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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future microschool leaders are heavily focused on nonacademic learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like many former microschool leaders, she said opening another one is “not off the table.”&�Բ�����;

Public microschools are bigger than private ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historically, those are the three pots of funding districts have relied on to educate America’s students. One of the nation’s leading school finance experts says leaders should start planning for a fourth — the new from the IRS.

Advocates for the program, which Congress passed last year as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, have promoted it as a way to expand for parents who want to leave public schools. But according to Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, district schools could also be big winners.

Under the program, which kicks in next year, taxpayers will get a dollar-for-dollar credit, up to $1,700, if they donate to a scholarship granting organization. Just like an SGO can provide scholarships to private and religious schools, another could direct awards to kids in district schools.

“Given that 90% of the kids in our country, and their families, have attended public schools,” Roza said during “these SGOs could have …broader appeal, to the average taxpayer.”

The Treasury Department further confirmed that public school students will be eligible for scholarship funds during a Tuesday with advocates, according to reporting from the New York Times. The agency is still finalizing rules for the program, and states that opt in [] will have to approve a list of SGOs to accept donations. With the vast majority of U.S. K-12 students eligible for the scholarships, a variety of organizations, like the , have already envisioned how the tax credit could support public school kids who need afterschool and summer learning programs. Chad Aldeman, an education analyst and frequent contributor for ����Ӱ��, , including public school foundations, to become SGOs. 

But some who oppose the program warn that districts shouldn’t get their hopes up, arguing that the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to weaken public schools.

The federal tax credit “will give tax money that should be used on public goods, like public education, to unregulated SGOs to fund mostly private school tuition and other private education expenses,” Jessica Levin, litigation director for the Education Law Center, said during .

She suggested that it’s unrealistic to expect the administration to make it easy for public school students to benefit from the program “now that they finally achieved their dream of a federal voucher law.”&�Բ�����;

Cecilia Retelle Zywicki, founder of LearningSpring, which is building a system for states to track SGOs and payments, attended the closed-door meeting at Treasury Tuesday. While excited about the prospects for helping more students, she urged caution until the administration releases rules for the program later this year.

“This is big, and represents a lot of opportunity for a lot of people,” she said. “But this means the details matter. Compliance and accountability are paramount. It’s exciting, but requires outstanding management and unbiased information.”&�Բ�����;

‘Maximize those dollars’

Before Congress passed the law that included the new tax credit, organizations supporting public schools worked hard to stop it. In March 2025, Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, the School Superintendents Association, the “greatest threat to public education we’ve ever had at the federal level.” She noted how private schools accepting scholarships would be able to discriminate in admissions based on students’ religion, disabilities or academic performance.

But the potential for public school kids to benefit is one reason Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, opted into the program. Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York, also a Democrat, plans to participate as well. 

Scott Smith, chief financial and operating officer in the Cherry Creek district, southeast of Denver, is among those who have been skeptical that the tax credit will be a windfall for public schools. 

“This administration has shown that it doesn’t support traditional public education,” he said. But he’s still hopeful, and said across the district’s 70 schools, there is uneven access to opportunities like summer camps and afterschool enrichment. “If the rules get written in such a way that allow public schools to benefit, we will most certainly do everything we can to maximize those dollars and invest them into the students who need them the most.”&�Բ�����;

The tax credit will pay for a broad range of , including supplies, fees, field trips, uniforms and digital devices — a lot of the items that public education foundations already provide to supplement district budgets across the country, said Mike Taylor, CEO of the National Association of Education Foundations. 

Many public school districts currently charge tuition for students who live outside of their boundaries. A district, Taylor said, could accept more of those students through scholarships. 

There has been “a sea change” in attitudes toward the program, he said. “It’s happening, and we’re going to make sure we take advantage of this.”

Even Josh Cowen, one of the nation’s most outspoken voucher critics, , “It’s important to squeeze every dollar out of the new federal scholarship tax credit for public school families.”&�Բ�����;

He urged nonprofits to learn from the well-established SGOs supporting private schools and said he wouldn’t “” public school supporters if they need guidance on how to use this new “revenue stream.”&�Բ�����;

At least one group, which worked to expand internet access in schools and students’ homes, has already reinvented itself as an SGO. plans to deliver scholarships for high-quality literacy tutoring to kids nationwide who enter first grade off track in reading. 

“This is the pathway to take tutoring to scale in public school,” said Evan Marwell, the organization’s founder and CEO. The challenge is getting taxpayers without kids in public schools to donate, but he thinks he has the right approach. “A message of ‘America has a reading crisis, this is our way to fix it and here’s the evidence that shows it works’ is going to be incredibly compelling.”&�Բ�����;

After the legislation passed, he began meeting with governors in both red and blue states to encourage them to add his organization to their approved SGO lists. He said it was clear they all care about improving literacy, but existing states and districts can’t afford to provide tutoring to all the students who need it. 

Roza described a more expansive scenario in which a district would set a price on a “bundled set of enhanced services” for every student, not just those with specific needs.

That bundle, funded by an SGO, might include field trips, a robotics lab or special assemblies — offerings that go above and beyond the basic education that schools are legally required to provide. She doesn’t think it would be hard for district leaders to convince local taxpayers to donate to an SGO that would direct scholarships to students in a specific district. 

“Donating a portion of your federal taxes to our SGO helps us go beyond the bare minimum to better serve our students,” is one pitch a school board might make to the community, she said.

‘Financial gaps’

Levin, with the Education Law Center, slammed the idea and said it’s wrong for districts to start charging parents for things that they don’t already pay for. The logistics of offering such a “premium package,” she added, would be difficult for districts to manage. 

“There are way too many variables for public schools to try to control,” she said, including the SGO raising enough every year to cover all students and ensuring parents apply for the scholarships.

Others wonder if district-focused SGOs would attract major donations in some communities, but not others — similar to cases in which PTAs in wealthier districts can collect enough donations for facility upgrades and while others can only raise enough for small grants to fund teachers or field trips.

“Taxpayers are most likely to fund an SGO that directly benefits their own school district,” said Katie Roy, executive director of the . An acronym for Strategic Public Education National Data, the new effort aims to preserve and collect education finance information after the many large surveys. “The benefits of these tax credits — and the resulting funding — are poised to flow primarily toward more affluent school districts, potentially widening existing financial gaps between schools.”

To take advantage of the full $1,700 credit on their income taxes, a donor must have that much to contribute to an SGO each year. In lower-income communities, many residents don’t earn enough to .

But the extent to which an SGO can narrow its scholarship eligibility to students in specific schools or districts will depend on the rules the Treasury Department sets for the program, said Kristin Blagg, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, a left-learning think tank. 

“For those seeking to develop an SGO, I’d imagine it’s difficult to plan for the future without knowing what those federal regulatory guardrails are,” she said, “and what additional guardrails, if any, a host state may be able to impose.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning recession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drop in reading for pleasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing the ‘clouds in’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Unapologetically college prep’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‼���������ٱ�Ի���’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tipping point’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Disrespect crept in’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Kids are getting burned’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Blah blah blah.” That’s all I heard during story time, sitting on a colorful checkered carpet in kindergarten, feeling like a stain that didn’t belong, yet somehow stood out. English was not my first language, and mastering it took time. Years later, I became the one other students would ask, “What clicked?” or “How’d you do it?” 

The answer I always heard from upperclassmen was simple: “Just do the work.” But as a first-generation student in East Tulsa, I learned that doing the work was not enough. Balancing school, homework, extracurriculars, home responsibilities and applications all before turning 18 is tough. 

Like most of my classmates, fitting in was a priority. Many were Hispanic like me, but they often had siblings or parents who spoke English. I didn’t have that privilege. As the oldest, I became the bridge between home and my community: the translator, the example, the one who had to “walk” so my siblings could run. My mom was just as lost as I was, a non-English speaker herself, navigating a school system nothing like the one she grew up in. Nevertheless, she found a way to support me. 

She enrolled me at ReadSmart Learning, a tutoring program in Tulsa. I still remember the big cartoony bluebird at drop-off and the pins I earned for completing lessons. Slowly, my grades rose and I spoke English with more confidence. My mom noticed, rewarding me with packs of Shopkins figurines and saying, “Ya vez? No hay mal que por bien no venga mija, siguele echando ganas.”&�Բ�����;

Every cloud has a silver lining, sweetie. Keep working hard.

Her faith in me made me believe that effort could change everything. For first-generation students like me, programs like ReadSmart aren’t extras. They’re essentials. 

Middle school brought a new challenge, an all-English environment. Although it was intimidating at first, it also brought math. Numbers became a language I could master, and that love followed me into high school. Tulsa Honor Academy’s College Readiness team was a constant presence, always helping me navigate hands-on opportunities that I wouldn’t have found on my own, including Tulsa Technology Center’s dual enrollment program. Tulsa Tech offers a two-year program that allows students to take classes and get a real view on what engineering or pre-med tracks might look like. It was here that I found that electrical engineering was the career path I wanted. 

I’ll never forget the project in which my team and I used programming sensors to detect a chocolate chip cookie. Our clay “chips” had a mind of their own and tumbled off the conveyor belt, scattering everywhere. Hours of troubleshooting, reshaping and laughing with my team taught me more about perseverance. I learned that pushing through the struggle is what makes the result feel rewarding and worth it. 

That same perseverance carried me through applying for programs and scholarships such as , and Imposter syndrome creeps in sometimes, but I always keep going. 

Perseverance has helped me become a and earned me a full ride to Washington University in St. Louis.

Now, when students come to me and ask “What clicked?” or “How’d you do it?” I don’t tell them to just do the work. I tell them to look for scholarships, apply to summer programs, build their extracurriculars, keep their grades up, and most importantly, take every opportunity in their path. I give them the guidance I had to piece together for myself, because nobody handed it to me. 

My story isn’t about being exceptional. It’s about dreaming big for your future and creating a plan. It’s about dedication to your goals and being relentless, no matter what obstacles stand in your way. It’s about the power of having someone who believes in you and is willing to walk alongside you, even if they don’t have all the answers. 

The truth is, your circumstances do not define your future. With perseverance, hard work and the courage to keep going, kids like me don’t just get by. We succeed academically. We become professionals. We go back and tell the next kid on that carpet: “You belong here, too.”

“Resting up from my vacay.”

“Netflix binge last night.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘States already had the data’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tulsa makes progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curriculum Associates denies the accusations. 

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

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

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

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

‘Theories of consent’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A spokesperson for the FTC told ����Ӱ�� it doesn’t “have anything to add to the amicus brief.”

‘The long game’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Administrative nightmare’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pretty opaque’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, teachers like Sarah Clifford.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Art of teaching’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Life experience’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAY LAKE, Wyo. — There was a lot of giggling in the parking lot as teenagers plunged bare hands into coolers filled with small, slippery rainbow trout fry. 

The objective was to catch the fish in clear plastic cups, but the juvenile trout were fast and very squirmy, and the effort elicited shrieks, splashing and laughter. 

The kids — middle and high school students from Fort Washakie, Wyoming Indian and St. Stephens schools — were pretty comfortable handling the baby trout. That makes sense, given that they hatched them from eggs and reared them in classroom tanks over the previous four months. 

Thursday’s fish release under leaky rainclouds was the culmination of the Trout in the Classroom program, which schools on the Wind River Reservation have participated in for three years. 

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department funds the program, which Trout Unlimited facilitates and the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative coordinates. Trout in the Classroom allows students to learn an array of scientific lessons as they do the hands-on work of raising the fish. 

After circling up in the Ray Lake parking lot, talking about watershed ecology and listening to a tribal blessing, students and their teachers got busy transporting dozens of fry from coolers in the parking lot to the nearby lake’s muddy shores. There, they released them, cup by cup, into the shallows, nudging them to their new wild home 

“OK, goodbye fishies!” a girl called as she knelt by the water. 

“Swim free!” a boy chimed in. 

Connecting the students directly to wildlife and its habitats helps foster emotional investment, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative Education and Culture Coordinator Jeremy Molt said. That contributes to the ultimate goal, “which is to inspire responsible cultural stewardship of the land.”&�Բ�����;

Molt has seen the shores of reservation lakes like this one grow less littered since the trout program began, which he links to young people’s increasing awareness of ecological health and a desire to protect it. 

Through the program, he said, “we’re kind of healing some of those disconnections” with the landscape and natural food sources. “We’re trying to rewire some of that.”

Fort Washakie science teacher John Gookin was among the fish transporters. The program gives educators like him opportunities to teach about topics like beneficial bacteria, the chemistry of water, how trout extract oxygen through their gills and the life cycles of freshwater swimmers.

“It engages the kids, and gives something operational for things like biochemistry,” he said. 

For example, in the classroom, his students “test how much ammonia is in the water,” Gookin said. “Then we learn about the shape of the ammonia molecule, the cycles of it and why that even matters.”

Because his students are all anglers themselves, he said, they were excited to help stock the lake and perpetuate healthy waters. 

And though they became wet with rain and mud, the giggles never died down.

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Supporters of the proposal argue that programs like MEGA reflect a broader recognition that states and local communities are often better positioned than Washington to understand the unique challenges facing their schools. Rather than maintaining fragmented federal programs with rigid compliance structures, decentralization efforts seek to give states more authority to innovate, coordinate resources and tailor solutions to regional realities.

The MEGA proposal therefore illustrates both the promise and the responsibility that accompany decentralization. Returning authority to states creates opportunities for more responsive and adaptive governance, but it also places responsibility squarely on state leaders to produce measurable results for children and families.

Decentralization alone does not guarantee success.

For decades, critics of centralized education policy argued that federal mandates often produced bloated compliance systems and procedural requirements disconnected from local realities. Washington became increasingly skilled at regulating inputs while struggling to improve long-term outcomes. 

Yet granting states more autonomy does not automatically produce effective governance.

A state can possess broad authority and still oversee failing schools, collapsing civic trust and stagnant upward mobility. Debates over parental rights, curriculum transparency, school choice and cultural accountability have become central to education politics in many states. Those issues matter. Parents should have meaningful authority over their children’s education, and communities deserve institutions that reflect local needs and values.

But education policy cannot become merely a politics of resistance. It must also become a politics of construction.

The real test of decentralization is whether states can build institutions that work.

Today, educational inequality remains profoundly geographic. In many parts of the country, a child’s ZIP code predicts educational achievement, workforce readiness, family stability and future earnings with alarming consistency. Some communities consistently produce mobility and strong civic outcomes. Others remain trapped in cycles of decline.

This is no longer simply a federal problem. It is increasingly a problem of state capacity.

Too many states spent decades demanding greater autonomy without building the institutional sophistication required to govern effectively once power returned to them. Many accountability systems still operate as relics of the old compliance era. They measure standardized-test averages and graduation statistics while failing to answer the question parents actually care about: Are children prepared to flourish as adults?

Any serious education agenda should focus less on bureaucratic processes and more on long-term human outcomes.

States should begin measuring mobility itself. That means tracking educational opportunity and life outcomes geographically—particularly at the ZIP-code level—and identifying which communities consistently produce upward mobility and which do not.

The purpose of these measures is not to create another compliance regime, but to identify which communities are successfully helping children transition into stable adulthood.

Such systems could include measures such as:

• Early literacy and numeracy rates 
• Chronic absenteeism 
• Access to tutoring, mentoring and after-school programs 
• Participation in career and technical education 
• Youth employment and apprenticeship participation 
• Postsecondary completion 
• Workforce participation 
• Family stability and parental involvement 

Examples of effective state-level reform already exist. Mississippi, once ranked near the bottom nationally in educational performance, has posted significant gains in early literacy after implementing statewide reading reforms, teacher training initiatives and evidence-based intervention strategies. Other states have increasingly aligned community colleges, workforce-development systems and career education with regional labor-market needs. 

These efforts remain uneven, but they demonstrate that state-led governance can produce measurable improvement when institutions are coherent and focused on outcomes.

States should not fear this kind of measurement or experimentation. Properly designed, it strengthens decentralization rather than weakens it. A governor in Wisconsin may understand the needs of manufacturing communities better than federal officials in Washington. Rural Appalachia faces different challenges than suburban Texas. States can align workforce systems, transportation policy, public safety and education in ways national bureaucracies often cannot.

That flexibility is precisely why decentralization matters. But flexibility without accountability becomes little more than fragmentation.

Decentralization is a governing framework, not a substitute for governing.

The central questions are straightforward: Can states build integrated longitudinal data systems that actually track outcomes over time? Can they identify which neighborhoods consistently trap children in educational failure? Can they align K–12 education with workforce demand and civic formation? Can they distinguish between symbolic politics and measurable improvement? 

Those are the priorities that matter now.

Americans increasingly distrust centralized institutions, but distrust alone does not build flourishing communities. Strong families, strong schools and strong civic institutions require operational excellence, not merely political rhetoric.

The country stands at another inflection point in education governance. The argument for returning greater authority to states has gained substantial momentum. The next challenge is proving that states can use that authority wisely.

Decentralization was never meant to be an escape from responsibility. Properly understood, it is a demand for greater responsibility — closer to the people, more responsive to local conditions and ultimately more accountable for results.

If states cannot deliver upward mobility, civic stability and educational competence, then the case for decentralization weakens. But if they can, this may yet become one of the great renewal stories of American public life.

The fourth time a child told me something similar, I knew we had a problem. A few minutes later, a little girl tugged on my shirt to tell me she didn’t need to learn either. She knew how from watching TV.

As a 16-year-old water safety advocate and teen ambassador for the National Drowning Prevention Alliance, I visit preschools and elementary schools around New York City — reading stories about water safety, teaching the rules, then purposely reciting them wrong so the kids can giggle at my mistakes and correct me. To the outside, it may look like storytime. To me, it is a lesson that could save a life.

Our nation has not come close to solving the childhood drowning epidemic. Each year, drown in America. Drowning is the for children ages 1 to 4. For children ages 5 to 14, it is the second leading cause of accidental death.

There’s a reason we keep failing. We have focused almost entirely on swim lessons because the data is too good to ignore: Formal instruction reduces drowning risk by a . But swim lessons only work if children actually get them. Millions of children don’t. 

Lessons require money, transportation, pool access and a caregiver who can take them. Even when programs are free, families still must find them, navigate registration forms and overcome language barriers. As a result, many children, especially in low-income, minority neighborhoods, fall through the cracks and receive no water safety education at all. 

African-American children ages 5 to 19 drown in swimming pools at than white children, and have few or no swimming skills.

That’s where teachers come in.

Teachers don’t need a pool. They don’t need a budget or a liability waiver. And they have the one thing no existing swim policy can guarantee: a captive audience of kids, already in the room.

It’s most urgent for the youngest children. To 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds, water is fascinating and naturally attracts them. It can also kill them, yet many don’t understand those dangers. It’s a concept adults tend to gloss over because to us, those dangers seem obvious.

A teacher can tell a preschooler never to go near water without a grown-up. A teacher can tell a kindergartner that water is dangerous even in — bathtubs, buckets, anything more than an inch. A teacher can teach small children that if they fall in, they should try to flip onto their back and float. Even knowing this could save a life.

Some educators worry that talking about water with young children will frighten them. I heard that line repeatedly when preschools rejected my request to visit the classroom. But consider this: We teach fire safety to preschoolers without frightening them. We teach them to get low and crawl. We teach street safety. We instruct them to look both ways before crossing the street. We even conduct lockdown drills with them. Water safety is no different. And when I speak to little children, I never use the word drowning. The kids still leave knowing exactly what to do.

The beauty of water safety education is that it can grow with the child. What starts as rules for little children turns into more sophisticated explanations for older children who can understand the science and consequences of water.

In elementary school, a teacher can explain that drowning doesn’t look like it does in the movies. There’s no splashing or screaming. It’s mostly silent. And if a friend is in trouble, you shouldn’t jump in after them. In water safety circles, it’s called the rule — throw something that floats, but never jump in yourself. A third or fourth grader can also understand that you never jump or dive into water without knowing how deep it is.

When children reach middle school, the lessons fit naturally into science class. A teacher can explain what a rip current is, how to identify one and what to do if you’re caught in one. They can also explain how suction works and why a broken pool drain generates enough force to hold a swimmer underwater.

In high school, water safety belongs in health class. We teach sex education. Why is water safety never mentioned? A teacher can explain why alcohol and open water are a deadly combination, how hydraulics in rivers and waterfalls can trap even the strongest swimmers, and why jumping on a dare may be the last decision they ever make.

None of this requires water. It requires a teacher. And the curriculum already exists for free from the and the .

Only one state has figured this out. In 2018, a 1-year-old boy named slipped away at a neighbor’s party and drowned in their pool. His parents turned their grief , signed in 2022, requiring water safety education in every Louisiana public school, kindergarten through 12th grade. In the three years since it passed, has followed. And now, the federal government has stepped back, too. In August 2025, the Trump administration the CDC’s drowning prevention program.

What’s clear is that classroom education can never replace swim lessons. There is no substitute for instruction in the water. But the classroom can serve as an insurance policy for the millions of children who will never get swim lessons.

Teachers don’t need to wait for a law. They can start tomorrow. If I can teach this during my lunch hour, just imagine what a real teacher could do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A of four urban districts confirms these research-based early literacy pedagogies are indeed widely implemented in these school systems. Educators are doing many things right: They are consistently delivering explicit phonics instruction that includes a clear purpose using high-quality foundational skills curricula. 

Across the four districts, between 88% and 94% of over 200 surveyed teachers reported using their foundational skills curriculum daily or almost daily. Classroom observations of 112 foundational skills lessons confirmed that instruction was focused, aligned, and explicit—hallmarks of effective early literacy teaching.

But something critical was often absent from those same lessons: the opportunity to

connect sounds and words to meaning. In a previous report, we explored how meaning is often missing in the tasks that upper elementary students are assigned — for instance, finding literal and nonliteral language in a reading passage but not what the author was trying to convey. In our latest publication, we look specifically at the foundational reading skills taught in the earlier grades.

Moreover, we found that many students meet literacy benchmarks for foundational skills on early literacy screening assessments. But by third grade — when they are expected to make meaning from more complex texts on state literacy assessments — far fewer demonstrate proficiency. 

In other words, early success with word reading does not always translate into later success with comprehension. 

This mirrors national trends: relying on early literacy assessments indicates that 56% of K–2 students nationally are “on track” for learning to read, but only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, a test that requires students to comprehend with greater depth.

What we found in our research, which included hours of classroom observation, was that only about one in five lessons gave students the chance to apply their phonics knowledge beyond single words to connected text: sentences, passages or stories that build reading fluency. And in more than half of lessons, teachers addressed word meaning just once or not at all.

In other words, students are learning how to blend sounds together to read words but not consistently how to make sense of them. We’ve made real progress on decoding, but the connections between decoding and meaning are often missing.

That stems, in part, from how early literacy instruction is structured and supported. Decoding and language comprehension are often taught in distinct lessons with different curricula, and teachers receive separate professional learning for each.

While this structure can support focused instruction, it can also give the false impression that meaning making does not belong in phonics lessons. At the same time, K–2 literacy data systems — including screeners and progress monitoring — tend to emphasize phonemic awareness and phonics, reinforcing the idea that those are the outcomes that matter.

The findings from this study point to an area for growth in foundational skills instruction that may help: bridging processes. These processes are the mechanisms that connect word recognition and language comprehension and should be incorporated into word recognition or phonics instruction, supporting students to build more meaning as they learn to decode. Two key bridging processes are vocabulary knowledge, which is understanding the meanings of words, and reading fluency or the ability to read connected text accurately and smoothly.

Without these bridging processes, decoding single words can be devoid of meaning.

Students may be able to sound out words yet still struggle to understand what they read. Importantly, bridging processes must be built into phonics instruction early on, and students should work on them throughout their early years of schooling, not just after they have successfully learned to decode words.

The encouraging news is that incorporating bridging processes does not require an overhaul of instruction or instructional systems. In many cases, bridging processes can be embedded into existing lessons in small but powerful ways.

Consider a phonics lesson on the two common sounds for double o, as in mood and look. A teacher might briefly define a target word — such as, “a brook is a small stream” — and show a picture of a brook before students practice reading it. Then she might instruct students to turn to a partner and share a sentence with the word brook.

This can take less than a minute but can anchor decoding in meaning, which is important for all students, especially for emergent multilingual students to expand their vocabulary as they are learning English. 

Similarly, building fluency doesn’t require a pivot away from explicit phonics instruction.

It requires ensuring that students regularly read sentences, passages and texts that incorporate the phonics patterns they are learning. 

For example, after decoding a list of words like book, cook, hood, soon, tool, and boot, students might read a simple sentence like, “We went to fish in the brook,” applying their phonics knowledge to connected text. Then they might read a short story about animals at a brook with several other double o words.

Our study found that such opportunities to build fluency were surprisingly rare and did not meaningfully increase from kindergarten through second grade. 

This is a missed opportunity. 

Stories and passages that use targeted phonics skills are often provided in early literacy curricula but are sometimes skipped due to pacing or a lack of understanding their importance. 

Fluency develops through practice with connected text; without it, students struggle to transition from decoding single words to understanding longer texts.

Bridging processes are critical for students to connect word recognition and language comprehension. Adequately addressing them requires more than individual teacher effort. District leaders must clearly assert that these processes are fundamental to foundational skills instruction and reflect this priority in curricula, professional learning and classroom observation tools.

District and school leaders should expand the data they use to capture a broader view of reading development, aligning tools with bridging processes and incorporating information beyond word recognition.

School leaders and instructional coaches should provide professional learning opportunities around bridging processes, leveraging existing structures like professional learning communities to teach educators how to embed vocabulary and fluency practice into phonics lessons without sacrificing instructional focus. 

This can be done through watching exemplar videos, conducting peer observations, lesson rehearsal and engaging in coaching conversations.

The promise of early literacy reform has always been that strong foundations would lead to strong readers. But developing students’ decoding skills alone is not enough.

If we continue to teach decoding and language comprehension as separate endeavors, the result will be the same: early gains that fade when students are asked to read and comprehend longer texts. But if we build the bridges through vocabulary knowledge, reading fluency practice and intentional meaning making in phonics instruction, we can change that trajectory.

SRI Education and ����Ӱ�� both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

Using a protocol I developed called “,” students mapped what gets in the way of learning. Nearly 100 participants generated more than 250 responses, which they posted, grouped and debated in real time. Students facilitated the process themselves and surfaced patterns with a clarity many adult teams struggle to reach. 

One theme rose quickly: “Nothing changes.”

Students weren’t talking about curriculum or rigor. They were describing what happens after they speak up. “We report things and nothing changes,” one student explained. Another added, “The biggest issue isn’t just bullying, it’s when adults don’t respond.” Across the workshop, roughly half of student responses pointed to the same issue: not whether students have a voice, but whether that voice leads to visible action. That’s the difference.

Across the country, policymakers are doubling down on civics, adding coursework, expanding standards and promoting credentials meant to signal engagement, including efforts like the Seal of Civic Engagement in Connecticut. These efforts are politically appealing, but they risk solving the wrong problem.

They rest on a flawed premise: that civic disengagement can be fixed through coursework and recognition alone. In reality, they may reinforce the very dynamic students describe, where participation is encouraged in theory but rarely shapes outcomes in practice.

This pattern is not unique. National surveys, including those from , show that many students feel their input is collected but rarely acted upon. The issue is not whether students are asked for their voice, but whether that voice meaningfully shapes outcomes.

When students spend years in systems where their input rarely influences decisions, they internalize a quiet but powerful lesson about how institutions work. Participation becomes symbolic, authority feels fixed and influence seems out of reach. Over time, students don’t just disengage. They adjust their expectations of how institutions operate.

The students in that Connecticut workshop were not disengaged. They were observant. In that room, they didn’t just identify problems; they modeled the kind of participation schools say they want to teach. Repeated experience taught them that speaking up does not necessarily lead to change.

We are asking students to believe in democracy while placing them in systems that rarely practice it. Civic engagement is not just about understanding democratic systems. It is about believing that participation matters and seeing evidence that it does.

A school can require civics coursework and still operate in ways that undermine it. It can teach the structure of government while modeling a system where decisions are largely made without meaningful student input. That contradiction is embedded in daily experience.

In too many schools, disengagement isn’t an accident. It is a predictable outcome of how systems are designed. Schools are one of the first public institutions young people encounter, and what they learn there about voice and power does not stay there. If we are serious about strengthening civic engagement, we have to look beyond what we teach and examine how schools function. 

This is, at its core, a design problem.

Students are more likely to engage when they feel known and respected. But belonging alone is not enough; a student can feel supported and still feel powerless.

The same conditions that build belonging, voice, participation and the ability to influence outcomes are also the conditions that foster long-term civic engagement. When those elements are absent, engagement fades over time.

What Needs to Change

This is not a call for another initiative layered onto an already crowded system. It is a call to rethink how schools operate on a daily basis. At a minimum, schools should establish structures where students regularly present proposals to school leadership and where responses are publicly tracked so students can see what changes and why. 

Schools should also make feedback loops visible, create consistent opportunities for dialogue and disagreement, and provide authentic audiences beyond the classroom where student ideas carry weight.

In the Connecticut workshop, the most striking moment was not the list of problems. It was what happened when students were given real responsibility to surface, organize and present their ideas. They did so thoughtfully and collaboratively, demonstrating the very civic skills schools aim to teach. The capacity is already there. The question is whether schools are designed to use it.

We tell students their voice matters, yet we place them in systems where it rarely influences outcomes. Students notice, and over time, they internalize that gap, not because they are apathetic, but because their experience has taught them what to expect.

If we continue to treat civic learning as a content issue, we will keep missing the point.

America does not have a civics crisis because students are disengaged. It has a civics crisis because too many schools are not designed to give students meaningful opportunities to participate. Until that changes, no amount of additional coursework will be enough, because students are already learning how our systems work — not from what we teach, but from how our schools actually operate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Feminism rooted in me’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The elephant in the room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where am I in this equation?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘This system doesn’t benefit us’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What comes next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An overhaul of Indiana’s public K-12 school accountability ratings will take effect despite objections from Attorney General Todd Rokita, who criticized the new system as diluting the importance of academic proficiency.

Rokita and Gov. Mike Braun signed off on the State Board of Education rule this month, concluding a multiyear effort by lawmakers to rewrite Indiana’s high school graduation and accountability requirements.

Braun on Wednesday brushed off Rokita’s criticism of the revised A-F ratings, which formally take effect for the 2026-27 school year.

A look at the new A-F model

The Board of Education the new statewide A-F model in March.

The new system assigns points to each student rather than using schoolwide averages and standardized test scores.

These student scores are based on academic proficiency, growth and other success indicators, which are then averaged within elementary, middle and high school grade bands and combined into the overall A-F grade assigned to each school.

Education officials praised the changes for better reflecting student progress, literacy and post-graduation readiness in place of the “all-or-nothing” model of the past.

The new approach mirrors changes to Indiana’s high school diplomas and diploma seals.

A school’s graduation rate and SAT performance each account for 10% of its score, combined with other measures like coursework, credentials, work-based learning and student engagement.

The state will calculate and publicly release letter grades under the new system for the 2025-26 school year, but will not take action against poorly rated schools during the transition year.

The rule is now final following signatures from Rokita and Braun on May 1.

Rokita argues new system blunts accountability

Rokita again raised concerns about the new accountability metrics in a letter to Braun this month, citing Board of Education metrics revealing few schools will be rated as D or F schools despite poor academic proficiency.

Thirty-three percent of Hoosier students in grades 3-8 are proficient in both English language arts and math on the state’s standardized exams, while fewer than one in four high school students meet SAT proficiency benchmarks, yet few schools will receive low ratings, Rokita wrote in the letter provided to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

“Under any system driven by academic performance, these proficiency rates would be expected to produce far more low-rated schools,” he wrote. “They do not.”

Rokita served as chairman of the subcommittee on K-12 education in the U.S. House of Representatives before his election as attorney general.

In his letter to Braun, Rokita criticized the Indiana Department of Education for not making its internal modeling public during the rulemaking process, writing the “surprisingly high number of schools” with higher-than-expected ratings is by design.

“In the extreme, a school where all students are fully proficient and a school where no students are proficient could receive the same rating if the nonproficient students satisfy various nonacademic indicators,” he wrote.

The Board of Education made revisions to the rule earlier this year to satisfy Rokita’s objections.

While those revisions satisfied his legal review, Rokita wrote he remains concerned the new system fails to accurately reflect student proficiency, which in turn could undermine the state’s school choice reforms.

He urged Braun to direct the Board of Education to reconsider its approach.

“If Indiana’s A-F system is to remain credible and transparent, it should clearly distinguish between schools where students meet those standards and those where they do not,” he wrote. “In practice, the Rule will likely not accomplish this task.”

Asked Wednesday about Rokita’s objections, Braun stood by Education Secretary Katie Jenner and the Board of Education.

“I’m going to trust the secretary of education, the boards that weigh into it,” Braun told reporters. “And to me, I’m always going to error on the side of more accountability, not less.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

It was also the kind of video that makes many teachers think, “That’s amazing — and there is absolutely no way I can do that.”

Most educators are not looking for one more performance to add to their day. They are already managing lesson plans, behavior, parent communication, paperwork, staff meetings, substitute shortages and the emotional weight of trying to meet every student’s needs. So when “greet students at the door” gets presented as another big, elaborate thing, it can feel unrealistic.

But the real power of a doorway greeting is not in the choreography.

It is in the connection.

I have seen this moment matter from preschool classrooms to high school hallways. After years of working with students and schools as a social worker, district administrator and consultant, I’ve learned that the ages and settings may change, but the need is remarkably consistent: Students want to know that someone is glad they are there.

Research suggests that this small routine can make a measurable difference. classrooms where teachers greeted students at the door saw a 20 percentage point increase in academic engagement and a 9 percentage point decrease in disruptive behavior. The researchers estimated that this kind of increase in engagement could add roughly an extra hour of engagement across a five-hour instructional day.

That is a significant return on a very small investment.

The beginning of class is one of the most important transitions of the school day. Students are moving from the hallway, cafeteria, playground or another classroom into a learning environment. They may be carrying noise, conflict, anxiety, excitement, frustration or unfinished conversations with them. The first few minutes of class can quickly become a scramble: students talking over each other, wandering, negotiating, arguing, sharpening pencils, asking what they missed or waiting to see how much the teacher will tolerate before stepping in.

A doorway greeting sets the tone before students cross the threshold.

The good news is that the most effective greetings in the research were not complicated and did not require special dance moves. The essentials are: Teachers used the student’s name. They made eye contact. They offered a brief nonverbal greeting — a handshake, fist bump, high five, nod or wave. Then they added a short positive or “pre-corrective” statement, which is simply a friendly reminder of what to do next.

That might sound like:

“Good morning, Jayden. I’m glad you’re here. Take a look at the warm-up on the board.”

“Hi, Maria. Good to see you. Grab your notebook and start with question one.”

“Welcome back, Marcus. Today is a fresh start. I’m glad you’re here because we’re going to learn about those volcanoes you were asking about.”

There is nothing flashy about it. But it is powerful because it combines connection and structure.

That combination matters.

Too often, schools treat relationships and expectations as if they are competing priorities. Some educators worry that a focus on relationships means being permissive. Others worry that a focus on expectations means being rigid or punitive. But students need both. They need to know that adults care about them, and they need to know what is expected.

A doorway greeting brings those two needs together in a practical way.

From a behavioral perspective, it is a predictable routine that explicitly teaches and reinforces expected behavior. Students know how to enter, where to look, what to start and how the class begins. That predictability lowers stress for students and teachers.

From a restorative practices perspective, it is a relationship-building habit. It communicates belonging. It gives teachers a daily opportunity to notice students before there is a problem. It allows a teacher to quietly repair after a difficult day, offer encouragement to a student who struggled yesterday or simply communicate, “You matter here. I see you and I’m glad you’re here.”

And from a classroom management perspective, it is prevention.

Teachers know that once a class begins in chaos, it can take a long time to recover. A calm, consistent start protects instructional time. It also reduces the need for repeated corrections once students are inside the room.

This practice becomes even more powerful when it is adopted schoolwide. I have seen schools make a community agreement for everyone to stand at their doors during passing periods or arrival time. The effect was immediate. Hallways felt calmer. Students were more connected to adults. Minor misbehavior decreased because adults were present, visible and welcoming. The whole building felt different. 

And something unexpected happened, too: Teachers began connecting with one another. They smiled and waved across the hall, offered words of encouragement, shared a quick joke and reminded one another, in small but meaningful ways, that they were in this together.

Of course, implementation matters. Doorway greetings should be simple, sustainable and adaptable. Teachers can choose a greeting style that fits their personality and their students. Some may use a fist bump. Some may use a warm verbal greeting. Some may offer students a choice: wave, elbow bump, peace sign or no-contact greeting. The point is not the gesture itself. The point is consistent positive contact paired with a clear start-of-class direction.

School leaders also have a role to play. If they want teachers greeting students at the door, they can model it themselves. They can be present, visible and engaged with students and staff during passing periods. That kind of modeling communicates that connection is not one more classroom management trick. It is part of the culture.

The best strategies in schools are often not the most complicated ones. They are the ones that are easy to repeat, grounded in research and aligned with what students and teachers actually need.

Greeting students at the door will not solve every behavior challenge. It will not replace strong instruction, meaningful relationships, clear routines or effective support systems. But it is one small practice that brings all of those ideas together. And when a routine becomes a habit, it becomes easier to sustain.

Two minutes at the door can say: You are welcome here. We are ready to learn. I see you. Let’s begin again.

For many students, that may be exactly the connection moment they need.

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

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

The vote was 16 to 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘We got busy’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Powerful source of information’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Blue and red states’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story was originally published by . for their newsletters.

The primary for the state’s top K-12 schools job is in less than a month, but judging from the polls, it’s debatable whether anyone is paying attention.

A whopping 32% of voters are undecided with just a few weeks until the for state superintendent of public instruction, according to by the Public Policy Institute of California. In the past, it’s been one of the state’s hottest races, with millions of dollars in spending.

Among the dozen or so candidates, none had more than 10% of voters’ support, meaning that the race is essentially a 10-way tie.

“There’s no lack of qualified candidates, but previous elections had an urgency and a sense that who won really mattered,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC. “We don’t have that this time.”

A job with few duties?

One reason for the malaise, observers said, may be that voters are more focused on education policy unfolding in Washington, D.C. The Trump administration is in the process of dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, which could potentially upend funding and student rights. Another reason might be that most of the candidates agree on the major issues, so there’s not much to distinguish them.

Regardless, the position might be nearly irrelevant by the time the new superintendent takes office. The state is poised to . Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed in January that the superintendent no longer run the California Department of Education. Instead, it would fall under the control of the State Board of Education, which is appointed by the governor. The idea was introduced in his January budget proposal and is expected to pass the Legislature.

That would shift power over the state’s 10,000 public schools to the governor’s office. The superintendent would have few responsibilities except championing various education-related causes. The governor’s race would carry more relevance to school funding, policies and other issues than the superintendent’s race.

Teachers union weighs in

The California Teachers Association, one of the biggest players in education politics, has been far more involved in the governor’s race than the superintendent race. After Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the governor’s race, the union endorsed billionaire Tom Steyer for governor, citing his alignment with the union’s priorities.

For superintendent, the union endorsed Richard Barrera, a San Diego Unified school board member who was little known outside San Diego before winning the union’s backing.

“The superintendent race is off the radar because the governor’s race has taken up so much bandwidth,” said David Goldberg, president of the union. “Although the superintendent’s impact is deeply felt by those who work in public education, it’s not widely known outside public education.”

The next superintendent will replace Tony Thurmond, who is termed out and is running for governor. The superintendent position is nonpartisan and pays . The top two candidates in June’s primary will advance to the November general election.

So far, the leading candidates in the superintendent’s race include a host of education policy veterans. Among them: Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, former head of the Assembly education committee; Josh Newman, former head of the Senate education committee; Anthony Rendon, former speaker of the Assembly and a longtime early education program administrator; and Nichelle Henderson, a Los Angeles Community College District board member.

‘A lightning rod’

Sonja Shaw, a school board member in Chino Valley, is also running and has gained traction on the right. In the most recent poll, she had support from 7% of voters, the same as Barrera. Lance Christensen, who ran against Thurmond in 2022, predicted that Shaw will advance to the November election because Democrats’ votes will split among the other candidates.

Shaw is best known for her fiery positions on transgender student rights. She was propelled to the limelight in 2023 when she presided over a Chino Valley school board meeting where out when he spoke over his time limit defending transgender students’ right to privacy. She’s been an outspoken advocate for schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender, and for students to participate on teams that align with their gender at birth.

“They can say anything they want about her, but she’s such a lightning rod that now everyone knows who she is,” said Christensen, who’s now a vice president at the anti-union California Policy Center. “I think this issue will take her all the way to Sacramento.”

Why no one’s talking about charter schools

One issue that’s been glaringly absent in the superintendent race is charter schools. In years past, charter schools were the No. 1 topic in the race. Candidates were deemed to be either “pro-charter” or “anti-charter,” with donations and rhetoric following suit. “Pro-charter” was often interpreted to mean anti-union, leading to an avalanche of rancor from both sides.

But the public, and even the unions, seem to have grown tired of arguing about the independent public schools. One reason is that many charter schools now have unions. Another reason is that because of declining enrollment, charter schools are no longer expanding; they appear to have plateaued at about 10% of overall enrollment.

A more likely reason is that voters see that charter schools and traditional public schools grapple with the same issues, said Marshall Tuck, a former chief executive of the Green Dot charter school network who ran for superintendent in 2018 and 2014. The 2018 election in which he lost to Thurmond was one of the most costly superintendent races ever, with contributions topping $50 million. By comparison, no candidate in the current election has raised more than $1 million so far.

Most schools – regardless of their governance structure – are facing , and lackluster student engagement since the pandemic ended.

“Now that we’ve removed the charter vitriol, we can focus on bigger issues,” said Tuck, who is now chief executive at EdVoice, a policy advocacy organization. “The core issues are the same everywhere.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end of NCLB

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Top national priority’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When a family in crisis — immigration status, housing or food insecurity or chronic health issues — opens that door, the central question is who they trust enough to let in. The effectiveness of human-centered efforts to combat chronic absenteeism depends not just on what advocates do, but also on who they are.

to return chronically absent students to the classroom fail because the outreach often triggers fear and deeper institutional distrust in the communities it is meant to help. Successful community outreach requires professionals who share cultural background, common language and lived experience. 

The fundamental flaw in the traditional, compliance-based approach to chronic absenteeism is that it assumes everyone views institutional authority in the same manner. However, for marginalized families — such as undocumented households, those in poverty or those with prior experience with the judicial system — contact from official institutions inspires fear, not partnership. A recent report from Concentric Educational Solutions details this phenomenon. 

To reconnect the chronically absent to opportunity, a new approach — and a new face — is needed.

That is why the key to reengaging the approximately 25% of American students who are chronically absent is systematic, supportive outreach conducted by local community members who know the cultural background, language, lived experience and neighborhood context of the families they serve. 

This approach, which focuses on learning the “why” behind absenteeism, is about understanding why a parent might not answer the door, what a family’s silence communicates and how to build a relationship in a living room that is often a family’s safest space. 

The presence of a professional who is invested in the community, who speaks a family’s language and understands its culture is qualitatively different even the most well meaning truancy officer. A shared identity is essential, ensuring advocates are perceived as trusted neighbors, not representatives of a system that may have previously failed the family.

Data shows that supportive interventions by trained community members lead to positive results. of this type of in-home outreach found that 48% of chronically absent students returned to school after just a single supportive intervention. This data shows the importance of families trusting the person delivering the help and the limits of compliance-based approaches to chronic absenteeism. 

For K-12 school districts and policymakers, the implications are clear. When thinking through outreach to the chronically absent, the messenger matters. Some districts use school staff for such outreach, but this often requires overtime pay and is hard to sustain; others hire members of the community specifically for the work. This is not a soft add-on: It is a critical component of how evidence-based attendance models actually function in the real world.

Unless school leaders hire individuals who are culturally and linguistically connected to the communities they serve for this sensitive outreach, they cannot expect genuine relational trust to simply materialize. That means prioritizing local hiring, language concordance and lived experience. This strategy ensures that the face at the door is one families recognize and trust and will directly translate institutional goals into positive student outcomes.

The knock at the door that can truly change a student’s trajectory is not the one carrying the authority of a uniform and truancy summons. It simply is the knock a family recognizes. Returning a student to school, engaging them in learning and reconnecting them to opportunity is sensitive work that occurs by rebuilding relationships one conversation at a time. And these critical conversations require individuals sharing a common language, a shared background and a face families already know and trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The laws’ tradeoffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help on the SAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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