with expensive races in many suburban districts, according to an analysis of campaign filings by .

The winners of the election will oversee , craft a new strategic plan, and grapple with several long-simmering issues, including  and continued disagreement over the role of independent  and semi-autonomous . They will also help lead a district that is still navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.

Update:

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The bill, perhaps the centerpiece of Bush’s “compassionate conservative” agenda, had sprinted through the U.S. House and Senate before hitting the summer quagmire that so often ensnares federal legislation. Administration officials hoped that a presidential swing through Florida might reawaken Washington and speed its way to passage.

It was only minutes before the activities began when Bush learned that a plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center towers. Like many, Brogan initially assumed the reports referred to a light aircraft that had wandered off-course.

But as the room filled with the singsong cadence of kids reading aloud — the activity, centered on a called The Pet Goat, had been selected to draw attention to NCLB’s literacy provisions — the atmosphere changed noticeably. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card approached Bush to whisper the news of the second crash. And over a seven-minute interval that would be picked apart for years, the president’s focus seemed to drift between the children in front of him and the horrors unfolding in Manhattan. Brogan called the moment “extraordinary.”

“He didn’t change his expression, but the color in his face visibly changed, especially for people who were only a few feet from him. It was crystal-clear that whatever he just heard was very disturbing.”

As the activity wound down, the president excused himself to join a call with national security leaders. After stopping to deliver brief remarks from the school’s media center, including a moment of silence for the still-uncounted victims, Bush’s entourage headed immediately to Air Force One. The advocacy tour was over. A wartime presidency had begun.

The ties linking 9/11 with NCLB were the result of a historical accident. During the 20 years that passed since that day, the U.S. government undertook generational commitments to both rid the world of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism and provide an excellent education to every American child. Begun amid a swell of bipartisan approval, both missions fell far short of their goals as the afterglow of national unity first ebbed, then extinguished altogether. And while much of the vision of NCLB is preserved in federal law, controversial requirements around school accountability have been significantly loosened; some of the law’s original architects even attribute its demise, in substantial part, to a combination of hyperpartisanship and neglect that arose as the Bush administration turned its focus to the ever-expanding War on Terror.

“This is really what 9/11 meant: People moved on to other things,” said Sandy Kress, an education advisor to President Bush who helped lead the White House’s efforts to lobby for NCLB. “Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, plus the return of normal politics, that was huge. The president certainly moved on, and so did the rest of the world.”

Moving at ‘breakneck speed — for Washington’

Kress came to Washington after the 2000 election to transform the sweeping education proposals of then-Gov. Bush’s campaign into legislation. He spent years before that as a power player in Texas politics, serving as president of the Dallas school board before receiving appointments to a series of commissions empaneled throughout the 1990s to improve the state’s schools.

At that time, Washington’s role in K-12 schools offered barely a hint of what it would later become. The principal statute governing federal interventions in education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, had been reauthorized in 1994 as the Improving America’s Schools Act, a fairly radical revision that required states to make “adequate yearly progress” toward proficiency for all their students. But reforms were still driven overwhelmingly by a set of ambitious governors: like Roy Roemer of Colorado, Jim Hunt of North Carolina and Bush of Texas.

By the time ESEA was due for another reauthorization, leaders in both parties were settling on a single model of reform. States would set high standards, deliver the instruction necessary to help students meet them, and institute regular assessments to keep an eye on their progress.

“I think people at the federal level realized they couldn’t get away any longer with simply saying, ‘America’s children aren’t learning enough, but just keep doing what you’re doing,’” said Brogan, who was elected as Florida’s commissioner of schools in 1994 and would go on to lead the state university systems of both Florida and Pennsylvania before serving as assistant secretary of education under president Donald Trump. “We had to come up with some new ideas…and at least spell out with clarity what kinds of things children were expected to master with each of the passing grade levels.”

That bipartisan convergence was reflected in placed on education reform by the campaigns of both Bush and Democrat Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election, argued Tom Loveless, former director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. Bush, whose own package of reforms in Texas had won the admiration of even some Democrats in Congress — including California Rep. George Miller, an avowed liberal serving on the House Education and Workforce Committee — was only too happy to break with prevailing orthodoxy in order to build his brand as a different kind of Republican. That included moving away from the party’s oft-stated commitment to abolish the federal Department of Education.

“Bush simply jettisoned that,” Loveless said. “He dropped it completely — it was in the ’96 platform, but it was not in the 2000 platform because the Bush people wouldn’t allow it in.”

“That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”
—Sandy Kress, education advisor to former President George W. Bush.

Bush began setting a course for a major new education law almost as soon as the Supreme Court handed him the presidency, meeting at the White House in January with Miller, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and future Republican House Speaker John Boehner. , as the proposal soon became known, passed through both chambers even though it was loaded with tough language on equity and accountability. Under the new law, states would be required to test all students between grades 3-8, separate the data by class and ethnicity, and publish detailed school report cards based on the results. Billions of dollars in new federal funding would be allocated to support improvement efforts.

Margaret Spellings — a senior Bush advisor whom he would later appoint as U.S. secretary of education — said she didn’t fully appreciate at the time how quickly the initiative came together.

“I was a relative newcomer [to national politics], and little did I know that this was all happening at breakneck speed for Washington,” she said. “Particularly when we fast-forward 20 years, it really is amazing that this mammoth piece of policy, the major elements of which stand to this day, got done that fast.”

But the process stalled in conference, a lengthy process intended to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions. As the summer dragged on, dozens of conferees worked through a torturous debate over how to define adequate yearly progress, then left Washington for August recess. The economy was in recession, and the president’s approval ratings were ticking downward. Eager to return permanently to Texas, Kress began to worry how long his sojourn in the capital would last.

“By the end of the summer, things were not so rosy,” he recalled. “We were thinking about trying to rev it up and get going again, and that’s how that Florida trip was planned.”

Reinvigorating bipartisanship

At around 8:15 a.m. on September 11, Kress was in the president’s suite at Sarasota’s Colony Beach and Tennis resort, presenting him with talking points and a visual aid — a chart showing America’s education expenditures growing over time, plotted against stagnant national test scores — for what he hoped would be a news-making speech at Booker Elementary.

On campus, Kress skipped the classroom visit to brief reporters before the president took the stage. Instead, he watched with them as a television at the school’s media center broadcast live footage of United Airlines Flight 175 slamming into the World Trade Center’s South Tower. As the Secret Service moved hurriedly to coordinate the group’s departure, the stagecraft morphed from political salesmanship to an emergency speech.

“Now we’re getting instructions: ‘You are to come with me and stand right here, and the president’s going to give some remarks. First thing, take down the chart’ — I did that — ‘and then stand right here. And when the president says his last words, he will go, and you’ll be right on him, and you’re to get in the car.’ It was all solemn and lockstep.”

From the Sarasota airport, Air Force One sped to Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base (“The plane took off faster than I’d ever lifted off on a plane, and got higher than I’d ever been on a plane,” Kress noted.) There it shed most of its passengers while Bush, still considered a potential target, delivered before departing to another location with his key political and security staffers. With virtually every airplane in the country grounded, Kress and his companions only arrived back in Washington that evening, in time to see the smoking wreckage of the Pentagon attack.

Along with his fears for the country, and intermittently his own safety, he couldn’t help worrying about the fate of the historic law he’d spent most of the year negotiating. Would the massive loss of life, to say nothing of the inevitable military action that would follow, leave room for a huge, expensive law overhauling K-12 schools?

As it turned out, he would later reflect, the collective outrage provoked by the attacks proved vastly more effective at pushing NCLB to the finish line than any messaging event could have. Congress would soon be occupied with authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan and drafting the USA Patriot Act, but both Democrats and Republicans also sought the chance to pass a major piece of domestic legislation and show that the nation’s business was still underway.

“9/11 probably reinvigorates bipartisanship for a bit,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin College on the politics of NCLB. “And there was an idea that we have to show, as a country, that we can make progress on things other than terrorism and war: ‘This is something we’ve already gotten most of the way through, and we should do it.’”

Before the year was out, overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate voted to accept the version of the bill that emerged from the conference committee. On January 8, 2002, Bush signed it, flanked by its congressional stewards, at an Ohio school located in Boehner’s district. The group then proceeded to Kennedy’s home state of Massachusetts for a celebration at the famed exam school Boston Latin. Only time constraints prevented them from flying to Miller’s California stomping grounds, Kress said.

In retrospect, No Child Left Behind was likely too far down the tracks to be derailed by events. But, as Spellings argued, the rush of purpose and unity following 9/11 put “a rocket booster” under it; moreover, national attention was significantly diverted from the last months of negotiations, which may have made final concessions go down smoother.

“They were trying to hold that coalition together without offending the far left or far right,” Loveless said — a towering task, given that teachers disliked the new testing requirements and conservatives resented losing out on a longed-for federal voucher program. “Bush really wanted a bipartisan bill, and I think the focus on foreign policy allowed them to do whatever they needed to do in conference and get the bill out.”

A short honeymoon

American flags were still flying from windows, and the renewed sense of national assurance only beginning to waver, when skepticism of NCLB began festering in school districts and state capitals.

Conflict arose almost immediately over new money. Under the law, total federal funding for K-12 schools between 2000 and 2003. But for schools now awakening to the threat of sanctions (including governance changes like the mass replacement of staff or restructuring as a charter school) if their students didn’t make consistent, measurable strides toward college readiness, it seemed unfair that escalating expectations on their staffs weren’t accompanied by continuing commitments of resources.

Their doubts spread soon enough to the public at large. In Brookings, Loveless noted that surveys from the law’s early years demonstrated little widespread understanding of its impact, including penalties for consistently underperforming schools. But as participants learned more of NCLB’s key provisions, they consistently came to like it less, he found.

“I think one thing NCLB was able to paper over was the fact that it did have punitive measures involved,” Loveless argued. “When people were polled on the question, in 2001 or 2002, ‘What do you do with a failing school?,’ respondents overwhelmingly supported giving more resources to that school — not closing it or transferring teachers or anything like that.”

Combined with its “utopianism” — the law put forward the aspiration that every student in the country would reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014, a starry-eyed notion that later became a punchline — NCLB’s main weakness lay in its fundamental challenge to Americans’ sunny perceptions of schools, Loveless said.

“It’s been a mainstay in polling: People are just happy with their local schools. And parents are even happier with the schools they send their own children to. So once it became evident that those schools were also endangered by sanctions and maybe weren’t quite what they were cracked up to be, [the law] lost some popularity.”

Eventually the dissatisfaction spread to Washington, where even NCLB’s supporters were increasingly bogged down in the fervid debate over whether Bush’s “Global War on Terror” should extend to Iraq. Along with industry groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, a diverse alliance of civil rights organizations including EdTrust, La Raza, and the Urban League had pushed hard to make testing and accountability a reality in every American school; but by 2004, NAACP chairman its mandates of fostering a “drill-and-kill curriculum.”

Consistent blows were landed by none other than Kennedy, a figure as vital to NCLB’s passage as any except the president. On the second anniversary of the happy ceremony held at Boston Latin, Kennedy’s office issued giving Bush a “D-minus” for rolling out his signature education reform. In an unmistakable dig at Bush’s famous photo op of the previous year, the release called it “way too soon for the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on No Child Left Behind.”

For the temporary boost it delivered to American pride and purpose, Kress said, September 11 ultimately sabotaged the “nice, short-term story” of NCLB’s enactment.

“Passing a bill should be a very positive event in a movement, but if you think passing a bill is the culmination of a movement, then you don’t understand politics,” he said. “That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ‘80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11.”

Though NCLB’s authors intended for the law to be reauthorized by 2007, it remained in effect for another eight years as controversy built up over its demands on states and school districts. have credited the landmark legislation with lifting student achievement and closing achievement gaps , but it has also been blamed for through an over-reliance on testing.

Those concerns contributed to the push to replace NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which offered states more latitude to design their own systems for measuring school performance. In the years since its 2015 passage, committed reformers have complained that the new law is far too slack, allowing states to potentially ignore failing schools and that reveal which students are falling behind.

Spellings credited NCLB’s supporters in Congress, industry, and the civil rights world with ensuring that many of its key principles remained in place. But she also warned that a political retreat from testing and accountability was underway, “flying under the banner of COVID and mental health and all other manner of bullshit.”

“The secret sauce — and this is what’s under threat in the states — is annual assessments, disaggregated data, and transparency,” she said. “It’s at risk.”

Rudalevige’s research as a political scientist ultimately led him to study the growing powers of the “imperial presidency.” He agreed that it became increasingly challenging for politicians to mend or improve NCLB — still less reauthorize it — once debates over the War on Terror came to “distract attention and dissolve whatever bipartisanship was still left.“.

“Could you do it if you had full presidential attention? Maybe, but Bush didn’t have that, and he didn’t have the institutional resources to make it work without that. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could put on auto-pilot.”

Lead Image: President George W. Bush was reading with a group of Florida second-graders when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, delivered the news that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. (Paul Richards and George W. Bush Presidential Library/Getty Images) Photo illustration by Meghan Gallagher/ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ

The delta variant is driving Texas’ case surge, and doctors are seeing more infections in children and more children being hospitalized.

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Here’s what El Paso parents should know about how to protect their school-aged children from being infected with the virus:

Q: What should parents know about the delta variant?

The delta variant is twice as contagious for children and adults as previous COVID-19 strains, said Dr. Stanley Spinner, chief medical officer and vice president of Texas Children’s Pediatrics and Texas Children’s Urgent Care.

“Because of the contagiousness of the delta variant, even people that are vaccinated can get infected — they will either be asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic. But they can still spread the virus to those that aren’t protected, mainly our kids under 12,” Spinner said.

Q: Should children wear a face covering at school?

Texas doctors emphatically say yes. And that includes teachers and school staff.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommends that students, teachers and school staff wear face masks, even if they are vaccinated.

Q: What can teachers do if children remove their mask during the school day?

Teachers cannot ask students to wear a mask because Gov. Greg Abbott forbade schools from requiring them, stressing the need for “personal responsibility rather than government mandates.”

El Paso districts have disposable masks on hand and can offer them to students who request them.

Q: Beyond masking, what else can students do to stay safe while at school?

Good hand hygiene can help protect students from becoming infected. Students should wash their hands before lunch, after using the restroom and before and after touching their face, said Jose Luis Salas, infection control director at El Paso Children’s Hospital.

Sharing food and drinks with their peers should also be avoided to minimize exposure and cross contamination, Salas said. And when possible, students should put a few feet of distance between themselves and their classmates.

Students should stay home from school if they have potential COVID-19 symptoms, such as a runny nose, sore throat or fever. They should get tested and not return to school until they receive a negative test result.

Q: Can parents find out whether teachers are vaccinated?

No. Districts are not collecting this information as the COVID-19 vaccine is voluntary and is not a requirement for public school enrollment or employment.

Q: How often should school-aged children be tested for COVID-19?

Students don’t need to be regularly tested for the virus, Spinner said. They should, however, get tested if they believe they were exposed to the virus. They must quarantine at home, away from others, until they receive a negative test result.

Q: What should parents of unvaccinated children do to keep their children safe?

Parents should wear a mask in indoor public spaces and keep their distance from others, regardless of whether they are vaccinated. That’s especially important now that the CDC considers El Paso County of community spread. Parents who have not yet been vaccinated should do so as soon as possible.

“Ultimately, defeating COVID is a team sport that’s going to require the highest number of people possible to adhere to masks, (and) in time the highest number of people to get vaccinated,” said Dr. Glenn Fennelly, chair of the department of pediatrics at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso.

Mask wearing and vaccination prevent new variants from emerging that could be more contagious, more deadly and less responsive to the vaccine.

Q: Are Texas doctors seeing hesitancy among vaccinated parents to take their children to get the vaccine?

Less than a quarter of 12- to 15-year-olds in El Paso have been vaccinated against COVID-19, which Fennelly says is “concerning.” It’s not unusual for parents to be more cautious with their children, though the vaccine is just as safe for children as it is for adults, he said. Parents should speak to their pediatrician or family doctor about any concerns they may have.

“The most important thing they (parents) can do for their child’s safety is to vaccinate them to protect them” from the virus, Spinner said. When they don’t, they put their child at risk of serious infection and even death.

Q: What are the common COVID-19 vaccine side effects in adolescents?

The common vaccine side effects in adolescents are no different than the ones adults experience. These include soreness at the injection site, muscle aches, fatigue and fever, all of which typically last one to two days.

The risk of adolescents experiencing myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart — are .

Q: What is the status of the COVID-19 vaccine for children under 12?

The Food and Drug Administration likely won’t issue an emergency use authorization for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to be used in children ages 5 to 11 until late fall at the earliest.

This article originally appeared .

The El Paso Independent School District’s Board of Trustees late Tuesday voted 6-1 to follow Dr. Hector Ocaranza’s health order announced Monday requiring people 2 years and older to wear face coverings in most indoor settings, including schools. Masks will be required in EPISD buses and schools beginning Thursday.

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The motion approved by the EPISD board also committed the district to joining a pending lawsuit by La Joya Independent School District and others in Travis County challenging Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban on local mask mandates. Trustee Daniel Call cast the only dissenting vote on the motion to require masks and sue the governor.

The El Paso City Council voted 5-3 Monday to file a lawsuit against Abbott to protect Ocaranza’s mask mandate. On Tuesday, County Court-at-Law No. 7 Judge Ruben Morales issued a temporary restraining order finding that Abbott’s executive order barring mask mandates exceeded his authority, the city said in a news release.

After local judges in Bexar and Dallas counties issued similar rulings, the Texas Supreme Court earlier this week .

Call said the litigation before the state’s high court factored into this decision.

“The likelihood of a mask mandate standing up to scrutiny with the Texas Supreme Court is very small, so if there is a mask mandate it probably will not last very long,” he said. “To me, judicial activism is not something that I think a school district should be involved with.”

But Trustee Israel Irrobali said decisions about what’s best at the local level shouldn’t come from lawmakers hundreds of miles away.

“At the end of the day, local control should be supreme and I believe that we should have the power in this situation to make that decision,” said Irrobali, who has said he . “It shouldn’t be left up to individuals in Austin that don’t know how it is in El Paso and have not been down here in quite a while.”

About a half hour later, the Socorro Independent School Board of Trustees voted unanimously to follow Ocaranza’s mask mandate unless it was struck down by a court. The order from Ocaranza, who briefed the Socorro board Tuesday night on current COVID-19 data, takes effect at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.

Socorro trustees voted without comment after getting a closed-door briefing from their attorney, Steve Blanco, about current litigation and other legal issues regarding mask mandates.

The votes followed hours of public testimony before both school boards from a divided constituency whose members included parents who advocated for more protection for students amid an increase in the cases of the delta variant of COVID-19, and others who said masks were detrimental to the mental and physical wellbeing of their children.

The votes were another attack on Abbott’s statewide executive order issued late last month that stripped local governments and school boards from making decisions about their own jurisdictions. Several large districts, including Dallas Independent School District and the Austin Independent School District, have mandated masks and smaller districts in rural areas have followed .

This article originally appeared .

The staff and board of stepped up this spring, recognizing an urgent need to develop an ambitious vision and catch-up plan that would support all children in getting back on track following more than a year of disruptions and struggles. Our objective: To ensure that, despite the significant challenges brought on by the pandemic, all our scholars will remain on track with grade-level performance, while receiving any and all supports they may need (academically, socially, emotionally and beyond).

At U Prep, we are unwavering in our belief that all children, from all backgrounds, can learn at the highest levels. They are brilliant, beautiful people and absolutely capable. Eighty-five percent of our students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches and 94 percent are students of color. In 2017, scholars at our Steele Street campus in Denver had the highest math growth in the state (out of all public elementary schools) and the eighth highest English Language Arts (ELA) growth, after a single year.

We take great pride that U Prep increased academic proficiency by more than 30 percent during that year while educating an equivalent student population to who we serve today, with more than 70 percent of our seats serving English Language Learners. You can read about that success .

As we now turn our focus to catch-up efforts in the wake of COVID, we’re leaning on that past experience along with our to drive our strategy.

Over the next two years, we are leveraging dollars to ensure that children who’ve fallen the furthest behind during remote learning will now make the most rapid growth. And, while we drive that academic work forward, which we believe is critical in fulfilling our mission of providing every child with a life of opportunity, we are also expanding our partnership with the to ensure children and families alike receive any and all additional mental health support they may need.

Our learning recovery approach is being guided by three key pillars:

— Grade Level is Grade Level: All scholars will be given access to grade-level content regardless of their level of current performance.

— Rapid Acceleration: We deliver moderate to significant interventions through additional staffing and a variety of targeted supports so that children get what they need when they need it.

— Family Partnerships: Every family deserves to know exactly where their child is, in relation to grade-level expectations. Built on a foundation of trust and honesty, educators engage with families as genuine partners who play an active role in their child’s “catch-up.”

Grade Level is Grade Level

No matter what you’re doing to catch kids up, you cannot stop putting grade-level content and work in front of them.

A fifth-grader who might be reading at a third-grade level must still be exposed to fifth-grade text and curriculum. We firmly believe that the more time a child is immersed in grade-level content alongside effective supports, the more growth they’re able to make.

Teachers regularly run critical grade-level assessments to gauge where children are, and create a game plan for aligning supports that will increase access to that grade-level work. Simultaneously, our school leaders have made significant investments in data analysis and are able to swiftly develop action plans that can support effective instruction with meaningful and rigorous grade-level curriculum.

Rapid Acceleration

This coming year, we will operate our K-5 campuses as if there were three small school models within them (while all staff, children and families remain deeply connected to the larger school).

Grades K-1 will operate as normal as possible (close to our ideal state), while we implement moderate interventions in grades 2-3. For our fourth and fifth graders, we will be committing to significant interventions; their needs in catching up and preparing for middle school (and beyond) is very different from our first graders’s needs, and we know that our remaining time with this oldest cohort is short.

With Rescue Plan dollars, we’re hiring an additional teacher at each campus to support grades 2-3, and two extra teachers to support grades 4-5 at each campus – one for each grade level. This means far more direct support and targeted individual and small group interventions for the children who are furthest behind and most need it. We will use assessments to further gauge unfinished learning and will then adjust instruction as needed with extra staff ready to play their part.

Beyond the school day, we have nearly 60 children (rising fourth and fifth-graders) in intensive tutoring this summer through a partnership with . This multi-week support provides scholars who are the furthest behind with a chance to begin their catch-up efforts now and build momentum heading into the school year ahead. In a bid to remove as many barriers as possible, all costs associated with the tutoring, as well as transportation, are covered by U Prep.

Tutoring will not conclude with summer’s end. Both U Prep campuses in Denver will provide afterschool tutoring Monday through Thursday throughout the school year, building on the knowledge and skills being acquired during core content instruction. Like the work over the summer, this tutoring opportunity will target upper elementary aged scholars and all costs will be covered.

Family Relationships

Strong home-to-school and school-to-home relationships must remain central in our efforts to catch kids up. This requires ongoing, honest conversations. Families deserve to know where their child actually is in relation to grade-level standards, and to understand the impact that this highly disrupted 15 months of school has had on learning.

One example of this belief being put into practice: Last December, U Prep had all students come to school in person during the height of remote learning to take part in literacy assessments, our “Literacy-palooza”. Parents reserved a time slot that worked for them, drove up to the buildings, were greeted with a hot cup of coffee and pastry, and waited while each child entered the school for a one-on-one test (with full health and safety guidelines in place). After their tests, kids selected brand new books to take home and add to their personal libraries.

Even during the most challenging of times this past year we found a way to communicate directly and honestly with families about where their child stands. They always deserve to know, and from that position of shared knowledge, we can build a shared plan. (What are we doing at school? What can you be doing at home? How can we do this together?).

Continuing to invest in relationship building, this summer we are making home visits to not only all of our new U Prep families, which we do each year, but to all of our returning fourth and fifth-grade families too. Through the year, every family will participate in four parent-teacher conferences, one each quarter, to make sure families have a crystal-clear view of how their student is progressing academically, socially and emotionally, and to ensure our partnership is strong and healthy. Every one of these moments, whether in conferences or home visits, is another chance to also learn from our parents’ expertise about their child – they are their first and primary educator and we have to be constantly learning from their expert knowledge.

A Challenge — and Opportunity

The three pillars of our catch-up plan, combined with our core values and historic success at targeting support, position us to do right by all children and families we serve. The U Prep board, together with the school teams, makes a promise to every child that they will be educated on the path to a four-year college degree and a genuine life of opportunity.

While the last year plus was an absolute test in maintaining our mission, the years ahead will be an even greater test of our level of care and commitment. We are ready and beyond excited to lean in to the opportunity ahead — to do anything and everything possible to ensure every student catches up.

That is our responsibility and one we take extremely seriously.

Recardo Brooks is a member of the board of University Prep and the parent of an alum. The tuition free public charter schools serve 727 children in Kindergarten through 5th grades at two campuses in Denver.

Across the country each year, thousands of teaching candidates get ready to begin their classroom careers. They finish up their graduate coursework, start scanning excitedly for job openings — and then fail their states’ teacher licensure exams. Dejected and daunted by the prospect of retaking the test, many never become teachers.

It’s a distressing pattern that has been documented for years and increasingly draws the focus of policymakers attempting to diversify the profession. As more experts point to the improved academic performance of students who are assigned to even one instructor of the same racial or ethnic background, some advocates have called for states to modify, or , their licensure tests, which are more likely to be a stumbling block to African American and Hispanic candidates.

by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a reform-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C., puts the issue in perspective. Data gathered from 38 states and the District of Columbia show that a huge portion of prospective elementary school teachers don’t pass their licensing exam on the first try. Of those that fail, non-white teachers are much less likely to re-take the test than their white classmates. And within states, students at different institutions faced radically different odds of ultimately securing a teaching credential. The conclusions will lead many to wonder whether novice educators are receiving enough training before being hired, and what can be done to assist those who weren’t adequately prepared.

NCTQ president Kate Walsh, a longtime and often critical observer of teacher prep programs, said in an interview that while the results were themselves “terrible,” a more pressing concern was the sheer difficulty of obtaining the evidence. State authorities should be active in publicizing that information, she argued, but many don’t even bother to collect it, and even federal efforts to investigate these questions have been “mired in confusion.”

“What’s interesting to me is that states didn’t have this data,” Walsh said. “We thought they did, but almost all states said that this was the first time they’d ever seen this data.”

The national findings, encompassing program-level exam results between 2015 and 2018, demonstrate clearly that large numbers of graduate students struggle to reach the finish line and become licensed teachers. Across all states that provided data, the average “best-attempt” rate for prep programs — the rate at which test-takers ever pass the test, whether or not they fail on their first try — is 83 percent, meaning that roughly one in six don’t realize their ambitions. And certain programs do much better than others: The average gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing institutions in each state was 44 percentage points.

What’s more, 29 percent of all prep programs reported that less than half of their teaching students passed the licensing exam on their first try. Six states (Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia) were home to at least one program in which no teaching candidate did so.

Florida, which the fourth-most teachers of any state, offers a revealing example. In the three years studied, two different teacher prep institutions saw no teaching candidates pass the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations their first time, though both are tiny programs serving roughly a dozen students between them. Many others — including Florida International University, Florida Gulf Coast University, University of North Florida, and University of Central Florida — reported first-time pass rates of 41 percent or less. All of those schools, which collectively produced over 2,300 test-takers, were rated by NCTQ as among the most selective in the state.

At the same time, a huge number of Florida’s prospective teachers who failed their licensure tests the first time go on to pass in later attempts, likely with the support and encouragement of their prep programs. And a substantial number of programs enrolling large numbers of low-income students (measured via their eligibility to receive Pell grants) report higher first-time pass rates than the average across the state.

Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who directs the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), called the data “compelling,” adding that researchers might fruitfully study which institutions are able to work best with teaching candidates who initially stumble with the exam.

The findings “begin to open up the teacher preparation black box a little bit and point to where we should be looking for different supports, curricula, interventions that seem to be able to help teacher candidates while they are in teacher preparation,” Goldhaber said.

Dodging the ‘heat’ of publication

In order to reach their findings, NCTQ first had to receive the data from states. A 2019 study, using national results for the commonly used Praxis exam that were provided by the testing vendor ETS, offered somewhat similar findings, but did not delve into differences by state or institution.

Acquiring results at that more granular level was much harder, Walsh said, because some local authorities “didn’t want the heat of being the ones to publish this data.” In all, seven states did not provide timely data on licensure exam performance, and eight provided only partial data. Of the states that did share their data with NCTQ, some had to be subjected to public records requests.

Meagan Comb, director of the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University and a one-time NCTQ fellow, said she wasn’t particularly surprised at the challenges posed by a third-party examination of test results. In a two-year stint as the director of educator effectiveness at Massachusetts’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Comb oversaw the state’s policy on both teacher preparation and licensure. She recalled that many in the state — considered a national leader in the collection and dissemination of education data — had ached for more information because “it was really hard to know how our pass rates compared with other states.” This often included program heads themselves, who didn’t always have a clear picture of which student groups were struggling or what aspects of the test gave them trouble.

“This report shows that you have to invest in data infrastructure,” Comb Said. There are a lot of states that can’t even link their teacher workforce with their teacher prep candidates, or there’s a state statute prohibiting them from looking at the efficacy of their teacher candidates. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in states across the country to think a lot about the data infrastructure they provide to teacher preparation programs for continuous improvement.”

Goldhaber noted that bottlenecks on data can arise in different areas. While some state education departments are “more inquisitive than others,” he acknowledged, schools of education would often prefer that low pass rates float under the radar.

“I think that, sometimes, the politics are really hard,” he said. “You have important political constituencies — deans, and everything they bring — who sometimes don’t want these data to be out there.”

Lack of transparency can be damaging not only to state authorities, and prep programs themselves, but also to prospective graduate students, some of whom will enroll unwittingly in a teacher prep program where they stand a significant chance of not gaining a license. The risk of failure is especially great for teaching candidates of color, who are significantly less likely than white candidates to retake the exam if they fail. The stress and expenses associated with the test, often amounting to hundreds of dollars in fees or preparation materials, can act as a roadblock to attracting more diverse teachers.

Walsh said that on grounds of consumer protection alone, that had to change.

“The whole point is, you’re supposed to be preparing candidates for licensure. And nobody points out to the kids going into these programs, ‘Your chances of getting a license at this institution are nil.’ So they take their money, take their time, and that’s it.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support for both the National Council on Teacher Quality and ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

When Newark students took a series of diagnostic tests last fall, some seven months into the pandemic, the results were alarming:

Nearly 80% of third graders and almost 90% of fourth graders would “not meet the passing score” on the state math exams, according to a district analysis that was not made public. The projections suggested that far fewer students were on track to master grade-level math than in previous years.

After a spring of school closures and limited learning, students were seriously struggling in math.

“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, learning loss among our students in mathematics is one of the most significant challenges faced by schools in Newark,” district officials wrote in an application this January seeking academic recovery funds. “Many of our students have fallen even further behind than they were prior to COVID-19.”

Many of those students likely continued to slip behind last school year as remote learning stretched into April, keeping students out of classrooms for 13 months. Yet, in more than two dozen public school board meetings since the global crisis began, district leaders have never given a detailed accounting of the pandemic’s toll on student learning.

Even after the fall test scores, which the district never publicly released, clearly showed that academic damage had already been done, Superintendent Roger LeĂłn suggested publicly that learning loss could still be curbed.

“Part of the strategy here is not to assume that there will be loss,” he said at a board meeting in December, “but to assume that we actually can do something about it right now.”

It isn’t just test scores. The district has taken other steps that, intentionally or not, have obscured the pandemic’s full impact on students.

After school buildings shut down last spring and , the district  during remote learning. And this past school year, several educators told Chalkbeat  even to students who never attended online class or completed any work — all while the district insisted its normal grading policies remained in effect.

“Their grades aren’t their correct grades,” a district elementary school teacher told Chalkbeat this week, asking to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation. “You couldn’t fail any kids.”

There is no doubt that district officials have closely monitored students’ academic progress over the past year and worked diligently on plans to address their needs. But they have not publicly shared data on student learning or gone into detail about the district’s plans for academic recovery. LeĂłn has referenced plans for tutoring and Saturday school, but has not disclosed specifics — leaving it unclear how the district will spend more than $40 million in   specifically intended to address learning loss.

Newark is not the only school district that hasn’t voluntarily released academic data from the past year. Still, the lack of transparency means Newark families and the public have no way of knowing how far students fell behind during the pandemic, and no way of holding the district accountable for catching them up.

“Until we have the numbers and we own what has happened to our children, we can’t fix it,” said Deborah Smith-Gregory, a former district teacher and president of the Newark NAACP.

Newark community members have repeatedly asked the district for details about the pandemic’s impact on student learning.

At a closed-door meeting in December, school board member A’Dorian Murray-Thomas told district officials that “the board and community want to know more information on how students are performing academically,” according to meeting minutes. An official then gave the committee a presentation on the results of the diagnostic tests students took this fall, called the NWEA MAP Growth tests.

But at a public board meeting the next week, officials said nothing about the tests. When a board member asked León about his plans to address learning loss, he gave only a vague answer. He mentioned “online programs,” “some changes to the curriculum,” and “opportunities before and after school, even on Saturdays.” He did not specify what the programs, curriculum changes, or opportunities were, nor how many students were getting support.

Yet just a month later, in a grant application not available to the public, the district went into detail about students’ academic needs and a proposed program to catch them up.

In the application for a state grant to address learning loss, the district revealed that the fall MAP tests showed “students in grades 3 and 4 are struggling in mathematics.” The district estimated that only 22% of third graders would be able to meet grade-level expectations on the state math test, compared with 35% who met expectations in 2019. Among fourth graders, just 11% were projected to meet math expectations, compared with 32% who did so in 2019.

In response, the district proposed a four-week math program this summer targeting 600 rising fourth and fifth graders with the lowest MAP scores. The program would “compensate for the learning loss of the most vulnerable students during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the district wrote in the application submitted this January, which the state would not release to Chalkbeat until June.

The state did not award Newark one of the roughly $156,000 learning loss grants. However, the district is getting more than $282 million in federal pandemic-relief funds, with about $40 million reserved for academic recovery efforts.

Whether Newark is putting any of that money towards an intensive math program this summer is unclear. A district spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the program, learning loss data, or recovery plans.

So what is Newark doing to address the unprecedented disruption in student learning, when most students were shut out of classrooms for over a year and many spent part of that time struggling to access online classes?

The district told the state last school year simply that it was offering “Saturday Academies; Extended School Day; Tutoring” to address learning gaps, as well as lessons and counseling to meet students’ social-emotional needs — all services that many schools provided well before the pandemic. The district is also operating a summer learning program, as it does every year. Officials have not described publicly how they modified summer school this year to respond to students’ heightened needs.

Newark is certainly not the only school district in New Jersey, or , where student learning has suffered over the past year.

An  of mid-year test data found that about 37% of students statewide were below grade level in math and English. The analysis also found wide racial gaps, with more than half of Black and Hispanic students below grade level in math, compared with less than 30% of White students.

An  of test scores from 15 New Jersey districts and charter schools also found evidence of pandemic learning loss. During the first half of last school year, students in grades 3-8 made about 30% less progress in English and 36% less progress in math than they would be expected to make during that period in a typical year, according to the analysis, which was commissioned by the advocacy group JerseyCAN.

Patricia Morgan, the group’s executive director, said officials from the state down to individual districts must be forthright about learning loss before they can properly address it: “We need to know where our students are to get them the resources they need.”

Conservative lawmakers wasted no time answering Gov. Greg Abbott’s call to enact further restrictions on how race is taught in relation to the nation’s history in public and charter school classrooms during a special session of the Texas Legislature.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, filed , which would go beyond House Bill 3979 that lawmakers passed in May. Like that bill, Hughes’ new legislation does not explicitly refer to “critical race theory,” an academic term Republicans in statehouses across the nation have latched onto in recent months.

Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines systemic racism in U.S. laws, policy and society, which Texas teachers say is not taught in K-12 schools.

SB 3 calls for the state education commissioner, who the governor appoints, to create a civics training program for educators that includes “guided classroom discussion of current events.” It also tasks the commissioner with determining the appropriate grade-level for such discussions.

The bill strikes out provisions House Democrats added to HB 3979 by Rep. Steve Toth, R-The Woodlands — which Abbott signed into law last month — that sought to diversify the historical figures and events students learn about, including the Chicano movement; the women’s and civil rights movements; Native American history; and the history of white supremacy, including slavery, and “the ways in which it is morally wrong.”

Georgina PĂ©rez, a Democrat who represents the El Paso area on the State Board of Education, said SB 3 is an effort by Republican lawmakers to “completely erase” people of color, who look like students on the border, and women from the state’s history books.

“You are nothing but a strikethrough” to these lawmakers, PĂ©rez said.

“Could you be any clearer that you only want the history of white dudes” taught to Texas public school students, she added, describing Hughes’ bill as an effort “to force children to learn a version of revisionist history.”

Hughes’ office did not respond to a request for comment on SB 3.

The bill was referred Friday to the Senate State Affairs Committee. A public hearing on it has yet to be set.

Abbott made further cracking down on critical race theory one of his , which began July 8. A special session can run up to 30 days but Abbott can call as many as he chooses during the interim. The regular session ended May 31.

In a statement last month, Toth’s office called HB 3979 “one of the strongest prohibitions on Critical Race Theory in the country” and said it “promotes harmony in the classroom by prohibiting the teaching of racial superiority or collective guilt.”

The graduate-level theory is not taught at the K-12 level, said Jeffrey Shepherd, the chair of the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso.

“Critical race theory helps us understand how race is socially constructed but (also) reproduced in law and other economic, political, (and) social institutions across the United States,” Shepherd said.

Spokespersons for the El Paso and Socorro Independent School Districts said their districts follow the state social studies standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, which the State Board of Education sets. The TEKS do not include critical race theory, PĂ©rez said.

SB 3 maintains HB 3979’s ban on teaching that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that an individual “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

It further maintains HB 3979’s language that barrs districts from compelling teachers to discuss current events and social issues.

Toth though filed a new bill Thursday, , to remove that provision from his original bill. Educators who choose to teach current events would still need to “explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.” HB 178 has yet to be referred to a committee.

Legislation restricting education about racism, which comes in the wake of nationwide protests against police killings of Black Americans, is about more than banning critical race theory, Shepherd said: “(It’s) being used for a broad and somewhat vague and flexible assault on what legislators think is a threat to present day political, social, and racial and gender relations.”

He was one of more than 200 educators and historians who wrote an during the regular sessions urging members to vote down HB 3979 and its companion legislation in the Texas Senate.

“Removing lessons that teach students how ideas of race and gender shaped our laws and policies will academically disadvantage students in Texas,” the letter read. “They will not be prepared to take Advanced Placement exams for college credit. They will not have the basic foundation in US history or the analytical skills required for students to succeed in colleges and universities.”

PĂ©rez views Abbott’s focus on critical race theory in the special session as an attempt to pander to his far-right base. The governor is up for re-election in 2022 and faces at least three primary challengers.

“If you want to continue the Texas miracle, it’s going to have to include factual, actual history,” PĂ©rez said. “And with all due respect, if Gov. Abbott thinks teachers in Texas are going to take this with a spoon of sugar, he has lost his ever-loving mind.”

The American Federation of Teachers, one of the country’s largest teachers unions which has chapters in EPISD and SISD, the start of Texas’ special session that it will defend its members who are punished for “teaching honest history.”

This article originally appeared .