That moment carried more than joy. It carried years of waiting lists, missed explanations, language barriers and advocacy in systems that were never designed with her family in mind.

Sofía’s story is not unique. Across the country, Latino families navigating special education often encounter structural barriers that make access more complicated than federal law intends. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, schools are required to provide timely evaluations and ensure meaningful parent participation. Yet the lived experiences of many multilingual families suggest that implementation is uneven.

In 2022, launched , a community-based research initiative that trains Latino parents to document and analyze the realities facing families like their own. Parents are not research subjects in this model; they are the researchers. Two years later, ISLA — working within its parent-led research model, Padres Investigadores, and supported by research consultants — trained a new team of Latino parent researchers to design and conduct a statewide study examining how families in North Carolina navigate special education.

highlight important gaps in communication and access.

For many Latino families, entering special education means navigating two unfamiliar systems at once: disability services and English. Parents in our study described four stages in their journey: recognizing developmental differences, securing evaluations and diagnoses, accessing services and navigating schools, and managing communication challenges that created delays, confusion and stress.

More than half of parents were the first to notice developmental concerns in their children, not teachers or doctors. Yet many said those concerns were initially dismissed. While IDEA establishes timelines for evaluations, over 40% of families in our study reported waiting six months or longer. Nearly half identified language as their biggest barrier to accessing quality services.

In early childhood, time matters. Delays in evaluation and intervention can shape long-term educational trajectories. When families do not fully understand what services exist, what documents they are signing or what rights they hold, special education becomes harder to access equitably.

Language access is not simply a courtesy; it is essential for meaningful participation. Families described inconsistent interpretation, incomplete translations and meetings that moved forward without ensuring comprehension. One father told us, “They talked about my child’s future in a language I couldn’t speak.”

Importantly, families were not disengaged. They attended meetings. They asked questions. They took notes. What they sought was clarity and partnership.

The parents in our study consistently named three priorities: clear multilingual information, culturally responsive communication and timely access to evaluations and services with reliable interpretation. These requests align closely with on effective special education practices.

One of the most powerful findings from this work is that when parents are included as partners in research and problem-solving, trust grows. Padres Investigadores shifts the dynamic from extraction to collaboration. Parents design questions, gather stories and interpret findings within their own communities. In doing so, they reveal insights that might otherwise remain invisible.

Natalia, who once felt overwhelmed when she heard the word “autism” connected to her son, is now one of those parent researchers. She supports other Spanish-speaking families navigating the same systems she once struggled to understand. Her leadership did not emerge from policy alone; it emerged from access to information and genuine inclusion.

Sofía’s first word through a device represents possibility. But possibility should not depend on a family’s fluency in English or familiarity with educational terminology.

Equity in special education is not only about compliance. It is about ensuring that families understand the process, feel respected in it and are able to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their children.

When language access, cultural understanding and parent partnership are treated as foundational, not supplemental, special education systems move closer to fulfilling the promise embedded in federal law.

Listening to families like Sofía’s is not an act of charity. It is a necessary step toward building systems that work as intended — for every child.

This is a major mistake.

Hispanic students, like all multilingual learners, deserve to be recognized and valued year-round. There are in U.S. public schools, making up more than 10% of the student population — and . If states and districts are serious about recognizing and honoring Hispanic heritage, they must consider the content and instruction they put in front of students every day. And specifically, how their instructional materials integrate and celebrate multilingual learners’ culture and languages.

For many students, culture and language are completely intertwined. Language isn’t just a form of communication; it’s a vital link to their heritage. Unfortunately, language loss across generations has been quite common in the U.S. Even states with large Latino populations, like California, Texas, and New Mexico, have experienced some erosion as each generation conforms to an English-dominant society.

Multilingual learners often have to negotiate a delicate balance between embracing cultural pride and bowing to societal pressures. School is still seen by many of these students and families as a place where they are supposed to put aside their home languages in exchange for learning “better” English. Unfortunately, many states and districts — including those with high multilingual learner populations — utilize curricula that support this perception by ignoring diversity in language and culture.

This perception must change. that students who feel connected to their cultural identity are more likely to be motivated in school, develop higher self-esteem and graduate at higher rates than those who don’t. That’s because when students see their languages and cultures reflected in their learning materials, it fosters a sense of belonging and validates their experiences. 

Schools should be places that acknowledge, respect or even build on their students’ home languages for greater learning. ; speaking more than one language has shown positive effects on cognitive brain function and . And as early as first grade, bilingual students have monolingual students in mathematical reasoning and problem-solving, as well as on math tests. 

The collective failure of schools to truly honor the home languages of multilingual learners doesn’t just devalue their heritage, it keeps them from reaching their full potential. Schools also miss out on the opportunity to introduce all students to the diverse perspectives and cultures that speakers of other languages bring to the table. that when students have those experiences, they develop greater tolerance for differences as well as an understanding and appreciation of other cultures.

A revealed that 70% of teachers do not feel prepared to teach multilingual learners. Additionally, a staggering 80% reported that their instructional materials don’t do enough to improve outcomes for multilingual learners.

Without the proper , even the most dedicated teachers are placed in an impossible situation as they struggle to provide the instruction their multilingual students deserve. Given that, it’s not surprising that many teachers spend time developing their own materials. By implementing curricula that are designed to support multilingual learners, districts can help educators spend more time doing what they do best: helping students grow. 

For both teachers and students, education should be about more than just surviving the school year. It should be about thriving academically, socially and culturally. For too long, multilingual learners have been denied the opportunities they need to succeed. Every student — regardless of home language or background — will have a greater chance to succeed in school and retain their heritage for generations to come if they have access to thoughtfully implementing inclusive curricula. Schools must give teachers the instructional materials that actually maximize their students’ bilingual superpower, and commit to honoring the languages and cultures of Hispanic students, and all multilingual learners, year-round.

Nearly half of Texas high school students who earn college credits are Hispanic, study says

Nearly half of all public high school students in Texas who earn college credits before they graduate are Hispanic, a new study found. That makes Texas a national leader in closing the gap between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students who participate in dual credit programs.

Hispanic students in dual credit classes, however, graduate from college at a lower rate compared to peers who were also in those programs, underscoring the need to strengthen the transition from high school to college for students of color.

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“We both have to focus on equalizing access to dual credit and providing dual credit students with the supports they need to go to college and complete college,” John Fink, a researcher with the Community College Research Center, said.

The Community College Research Center used National Student Clearinghouse data to look at high school juniors and seniors in 2015 who were enrolled in a dual credit course and in their first four years out of high school. Researchers selected that particular group of students to study the long term effects of dual credit on educational attainment. The researchers said it’s the first of its kind to break down dual credit outcomes by race, socioeconomic status and age by state.

The study found Black student participation, meanwhile, has lagged behind. Black students made up 8% of dual credit programs in the state, compared to 13% of Texas high school enrollment, according to a report on dual credit released Tuesday.

When Texas students made plans after high school, about half of dual enrollment students returned to the community college where they took dual credit classes for at least one term, according to the report’s findings.

The number of dual-credit students in Texas and around the country has ballooned in the past 10 years. Education leaders have seen dual credit programs as a way to encourage students to pursue higher education by giving them a chance to familiarize themselves with a college environment in high school. Earning college credit while still in high school has been linked to a higher educational attainment.

Texas legislators even changed to incentivize dual credit last year. Community colleges now get more money when high school students earn at least 15 college credit hours on their campuses. As part of the new funding system, state lawmakers also created the Financial Aid for Swift Transfer, or FAST, program, which gives community colleges extra money if they to low-income students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch.

In the past year alone, dual credit participation has grown at record numbers, with about 250,000 students taking advantage of the FAST program to take dual credit classes at no cost, Sarah Keyton, the interim commissioner of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, said in testimony in front of the Senate Higher Education Committee last month.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

I was lucky. Education was highly valued in my family, and several of my siblings also gravitated toward science, technology, engineering and math careers. But many other children from Hispanic families aren’t as fortunate. They suffer from low academic expectations and/or a lack of role models in STEM-related jobs. 

, Hispanic adults make up 17% of the U.S. labor force but just 8% of those working in STEM careers. Many Hispanic children aren’t even aware of the possibilities that exist within the STEM fields.

As technology plays an increasingly important role in Americans’ daily lives, STEM is a fundamental driver of economic success. Beyond that, learning about STEM topics prepares students to thrive in any career. It helps them see the world differently and become highly adept at solving problems and thinking critically. For these reasons and many more, it’s essential that all students — and especially those of color — receive a high-quality STEM education and learn about career options in these critical fields.

Here are five ways that schools, communities and families can deliver on this promise.

First, invest in strong STEM programming in schools. While all students deserve access to rigorous STEM instruction, children of color and those who live in poorer communities often lack access to key learning opportunities and resources, such as robotics and computer science, advanced science classes in high school, even hands-on experiments and other basic science and technology exposure in elementary school. To address these gaps, school districts can prioritize STEM education and invest in high-quality professional development to ensure that teachers feel qualified to teach science in engaging and practical ways that adequately prepare students for future careers.

Educators can promote organizations such as and the , which offer valuable resources for Hispanic STEM students seeking to connect with peers and expand their knowledge in the field. Families and other community members can advocate for stronger investment in STEM programming in their schools by seeking partnerships with local businesses and organizations, including STEM-focused clubs, workshops, seminars and competitions to enhance resources and opportunities.

Second, they can expose students to STEM career pathways beginning at a young age. Children can’t aspire to careers they don’t know about: They might understand what a computer programmer does, but what about a video game designer? A cybersecurity analyst? A chemist who studies how odor molecules can be used to make perfumes? A sound effects engineer who works on movie sets? There are plenty of resources that can inspire Hispanic students to engage in STEM and become community leaders. Shows like SciGirls, Maya and Miguel and Nina’s World, along with books like Ay, Mija! Why Do You Want to Be an Engineer? and The Lola Dérez S.T.E.M. Mysteries, showcase Hispanic excellence and encourage exploration with curiosity and passion.

By exposing students to a wide variety of STEM-related jobs, educators, families and community members can open a world of possibilities and inspire young people to pursue this career path. Learning about STEM-based jobs also helps students understand how the math and science content they’re learning in school prepares them for the real world after graduation. 

Third, they can set high expectations. Whether consciously or not, some teachers and administrators make assumptions about what students of color can — or cannot — achieve. These are often barriers that prevent Hispanic students and others from reaching their full potential. Setting high expectations for all children, and helping them reach these standards with guidance and support, can ensure that Hispanic students have the same opportunities as their peers.

Fourth, they can provide students with mentors and role models who look like them. Representation matters; connecting students with mentors who come from similar backgrounds gives them relatable heroes and a path that feels attainable as they see someone like them who has succeeded. This helps build a sense of community and a support network that is extremely valuable in encouraging them to follow STEM-related disciplines. Throughout my college and professional experience, I was often the only person of Mexican descent in the room. That can be very lonely and discouraging. To make sure others don’t have this experience, I regularly mentor students in elementary through high school. I also volunteer at my children’s school and talk about the success I’ve had in STEM. I point students toward my STEM heroes, such as Dr. Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman in space, and Dr. Carlos Bustamante, a biophysicist known for his research in single-molecule biology, so Hispanic students realize that people who look like me — and like them — can accomplish amazing things in their careers. Organizations such as — an association of Hispanic professionals — have qualified volunteers who advise and mentor young people.

Lastly, schools can provide opportunities for all students to engage in Advanced Placement math and science. College can be difficult for many families of color to afford, and this is no different for Hispanic families. In fact, nearly who cut their education short during or right after high school report doing so to support their families. If not for scholarships, I wouldn’t have been able to complete my own advanced degree. Earning Advanced Placement credits in high school can help students lower the cost of college by reducing the time to completion.

Organizations such as the nonprofit can help school systems implement high-quality AP courses that reach more students — and its programs integrate culturally relevant teaching practices, including materials that focus on Black and Latino voices and support for English learners. The organization also covers the registration fee for all AP exams taken by students at participating schools. Among African-American and Hispanic students at these schools, the average qualifying scores in math in the first year, significantly surpassing national averages. For female students, the scores rose 84%, 12 times the national average.

Perhaps the best way to help Hispanic students engage with STEM is to listen. Encourage them to ask questions, show them it’s OK to try and to fail — that’s part of the scientific process, and it’s how STEM professionals learn and grow — and provide a safe, supportive and inclusive learning environment. Engaging Hispanics in STEM not only gives them more options, it’s also imperative for advancing equity in STEM careers in the United States.

A Philadelphia group wants schools to focus more on being places of joy as a way to overhaul the culture in district schools, and it’s relying on parents and community voices for help.

Lift Every Voice, the organization behind this year’s Joy Campaign, is backing the creation of a to bolster access to recess, the arts, counselors, and the district’s program to bolster student mental health known as the Support Team for Educational Partnership. The blueprint would also create a Chief of Joy position in the district; in June, the City Council a resolution in Philly schools. The group says this approach to budgeting and community input is crucial for reducing things like disparities in student discipline.

The district has its own federally funded restorative justice program that focuses on student empowerment and engagement. But Lift Every Voice wants its work to be broader by auditing whether collective punishments like enforced quiet times and limited recess in schools contribute to inequities and an anti-Black environment. Parent surveys conducted by Lift Every Voice from earlier this year show that student mental health and school climate and environments are still major concerns that the district must address, the group says.

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Ultimately, it

“The school system is a closed system that doesn’t want to be told what to do and we’re starting to force them to come to grips with our voice that’s not going away,” said Wes Lathrop, Lift Every Voice’s organizing director.

Councilmember Kendra Brooks, who co-sponsored the June resolution, sees the campaign as a way to help schools embrace cultural differences, and as a way to to reduce disparities and biases, including those held by adults.

“We have to find a way to embrace the model and make it part of the normal cultural norms,” Brooks said. “A project we’re taking on has to be embedded. The only way we do that is consistency and sustainability, and oftentimes we haven’t seen that.”

Lathrop sees community involvement in restorative justice as a two-way street, pointing to the importance for all citizens of having students who are well-prepared for the job market and post-graduation life: “Parents can be a real guiding powerful force to really shape the future of the district.”

Susan McLeod, a Philadelphia public schools parent, got involved with Lift Every Voice because of issues her child was facing. She feels crucial decisions are made in the district without any parent involvement, such as announcements of district school closures more than 10 years ago that took her completely off guard. The group has helped her feel empowered on her own and her child’s behalf.

“It’s important for us to lay this foundation for our kids to have a better learning experience as young as elementary school,” McLeod said.

Racial disparities in student discipline represent one particular concern. The district has adopted practices rooted in restorative justice, an approach to discipline that emphasizes conflict mediation between students and other forms of resolving conflicts as alternatives to student suspensions and expulsions.

Overall suspensions have declined in Philadelphia public schools recently: The percentage of students with at least one suspension in a school year has dropped from about 11.5% in 2013 to about 5.7% in 2023. But over that same period, Black and Hispanic students were suspended at higher rates relative to their total enrollment than white students, according to data from the .

The district’s Relationships First initiative started in 2019 and expanded in 2023 to include more schools. It’s focused on developing students as leaders in restorative justice efforts and trains teachers to guide students in that work.

“Folks have the opportunity to engage in restorative conversations … and to be able to provide alternatives to suspension across the entire district,” said Luis Rosario, assistant director of school climate and culture for the district. “I do think it’s a testament to the leadership of our school district to move in that direction.”

These efforts dovetail with another led by Healing Futures. Healing Futures is operated by the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project that receives case referrals from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office in place of a legal charge. In programs that last a minimum of eight weeks with mentor participation, students attend weekly discussions about their values and community and how to take accountability for the harm created by the student’s actions.

“We want to make sure that as many different perspectives of a situation can come into the room and offer their insight and support collectively,” said Hanae Mason, who is shadowing Healing Futures as part of her work as a to improve systems serving youth.

Building students’ agency and perspective can take different forms and lead to various outcomes.

Mary Libby, former principal at what’s now the Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy, worked to introduce restorative justice practices and noticed students taking on more responsibility after formal restorative sessions. Students led the push when in honor of singer and local civil rights activist Marian Anderson, Libby said.

“In order for us to collectively move forward in a restorative and inclusive way, we need to trust and let the kids lead that process,” Libby said.

Malachi Grogan, an incoming seventh grader at Anderson who helped lead efforts to change the school’s name, is proud of the trust he has created with his peers where he can now lead restorative or cooling conversations.

“If we talk about it then we can get to know how people are feeling,” Grogan said. “And if we don’t know how people are feeling, how are we supposed to help them?”

Correction, Aug. 8, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that Healing Futures is not led by the district attorney’s office, but is part of the nonprofit Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project. It receives case referrals from the district attorney’s office but is not part of city government.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The researchers found that in 2016 there was no discernable difference between the chronic absenteeism rates of English learners and non-English learners. But around 2021, there was a marked shift: suddenly English learners were absent more frequently than their peers, both in the raw data and when controlling for other variables like socioeconomic status.

This trend was particularly acute for older students and those who had been classified as English learners for six or more years. 

The magnitude of this shift is small but “troubling,” according to the study, especially because previous research has shown a disproportionate effect of absences on English learners’ achievement in and . 

And these results seem to match statewide trends: the most recent data from California (2022–2023) show that the chronic absenteeism rate among English learners was close to , four percentage points above the rate for non-English learners. 

Across the nation, chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — surged during the pandemic, from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2022, and remained high in 2023. While most acute among students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike cut across districts regardless of size, racial breakdown or income.

“I think our findings really highlight this as an issue that should be looked at with a sense of urgency,” lead researcher Lucrecia Santibañez told ����Ӱ��. She noted that missing a significant amount of classroom time has a negative impact on both test scores and social emotional learning, effects that can compound over time. “Clearly this population has struggled to recover to where they were before. So if we were already worried about them before the pandemic … these higher absenteeism rates are probably going to make that worse.”

Santibañez, who is Mexican and a mother of three, said her personal experiences helped spur her interest in studying Latino populations in schools. During the COVID recovery period, she began hearing from English language development teachers who were struggling to engage their students and get them back to school.

Santibañez and her co-researchers analyzed data from 444,000 students in four urban, rural and suburban mid- to large-size school districts over eight school years, from 2014 to 2022. The researchers did not disclose the names of the districts in the study.

Data was also broken down by grade level, year and type of English learner status. Although English learners are often treated as a homogenous group, they’re made up of five different categories of students who typically have different needs, outcomes and prevalence of chronic absenteeism, according to Santibañez. This study is the first to disaggregate this group, which Santibañez said will allow district leaders and policy makers to better understand how to best serve students’ unique needs.  

“It’s important, I think, for the research community to look at these groups differently, because they’re going to exhibit things that — when you lump them all together — it’s going to wash out some of these nuances,” Santibañez said.

The rising absenteeism trend is most evident and persistent for students currently identified as English learners and long-term English learners — students who have been classified as English learners for at least six years, the research found. Reclassified students — those who were previously identified as English learners but have since demonstrated English proficiency— are less likely to be absent, which matches previous research. Although they also saw a rise in chronic absenteeism in 2021, they’ve since returned to previously lower levels.

The study also found that as English language learners enter middle and high school, they’re more likely to be absent. Santibañez said that this mirrors when these students tend to get put into lower-rigor — often lower-quality — classes, which might lead to a dip in engagement.

English learners are a growing population, representing just over of students enrolled in public schools nationally. The vast majority (76%) as their primary language, followed by Arabic (2%) and Chinese (2%).

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said she’s not surprised by the outcomes of the study and has noticed similar trends across California over the past year and a half. It’s harder to nail down national trends, she said, because they’re not tracked the same way, but the 2021-22 federal data shows that the English learner chronic absenteeism rate was about 36% — six percentage points higher  

‘Something changed’

While English learners often face to educational success — stemming from lack of services, deficit-laden instructional practices and inconsistent inter-district policies — researchers hypothesize a number of demographic factors may have historically encouraged strong attendance. For example, the majority of English learners are the children of immigrants who tend to move less and

After the onset of the pandemic, though, absenteeism among English learners rose disproportionately as additional factors came into play, including a to services and support. 

English language learners and their families were often among “the essential workers and the communities most affected economically — and health-wise — by the pandemic [so] they may experience extreme death and trauma,” according to Chang. Parents who were essential workers were also less likely to be home to make sure their kids were attending remote classes.

“Now coming back from the pandemic,” she added, “you still have issues of access to health care to prevent kids from getting sick in the first place.” And families may still be confused and overly cautious about when to keep sick kids at home. 

There are also safety and bullying concerns, Chang said. According to the 2023 — which surveyed 980 families, the vast majority of whom identified as Latino with kids who are English learners — almost two-thirds of families reported having concerns about gun violence, 79% reported they were worried about an illness outbreak and 1 in 3 said they do not have access to medical care. 

Chang emphasized the need to understand and combat the root causes of chronic absenteeism since “remediation is always more costly than making sure kids get what they need in the first place.”

“I think we should be understanding the reasons from an assets-based perspective,” said lead researcher Santibañez, “from a sense of knowing that this was not a group that was disengaged with school before. This is not a group that’s been traditionally absent from schools. So something changed, and I think we need to understand how it changed and how can we go back to re-engaging these students and their families with schools.”

The data, released by the and the , found about one-third of community college students transfer to a four-year school with less than half graduating within six years — equating to the net completion rate of 16 percent.

But the report, in collaboration with the , saw even smaller completion rates for students who are Black, Latino and low-income at 9, 13 and 11 percent respectively.

John Fink, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center, said this is because the transfer system is “riddled with barriers” from the historic lack of collaboration between community colleges and four-year schools.

“It’s not an equitable system when we rely on [community college] students to come in with knowledge of this hidden curriculum on how to transfer instead of holding institutions responsible for creating clear pathways and adequate advising along the way,” Fink said.

The confusion and lack of clarity has added to students’ growing disdain for working towards a four-year degree as recent enrollment gains come particularly from community colleges with a vocational program focus, Fink said. 

“The [transfer system] largely replicates existing societal inequities,” Fink said. “The folks who are going to community college in large numbers are from communities that have historically had less access to bachelor and graduate degrees — like low-income and students of color.”

“If there’s no additional resources and support to make up for this, you can expect to see these disparities in completion outcomes,” Fink said.

Disparate Bachelor’s Degree Outcomes

The report showed mixed four-year completion outcomes from community college transfers demographically, Fink said. 

Low-income, Black and Latino students saw completion rates below the national average, in addition to men and students 25 years or older.

But high-income, Asian and White students saw completion rates above the national average, in addition to women and students 18 to 19 years old.

Fink said completion rates have increased slightly compared to previous years — jumping from 14 percent in 2016.

But he noted the increase is “not a lot [and] definitely not where we need it to be.”

“There is so much potential here to create greater economic mobility, to further diversify student bodies and to bring in community college transfers that can perform at the same if not higher rates than non-transfer students,” Fink said.

Fink said creating a “sense of belonging” on campus and expanding core practices such as dual enrollment will greatly improve transfer completion outcomes.

“Visibility, belonging and inclusion are important things to think about in order to change some of these dismal outcomes nationally,” Fink said.

‘Exclusionary’ Transfer Practices 

Dr. Marielena DeSanctis, president of the , said the completion disparities for students from low-income backgrounds are troubling.

“There’s plenty of data that speaks to more and more jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree, so it’s concerning when you start limiting the number of people that can attain one,” DeSanctis said.

DeSanctis, who previously worked at , said Florida has a very different landscape for students to transfer from a community college to a four-year school compared to Colorado.

“There was no question that the courses you were taking were going to transfer and that it was going to be equivalent credits [but] here in Colorado that’s not the case,” DeSanctis said, noting the harm of “exclusionary” transfer practices she’s noticed from four-year schools.

“Because community colleges tend to be more racially and ethnically diverse, we should be telling students that community college is a vehicle to transfer to a university — particularly students that are ready to change the trajectory of their lives,” DeSanctis said. 

Debi Gaitan, vice president of student services at , agreed with DeSanctis, adding that constraints placed on students from low-income backgrounds shouldn’t hinder them from having access to a four-year school whether they decide to transfer or go straight into the workforce.

“San Antonio is very much a city where we can see where our communities of poverty reside and they feed directly into our institutions,” Gaitan said, noting that her students are often part-time, caring for family members and working to make ends meet.

“We want to ensure the stigma of not completing is not placed on this population,” Gaitan said. “It’s more about ‘did they reach their goal of being able to get a better job with better income to get out of poverty.’”

Gaitan said it’s important for both community colleges and four-year schools to actively reach out to students from low-income backgrounds.

“Students that have choices and are resourced know about us and know what we have to offer,” Gaitan said. “Therefore we need to shift to the communities that don’t know we’re here…[because] students from intergenerational cycles of poverty need those same resources our upwardly mobile, higher income communities already have.”

Gaitan said resources that have been effective in her community include counseling programs and “apartment starters” where students have access to microwaves, washing machines and other household needs so they can focus on their studies.

“These are communities that need us to be different and need us to be doing more,” Gaitan said. “We want as many people in higher education to know this as possible because that’s how we have learned and that’s how we have adopted and adapted some really promising practices.”

This article is part of a series in partnership with reporter Joshua Bay’s highlighting the struggles of community college students.

While overall completion rates for students nationwide stalled at all colleges, Black and Latino students’ saw success at community colleges, which were prepared for pandemic challenges with tools in place like online classes for working students.

“[Community colleges] were better situated to handle the disruption from in-person to online courses…and that, in fact, led to greater retention rates,” said Josh Wyner, founder and executive director of the .

Analyzing trends for students six years after enrolling in postsecondary education, a from the found a 62.2 percent completion rate for those starting in fall 2017 — a stalled number compared to 2015.

But, Black and Latino students’ who enrolled in fall 2017 saw completion rates decline to 43.4 percent and 50.1 percent respectively — a 0.5 and 0.2 percentage point drop compared to those enrolled in 2016.

Wyner said the imbalance for Black and Latino students came from either the need to work when parents lost their jobs or the need to take care of siblings because their parents didn’t have jobs during the pandemic where they could work from home.

“Income and wealth disparities often prevented students from these groups from not only enrolling in college in the first place but also staying when there were disruptions,” Wyner said.

At public four-year colleges, Black and Latino students saw steeper completion rate declines to 48.7 percent and 56.1 percent respectively — a 1.5 and 1 percentage point drop compared to those enrolled in 2016.

In contrast, Black and Latino students at community colleges increased to 31.6 percent and 38 percent respectively — a 0.5 and 0.1 percentage point gain compared to those enrolled in 2016.

Wyner said the completion rate hike at community colleges was because those schools historically enroll students with diverse educational needs, and by necessity, were already invested in online learning pre-pandemic.

Amrit Ahluwalia, director of strategic insights at , said in a statement in response to the report that the increase in community college completion rates show how young students view college as a “means to an end.”

“When they get the learning they feel they need to support their short-term employability, they find jobs and leave their programs,” Ahluwalia said.

Wyner said because Black and Latino students often come from lower income communities, they view community college as a more attainable means of education.

“On average, tuition for a public institution is twice the rate at a four-year college than a community college,” Wyner said. “So it would make sense that if income correlates [completion declines for Black and Latino students] would be felt more in the four-year space than the community college space.”

This comes as more than 2.4 million students enrolled in postsecondary education for the first time in fall 2017 — an increase of 1.2 percent compared to 2016.

“Not only have fewer of the 2017 starters completed as of 2023, but the data also show fewer still enrolled, suggesting that this is more than just a matter of slower progress during the pandemic years,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the research center, said in a statement.

In addition, the gender gap continued to grow for those enrolled in fall 2017 — with a completion rate of 65.6 percent for female students compared to 58.4 percent for males.

Wyner said the low number of colleges providing hands-on learning had a disproportionate impact on male student retention.

“There’s pretty good evidence that adults learn better when theory is taught alongside hands-on learning,” Wyner said. “I do think that is something that really needs to be thought about as a way to bring men back into higher ed.”

He added how this is especially true for male students who feel disconnected from learning because they were raised in families that worked blue-collar jobs without needing a degree.

Moving forward, Wyner said colleges need to fully address the value they offer to students so they continue to stick around despite their life circumstances.

“If your programs aren’t actually delivering value to students, they may be making entirely rational decisions to leave,” Wyner said.

The analysis, from and the at Johns Hopkins University, looked at that found more than 14 million chronically absent students during the 2021-22 academic year — an increase of nearly seven million students compared to 2017-18.

Robert Balfanz, director of the Everyone Graduates Center, said an “all hands on deck” approach is needed to address widespread absenteeism in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“If you can imagine a rising tide, students who were a little underwater are now underwater more and those that weren’t underwater before now are,” Balfanz told ����Ӱ��.

This analysis served as a second look into the attendance trend which previously showed how across the country were enrolled in schools with high or extreme chronic absenteeism — more than twice the rate compared to the 2017-18 academic year.

Students are considered chronically absent if they miss at least , or roughly 18 days.

Although the attendance trend affected students of all ethnic backgrounds, Latino students took the brunt of the declines — increasing from nearly 2.4 million in 2017-18 to five million in 2021-22, a 53 percent jump.

Pacific Islander students saw the second biggest jump of 46 percent, white students by 39 percent, Black students by 36 percent and Native American students by 29 percent.

Balfanz said pandemic-era challenges for low-income and immigrant families pulled students away from school and contributed to the widening attendance gaps.

“Many kids got jobs because their parents lost theirs and became a lot more restricted,” Balfanz said, adding how Latino students often faced this burden compared to other ethnic groups.

He added how “caregiving” also played a major factor in declining Latino student attendance — often coming from multigenerational families with stronger cultural expectations to look after younger siblings.

The attendance trend was also observed geographically, particularly impacting students in both suburban and rural areas.

Chronic absenteeism in suburban and rural school districts jumped to 5.1 million and 2.5 million students respectively in 2021-22 — a 46 percent and 47 percent increase compared to 2.8 million and 1.4 million in 2017-18.

Schools in cities experienced an increase of 44 percent and districts in towns jumped by 42 percent.

Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works, said “inequitable access to needed [healthcare] services and poor transportation” during the pandemic contributed to the attendance gaps in rural areas.

The greatest increases in chronic absenteeism occurred among schools serving larger numbers of students living in poverty, the analysis found.

Among schools with 75 percent or more students receiving free or reduced-price lunch, chronic absence nearly tripled — from 25 percent to 69 percent. 

Chang said poverty was the driving force behind student chronic absenteeism nationwide.

“Kids who are living in poverty are much more likely to have all of these barriers when it comes to aversion and disengagement,” Chang told ����Ӱ��.

“It’s hard for students to keep going when they feel like nobody knows them or nobody cares,” Balfanz added. “Solving that disconnect they have is a great first step.”

It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal. 

And around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines. 

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious. 

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, ����Ӱ�� is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects. 

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. What’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago. 

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students. 

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools. 

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled 

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person. 

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson. 

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers. 

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021. 

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities. 

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers. 

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty. 

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress. 

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told ����Ӱ��. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.” 

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But , that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms. 

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery. 

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number. 

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah. 

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools. 

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period. 

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told ����Ӱ��’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022. 

But if we really want to celebrate the culture and give Latino students a true sense of belonging in their schools, we should do far more than have a program, assembly or fancy celebration to honor our students’ heritage. Instead, we should look at the foundational role that families play within Latino culture and embrace and honor those values. Values of belonging, collaboration and hard work. 

Growing up in Los Angeles, I was often surrounded by my large extended family. Both my parents are from Jalisco, Mexico: my mother is one of 11 siblings and my father is one of six. Many of my aunts, uncles and cousins also moved to Los Angeles. My Dad instilled in me the importance of courage, and the value of hard work as the expression of one’s integrity and honor.  

But despite these important family values, as a first-generation student, I lacked the resources or institutional knowledge to easily navigate the U.S. education system — it took me seven years just to complete college. Now that our nieces and nephews are getting ready to go to college, we make sure they have the tools to navigate the complex higher education system. This is part of our family culture: a shared responsibility to pass along what you learn, paving the way for the next generation. Our family also instilled a sense of belonging and security that gave us the courage to take risks — after all, there’s no bigger risk than immigrating to a foreign land.

Imagine if school communities embodied Latino family norms; where responsibility is shared, accountability is collective and a sense of belonging lives. Can you imagine what that might look like? We strive to do this every day at our school. Like many Latino families, we emphasize working in groups and collaborative efforts over a focus on the individual. 

“We see you and got you.” Those words hold power. It’s about knowing that your community, your group, has your back. Family has your back. This is something we discuss at our schools because it resonates deeply with our students: to be seen, to know you are unconditionally supported. At Aspire Public Schools’ Los Angeles-area schools, where the majority of our students identify as Latino, we embrace this idea, to make our students feel safe and supported unconditionally, in everything we do. 

For example, at where I worked for 12 years, we created an advisory group program at our secondary school. Freshmen are placed into micro-communities of about 30 students with one teacher who stays with the group all four years. Weekly community circles and guided conversations about issues that affect our scholars’ lives help them feel seen and supported. Like a large, extended family, these groups benefit from collaborative learning, shared responsibility and an environment built on trust and belonging. 

Programs like this allow us to create a familial identity at Aspire. We focus on students’ social-emotional learning, equity work and culturally relevant pedagogy that helps students feel supported. But most importantly, we leverage each other’s humanity. We support each other in providing a learning space for students and staff. A place where students learn from teachers and each other. A place where teachers learn from their students and their colleagues.  Just like we learn from family.

When you think about how family roots children, gives them a sense of confidence and purpose and offers space to be who they really are — how could you not want to embed those values in a school? We want these ideals to resonate deeply with our students. When a community of trust and belonging exists, students have the freedom to take risks and follow their intellectual curiosity. Instilling a school culture with family-inspired values brings out the genius in our students and gives them the space to enjoy their education and discover their own passions. This is how we honor Latino culture — every day.

Some sift through these data and conclude that the U.S’s growing diversity is sure to deliver an “” for progressive politicians. At the same time, fret that these trends are fated to generate anxious, — even ethno-nationalist — political backlash from blue-collar, white (generally non-Latino) Americans. 

But comparatively few have approached the demographic facts as an opportunity to be engaged, or as a situation to be managed. After all, if these trends are as certain as the tides, what is left to be done? This is a mistake — and an abdication of our obligation as citizens in a self-governing democracy. This growing diversity presents schools with a major opportunity to rectify long-standing inequities and reform themselves to help Latino students build on the strengths that they bring to campus. 

suggest that U.S. schools now enroll more than twice as many Latino students as they did in 1995. Indeed, the data suggest that, by 2030, Latinos will make up roughly 30% of all public school enrollment. This should spur schools and policymakers to action, since research suggests that these students bring and — — some of the country’s .

As , “With the ability to navigate across and between cultural and linguistic differences, Latino students bring a multitude of talents and assets that make our schools — and our country — stronger.” However, U.S. schools have a checkered history of recognizing and valuing that potential. 

American public schools have historically Latino students from of other racial or ethnic backgrounds through a variety of overt and covert methods. This isn’t just a problem from the distant past. English learners, who are disproportionately likely to be Latino, are currently the student group most likely to attend . And, as the UnidosUS report makes clear, schools have particularly struggled to adequately support children of these backgrounds throughout the pandemic. This echoes a of finding English learners and were often left out of schools’ pandemic learning efforts.

In sum, it is far from clear that American public schools are prepared to provide all Latino students with high-quality learning opportunities in this era of new and growing student diversity. These trends have been building for years, and Latinos have faced inequities in American public education for generations. They will face versions of these injustices next fall. They will almost assuredly still be facing them in 2030 (and beyond). 

This will necessarily be a complex project, as American Latinos are profoundly diverse. Latinos in Chicago are , while Latinos in D.C. are . Latinos in Miami are more likely to have ancestry, though many in the community . And Latinos are , encompassing groups of people who identify as ethnically Latino but also racially white, Black or some other identity. While , others speak English, both languages, Portuguese, or one of a panoply of Central American languages. 

From to to to to to to to , Latino diversity shows up in myriad ways throughout the culture of the United States. Latinos have long been at the vanguard of improving American soccer and lists of all-time great Major League Baseball players are stacked with Latino players from , the , , , and (to say nothing of Latino stars in the and ). 

As such, while policies aimed at improving English learners education in the US are necessary to helping more Latinos succeed (), neither are they sufficient for expanding opportunities to the full range of Latino students. What else can we do? 

For one, policymakers at all levels should prioritize diversifying the teaching force in their communities — and across the country. A recent Urban Institute study from Texas confirms that from having some teachers who share their identities. Specifically, that Latino students who had Latino teachers in elementary school had higher academic achievement, better behavior and better high school graduation rates. 

Meanwhile, current teacher training, credentialing and licensure systems are broadly ineffective at producing highly effective teacher candidates, but are reliable at reducing the linguistic, cultural and racial/ethnic diversity of the teaching force. Fortunately, there is that alternative certification programs such as district-driven “grow-your-own” programs, teacher apprenticeships and residencies, and other fellowship programs are generally effective at diversifying local teacher training pipelines.

And as policymakers commit to teacher diversity, they should pay particular attention to linguistic diversity. Research suggests that EL children — — gain from enrolling in schools that provide them with bilingual instruction. Yet, these programs are relatively rare, with nowhere near enough supply to meet demand, particularly in light of . Most communities won’t be able to grow access to bilingual — or integrated dual language immersion — programs . 

Finally, education leaders should prioritize young English-learning children as they invest in early education programs. While there is ample evidence that early education programs are universally beneficial for children and families, research indicates that . Further, show a for . 

Of course there’s more that can be done beyond these three big proposals: diversify the teaching force, ensure that Latino children have widespread access to bilingual education and prioritize enrolling these children in early education programs. But this simple agenda would go a long way towards rectifying long-standing educational inequities and preparing U.S. public schools to deliver on the newly diverse demographics already arriving at its doors.

Some of these children also struggled with a language barrier — as did their parents — making the switch to remote learning even tougher, according to UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, which released the study July 11 at its conference in San Antonio. 

“This report comes at a pivotal time as our schools and communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, which disproportionately impacted Latino students and their families,” UnidosUS president and CEO Janet Murguía says in the foreword. “We cannot allow hard won educational gains to be reversed, yet we also know that the pre-pandemic status quo was not working as well as it should.” 

Latinos make up a formidable percentage of the K-12 population, growing from 9% in 1984 to 28% today. Some 94% of those under 18 are U.S.-born citizens and nearly three quarters are of Mexican descent. Despite stringent and sometimes hostile U.S. immigration policies, their numbers are increasing: Latinos are expected to hit 30% of the K-12 population by 2030. 

First Lady Jill Biden, who spoke at the conference Monday, said the White House stands in support of the Latino community. She touched upon the gun safety laws brought about by the tragic shootings in nearby Uvalde, the diversity of the Latino population as a whole and the goals that unite this group. 

“Yes, the Latino community is unique,” she said. “But what I’ve heard from you again and again is that you want what all families want. Good schools. Good jobs. Safe neighborhoods. You want justice and equality—the opportunity to build a better life for your families. It’s not only what all families want; it’s what all families deserve.”

Latino students have made substantial gains in recent decades on the education front, UnidosUS notes. Their on-time high school graduation rate increased from 71% in the 2010-11 school year to nearly 82% in 2018-19, an all-time high. Likewise, the number of Hispanic students enrolled in postsecondary programs jumped from 782,400 in 1990 to nearly 3.8 million in 2019, a 384% increase.

But both of these figures took a hit in recent years: The on-time Latino high school graduation rate dropped by .7% from 2020 to 2021, according to a data analysis from 25 states representing 57% of the student population. Even more troubling, Latino freshman enrollment in college shrunk by 7.8% in spring 2021 compared to the year before, marking the first such decline in a decade: The figure rebounded by 4% by the spring 2022 semester, UnidosUS found, but it remained below pre-pandemic levels. 

The trend is in keeping with that of the overall college population, which is down by more than 1.4 million undergraduates.

Not all academic indicators are available and many poor students were not tested during the height of COVID, but at least one critical test shows a lag: Latino students in 3rd through 8th grade saw greater declines than their non-Latino white peers on NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress, an interim assessment administered in schools across the country.

But, UnidosUS writes in its report, the loss needs to be put in context. Latino students were more likely to attend high-poverty schools that participated in remote instruction for a longer period of time, often yielding a greater rate of learning loss for students, the organization found.

UnidosUS recommends improved data collection and analysis meant to identify academic weaknesses and improve results. It implores districts to honor student’s rights to their education — some schools have been sued for failing to enroll immigrant students whom they feel will not graduate on time — and include the voices of students and their families in shaping education policies and services. 

It also calls for a major increase in funding, a “bold and historical investment in Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” the federal formula grant program intended to support English learners by increasing funding from $831 million to $2 billion. 

“Since 2001, the population of English learners has increased by 35%,” the report notes. “However, Title III funding has not kept pace. When adjusted for inflation, funding has decreased by 24% since 2002.”

The group found Latino students are more likely than their peers to attend a low-rated school and to have a novice teacher. These children also have limited exposure to educators who look like them — just 9% of teachers are Latino — which is an important factor in student success. 

And language access remains a challenge: More than three quarters of the nation’s 5.1 million English language learners are Latino and a similar percentage speak Spanish at home.

Research shows students learning English typically make academic gains at rates similar to or higher than their peers, the study notes, but experience greater learning loss in the summer months when they are not in the classroom. The pandemic, which sent the nation’s entire school population home for months at a time, worsened this slide for Latino children, who were disconnected from their teachers and the technology their schools offered. Just two years prior to the pandemic, data shows nearly a third of Latino households lacked high-speed broadband internet and 17% did not have a computer in the home.

Despite many schools’ efforts to place a device in the hands of every child, Latinos remain at a disadvantage. Two years into the pandemic, 1 in 3 often or sometimes faced one of the following problems: They had to complete their homework on a cell phone, were unable to turn in their assignments because they lacked computer or internet access, or were forced to use public Wi-Fi to complete at-home work, UnidosUS reported.

And their lack of connectivity wasn’t the only problem, the group found: 50% of Latino parents reported having difficulty helping their kids with unfamiliar coursework and 58% had problems communicating with teachers, possibly because of a language barrier and schools’ failure to employ translators.  

But until recently, it remained unclear what impact the decision had on California’s Chicano students.

This spring, in a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, scholars Francisca Antman and Kalena Cortes filled the gap with the first-ever quantitative analysis of the case’s long-run impacts. 

Participating in desegregation, they found, led to a significant increase in educational attainment for Mexican-American students. Those born after the ruling completed nearly a full year of schooling more than a comparison cohort born 10 years prior and were nearly 20% more likely to graduate from high school. In the decades following the case, Chicano students in highly segregated counties were able to cut by more than half the disparity in their schooling outcomes with those of Chicano students in minimally segregated counties.

“What we see is really a dramatic rise in educational attainment for Hispanics after the end of de jure segregation,” said Antman, an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. That finding, she noted, held true “particularly in those areas that we think were most likely to be segregated.”

In California before the Mendez decision, segregating Mexican-American students into separate schools was common practice, driven to a large extent by . Those who advocated for separate schools claimed Hispanic students were unclean, intellectually inferior and lacking English language skills — even though Mexican-American youth who did not speak Spanish were also segregated.

Today, Latino residents make up of the U.S. population and an even of the nation’s public school student body. Yet Latino youth continue to be . Analyzing the Mendez decision is key to understanding the present circumstances for Latino students and families, the authors .

With desegregation, Antman explained, “Hispanic students [began to] have access to white classrooms or schools that they didn’t before” — meaning more resources and improved facilities. Though exact data on the flow of financial resources does not exist, she and her co-author hypothesize that such shifts may have triggered the outsized benefits for Chicano youth.

At the same time, education outcomes improved for all learners, Mexican-American and white students alike.

“Educational attainment is rising for all groups,” she said, adding that students nationwide tended to complete more schooling over the time period her study observed.

There is no official record of which areas separated Mexican-American students into separate schools as exists for school segregation in the American South — posing a major obstacle to research on the topic. That did not stop Antman and Cortes.

“A lot of times, researchers only pursue questions that they can answer [cleanly with existing data],” said the CU Boulder economist. But “sometimes the question is so important that you want to pursue it even if you can’t get the absolute best, clearest answer.”

She and her co-author got around the limitation by using 1940 census data to create a proxy measure for segregation levels. According to historical accounts, areas with the highest share of Hispanics in their population were the locales with the most rampant segregation. The researchers then identified the top quarter of California counties with the highest share of Hispanic residents and compared them to the bottom quarter with the least to represent high- and low-segregation counties.

In another key hurdle, records are also absent on how effectively each school district followed through on the desegregation effort. Implementation varied at the local level with some districts opening separate schools or maintaining segregation in certain grade levels while desegregating others. The authors account for the messy rollout using what’s called an “intent-to-treat” approach that includes all students in their analysis, regardless of their district’s follow through on desegregation. The method simply measures the effect of students’ exposure to the legal change. If anything, the approach would understate the impacts of integration, the authors explain, by grouping students who experienced desegregation together with those who remained separated.

As with the Brown case, impacts grew over time, Antman and Cortes found. Mexican-American students who were toddlers at the time of Mendez were likely to complete more total years of schooling than those who were in primary school (who in turn were more likely to see higher educational attainment than their older peers). Achievement gaps between Chicano and white students closed over time.

Compared to cohorts that began school before Mendez, those who matriculated after segregation was outlawed were 18.4% more likely to graduate from junior high school and 19.4% more likely to graduate from high school, the analysis revealed.

Fast forward to the current day, and school segregation levels nationwide have — with a for Latino students, who continue to have than any other racial or ethnic group in the U.S. and have been hit especially hard by the pandemic. With that backdrop, Antman said her results underscore the continued need for integration.

“Some might might say, ‘Well, would it really matter to desegregate [in the present day]?’” she said. “This certainly would suggest that it would matter very much.”

Across the country, schools serving predominantly Black students have 5 percent than schools with fewer Black students, according to analysis from education advocacy nonprofit The Education Trust.

In a quarter of states, gaps are even wider: Predominantly Black schools have at least twice as many novice teachers as schools serving the fewest.

In two particularly egregious cases, researchers found in Mississippi, a quarter of Black students attended schools with high percentages of novice teachers, compared to just 7 percent of non-Black students. And in Louisiana, one in three Black students attend schools with high percentages of inexperienced teachers.

“Our findings reveal that our education system is failing Black students, as they find themselves more likely than any other group of students to be in classrooms with teachers who are in their first years of teaching or teachers who are uncertified,” the focused on Black and Latino students separately, stated.

Little progress in efforts to retain teachers in these schools has been made since federal data showed similar disparities in 2014 — so stark then that the . 

Novice teachers said they leave their posts because they receive little training or mentoring. As a result, students could go years without an experienced educator — the .

Gaps in access to quality teachers can have long-term consequences on students’ . 

Without action, the churn of inexperienced teachers will have long-term, negative impacts on students of color at a rate not experienced by their peers in predominantly white schools, Education Trust researchers said. 

“…The pattern of Black and Latino students getting assigned to brand new teachers year after year after year — attending schools with a majority of teachers who haven’t had the time to master their craft and need more support — is at its heart a racial justice issue,” said Sarah Mehrotra, who co-authored the .

“If we care about equity in education, we have to pay attention to who is teaching our Black and Brown students, and what we can be doing differently to support them,” she said.

In 32 states, there are more first-year teachers in schools serving the most Latino students. Three – Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Washington – have the biggest gaps, with Latino students at least twice as likely to have a novice teacher.

In Massachusetts, access to certified teachers is particularly inequitable: 29 percent of Latino students attend schools with high percentages of uncertified teachers, compared to just 12 percent of their peers. 

The findings bring states’ commitment to teacher development into question at a time when many face educator shortages and allocate billions in pandemic relief aid to accelerate learning.

“This disparity… means that groups of students are missing out, by no fault of their own, on the critical learning opportunities necessary to prepare them for success in college and/or the workforce,” the reports stated, analyzing the U.S. Department of Education’s 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection.

In the predominantly Black and Latino schools analyzed, where there are fewer experienced educators, teachers of color are “over-represented” and have higher turnover rates than their peers — a “disruption” for students and communities, Mehrotra said. 

Teachers of color experience “antagonistic school culture, [are] deprived of agency/autonomy, navigating unfavorable working conditions and carrying an “invisible tax” – the extra work they take on (being a translator for families, being a disciplinarian) without additional compensation,” she added. Vacancies are filled by substitutes or novice teachers. 

One New Orleans teacher told the Education Trust: “The teaching profession was built on altruism, and many folks have taken advantage of this to bring in teachers on lower salaries.”

Though 2020-21 data is not available, Mehrotra predicted schools serving predominantly low-income students and students of color, where teachers double as counselors or manage larger classes, “are bearing the brunt of these pandemic related exits, teacher burnout and these alarming shortages.” 

Stronger statewide data systems — to track teacher departures, demographic data and professional development opportunities — tops the reports’ policy recommendations to retain experienced teachers for students of color.

Researchers say while there are bright spots like — where new teachers enter a three-year mentorship program and can access loan forgiveness for working in high-needs schools — the problem and its solutions have been widespread and well-known.

 “We could have predicted the data in a lot of ways,” Education Trust researcher Eric Duncan said, adding the have persisted for years. States and districts must double down on their commitment to engage teachers directly to, “go a little bit more under the hood and say, ?”

Further recommendations from the reports include investing in mentorship, and grow-your-own programs; incentivizing work in high-need schools and subjects; and hiring earlier in high-turnover districts.

Disclosure: Marianna McMurdock was an intern at the Education Trust-West in the summer of 2020.