Two decades after Hurricane Katrina, the legacy of New Orleans’ radical education experiment is still contested. Was it a success? The final episode of Where the Schools Went grapples with this question head on.

Doug Harris, chair of Tulane University’s Department of Economics and founding director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, has led the team studying the city’s schools for years. Their findings show both real progress and persistent gaps: higher graduation rates, more students going to college, stronger test scores, but uneven results and questions about whether the momentum can last. 

We talk with Doug about how to make sense of this data and what lessons other cities might take from it:

But of course, data can only go so far. In the second half of this episode, we return to voices you’ve heard from throughout Where the Schools Went to test those findings. 

Chris Stewart reflects on how New Orleans became the center of a national fight over education policy, with critics and champions battling on social media and in statehouses over whether the “system of schools” model would spread. 

Former principal and school founder Alexina Medley, who led a school both before and after Katrina, describes her pride in how far the city has come, but also cautions that the impact of COVID means it now faces a new crossroads. 

Dana Peterson, CEO of New Schools for New Orleans, calls accountability the city’s greatest legacy while cautioning that progress should not be mistaken for success. 

And John White, the former state superintendent, argues that the deepest lesson is about the importance of coherence and its ability to empower educators, hold them to clear standards, and resource schools fairly.

Finally, I share some of my own reflections. As a veteran of the education wars who left school leadership burned out, I found that reporting for this series helped me to reconnect with the purpose of schools and the people who run them. This story, and the city of New Orleans more broadly, offers a lesson not only in how to build better schools, but also in how to practice a better kind of politics.

Listen to the final episode above. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans dismantled its public school system in a way no other American city had tried. Neighborhood zones disappeared. The elected school board was stripped of most authority. What emerged was a patchwork of independent charters with near-total autonomy. In the early years, there was energy and innovation, but also chaos. Families had to navigate dozens of separate enrollment processes. Students with disabilities could be turned away or underserved. Discipline practices meant that the city’s schools were ranked among the highest in the nation in suspensions and expulsion rates.

Over time, a new approach began to take shape. Leaders in the state-run Recovery School District started to ask which parts of a school system truly needed central oversight. Guided by principles of equity, accountability, and parent choice, they began to stitch together a more coherent structure. OneApp, a single citywide enrollment process, replaced the maze of school-by-school applications. A centralized expulsion system curbed abusive discipline practices.

Perhaps the most significant change came in special education. After a lawsuit from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the city overhauled how it identified and served students with disabilities. Funding was restructured so schools taking on the highest-need students received more resources. That shift made programs like Opportunities Academy possible, a groundbreaking school for young adults with intellectual disabilities that combines life skills classes with student-run businesses.

By the late 2010s, New Orleans had built a system that left most day-to-day decisions to schools but took a firm hand where fairness and access were at stake. Enrollment became more transparent. Suspension and expulsion rates dropped. Special education services improved dramatically.

In this episode of Where the Schools Went, we hear from the architects of these changes and the educators who made them work. Their story is not one of rebuilding the old district, but rather deciding which levers to pull, which to leave alone, and how to make the few things a system must do work uncommonly well.

Listen to episode four above, and watch for the final chapter debuting Sep. 9. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

Before Hurricane Katrina, teaching in New Orleans was more than a job. It was a pathway to the middle class; a profession led by veteran Black educators with deep roots in the city and protected by one of the South’s most powerful teachers’ unions. The United Teachers of New Orleans had fought for higher pay, stronger benefits, and job security. But those protections also made it hard to remove ineffective teachers and left principals with little control over who worked in their buildings.

After the storm, the entire teaching force was dismissed. More than 7,000 educators lost their jobs in a single stroke, many learning the news from the evening broadcast. 

The layoffs wiped out decades of experience and dealt a heavy blow to the city’s Black middle class. Some of those educators came back, determined to reopen their schools under extraordinary conditions. At Warren Easton Charter High School, staff taught on the second and third floors while the first floor remained under water. Still, the majority of dismissed educators never taught in the city again.

Into the gap came a wave of new recruits, many in their twenties, many white, and often from outside Louisiana. Programs like Teach For America promised energy and results. Principals could now hire quickly, replace teachers just as fast, and push for immediate improvement. 

Some schools thrived under the new flexibility. Others struggled with constant turnover and cultural gaps between teachers and the communities they served.

Today, the city’s teaching force is more diverse and more local than it was in the years after the storm. Yet a new challenge looms: how to attract and keep enough teachers willing to do the hard, often unglamorous work of helping students succeed. In the third episode of Where the Schools Went, you will hear from veteran educators, school leaders, and newcomers about how the city rebuilt its classrooms, what was gained, what was lost, and why the question of who teaches still shapes the future of its schools.

Listen to episode three above, and watch for the next chapter debuting Sep. 2. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans faced two urgent questions: Which schools would be rebuilt, and who would run them? In the Ninth Ward, few fights were as big as the one over George Washington Carver High School, a community anchor with deep history and proud traditions.

When the state chose Collegiate Academies, a high-performing charter network led mostly by people from outside of the city, the pushback was swift. Alumni rallied. Students staged a walkout during Collegiate Carver’s first year. The arguments weren’t primarily about academics, but about who gets to shape the future of a place like Carver, and whether a model built for results could ever feel like home to the people who had kept the school’s spirit alive. 

For many, the fight over Carver came to represent a larger fight over what kind of New Orleans would rise after the flood.

In time, the picture shifted. 

In this episode, you’ll hear from alumni, educators, and advocates about what can happen when people who once saw each other as opponents realize they’re fighting for the same thing. As Carver began pairing academic gains with a return to the traditions that had long defined the Green and Orange, something beautiful began to grow. “Episode Two: The Battle for Carver” traces that bumpy path and draws lessons that extend far beyond one school.

Listen to episode two above, and watch for the next chapter debuting on Aug. 26. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans in August 2005, it destroyed homes and flooded neighborhoods. Eighty percent of the city was submerged, 1,800 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. It also upended a public school system already collapsing under the weight of decades of failure. 

In the years that followed, the system was not just rebuilt; it was radically reimagined.

The debut installment of revisits the years leading up to the storm and the questions New Orleans was already grappling with. Crumbling buildings, failing academics, and deep corruption had eroded trust with the public — so much so that the FBI had even set up shop inside the school district’s central office. The below episode explores the question: What happens when a public institution fails the people it was built to serve? 

And what should come next?

We hear the story from the people who lived it, like former school district employee Ken Ducote, who used code names and classic cars to pass documents to the FBI. We learn about the students who had to leave school to use the bathroom at Taco Bell, because the ones in their building were constantly broken. And we meet the valedictorian who was barred from graduating after failing the math exit exam — for the fifth time.

In episode one, we talk about what loss really meant after the storm and the rituals and routines that helped bind communities together. We hear from a child who couldn’t find his mother for more than a month, a teacher who sheltered with her family in a room in a church basement and the students who, even in new classrooms in new cities, hid under desks every time it rained.

But this isn’t just a story about what was lost or broken. It’s about what people built in the aftermath. Just days after the storm, a team of New Orleans educators reunited with their students in Houston, many of them living in the Astrodome, and opened a school for them. This new campus quickly grew into a community for kids who had lost nearly everything in their lives.

The episode doesn’t settle the debate about what came next. But it begins to unpack the competing beliefs surrounding New Orleans’ post-Katrina school reforms. Some hail the transformation as miraculous, a turnaround that turned one of the nation’s worst-performing districts into a national model. Others view it as a betrayal: a dismantling of community control, the displacement of Black educators, and the erasure of local identity. This episode is the first of five chapters that will help you decide which, if any, of those narratives is correct.

Listen to episode one above, and watch for episode two debuting on Aug. 19. 

Where the Schools Went is a five-part podcast series from The Branch, produced in partnership with ����Ӱ�� and MeidasTouch. Listen at or .

Mary Koslap-Petraco, a pediatric nurse practitioner who exclusively treats underserved children, said when she heard the news Thursday morning she was immediately filled with “absolute dread.”

“I have been following him for years,” she told ����Ӱ��. “I’ve read what he has written. I’ve heard what he has said. I know he has made a fortune with his anti-vax stance.”

She is primarily concerned that his rhetoric might “scare the daylights out of people so that they don’t want to vaccinate their children.” She also fears he could move to defund a program under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that provides vaccines to kids who lack health insurance or otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them. While the program is federally mandated by Congress, moves to drain its funding could essentially render it useless.

Koslap-Petraco’s practice in Massapequa Park, New York relies heavily on the program to vaccinate pediatric patients, she said. If it were to disappear, she asked, “How am I supposed to take care of poor children? Are they supposed to just die or get sick because their parents don’t have the funds to get the vaccines for them?” 

And, if the government-run program were to stop paying for vaccines, she said she’s terrified private insurance companies might follow suit. 

Vaccines for Children is “the backbone of pediatric vaccine infrastructure in the country,” said Richard Hughes IV, former vice president of public policy at Moderna and a George Washington University law professor who teaches a course on vaccine law.

Kennedy will also have immense power over Medicaid, which covers low-income populations and provides billions of dollars to schools annually for physical, mental and behavioral health services for eligible students.

If Kennedy moves to weaken programs at HHS, which experts expect him to do, through across-the-board cuts in public health funding that trickle down to immunization programs or more targeted attacks, low-income and minority school-aged kids will be disproportionately impacted, Hughes said. 

“I just absolutely, fundamentally, confidently believe that we will see deaths,” he added.

Anticipating chaos and instability

Following a contentious seven hours of grilling across two confirmation hearings, Democratic senators Kennedy’s confirmation on the floor late into the night Wednesday. The following morning, all 45 Democrats and both Independents voted in opposition and all but one Republican — childhood polio survivor Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — lined up behind President Donald Trump’s pick.

James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said that while it was good to see senators across the political spectrum asking tough questions and Kennedy offering up some concessions on vaccine-related policies and initiatives, he’s skeptical these will stick.

“Whatever you’ve seen him do for the last 25 to 30 years is a much, much greater predictor than what you saw him do during two or three days of Senate confirmation proceedings,” Hodge said. “Ergo, be concerned significantly about the future of vaccines, vaccine exemptions, [and] how we’re going to fund these things.”

Hodge also said he doesn’t trust how Kennedy will respond to the consequences of a dropoff in childhood vaccines, pointing to the current in West Texas schools.

“The simple reality is he may plant misinformation or mis-messaging,” he said.

During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy tried to distance himself from his past anti-vaccination sentiments stating, “News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety … I believe that vaccines played a critical role in health care. All of my kids are vaccinated.”

He was confirmed as Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education, was sitting down for her first day of hearings. At one point that morning, McMahon signaled to possibly shifting enforcement to HHS of the — a federal law dating back to 1975 that mandates a free, appropriate public education for the with disabilities — if Trump were to succeed in shutting down the education department.

This would effectively put IDEA’s under Kennedy’s purview, further linking the education and public health care systems.

In a post on the social media site BlueSky, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, she is “concerned that anyone is willing to move IDEA services for kids with disabilities into HHS, under a secretary who questions science.”

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union and a parent of a child with ADHD and autism, told ����Ӱ�� the idea was “absolutely absurd” and would cause chaos and instability. 

Kennedy’s history of falsely asserting a link between childhood vaccines and autism — a disability included under IDEA coverage — is particularly concerning to experts in this light.

“You obviously have a contingent of kids who are beneficiaries of IDEA that are navigating autism spectrum disorder,” said Hughes, “Could [we] potentially see some sort of policy activity and rhetoric around that? Potentially.”

Vaccines — and therefore HHS — are inextricably linked to schools. Currently, all 50 states have vaccine requirements for children entering child care and schools. But Kennedy, who now has control of an agency with a $1.7 trillion budget and 90,000 employees spread across 13 agencies, could pull multiple levers to roll back requirements, enforcements and funding, according to ����Ӱ��’s previous reporting. And Trump has signaled an interest in that mandate vaccines.

“There’s a certain percentage of the population that is focused on removing school entry requirements,” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine SAFE Communities Coalition. “They are loud, and they are organized and they are well funded by groups just like RFK Jr.’s .”

Kennedy will also have the ability to influence the makeup of the committees that approve vaccines and add them to the federal vaccine schedule, which state legislators rely on to determine their school policies. Hodge said one of these committees is already being “re-organized and re-thought as we speak.”

“With him now in place, just expect that committee to start really changing its members, its tone, the demeanor, the forcefulness of which it’s suggesting vaccines,” he added.

Hughes, the law professor, said he is preparing for mass staffing changes throughout the agency, mirroring what’s already happened across in Trump’s first weeks in office. He predicts this will include Kennedy possibly asking for the resignations “of all scientific leaders with HHS.” 

Kennedy appeared to confirm that he was eyeing staffing cuts Thursday night during on Fox News’s “The Ingraham Angle.”

“I have a list in my head … if you’ve been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about,” Kennedy said.

The world is a messy place. Most of us figure this out by the time we hit adulthood: However compelling our convictions, however good our intentions, humans are constantly tripping into one another. What looks like virtuous, upstanding behavior through our eyes — always looks different to others. Worse yet, sometimes the Good Thing to Do in a moment can be all but impossible to discern. Do you tell the truth now, even if that causes your friend pain? Do you tell them later, even if your delay hurts many more people? Do you turn to violence to stop the violence of others — and if so, how much? 

Pretty much every moral tradition is clear that harm to children is among the gravest misdeeds. This isn’t complicated. Children merit unique protective cushions because of their enormous potential. How they develop now will shape their — and our — future. Further, children cannot deserve harm. They’re morally blameless — . As messy as the world is, it’s obvious that adults shouldn’t hurt children. Further, systems that are somehow violating this — bombing them, shooting them, starving them, injuring them — are also fundamentally wrong. There are no legitimate excuses. End of discussion. 

Hold that close to your heart as you reflect on the Trump administration’s recent decision to open K–12 campuses to armed enforcement actions. For 14 years, the U.S. federal government had recommended that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents should steer clear of “” like schools, but also churches, hospitals and other community centers. Immediately after taking power, , opening schools across the country to immigration raids. 

To understand the behind this change, it’s worth understanding why officials ever avoided conducting enforcement at these locations. It’s not that federal leaders were reluctant to carry out U.S. laws, rather, it’s that they wanted to separate the potentially dangerous, complex work of immigration enforcement activity from disrupting children’s daily lives. 

As , “We can accomplish our law enforcement mission without denying individuals access to needed medical care, children access to their schools, the displaced access to food and shelter, people of faith access to their places of worship, and more. Adherence to this principle is a bedrock of our stature as public servants.”

Again: Protecting kids is a paramount moral concern. And in 2025, it’s clear that U.S. adults have collectively failed in that task. Today’s K–12 students have weathered the academic and social strains of a deadly global pandemic. They attend school in an era when campus shootings are regularly in the news and natural disasters amplified by climate change have decimated their communities and shuttered their classrooms in places like , and . They’ve watched violent assaults on representative government being not just normalized as part of U.S. politics — but excused and even celebrated by the leaders of one of our major political parties. Is it any wonder that children’s mental health ?

The kids are not all right. This is a terrible moment to introduce more uncertainty and instability into their lives. At least one major district is pushing back. Denver Public Schools this week to keep ICE agents out of schools, with the school board president noting, “Scared children can’t learn.”

Obviously, the Trump administration’s new ICE-in-Your- Classrooms policy could be stressful for children of immigrants, who are uniquely sensitive to the possible consequences of these raids. Research has that increased immigration enforcement activity around children of immigrants . In the weeks since Trump’s order, , regardless of the specific state of their family’s documentation, . 

And yet, this new policy affects all children. , “This administration is breaking with the idea that schools should be an accepting and reassuring space for young people.” Children don’t have to have an immigrant parent to struggle with this moment. It’s hard to imagine how armed law enforcement activity on campus could help them feel safer or help them learn more, especially as the most recent round of math and reading scores have confirmed that the country’s students are falling further off pace, academically speaking. 

Of course, that’s perhaps the point. The new administration’s K–12 education plans are thin (at best) when it comes to proposals for improving how schools support children’s academic achievement. , Trump and his deputies are and . 

This won’t make communities safer or improve kids’ academic performance. Research , shows that are major to their . It also has found that culturally and linguistically diverse kids are some of U.S. schools’ best students, whose presence appears to academic achievement . 

If this debate still seems complicated: remember that the world’s messy. U.S. immigration laws, , should be enforced. Meanwhile, our kids — currently overcoming generationally awful obstacles — deserve to feel safe and secure enough to focus on learning. 

But anyone who reflects on those two public priorities and concludes that children’s well-being is of secondary importance is betraying the depravity of their moral compass. They are showing that they do not, however much they protest, understand what it means to put students first. 

Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a Founding Partner at the Children’s Equity Project, and a father to three public school students. These views are his alone and do not reflect his employers or any organizations with which he may be affiliated. 

A quarter of the 13-18 year olds in the study used devices for two hours each school day, which lasts around seven hours. The averages outnumber minutes allotted for lunch and period breaks combined, showing youth are distracted by phones throughout huge chunks of class time. 

, is the first to accurately paint a picture of adolescent phone behavior by using a third party app to monitor usage over four months in 2023. Previous studies have relied on parent surveys or self-reported estimates. 

“That’s pretty alarming … It’s too much, not only because of the missed learning opportunity in the classroom,” said researcher Lauren Hale, sleep expert and professor at Stony Brook’s Renaissance School of Medicine. 

“They’re missing out on real life social interaction with peers, which is just as valuable for growth during a critical period of one’s life,” she told ����Ӱ��. 

Hale and the other researchers’ early findings come from 117 teens for which they had school data, just one slice of a pool from over 300 participants, which will be analyzed and used to consider how phone usage impacts sleep, obesity, depression and other outcomes. 

Teens most often used messaging, Instagram and video streaming platforms. While most spent about 26 minutes on Instagram, in one extreme case, a student was on the app for 269 minutes — nearly 5 hours — during the school day.

Data reveal particular groups of students are using their phones more than their peers: Girls and older kids, aged 16 to 18, spent a half hour above the average 1.5 hours; and Latino and multiracial students spent on average 15 minutes above average. 

Additionally, though researchers cannot hypothesize as to why based on the descriptive data, kids who have one or more parents with a college degree used smartphones less during the school day. 

The findings are particularly concerning given young people missed key social years with peers during the pandemic, the impact of which is felt in ways big and small, like being hesitant to work with peers in groups.

Teachers in contact with Hale since research went public in early February say of the 1.5 hour average, “that’s too low an estimate. They think we underestimated.”

is among several districts with plans to institute a cellphone ban, though such bans are inconsistently implemented and new research from the UK suggests bans alone .

“These results are consistent, supportive evidence of anecdotal stories from across the country about kids missing out on learning and social opportunities. [They] can help justify efforts to provide a coherent smartphone policy for schools,” said Hale, adding that such policy should not be left up to individual teachers to enforce.

It was October 2022 when Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho made a false assurance about a massive ransomware attack on the country’s second-largest school district — and the leak of thousands of highly sensitive student mental health records — that set me off.

Published reports that the breach exposed students’ psychological evaluations, Carvalho said, were “absolutely incorrect.” The dark web proved otherwise: On a shady corner of the internet, I revealed, hackers used the detailed, very confidential records about Los Angeles children as leverage in a sick ploy for money. After my story ran, L.A. schools acknowledged publicly that some 2,000 student psych evals were indeed exposed by the Vice Society ransomware gang. 

And so began my descent down the rabbit hole, marking the early days of an in-depth investigation I published Tuesday and supported by a grant from the .

What I found is that as educators take steps to protect themselves, their school districts and their reputations after cyberattacks, they employ a pervasive pattern of obfuscation that leaves students, parents and teachers — the real victims of the hacks and subsequent data breaches — in the dark. 

I spent a year (OK, more than a year) learning everything I could about more than 300 K-12 school cyberattacks since the pandemic pushed students into online learning and educators became lucrative targets for hackers. I reconfigured a crappy old laptop to track ransomware gangs on the dark web and to analyze the reams of sensitive files published to their sketchy leak sites. I obtained thousands of public records from more than two dozen school districts. I used the government procurement database GovSpend to uncover school spending after attacks, including ransom payments made to cyberthieves in Bitcoin. I scoured news reports, state data breach disclosures and district websites for public confirmations and, oftentimes, denials — sometimes even after their students’ and employees’ personal information had already been published. 

My reporting documented that educators routinely offered incomplete, misleading or downright inaccurate information about cyberattacks — and the risks that subsequent data breaches pose to students, parents and teachers for identity theft, fraud and other forms of online exploitation. 

The hollowness in schools’ messaging and the mechanisms that leave school communities clueless are no coincidence. Staring down a cyberattack and the prospect of being sued over the leak of sensitive information, school leaders turn to insurance companies, consultants and privacy lawyers to steer “privileged investigations,” which keep key details hidden from the public. Often contacted before the police, the paid consultants who arrive in the wake of a cyberattack are portrayed to the public as an encouraging sign, trained to handle the bad actors and restore learning.

But what isn’t as apparent to students, parents and district employees is that these individuals are not there to protect them — but to protect schools from them. 

School cybersecurity expert Doug Levin had this to say about our investigation: “For institutions whose mission is to lift up and protect children and youth, it is unconscionable that they are incentivized to cover up the criminal acts perpetrated against them by malicious foreign actors.”

K-12 cyberattacks in focus: Now you can fall down the school cyberattack rabbit hole, too! Use our new search feature to read about how incidents unfolded in your own community, complete with investigative reveals you won’t want to miss. 

Emotional support

This story was brought to you with invaluable editing and guidance from ����Ӱ��’s Kathy Moore.

And Matilda.

All Alaska students could be provided free breakfast and lunch at school, under a new bill in the Alaska Legislature.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Dibert of Fairbanks prefiled the legislation, , ahead of the legislative session that began on Tuesday. The bill would direct the state to provide sufficient funding to all districts to have breakfast and lunch for any student who requests it, free of cost.

“I’ve seen the effects of feeding our kids, and especially during COVID, when all kids got lunches and breakfast at no cost,” said Dibert, who has been a teacher. “So it was just very enlightening, and I would love to see that again for our families and for our students and for our school staff.”

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal relief funding allowed schools to provide free meals due to federal waivers. But those funds sunsetted in 2022, resulting in some

, over half of Alaska’s students — 51% — were eligible for free or reduced price meals. An estimated 46%, or roughly 48,000 students, were enrolled to receive free school meals.

As an elementary school teacher in Fairbanks for 22 years, Dibert said she herself sometimes paid for her students to eat, rather than see them go hungry.

“Over the years, if a student didn’t have enough money, or their bill wasn’t paid, oftentimes I would even pay with my account,” she said. “I don’t know entirely how big those bills got, because I was on the classroom side of it. But I did really not like seeing kids come into the classroom sad that they couldn’t get breakfast or lunch.”

Dibert, who is Koyukon Athabascan, also cited the current Yukon River salmon crash leaving communities and families who subsisted and shared fish going without.

“My grandparents lived out on the Yukon River, and as a child, they would always send us salmon from the Yukon River. And we always would have food on our table, lots of salmon,” she said. “So with no salmon on the Yukon, I know that’s a hardship to feed families, and it’s costly to families. So in that aspect, this bill could be very beneficial to ease the pain there, to help feed kids.”

Education and health researchers point to universal free meals having for students, including improved academic performance, attendance and student health outcomes.

Dibert said the bill is in the beginning stages of the legislative process, so details will be worked out, but she hopes the program would also promote local foods on school menus, like salmon or moose. “It would be working district by district, for sure,” she said. “I don’t want it to be canned, you know, protein, like, one grain, one fruit.”

The allocations to school districts would also vary by region and food prices, she said, accommodating notoriously higher grocery prices in Alaska’s rural areas.

She said funding the proposal could include some federal or municipal contributions as well.

“It’s not that much to have the opportunity to feed our kids,” she said.

Last year, the Legislature axed funding for making reduced-priced lunches free for low-income students, The estimated $480,000 in funding was to be taken from the Department of Corrections, but lawmakers voted against it.

Once the bill has been formally introduced during a House floor session, it will next be assigned to relevant committees for discussion and debate in the coming weeks.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

This week, President Donald Trump that had been in place since 2011 that discouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from making arrests in “protected areas” like schools, medical centers and places of worship.

Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters said in a TV interview posted Friday that he would help the Trump administration in “any way they see fit” to carry out immigration enforcement, including ICE raids in schools.

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“For years the liberal media has been vilifying Republicans for separating illegal immigrant children from their parents,” Walters said in a news release Friday afternoon. “Now they want us to explain why we’d let ICE agents into schools. The answer is simple: we want to ensure that deported parents are reconnected with their children and keep families together.”

Chicago Public Schools said ICE agents attempted to enter an elementary school on Friday, but the school denied them entry. However, the it was one of its agents in the area investigating a threat, not ICE conducting immigration enforcement.

Walters has proposed a rule at the state Education Department, which he leads, that would or legal immigration status during enrollment.

His proposal would not prohibit any students from attending public schools, but districts would have to report to the Education Department the number of undocumented children they enroll.

Walters said Friday he intends to share this information with the federal government to assist with immigration enforcement.

“The first step is getting them the information,” Walters said in an interview with Tulsa TV station KTUL. “That’s part of what they flagged is, you know, schools haven’t been working with law enforcement on this. Well, in Oklahoma, we’re going to work with law enforcement. We are going to work with the Trump administration.”

The Oklahoma State Board of Education, which Walters also heads, is expected to vote Tuesday on the proposed immigration rule. If it passes, the state Legislature would have the choice of voting on it or allowing the governor to decide whether to approve it. The rule would carry the force of law if OK’d by the Legislature or governor.

Gov. Kevin Stitt’s office remains focused on deporting undocumented immigrants who committed crimes unrelated to their immigration status, spokesperson Meyer Siegfried said.

“Governor Stitt supports the strong enforcement of immigration laws and believes we have a responsibility to know who is in our state and how taxpayer dollars are being spent,” Siegfried said.

The office of the Senate president pro tem did not return a request for comment Friday. House Speaker Kyle Hilbert’s office declined to comment on a rule that hasn’t yet passed a board vote to be submitted to the Legislature, nor did he remark on potential ICE involvement in schools.

Walters initially suggested the rule last month as a way to gauge current and future needs for English learner programs and other school resources to accommodate immigrant children.

Advocates of Oklahoma immigrant communities warned citizenship checks in schools could dissuade undocumented families from enrolling their children in public education.

Schools should be a safe haven from immigration enforcement, said Juan Lecona, a member of the Oklahoma City Public Schools Board of Education. 

“This is not about red or blue,” Lecona said Friday. “It’s about the future of our students. Let them learn. Let them become whoever they want to be in the future. By doing this, you are breaking up families, and on top of that, how are the schools going to benefit from it?”

Lecona is the first immigrant to serve on the Oklahoma City school board. His parents brought him to the U.S. from Mexico when he was a child in 1990 with a legal visa and permit, he said. Once that paperwork expired, he became undocumented.

Lecona is now a U.S. citizen with children attending the Oklahoma City district. As a school board member, he represents a majority Latino area in the city’s south side.

He said immigrants living in his community are afraid and “don’t know what to do.”

“I’m concerned for my community, our working people, because that’s what we want. We just want to work and achieve our American dream,” Lecona said. “We’re not here to cause trouble.”

Oklahoma City Superintendent Jamie Polk has said the district has no plans to collect students’ immigration status. The district administration did not return a request for comment on Walters’ statements Friday.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

Some Iowa representatives want to ban margarine and certain food dyes from schools with a bill modeled closely after a law passed last year in California.

was discussed in an education subcommittee Wednesday. Representatives decided to amend the bill, which as introduced included margarine, Red Dye 40 and Yellow Dye 7, to be “more closely conforming” to the .

Rep. Jeff Shipley, R-Fairfield, who chaired the subcommittee, to ban margarine and hydrogenated vegetable oils from schools. The 2023 proposal passed its subcommittee, but did not advance.

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Rep. Heather Matson, D-Ankeny, opposed the margarine element of the bill, and argued research supports margarine is “just as healthy as butter.”

“If you’re arguing that corn oil and soybean oil is fundamentally unhealthy for our kids, that’s also an important part of the conversation to have, because that is kind of what we’re saying in here,” Matson said.

Matson said after further research into California’s law and the years of research from the state into associated health effects, she is “open to a conversation” about restricting the color additives.

Matson also questioned why the Iowa bill specified just Red Dye 40 and Yellow Dye 7, the latter of which, according to comment submitted by the International Association of Color Manufacturers, is not used in food or beverages.

The California law outlaws the dyes Blue 1, Blue 2, Green 3, Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. The law also regulated the percentage of fats, sugars and saturated fats that could comprise a school meal, though these elements were not part of the Iowa representatives’ discussion.

Matson pointed out the California law passed years after the state funded an in which the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment found synthetic food dyes can be linked to hyperactivity and neurobehavioral problems in children.

Matson said she was unwilling to sign off on the bill as is, but would be “willing to have a conversation on a bill that would be more thoughtfully put together.”

Rep. Brooke Boden, R-Indianola, said she was “extremely glad” the issue of food dye additives was before her and that she’d be the first to vote in favor of removing the synthetic dyes.

“I have a child who sees a neurologist, who asked us to remove food dye, and it significantly changed my child’s life,” Boden said.

Boden noted there has been movement on this effort at a federal level as well with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recent ban of .

Representatives for Rural School Advocates of Iowa, Urban Education Network of Iowa, and Iowa State Education Association, who registered as undecided on the bill, said they felt positively about the direction of the bill, but wanted to know more information about how it would be implemented in Iowa schools and if there would be additional costs.

Shipley moved to amend the bill to more closely resemble the California law, and to keep margarine in the bill “for now,” noting it might be reasonable to split the issues into separate bills later.

“I think these are conversations that people of Iowa are wanting to have, and so I think it is incumbent on us to reflect that and make sure we are having as wide ranging a dialog as possible,” Shipley said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com.

It’s official: After months of voicing concerns about the effects of cellphones on student mental health and learning, Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed a $13.5 million plan to help districts implement a ban.

Hochul said her plan would help create a “distraction-free” learning environment during the school day. The money aims to help cover associated costs that districts might incur, such as paying for digital pouches that lock devices or additional staff to collect phones each day. Covering the potential costs was one of the issues that forced New York City to put the brakes on its own ban, and it remains to be seen how far the governor’s proposed allocation will go.

On Tuesday, Hochul included the proposal in her $252 billion state 2026 budget, which would send $37.4 billion to schools across the state — , or 4.7%, from the prior year’s budget. It builds on focused on affordability outlined by Hochul during her State of the State address last week.

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The governor’s budget proposal marks the start of negotiations with lawmakers over how the state should allocate its funding for the next fiscal year, which begins in April.

Under Hochul’s cellphone proposal, students would be required to disconnect from devices from “bell to bell,” including during class time, lunch, and in the hallways. The policy would go into effect at the start of the next school year, with districts able to decide the specifics of how they would store phones and ensure compliance, according to Hochul’s office.

“Our kids will finally be free from the endless disruptions of social media and all the mental health pressures that come from it,” she said during her speech at the State Capitol.

Students with disabilities, as well as others who rely on digital devices for medical reasons or translation purposes, would be allowed exemptions from the policy.

In New York City, the Education Department appeared poised to implement on student cellphone use in schools last summer but later after intervention by Mayor Eric Adams.

Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the Education Department, said Tuesday that the department was “looking forward to partnering with the Governor” on the issue.

“The feedback we have heard from our school communities has been clear: access to cell phones in the classroom distracts from learning, divides attention, and significantly impacts our students’ mental health,” she said in a statement. “Following our engagement with parent leadership groups last spring, in partnership with the Health Department, we’ve been working on an evaluation to better understand both how schools are implementing policies to restrict cell phones, and lessons learned from those implementations.”

Currently, the city’s schools can over whether and how to restrict student cellphone use. At the end of last school year, about 350 schools already had bans in place, with an additional 500 planning to implement them this year, city officials previously said. Some schools provide students with locking Yondr pouches, while others collect phones or employ alternative strategies.

Those pouches, though, can cost schools $30 per student in the first year, according to the company. Yondr CEO Graham Dugoni noted the company offered “volume discounts” in a statement and praised Hochul’s proposed cellphone ban.

“We look forward to supporting more school communities across New York in creating successful phone-free learning environments,” he said.

Adams, who has expressed some concerns about adopting a citywide policy on the issue, previously told reporters that the city would comply with any state mandate.

NYC could lose out under school funding formula proposal

Hochul’s proposed budget also called for updates to the state’s school funding formula, an issue expected to take center stage in education budget discussions this year. Known as Foundation Aid, the formula was originally created in 2007, and in some cases relies on decades-old data to determine how much funding is sent to school districts.

For years, advocates, lawmakers, and other education officials have to the formula, with some arguing it requires . But the governor’s proposed updates — which were among the suggestions put forward by the state’s Board of Regents and issued by the Rockefeller Institute — could potentially result in New York City receiving a smaller funding increase, advocates warned Tuesday.

For one change, Hochul called for replacing the 2000 Census poverty rate with the most recent Census Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates, or SAIPE, data. The formula should also stop using federal free- and reduced-price lunch eligibility as a basis for measuring student need, the governor said, instead switching to broader “economically disadvantaged” student counts.

“This will ensure that state dollars go to students who need them the most,” Hochul said.

But according to the more than 300-page report issued by the Rockefeller Institute last month, switching from the 2000 Census Bureau poverty count to three-year average SAIPE data would decrease New York City’s Foundation Aid funding by a projected $392 million. (The city’s schools would still see an overall increase to Foundation Aid funding.)

Kim Sweet, executive director of the nonprofit group Advocates for Children of New York, said even when combined with the swap to using economically disadvantaged student counts, the proposed changes would result in less overall funding for New York City schools.

“The current federal poverty threshold for a family of four is just $32,150,” she said in a statement. “Trying to make ends meet on $30,000 means something very different for a family in New York City than elsewhere in the State.”

Hochul’s proposal did not include several changes to the formula sought by city advocates and officials, such as additional funding for , or extra dollars to implement the state’s for New York City schools.

The city’s Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how the proposed changes were expected to impact local schools.

The governor’s budget proposal would also modify the formula to send additional aid to low-wealth school districts, as well as ensure that every district receives an annual increase of at least 2%, state officials said. The proposed modifications would result in an increase to Foundation Aid of roughly $1.5 billion, or 5.9%, according to officials.

Early college funding, free school meals, and other proposals

Hochul’s other proposals included establishing a $64.6 million “College in High School Opportunity Fund,” allocating $340 million for universal free school meals, increases in funding for child care programs, and more.

The proposed “College in High School Opportunity Fund” would seek to build institutional support for the model, which provides high school students with a chance to take college courses and receive additional mentorship opportunities while earning their diplomas. Across the country and the state, the model has seen success at improving college matriculation rates and other measures of academic achievement among high school students.

As she unveiled her budget proposal, Hochul also addressed concerns about the “cloud of uncertainty” posed by President Donald Trump’s administration, as the president vowed to slash federal funding during his campaign.

“Changes at the federal level will create new challenges for our state,” Hochul said, warning Republicans could cut “critical funding streams for Medicaid, education, child care, utility assistance,” and more.

“Those who are hurt need to raise their voices, and direct that anger at Washington, and push their members of Congress to fight for them,” she said. “Because New York and other states will simply not be able to shoulder these costs on our own.”

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

School districts across Los Angeles County have announced plans to close all or some schools as multiple fires spread across the Los Angeles area.

In total, nearly two dozen school districts have announced full or partial closures. However, some that had closed Wednesday announced that they’d be able to reopen on Thursday, in spite of bad air quality.

Alhambra Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

Superintendent Denise Jaramillo  that district staff need more time to inspect schools for safety.

“While our campuses have fared relatively well thus far, the air quality is expected to remain poor due to excessive dust from the winds and smoke from the fires,” Jaramillio wrote.

The statement also said “a significant number of our staff members are currently under evacuation orders, which will impact school operations and staffing levels.”

Families are advised to limit outdoor activities and keep phones and other devices charged in case of power outages.

Arcadia Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

All district events and services will continue to be closed and canceled, including athletics, and after-school programs.

“Our maintenance, facilities and operations departments, and district staff continue to work to secure campuses as much as possible and do everything they can, but at this time, campuses are not safe to resume school activities,” the district 

The district asked families not to call schools and “inundate phone lines that need to be clear for communications with local authorities.”

The district will continue to post updates online,  and in a recorded message on the emergency phone hotline—(626) 821-1783.

Azusa Unified

Schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

“After thoroughly assessing all school sites, we can confirm that our campuses are safe for students and staff to return,” the district said  on its website. “The high winds caused several downed trees across our school sites and a large amount of dust, debris, and foliage. Crews are currently addressing these issues and will continue this work. Please be assured that safety is our top priority, and our school sites are safe and ready for students and staff to return.”

Baldwin Park Unified

Schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

“Power has been restored across all BPUSD campuses, and our teams have conducted safety assessments to ensure a safe environment for students and staff,” wrote Superintendent Froilan N. Mendoza .

Outdoor activities will be limited, however.

Bonita Unified School District

Most schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

In a statement posted to social media, the district said power had been restored at all but three campuses: Ekstrand Elementary, La Verne Heights Elementary, and Oak Mesa Elementary, which will remain closed.

Burbank Unified

All schools remain closed through Friday, Jan. 10.

The district, which is close to the Eaton Fire, said  that it would not offer childcare or after-school activities.

Charter schools

Various closures Thursday, Jan. 9.

The California Charter School Association announced that  in the area are closed including all campuses of:

Green Dot Public Schools announced the closure of four campuses on :

• Animo Ellen Ochoa Charter Middle School
• Animo Jackie Robinson Charter High School
• Animo Ralph Bunche Charter High School
• Animo Jefferson Charter Middle School

Duarte Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

In , the district cited concerns about fires, poor air quality, hazardous travel conditions, and power outages in Duarte in deciding to keep schools closed.

El Monte City School District

Schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

“Outside of losing a couple of small trees, minor damages, and some power issues, all schools are secure and ready for students and staff to return,” the district said .

Garvey School District

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

Superintendent Anita Chu said  that it plans to re-open Friday.

Glendale Unified

All schools remain closed through Friday, Jan. 10.

Child care and district offices . The district offers tips for helping families cope with the fires and stay safe.

The district  the accessibility of roadways and air quality in its decision to close schools.

Glendora Unified

Schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

While the district had anticipated reopening schools Thursday, “unfortunately, power remains down at four sites and internet and communication services are unavailable throughout the district,” it .

The school will provide grab-and-go lunches from 11 a.m. to noon at:

• Glendora High School: 1600 E Foothill Blvd., Glendora
• Stanton Elementary School: 725 S Vecino Dr., Glendora

La Cañada Unified

All schools remain closed through Friday, Jan. 10.

“The devastating wildfires and winds are tragically impacting our community,” the district . “Please remain safe and connected. We will work together as a strong and loving community to build back and support each other.”

Las Virgenes Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

In a  posted to the district’s Facebook page earlier this week, Superintendent Dan Stepenosky said that Southern California Edison had turned off the power at a number of schools.

Los Angeles Unified

All schools will be closed on Thursday, Jan. 9.

The district  that all schools and offices will be closed Thursday, while some essential employees will report to work.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said in a press conference that unpredictable winds and ongoing fires prompted the shutdown.

“A number of clouds of smoke, dust, have permeated into our communities, making conditions less than desirable, and in some instances, downright dangerous,” Carvalho said.

The district is preparing for the possibility of online learning Friday, Jan. 10 and will announce a decision about whether to extend school closures by 4 p.m. Thursday afternoon.

Resources

The district will distribute meals to LAUSD students from 8–10 a.m. Thursday at:

• Mulholland Middle School— 
• Sepulveda Middle School— 
• Hollenbeck Middle School— 
• South Gate High School— 
• Fremont High School— 
• Harry Bridges Span School— 
• Marina Del Rey Middle School— 
• Sonia Sotomayor Arts and Sciences and Magnet-— 

Families may receive two meals per student.

Students can find academic support through LAUSD’s .

Mental health

• For students and families: Student and Family Wellness Resource Line, (213) 241-3840, from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
• District employees:  and a 24/7 support line at 800-882-1341

The Palisades fire reached the campuses of three LAUSD schools.

Palisades Charter Elementary School and Marquez Charter Elementary School were destroyed.

“ We were on site and could not believe what we were witnessing,” Carvalho said. He said the school’s 700 students will be relocated.

In addition, Carvalho said that a large portion of Palisades High, which is not currently in session, was destroyed.

Monrovia Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

Superintendent Paula Hart Rodas cited high winds and power outages in .

“Our team is continuing to assess the damage caused by the windstorm and will provide an update on the status of our schools tomorrow,” Rodas wrote.

Mountain View School District

Schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

“Though we experienced some damage, including downed trees, limbs, canopy failures, and fencing displacement, our facilities have held up well overall,” the district .

It did warn of air quality problems, however. “We may be in the unhealthy range. Therefore, we will continue to assess the situation and take appropriate measures to ensure the safety of our students and staff, including providing indoor locations for students to remain during breaks,” the statement said.

Pasadena Unified

All schools remain closed through Friday, Jan. 10. 

As the  the district announced school closures would extend through the end of the week.

“This allows our teams time to assess the conditions of our facilities and for our employees, students, and families to begin reestablishing some normalcy,” Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco 

The district is also suspending grab-and-go meals because the facility where the food is stored is within a mandatory evacuation zone.

Rosemead School District

Schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

The district said in an  that air quality would be monitored.

“Air filtration systems will be running in all classrooms throughout the day, and masks will be available to any student or staff member who wishes to use one,” the statement said. “All schools will also follow ‘rainy day schedules,’ which will limit outdoor activities. Activities during recess and lunch will be adjusted accordingly to ensure student safety.”

San Gabriel Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

Superintendent Jim Symonds that high winds are forecasted through Wednesday evening and poor air quality is expected from smoke, ash and dust.

“We will continue to monitor conditions and hope to return all students and staff to campuses on Friday, January 10 so long as conditions improve,” Symonds wrote.

He said while campuses have “fared well thus far,” staff need time to inspect facilities.

San Marino Unified

Schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

Despite hopes to reopen, Superintendent Linda de la Torre said in a  that in addition to safety concerns, “approximately 60% of our workforce live near or in areas currently under evacuation orders due to fires exacerbated by the windstorm. Many of our valued employees have been evacuated or are otherwise dealing with significant challenges, and our thoughts are with them and their families during this difficult time.”

Santa Monica-Malibu Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

Santa Monica-Malibu USD announced late Wednesday afternoon that that all schools will remain closed Thursday because of ongoing safety concerns and poor air quality.

“We watch with all of you in disbelief the devastation and displacement caused by the Palisades fire, which continues to grow and evade containment,” Superintendent Antonio Shelton wrote in a statement.

The district has collected  and is offering grab-and-go meals for students on Thursday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. at:

• Lincoln Middle School— . (drop-off area on California Avenue)
• JAMS Clubhouse Boys and Girls Club Of Santa Monica— . (off 17th Street)
• Santa Monica High School– .  (7th and Michigan)
• Malibu High School— . (admin building parking area)

The district anticipates deciding by Thursday afternoon whether schools will remain closed through the end of the week.

South Pasadena Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 8.

The closure includes the district office, before- and after-school programs and activities.

“A significant percentage of our employees and neighbors are under evacuation orders, evacuation warnings, or have lost their homes,” Superintendent Geoff Yantz .

“Our hearts go out to everyone who has experienced hardships.”

Yantz said it is difficult to safely operate schools without enough staff.

The decision to close schools was made in consultation with neighboring districts and the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

Temple City Unified

All schools remain closed Thursday, Jan. 9.

“Thank you again for your patience as we prioritize the health and safety of our school community,” the district .

It has not yet made a determination about Friday.

Valle Lindo

Schools will reopen Thursday, Jan. 9.

In a , Superintendent Elizabeth Evans alluded to the poor air quality.

“In light of the ongoing fires and air quality concerns,” she said, the district will put several safety measures in place:

• Outdoor activities, including physical education classes, will take place indoors.
• Nutrition, recess, and lunch periods will also be held indoors.
• Masks will be available upon request at school offices.
• Student services staff will be available to support students who have concerns.

More fire coverage

These fires are fast-moving and straight up frightening. For the most up-to-date information about the fire you can check:

Palisades Fire

Eaton Fire

Hurst Fire

One thing is clear from the stories that populate this year’s list: Many of America’s schools are still grappling with the academic struggles that followed the pandemic – as well as the end of federal relief funds, which expired this fall. Student enrollments have yet to recover and many districts are facing – or will soon face – tough decisions about closures.

Meanwhile, some educators are testing innovative ways of teaching math, reading and science, hoping to gain back some of the academic ground lost since the COVID shutdowns. Technology is also playing a pivotal role in this post-pandemic world, with communities weighing the impact of cellphones and artificial intelligence on student learning and mental health.

November’s election – which featured debates over school choice, Christianity in public schools and the fate of the Department of Education – also made headlines here at ����Ӱ��. And, as calls for cracking down on immigration grew even louder, we dug deep into the hurdles facing immigrant students and schools. 

Here’s a roundup of our most memorable and impactful stories of the year:

Exclusive: Thousands of Schools at Risk of Closing Due to Enrollment Loss

By Linda Jacobson

Long before districts close schools, enrollment loss takes a toll on staff and families, from combined classes to the loss of afterschool programs. This exclusive analysis by Linda Jacobson, based on Brookings Institution research, found that more than 4,400 schools lost at least one-fifth of their students during the pandemic — more than double the number during the pre-COVID period. The detailed look shows how the crisis is playing out at the school level and which districts face tough decisions about closures and cuts. 

Unwelcome to America’: Hundreds of U.S. High Schools Wrongfully Refused Entry to Older, Immigrant Student

By Jo Napolitano

����Ӱ��’s 16-month-long undercover investigation of school enrollment practices for older immigrant students revealed rampant refusals of teens who had a legal right to attend, shutting a door critical to success in America. Senior reporter Jo Napolitano called 630 high schools in every state and D.C. to test whether they would enroll a 19-year-old Venezuelan newcomer who had limited English language skills and whose education was interrupted after ninth grade. “Hector Guerrero” was turned down more than 300 times, including 204 denials in the 35 states and D.C., where high school attendance goes up to at least age 20. ����Ӱ��’s investigation revealed pervasive hostility and suspicion toward these students in a particularly xenophobic era and a deeply arbitrary process determining their access to K-12 education.

Interactive: Which School Districts Do the Best Job of Teaching Kids to Read?

By Chad Aldeman

It’s not news that low-income fourth graders are years behind their higher-income peers in reading. But poverty is not destiny, and some schools and districts hugely outperform expectations. Working with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, contributor Chad Aldeman set out to find districts that are beating the odds and successfully teaching kids to read. From Steubenville City, Ohio, to Worcester County, Maryland, and across the country, click on their interactive map to find the highfliers in your state. 

Whistleblower: L.A. Schools’ Chatbot Misused Student Data as Tech Company Crumbled

by Mark Keierleber

In early June, a former top software engineer at ed tech startup, AllHere, warned Los Angeles district officials and others about student data privacy risks associated with the company’s AI chatbot “Ed.” The LA Unified School District had agreed to pay AllHere $6 million for the chatbot and the spring rollout of Ed was highly publicized, with L.A. schools chief Alberto Carvalho calling the chatbot’s student knowledge powers “unprecedented in American public education.” But, as Mark Keierleber reported, red flags soon began to emerge. The company financially imploded and its founder Joanna Smith-Griffin left the company. In November, federal prosecutors indicted her, accusing of defrauding investors of $10 million.

America’s Most Popular Autism Therapy May Not Work — and May Cause Serious Harms

by Beth Hawkins

Today, a child’s new autism diagnosis is frequently followed by a referral to a variation of an intervention called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, and four decades of pressure from parents and advocates has created a sprawling treatment industry. Yet, even as providers and lobbyists jockey to strengthen ABA’s dominance, autistic adults and researchers increasingly say there’s alarmingly little proof it’s effective — and mounting evidence it’s traumatizing. In an exclusive investigation, Beth Hawkins spoke with families, teachers and scholars about the growing controversy surrounding autism’s “gold standard” treatment. 

A Cautionary AI Tale: Why IBM’s Dazzling Watson Supercomputer Made a Lousy Tutor

by Greg Toppo

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer crushed Jeopardy! champions, raising hopes that it could help create a powerful tutoring system that would rival human teachers. But the visionary at the head of the effort watched as the project fizzled, the victim of AI’s inability to hold students’ attention. As new educational AI contenders like Khanmigo emerge, what lessons can they learn from the past? ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo took a look at how IBM’s failed effort tempers today’s shiny AI promises.

State-by-State, How Segregation Legally Continues 7 Decades Post Brown v. Board

by Marianna McMurdock

Seventy years after the Supreme Court outlawed separating public school children by race, Marianna McMurdock sought to answer a pivotal question: How are some of the most coveted public schools in the U.S. able to legally exclude all but the most privileged families? Last spring, she spoke with researchers at the nonprofits Available to All and Bellwether, which published a report that examined the troubling laws, loopholes and trends that are undermining the legacy of Brown v. Board in each state. The researchers called for urgent legal reform to offset the impact that one’s home address has on enrollment, particularly as many districts have started considering closures.

Being ‘Bad at Math’ Is a Pervasive Concept. Can it Be Banished From Schools?

by Jo Napolitano

Are you bad at math? If you are, it’s likely that self-fulfilling seed got planted early. Many math education leaders are trying to uproot that thinking, arguing that any student can master the subject with the right accommodations and tutoring. Changing the bad-at-math mindset in U.S. schools, however, will not be easy, others warn. “We use math as a means to sort kids by who gets to be at the top and who gets to be at the bottom,” one math equity advocate told Jo Napolitano. 

Hope Rises in Pine Bluff: Saving Schools in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City

by ����Ӱ�� Staff

Pine Bluff, Arkansas, earned the unwelcome distinction in the 2020 census of being America’s fastest-shrinking city, losing over 12% of its population in one decade. Amid this exodus of families, students and taxpayers, its school district had to navigate school closures, budget pressures and a state takeover. Throughout last winter, members of ����Ӱ��’s newsroom embedded in Pine Bluff to report on the region’s trajectory. Here are some of the powerful stories they came back with: 

Kids, Screen Time & Despair: An Expert in the Economics of Happiness Echoes Psychologists’ Warnings About Tech

By Kevin Mahnken

A prominent economist has joined the growing chorus of experts warning against the dangers posed to youth mental health by screens and social media, reported Kevin Mahnken. New papers released by Dartmouth College professor Danny Blanchflower, a leading expert in the burgeoning field of happiness economics, suggest that the huge increase in screen time over the last decade has made the young more likely to despair than the middle-aged. 

Why Is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?

By Amanda Geduld

As educators push for more transparency in grading policies post-pandemic, some are turning to standards-based grading. When done correctly, it separates academic mastery from behavior and more accurately reflects what students know. But misunderstandings of the model, a lack of proper training, and a rush to adopt it often leads to messy implementation. Associate professor Laura Link told Amanda Geduld that as schools look to fix learning gaps, “standards-based grading is one that seems like it can be a quickly adopted effort. But it could backfire — and does backfire — very easily.”

Texas Seeks to Inject Bible Stories into Elementary School Reading Program

by Linda Jacobson

Last May, a sweeping redesign of Texas’ elementary school curriculum that used Bible stories to teach reading was unveiled. At the time, state education Commissioner Mike Morath described the changes as a shift toward a “classical model of education.” But the revisions raised questions about potential religious indoctrination and bias. Nevertheless, in November, the Texas Board of Education approved the new curriculum in a close vote. Linda Jacobson followed the story closely.

The Political War Over the Department of Education Is Only Beginning

By Kevin Mahnken 

Fresh from their November victories, Republicans are already working to help President-elect Donald Trump achieve his promise of abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. But research suggests that, while perceptions of the agency are mixed, the public is unlikely to back a sweeping course of elimination. “Saying you’ll get rid of it reads generically as being anti-education,” one political scientist told Kevin Mahnken. “That strikes me as a very heavy albatross to hang around your neck come the midterms.” 

18 Years, $2 Billion: Inside New Orleans’ Biggest School Recovery Effort in History

By Beth Hawkins

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina destroyed 110 New Orleans schools. Displaced families could not return until there were classrooms to welcome their kids, but no one had ever tried to rebuild an entire school system. While many of the buildings were moldering even before the storm, federal funds couldn’t be used to build something better. Some of the schools had landmark status and were of great historical significance. Eighteen years and $2 billion later, Beth Hawkins took a look at seven schools that illustrate how the district accomplished the task.

As Ryan Walters’ Right-Wing Star Rose, Critics Say Oklahoma Ed Dept. Fell Apart

By Linda Jacobson

Oklahoma state education chief Republican Ryan Walters has acted as a one-man publicity machine, a performance that’s earned him venomous foes and ardent fans who follow him with a near-religious fervor. But one casualty of his approach might be a functioning state education bureaucracy. Even Republican lawmakers have grown impatient, calling for a probe into how Walters handles state and federal funds. As Rep. Tammy West, a GOP incumbent running for re-election, told reporter Linda Jacobson, “Regardless of party, citizens want transparency, accountability and communication.”

AI ‘Companions’ Are Patient, Funny, Upbeat — and Probably Rewiring Kids Brains

By Greg Toppo

A college student relies on ChatGPT to help him make life decisions, including whether to break up with his girlfriend. Is this a future we feel good about? While AI bots and companions like ChatGPT, Replika and Snapchat’s MyAI, can offer support, comfort and advice, experts are beginning to warn of potential risks. ����Ӱ��’s Greg Toppo talks to researchers and policy experts about what we should be doing to help make them safer.

Indiana Looks to Swiss Experts to Create Thousands of Student Apprenticeships

By Patrick O’Donnell

Indiana officials have turned to experts at the Swiss version of MIT for help in becoming a national career training leader by making apprenticeships available to thousands of high school students across the state. Indiana is the latest state to work with ETH Zurich — where Albert Einstein once studied — to develop ways to break down barriers between educators and businesses so that career training can be a large part of a reinvented high school experience, reported Patrick O’Donnell. 

Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died in Federal Boarding Schools

By Marianna McMurdock 

Nearly 1,000 Native American children died while forced to attend government-affiliated boarding schools, according to a report published last summer by the Interior Department. The children are buried in 74 unmarked and marked graves, reported Marianna McMurdock, as tribes assess repatriation of remains. Nearly 19,000 children were estimated to be kidnapped, often at gunpoint, and enrolled in the schools with the aim of assimilation. “We [were] never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers,” said one survivor. 

The Nation’s Biggest Charter School System Is Under Fire in Los Angeles

By Ben Chapman 

The nation’s largest experiment with charter schools is no longer growing. These days, Los Angeles charter operators say they are just trying to survive. With tough new policies governing co-locations, falling enrollment, and a hostile district school board, charter leaders say they’ve never faced stronger headwinds, reported Ben Chapman. With enrollment plummeting across the district, some charter networks have recently announced closures while others have stopped submitting proposals for new campuses. “Now, particularly in L.A., our focus is not on growing,” said Joanna Belcher, chief impact officer for KIPP SoCal. 

Florida Students Seize on Parental Rights to Stop Educators from Hitting Kids

By Mark Keierleber 

Late last year, Florida senior Brooklynn Daniels was called to the principal’s office and spanked with a wooden paddle “that was thick like a chapter book.” Like in many enclaves that dot the Florida panhandle, Liberty County permits corporal punishment as a form of student discipline. But her flogging, the honors student said, went much further: She alleged sexual assault and filed a police report, reported Mark Keierleber. Daniels joined a student-led movement to change Florida law that has latched onto the GOP-led parental rights movement. 

Interactive: See How Student Achievement Gaps Are Growing in Your State

By Chad Aldeman

In 2012, then-President Barack Obama freed states from the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind in exchange for reforms related to standards, assessments and teacher evaluations. That relaxing of school and district accountability pressures corresponded with a decline in student performance across the country that is still being felt — achievement gaps are growing across subjects and all across the country. To illustrate these alarming discrepancies, contributor Chad Aldeman and Eamonn Fitzmaurice, ����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, created an interactive tool that enables you to see what’s happening with student performance in your state.

Left Powerless: Non-English–Speaking Parents Denied Vital Translation Services

by Amanda Geduld

Flouting federal laws, K-12 public schools routinely fail to provide qualified interpreters to non-English-speaking families. Parents must instead rely on Google translate, their own kid or a bilingual staff member who isn’t a trained interpreter for issues as simple as their child’s absence for a day or as complex and intimidating as a special education meeting or a school disciplinary hearing. The problem is pervasive and vastly underreported, experts told Amanda Geduld. School leaders say they are trying their best, but lack the money and staffing to meet the need. 

Failed West Virginia Microschool Fuels State Probe and Some Soul-Searching

By Linda Jacobson

The West Virginia treasurer’s investigation into a microschool, funded with education savings accounts, offers a glimpse into an emerging market that has mushroomed since the pandemic. When the program shut down after a few months, parents were left demanding their money back and scrambling to find other arrangements for their children. The example, experts say, shows that it takes more than good intentions to provide a quality education program. As one parent told Linda Jacobson, “I should have seen the red flags.”

In the Rush to Covid Recovery, Did We Forget About Our Youngest Learners?

by Lauren Camera

The country’s youngest elementary school students suffered steep academic setbacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – just like students in older grades. But new research shows that they aren’t catching back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math the way older students are. And when it comes to math, many are falling even further behind. “We were shocked when we first saw the data,” Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, told Lauren Camera.

New York’s school funding formula relies on outdated information and “reflects an antiquated concept of what public school districts are expected to do.”

That’s according to a more than 300-page report released this week by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a public policy think tank based at SUNY. As part of between Albany lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state charged the organization with issuing a set of recommendations to revise Foundation Aid, the formula that sends roughly $24.9 billion to school districts — including more than $9.5 billion to New York City schools.

First implemented in 2007, Foundation Aid uses decades-old data to calculate district needs, like relying on figures from the 2000 Census to measure student poverty. Other factors that impact district spending, including the number of students living in temporary housing, don’t weigh into the current formula at all. (Foundation Aid only received from the state in recent years — following a lengthy fight from education advocates.)

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Though the institute’s recommendations are not binding, its proposals could influence debates over how to update the formula when lawmakers return to Albany in January.

State Sen. Shelley Mayer, a Democrat who chairs the senate’s education committee, stressed that “any determinations about how to change the formula will rest with the Legislature and Governor.”

“The Rockefeller Institute’s report offers a set of recommendations –– some good, some concerning –– to begin a robust conversation about how to fix the Foundation Aid Formula,” Mayer said in a Tuesday statement. “Further, we are not limited by what is proposed in the Rockefeller Institute’s report.”

Read the Rockefeller Institute’s report .

Recommendations: School funding formula needs ‘significant change’

In its report, the Rockefeller Institute called for “significant change” to the formula. Schools today provide far more services than when the formula was initially created, the organization noted, pointing to mental health support at school, language instruction for English learners, and a growing reliance on schools as a “community hub.”

The recommendations include modifying how the formula accounts for inflation, changing and updating the data used to determine student poverty, and establishing more nuanced calculations for funding based on students with disabilities, among other changes.

One of its suggestions is already getting pushback from some lawmakers and the governor: phasing out 50% of “save harmless,” or “hold harmless,” a policy that shields districts with declining enrollment from losing funding.

During the last budget cycle, Hochul sought to effectively end that provision, but the proposal was rebuffed by state lawmakers.

In a statement on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Hochul’s office distanced the governor from the Institute’s proposal to phase out the policy.

“As we craft the upcoming Executive Budget, the Governor believes we should avoid proposals that would negatively impact school budgets, such as eliminating the hold-harmless provision of the Foundation Aid formula,” the spokesperson said.

Reactions: Formula needs overhaul, not tweaks, some argue

Some observers worry that the institute’s proposals don’t go far enough to overhaul the formula, and fail to account for major issues impacting New York City schools.

Michael Rebell, executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Columbia University’s Teachers College and the lawyer who led the landmark case against the state that paved the way for Foundation Aid, argues it isn’t enough to change aspects of the formula. He believes the state’s current approach falls to provide a “sound basic education.”

“We need a process that takes a totally new look at what students need in 2024 and 2025, not tweaking and patching up something that was written in 2006,” he said. “If you’re not looking at the overall impact of whether kids in every district are getting a fair shot — are getting the opportunity for sound basic education — what have you accomplished?”

Some advocates expressed mixed feelings about the report, noting it did not address several key concerns in New York City, including schools’ needs to help students in temporary housing. In New York City the number of students experiencing homelessness grew to last school year.

“We are disappointed that there are no recommendations to add weights for students experiencing homelessness and students in foster care so that schools can better meet their needs; to provide per pupil funding for 3-K and pre-K students; or to help NYC meet the new class size limits required by state law,” said Kim Sweet, executive director of Advocates for Children, in a statement.

State Sen. John Liu, a Queens Democrat who chairs the Senate’s New York City education committee, echoed concerns about the report’s exclusion of the city’s class size reduction mandate.

“This absolutely must be considered to provide our school kids a constitutionally required, sound, basic education,” he said in a statement.

Impacts: How proposals could affect NYC schools remains unclear

It’s difficult to determine how the report’s proposals might impact students in a particular school district, because they cannot be considered in isolation from one another, Rebell said.

For example, a recommendation that the formula stop using federal free- and reduced-price lunch eligibility as a basis for measuring student poverty might result in less funding for New York City schools, he said. At the same time, a proposal to update how the formula accounts for differing costs between regions could mean more state funding for the city’s students.

And with the state under no obligation to adopt any or all of the Rockefeller Institute’s recommendations, it remains unclear what the report might mean for students.

“I can look at aspects of this formula and say, ‘This would help New York City. That would hurt New York City,’ but that’s not the way to do it,” Rebell said. “The way to do it is: What do kids in New York City need? What do kids in these rural districts need? How can we put together a package that’s responsive to all of it?”

The city’s Education Department and teachers union were both reviewing the report.

“We are continuing to review the report and the impacts of its proposals, and look forward to working with the Governor and the legislature moving forward,” Education Department spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said, “Some ideas sound promising. Others are cause for concern.”

He was focused, he said, “on what changes need to take place if we are to better support our city’s students, educators, and school communities.”

Looking ahead: Formula need regular updates, report says

Regardless of how state officials choose to update Foundation Aid, the Rockefeller Institute noted more regular revisions to the school funding formula are critical. The report noted student populations and needs, state learning standards, and other measures of academic achievement are all subject to change each year.

“Assuming state policymakers enact some of the recommendations quickly, they should not wait another 17 years to examine the Foundation Aid formula for additional needed revision,” the report said. “An essential part of this reform effort should be a commitment to revisit the Foundation Aid formula every three to five years.”

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

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

The proximate cause of the political fracas is a in Chicago Public Schools’ annual budget, driven primarily by the drying up of federal pandemic relief dollars. But funding challenges in the Windy City are downstream of a concerning reality: Chicago is increasingly beholden to the wishes of its teachers union. This is especially the case under the leadership of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who spent a decade as an organizer for the CTU and ascended to the mayoralty with its backing. At the helm of the city, Johnson has been willing to bend over backward to put his union sympathies into policy. A since-retired reporter Chicago Magazine editor Edward McClelland that CTU President Stacy Davis Gates “made Brandon Johnson.” Now, “Stacy Davis Gates owns Brandon Johnson.” 

Former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) a similar sentiment: “We have a new political machine [in Chicago], and it’s called the CTU, and its vassal is Mayor Johnson.”

The previous board’s resignations marked the apex of the tensions that have been simmering between it and Johnson ever since the board a controversial $9.9 billion budget in July. In addition, the board has sided with CPS CEO Pedro Martinez in opposing a $300 million short-term, high-interest loan to pay for the expensive raises sought by the CTU, which is negotiating a new contract with the board. After Johnson’s hardball move, there’s little question that the union’s negotiators are breathing a sigh of relief. In the memorable words of Chicago Magazine’s McClelland, following the board’s resignations, “Mayor CTU will appoint a set of lackeys, brownnosers, and apple polishers who will carry out the Chicago Teachers Union’s program” — fire Martinez, take out the loan, and use the money to hand out for teachers.

Indeed, it’s clear that Johnson’s recent school board moves align well with the CTU’s positions. The union, which is toward Martinez, wants him gone. But the school board, which was almost entirely hand-picked by Johnson himself, refused to play along because it recognized the irresponsibility of taking on a risky loan.

It’s worth dwelling a bit on the financial situation of CPS. It can be boiled down to two words: not good. The school board a $9.9 billion budget in July that money for the contract that the board is currently negotiating with the CTU, which typically $100 million to $120 million annually to the district’s operating costs, nor a non-teaching-staff pension payment that will cost the district $175 million. 

These two expenses culminated in the roughly $300 million gap mentioned above. Mayor Johnson has pushed the school board and Martinez to take out a loan to close this gap, but because CPS bonds are “junk” rated, the interest payments on the loan would likely be exorbitant. Indeed, CPS is already $9.3 billion in debt, and principal and interest payments on outstanding debt — the debt that exists before this potential new loan would take effect — will $817 million this year alone. When Johnson first floated the idea of taking out a loan in July, an internal CPS memo by Chalkbeat called it a “fictional or phantom revenue source.”

An apparent lack of adequate state funding may also be at play here. In 2017, Illinois changed its to better fund historically under-resourced districts. Under the reformed funding formula, CPS 79% of its required funding this year the district’s recent increase in English language learners and a decrease in local revenue, both of which increased the required funding per the state’s formula. 

Lurking in the background of this shortfall is the between Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, providing fertile ground for the conspiracy-minded to suspect that the governor is holding back funding from Chicago’s schools out of personal pettiness. But the reality is more prosaic: in Illinois are even worse off than Chicago, including the 49 of them that are funded below 70%of what the state formula says they need. This suggests that Chicago is not being squashed by gubernatorial caprices. In the words of one person close to CPS, “I think that the union thought, once Brandon [Johnson] got elected, that they’d be able to walk into Springfield and get whatever they wanted. . . . But there’s no money, especially after ESSER funds have expired.”

Still, Chicago spends a lot of money each year on education. Per-student operating expenses in FY 22 $24,132, roughly double the . Moreover, as Chad Aldeman wrote last month, CPS has added thousands of personnel at the same time that enrollment in the district has been declining. “Budgeting decisions like these would be anathema in any other industry,” argues Aldeman, “where leaders normally try to match up the number of employees with customer demand.” But “Chicago Public Schools is doing the opposite.” 

Indeed, Aldeman notes that the district “chose to invest 92% of its one-time relief funds in full-time school employees,” a decision that greatly benefited the CTU’s members — and, by extension, CTU’s coffers.

But “Mayor CTU” refuses to countenance worries about the CPS’s dire financial straits. In the press conference during which Johnson announced the board’s new appointees — which local news outlets have described as “” and “” — he compared those raising concerns about fiscal responsibility to slaveholders. “They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people,” Johnson argued. “And now you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”

One can hardly blame the CTU for its insistence that its members receive generous raises, financial considerations be damned. The first concern of a union, after all, is simple: to act in the best interests of its members. But Brandon Johnson deserves less sympathy. In a time of unprecedented financial chaos for the school district, Mayor Johnson is acting in the interests not of Chicago as a whole but of the CTU. This is not to suggest that Johnson is a stooge of the union. Johnson strikes this observer as a full-throated advocate for the cause on which he rose to power, which is why the CTU funded him so generously in the first place; the arrow of causality does not point in the opposite direction.

Still, Johnson should know better than to jeopardize the financial health of the city’s school system in order to push forward the interests of just one of his many constituencies. In contrast, Chicago voters delivered a strong anti-union verdict in last week’s elections, as just four of the 10 school-board candidates elected were backed by the CTU. 

Perhaps this is a sign that Chicagoans have recognized the peril of being beholden to the union.

In a signed letter attached to today’s “Ours to Solve, Once — and For All” report, the six-member council (Jean-Claude Brizard, Mitch Daniels, Chris Howard, Andrew Luck, Frances Messano and Condoleezza Rice) writes that it identified “fundamental barriers” to student equity and success within the current school system. “Despite our national commitment to the issue, steep increases in funding, and decades of reform efforts, our current system has been unable to offset poor student outcomes – particularly for minority and low-income students,” the introduction to the report says. “This failure goes against who we profess to be as a nation.”

Hoover Institution Director and Council Co-Chair Condoleezza Rice went a step further in a Tuesday statement, framing the issue through the lens of national stability: “Education excellence is critical to the societal contract supporting our democracy and is inextricably tied to the success — or failure — of our nation.”

Today’s report is unique in its focus on broader, system-level reforms. The council criticizes the existing structure of the nation’s education landscape, noting that the local school boards and state and federal agencies that run today’s schools “are not the product of coherent and thoughtful design. Rather, they evolved over decades to a point where they hinder more than help the cause of improved outcomes for all students.”

The group also highlights the “perplexing contradiction” of today’s public schools, where the current system boasts strong community support, superior research and dedicated teachers and staff, but students’ academic outcomes vary widely — and many of these results are underwhelming. 

“According to virtually every available metric, the overall quality of American schools has either declined or remained stagnant since the 1970s,” the council writes.

On a per-student basis, the U.S. spends 40% more than the average spent by member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the council notes. At the same time, the U.S ranks 34th in math globally on the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluations.

“Changing the way these institutions are organized and function ― what we call the ‘operating system’ of public education ― will raise trust, respect, agency, and empowerment for teachers and principals and will provide essential support from other education leaders,” the group says in the report.

The council recommends four core commitments that they believe will help improve the educational “operating system”: Re-organizing the current system toward a new “true north”  that focuses on student outcomes; minimizing regulations and mandates in favor of embracing incentives; cultivating and rewarding professional mastery in the education workforce; and flipping the system “from top-down to bottom-up.”  

“In the flipped system hierarchy, schools are the apex organization,” writes the council. “They need sufficient discretion to make decisions in situ to manage their own operations and to adapt their efforts to address the needs of their students.”

A Hoover Institution spokesperson said that a dedicated website will accompany the report. Set to launch next month, the hub will offer readers and policymakers additional resources and details. 

A summit is also being scheduled for January at Stanford University, which will aim to bring experts together from across the country to discuss  and debate the findings of the report. 

“We hope this report builds motivation and commitment for change,” the council members write in their introduction. “Together, we can launch a new approach to address the current state of public education in America, and provide every child the foundational opportunities they deserve.” 

Disclosure: The Hoover Institution provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

Over the last three years, Maui Waena Intermediate has invested nearly $300,000 in Covid-19 relief funds in its after-school program, hiring more staff and adding new programs to help students recover academically and socially from the pandemic.

The Valley Isle school’s extracurricular offerings have been a big draw for students, and class attendance has been steadily improving.

“They’re more connected and they want to come to school,” said Jennifer Suzuki, Maui Waena’s media teacher and after-school coordinator.

But while the increased after-school offerings may be drawing more kids to campus, the infusion of pandemic-era funding hasn’t achieved its primary goal: improving academic achievement. Only 26% of students at the school were proficient in math in the 2023-24 school year — the same as the year before, and a slight dip from the year before that.

Maui Waena’s struggles are reflective of a broader challenge in the state. Academic test scores in Hawaii have essentially flatlined for the last three years, despite an infusion of over $600 million in federal support to help schools address pandemic-era challenges, including learning loss.

Test scores released last month showed that 52% of Hawaii students were proficient in language arts last year, compared to 54% in the 2018-19 school year. Approximately 40% of students were proficient in math, down from 43% before the pandemic.

Advocates have been calling for years for the Hawaii Department of Education to provide greater detail about how schools are spending Covid relief funds. With funding ending this fall, a bigger concern is emerging over the lack of information about what the federal investment has achieved.

Principals say federal funds have supported student learning by enabling schools to purchase new curricula, hire more staff and expand access to tutoring and after-school programs. But there’s little information on what initiatives have resulted in the greatest student improvements, even though school leaders will likely need to convince lawmakers next year that the state should spend its own money to continue pandemic-era programs.

The DOE said in 2021 that it would fund a  to assess how different strategies helped middle school students recover from the pandemic, but spokesperson Nanea Ching said the initiative hasn’t been started. She did not say if the department still plans to move forward with the study.

In some cases, it’s too early to tell which federal investments drove the greatest gains in student learning during the pandemic, said Ash Dhammani, a policy data analyst at the . The long-term effects of programs from the pandemic may also depend on whether schools can use state funding to replace federal funds, he added. 

“It’s really important to highlight now, are we doing right by our students,” Dhammani said, “and did we do enough with this one-time money?” 

Covid Funds Spent On Variety Of School Needs

Hawaii schools experienced a smaller drop in student achievement during the pandemic than most states, but it’s concerning that progress has stalled in recent years, said David Sun-Miyashiro, executive director of HawaiiKidsCAN.

Improving student achievement was already a major issue in Hawaii before the pandemic. In early 2020, former superintendent Christina Kishimoto  of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in math and reading by the end of the decade. Some educational advocates deemed her plan as overly ambitious but recognized that schools needed to progress at a faster rate.

A revised DOE plan calls for 65% of Hawaii students to achieve proficiency in reading and 50% in math by 2029.

In a Board of Education meeting last month, DOE Assistant Superintendent Elizabeth Higashi said Hawaii is following a national pattern of states seeing small to no improvements in academics. Attendance remains a challenge for some Hawaii schools, she said, which also reduces students’ learning time. Roughly a quarter of students were chronically absent from school last year.

In the final round of federal Covid relief funding, DOE received over $412 million to spend between 2021 and 2024. The DOE had to spend at least a quarter of the funds to address learning loss and support after-school and summer programs, but school leaders received a large degree of freedom on how to spend the remaining dollars.

Compared to other states, Dhammani said, Hawaii has done a good job of publishing  on the status of its federal funds, although the spending categories referenced in the monthly reports could be more detailed.

Some federal funds supported statewide initiatives, like free summer school classes, professional development for teachers and tutoring for middle school students. Complex areas also received nearly $170 million for individual school efforts to improve attendance and support academic and mental health needs.

For example, Kaneohe Elementary hired a social worker to support struggling families, while Keelikolani Middle School created an attendance arcade where students could play games before school and receive rewards for coming to class on time. 

“The funds were like a godsend,” said Keelikolani Middle School Principal Joe Passantino. Since 2021, the school has surpassed its pre-pandemic state test scores in both math and reading.

But while principals say federal funds helped students recover from the effects of online learning, it’s been harder to track which strategies were most effective, especially when statewide academic progress has slowed in recent years.

For example, Sun-Miyashiro is interested in how the department funded tutoring programs during the pandemic and if schools were able to reach students who were struggling the most.

“It would be great to have data linked with activities and then be able to show how that had a meaningful impact,” Sun-Miyashiro said.

With so many different uses for federal relief funds, it’s hard to determine which programs have resulted in the greatest success, Deputy Superintendent of Academics Heidi Armstrong said. In some cases, she added, investments in initiatives like new reading curriculum or regular screeners for students’ academics and mental health can benefit schools even after the federal funds expire.

“It’s very difficult to separate each one of those to say, this is what got us back to pre-pandemic levels, because there’s so many factors involved,” Armstrong said. “We are working very diligently to ensure that we continue on this trajectory.” 

What Happens When Pandmic Funds Run Out?

While tracking the impact of federal dollars has been difficult, school administrators say the funding has been critical in connecting students with additional staff and resources that didn’t exist before the pandemic. Some are now worried that they won’t be able to sustain vital programs unless the state steps in with additional support.

At Lanakila Elementary, math and reading scores have met or surpassed their pre-pandemic levels. Using federal relief funds, principal Kerry Higa hired five additional teachers who could provide more individualized support to students by working with them in small groups.

The additional staff positions alone can’t account for the improved scores, Higa said, but having more quality teachers on campus has gone a long way, especially as students struggled to communicate and express themselves as they returned to in-person learning.

But as federal funds expire this year, the school has been unable to keep one of its teachers on staff, Higa said. He’s worried that other statewide programs, like free summer school, could also come to an end and provide fewer opportunities for his students to learn outside of class.

DOE received just over $20 million from the Legislature to replace federal funds and  in 2025 but will need to request more money to sustain the program in the future. Over the past three years, DOE spent roughly $40 million in federal funding on summer programs.

The state may be able to fill in some funding gaps for programs like summer school and tutoring, Sun-Miyashiro said, but the department will need to make a strong case for continuing these initiatives during the 2025 legislative session.

Deborah Bond-Upson, president of Parents for Public Schools of Hawaii and interim director of the Hui for Excellence in Education, said she’s worried about what the end of federal funding could mean for students. But she’s interested in tracking how the pandemic-era investments in professional development and technology for schools will serve students in the coming years.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .

There were two crates waiting for Valerie Smith, an elementary school librarian, when she arrived at the Sanford School Department’s central office on Monday. In one was a collection of 30 picture books featuring experiences of modern-day immigrants and their families, along with discussion prompts. In the other, a custom display built by Maine businesses to highlight the books.

For the district that has recently seen an influx of immigrants from Central Africa, Smith said it was the perfect fit. With tightening school budgets, the new Maine Department of Education initiative to send the diverse and inclusive collection to every district in the state will benefit all students, she said.

The Portland-based nonprofit, I’m Your Neighbor Books, that developed and distributed the collection nationwide said after almost three years of widespread bans targeting books on similar topics, this project strengthens Maine’s commitment to inclusive, diverse education. Smith, who hasn’t personally been targeted by the attacks on librarians through the book banning movement but has been wary of them, echoed the importance of the positive educational opportunities the collection will bring to her district.

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“That’s what we do in libraries. We want kids to see themselves in our books,” she said.

“Being able to enhance our collection, or widen it, with these books is going to be super — not only for those new Mainers or kiddos from different cultures coming to our schools, but are also great for our kiddos, who have been here all their life, because they can learn about some of those experiences by reading those books.”

The collection features books highlighting representation, inclusion and belonging of immigrants and first-through-third generation families that I’m Your Neighbor books has distributed to schools across the country. They include titles written by and about immigrants from different parts of the world, such as Abuelita and Me by Leonarda Carranza, about a girl and her grandmother experiencing racism, In My Mosque by M.O. Yuksel, a book highlighting mosques as gathering places, and Priya Dreams of Marigold & Masala by Meenal Patel, a book containing colorful descriptions of India.

Peaks Island author Anne Sibley O’Brien’s book, I’m New Here, about three immigrant children’s experiences in an English-speaking elementary school, is also featured in the collection.

However, the partnership with the Maine DOE, dubbed The Pine Project, is the first of its kind, distributing the organization’s Welcoming Library collection to every public school district with almost $650,000 in federal pandemic relief funds, according to Kendra Carter, an education marketing coordinator for the DOE.

The initiative will put almost 6,200 total books in circulation across the state, to be used as districts see fit, said Kirsten Cappy, executive director of I’m Your Neighbor Books.

“If we do not add in a collection of books about modern migrants and new generation communities, we’re leaving out what our classrooms and communities actually look like,” Cappy said about the importance of the collection, which she thinks will significantly diversify the titles available to Maine teachers.

“The presence of these books changes teaching, and it changes minds.”

The goal of the project, according to the Maine DOE, is to “enhance students’ understanding of diverse experiences and foster inclusive school environments,” Carter said in an email. The department will also offer an online training on September 30 to help educators teach the topics the books cover, which includes social emotional learning.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com. Follow Maine Morning Star on and .

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Less than three years after taking the helm of New York City’s school system, Chancellor David Banks is planning to retire at the end of the year amid widening probes of City Hall.

Banks’ stunning Tuesday announcement comes nearly three weeks after federal agents visited his home the day before school started and seized his phones as part of a broader investigation into members of Mayor Eric Adams’ inner circle. Investigators also confiscated phones from Banks’ partner, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, and his two brothers, Phil Banks, deputy mayor for public safety, and Terence Banks, a consultant and former MTA staffer.

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Investigators are who sought contracts with the city.

The announcement from the 62-year-old schools chief concludes a that stretched from being a school safety agent to helping launch a network of public schools geared toward young men of color. Tapped by Adams, who said he never seriously considered other candidates to helm the nation’s largest school district, Banks promised sweeping change to a system he described as

In his time in office, Banks focused more narrowly on two goals: instruction and .

“On behalf of all New Yorkers, we thank Chancellor Banks for his service, and wish him well in his retirement at the end of the calendar year,” Adams said in a statement Tuesday.

In a Tuesday letter informing Adams of his plan to retire, Banks said he would do “everything possible to ensure a smooth transition.”

“Serving as Chancellor has been a profound honor and a deeply fulfilling experience,” he said. “I am confident that NYC Public Schools will continue to grow, innovate and excel under the next Chancellor.”

Banks did not acknowledge the federal investigations in his letter, and he said his intent to retire by Dec. 31 predated the start of the school year.

The announcement comes on the heels of a series of resignations of high-profile figures in the Adams administration, including , who stepped down earlier this month, and , who plans to resign at the end of the year.

As members of his administration have left City Hall, Adams has faced pressure from some to step down. Critics were quick to use the school chancellor’s announcement as .

Banks’ tenure has been filled with a host of challenges: prioritizing what programs to save amid fiscal pressures of , figuring out how to , and responding to the ways in which are remaking the learning experience.

For much of last school year, the Israel-Hamas war has between students, teachers, and , thrusting Banks into the spotlight when he testified before Congress in May, .

“This is a chancellor … who is authentic, who lives his life with integrity,” Banks said during a Sept. 13 press conference in response to questions about the federal investigations. “That’s the only way that I know how to be.”

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

A coalition of more than 100 New York organizations is urging the state to overhaul its nearly two-decade-old school funding formula.

The organizations, which previously joined forces to raise alarm over school programs that were put at-risk by the expiration of billions of dollars of federal pandemic stimulus funds, are now turning their attention to the state’s Foundation Aid formula.

In , issued on Monday, they called for a revision to how the formula accounts for student poverty, added funding for and the foster care system, increased support for students with disabilities and English language learners, and new funds for preschool students, as well as extra money to implement the state’s for New York City schools, among other changes.

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First implemented in 2007, the state’s formula is to meet student needs, many education experts and politicians agree. As part of a state budget agreement earlier this year, the Rockefeller Institute is conducting a study on how to revise the formula, which sends roughly $24.9 billion to school districts — including more than $9.5 billion to New York City schools.

Though Foundation Aid just recently for the first time, it relies on decades-old data to calculate some metrics of district needs. Other factors, such as the number of students living in temporary housing, don’t weigh into the current formula at all.

“Gov. Hochul and the state legislature deserve a lot of credit for fully funding Foundation Aid,” said Randi Levine, policy director of the nonprofit group Advocates for Children, one of the organizations that signed onto the statement. “But the formula was developed more than 15 years ago … and doesn’t address the current needs of students and schools. We think the time has come to make changes to this outdated formula and ensure it reflects the needs of today’s students and schools, with particular attention to students who need the most support.”

Some question state’s approach to updating school funding formula

Advocates have also called for the state to overhaul the base model the formula uses to determine funding, arguing it isn’t responsive to the needs of large, urban districts like New York City. Known as the “successful school district model,” the base of the formula is currently calculated using the average per-pupil funding from a subset of school districts that perform well on standardized state exams.

As part of its study, the Rockefeller Institute held a series of public hearings over the summer to solicit testimony on the current formula, and has been tasked with issuing recommendations by Dec. 1.

But some have over the state’s current approach to updating the formula, noting the Rockefeller Institute’s recommendations are not binding, and tasked the institute with developing a formula that is “fiscally sustainable for the state, local taxpayers, and school districts.”

“The key question should not be what is fiscally sustainable, but what our schools and students need to get a high quality education today,” Levine said. “This process could have major implications for students and schools in New York City and around the state, and it is essential that we get it right.”

Arlen Benjamin-Gomez, executive director of EdTrust-New York, added that the Rockefeller Institute has been given just months to conduct its study and issue recommendations.

“We are really concerned about the aggressive timeline, and that the stakeholder engagement was done at a time when folks just aren’t around,” she said. “I went to the New York City hearing and testified in front of a big, empty high school auditorium, because it was the middle of summer.”

During the last budget cycle, Hochul also introduced a tweak that adjusted how the formula accounts for inflation. That change led to the city missing out on roughly $120 million, though total state funding still increased for the year, according to city officials.

Though the city and state contributed roughly equal funding to New York City schools in the 2001-02 school year, advocates and city officials have noted that balance has shifted significantly in the two decades since. Today, the state contributes just over a third of the Education Department’s budget — meaning the city is shouldering a greater share of education spending, as overall costs have risen significantly over time.

Some of the changes the organizations are calling for echo suggestions voiced by the city’s Education Department. During the in Manhattan, schools Chancellor David Banks said the state should work to create a “more effective and equitable” school funding formula.

“Even with full funding, the Foundation Aid that we’re receiving has not kept pace,” Banks said, citing new challenges facing the city’s schools — including an influx of migrant students and expanded costs associated with services added over the past two decades, like 3-K and pre-K. “It is not nearly enough to support our students in the educational experience that they deserve.”

He called on the state to review the successful school district model, and to implement four specific changes: Providing funds for students in temporary housing and the foster care system, increasing weights for students with disabilities, updating regional cost calculations, and designating dollars to support the implementation of the state’s class size mandate.

Concerns over the formula are not unique to New York City, according to Marina Marcou-O’Malley, co-executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, another group that signed onto the Monday statement.

“The same concerns exist in every school district in the state that we have talked to,” she said.

Marcou-O’Malley noted she was alarmed during last year’s budget cycle to see the governor discussing changes that would result in some districts receiving less funding, despite Hochul continuing to point to her administration fully funding Foundation Aid.

“You can’t have it both ways,” she said. “You’re either going to fully invest in education and sustain that, or you’re going to be cutting education.”

In total, more than 110 organizations signed onto the Monday statement calling for the formula to be overhauled.

“It’s rare in education that so many folks are so aligned,” Benjamin-Gomez said. “Everybody agrees that this formula is outdated and needs to be updated.”

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) released A Nation at Risk (ANAR), which issued a wake-up call, named the state of US education a crisis, and presented thirty recommendations for action. It bears noting that the Commission’s recommendations were targeted in focus and scope, leaving the prevailing “one best” district-based education model intact. We will never know whether larger-scaled interventions were considered or not. Whatever the genesis, the final recommendations left education policymakers with an organizational checklist, and as the essays in this series have demonstrated, they responded accordingly.

A Nation at Risk + 40 brought together twelve exceptional scholars and thought leaders to review the nation’s response to the Commission’s challenge. At the outset of this research collaboration, compiling the record of forty years of school improvement efforts and summarizing the available evidence of their respective impacts on student outcomes appeared straightforward, if even a bit tedious. It turned out to be anything but that.

Each of the twelve essays fulfilled its assignment. In each strand of investigation, the authors documented the evolution of improvement activity and —where it exists — described the degree to which the efforts paid off. On its own, every one of the essays makes an important contribution to our ongoing national conversation about the critical state of the public K–12 education sector. While we make no claim that the scope of inquiry was definitive, the separate reviews cover billions of dollars in major programs and initiatives pursued by districts, states, and philanthropy. Many of these initiatives were incentivized by Congress and span Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. Our authors offer their own recommendations that, if followed, hold promise to improve conditions in the spheres they examined.

The research collaborative delivered an even more valuable asset, as the result is far more than the sum of the parts. Until the essays were gathered into a collection, the aggregate record of attempts to improve the K–12 education system in the United States was uncharted and unrecognized. We know of no other compilation that illuminates the sheer breadth of reform activity.

For the first time, we can compare the impacts across different areas of investment. Beyond this, taking the full collection as a whole augments the strand-specific recommendations with several crosscutting observations to inform future action.

What did we do?

There can be no dispute that, as a nation, we certainly tried hard to fix the problem. Practically speaking, we addressed every node that was mentioned by the Commission and several that weren’t. It is remarkable how doggedly educators, policy leaders, advocates, and funders have augmented policy and practice with interventions. The sheer volume and spread of reform efforts are worth examining, as they begin to shed light on the situation we currently face in public K–12 education.

Other scholars (Hattie 2023) have used evaluations and other research to rank the impact on student performance of various reforms. The impact estimates are drawn from a vast collection of meta analyses, yielding a super-meta-analysis that rank-orders reported results across different interventions. The rankings are widely interpreted as the definitive, adjudicated, and authoritative guide to improving student performance. In statehouses, state education agencies, and school districts, the rankings have taken on mythic proportions in guiding policy decisions about school improvement.

It is easy to see the appeal. The aim is noble, and the appetite is intense. Sadly, deeper inquiry into the rankings shows significant problems with the work: the desire to be expansive sits in tension with the need to apply stringent criteria about which meta-analyses are fed into the rankings. We learned that the underlying quality of the reform interventions themselves and the rigor of the research about their effects varied widely. To illustrate with a hypothetical: in the rankings, one thousand low-quality interventions with medium-strength evidence receive higher weight than one hundred high-quality interventions with a high-quality evaluation.

The concerns go beyond the problem of the quality of evidence. The implication for policymaking and educator practice is that the rankings encourage devotion to one or two marginal adjustments to schooling at the expense of lower-ranked options. The greatest risk lies in overlooking emerging successes for years until the next update to the rankings occurs.

Wishing to avoid a similar result, we chose a different approach to exploring the body of evidence. Beyond the notable volume of reform efforts attempted over the past forty years, it is useful to consider the points of the system that the various reforms were designed to change. This is important because many of the checklist items from ANAR’s recommendations aim at strengthening only one facet of the K–12 system, and the Commission did not offer recommendations on mixing, matching, or stacking multiple reform efforts.

The stability of the basic model of US K–12 public education over four decades is advantageous for our purposes because it supports a generalized theory of action, sometimes called a “logic model.” Theories of action specify the types of capital, staffing, and other resources that are needed to provide K–12 education. Theories of action also detail the policies and practices that are followed. Inputs and processes combine to produce a near-term result referred to as “outputs.” The eventual value of the results is identified as “outcomes.” With this lens, we classify the policies, programs, and initiatives discussed by the essay authors in order to learn about the targets and yields of reform activity. To be clear, some improvement efforts span our classification categories (e.g., some professional development includes input and process features); these are assigned by their most prevalent attributes.

Our authors are highly sensitive to the availability and caliber of research and evaluation. In many areas, such as public school choice and inclusion of master teachers in educator preparation programs, no evidence exists. In other areas, impact information is hindered by studies involving few examples, fuzzy specifications, or weak counterfactuals. Evaluative studies of school-based health centers and socio-emotional learning are examples where evidence of impact is lacking. The field of impact studies has evolved in constructive ways, but it still hinges critically on a weak commitment to objective assessment of impacts and the discipline to incorporate the insights into practice.

Inputs

A preponderance of the improvement efforts identified by the authors sought to adjust the inputs used by the education system. These include teacher-focused efforts such as alternative certification and incentive pay arrangements, adding school-based health centers, strengthening early childhood programs, and overhauling curriculum. System-focused input changes seek to expand the variety of inputs or the overall structure of the system, whereas marginal input reforms seek to improve the quality of the selective resources within the existing stock.

Taken together, these efforts aimed to enrich the ingredients in the “recipe” for K–12 education. Focusing reform attention on adjusting the quantity, quality, or intensity of a factor before it is used keeps the reform at arm’s length from the actual production of education. Think of upgrading tires on a race car — the improvement to the equipment takes place offline and then is brought online in the hopes of improved performance.

The evidence shows that the range of impacts for inputs-focused reforms run from zero to as much as three-quarters of a year of additional achievement for students. About half the input reforms have negligible or no effect on student academic achievement. The options that show no impact share the attribute of shallow or isolated treatment—a few hours of professional development or play-based preschool. For both system-focused and marginal input reforms, positive results point to interventions that have significant weight, scale, and duration to create and sustain the momentum for change. As examples, we see this in the small-schools movement (systems focused) and in laser-focused teacher professional development (marginal adjustments).

Input reforms assume that the rest of the system will respond organically to the change in the treated input. As the evidence shows, many efforts provided too little leverage to lift the rest of the operation. Worse, an exclusive input focus ignores the possible interactions with other components that may react in different ways than expected.

Processes

Process reforms aim to change the way education is created, delivered, and monitored by schools and their oversight bodies. To extend the recipe analogy, processes are the mixing and cooking instructions. Marginal process reforms attempt to mix inputs in new ways or interact inputs with new policies or protocols. Systemwide process changes try to ubiquitously reengineer old ways of doing things to produce better results, such as the experience of adopting the IMPACT teacher evaluation and compensation initiative in Washington, DC, or implementing a digital learning platform across all the middle schools in a district.

Given the challenges of designing and implementing new programs, it is little wonder that our authors found fewer process reform examples in their scans. Across the essays, the authors identified three general areas of process reforms.

Teacher professional development falls largely into the process category—selected areas of knowledge and skills are targeted to expand the capacity of teachers to perform their duties. This differs from input reforms, which are directed toward improving the number or quality of candidates at the point of hiring. The available evidence suggests that for much of the past forty years, there was little or no effect from a large proportion of professional development. Recent evidence, however, shows positive impacts when the programs are strictly focused, multifaceted, and sustained, producing between one and four months of extra achievement.

Incentive programs for higher teacher performance have strong impacts on student academic achievement for their duration, from about two months to an extra year of added achievement. However, these impacts are largely one sided; they did not induce low-performing teachers to move up or move out. Rather, they provided financial and work assignment flexibility incentives for teachers. Similar programs that trade extra compensation for teaching in the most challenging settings also produce strong student gains of similar magnitudes. Both types of reforms are highly vulnerable to political disruption at all points of the program, especially if teachers’ participation requires evaluation of their performance.

Technology adoptions can also be classified as process reforms. Once technology has been purchased and distributed, it serves a process function. The evidence of impact from the broad provision of education technologies has, for the most part, been disappointing, showing no impact and substantial stranding of investments. Despite that general trend, however, a number of significant and strongly positive examples of technology-supported education have emerged as promising proof points.

The third area of process reforms occurs at the governance level of the system. Since ANAR’s release, states have changed the way they fill key positions on their boards of education and within the Council of Chief State School Officers. The change in appointment mechanisms is a process change whose influence is systemwide. Likewise, changes in district school boards to a portfolio management model also flow across the district system. The evidence on these governance changes has been mixed.

It is clear that important differences exist between systemwide process changes and those that are marginal in nature. Some process reforms can work only if introduced systemwide, such as adoption of student safety protocols or school-based disciplinary programs; a “half a loaf” approach won’t work. Alternatively, marginal process change can be narrow in scope, in terms of either the focus of the reform or the organizational level that is targeted. Pilot programs are a clear example. In marginal process reforms, the rest of the schooling equation remains untouched. The balance between systems and marginal processes can shift either way depending on the interplay of cost, the scope of the planned innovation, friction with adjacent policies or practices, and political resistance.

Moreover, estimating the effects of process changes is technically and practically more difficult than measuring the effects of input shifts. The interactions of new processes with other factors and their dynamic nature over time create complexity that is difficult to measure. The body of evidence is therefore smaller than exists for input-focused changes. New instructional models such as discovery or expeditionary learning are process changes. The evidence on these is thin, except for personalized learning modalities, which show strongly positive effects on learning gains and graduation rates.

Likewise, the expansion of technology — equipment, connectivity, and content—in schools is a process change that has altered the way curriculum and instruction are organized and deployed. The impacts are sobering: unused resources cannot advance learning, but where strong implementation occurs, we also see improved student academic achievement.

The final set of process changes can be grouped as “infusion” efforts. Extended school years appear not to improve student results, but additional time in focused instruction helps; the extra time matters only if it is used well. Similarly, teacher and leader professional learning programs are seen as a mixed bag. As with extra time in school, the evidence shows that focused and targeted experience can produce positive impacts on student learning, but those conditions do not appear to be the norm.

Although they have a smaller evidence base, process reforms deal with larger segments of the education enterprise than inputs. Those that work share the attribute of internal design coherence, even if they do not fit well into the rest of the system. Finally, the larger the process reform, the more of a political target it offers to opponents.

Outputs

When we consider the near-term results of elementary and secondary education or the milestones on the way to reach these results, we are discussing outputs. These are the immediate products that reflect the end state that inputs and processes have created. In K–12 education, common outputs include meeting learning benchmarks for grade promotion, satisfying graduation requirements, and implementing performance measures for teachers and leaders. It bears noting that outputs are agnostic to inputs and processes: many combinations are possible to create a particular output.

Systems-oriented improvement efforts have been judged by both outputs and outcomes. In Cami Anderson’s essay on the results of districtwide reform strategies in Newark, New Jersey (chapter 12), early childhood enrollment increases of 35 percentage points were one output. Another was the rise of 20 points in the percent of Black students enrolled in above-average schools, followed by significant early gains in reading achievement and eventual gains in math. Ironically, the impressive improvements in Newark were not tallied to be a successful outcome, largely because of friction in the community and with elected leaders. Similar efforts under the US Department of Education School Improvement Program did not create positive results.

There are other examples of reforms that aim to change outputs. Redirecting school board activity to prioritize academics and student learning has been shown to produce positive movement on outcome measures for schools and districts.

The largest efforts to move outputs of elementary and secondary schooling lie in the national adoption of accountability programs. The consequential approach to school-based accountability advanced by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) improved learning by one half per year of student achievement and narrowed achievement gaps between groups of students. High school graduation rates increased by 15 percentage points with concomitant increases in college enrollments. These improvement trends persisted through 2015, but they have all but reversed over the past eight years, with student learning falling dramatically over the course of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Other efforts to affect teacher preparation programs also looked at outputs, but to no avail: current teacher certification exams are unable to predict future variations in teachers’ performance once they are in the classroom. Other common indicators, such as academic credentials or years of experience (also inputs), are similarly disconnected from future teacher performance.

Finally, some reform activities deliberately circumvent mainstream institutions and channels in an attempt to create better outputs. Extra-system initiatives can take the form of inputs or processes, or they can combine the two. Some options that have shown positive impacts for student results include mayoral control (significant gains in achievement and better fiscal controls) and gubernatorial appointment of state board members (better performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress assessments).

As noted by other scholars, school choice can arise within, across, or outside of school systems (Lake 2020). Intradistrict school choice redistributes seats in schools by changing the way students are assigned to schools; it aims to improve the outputs for the students who access better classrooms. As a process reform, it is associated with stronger achievement in math for minority students. Interdistrict choice is rare, and its effects are not well studied. Charter schools operate in a separate policy stream and deliver stronger growth and achievement in reading and math, especially in urban charter school networks (CREDO 2023). For vouchers, the impact for students on balance has not been positive; the evidence on vouchers shows weaker achievement for enrolled students even as they create positive spillover impacts on public schools. Other efforts that move outside the usual institutional arrangements are less understood. Newer options such as education savings accounts (ESAs) and microschools have yet to be examined in depth.

Outcomes

In an education theory of action, outcomes are the final results of the entire enterprise. Outcomes differ from outputs because they apply external standards and criteria to the nominal outputs to make judgments about what is “good enough.” So, while outputs may be expressed as test scores, CTE credentials, or course completions, when we apply evaluation standards such as postsecondary readiness, we are making judgments about the performance that was produced.

Since ANAR was released, we have gained clarity, if not conviction, about what we intend our schools to produce. Performance frameworks that illustrate the results that stakeholders deem desirable have grown in number and complexity. Across the country, charter school authorizers and state and local school boards use performance frameworks as central elements of school and district oversight and accountability. Newer examples of our collective expectations are seen in the work in some states to define the profile of a graduate, setting explicit criteria for what a high school diploma should represent.

By law, every state reports publicly on how its students and schools are performing. State-issued “report cards” for districts and schools generally include demographic information for teachers and students, operational and financial information, and student academic performance information. States set thresholds for student and school performance expectations, though these thresholds vary a lot. Whatever their aspirations, we are not in vastly different territory today than in 1983. Disappointing outcomes (e.g., high school math performance) have even prompted attempts to improve the optics by diluting some of the criteria (such as watering down the instructional frameworks or course requirements), but such maneuvers do nothing to alter the underlying reality.

Insights from the audience

As Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Indeed, the staggering array of treatments, interventions, redesigns, and innovations that our authors identified makes it a challenge to rationalize our collective experience into any semblance of order. If we had aimed for chaos at the outset, it is hard to imagine a better result.

Despite the cacophony, the catalog of activity amassed by the authors supports a few observations about our forty-year effort to reform that hold potential for illuminating future directions for elementary and secondary education in our country. After identification, we can characterize the record of reform efforts with six I’s: impulsive, incremental, incoherent, impatient, intransigent, and ineffective, as discussed below.

Impulsive

Most of the reforms were adopted at full scale—across an entire state or the nation. Many efforts to push programs across states or regions had roots in advocacy pressure to move reforms quickly. Many state leaders were game to bring new policies to their state if they were perceived as having been successful elsewhere, as it reduced the perception of risk and provided an existing model to copy.

Doing the “here, too” dance hobbled the new adopters in two ways. It skipped over analysis of the “fit” of the reform in the local context—and the important variation in local contexts — on the receiving end. It is impossible in hindsight to determine how many of the “mixed result” outcomes stemmed from differences in the settings on the ground, but it seems safe to say local contours were likely overlooked as most of the programs or policies were advanced. It is also true that jurisdiction-wide adoption curtailed the ability to evaluate implementation and impacts in real time, so valuable learning was lost at the get-go.

Incremental

The most pervasive attribute is the incremental nature of the interventions. This stems in part from the original recommendations of the ANAR Commission, framed as commonsensical and achievable changes. The commitment to incrementalism continued even when earlier efforts proved ineffective. One might argue that it made sense to aim small to soften implementation friction. The record suggests otherwise. Because the interventions were mostly narrowly focused, not only did they lack the scope or initial scale necessary to drive needed system changes, but in their sheer volume—so many reforms in so many areas—they led to a reform fatigue that lasts to this day.

It is important to note that the essays identified examples of successful reform that did not involve incremental adjustments. Systemwide efforts as described for Newark and new systems building as seen with charter schools have larger blueprints and therefore greater areas for change.

Incoherent

A third observation is that most of the changes undertaken over the past decades were launched with no consideration for how the reform would interact with the rest of the K–12 system. Changes to piece parts were designed and adopted as autonomous endeavors. This partially explains why many innovations fail to scale effectively.

This does not mean that things were only tried one at a time. Many examples exist of multiple incremental reforms launched simultaneously without an understanding of the interplay between them or with the rest of the equation. Reforms were “bolted on,” one after another, without regard for how they fit together. And each one that was added “diluted” the impact of the others. The resulting lack of coherence often led to unintended consequences that were never even considered, much less planned for.

One important implication of incoherence is a lost opportunity to ensure that stakeholders — especially the ground-level personnel—function with an understanding of the way the system works and how they belong in it; a well-crafted plan of action can provide that. A second implication is that it is difficult to objectively learn from experience, especially from unsuccessful ventures. When the general model is unorganized, it is hard to assign causality, for example, between lack of implementation fidelity of a sound design and a design that does not fit the context it is meant to improve.

Impatient

A separate issue that permeates the essays is the (often unstated) expectation that improvement efforts produce large demonstrable results almost immediately and without regard to the time requirements of the change being made. Changes to organizational culture need to occur rapidly, but other changes take time. Shifts in instructional methods often require more than a single year to stabilize enough to know how well they work. Incorporating new systems such as new-teacher onboarding can take even longer to reveal their true value and impact.

The expectation of quick results creates multiple harms. It doesn’t give the good parts time to take root or provide the space to iterate toward success. Moreover, it seeds unrealistic expectations about the diligence needed to give new approaches their due. From a political vantage, it gives the doubters and pouters a head start on declaring new reforms a failure. It also contributes to the “carousel,” as one teacher described it: “I don’t have to do anything but wait—in three years there will be something new.”

Compounding the problem, the governance side of the equation needs strong and enduring leadership to be patient with complicated, multifaceted reform efforts and to plan and invest for the long term. Even if the enabling conditions are understood and a proven scaling strategy is in place—such as with charter management organizations—when the reform in question needs ten to twenty years to come to fruition, rapid turnover cycles of education leaders lose important institutional knowledge, and politicians are short on patience (or incentive) to see it through.

All too often, the time needed to see results is longer than the amount of time politicians have in their seats, and it does not line up with the cyclical campaign and election cycle. Shortrun wins are coveted by political actors seeking to establish a record of success on which to build advancement. The bias toward quick returns and the lack of political will or appetite to invest in long-run solutions have a serious trickle-down effect: (1) a constant churn of reform that does not give space or time to realize success and (2) systems that learn to wait out the current wave of reforms, as “this, too, shall pass.” When the need for improvement is glaring but the actors in legislatures and education agencies prioritize their own short-run interests, we face compound system failure.

Intransigent

The authors carefully identified examples of reforms that produced positive student learning impacts, but many were subject to political interference or failed to perform at scale. Still, the examples show what may be possible. What they do not show is the complementing picture of the myriad reforms that went nowhere and evaporated into history. There is no tally of their number.

But anecdotal reports have consistently told the story of reform churn. Charles Payne’s phrase, “So much reform, so little change,” seems to apply. Instead of forty years of sustained and coherent reform, we have forty short-run reforms that each last three years. School teams are introduced to new practices during the professional development days that accompany the start of school each fall, with short windows of time to prepare for deployment and little implementation support during the year. The school teams learn about impacts indirectly — and often too late to try modifications. Decisions about continuing or terminating the effort usually do not include input from those on the front line. More often than not, new initiatives are quietly abandoned, with the cycle left to repeat itself the following year.

It is notable that, despite this endless churn of reforms, the prevailing institutional structure of “SEA, LEA school board, district administration, school leadership, grade/class grouping, teacher” remains largely unchanged, despite repeated pressures on it to adapt. The possibility exists that the summative effect of all the efforts over the years has fostered a resiliency to any improvement efforts—an adaptive state of resistance to change of its core activities. It may help to explain the tendency to shift focus to other facets of students, teachers, or teaching where ground may be more fertile for positive experience. There is no way to test this idea empirically, but it fits the pattern of the evidence and explains the abundant cynicism and burnout.

Ineffective

The strongest case for learning from our experience lies in our national trends on student performance. Given the authors’ reports, it is little wonder that, even before the blow to student learning of COVID-19 school closures, the long-run reports noted that US student performance was stagnant or in decline.

Two considerations help to explain our current state. Part of the problem is that, apart from formal pilots, most reforms launch without considering how to learn from them. We are seriously underresourced across the sector in measuring local conditions and reform effectiveness.

In addition, even after forty years, the system has significant internal inconsistency—it lacks a “unified theory” of how reform should be done. This essay collection recounts how many reforms were launched without a sufficient discussion of which level of the system (e.g., state, district, school) might be the most effective to lead the transformation efforts.

Conclusion

We face an even more daunting challenge today, which is that forty years of reform have exhausted everyone involved. The one thing we may have conclusively proven is that the system, as presently constituted, has been resilient to reforms at scale. A modern ANAR report might not fall on deaf ears—the need for school reform is real—but it would fall on ears that are tired of hearing about it.

What is clear is that we have a thin collection of reforms that have been shown to work and that can scale. None of the proven reforms seek to integrate with other proven reforms to concentrate their success. The larger the scale of innovation/reform, the larger the political target it presents for opponents of change.

What we do have is an impressive record of what not to do. We can’t assume that ideas that have been proven effective in one setting will be effective in every setting. We can’t expect change at the margins (no matter how well they are done) to be able to leverage an entire school model. We can’t impose reforms that ignore how the change affects other parts of the enterprise. We should accept these lessons as a form of learning in itself and perhaps the best final message of this exercise. Drawing on the six I’ —impulsive, incremental, incoherent, impatient, intransigent, and ineffective—may provide lodestars by which to assess new proposals toward more effective approaches to delivering strong education to our nation’s students.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: .