Their bill, titled the , is being framed as a defense of public education. It is actually something else: a revealing glimpse into the mindset that is holding Democrats back.

A decade ago, Democrats were more willing to challenge the status quo. On education, they pushed for higher standards, greater accountability and new models like charter schools. They believed public education wasn’t just something to defend, but something to improve. They were willing to take on districts that weren’t delivering for students, even when it meant challenging teachers unions.

That spirit is hard to find today. 

The federal scholarship tax credit program, enacted last year, lets states direct federal dollars — potentially billions — to a wide range of student needs, including tutoring, afterschool programs, transportation and services for kids with disabilities. In states that opt in, families have the choice to use these scholarships to fill the gaps in their children’s education.��

That is something denied to states that opt out. And yet, the majority of Democrats in the Senate are trying to repeal the program — not because those uses fall outside their priorities, but because the funding flows outside traditional public school systems. 

Even though the tax credit program would provide significant new resources to advance priorities Democrats themselves have championed, its support for private school scholarships crosses a line in the sand for them. To most families, turning down new funding for students doesn’t make sense. But for Democrats, it follows a clear chain of logic, one that prioritizes the preservation of existing school systems over students’ needs, defers to the interests of teachers unions and applies ideological purity tests that treat any nontraditional learning environment as a threat.��

That way of thinking carries real consequences, especially at a moment when students need more support, not less.

The country is in the midst of a decade-long education depression, one marked by historic learning loss, widening achievement gaps and growing disengagement. Families see it, educators feel it and districts, facing acute financial strain, struggle to meet students’ needs.

For years, many on the left have that the United States always finds money for other priorities but refuses to invest meaningfully in education. President Donald Trump’s proposed record-breaking $1.5 trillion defense budget underscores the point. But for the first time in a long while, there is also, finally, new money for education. And Democrats want to turn these dollars away.��

That choice is even harder to justify when you consider the broader fiscal reality. The federal government has run deficits for more than two decades; if lawmakers are going to keep borrowing against the future, the least they can do is invest in the generation who will inherit their debt.

Democrats’ reflexive opposition to the tax credit program reveals how much their policy imagination has narrowed, leaving them unable to see how it helps their constituents and advances their priorities. Some of their critiques are substantive: Questions about accountability, oversight and whether private school scholarships are subject to the same civil rights protections as traditional public schools deserve serious answers. But those are arguments for getting in the room and shaping the program, not walking away. Repealing the program would only ensure that the students who need those dollars most — low- and middle-income families, children with disabilities, communities of color — would end up with nothing. Democrats should be fighting to make this program work for those families, not fighting to take it off the table. 

Democrats long held a clear advantage over Republicans on education. That advantage has in recent years as voters have grown more skeptical that the party is delivering results. Trying to repeal the tax credit program will only make matters worse.

Polling across multiple states shows strong support for participation in the scholarship tax credit program, including among Democratic voters. In many cases, support approaches or exceeds , particularly among working-class families and families of color.

What some Democratic politicians see as an unacceptable departure from orthodoxy, many families see as a practical way to get their children the help they need. At some point, the gap between how policymakers view the issue and how families experience it demands a reckoning. Democrats should focus less on defending what exists and more on exploring what could be. 

When Colorado’s Jared Polis became the first Democratic governor to announce that his state would opt into the scholarship tax credit program, he framed it perfectly: “[I]t’s only our own creativity that can hold us back. Anything we can envision, this is a very powerful funding mechanism.” He called the decision a “no-brainer” and said he “would be crazy not to” participate.

That is the mindset Democrats need right now. Not a defensive posture, but an expansive one — grounded not in scarcity, but in abundance. 

An starts from the premise that the goal is an educated public, not the preservation of any particular school model or the adults employed within it. It recognizes that public funding can support a wide range of tools, strategies and approaches, so long as they serve students well. And it invites educators, families and policymakers to imagine different ways of organizing learning, rather than assuming the century-old model designed for an industrial economy is the only one capable of serving today’s students.

The tax credit program is not a cure-all, but it is a meaningful new investment. At a moment of real need, real disruption and real opportunity, Democrats should not be narrowing the conversation. They should be expanding it.

“We wouldn’t be able to function as an organization without him,” said Superintendent Jennifer Gaffney. “A lot of what students, teachers and our office staff do is centered around the use of technology and data systems. He is the backbone of all that.”

But now Gaffney doesn’t know how much longer she can rely on the federal dollars that pay his salary. The Rural Education Achievement Program is among the 17 funding sources that the Trump administration wants to roll into a . Congress approved $220 million for REAP this year, but under the president’s plan, governors and state education chiefs would decide whether rural districts would get extra money.

Monty Mayer, superintendent of the Velva Public Schools in North Dakota, about 20 miles southeast of Minot, used the $14,000 he received from the program this year to pay teaching assistants to work with students who were behind academically.

“Money rolled into a block grant would be swallowed up by the bigger schools as their needs are much greater than ours,” he said. That would leave “small rural schools looking to find answers in different places without a clear picture as to where those resources would come from.”

During with the Senate appropriations committee in late April, Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced several questions from both Democrats and Republicans about the future of the program. She suggested that REAP was underutilized.

“A lot of rural schools do not have grant writers, cannot bring in the resources other states might have or other cities might have,” she said. “A lot of states never participated in any of the grant funding.”

Under a consolidated program, she said, all states would receive a portion of the block grant and officials would decide “how this money should be spent in their state, where the greatest needs are, whether that’s in rural communities.”

Officials with years of experience in rural education say that isn’t how REAP works. States or districts don’t write grant proposals for the funding, said Steven Johnson, superintendent of the Fort Ransom Public School District, which operates one elementary school in southeast North Dakota. Districts , based on size and location, receive an invitation to apply. And most do, Johnson said.

“It’s rarely about capacity or lack of grant-writing ability. If anything, what we’re seeing is the opposite,” he said. “Rural districts rely on REAP because it is simple, direct and does not require extensive administrative capacity.”

Abigail Swisher, who previously worked on the REAP program at the department, said where rural districts struggle is applying for large, competitive grant programs.

“Applying for competitive federal grants is time-consuming and complex. Larger districts are hiring grant writers who have the specialized expertise and who have time,” she said. “That’s exactly why we have the REAP program. It was designed by Congress to help fill that gap.”

There were efforts to help rural districts access those other programs, she said, but those ended with the new administration.

‘Testing and reporting standards’ 

Districts that for Small, Rural School Achievement funding, one of the two REAP programs, have fewer than 600 students and are located in an area their state defines as rural. Others, with 20% of students who live below the poverty line, qualify for the Rural and Low-Income School program, and some are eligible for both. This year, 17,873 were eligible for one or both programs.

Last week, Kirstin Baesler, the assistant secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education, that they have considerable leeway to use federal funds for programs like tutoring or after-school programs.��

But Johnson said that flexibility was “one of the original core concepts behind REAP.” His district, for example, didn’t have enough poor students to qualify for Title I funding, but under existing law, he was able to use federal funds to provide students with reading and math tutoring.

Congress created REAP as part of No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal accountability law that set strict expectations for school improvement, and reauthorized the program as part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Despite their small size, rural districts were not exempt from NCLB’s mandates, Johnson said. 

“Small, rural schools were expected to meet the same testing and reporting standards as larger systems but often lacked the staffing and resources to do so,” he said.

A from AASA, the School Superintendents Association, showed that districts most commonly used the funds for technology, followed by staff training, compensation and expanding programs like STEM and arts for students. When Johnson asked other administrators across the country, they listed bullying prevention, special education assistants and support to help students graduate among the ways they use the funds.

“Rural districts piece together budgets with many smaller sources,” said Margaret Buckton, a school finance consultant in Iowa. Although REAP “isn’t a huge sum, when combined with other small grants, it likely makes a difference.”

Questions of ‘efficacy’

In her exchanges with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who has made rural schools a priority, McMahon questioned whether the program has a positive impact.

“Many of these programs have lost their efficacy and they really are not returning, giving the returns that we hope to see for rural schools,” McMahon said.

The Department of Education did not respond to questions about what data McMahon was referring to when she said the program wasn’t effective. But Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said because districts can use the funds in a variety of ways, the department looks primarily at compliance issues rather than impact on students.

“There is no single, consistent student outcome measure applied across grantees,” she said. “The program has not been the subject of a comprehensive federal evaluation in close to a decade, which makes any sweeping claim about effectiveness difficult to substantiate from the data.”

That was mostly a summary of the challenges facing rural schools, like transportation and teacher recruitment, and what the department was doing to support them.

The department also tracks whether districts comply with the rules for using the funds.

A in the Custer County, Colorado, district, for example, discovered an accounting error because a staff member entered data using hand-written notes. The same issue came up in Indiana’s in 2022. The department’s website doesn’t list any reports conducted since McMahon took office.

The administration pitched the same block grant idea last year, and Congress ultimately rejected it. With the appropriations process likely to drag out for months, it’s unclear whether lawmakers will be more receptive this year. 

But for rural districts like Sackets Harbor, the site of an important naval base during the war of 1812, the continued uncertainty over federal funding is “unnerving,” said Gaffney, the superintendent. 

The district’s annual , in which students fanned out across the historic town for service projects, like gardening and polishing headstones, is popular with local residents. The school board asked voters to approve a nearly 8% tax increase, which they did. But with increases in English learners and students with disabilities, Gaffney said the district is still under “a great deal of financial pressure.”

“That is precisely why every dollar matters to us, including REAP funding,” she said. “These resources are vital in helping us maintain programs, services and opportunities for our students.”

By the end of 2027, New York state is planning to completely phase out Regents exams and, instead, implement a new framework. This approach emphasizes not only content knowledge, but the development of skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex world.��

The shift away from Regents exams and toward a more holistic framework like one that Portrait of a Graduate represents presents a genuine opportunity. Not just to change how students are assessed, but to rethink what New York’s public education system prioritizes — real-world skills and holistic development over test scores.

For decades, education policy focused heavily on measurement. From No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, the dominant theory of education reform has been to define measurable standards, test consistently and hold schools accountable for results. The intention was serious: raise achievement and close persistent gaps. But after nearly 25 years, outcomes remain uneven. In many places, proficiency has barely moved, even as educators and parents confront rising levels of student anxiety, disengagement and mental health challenges.

Now, as the state moves away from the Regents and begins building toward the Portrait of a Graduate, the question is no longer only what is measured, but whether educators can build a curriculum that actually helps students develop the skills the framework demands.

These are not developed in typical classroom settings alone. They are built through experience: sustained practice, collaboration, feedback and the opportunity to perform and communicate in real time. Some of the most powerful environments available for developing these capacities already exist, though they are too often pushed to the margins of the school day.

They exist in music and the arts.

In a music classroom, students learn to listen deeply, adjust in real time and collaborate toward a shared goal. They develop discipline through practice and resilience through repetition, and they learn to manage pressure while communicating something meaningful in front of others. These are not simply artistic experiences; they are cognitive and human ones.

Music doesn’t just engage the brain, it changes it. In just a few years, children who study music show in the regions responsible for processing complexity and in the pathways that connect the entire brain. This is not enrichment, this is development. And the evidence goes further: Research has consistently shown that structured music training strengthens — the very capacities that support the skills included in the Portrait of a Graduate framework.��

But beyond the research, children’s experiences are just as compelling. Students who have music classes daily develop not only skill, but , focus and a sense of agency. They begin to see themselves differently — not just as learners, but as contributors and creators.

For more than a century, the Regents exams signaled what New York’s education system valued. Now, the Portrait of a Graduate is redefining what student success looks like, shifting the focus toward the capacities young people need to thrive in the world beyond school. It’s up to educators to build a curriculum that genuinely develops them.

The Portrait of a Graduate asks schools to develop students who can think critically, communicate clearly, collaborate under pressure and navigate ambiguity with confidence. Music education has been doing exactly that in classrooms across the state for generations. The research confirms it. The students who have lived it demonstrate it.

As New York moves away from the Regents exams and redefines what it means to graduate, music education may be the most important curriculum for achieving the student success New York state is after.

Despite having room to serve more children, Middletown day care owner Peggy Fuentes often has to turn away families in desperate need of care. Each of her toddler classrooms has 10 students — the state caps class sizes for that age group at 12 — but to fill the remaining seats, she’d have to hire another employee. That’s because a decades-old state regulation says day care classrooms have to have one adult for every five children between 18 and 36 months old.

With operating costs climbing across the board, , Fuentes said it simply isn’t feasible to pay another salary to accommodate just two more children.

“I have an inventory of childcare spots that I’m reluctant to use because it is cost prohibitive,” said Fuentes, owner of On My Way Early Learning and Childcare Center, which serves around 240 children under 13.

New York state has some of the strictest staffing requirements in the country — stricter, in fact, than New York City’s. As state leaders allocate billions of dollars to address the childcare shortage in this year’s budget, a new state law could ease those requirements and unlock new day care seats at no additional cost to providers — but only if the state agency that oversees childcare decides to act on it.  

In December, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation eliminating a provision that has prohibited the state Office of Children and Family Services from relaxing childcare staffing ratios. The new law leaves it to the agency to actually change the ratios; if it did so, the same number of workers could care for more children.  

State Senator James Skoufis, who introduced the bill in 2024, told New York Focus that adjusting the ratios is “more critical than ever” amid the state’s ongoing efforts to scale up its childcare sector and provide more affordable care to working parents.

Childcare advocates who oppose the change are concerned having the same number of staff supervising more children would increase the risk of accidents and injuries and fail to address a root cause of the state’s childcare crisis: low wages for workers.

Supporters counter that looser ratios are consistent with set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional membership organization that promotes high-quality early childhood education, and that alignment with the group’s guidance would offer flexibility to providers who already operate with razor-thin profit margins.

So far, OCFS has not indicated whether it plans to update the regulations. In a statement provided to New York Focus, OCFS spokesperson Daniel Marans said the agency is “currently assessing the viability of the requested ratio change, with the goal of supporting childcare providers without compromising our commitment to child safety.” The law does not impose a deadline for OCFS to make the switch.

More than 60 percent of New York’s census tracts are classified as a “childcare desert,” meaning that there are three or more children under 5 waiting for every available slot, according to the . Meanwhile, more than 16,000 children are specifically as a result of staffing shortages that have led programs to operate under capacity. While that’s not necessarily related to staffing ratios, some think easing them could help address the shortage.

“We can provide more resources to counties and to providers all we want, but if we don’t provide the very common sense flexibility that these providers require in order to effectuate creating more seats, then the money is only going to go so far,” said Skoufis.

Skoufis introduced the bill after providers, including Fuentes, expressed their frustrations to lawmakers over being held to tougher ratios than their counterparts in New York City, where staffing requirements are set by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Day care providers in the five boroughs must have one staff member for every five children between 12 and 18 months and one for every six children who are 2 years old. In the rest of the state, it’s 1–4 and 1–5, respectively. The discrepancies are even wider for older children.

Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who sponsored the bill, believes aligning ratios with New York City could help thousands of those families access a seat without burdening providers or taxpayers with additional costs.

“Childcare providers are operating on such slim margins that they frequently worry about going out of business,” Hevesi said. “We were looking for a way to give them some breathing room in an incredibly difficult climate without costing anybody any money.”

Dede Hill, vice president of policy at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, a social policy and advocacy organization, has a different perspective. “One thing that makes childcare in New York state so high quality is because we have low ratios — and that’s certainly not something we want to step away from,” she said. Hill is a member of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, which advocates for universal childcare.

“I don’t think staffing ratios are the solution to the tremendous issues we have related to supply,” said Hill. The key is more investment in the workforce, including higher pay for childcare workers, she said.

One reason providers are facing significant financial strain is that the state’s reimbursement level for its , which covers nearly all of the cost of childcare for low- and middle-income families, isn’t enough to provide high quality care, Hill said. With providers forced to absorb the shortfall, many are unable to offer adequate wages: In 2025, the annual average salary for childcare workers in New York , lower than 96 percent of other jobs.

Fuentes, who has owned her day care center in Orange County for 17 years, said she currently has to choose between raising tuition for all children in order to pay another employee and waitlisting families even though there is ample space to serve them. If OCFS chose to align statewide staffing ratios with New York City, she said, she could enroll around 15 more children without hiring additional staff.

“There’s a childcare crisis in New York,” she said. “If we can’t use our full supply of seats, then that crisis is just going to continue.”

For Heidi-Jo Brandt, president of a union representing more than 8,800 providers outside New York City, the flexibility doesn’t seem worth it. Some revisions to standards may be appropriate, such as the current 1–2 ratio for children under 2 in home-based care, she said, but a broader relaxing of staffing ratios could put children at risk. Research shows inadequate supervision is the main cause of injuries in childcare settings, including , , and from bottle warmers.

“While it could have a tremendous impact statewide, our concern is always for the safety of children,” said Brandt.

Some research indicates that high staff-to-child ratios and smaller group sizes are critical for children’s health, safety, and development, but data on the safety outcome of ratios like New York City’s is limited.

In recent years, as the childcare industry has reeled from a pandemic-driven dip in enrollment and rise in operating costs, have proposed loosening their childcare staffing ratios, increasing maximum group sizes, and relaxing other regulations to meet demand. Many states set ratios based on guidance from the National Association for the Education of Young Children; New York City’s ratios are roughly in line with the group’s recommendations.

Meanwhile, New York state has some of the most stringent ratios nationwide. It is that uses the restrictive ratios recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Even New York City’s staffing ratios remain stricter than those in many other states.

Skoufis first introduced the bill after then-OCFS Commissioner Suzanne Miles-Gustave informed him that aligning statewide ratios with New York City would require legislation. At the time, he said, OCFS officials “made it crystal clear” they wanted to pursue the changes, though he’s less clear on their position today.

In a January letter to current OCFS Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden, Skoufis argued that it is “financially unreasonable” to require a 1–5 staff-to-child ratio for 18- to 36-month-olds with a maximum group size of 12.

Hevesi said that he believes the agency should “act sooner rather than later” given the potential benefits.

“My instinct is that there’s going to be support to look at this and see what’s appropriate — but my role was just to take the handcuffs off and now they are free to do whatever they feel is appropriate,” he said.

Buffalo day care owner Emily Thrasher pointed out that New York City and state regulations differ on other aspects of childcare: The city also has more lenient classroom space requirements than the rest of the state, as well as different age group definitions that determine other regulations. For example, New York City defines a toddler as a child between 12 and 24 months old, while New York state’s definition is 18 to 36 months.

Thrasher said full alignment with New York City’s standards would allow her small business to generate hundreds of thousands of additional dollars annually. That, in turn, would enable her to serve more families.

“I can’t even imagine how much that would compound for larger day care centers,” she said. “We could help more families, open more slots, pay our staff more. … The changes seem small, but it would make the biggest difference.”

This story originally appeared in , a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. .

The announcement represents a major win for supporters of private school choice who have been lobbying Democratic governors to participate in the program. However, Hochul’s office said she intends to review the details before making the decision official.

The American Federation for Children, a national school choice advocacy group, said Thursday night that Hochul first made the announcement at a private gathering. , an organization that supports Jewish religious education, according to an Agudath spokesperson.

Emma Wallner, a spokesperson for the governor, confirmed Hochul’s plans to opt in to the tax credit.

“Governor Hochul is supportive of the federal tax credit scholarship and its potential to help New York students and schools,” Wallner wrote in a statement. “Our office awaits information from the federal government on the program and will thoroughly review the details of the policy for poison pills that could harm New York’s education system.”

The , which will clarify, for example, how donated money might benefit public school students or whether states can prevent scholarship-granting organizations from discriminating against certain students.

The tax credit was approved last year as part of the Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It allows taxpayers to get a dollar-for-dollar credit up to $1,700 on their federal taxes if they donate money to an eligible scholarship-granting organization. These organizations could give students money for private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational expenses.

Governors, however, have to opt into the program for students in their state to benefit.

“Finally, school choice is coming to New York, thanks to the courage of Governor Hochul and the tremendous advocacy of countless families, educators, and supporters who have worked for generations to advance options for kids who need them,” American Federation for Children CEO Tommy Schultz said in a press release.

According to a , 29 states, nearly all of them led by Republicans, have opted into the tax credit. That list does not include New York.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is the . Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein said last year that he .

Some Democratic governors have been strongly opposed. In Wisconsin, which launched one of the nation’s earliest voucher programs, . In a veto statement, he cited the lack of any accountability measures in the federal program.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also , as did , but Republican-controlled legislatures overrode vetoes in both states.

Other Democratic governors are taking a wait-and-see approach. Democratic backers of expanding school choice and that states that don’t opt in risk their own taxpayers donating to scholarship groups in other states. Opponents say the program undermines public education and threatens funding, .

Nationally and in New York, supporters of religious education have lobbied for the tax credit as a way to ease the tuition burden for families.

“This is extraordinary news for Jewish families and for every community across our state,” said Sydney Altfield, the CEO of Teach NYS, an organization that lobbies for public funding for Jewish schools. “Blue states across the country will now be watching closely.”

Hochul has courted the Orthodox Jewish community, an influential voting bloc, as she faces reelection in November. Along with state legislative leaders, she previously oversight of private schools, a measure that would largely benefit certain yeshivas that . The state’s education commissioner, Betty Rosa, called the move a “travesty.”

Hochul has backed other efforts to expand school choice since taking office nearly five years ago, drawing pushback from other New York Democrats. In 2023, she proposed to in New York City, even as the publicly funded yet privately managed schools have fallen out of favor among many left-leaning elected officials. State lawmakers but ultimately approved a more .

Hochul has also touted her commitment to funding traditional public schools and has presided over increases in state spending. State officials indicated Thursday that schools should expect at least a 2% bump in the state’s forthcoming budget, which is more than a month overdue and has .

“I’m proud of the resources we have put into education,” she told reporters Thursday.

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

This story originally appeared in , a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. .

When Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled her signature literacy legislation in 2024, she stressed that New York was late to the game — calling it “embarrassing” that Connecticut, New Jersey, and other states had already embraced phonics-based instruction. New York schools had fallen behind the national curve, she said, and had been teaching students how to read the wrong way.

A large reason for that, she emphasized, is that under state law, districts choose their own curricula. The Back to Basics law was supposed to fix that problem, by requiring school districts to align instruction with research on how children best learn to read by September 2025.

Specifically, districts had to start teaching using the “science of reading,” a phonics-based approach grounded in the idea that reading isn’t innate and must be explicitly taught through skills like sounding out words. At the time, it was gaining traction as the policy du jour in literacy instruction as an alternative to “balanced literacy,” an approach long embraced by New York districts that teaches children to instead rely on context clues for reading comprehension.

By passing the Back to Basics plan, New York joined  and the District of Columbia in a nationwide movement fueled in part by results in Mississippi, where rigorous literacy laws  in academic performance over the past 13 years.

But a New York Focus analysis of mandatory school surveys submitted to the state has found that more than 130 school districts are still using “balanced literacy” curricula.

Teachers in those districts, primarily in rural and suburban areas, are often required to use reading programs that advocates say contradict the settled body of research around teaching reading. The misaligned curricula could have an especially profound impact on students of color and those from low-income families, who are already more likely to experience reading difficulties, these advocates say.

New York’s law differs from those of some other states, which require districts to pick from a list of state-approved reading curricula and offer extra funding for districts to purchase them. Others have allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to advance multiyear literacy plans with clear benchmarks.

While New York’s Back to Basics law required the State Education Department to provide best practices to districts, it entrusts school districts with making the switch and measuring their own compliance — leaving in place a discretionary system that advocates argue contributed to New York’s low literacy rates to begin with.

So far, that piecemeal approach has left hundreds of thousands of students learning how to read with widely discredited curricula and instructional materials.

“Our concern is a lack of urgency,” said Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, which recently published  of the survey data submitted to the state in September. “If 400,000 kids aren’t getting evidence-based instruction, that, to us, is a crisis.”

Smink said the law lacks enforcement mechanisms in part because of New York’s deeply embedded culture as a strong local-control state, where most decisions about public schools are determined by districts, school boards, and even individual campuses. He also said the state teachers union wields significant influence and “opposes anything they think threatens teacher autonomy.

The literacy law, which invested $10 million in teacher training and tasked the union with training 20,000 teachers, came under fire after a March  revealed that the training program heavily featured the instructional methods that Hochul set out to replace.

The survey data offers an unprecedented statewide look at how schools are teaching elementary school students how to read and write — and insight into the state’s progress as it gears up to replicate the same approach with .

New York’s reading scores are average at best.��Thirty-one percent of New York fourth graders were proficient in reading last year, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress — just slightly above the US average and much lower than similar states like Massachusetts and New Jersey. Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, also outperformed New York, which spends more money per pupil than any other state.

According to education advocates, the Back to Basics is doing little to make up for lost ground. “We are shockingly behind,” said Assemblymember Robert Carroll, a leading literacy advocate. “If we don’t do something, we are on the path to be the last in the nation on this.”

In response to a request for comment, a Hochul spokesperson wrote, “We anticipate continued progress and are working with SED to ensure that all schools are implementing evidence-based literacy instruction.”

The structure of New York’s education system means that students in neighboring districts may be learning with vastly different curricula. Until recently, Celine Schneider’s children attended school in Riverhead Central School District, where last year less than a third of third graders were proficient in reading.

On the literacy curricula survey, Riverhead was one of 16 districts that reported not aligning with the state’s best practices in every category of reading instruction, as well as in writing. The district said it uses a mix of curricula, including some aligned with the science of reading alongside balanced literacy programs critics say fail to teach children how to decode words properly.

Riverhead declined an interview request, but provided a statement through a communications firm verifying that its reading curriculum and instruction “are aligned with the state’s core curriculum standards and teaching practices.”

Schneider said that in Riverhead, students were promoted from one grade to another without gaining basic literacy skills. After watching her daughter fall behind, lose confidence, and endure bullying for not knowing how to read, Schneider said she decided to transfer her children to a nearby district with stronger reading intervention, despite the hefty tuitions required to switch districts. (The district, Quogue Union Free School District, said in its survey response that it uses science of reading curricula and aligns with the state’s best practices, though it did also report using a popular balanced literacy program.)

“It was either let them continue to fail, or struggle financially to make sure my kids are okay in the long run,” she said.��

Schneider asked Quogue to assess her children’s reading abilities, and expected mixed results: Her oldest struggled with dyslexia, and she had just learned her other daughter was going to enter second grade as a nonreader. But the other three seemed to be succeeding in school.

Instead, the results were shockingly similar — all five were at least a grade level behind.

“Not being able to read destroys a child’s future,” she said. “We are setting our kids up to fail.”

Educators and policymakers have long debated how to best teach students how to read. “Balanced literacy” dominated US classrooms for much of the past 20 years, but many schools have moved away from it due to mounting evidence that can lead to poor reading outcomes.

The science of reading, on the other hand, represents a vast body of research emphasizing the importance of phonics — the relationship between letters and sounds — in teaching children how to read. While the approach has some detractors who say it pushes a “one-size-fits-all” approach that may not work for every child, studies show that instruction based on the science of reading improves reading proficiency, especially for children with dyslexia.

But whether it can underpin an effective education policy depends on how it is implemented, and some worry New York’s patchwork approach could limit its potential benefits.

In 2024, 46 percent of New York third graders were below basic proficiency in reading.��Those outcomes could have profound implications: Research shows children who fail to read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school.

Mississippi’s success with the science of reading is hard to ignore. The state was ranked second worst nationwide for fourth-grade reading in 2013 and rose to the top 10 within a decade. Nearby states that followed suit, including Alabama and Louisiana, saw similar gains, a trend referred to as the “Southern surge.” Outcomes in other states have been more mixed, fueling debate between critics who see stalled scores as a cause for concern and proponents who argue the reforms need time to take hold.

Under New York’s Back to Basics plan, all school districts were supposed to confirm in the September survey that they transitioned to the science of reading in their curricula, instruction, and teacher training, and that they’re following best practices in seven literacy and writing categories. As part of the survey, districts submitted the curricula they use.

Most school districts reported meeting best practices, but the results still show areas of concern, especially in writing, fluency, and vocabulary practices; in each of those areas, over 100 school districts and BOCES — regional organizations that provide educational resources to districts — said they were out of alignment. Many also shared plans to improve instruction, including by reviewing curricula, revamping teacher training, and establishing literacy committees to inform programming.

Plattsburgh, Friendship, and Watkins Glen school districts all reported misalignment even though they submitted curricula that align with the science of reading. Superintendents at those school districts said they opted for candor, and that the survey revealed where instruction still needs improvement.

“There was a relatively large learning curve to get a full staff of teachers up to the expectation of Back to Basics,” said Watkins Glen Superintendent Kai D’Alleva.��“But there has been tremendous buy-in, and we’re excited to see the fruits of this labor develop over the next few years.”

Overall, more than 130 of the state’s 713 school districts submitted balanced literacy curricula, with the most popular being Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study, two of the most controversial programs. Scores of districts also created their own curriculum or reported using other programs that have not been reviewed by EdReports, a nonprofit that states and districts use to review the quality of K-12 instructional materials.

Kat Fratticci, co-founder of the Long Island Literacy Coalition, a community-based advocacy group founded in 2024 to promote the science of reading, said some districts are hesitant to revamp reading instruction because they’ve already invested heavily in their current curriculum, instructional materials, and teacher training.

At the same time, the state law does not have any clear enforcement mechanism built in to account for these variations. And the survey results don’t capture the full picture. Districts have to fill out the attestation survey annually, but they’re not required to submit proof that their curricula are aligned, and the state doesn’t provide guidance on what programs districts should steer clear of. Dozens of districts reported using balanced literacy programs despite confirming their alignment with all best practices.

The state shouldn’t tell school districts exactly what to purchase and teach, said Tarja Parssinen, founder of the Western NY Education Alliance, but “there has to be some guidance, some support, and some recommendations about what to stay away from.”

Balanced literacy curricula can mask dyslexia and other learning delays, research shows, because they often encourage students to guess words based on pictures or context clues rather than decode letters and sounds. In Schneider’s case, she said she thought her children were reading at the appropriate level because they would read aloud at home — until she noticed they were just reciting passages they had memorized in class.

Other Riverhead parents told New York Focus how their children who struggled to read were pushed along without proper intervention. One mother, who asked to remain anonymous due to potential litigation, said her son was reading at a kindergarten level in fourth grade before he started receiving one-on-one reading intervention.

“There’s a mantra in New York state: Just wait and see, wait and see if they grow out of it,” said Yolanda Thompson, special education advocate and three-time Riverhead school board candidate. “There needs to be a huge cultural mindset shift. We can’t fix something we don’t understand.”

The students most harmed when districts don’t use best practices are often students of color, those from low-income families, and multilingual learners, said Fratticci. “They don’t necessarily have that safety net of private tutoring or reading specialists outside of school, so when the classroom fails them, there’s no backup.”

That’s true in Riverhead, said Thompson. A majority of students there are from low-income families and around 40 percent are English language learners.

In the survey, Riverhead wrote that many of its teachers are new to the profession and work with high-needs students, and that financial constraints limit access to instructional resources. The district added that it hired three literacy coaches to lead professional development and support implementation of the science of reading, and is evaluating the need to purchase new instructional materials to teach phonics.

Education Department spokesperson Karen Male said in a statement that the agency plans to reach out to noncompliant districts to provide free instructional resources, explore professional development with colleges and universities, and work with districts to identify other needs. The agency did specify when districts must achieve full compliance.

Without holding districts accountable, Assemblymember Carroll said, New York will continue to lose the race to literacy.

In 2023, Carroll introduced a bill called the Right to Read Act, which would require all elementary school teachers to be trained in the science of reading, provide grants to districts to hire literacy coaches, and mandate school districts to choose from a list of approved, evidence-based curricula. The legislation is currently awaiting action in the education committee, but Carroll said he’s optimistic it will advance this year, citing recent conversations with colleagues and the governor about the need to improve New York schools to keep residents from leaving the state.

“Right now, in New York, you have to be lucky to learn how to read — and that is unjustified and unconscionable,” Carroll said. “We know how to fix this, and I know the governor wants to fix this. But we all need to work together because this is going to take the effort of the legislature and the governor working together to get this done.”

Carroll’s bill has the support of EdTrust, which is also calling for school districts to submit literacy plans with evidence of implementation and notify parents if they are using non-evidence-based curricula. In addition, the organization wants to see the state invest $15 million so that districts can purchase science of reading curricula, and mandatory universal screening in grades K-3.

“We have to catch up with the rest of the nation,” Smink said. “For the amount of money we spend and for how important learning to read is, we deserve policies like every other state.”

Despite New York City’s last-minute withdrawal of, parents, students, and educators packed this week’s school board meeting to speak on AI anyway.

More than 100 New Yorkers testified at a nearly seven-hour-long meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, earlier this week.

Community members repeatedly argued that the Education Department is rolling out AI tools without clear rules, transparency, or adequate knowledge of the technology. Students said AI was already reshaping classrooms, and surveillance practices, like the, are already in use at 150 city schools. Educators expressed concern that the increasing use of various technologies in schools conflicts with the the city released in March.

One parent from Park Slope approached the microphone with her two toddlers in tow, holding one in her arm while clasping the other tightly by the hand.

“I’ve never been an activist before, but I feel so strongly about this: It is starting. Gen Z is turning against AI; I’m turning against AI. The city is telling us that AI is inevitable, but won’t tell me what devices and applications my children are using. You tell us you are spending our money to give artificial intelligence to our children?” she said to a chorus of cheers at Wednesday night’s packed meeting.

The had little to do with AI. It centered on the Education Department’s capital plan, the estimated budget for the coming year, and the updated Fair Student Funding weights that shape how money flows to schools. The panel also voted on 30 separate contract agreements, from cafeteria equipment repairs to special education services.

But the bulk of the seven-hour meeting involved parents, children, and educators arguing against the city’s spending on AI and educational technology contracts and the city’s preliminary AI policy. Although the Next Generation High School proposal was removed from Wednesday’s agenda following backlash over its AI focus and selective admissions, speakers said those concerns would extend to future school plans.

“Many feel AI is teaching a dangerous message that results matter more than the learning process. Some of the most important learning happens when students struggle, make mistakes, ask questions, and improve over time,” said student panel member Julia Nasef, of Staten Island’s Tottenville High School.

AI discussions surface issues with current Department of Education process

Throughout the night, speakers expressed waning confidence in the Education Department’s and its ability to protect students, educators, and families from a complex and rapidly-changing technology.

Most of the speakers were opposed to any AI in the classroom.

Panel for Educational Policy Chair Greg Faulkner admitted on Wednesday that he was a “baby boomer” with limited understanding of AI, and that he wanted more thorough engagement with both the community and Education Department in future AI-related proposals.

But he also thought that Chancellor Kamar Samuel’s move to pull the AI-focused school proposal for Next Generation High School aligns with the schools chief’s priority to better engage and respond to the needs of local communities.

“Under previous administrations, the general assumption was that the panel votes yes on all DOE proposals. But the chancellor’s decision and the panel’s back-and-forth discussion on Wednesday showed us that the old model isn’t working anymore,” Faulkner told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

Faulkner said the “AI question” has him considering proposing changes to some of the Education Department’s policy-making processes. He said he would like the panel to work more closely with the department’s AI policy authors — the names of whom are not public — so the panel can get up to speed on AI research and better share community concerns.

Education Department officials said that the initial AI guidance was shaped by the Department’s central Academics and Instruction team, with input from stakeholders and various internal Department subcommittees.

“We have not had any briefings on AI research, and while I am concerned about a moratorium, I don’t know enough about this technology,” said Faulkner.

Nasef, the student PEP member, said at the meeting that many of her peers acknowledge that AI can be helpful when used “intentionally” to help them understand math and science concepts, for example.

She urged the panel to “support clear, student‑centered guidelines for AI implementation.”

The, released last month, did not include guidance on how or if students can use AI for homework, nor did it differentiate AI use for students in different grades

Panel greenlights controversial tech contracts as AI policy lags

Of the 30 contract proposals up for a vote, three included three educational technology products. Just one was voted down.

One of the contracts approved covered the full line of K-12 digital learning products from , a global educational services company that has in their digital test prep products. Several speakers who testified at Wednesday’s meeting mentioned the company’s recent privacy breach affecting the personal information of. Despite those concerns, the PEP approved the company’s $500,000 contract.

A representative for AI-based software tailored to early childhood education , spoke at the meeting. He assured panel members that the software could be “turned off at any point” because “teachers have complete control of what is going on in the classroom.” This was the only contract that the PEP voted against.

Naveed Hasan, the panel’s de-facto technology expert who had previously supported the AI-focused high school, announced at the meeting that he now supports a two-year moratorium on AI use in schools, saying the city needs more time to address data privacy infrastructure and learning concerns.

The term limits of all current panel members expire at the end of June. The Education Department’s full AI policy is also expected to be released that month, and the Education Department is asking families and educators for through May 8.

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

Students across New York were unable to log in to the digital platform for the state’s grades 3-8 math exam Wednesday morning, raising fresh questions about the transition to computer-based assessments.

The New York State Education Department told schools they could pause or delay the math tests, officials confirmed.

The issue affected schools across the state, including some in New York City where schools were expected to administer the exams sometime between April 28 and May 8.

“More than 116,000 students tested without error this morning, with thousands more expected to complete testing later today,” state Education Department spokesperson JP O’Hare wrote in a statement. “Since the testing window opened, more than two million exams have been successfully submitted.”

Officials declined to provide specific numbers of affected students. But O’Hare said it was a “limited number.”

Upon learning of the problem, O’Hare added, “NYSED immediately contacted our vendor, NWEA, to expeditiously address the issue.”

State officials said schools can administer the exams at a later point during the window, which runs through May 15.

The city’s messaging to caregivers struck a somewhat different tone. A letter principals were encouraged to distribute said “many” students were unable to complete the test and “we are pausing the administration of the Math exam and will reschedule once we receive the assurances we need that no additional disruptions will occur.”

A message to principals encouraged them to postpone state testing scheduled for Thursday.

New York’s multi-year transition to computer-based tests has been by . This year’s problems come amid a against the proliferation of technology in schools, including the amount of time students spend on screens.

After , the state fully transitioned from paper-and-pencil tests to computer-based tests this spring. The grades 3-8 English language arts exams have already been administered.

Some principals began receiving notifications Wednesday morning from the city’s Education Department about the login problems with Nextera, the state’s testing platform.

“We are receiving a high volume of escalations about students having trouble logging into Nextera,” city officials wrote in an email obtained by Chalkbeat. “It is happening statewide.” The message said schools could continue testing if students had already logged in, but should cancel testing for the day if students continued to have problems.

Officials at NWEA, the state’s testing vendor, said they “have directed all available internal resources” to fixing the problem and hope to have the system running by Thursday.

“The cause of this has not yet been identified, which means the fix is also pending,” Simona Beattie, a company spokesperson, said in a statement.

At one Brooklyn elementary school, students were unable to log in to start their exams for more than an hour but were eventually able to log in and complete the tests, according to the principal who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I’m sure there are going to be parents who feel like it’s not going to be the best picture of their child’s performance because of the way it happened today,” the principal said. More broadly, the school leader wishes the state would keep paper and pencil tests, especially for younger students who have to “learn a whole other set of skills” to take them digitally.

At another Brooklyn school, a teacher proctoring the exam for a group of sixth graders with disabilities said that one of the seven students was able to log on. The rest spent two hours trying before the school allowed them to take a break and play basketball in the gym.

“They were frustrated but understood there was nothing we could do,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity since she was not authorized to speak. “They were so patient.”

After their gym break, the students were able to log on and take the test, the teacher said, but she questioned the validity of the results.

“Your purpose is to test them, it’s not to test them after two hours of testing their patience,” she said.

City teachers union President Michael Mulgrew blasted the state Education Department in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Once again, students and educators were left scrambling because the state failed in its responsibility to hold its vendors and consultants accountable,” he said.

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

A few years back, a groundswell of Brooklyn parents in District 13 wanted to ditch gifted and talented classes, concerned about sorting and segregating children starting in kindergarten.

Then-Superintendent Kamar Samuels, now chancellor of New York City schools, wanted to find an alternative that offered rigorous academics for all students in a school rather than a select few. He settled on the and encouraged schools in District 13, which spans from Brooklyn Heights to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to pursue the yearslong authorization process, using a grant to support the shift.

The IB approach embraces inquiry-based, transdisciplinary learning that allows students to go deep into a specific topic across classes, connecting global issues to their own experiences. Educators are trained to facilitate these connections and foster ways for students to become independent thinkers and leaders.

“It means something for a teacher to be an IB teacher. It means you’ve gone through a process,” , when introducing the initiative, “and you’re really pushing the envelope as you think about all your students.”

The district now has five elementary schools and two middle schools in the program, representing New York City’s first IB “pathway” designed to serve children from 3-K through eighth grade. (The district also hopes that students continue on to the handful of public IB high schools in the city, including those in neighboring districts.)

The IB model might soon gain in popularity as schools grapple with the state’s graduation requirement overhaul, as the Portrait of a Graduate framework replaces Regents exams for diplomas starting in the 2027-28 school year. The approach closely aligns with the state’s students must demonstrate (such as being creative innovators, effective communicators, and global citizens). And as schools await the state’s guidance on how to assess students under the new framework, IB schools already have a well-developed system of project-based assessments.

The schools also boast strong post-secondary outcomes: 71% of IB students in the U.S. enrolled in college compared to the average of 56%, .

On a recent Monday at P.S. 56, in Clinton Hill, second graders hummed as they worked on a project for a unit on self-expression. The kids were creating shapes to use for fabric construction, incorporating math, writing, and social-emotional learning as they jotted down the way the colors they used made them feel.

In a fifth grade room down the hall, students — also doing a unit on self-expression — tackled a poem about technology, as they discussed the effect technology is having on education. Another fifth grade class read a poem about bullying, and students were asked to write their own poem about a problem they wanted to change.

Jayda, a fifth grader, wrote about concerns with the increase in immigration enforcement across the nation. She recently participated in an anti-ICE protest that Lucy, another fifth grader, organized. They and their peers talked about how they struggled with writing when they were younger but have since blossomed as writers, especially as they’ve been able to work on more creative writing.

“Now it’s my passion,” fifth grader Noah said. “I couldn’t imagine life without it.”

Tracey Scronic, the instruction lead and coordinator for District 13’s IB schools, sees the shift to the IB model as an “equity tool” to ensure all of a school’s students are exposed to enrichment. She said it “de-prioritizes traditional testing’s emphasis on regurgitation of information.”

Leaning on IB to tackle enrollment declines

The IB program at P.S. 56 has helped prop up enrollment, its principal, Eric Grande, said.

Just before Grande became principal of P.S. 56 a decade ago, the Clinton Hill elementary school tried to bolster enrollment, then hovering below 200 students, by adding a gifted and talented program. Grande added a “world language” program, focusing on Spanish, hoping that would attract more families. But the school didn’t feel cohesive.

“Even though we had a relatively small school, there was almost like schools within the school,” Grande said. “You had your world language Spanish program, your gifted and talented program, you had your special education classes and your gen ed classes, and it just started to feel a little bit off.”

Students within the school, which is more racially diverse than most New York City elementary schools, were not integrated within the different programs, he said. (Last year, about 36% of its students were Black, 36% were white, 17% were Latino, and 1% were Asian American; roughly 47% of children came from low-income families.)

Grande began looking for a model to bring everyone — and all of their different programs — together, appeasing families who wanted a foreign language and those who wanted a project-based approach to teaching. IB offered the “perfect synergy of all things that we were doing.”

The school is now in its second year as an authorized IB school following three years as a candidate school. Enrollment has increased, with about 230 students last year.

And while Grande said his school has never been too focused on test prep, he was proud to see a shift in state test scores since his teachers transitioned to the IB framework, from about 35% proficiency on reading in 2019, the year before the pandemic, to more than 60% last year.

The move to IB can be challenging

The buy-in from teachers on IB takes some time, said Scronic. They needed training to shift practices and must do more in-depth planning around the new units. They also needed to figure out how to meld the IB framework with the mandated literacy curriculum for their district, EL Education.

“It is a bit more cognitively intense for the teachers,” Scronic said. But after a while, she said teachers feel like they’re being respected again for their craft and facilitating connections between the curriculum and students’ own lives. “I feel like the passion that a brand-new teacher brings to the profession then kind of gets squashed sometimes, IB has brought that back.”

Becoming an authorized IB school is not easy. Schools have to pay the Switzerland-based nonprofit that oversees the IB program about $9,000 a year to start the training and candidacy process. It’s about $10,000 each year once a school is authorized to support the implementation and maintenance of IB programs, . District 13 used a grant to cover the costs for the initial training for the schools, though the schools have had to foot the bill for new teachers.

Though Scronic leads District 13’s IB initiative, she’s started holding monthly Zoom meetings for about 40 IB elementary and middle schools in the city, a grassroots effort to provide support and create a community to share best practices and resources.

Samuels continued to promote IB schools when he left his Brooklyn district to become superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3. He encouraged schools in Harlem to adopt the IB model as a way to tackle declining enrollment in a part of the district facing heavy competition from charter schools. (District 3 used a grant to cover the costs as well.)

But Samuels acknowledged the challenges in pursuing IB authorization.

“I do believe in a lot of the work of IB, but it really takes a big investment,” “It takes principals being onboard. It takes teachers being onboard and willing to go and get a lot of background and content knowledge, and to be able to personalize for young people and the kids in your school.”

A middle school IB program helps students find their ‘voice’

Sanai Gary, an eighth grader at Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Restoration Academy — which is in its first full year as an authorized IB school after its yearslong candidacy — said the IB approach has helped her deepen her learning.

“I like how the topics transmit over to other classes. I feel like it helps me learn better,” said Sanai. “It gives me more time to focus on it.”

Last year, she and her peers became clean water advocates after diving into a unit on global sustainability.

It started after they read a novel in English class, “,” about the struggle in South Sudan for clean water. In their Individuals and Societies class (akin to social studies), a student brought up questions about t, that got the students wondering about the water quality in their own school. So, in science class, they tested their school’s water fountains and created makeshift filtration devices.

Concerned about the color and clarity of their school’s water, back in English class, the students mounted a letter-writing campaign to city officials demanding changes.

Restoration Academy has struggled with enrollment and has long served marginalized students. The middle school currently has roughly 80 middle schoolers; about 80% are Black and Latino, and more than 90% are from low-income families. Pre-pandemic, about 20% of its students were considered proficient in reading. Since transitioning to IB, the scores have improved, rising to about 30% last year.

But more importantly, Principal Adele Simon said, students are increasingly linking what’s happening around the world to their own lives and finding their voices to advocate for change based on what they’re learning in school.

“It’s the connection between what they’re reading,” Simon said, “and not just reading it for the purpose of reading it, but reading it for the purpose of, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with this? … Who’s in power and who is not in power? And how can I make sure that the people in power represent me and my community?”

Their school is getting new water fountains with filtration devices this spring.

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

He co-sponsored this year that would give parents an ed-tech “right of refusal.” A former English teacher, he was never a fan of the shift toward every student having their own laptop. Technology, he said, isn’t making students any smarter.

“In fact, we know it’s making them dumber,” he said, expressing a view shared by parents across the country, especially those with students in the elementary grades. 

When his fellow lawmaker Rep. Leanne Harple read the bill, she imagined how tough it might be for teachers to accommodate such requests. An English teacher herself, she also speaks from experience. Her students do research online, where the information is more up to date than in books and academic journals. A 2024 American Federation of Teachers showed 83% of teachers use technology in the classroom daily.

The bill “would create, in some cases, a lot more work,” she said. For every assignment, teachers would “have to create an alternative that’s completely analog.”

Their opposing views on the topic reflect a growing national debate. Parents who advocated for bell-to-bell cellphone bans are now targeting Chromebooks and other ed tech. Influenced by researchers like Jonathan Haidt and Jared Cooney Horvath, who argue that cellphones and classroom technology have harmed students’ development, they’ve mobilized in Facebook groups. They’re demanding pencil-and-paper assignments and asking teachers to excuse their kids from computer-based math and reading apps. Their pleas have sparked pushback from districts that for years have relied on technology for everything from curriculum to testing.

“In August, almost no one was talking about this, and now I’m having no other conversations,” said Kelly Clancy, a mom of three in South Brooklyn, New York, who also serves on her local community education council. “There’s a sea change in parents realizing that they don’t want their kids in front of screens.”

She’s among those challenging the New York City schools’ use of digital programs. She refused to let teachers enter her kids’ work into , an AI tool from the curriculum company HMH that generates feedback on student writing. But when she tried to opt her children out of i-Ready, a widely used testing program from the company Curriculum Associates, she met resistance. The tests are a “baseline component” of the district’s assessment system, David Pretto, superintendent of District 20, wrote in an email. Her school’s principal, he said, “is not in the position to exclude your child from universal screening.”

Clancy didn’t take no for an answer. 

“We will get legal advice if necessary, but my children will not complete these,” she wrote back.

In a statement, the district said any tool using student data “must undergo a rigorous … review process to meet strict privacy, security and compliance standards before it is approved for use.” Officials urged parents to contact local schools with their concerns.

Across the country, the Seattle Public Schools has advised staff that “families may not opt out of district-adopted digital curriculum,” but a spokesperson for the district told ����Ӱ�� that “this is an evolving landscape,” and “we will continue to review and update the guidance as needed.”

Parents in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District are also determined to keep their students off Chromebooks at school. 

“They’re saying we can’t, but we’ll find a way,” Yair Lev, a parent of two, said after a last month in which Superintendent Frank Ranelli said opting out wasn’t possible because the curriculum is computer-based.

Teachers, Lev said, are caught in the middle. He collected from five teachers, who said students often access gaming sites and YouTube during class, and even make video calls to students in other classrooms.

“There should be clear districtwide policies and parameters for when laptops should and should not be used, rather than leaving major decisions to classroom-by-classroom discretion,” one wrote.

Not ‘our best moment’

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, said he’s not opposed to technology. He consults for cardiology startups using AI and has taken the lead on AI use in his division at the hospital. But he and his wife realized that “kids are being exposed to a lot of screens, and we decided to try to reduce it at home.”

In some ways, he represents many of the parents pushing for tech opt outs. His children are young, and they’re starting school at a time when Haidt, a social psychologist, that cellphones and social media have harmed children’s mental health. Lev’s kids are also beginning their education after the pandemic, when parents are demanding more say over what’s taking place in the classroom and data breaches have compromised student privacy.

“The image of technology in schools that’s seared into every parent’s mind is the lockdown version of technology. It wasn’t our best moment,” said Joseph South, chief innovation officer at the International Society for Technology in Education, which merged in 2023 with ASCD, a major curriculum organization. 

Until the pandemic, Elyssa East, a New York City mom, was raising her son screen-free. That became impossible during school closures. Around the same time, she learned that he had some learning difficulties and would “really fall apart when it came to any instruction on the screen.”

Online math programs like Zearn and IXL made him feel “defeated,” she said, because they were assigned for remediation. 

“Here is this technology that’s supposed to help him, but it makes him feel even worse than a human teacher would,” East said. 

She eventually switched him to a private school. She has opted him out of math apps and he writes on an old electric typewriter.

​​”He likes that a lot,” she said. Compared to a laptop, “it’s a totally different experience.”

‘Caught in the crossfire’

Some teachers have no problem with .

Dylan Kane, a seventh grade math teacher in Lake County, Colorado, near Aspen, went . Students, he wrote, are more focused, are completing more work and spend less time “fussing with logistics,” like connecting to the internet or forgetting their Chromebook at home.

Like many parents, he was influenced by Horvath’s . In his 2025 book, the cognitive neuroscientist argues that the widespread use of classroom technology has left students distracted and unable to retain information.  

But prior to January, Kane never had a parent request to opt their child out of using computers or specific software. Even during parent-teacher conferences this spring, his decision to ditch Chromebooks in class never came up.

“I work in a small, rural town that’s relatively low-income, not a lot of college-educated parents. I think much of the tech backlash from parents is coming from the more-online, higher-educated folks,” he said. He thinks trying to accommodate individual parents’ objections would be tricky. “Teachers could be caught in the crossfire because they have to deal with district-mandated online programs and then potentially parent opt-outs.” 

South at ISTE+ASCD said he’s heard plenty of “horror stories” about technology, like apps dominated by advertising and students spending class time “shooting aliens” on the screen. But those examples are often due to teachers using a program that was never vetted by their district or “some random kid who found a workaround,” he said.

He and Richard Culatta, the organization’s CEO, added that moving through state legislatures that limit screen time don’t necessarily address parents’ other concerns like cyberbullying, protecting student data or improving the overall quality of instruction. 

Many of the bills require paper worksheets to be used instead of technology, said Culatta, who quipped that he often feels like he’s in a “time warp.” 

“There’s no quality indicator,” he said. “You could literally take any garbage worksheet and it would be fine.”

‘Rapid innovation’

Opt-out requests have forced districts to be more thoughtful about how they use technology. 

The Worcester Public Schools in central Massachusetts is like a lot of districts. It went through “a period of rapid innovation and tech acquisition” prior to the pandemic to make sure “teachers and students had the tools needed to be future-ready,” said Sarah Kyriazis, director of the district’s Office of Innovation. 

Schools added even more ed tech tools during COVID lockdowns for remote and hybrid learning. Now some parents are questioning those decisions at a time of “national concern about data, privacy, security and screen time,” she said. 

The district’s school committee has so far to allow parents to opt out of ed tech programs. But Kyriazis is collecting feedback from teachers on the apps they feel are most important for instruction. The goal, she said, is to whittle down the amount of data sent through online platforms to third-party vendors. Principals and teachers, she said, should be able to “speak with parents about each app and its purpose in the classroom.” 

Further west, the Northampton, Massachusetts, district is accommodating opt-out requests from about 12 parents. To do so, teachers must come up with activities that allow students to learn from the same curriculum as their peers “without using the disputed programs,” said Superintendent Portia Bonner. 

Laura Carney Erny, who has a second grader in the district, hasn’t tried to opt her son out of tech yet, but she’s thinking about it for third grade. Even learning which programs the school used took “months of back-and-forth emails” with teachers and administrators, she said.

Parents say they don’t want to further complicate the lives of teachers, especially those who lack classroom aides. Northampton lost in 2024 who were paid with temporary COVID relief funds. 

“I don’t blame teachers for relying on tech because it’s an easy thing to do,” she said. “Some of these programs help keep the kids in their seats.”

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, former teacher Kate Brody is among those who have opted their children out of practice sessions on i-Ready, now the subject of a over student privacy. She decided the program was a problem when her first grader couldn’t tear himself away from the screen to use the bathroom and started having accidents. 

“I used to teach full time,” she said. “I definitely don’t want to create a world where we’re asking teachers to do multiple lesson plans and monitor half the class on the computer and do analog lessons for the other half.” 

It’s unfair to teachers to field opt-out requests every year, she said. That’s why, as a board member for Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group of parents and educators, she backs a that calls for limits on the use of technology for all students, especially in the early grades. The board will vote on the plan April 21.

“Right now,” she said, “it’s the Wild West.”

Dylan Lopez Contreras sat waiting for a copy of his class schedule in a sunny fourth-floor room of his Bronx high school as his counselor walked in wearing a “Free Dylan” button attached to the strap of his messenger bag.

Dylan stood, and Hedin Bernard lifted Dylan’s more-than-6-foot frame off the floor in a tight bear hug.

It had been more than 10 months since Dylan set foot in ELLIS Preparatory Academy, a high school geared toward older, newly arrived immigrant students. The last time the two had seen each other, Dylan’s hair was dyed purple and just covered his ears. Now, it fell below the 21-year-old’s shoulders and the purple dye had faded to yellow.

Last May, in a Manhattan courthouse after his asylum hearing, making him the first known New York City public school student detained during President Donald Trump’s second term. The Venezuelan native became the public face of an , remaining in custody until .

After Dylan’s arrest, his mom Raiza’s . Ever since then, Bernard has, along with ELLIS founding Principal Norma Vega, led the school’s efforts to rally behind Dylan, which included helping to put Raiza in touch with lawyers and advocates, organizing a student letter-writing campaign, and supporting a fundraiser for the family. With Dylan’s return to ELLIS, they hope he can focus on “what will happen, not what did happen,” Vega said.

But the jubilation of Dylan’s return has been mixed with frequent reminders of the looming threat of immigration enforcement facing him and other ELLIS students.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, released Dylan while he awaits a decision on an appeal in his . An immigration judge , and the appeals process could take years, according to his lawyers from the New York Legal Assistance Group. But ICE has the ability to take him back into custody at any time and requires regular check-ins, his lawyers said.

Shortly after Bernard reunited with Dylan Tuesday morning, as Dylan scarfed down a donut and drank coffee poured from Bernard’s thermos, the counselor invited him to join a college trip that week.

ELLIS staffers believe that is the surest path out of poverty. The trip would visit three colleges in upstate New York.

Dylan glanced down at his leg, where a black ankle monitor had been attached as a condition of his release. With his travel restrictions, Dylan knew he likely couldn’t attend.

But that didn’t slow down the ELLIS staffers for long. Later that morning, Bernard asked a colleague to invite college representatives to ELLIS, so Dylan wouldn’t have to leave school to meet them.

Dylan’s detention still lingers

The swiftness of the changes over the past two weeks has been hard for Dylan to comprehend.

After months in Moshannon Valley Processing Center, a Western Pennsylvania detention facility, Dylan had , flanked by Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, thanking his supporters in Spanish from under the blue brim of a New York Knicks hat.

He had been sleeping on a thin cot in a cell with more than 70 men. Now he was in his own bed, cuddled with his younger siblings, ages 8 and 10, who had asked to sleep next to him. And after losing about 30 pounds in detention because he often couldn’t stomach the food, Dylan had a phalanx of adults at ELLIS showering him with .

“It’s a big contrast, to go through so much mistreatment, and then come back to people who love and support you,” he said in Spanish.

Still, his thoughts drift back to a friend in detention nicknamed “El Mayor,” or the elder, who has already called Dylan to let him know how happy he was to hear about his release and to ask if he could use his public profile to advocate for the release of others. (Dylan did exactly that at his press conference.) As long as those men remain in detention, Moshannon Valley is “not going to feel very far away,” he said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson denied that there were any problems with the conditions at Moshannon. “All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the spokesperson said. “In fact, ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.”

ELLIS staffers said reintegrating Dylan into school will mean helping him catch up on all he missed over the past 10 months while also processing the ongoing trauma of his detention.

While Dylan was incarcerated, his classmates ., prepared for or taken Regents exams they needed for graduation, and kept up with the guitar lessons Dylan enjoyed before his arrest.

Letters from his classmates helped sustain him as his detention stretched from days to months, and his optimism for a quick release faded. He watched new detainees — including grandparents and young kids — come and go while he remained locked up.

Dylan had no formal education in detention. But he was determined to do what he could to keep up with his English.

He practiced speaking with cellmates from places like China and the United Kingdom and to advocate for better treatment from the guards.

He devoured manga and Marvel comics donated by the advocacy group ROCC NYC, which played a critical role in supporting his family and keeping public attention on his case. He scoured an English dictionary from the facility’s library to learn new vocabulary but had no one to check his pronunciation. And he tried to read some classics, such as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez.

When he returned to ELLIS last week, Vega stopped him in the hallway to hand him a gift from a staffer in her district office: a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” another classic Dylan had asked to read but couldn’t get a copy of.

Dylan, who had fled Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro’s repressive regime, had been , and spent 10 months in ICE custody, had said he wanted to understand Dante’s nine circles of hell.

ELLIS gears up to help Dylan adjust

Staffers at ELLIS are accustomed to helping students navigate all kinds of trauma, but they’d never had a student return from long-term incarceration, Bernard said.

Dylan’s counselors at ELLIS plan to refer him to a Spanish-speaking therapist through a mental health clinic located on the first floor of ELLIS’ building, Bernard said. And staffers will watch for any signs that he is struggling.

They’re also hoping to give Dylan chances to enjoy himself outside academic courses, though his ankle monitor is complicating those plans. His counselor enrolled Dylan in a swim class, but Dylan worried about getting the device wet.

Schools in New York are required to continue enrolling students through age 21, but state law doesn’t stop them from staying longer if the school agrees, Vega said.

ELLIS staffers don’t want to keep Dylan in high school longer than necessary but are encouraging him to stay for two years, so he can master English before applying to college.

In the meantime, he is eager to earn money to help his mom and siblings with rent. He hopes to take a bartending course so he can work at night without interfering with his school schedule.

Dylan worked long hours as a delivery driver before his arrest, and Bernard remains concerned about how long he’ll want to stay in school.

Staffers at ELLIS are working on finding him an internship that allows him to make money while learning new skills and burnishing his college resume.

Dylan said he’s willing to stay at ELLIS “as long as it takes.”

Dylan and ELLIS face an uncertain future

Dylan’s arrest, and the aggressive escalation in immigration enforcement it represented, cast a long shadow over ELLIS over the past 10 months, .

Students had begun to talk more openly about self-deportation. Pressure to abandon school for work grew as students confronted their diminished prospects for building a future in the U.S. And ELLIS’ enrollment, like that at immigrant-heavy schools across the city, has declined as border crossings slowed to a trickle.

Many of the ELLIS students who greeted Dylan Tuesday with tearful hugs and exclamations like “bienvenidos, loco!” (welcome back, crazy!) had endured their own brushes with immigration enforcement.

Dylan saw a friend whose mother was deported while he was in detention, leaving her without a way to pay rent or look after her toddler during school hours. Dylan’s is considering returning to Ecuador in part because of the fear of ICE. Another student saw Dylan’s ankle monitor and asked a staff member what the device did, adding that her dad had one too, Bernard said.

And when Dylan greeted two fellow Venezuelan students, one asked if he’d had to sleep on the floor — noting that’s where he’d slept after being detained while crossing the border. “I know the floor,” Dylan responded with a wry smile.

During lunch time, Dylan settled into a booth with friends and munched on mozzarella sticks. He had a newfound appreciation for school cafeteria food.

His friendships were what Dylan missed most about ELLIS, and there was lots to catch up on. The conversation soon turned to an ordinary high school concern: Dylan had to figure out what color to dye his hair next.

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

New of these schools, shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��, was published Thursday by Education Reimagined, a national nonprofit that helps schools implement . It’s an approach where young people have ownership of their education, learn in their communities and show their knowledge through multiple ways, not just tests, according to the nonprofit. 

Over the 2024-25 school year, Education Reimagined studied in St. Paul, Minnesota; in LaFayette, New York; and in Mukwonago, Wisconsin —  a mix of urban, suburban and rural communities that enrolled a total of 388 K-12 students. More than 45% had individualized education programs or 504 plans — documents that spell out how needs will be met under the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

“In all the sites we studied, the systems are designed to fit the learner and their needs, not the other way around,” said Khara Schonfeld, one of the organization’s researchers. “They’re seeing differences as the norm as opposed to the exception. That means learners are showing up.”

That included mindsets that shifted how staff understood learning differences and student potential; different organizational structures; and key daily practices for student support and success.

The approach has produced positive academic results. At Norris School District, students with IEPs increase reading performance by an average of 8 percentage points and math by 4 percentage points per trimester. Avalon students with IEPs consistently for students with IEPs on math and reading tests. 

In the LaFayette Central School District, the opening of LaFayette Big Picture in 2008 correlated with graduation rates for students with IEPs in the district rising from a range of 50% to 70% to a scale of 95% to 100%.

Students who enrolled in these schools also experienced a decline in behavioral incidents and became more engaged in their education, according to the research.

“A lot of the learners came with past trauma, including education trauma — they had a hard time in previous schools,” she said. “So it all really focused on this idea of healing and making sure that they felt safe and cared for. We had a couple of alumni say, ‘I went to the school. I can talk to anyone about anything that I want to get or find out because the school taught me how to do that.”

Schonfeld said common accommodations students with disabilities need in traditional classroom settings are provided to everyone — a key factor in the learner-centered system’s success.

In Minnesota’s Avalon School, staff begin each day with a session where students and their advisors connect in a sensory-friendly setting  — an environment that reduces stimuli like harsh lighting and loud noises. Norris School District’s single campus, where 75% of the students have IEPs, celebrates small accomplishments that might go unnoticed, such as a student’s ability to hold an entire conversation, the case study said.

Leadership structures are also different at these schools. Avalon, a charter school, has a teacher-majority board that allows educators to redesign schedules and positions. LaFayette Big Picture School pairs students with mentors, while Norris School District has staff meetings every day.

Some daily practices include offering internships onsite to ensure students don’t have to be “ready” to travel outside the building to experience career education. The schools also interpret disruptive behavior as communication about unmet needs rather than misconduct, according to the research. For example, Avalon School uses a strategy called relational repair, where educators ask reflective questions after a disruptive behavior to build trust with students. At Norris, students are taught to name feelings to help staff find the right support during a behavioral incident.

This learner-centered framework has a positive ripple effect with families and educators, Schonfeld said. Parents of students at all three schools have shared they no longer have to fight for their child’s special education accommodations. 

Teachers also feel more supported and satisfied with their jobs, the researchers found. Avalon School has maintained a 90% year-to-year retention rate over two decades, with current teachers averaging 10 years of experience. At LaFayette, more than half of the staff have been at the school for at least nine years.

The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

New York City students with a passion for STEM — and an interest in artificial intelligence — may soon have a high school dedicated to training “the next generation of technology professionals.”

But families in Manhattan’s District 2 are pushing back against for , a new screened admissions high school that would take the place of the tiny, girls-only Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women. Next Generation would be the first city public school to focus its curriculum on AI and computer science.

As details of the two proposals emerged over the last month, so have dual tensions: What should fill the space left by Young Women in Business, and how private technology companies and their artificial intelligence products could shape the curriculum at Next Generation.

Much of the opposition to Next Generation has come from families at a middle school also in the Broadway building, Lower Manhattan Community School. Also known as LMC, parents at the school have called on the department for years to expand enrollment from grades 6-8 up to grade 12.

The Panel for Educational Policy, the board that votes on new schools and closures, is expected to consider the proposals for Next Generation and Business for Young Women at its April 29 meeting.

The Education Department released both proposals on March 6, the day after the city’s eighth graders received their high school acceptance offers. If approved, Next Generation would welcome its first class of ninth graders in the fall. (The plan to close Business for Young Women in June is not contingent on Next Generation’s approval.)

Despite not having the green light yet, Next Generation has already held three virtual open houses. Its states the school is “set to open” in fall 2026, noting that applications would open March 19.

Parents ask: ‘Why this school and why here?’

Manhattan High Schools Superintendent Gary Beidleman introduced the idea for Next Generation Technology High School at a .

Panel for Educational Policy members and families of the three co-located schools at 26 Broadway — in addition to LMC and Business for Young Women, Richard R. Green High School of Teaching shares the building — said that meeting was the first time the district school community had been notified of the proposed STEM- and technology-focused screened high school.

At the Feb. 25 announcement, Beidleman said Next Generation grew out of his experience as a summer 2024 , and that Google and OpenAI are part of the planning team for the school. One of the school’s goals, he said, is to “expand pathways connected to high-growth technology careers” and provide advanced STEM and technology programming for NYC students. Next Generation also plans to offer a summer internship program with Carnegie Mellon University.

Caleb Haraguchi-Combs, founding principal and project director of Next Generation High School, said in an information session that the school would utilize . How much of this AI-powered, AI-focused Google coursework would comprise the curriculum is still in flux, according to the proposal’s .

The school’s academic description includes similar or identical language as found on the Google Skills website: Next Generation’s “special access to technology industry mentors,” “technology certifications,” and “curriculum that adapts to the dynamic changes in the technology field” are offerings advertised on the homepage of the Google Skills site.

Officials and families question new school proposal process

The community and Panel for Educational Policy members have asked questions about the fast proposal process, speaking to uncertainty around admissions for the coming school year.

in a letter to the Panel for Educational Policy that the proposal seemingly came out of nowhere, and families were not provided adequate engagement opportunities before its release. Panel Chair Greg Faulkner said he has received hundreds of similar letters from parents since the community learned of the incoming proposal in late February.

High school offers were released March 5, ahead of the panel’s vote and months before the proposed school would open. It remains unclear how the Education Department would handle screening requirements — such as interviews or assessments — after the main admissions cycle has concluded. The Office of District Planning did not respond to questions about how enrollment would work for this fall.

of the school, created by the Next Generation’s founding principal and program director on March 8, had under 100 signatures at the time of publishing.

A public hearing is scheduled for April 14, two weeks before the panel’s vote.

“I would love more transparency around why the department chooses certain schools to go in certain places,” said Sarah Calderon, a parent at Lower Manhattan Community School. “When we asked the superintendent, ‘Why this school and why here?’ he said he had no data on district demand.”

Beidelman told parents at the Feb. 25 District 2 meeting that expanding Lower Manhattan Community “was not an idea that was on the table.”

The Education Department receives many proposals each year, including some from outside New York City, said Sean Rux of the Office of New School Development.

“This was the proposal that spoke to us,” Rux said.

Families push to expand Lower Manhattan Community School

The plan to close the underenrolled Business for Young Women school has been percolating for a few years — with just 91 students this year, it’s the smallest district high school in the city, said Education Department officials.

Families at Lower Manhattan Community School say they have pushed for years to expand into a 6–12 model, and would like to move into the space used by Business for Young Women, if closed.

“A proposal to expand LMC could potentially open up sixth grade admissions to applicants citywide, but we have not been given the opportunity to even submit a proposal,” said Anne Hager, a parent of a sixth grader at Lower Manhattan School.

At a PTA meeting with Education Department staff on Wednesday, LMC’s Student Leadership Team presented its case to expand the school instead of opening Next Generation.

A new 6-12 would eliminate the need for LMC students to go through a second, onerous application process, something that students with disabilities would especially benefit from, they said. The presentation also cited Department of Education data from 2024 that showed 6-12 schools have nearly three times higher demand than their 6-8 middle school counterparts.

compared with citywide averages.

The department’s proposal focuses largely on space at the Broadway campus, estimating that Next Generation would serve roughly 450 students by its fourth year. All three schools can comfortably co-locate, according to the proposal, though its capacity calculations do not allot for significant expansion for either Richard R. Green High School or LMC.

Debate over AI timing and oversight

Next Generation’s proposal arrives amid over artificial intelligence in schools.

The school initially marketed itself in information sessions and on social media as an “AI school,” though DOE officials later clarified that students would learn about artificial intelligence rather than be taught by it.

“Students need to be creators, not consumers, of technology,” Beidleman said at the Feb. 25 meeting. “Lessons learned from the past show us that new tech in place creates an opportunity.”

Some parents have argued that broad use of an AI platform in public schools should not be allowed before comprehensive guidelines have been released by the city.

Greg Faulkner, who chairs the Panel for Educational Policy, said he first learned of the proposal after receiving Next Generation’s last month. Since then, the panel has received hundreds of letters from parents opposing the plan and raising concerns about the lack of community engagement so far.

“I have two major hesitations with this: We don’t know what kind of AI involvement there will be. The development team has not provided a playbook for how that will look,” Faulkner said. “And in reading the response letters from District 2 parents, I see that proper engagement and process was not done.”

At a District 2 town hall on March 5, Chancellor Kamar Samuels said the Education Department expects to release AI guidance in the coming weeks and will provide a 45-day window for community feedback once it’s published.

Five Community Education Councils have passed resolutions calling for a two-year moratorium on artificial intelligence use in schools. But calls for broad AI guidelines implemented at the city level are nothing new; of an AI-powered reading program in 2024 after former Comptroller Brad Lander called for a citywide playbook.

“I think the question of teacher capacity and teacher shortages, the research on kids and AI, is still nascent, and the DOE’s lack of its own AI policy leads me to question the timing of any AI school,” said Calderon, the parent at Lower Manhattan Community.

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

There has been considerable debate in schools and among policymakers on how best to ensure American students are keeping pace academically. Research shows the COVID-19 pandemic and school shutdowns had a significant negative impact on students’ learning.

This debate over academic proficiency, while well-intentioned, is ultimately failing our children. It completely overlooks that American students are falling behind on a much-more important developmental goal: moral proficiency.

The failure to emphasize kindness, respect and character in our schools is encouraging other behaviors to fill that void. An epidemic of bullying pervades classrooms and affects students across the country. The numbers tell the story: According to a Pew Research Center released last year, nearly 60% of teens identify bullying as commonplace in their schools. One in five say it’s extremely common, and among teens it was cited as the second biggest problem affecting students today. Previous studies have found that two in five students say they were bullied on school property, and nearly half reported being victims of cyberbullying.

Three years ago, we lost our 17-year-old son to bullying. We sent a healthy, happy 16-year-old boy to a new school excited to make friends. He was kind to everyone, a leader, and wanted a life in public service. This made him a target. His reputation was destroyed by lies spread in person and online over the course of a year, beginning with a school election. While he stood up for himself until his final breath, he suffered in plain sight and — unnecessarily, avoidably and alone.

After his death, we learned that many schools, including our son’s, have no legal obligation to protect your child from bullying. We became advocates for change. No child should have to endure the same cruelty, anguish and pain as Jack did. 

This campaign for change took an important step forward in October when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the to combat bullying in schools and extend protections already afforded to public school students to those in the state’s independent schools. A diverse coalition of caring legislators and faith-based and independent school leaders worked with us to pass the law, giving half a million private school students in New York the most basic human right: to feel safe. The law ensures that when a child comes forward or bullying is witnessed, the school is obligated to act promptly: investigate, communicate and respond. 

But these policy changes are a solution to an epidemic that needs a bigger fix than new laws. We know the cure. Bullying is like an insidious disease that grows unchecked in cultures where character and kindness are not cherished.

The chief mission of our schools must be teaching skills and values for life, not just improving test outcomes. That means respect for others and their differences. It means civility; not just reading the student handbook but living it. And it means calling out — and addressing — behaviors and actions that threaten the school climate for everyone. 

Bullying cannot be viewed as acceptable or endurable behavior. The old adages that it will “toughen them up” or “is part of growing up” are archaic and misguided. The bullying our kids experience today is not simple playground teasing — our children do not feel safe in school anymore, and because of social media, that fear follows them home. Ask yourself: How can you learn algebra in the classroom if you are afraid of what could happen in the hallway?

Only have protections in place for every child. This is unacceptable. We need to help the remaining four million private and parochial school students at risk. Anti-bullying mandates actually reaffirm the mission of our schools: teach the whole child. We hope the Jack Reid Law is a wake-up call. Laws are meaningless symbols if not lived. Climate and culture matter. It must start with school leaders and flow through the entire system of the school: from the chemistry teacher to the gym coach and to each child.

Kindness and bullying are both contagious. One is free; the other cost us our entire fortune — our beloved son. Which one do you want in your school?

As New York City schools ramp up their focus on job readiness programs, a parent board overseeing high schools is calling on the Education Department to implement career aptitude assessments for all ninth and 11th graders.

“It helps with the ever popular question of ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” said Lawrence Lee, one of the sponsors . “It’s a big world with lots of different options and choices. I think many people look around and think their choices are only what they can see around them.”

, like other schools across the state and nation, are increasingly focusing on career education. There are more than 130 career and technical schools plus over 260 career and technical programs offering internships, apprenticeships, and job-focused courses across the five boroughs. But often, students are left to navigate a complicated application process without guidance on how various programs, electives, internships, career and technical tracks, and postsecondary paths might align with long-term goals, the high school council board members said. They believe the career aptitude assessments can help students reflect on their choices to improve how they select courses and work toward real-world goals.

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“By 11th grade, those decisions directly affect college applications, workforce credentials, and financial planning. Rather than leave those moments to chance, these assessments can give students the agency to better understand their own talents and to see multiple futures for themselves,” said Deborah Alexander, one of the resolution’s sponsors.

Education Department officials said they will review the resolution, but added they currently use platforms that offer interactive career exploration activities and generate tailored career options based on students’ interests.

“This career planning is also embedded in 1:1 advising, ensuring each high schooler receives personalized support in mapping out their next steps,” Education Department spokesperson Isla Gething said in a statement.

The high school council members want students to take “developmentally appropriate, research‐based” assessments in the fall of freshman year and spring of junior year, saying it will help provide more guidance especially for students from historically underserved communities and those learning English as a new language.

“Some students grow up surrounded by professionals who talk openly about their work and pathways, but many do not,” Alexander said. “That difference can shape who sees themselves as an engineer, a nurse, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur, or who never considers those possibilities at all.”

The online career assessment industry has exploded in recent years: An across the country use off-the-shelf advising tools from more than 20 companies, and many others use custom tech tools.

Some research suggests that career aptitude tools can help students better understand their strengths, that might otherwise not have been on their radar. Some experts suggest the tech tools can also help erode , when it comes to career advice.

But evidence of how effective these tools are remains scarce, which is why education research organization MDRC has embarked on a long-term analysis of two of the tech tools, expecting to release results in the summer. Though the tools offer schools a way to advise students without having to hire more counselors — doing deep dives into what kinds of careers fit a student’s aptitudes and personality as well as what kind of degree to pursue and potential salary ranges — they often need, said Rachel Rosen, a senior research associate at MDRC.

“They’re not perfect,” Rosen said of the tools. “They are better if there is a teacher or an adult who will take the information and really work closely with the students on understanding how it can help them think creatively about what the tools are saying.”

While MDRC researchers don’t yet have definitive answers on whether the tool helped reduce bias, they did find that by the time students take the assessments, they already have some of their own assumptions about who they are and what kinds of careers they might do, Rosen said.

“They felt like they knew themselves better than the tool,” she said, and while the tools still had potential, “they need some good adult guidance to go with them.”

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

New York City received more than 50,000 applications for its free preschool programs in just two weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday.

That number is about half of the total applications the city received last year for its 3-K and prekindergarten programs — some 94,840. But families of 3- and 4-year-olds still have nearly a month to apply, and many families often wait until the end of the application window since applications are not accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Applications remain open through Feb. 27.

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“Every child deserves access to free, high quality childcare – and we’re making sure families across the city know that now is the time to enroll in 3-k and pre-K,” Mamdani said in a statement.

Mamdani seems to be taking a page from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s playbook, when the former mayor launched the city’s massive free pre-K program a decade ago and made outreach a major focal point. De Blasio’s administration to get the word out, particularly in low-income neighborhoods where families were less familiar with the city’s new offerings, and staffers called families of 4-year-olds across the city to encourage them to apply.

Former Mayor Eric Adams, however, did not focus as much on outreach, complained City Council members, who fought for more funding to to families. Last year, about 1 in every 5 seats for the city’s free child care programs for children ages 4 and under, or more than 27,000 of roughly 136,000 seats, went unfilled,

The new mayor has a vested interest in making sure : Not only did he vow to strengthen the city’s 3-K program and ensure that it’s truly universal, showing the demand for the city’s existing programs will help shore up support for his 2-Care program for the city’s 2-year-olds.

In her recent executive budget proposal, Gov. Kathy Hochul to help New York City roll out its 2-Care program and committed to invest $500 million over two years in the program. The city is aiming to create 2,000 new child care seats for 2-year-olds in high-need areas of the city in the fall, then grow to 8,000 seats the following year, and reach all of the city’s 2-year-olds by the end of Mamdani’s first term.

On Friday, Mamdani visited a home-based child care provider in Manhattan’s Chinatown as a way to show his commitment to the providers who operate out of home and often offer care that is culturally and linguistically responsive to families in their communities.

The administration will likely have to rely heavily on home-based providers to scale up its 2-Care program, which will pose many logistical hurdles. That from losing kids to 3-K and pre-K programs and the COVID pandemic. More recently, the Trump administration’s have affected the immigrant-heavy workforce, advocates and providers have said.

Emmy Liss, a former de Blasio administration staffer who is heading the mayor’s Office of Child Care, acknowledged that not all home-based providers fared well in the rollout of the city’s 3-K and pre-K programs.

“We want to work closely in partnership with them in this next phase of work, because we cannot do this work without them,”

Families can apply to 3-K and pre-K online through or by calling 718-935-2009. City officials said any family that applies by the deadline will receive an offer.

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

Sorry kids, New York City students will still not have a traditional snow day, no matter how many inches fall.

School will be in session on Monday, whether in-person or remote, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday as he provided an update on the preparations for a potentially massive winter storm heading to the area over the weekend.

The mayor said he will make the final decision by noon on Sunday whether classes will pivot to remote learning. The city is also canceling Sunday’s Public School Athletic League activities as well as any other Sunday school events.

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“I have to apologize to the students that we’re hoping for a different answer for a traditional snow day,” Mamdani said during a press briefing on the storm, acknowledging that the city has no flexibility in its calendar to cancel instructional days.

New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said the city was committed to swiftly sharing information about schools.

“We know that families need timely, clear information to plan their schedules,” Samuels said.

He also said that schools will be flexible in their approach to remote learning.

“No one is asking kids to be on a device for six hours and 20 minutes,” Samuels said. “Some learning will be synchronous. Some will be asynchronous. You can still have your hot chocolate, you can still go out and enjoy the snow.”

Education Department officials are encouraging students and staff to log in to remote learning platforms over the weekend to make sure they can connect and to avoid technical glitches Monday morning, according to a letter to principals obtained by Chalkbeat. School leaders were also encouraged to stagger school start times for each grade level by 15-minute increments “to ensure a smooth login experience,” the email states.

The National Weather Service is predicting , and the city is gearing up. Schools across the five boroughs are reaching out to their students to ensure they have devices and understand how to log on in the event of a remote school day.

This is the first major logistical test for the mayor and his new chancellor. A big chunk of the city’s nearly 900,000 students — all high school students and those attending 6-12 schools — already had the day off for a teacher professional development day. But the day might be complicated for many parents of young children: They might be frustrated with remote learning and prefer that their kids play outside, or they might be scrambling for child care, especially if they must work in-person.

Many families also depend on schools to provide their children breakfast and lunch.

Schools last closed in-person classes because of snow two years ago, and it did not go well: , despite efforts to . The Education Department subsequently conducted another drill, but it was optional, .

“We are preparing for the possibility of remote such that we do not repeat those mistakes of the past,” Mamdani said.

Samuels recalled the 2024 remote snow day as a “day that will live in infamy” and said, “We’ve stress tested the system, both in person with students logging in and as well. We’ve had simulations so we are prepared now.”

The most recent test, Samuels said, was in December.

“We’ve increased the capacity to make sure that we can house as many students as possible on that day,” Samuels added. “So we now have the capacity of having a million students logging at the same time within 60 seconds.”

The mayor and chancellor offered conflicting messages this week about whether closing school altogether, with no remote learning, could be an option. Samuels that remote learning would be required if school buildings are shuttered, though Mamdani that he was mulling a traditional snow day.

Changes to the school calendar make cancelling school difficult, if not impossible.

The city stopped having traditional snow days in 2020, deciding that schools could instead offer remote learning to help meet the mandated 180 instructional days as more holidays have been added to the calendar.

The state allows certain professional development days to count toward that number, and because of that, New York City students are only in

Mamdani emphasized the steps the city is taking to prepare for the storm.

More than 2,000 sanitation workers are going to start 12-hour shifts starting Saturday evening as the city issues a hazardous travel advisory for Sunday and Monday. He urged people to take the storm seriously and stay home.

The city’s subway and bus system is expected to be operational, said Janno Lieber, CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

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

Does your child’s public school have a library?

The City Council now requires New York City’s Education Department to report data on school librarians and library access.

The first-ever report of public school library data was released last month, and revealed that across 1,614 public schools, 1,016 have a library. Yet, there were only 273 full-time librarians and 12 part-time librarians.

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Research access to school libraries with certified librarians tends to result in better academic performance and higher graduation rates at those schools. One showed that a loss of librarians is associated with lower reading scores.

City Council passed school librarians data law after years of advocacy from parents and librarians who warned of a drastic loss in librarians across the city. In 2023, school budget item lines to find that nearly a third of schools with more than 700 students did not have a librarian listed in their budget, even though state standards require all secondary schools with more than 700 students to have a full-time certified librarian.

This year’s data paints a similarly dire picture, and advocates have concerns about both what the data reveals and the accuracy of the data itself. For one, they are critical of the method the Education Department used to report on the number of schools that have libraries. Also, having a library space without a librarian remains a concern.

“Even if all the numbers are accurate, it still … paints a picture that there’s still so much work that needs to be done,” said Roy Rosewood, a school librarian in Queens who’s been advocating for librarians since 2013.

Rosewood and other advocates are concerned that the Education Department used a school’s operating hours as a proxy for the school’s library hours, according to the data. Advocates and librarians told Chalkbeat that this is not a reliable measurement of a library’s open hours, since libraries can often be shut down for testing, meetings, or other purposes.

“Last year, the library was pretty much closed all of April and May for testing,” said one librarian who is untenured and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “A lot of times when they shut down the libraries for testing, they don’t even put the librarian to proctor those tests. So we’re not even in the space that is closed down.”

For those two months, she spent most of her time in the teachers’ cafeteria and periodically, she walked around the school with a cart of books for students to check in or out.

Advocates also pointed out the importance of having a librarian, not just a library.

“A physical space means nothing,” said Jenny Fox, a New York City public school parent and founder of Librarians = Literacy, an advocacy group focused on raising awareness about the city’s library desert. Fox said she spends a lot of time educating people on what librarians do, something that is often misunderstood or overlooked.

“They’re not just checking books in and out. They’re teaching your kids about media literacy, safety online, how to vet an article for truthfulness,” Fox said. Librarians build their own curriculum, help students with research skills, and are one of the only people in the school who interact with every child.

An Education Department spokesperson said the department recognizes that school libraries are “essential,” and noted, “There’s still room to grow, and we will continue expanding these numbers to bring more knowledge, books, and a culture of reading to more students.”

On his fourth day as New York City schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels visited a Brooklyn school, and parents and educators pressed him about the lack of librarians. He agreed that school libraries were “critical,” saying when schools in the districts he worked in got libraries put into their buildings, “you could see the difference in the culture that changes.”

Parts of the City Council’s school library law have yet to be implemented. State law states that students in seventh and eight grades are receive at least one period of library and information instruction per week. Only about 20% of K-8 schools and junior high schools have a full-time librarian, according to a data analysis from Librarians = Literacy, suggesting the law’s requirements aren’t being met. The anonymous librarian said she is only teaching four library classes, but there are about 60 classes of seventh and eighth graders at her school.

The data on the number of students in those grades who receive library instruction is set to be released on June 1. Next year’s data will also include information such as the number of non-licensed school librarians that are assigned to help fill the librarian gap, the number of hours per day licensed librarians are assigned to do school library work, and more.

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

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to revamp the way the state’s schools teach math.

Hochul announced the plan in her annual State of the State address on Tuesday, along with several child care and education initiatives she has previewed over the past week. The governor’s broader agenda includes funding a ; expanding pre-K and child care vouchers statewide; growing a ; bolstering the state’s teacher training pipeline; and building on free community college for adults who want to train for high-demand careers.

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The governor’s office released few details about the plan to overhaul math, but in its outlining Hochul’s priorities for the year, state officials compared it to existing efforts to revamp literacy instruction. The governor has worked with teachers and school districts to adopt evidence-based “science of reading” practices that focus on phonics and explicit reading instruction, state officials wrote.

Similarly, Hochul said in her Tuesday speech that it is time to get “back to basics” in math. “My hope is for New York students to be the most academically prepared in the country,” Hochul said.

To that end, she will introduce legislation to require the State Education Department to provide school districts with best practices for teaching math and guidance on selecting math curriculums that align with state standards.

The state will also require the State University of New York and the City University of New York to offer extra training in evidence-based math instruction to teachers, especially in New York’s districts with the lowest math performance.

“With these proposals, New York parents can rest assured that there is no better place for their children to learn and thrive than here in our state,” Hochul said.

New York City is already several years into an experiment in mandating and standardizing school curriculums in the name of evidence-based teaching practices. Well before the state rolled out its curriculum recommendations, former Mayor Eric Adams introduced a teaching overhaul called NYC Reads, which required elementary schools to use one of three city-approved reading programs.

At the same time, under a math reform called NYC Solves, the city required high schools, and later some middle schools, to adopt a standardized curriculum for algebra.

Some educators and experts contended that it didn’t make sense to introduce a math overhaul in high school, and lacked the vocabulary or tools to follow what was being taught.

New York City’s new schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, seems to agree.

Math reform should start with elementary schools, he “If we don’t do math well,” Samuels added, students won’t “be ready for the jobs that exist, much less the jobs that don’t.”

Samuels also argued for a balancing a “back-to-basics” approach to math that emphasizes memorization and math facts with a focus on creative problem-solving. Conceptual understanding is important, Samuels said, but parents “look back at me and say, ‘My kid is in fourth grade and doesn’t know the times tables.’”

“We think of [times tables] as an old thing, but we absolutely need to incorporate it so that our parents can believe in what we do again,” Samuels said.

The jury remains out on whether New York City’s curriculum mandates have improved performance. The Adams administration they said were evidence of positive results, but education experts say it’s too soon to draw conclusions.

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

Every morning, all of the roughly 100 seniors at Kingsborough Early College Secondary school start their day taking classes together at CUNY Kingsborough Community College.

In the afternoon, they hop on a yellow school bus and head back to their school on the Lafayette educational campus about 15 minutes away.

Kingsborough juniors make the reverse trek. They start their morning at the Lafayette campus then take the bus to the community college for afternoon classes.

By the time the students graduate high school, most have earned associate degrees from CUNY Kingsborough. In fact, the majority — 57% — of CUNY Kingsborough students are not stereotypical college students. They’re high schoolers, according to a from a New York coalition of advocates and education institutions.

CUNY Kingsborough is one of six community colleges across the state where high schoolers make up the majority of students. It could be the harbinger of something bigger. As dual enrollment programs — where high school students take college courses and earn college-level credit — are expanding in New York state and elsewhere.

The state Education Department is making these programs a priority. It recently requiring institutions to not only report their dual enrollment partnership agreements but also to provide data on enrollment and outcomes. The idea is to help officials and educators get a better grasp on the variety of dual enrollment programs and find ways to ensure the programs reach more students who are underrepresented in higher education.

The stakes are high: According to a 2024 , workers will need a bachelor’s degree for 66% of “good jobs” in 2031 — defined as one that pays a minimum of $43,000 a year nationally to workers ages 25-44.

The state’s proposed rules, which it’s expected to adopt early next year, will mark the state’s first consistent policy governing these programs. Additionally, the state to support dual enrollment and other early college programs to focus on enrolling more students from low-income families.

Several studies have celebrated dual enrollment programs for helping put students on a path to college by exposing them to high-level coursework.

At Kingsborough, the program has proven so successful that many of its students not only complete higher education degrees, they eventually return to work at the school. Of the school’s 80 staffers, 16 are graduates, its principal, Tracee Murren, said.

And there’s one other very obvious benefit dual enrollment programs frequently offer: Students can save money by earning college credits, often for free, before they finish high school.

Early college programs help families save on average $13,000 on the cost of a bachelor’s degree, said Alexandra Wilcox, deputy director of the , the group that studied the state’s dual enrollment expansion.

Research has found students in these programs are also more likely , , and earn a within six years.

“It really is a game changer in terms of being able to save time and money to a degree,” Wilcox said.

But a deeper understanding of the types of programs, who they’re serving, and what their outcomes are — the things the state is proposing to capture — will ultimately strengthen dual enrollment programs, said Wilcox.

Though New York pioneered dual enrollment programs, launching them more than 50 years ago, the state’s approach in terms of policy and funding has been “inconsistent and unpredictable,” Wilcox said.

NYC has range of early college programs

Across New York state, dual enrollment jumped 15% year-over-year, the alliance report found. It now has the nation’s third largest number of students in dual enrollment with more than 176,000, behind California and Texas.

In New York City, the majority of dual enrollment students are in , where they take college-level courses at CUNY for free, generally as an add-on to their regular high school courses. But there’s rising interest in the early college approach, which integrates college courses more deeply into the curriculum. About 30,000 students take College Now courses while roughly 3,500 students take CUNY classes through early college courses, a CUNY spokesperson said.

Nearly 45 out of the city’s 400 high schools offer early college programs, according to the city’s MySchools lookup tool.

The early college model traces its roots to , which opened in 1974 to provide students who struggled in traditional schools with an opportunity to take courses at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where the school is still located.

Some early college programs do not screen students based on their academic records, like Pathways in Technology Early College High School, known as P-TECH. That school launched in Brooklyn in 2011 and across the boroughs that offer a six-year program, grades 9-14, each affiliated with different CUNY institutions. Students at these schools can graduate with an associate degree in a STEM field at no cost.

Other programs are highly selective. Bard College, a liberal arts school in Annandale-on-Hudson, has four New York City campuses, where Bard professors teach students, who go through a rigorous admissions process involving a test and interview. The newly opened — which partners with Delaware State University, a historically Black institution — also admits students based on GPAs, a writing exercise, and a video submission. The HBCU Early College students take online classes through Delaware State.

Access to dual enrollment programs shifts

At , which opened in 2006, the school targets students who are underserved in higher education — those “not typically selected for gifted and talented,” Murren said.

The school starts in sixth grade, admitting students through a lottery. Demand for it is high: Roughly 1,000 students apply for 100 seats every year.

Roughly 40 to 50% enter the program reading below grade level, Murren said, and the school takes an intensive approach to ensure they’re ready to read dense college-level material as they reach the upper grades. Middle schoolers also have an advisory class every day to ensure they have the “mental fortitude” to take on college-level work, she said.

The students take their first college class in ninth grade, a Spanish course, stretching it from one semester to the entire year to make it slower and more digestible, Murren said. The school intentionally starts with a foreign language since it’s a course that many four-year colleges require and has no prerequisites.

Professors from CUNY Kingsborough Community College come to the Lafayette campus to teach the freshman and sophomores in the afternoon, and the school has an extended day to accommodate these courses.

Balancing high school and the more advanced college courses simultaneously isn’t easy, Murren acknowledged. But her staff is committed. There’s low teacher turnover, and they get to know most students from the age of 10.

The students, for the most part, take their college classes together once they start attending the CUNY campus, maintaining a sense of community.

Murren said the students also support each other, characterizing their approach in this way: “‘We’ve been going through this together, and I don’t want you to fall off, so I’m going to make sure that you don’t.’”

She added: “We should never doubt what our students are capable of, their abilities, and their tenacity really shines through when given the opportunity.”

Historically, many high schools have used dual enrollment programs as an acceleration strategy instead of also a strategy to promote college access, said John Fink, a researcher at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

But that’s changing. Research into dual enrollment is also shifting away from addressing whether it works and instead trying to understand how to make it work better — and for more students, not just the top students who are “already acing everything,” he said.

The key question, Fink believes, is how to make sure that families know there’s free college available to New York City high schoolers.

“Even though you think that word would get out, it doesn’t,” he said, “[but] when it’s implemented as a purposeful path to debt-free college … that marketing also helps sell the high school.”

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Naomi Veerasammy and her 2-year-old daughter leave their Jamaica, Queens, apartment weekday mornings by 6:30 a.m. and head to the home of whichever friend or relative has agreed to watch the toddler that day.

Veersammy, a paraprofessional at a public elementary school, relies on a rotating cast of relatives and friends to watch her daughter for little to no pay, so she can still make it to work by 8 a.m. on the city bus.

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The single mom nets under $2,000 a month in income and can’t afford full-time day care, which costs between .

“It’s very, very hard on me financially, mentally, physically to find a sitter for my daughter every day,” Veersammy said, adding that her daughter needs stability.

Hoping for more stable child care, Veerasammy applied for worth an average of $300 a week for kids up to age 13 from low-income families across the state.

Veerasammy met , but the city . She’s now on a waitlist that has mushroomed to 10,000 city children. It’s a glaring indication of both the exploding child care affordability crisis for the city’s middle- and low-income families and the insufficiency of the current publicly funded options to help defray those costs, experts said.

The massive waitlist is also an acute crisis in and of itself — one that threatens to and shutter .

Andrea Davilar, a family child care provider in St. Albans, Queens, currently has only four of her 12 full-day seats filled. She suspects there are families on the waitlist who are interested in enrolling their kids, but can’t until they receive vouchers.

“Are they trying to force us out of business?” she said of the city’s waitlist. “They have to remember we are the backbone behind the workforce.”

Losing family child care providers is something the city can ill afford at a time when incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani is hoping to — an expansion that would likely lean heavily on home-based programs.

That’s part of why some observers are encouraging Mamdani to make clearing the voucher waitlist his first step on what could be a long road to building free child care.

Issuing vouchers to those 10,000 kids would bring “virtually free child care immediately” to a wide swath of city families, said Lauren Melodia, an economist at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who studies child care.

“It’s not the big vision … but you want to be able to deliver services to people while you’re building the big vision,” she added.

Mamdani’s transition team didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Vouchers are a key tool for infant, toddler, after-school care

The vouchers can be redeemed at a wide range of child care providers or even used to pay approved relatives or friends. They’re an especially critical resource for families with kids 2 and under who don’t qualify for the city’s free 3-K and prekindergarten programs as well as those who need care outside of school hours.

Separate from the vouchers, the city funds a limited number of free seats for kids 2 and under from low-income families. But families often don’t know about the seats or how to apply, experts have said. Roughly 40% of those seats .

Officials in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said the voucher program’s costs are soaring because of the program’s popularity, an increase in the voucher’s value, and a growing number of families who are supposed to receive subsidized child care as a condition of their federal welfare benefits.

Officials predict the city will need a total of $2.9 billion from the state in the upcoming budget — $1.8 billion more than the city typically receives — just to maintain the program.

Melodia, the economist, said the cost of providing vouchers to all the families on the waitlist for a year would be more modest: around $155 million.

Gordon Tepper, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said “no one has done more to support and expand child care statewide” than the governor, noting that she has doubled funding for the voucher program and wants to reach universal child care.

Demand for vouchers boomed as eligibility widened

The voucher program’s current budget crunch traces back to a .

Prior to the pandemic, the city to families receiving federal cash assistance, whose child care the city is required to subsidize because their benefits come with work requirements.

Those work requirements relaxed during the pandemic, keeping more families at home with less need for child care. The number of vouchers going to those families fell from over 55,000 in 2017 to under 19,000 in 2022.

That drop, combined with a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, allowed Hochul to significantly expand the eligibility criteria for the vouchers, opening them to families who make under 85% of the state median income, or roughly $114,000 a year for a family of four.

At the same time, Hochul nearly doubled the value of the vouchers, from an average of $154 a week in 2019 to $301 a week last year. The change made the vouchers more attractive to families and providers — and expensive for the state.

City families flocked to the vouchers. Enrollment in the low-income voucher program

The changes created a major budget cliff.

After federal pandemic aid dried up, city officials resumed enforcing work requirements, bringing an expected surge of families who receive federal assistance to request vouchers.

To avoid kicking thousands of families out of the program each month, city officials asked the state, which has historically funded most of the voucher system, to commit an additional $900 million to the $1 billion city program.

Hochul eventually agreed to free up an additional $350 million for the program, contingent on the city chipping in the same amount.

That infusion allowed the city to continue offering vouchers to the majority of families who were already enrolled, city officials said. But it wasn’t enough to enroll new families.

Starting last May, the city began placing eligible new applicants for low-income vouchers on a waitlist, which has grown from to its current 10,000.

Parents on voucher waitlist are desperate for relief

For families stuck on the waitlist, shouldering the costs of child care on their own often comes at the expense of other basic needs.

Milana Kochishvili, a mother of two elementary school children in southern Brooklyn, applied for vouchers after her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, leaving the family to rely on her $72,000 annual income as a payroll specialist at a plumbing company. But she has been on the waitlist for months.

The only after-school option that works with her schedule costs about $800 a month. With $4,500 a month in take-home pay — nearly half of which goes to pay rent — it’s an expense she can’t afford.

“I’m in a position now where I can only afford basics,” she said. “God forbid the car breaks or something like that, that’s it.”

Adams recently , with a pledge to add 20,000 seats by 2027. But for some parents who work longer hours, the schedule of the city’s free programs don’t fit their needs.

Kimberly Watson, a single mom of an elementary student in Brooklyn, works as a caseworker in a hospital and needed an after-school program with longer hours. The private program she found costs $450 a month — an untenable expense for Watson, who takes home roughly $2,700 a month in income and spends $1,200 on rent.

She applied for a child care voucher and cleared the eligibility threshold, but was placed on the waitlist. Paying for child care has left her behind on some utility bills — and even on her rent, she said.

Getting a voucher would mean she can “just cut back on one thing that I have to worry about so I can catch up on other things.”

For Veerasammy, the paraprofessional with a 2-year-old, there could be some economic relief on the horizon: that would give paraprofessionals a $10,000 recurring annual bonus.

But she said that money would go toward paying off credit card debt, leaving her still in need of a voucher.

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

That sounds exciting but it spells disaster for the place we most depend on human growth: schools. As counterintuitive as it may sound, this is a moment where we actually need less technology in the classroom to help students learn to read and write.

This threat comes at a time when most American students are already struggling with the basics. Earlier this month, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 12th-grade reading scores have sunk to their lowest level in more than three decades. Barely a third of American high school seniors read at a proficient level. 

Layer on top of this collapse a technology that lets students outsource reading and writing entirely, and you create a perfect storm of ignorance. We risk raising a generation fluent in prompting a chatbot but incapable of critical thought. As , “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.”

This isn’t the first time untested ideas have been foisted on classrooms in the name of progress. In the 1990s, the “whole language” movement promised to revolutionize reading instruction by moving away from phonics and toward guessing words from context. The theory was novel. The results were disastrous. Reading scores fell. An entire generation was left behind. 

Today, AI is already being marketed by some as a new cure for literacy. The group  has launched a program called Rethinking Reading: AI for Literacy Achievement, promising that “AI can help expand access, personalize instruction, and support educators in new ways.” But we already know what works: systematic phonics, structured literacy and direct instruction on vocabulary, reading comprehension and expository writing skills. Once again, we risk unproven ideas being rushed into classrooms, dooming another generation to an even worse fate. 

Writing and reading are not separate tasks from thinking; they are thinking. To struggle with words on a page is to clarify, deepen, and expand your mind. Literacy is the serum that gives us the superpower of deep, symbolic thought. But if students let AI do the writing and reading for them, they skip the most important lesson: critical thinking. 

In this new paradigm, the focus becomes what students produce, when the goal should be giving students the tools to learn how to learn for the rest of their lives. Giving new or struggling readers AI as a tool before they are proficient will permanently relegate them to understanding the world through the prism of a large language model. Their screens may be full of words, but their minds will be empty of thought.

For adults, the calculation is different. If you already know how to read and write, AI may help you synthesize ideas or accelerate output. Teachers can use these tools for planning and scheduling. But for children, the goal is not speed or efficiency. The goal is learning how to learn. That requires time under tension — sitting with ideas, wrestling with words, developing the patience and stamina that deep thinking demands.

I know it may sound backwards, but for this reason classrooms don’t need more AI technology. They need less. They need books, foundational literacy instruction and teachers who challenge students to think for themselves. 

The legislation I’ve drafted will accomplish this by directing the New York State Education Department to prohibit the use of artificial intelligence in K-8 classrooms, except for diagnostic purposes or explicit instruction interventions. This will still allow AI to play a controlled role in diagnostics, helping educators spot weaknesses and target interventions. But the heart of school must remain human: reading, writing and thinking without a machine.

AI may unlock scientific discovery for the world’s greatest minds. But if children never learn to read, write and think, it will stunt the potential of the world itself. The threat is not that machines will out-think us. The threat is that we will stop thinking altogether. That is why policymakers must resist the temptation to see AI as a shortcut for America’s literacy crisis. There are no shortcuts. If we want the next generation to lead in an AI-powered world, the first step is the oldest one: teach every child to read.

New York City schools with fewer students than projected will not have to give back money midyear, Education Department officials announced Monday, as the public school system saw its biggest enrollment drop in four years.

Enrollment in the city’s K-12 and preschool programs fell by about 22,000, or 2.4%, compared to last year, according to the Education Department’s preliminary numbers. A total of 884,400 students were enrolled in the city’s traditional public schools as of Oct. 31, according to the figures.

Nearly two-thirds of the city’s roughly 1,600 schools had fewer students than projected, officials said. In past years, those schools would have had to pay back a total of more than $250 million to the city. But those funds will now stay with schools.

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“As we navigate enrollment fluctuations and uncertainty around federal funding, we’re committed to providing stability and ensuring every school has the resources it needs,” schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement.

The remaining third of schools whose enrollment was higher than projected will receive extra money to account for the additional students, officials said, but didn’t say how much that will cost.

In some ways, Mayor Eric Adams’ parting gift to schools could become a headache for the next mayor, who will have to confront the costly but popular initiative.

City officials did not immediately offer an explanation for the enrollment drop, but it’s likely that changing immigration patterns played a role. Over the three school years prior to this one, city schools absorbed an influx of roughly 50,000 migrant students.

That surge helped offset declining enrollment, keeping the city’s student numbers relatively flat between 2022 and 2024. But immigration into the and has ground to a halt under President Donald Trump’s enforcement efforts. Adams has closed many of the emergency shelters the city opened to house migrants.

Several educators at schools with large immigrant populations have noticed sharp enrollment declines this year, driven by existing students leaving and fewer new ones showing up.

“We definitely have seen a decline this year in our schools that serve newcomers,” said John Sullivan, the superintendent overseeing transfer schools geared toward older high school students, at a hearing last week with the City Council.

Manhattan’s Liberty High School Academy for Newcomers is down about 200 students this year compared to its average enrollment in recent years, Sullivan said. More students learning English are dropping out of school early to take jobs, he said.

ELLIS Prep, another high school in the Bronx geared toward older newcomers, has , Principal Norma Vega said. The school is down about 30 students from last year and roughly 20 students under its projection for this year. That meant Vega would have had to pay back roughly $333,000 if the city had followed through with the midyear clawback.

Keeping that money will allow her to continue funding field trips, computers for students, and extra tutoring, she said.

Vega already missed the deadline for this school year to cut teachers, which means she would have started next school year with a deficit and likely would have lost her English as a New Language coordinator, one of her newest hires.

“It’s a blessing” to not have to pay back the funds midyear, Vega said.

Before the pandemic, schools typically had to give money back to the city during the middle of the school year if they enrolled fewer students than projected. (Those that enrolled more students would get extra funds midyear.)

The policy to keep school budgets afloat despite enrollment, known as being “held harmless,” was initially enacted during the pandemic when many schools saw their rosters dwindle but had mounting needs to support students academically and emotionally.

Enrollment citywide has been on the decline for a decade, but went into freefall during the pandemic, . This year’s enrollment decline is the largest since the 2021-22 school year, when enrollment fell by around 36,000 students, or 3.8%, from the previous year.

The city halted the hold harmless only to

Last school year, the decision not to claw back school budgets midyear meant schools hung onto $157 million they would have otherwise had to give back. City officials to ensure that no schools started out this school year with less funding than they had at the start of last school year.

This year’s total is far larger, given the steeper enrollment decline.

Emily Paige, the principal of Urban Assembly Unison, a small Brooklyn middle school, said she was on the hook for roughly $100,000 because of enrollment losses — enough to cover an entire teacher salary.

While the hold harmless policy is widely popular among school staff and families, it can be an unsustainable practice, some observers say, artificially inflating schools’ budgets and creating even more difficult financial decisions down the road as the city confronts increasingly expensive small schools.

The union representing principals, the Council for School Administrators, or CSA, claimed the move as a victory for its members, saying in an email to principals on Sunday its “top priority” this year has been ensuring the city kept its promise to hold schools harmless.

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Therefore, the response begins at City Hall.   

Education leaders and equity advocates reject the idea that standing up for students and protecting funding are mutually exclusive. Both can and must be pursued. Every child in New York City deserves to feel safe, seen and supported in school. The new administration should be guided by that commitment. 

EdTrust-New York has expressed to work closely with the Mamdani administration to fulfill the long-standing promise of free, universal child care for children age two and under, as well as full access to Pre-K and 3-K. Families across the city still pay up to $26,000 annually for child care, and too many remain on waitlists.

Meeting this demand requires sustainable funding, additional child care sites, a well-paid workforce and full-day programs in neighborhoods where families live. Such investments would give all children a strong start. 

New York City must also confront the alarming reality that nearly half of fourth graders score below basic proficiency in reading, with even worse outcomes for Black and Latinx students. While initiatives like NYC Reads and NYC Solves mark progress, they need ongoing support and expansion.

EdTrust-New York encourages the Mamdani administration to continue expanding multilingual materials, provide interventions for English learners and students with disabilities, and ensure that all educators receive training in the science of reading. At the same time, the city should work toward developing a comprehensive adolescent literacy plan to support middle and high school students.

Mamdani’s leadership should reflect a deep commitment to a curriculum that honors the identities and experiences of all students. Fully implementing culturally responsive education means expanding Black, Native American, AAPI and Latin studies, as well as giving educators the training and tools needed to teach the curricula. The city’s schools also need greater investment in collective care teams, educators, counselors, nurses and social workers who can provide the academic and emotional support students need.

Segregation continues to divide New York City students by race and class. The incoming administration has an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward integration by encouraging all districts to create integration plans, using admissions models such as lottery. The city also needs to recruit and retain more educators of color and publicly report school integration data to track progress. 

The Mamdani administration should also protect and support immigrant students and multilingual learners, who face growing threats from federal policies and systemic barriers. Schools can strengthen scaffolds in literacy and math, expand bilingual curricula  and provide mental health services for students facing trauma.

In addition, older immigrant students should have access to the full high school experience, not just for language acquisition or diploma-completion programs. Higher education partners can also play a vital role also by expanding financial aid and creating safe, supportive pathways for undocumented students to attend and graduate from college. 

Improving school climate is another key priority, particularly the need to shift from exclusion and punishment to belonging and support. With more than a third of students chronically absent — especially Black, Latino, and those from low-income backgrounds — and many affected by punitive discipline, the city can invest in restorative justice and mental health programs.

That should include funding restorative initiatives in all schools, training educators in healing-centered approaches and increasing weighted funding for the most-affected student groups. 

Under mayoral control, New York City has achieved important system-wide progress, such as the expansion of universal pre-K and the launch of NYC Reads. Mamdani should maintain this structure but ensure stronger accountability and input from parents and students. He can build on this success by ensuring that parents, students and caregivers, who should be granted voting power on Community Education Councils, have meaningful influence over district policy decisions. 

Finally, the Mamdani administration should expand access to college and career pathways. Too few students can enroll in college in high school programs that boost college success. Let’s expand these programs citywide, closing access gaps and strengthening support in college. That should include proven initiatives like CUNY’s ASAP and ACE, which help students persist and graduate despite financial emergencies. 

As Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to lead the nation’s largest school system, he inherits both profound challenges and enormous opportunities. This moment offers a shared chance to build a public education system that not only aspires to equity but truly delivers on that promise.