An administrative law judge has ruled that an Iowa school teacher committed job-related misconduct when he posted negative Facebook comments about conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

Matthew Kargol worked for the Oskaloosa Community School District as an art teacher and coach until he was fired in September 2025. Kargol then filed for unemployment benefits and the district resisted, which led to a recent hearing before Administrative Law Judge David Steen.

In his written factual findings of the case, Steen reported that on Sept. 10, 2025, Kargol had posted a comment to Facebook stating, “1 Nazi down.” That comment was posted within hours of authorities confirming Kirk had been shot and killed that day while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

When another Facebook user commented, “What a s—-y thing to say,” Kargol allegedly replied, “Yep, he was part of the problem, a Nazi.”

Steen reported that Kargol posted his comments around 5 p.m. and then deleted them within an hour. By 6 p.m., the district began fielding a number of telephone calls and text messages from members of the public, Steen found.

According to Steen’s findings, the district’s leadership team met that evening and included Kargol via telephone conference call. District leaders asked Kargol to resign, and he declined, after which the district officials said they were concerned for his safety due to the public’s reaction to his comments.

The district placed Kargol on administrative leave that evening, Steen found. The next day, district officials fielded roughly 1,500 telephone calls and received 280 voicemail messages regarding Kargol’s posts.

“These calls required the employer to redirect staff and other resources from their normal duties,” Steen stated in his ruling. “The employer also requested additional law enforcement presence at school facilities due to the possibility of physical threats, which some of the messages alluded to. The employer continued to receive numerous communications from the public for days after the post was removed.”

On Sept. 16, 2025, Superintendent Mike Fisher submitted a written recommendation to the school board to fire Kargol, with the two primary reasons cited as a disruption to the learning environment and a violation of the district’s code of ethics. Upon Fisher’s recommendation, the board fired Kargol on Sept. 17, 2025.

According to Steen’s findings, the district calculated the cost of its response to the situation was $14,332.10 – and amount that includes the wages of the regular staff who handled the phone calls and other communications.

As for the ethics-policy violation, Steen noted that the policy states that employees “are representatives of the district at all times and must model appropriate character, both on and off the worksite. This applies to material posted with personal devices and on personal websites and/or social media accounts.”

The policy goes on to say that social media posts “which diminish the professionalism” of the district may result in disciplinary action, including termination, if it is found to be disruptive to the educational environment.

The district, Steen noted, also has a policy on “employee expression” that states “the First Amendment protects a public employee’s speech when the employee is speaking as an individual citizen on a matter of public concern,” but that “even so, employee expression that has an adverse impact on district operations and/or negatively impacts an employee’s ability to perform their job for the district may still result in disciplinary action up to and including termination.”

Based on the policies and Kargol’s conduct, Steen concluded the district fired Kargol for job-related misconduct that disqualified him from collecting unemployment benefits.

The issue before him, Steen observed, wasn’t whether the district made a correct decision in firing Kargol, but whether Kargol is entitled to unemployment insurance benefits under Iowa law.

In ruling against Kargol on that issue, Steen noted Kargol was aware of district policies regarding social media use as well as work rules that specifically state employees are considered representatives of the school district at all times.

Kargol’s posts, Steen ruled, “reflected negatively on the employer and were against the employer’s interests.” The posts also “caused substantial disruption to the learning environment, causing staff at all levels to need to redirect focus and resources on the public’s response for days after the incident,” Steen stated.

Kargol’s federal lawsuit against the school district, alleging retaliation for exercising his First Amendment right to expression, is still working its way through the courts.

In that lawsuit, Kargol argues that in comments made last fall, Fisher made clear that his condemnation of Kargol’s Facebook posts “was rooted in his personal beliefs, not in evidence of disruption. Speaking as ‘a man of faith,’ Fisher expressed disappointment in the state of society and disapproval of Mr. Kargol’s expression. By invoking his personal religious identity in condemning Mr. Kargol’s speech, Fisher confirmed that his reaction was based on his own values and ideology, not on legitimate pedagogical concerns.”

The district has denied any wrongdoing in that case. A trial date has yet to be scheduled.

have been filed against their former employers by Iowa educators, a public defender and a paramedic, all of whom allege they were fired or sanctioned for online comments posted in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death.

Earlier this week, and its executive director, alleging they improperly solicited complaints related to anti-Kirk social media posts.

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.

A new application designed to scale up extra help, was launched in the winter of 2024. Since then, a disembodied voice has been assessing students’ work in fifth- through 12th-grade math and responding as they write out equations, speak or type their questions.

But come early October, the company says, that same gentle drilling will be delivered by the teachers they know best — but only if these often tech-wary educators allow the avatar feature. 

Sawyer Altman, who co-created the app and gave it a quirky name to stand out in a crowded field, bets they will: Goblins embraces — rather than replaces — their role, he said.

“We believe the connection a teacher has with their students is very special and it’s an essential part of that social motivation, the idea that this person sees me, cares about me, is willing to invest in me,” Altman said. “We want to make it possible for teachers to step into this new era of education, which is AI enhanced, on their own terms, where they are still the center of teaching.”

More than a quarter of Goblins’ 16,000 student users — whom Altman said he landed by cold calling their school districts — are located in New York City. 

But his technology can be found in 24 states spanning urban and rural communities, from Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona to Putnam County School District in Florida and a string of Pennsylvania private schools, he said. Students use Goblins for help with Algebra 1 more than any other course.

Michael Molchan, who teaches high school-level math and science to some 40 students at a regional, four-county education center in Pennsylvania, said he’s had good luck with Goblins so far and is open to being “cloned.”  

“If a little avatar of Mr. Molchan opens up and sounds like me, that could be another way of connecting with students and I would certainly be all for that,” he said, adding AI is evolving quickly and that teachers should accept rather than fear it. “If we embrace it and encourage it, but also help the students understand how to use it, they will be better for it.”

Altman, 30 and a 2017 Stanford University graduate who majored in science, technology and society, served briefly as a precalculus teacher at a New York City high school. 

He loved working one-on-one with students to identify gaps in their knowledge — and the relief that came with addressing a problem that could harm their grades and self-confidence, he said. 

With up to 30 kids in a class though, there wasn’t enough of him to go around, he said. That frustration is what prompted him to create the app, which he markets as a math teacher cloning device. 

Altman knows of and hopes his company can overcome the challenges others could not. 

“For so long, ed tech has been hampered by the fact that the tools they created are just not that engaging,” Altman said. “There has been this dream of personalization for at least a decade.”

And now, he said, it’s here. Altman’s AI-powered learning competitors in the math space include the better-known IXL, IReady and the household name that is Duolingo. 

But, he argues, his company’s product, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, is more varied in its communication, conversing with students using speech, handwriting and text. The accompanying avatar will be a step beyond that. 

The cartoonish icons are surprisingly easy to make: Teachers upload a single selfie and then speak into their phone or computer’s microphone for just 30 seconds to create an image in their likeness, he said. 

Goblins works on multiple devices, including touch screen and non-touch screen Chromebooks, iPads and smartphones. Its verbal feedback is accompanied by a written transcript and guides students using Socratic or open-ended questioning, Altman said.

Jenn Tifft is a sixth-grade math and science teacher at Rutland Town School in Vermont and has been using Goblins for about a year. She said her students enjoyed learning to craft their interaction with the app to get the type of support they need. 

“They get to learn how to use AI as a tool to help guide them, as opposed to doing their work for them,” she said. “They liked having it as an option in the classroom.” 

But at least one critic disagrees with Altman’s approach. Benjamin Riley is founder of Cognitive Resonance, a consulting company which seeks to help people understand cognitive science and generative AI. He’s long been skeptical about AI’s role in education — and even more so about this endeavor. 

“Whether the avatar looks and sounds like the actual teacher is irrelevant,” he said. “It is not sentient, and therefore has no capacity to imagine what is happening in the minds of students. This is true of all AI ‘tutoring’ systems. And having it look and sound like the actual human teacher strikes me as a particularly bad idea. What will happen to classroom norms when kids discover they can be rude to the avatar in ways they would never dare with an actual human?”

Altman understands Riley’s concerns, admitting his is a novel technology that “has the potential to rewrite classroom norms.” But he said, too, the context of the classroom keeps kids accountable for their behavior.

Goblins, a private company of just six employees, offers its services in more than 30 languages. And the type of information it generates helps more than the students themselves, Altman said: Classroom teachers have access to a truncated transcript of their students’ interaction with the app and analytics, helping them zero in on any weak points. 

This, Altman said, better informs their interaction with individual students, or, if several children are ensnared in a mathematical quagmire, rearrange the focus of their lessons.

, achievement director for middle school math at KIPP NJ, piloted Goblins last school year before expanding its use to some 550 sixth graders in Newark.

She said the technology helps them with geometry, ratios, fractions and rational numbers, among other topics — and agrees with Altman on the time-saving element.

“Teachers’ response has been fairly positive overall,” she said, adding that it helps children understand more than whether they answered a question correctly.  “It identifies where they might have made a mistake and whether they are far away from the right answer — or close to it.”

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When Brigitta Hunter started her teaching career, she had $20,000 in student loans and zero income – even though she was working nearly full time in the classroom.

“We lived on my husband’s pathetic little paycheck. I don’t know how we did it,” Hunter said. “And we were lucky – he had a job and my loans weren’t that bad. It can be almost impossible for some people.”

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Each year, about 28,000 people in California work for free for about a year as teachers or classroom aides while they complete the requirements for their teaching credentials. That year without pay can be a dire hardship for many aspiring teachers, even deterring them from pursuing the profession.

A new bill by Assemblymember , a Democrat from Torrance, would set aside money for school districts to pay would-be teachers while they do their student teaching service. The goal is to help alleviate the teacher shortage and attract lower-income candidates to the profession.

“Nothing makes a bigger difference in improving the quality of public education than getting highly qualified teachers in the classroom,” Muratsuchi said. “This bill helps remove some of the obstacles to that.”

Big loans, low pay

To be a K-12 public school teacher in California, candidates need a bachelor’s degree and a teaching credential, typically earned after completing a one-year program combining coursework and 600 hours of classroom experience. During that time, candidates work with veteran teachers or lead their own classes.

Teacher credential programs cost between $20,000 and $40,000, depending on where a student enrolls and where they live. In 2020, about 60% of teachers borrowed money to finish their degrees, according to a , with loans averaging about $30,000 for a four-year bachelor’s degree and a credential program.

Entering the profession with hefty student loans can be demoralizing and stressful, the report said, adding to the challenges new teachers face. The in California is $58,000, according to the National Education Association, among the highest in the country but still hard to live on in many parts of the state. It could take a decade or more for teachers to pay off their loans.

Muratsuchi’s bill, , passed the Assembly on Monday and now awaits a vote in the Senate. It would create a grant program for districts to pay student teachers the same amount they pay substitute teachers, which is roughly $140 a day. The overall cost would be up to $300 million a year, according to Assembly analysts, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has set aside $100 million for the program in his revised budget.

Muratsuchi has another bill related to teacher pay, also working its way through the Legislature. , which passed the Assembly this week, would raise teacher salaries across the board.

Paying teachers, saving money

Christopher Carr, executive director of Aspire Public Schools in Los Angeles, a network of 11 charter schools, called the bill a potential “game changer.”

Teacher candidates often have to work second jobs to make ends meet, and sometimes finish with debt of $70,000 or more, he said. That can be an insurmountable barrier for people with limited resources. Paying would-be teachers would attract more people to the teaching profession, especially Black and Latino candidates, he said.

School districts around the state have been trying to diversify their teacher workforces, based on that Black and Latino students tend to do better academically when they have at least one teacher of the same race.

Carr’s schools pay their teachers-in-training through grants and a partnership with a local college, which has led to more of them staying on to teach full time after they receive their credentials, he said. That has saved the schools money by reducing turnover.

“This could open doors and be a step toward racial justice,” Carr said. “California has a million spending priorities, but this will lead to better outcomes for students and ultimately save the state money.”

Tyanthony Davis, chief executive director of Inner City Education Foundation, a charter school network in Los Angeles, put it this way: “If we have well paid, qualified, happy teachers, we’ll have happier classrooms.”

No opposition, yet

Muratusuchi’s bill has no formal opposition. The California Taxpayers Association has not taken a position. The California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, is a supporter.

“This legislation comes at a critical time as we continue to face an educator recruitment and retention crisis,” said David Goldberg, the union president. “Providing new grants to compensate student teachers for important on-the-job training is a strong step forward in the right direction to strengthening public education.”

Hunter survived her student-teaching experience and went on to teach fourth grade for 34 years, retiring last year from the Mark West Union School District in Santa Rosa. The last 15 years of her career she served as a mentor to aspiring teachers. She saw first-hand the stress that would-be teachers endure as they juggle coursework, long days in the classroom and often second jobs on nights and weekends.

But paying student-teachers, she said, should only be the beginning. Novice teachers also need  smaller class sizes, more support from administrators and more help with enrichment activities, such as extra staff to lead lessons in art and physical education.

“We definitely need more teachers, and paying student teachers is a good start,” Hunter said. “But there’s a lot more we can do to help them.”

This article was and was republished under the license.

Mayor Eric Adams and the city’s second-largest union, the United Federation of Teachers, struck a tentative five-year agreement on Tuesday, one that significantly raises starting salaries for newly hired teachers and includes a major expansion of remote learning.

The deal, which must be approved by the union’s 120,000 members, guarantees raises of 17.58% to 20.42% by 2026, including compounded wage increases and bonuses.

In addition to broadening an existing pilot on remote learning, high schools and combined middle-high schools will be able to offer virtual learning programs after school and on weekends. Students and teachers will have to volunteer to participate in the remote programs, according to a summary of the agreement.

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The UFT and the Adams administration also agreed to a yearly, perpetual retention bonus, which will top out at $1,000 by 2026, and an additional one-time $3,000 ratification bonus.

The starting salary for new teachers would be $72,349, including the bonuses, by the end of the proposed agreement — up from the current $61,070 floor, according to the UFT. The top salary for paraprofessionals would be $56,761.

The deal is retroactive to September 2021, when the most recent contract expired. It provides for 3% raises for the first three years and 3.25% bonus in the final two years, a pattern similar to that in February.

Adams announced the agreement from the City Hall rotunda Tuesday afternoon alongside UFT President Michael Mulgrew, Schools Chancellor David Banks and Office of Labor Relations Commissioner Renee Campion.

“I’m proud to announce that the city of New York has reached a tentative five-plus year contract agreement with the United Federation of Teachers that provides substantial wage increases for the people who teach, support and safeguard our children and secures a fair deal for taxpayers as well,” Adams said.

Virtual Expansion

The after-hours virtual learning expansion in the nation’s largest school district that allows students to log in, from their own school buildings, to take online courses taught by public school teachers in other parts of the city.

The program outlined in Tuesday’s tentative agreement would begin in the 2023-2024 school year, with 25% of high schools eligible to be selected. All high schools will be eligible to participate by 2027-28, according to the UFT’s summary of the agreement.

Students and teachers would not be required to participate in virtual learning. Rather, schools where students miss hours or days of school because of work would be able to offer virtual lessons outside of traditional school hours. Teachers would not take extra time in order to teach the after-hours virtual lessons: their time will be redistributed.

Adams said he was “proud” of the proposed remote learning experiment, saying it “will create new opportunities for our students, including those who want the ability to take classes at non-traditional times like evenings and weekends, as well as those whom traditional in-person schedules don’t work for.”

Mulgrew also noted the remote-learning pilot would also benefit students who fall behind on literacy.

In line with the contract covering DC37 municipal workers, some UFT members who do not work directly in schools would be eligible to work remotely up to two days a week under the deal, according to the teachers’ union.

Campion and Mulgrew said health care premiums and benefits, a key concern for many union members, remain unchanged.

“We’re not getting rid of our benefits,” Mulgrew said in response to questions from THE CITY. “I wish the rest of America would do what we’re doing here in New York City because health care is a crisis and it is destroying the pocketbooks of so many families.”

Mulgrew also announced the tentative agreement will cut in half — from 15 to eight years — the length of time it takes most teachers to reach a salary of $100,000.

The union president also highlighted the retention bonus as a win for members.

“And that goes on forever, in perpetuity,” Mulgrew said. “We’re saying to all of our titles and every member, whether you’re in the first year or your 25th year, New York City is saying that we appreciate you, and we recognize the challenges that you take on every day.”

Additional reporting by Katie Honan

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in rural, segregated Kentucky, hooks graduated from Stanford University in 1974 with a degree in English literature. Throughout the course of her career, she wrote dozens of books under the name she adopted to honor her maternal great-grandmother. Each one helped cement her reputation as a great thinker, a woman whose observations about education, race and love would earn iconic status among the many students she taught through the years and the hordes of other college and graduate students assigned her work.

“To me the classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place of passion and possibility, a place where spirit matters, where all that we learn and know leads us into greater connection, into greater understanding of life lived in community,” she wrote in her 2003 book, .

A feminist scholar and social activist, hooks was most recently a distinguished professor in residence in Appalacian studies at Berea College. She died Dec. 15 at age 69 after an extended illness, the Kentucky university.  

Stephanie J. Hull is the president and CEO of Girls Inc., a national organization that serves — through programing and advocacy — more than 132,000 girls through a network of 80 local organizations across the U.S. and Canada. She was first introduced to hooks in graduate school at Harvard and later taught some of her work at Dartmouth.

“I never read or heard anything from her that I didn’t admire,” Hull said of hooks. “What she spoke was important. What she wrote was important. Her way of thinking and her approach was so transformative … and so challenging — but in a very productive way.”

Hull knew her own accomplishments were substantive, having risen to academic heights as a Black woman in the 1960s and ’70s. But, she said, she didn’t feel the weight of racism in her daily life, in part because of women like hooks.

“She broke that ground and made it less remarkable for me,” Hull said. “bell hooks meant for us to build on what she built. I don’t think she meant for us to stop at that point. Her work says, ‘Keep going.’”

That’s exactly what Ashley Rodriguez Lantigua, 20, hopes to do. A first-generation college student, she was particularly moved by hooks’s book  A student at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, she wants to one day work in education.

She said she drew inspiration from hooks’s assertion that love should be at the center of the classroom. If that were the case, Rodriguez Lantigua said, schools would look remarkably different.

“Without an ethic of love in a classroom, we can’t center wellness, especially in the schools I have gone through, public schools, with their focus on standardized testing,” Rodriguez Lantigua said, adding that hooks encouraged her to create something better. “I see it as a space for healing where children are reminded of their power and their ability to dream.”  

But hooks’s work wasn’t just about helping others. Serena Natile, an academic and feminist activist, said Teaching to Transgress made her feel legitimized, allowing her to abandon the stereotype she had come to embrace as a standard for the field — one she did not fit.

“My strength was very different and was a great one and I had to use that — not to lecture behind the table, but create more conversations with students, changing the way they would approach me … and listen to them more,” said Natile, an assistant professor at the University of Warwick’s School of Law in the U.K.

An English professor at the University of Central Florida, Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés admired hooks as a teacher, writer and critic. 

“The one thing that stood out to me from the beginning was how directly she spoke to the reader — with no footnotes, no highfalutin’ academic lingo,” Rodríguez Milanés said. “She was writing in plain English and it was really impressive to me. It made me think, ‘I belong in academe, too.’”

Rodríguez Milanés said hooks also helped her fight the imposter syndrome she’s battled throughout her career, her fear that someone might some day rip away the Ph.D. she worked so hard to earn. And while hooks might have, in her early works, appealed mostly to Black women, she later expanded to all.

“By the time we got to Teaching to Transgress and Feminism is for Everyone, she was reaching across different communities,” she said, adding that the Latin community started to quote her work, reflecting its universality.   

Sarah Brown, senior educational specialist at the Center for Powerful Public Schools, an organization founded in 2003 to help schools create a more equitable and motivational learning environment, is dedicating the next year to rereading hooks’s works.

“There are just so many aspects of my different identities that she spoke to,” Brown said. “There is only one bell hooks, only one who could so eloquently and yet succinctly capture it all.”

Alicia Montgomery, the Center’s executive director, said hooks encouraged Black women such as herself to speak up and be heard no matter how their opinions are received.

“She would say things people would not like,” Montgomery said. “When you want to be authentically yourself, you have to do that knowing what it is going to cost.”

Hooks’s legacy will live on through those she’s touched, Montgomery said.

“We will speak her into existence,” she said, adding hooks’s work is no doubt inspiring other young Black and brown thought leaders in the making. “I’m waiting to see what that next bell hooks has to say.”

March 12, 2020, was my last typical day in the classroom before COVID-19 changed everything. When my district closed the following day, I assumed, as did many, that this was a temporary precaution. As the closure continued, fear began to set it in. With each passing week, I worried that the growth in reading my first-graders and I worked so hard for would fade away.

Many schools have been closed for in-person instruction for over a year. While models of hybrid and remote instruction have evolved, many students have not re-entered the classroom. Teachers and caregivers rightfully worry about the long-term adverse effects of interrupted instruction.

Many pre-pandemic instructional approaches to teaching reading were already failing students and teachers. Only in the U.S. had achieved reading proficiency at grade level in 2019. As the years go by, the gaps become larger, and as instruction shifts from learning to read to reading to learn, students who are reading below grade level seldom catch up to their peers. And for many children, the consequences of reading failure extend beyond difficulty in the classroom. These students often confront significant social and emotional challenges as they become increasingly aware of their differences from their classmates.

Teachers are not immune from the consequences of reading failure. They want nothing more than to help their students experience success, and the pressure they feel to ensure their students succeed despite factors beyond their control can be overwhelming. It is unsurprising that nearly .

The stress of COVID-19 has only exacerbated these challenges. When my district reopened for in-person classes in the fall of 2020, we were faced with difficult decisions about how to best deliver instruction. One factor that helped streamline this transition for educators at my school was our background in and knowledge of instructional practices aligned with the. Having an extensive knowledge base of what we needed to teach allowed us to focus on how we would teach.

The science of reading is a vast body of scientifically based research about reading and writing. This research has been conducted over the last five decades and has resulted in thousands of studies that inform effective literacy assessment and teaching practices. The findings from the science of reading can inform educators about which approaches and programs provide the most benefit to the most learners, closing gaps in foundational skills and other aspects of reading and writing.

At our school, all students take a series of short screening tests to assess reading ability at the beginning of the school year. Using results from these tests and other ongoing student progress assessments, I then tailor lesson plans and provide supplemental instruction throughout the year. If a student receives a low score in a particular area, I conduct a follow-up assessment to learn the underlying reason for the difficulty. For example, if students score poorly on a measure of oral reading fluency, I then administer a phonics test to see if their fluency is being hampered by phonic patterns they have not yet learned.

Next, I analyze data from all the students’ assessments and create small groups focused on the literacy skill(s) students need to work on. One group may receive additional instruction on reading and writing words with a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, while another practices words featuring the silent E. If a student is not making adequate progress, I adjust the intensity of reading instruction, the amount of one-on-one time spent with that student or the group’s size. Implementing evidence-aligned instructional practices in small groups focused specifically on topics students need the most practice with allows me to maximize limited instruction time — which has become especially critical in ever-evolving distance learning environments.

This model shifted minimally during the 2020-21 school year, even in the midst of school closures. As educators training in the findings derived from the science of reading, my colleagues and I built virtual lessons that center on the critical components of foundational reading skills. We conducted reading exercises to practice skills such as , the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words, on video with small groups of students. Using other online platforms, we created interactive lessons in which students practiced reading and writing specific words, and reading full sentences and answering corresponding comprehension questions. The software enabled us to see all students’ screens at once and gauge who was on target and who needed additional support. It also provided information for planning subsequent lessons.

Understanding evidence-based approaches to learning dictated our lesson planning, while the digital tools help bring them to fruition. Having a strong understanding of the science of reading also allowed us to teach creatively and flexibly, to effectively meet each student’s needs.

Educators at my school learned a great deal during our brief time teaching remotely, and we applied some of these methods when we resumed in-person instruction. A major obstacle of COVID-era teaching, even in person, is that students cannot leave their classrooms and I cannot pull together students from multiple classrooms who have similar skill levels. To ensure small-group instruction could continue, we leveraged our student teachers, who were able to participate only in remote instruction even after we returned to the classroom. The student teachers virtually led small groups composed of students needing intervention on the same skills from the four classrooms in our grade level.

There are multiple factors that teachers cannot control; one person alone cannot make the systematic changes needed for all children to reach proficiency in literacy. But one knowledgeable teacher can forever change the trajectory of a student’s life. Students will face many challenges once they leave the classroom. Low literacy does not need to be one of them.

Jessica Pasik is a reading specialist with the Fulton City School District in New York, an adjunct professor of literacy at SUNY Oswego and a board member of the national literacy education nonprofit .

One of the most contentious debates in education as students return to their classrooms is how to address learning loss due to the pandemic. A recent survey showed that of U.S. adults are concerned with students’ academic progress, and there is no shortage of ideas about how to make up for lost time.

But how do children feel after this extremely challenging year?

The widespread concern over learning loss isn’t lost on my fourth-graders. And if they are to overcome the obstacles ahead and not only catch up, but thrive academically, they’ll first need to believe it’s possible. In my classroom, cultivating a growth mindset and trusting relationships has always been routine — now, it feels more essential than ever.

When we returned to in-person learning last fall, my classroom was a sea of tiny eyes and colorful masks. While we were thrilled to be back in school, not being able to see each other’s expressions — our smiles, our questioning glances, our looks of concentration — made it hard to connect. On top of that, my students were struggling to pick up where they’d left off before schools shuttered in the spring, and their confidence was fading. To get things on track, I turned to video journaling.

From the beginning, the videos offered the only way for me to see my students’ full faces and smiles, and for them to see mine. But over the next several months, our videos became the place where we’d explore our capacity to overcome challenges, big and small. Now, each week, I send my students a reflection question though , a video journal. They then use their phone or laptop to record themselves sharing their thoughts, or they can respond through text if they prefer. They upload their reflections to the secure platform, where I am the only one who sees it. If I want to follow up with a response, I can do so.

Because it’s a one-on-one forum, students can be honest and open in their responses. I can pose a range of questions to see how they are really doing, from asking them to share about a time they helped someone to talking about how they cope with stress. It has created a space that is comfortable for them to reflect on their learning, while introducing me to their interests and hobbies — all of which carry great weight in the classroom. If I know that one of my students is passionate about playing baseball, it gives me something to call upon when they’re struggling in class and need to be reminded of the power of practice.

If a student shares a personal story about coping with stress, it creates an opportunity for me to affirm those feelings and develop a trusting relationship. These connections are critical — students must trust that the work I assign is worth their time, that they’re safe to take risks in their learning and that they can seek help without fear of embarrassment. Learning recovery won’t happen without these trusting relationships.

Many of my students have become more confident in class since we’ve started video journaling regularly. For those who are still learning to read and write, it gives them a way to successfully express themselves and their ideas directly with me, which has empowered them to take more chances during our literacy lessons.

As we anticipate what schools will look like in the future, it’s likely that students and teachers will continue to wear masks — and video journaling allows educators and children to see beyond them. In addition, as we look for ways to help students recover and grow after this difficult year, helping them see themselves as capable instead of behind will be important. I’ll continue to use different tools to foster the confidence my students will need to fearlessly tackle whatever challenges might lie ahead, in the postpandemic era and beyond.

Tava Dennis is a fourth-grade teacher at Sonoma Heights Elementary School in Winnemucca, Nevada.

The National Teacher of the Year program is a unique fixture in America’s education landscape — an annual, highly publicized recognition of excellence in the art of teaching, complete with a national tour and a trip to the Rose Garden. One day you’re leading a tenth-grade biology seminar; the next, you’re a combination Kennedy Center honoree and a World Series winner.

The selection process continues in 2021 even in the middle of an utterly atypical school year, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington, D.C., awaiting a final decision from the Council of Chief State School Officers, which has conferred the award since 1952. The winner will be granted access to leadership training, influential policy networks, and a platform to discuss the issues and students they care about for the next 12 months.

But where are these professional exemplars coming from? A new study examines the characteristics of Teachers of the Year over the last three decades, finding that winners disproportionately teach in schools with lower-than-average numbers of low-income kids. Both at the state and national levels, underrepresented teachers include those working with special-needs students, those who teach in elementary and middle schools, and those employed by charter schools.

Lead author Christopher Redding, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Florida, told ����Ӱ�� in an interview that little previous research focused on the selection process for Teacher of the Year. Given the rarity of education policies and institutions that place educators in leadership roles, he noted, that made it a ripe area for investigation.

“We structured the study to treat the program as something that deserves attention in and of itself,” Redding said. “You want to have a large role for teachers to be able to advocate for the profession, and at least as the program is designed now, it’s really trying to be a vehicle to accomplish that aim. So it seems like we should be asking who is going to have the opportunity to speak on behalf of the teaching profession.”

Redding and co-author Ted Myers used publicly available information to identify over 1,600 state and national Teachers of the Year — each year, the CCSSO picks finalists and an ultimate national winner from the ranks of state Teachers of the Year, who are themselves selected by their districts and state education agencies — between 1988 and 2019. Matching each winner to their respective schools, they used data from a pair of ongoing, nationwide school surveys to compare the Teachers of the Year against the wider population of American educators.

The results show that the winners, and the places they work, are disproportionately drawn from a few categories. Thirty percent of recent National Teachers of the Year have been English instructors, while 23 percent have taught social studies; those percentages are, respectively, three and four times greater than the share of those teachers in the American teaching ranks. No National Teachers of the Year have taught health, foreign languages, or career and technical education, and just one (Tabatha Rosproy, ) has been an early childhood educator.

The authors specifically cite special education staff as being overlooked; while 10 percent of teachers in their nationally representative sample worked with special-needs students, only 3 percent of state-level Teachers of the Year did. Given the pronounced differences in training, credentialing, and work responsibilities between those working in the field versus their peers in general education classrooms, the authors argue, it is reasonable to ask whether their professional concerns will find a voice in the program’s advocacy efforts.

Schools where winners worked tended to be much bigger than other schools in their state, enrolling 415 more students on average. That’s explained somewhat by the fact that Teachers of the Year are generally more likely to come from high schools — some 46 percent of all winners, compared with 20 percent of teachers nationwide. And while charter schools were underrepresented by about three percentage points among those producing Teachers of the Year, magnet schools were slightly overrepresented.

Most strikingly, schools where Teachers of the Year were selected also enrolled 8.4 percent fewer low-income students (those eligible for free and reduced-price lunch) than other schools in their state and award year. In 26 years out of 32 studied, award recipients also worked in schools with smaller shares of minority students than the state average, though the disparity in that instance was narrower (1.7 percentage points).

It’s unclear what factors might explain the trends in selection. The weight of research evidence indicates that top-performing teachers are in comparatively affluent schools and districts, while schools that disproportionately enroll more low-income and non-white students tend to hire younger staff with much less classroom experience. Whatever the cause, in Redding’s view, that demographic mismatch raises the question of whether the Teacher of the Year program — one of only a few elevating the voices of school employees, and by far the most prominent — can fully represent the views of most teachers.

“What stands out the most is that it does really seem like teachers from high-poverty schools are less likely to be selected,” he noted. “If that shapes the issues that are being [raised], it underrepresents the ones that might be of most concern to teachers working in high-poverty schools.”

Over the last few years, National Teachers of the Year have increasingly found themselves either willing or reluctant participants in the national conversation around education politics. When Boston charter school teacher Sydney Chaffee received the award in 2017, members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association voted down a motion to offer her congratulations even though she was the state’s first national winner. More recently, 2019 National Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson Donald Trump after the president declined to attend his award ceremony in person. He has for tweeting out a joke calling for violence against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConell.

But the most famous example is that of 2016 winner Jahana Hayes, who used her year of notoriety to begin a political career that has now taken her to Congress.

Sarah Brown Wessling, the interim director of the National Teacher of the Year program (and herself the 2010 National Teacher of the Year), told ����Ӱ�� via email that the Council of Chief State School Officers was “constantly striving to improve the program and our supports to teachers.”

“CCSSO is proud of state efforts to diversify the selection of State Teachers of the Year, and of the national Selection Committee’s attention to selecting finalists and National Teachers of the Year who can represent teachers and students across the country. Recent National Teachers of the Year have taught in a variety of settings representative of America’s schools and students, from preschoolers in a small town to immigrant and refugee high school students in larger cities.”

Juliana Urtubey — pre-K-to-5 special education teacher from the Clark County School District in Nevada — is the National Teacher of the Year, the Council of Chief State School Officers today on CBS This Morning.

First lady Jill Biden surprised Urtubey at Booker Elementary School to make the announcement.

Urtubey works with classroom teachers to improve instruction for students with special needs. 

“I get to be part of a whole new world with so many students,” she told host Gayle King about her love for teaching, adding that her students “have made that same kind of impact on my life.”

John Arthur, Utah’s Teacher of the Year, recently received a visit from a former student at Meadowlark Elementary School in Salt Lake City. Addressing him as “Captain” — the nickname students gave him based on a manga character — the eighth grader didn’t mince words.

“What’s it like being the teacher of the worst year ever?” he asked.

Arthur emphasized the positive. He worked on becoming more dynamic, using song, dance and stories to maintain his students’ interest during the long, lonely days of Zoom. And on Wednesdays, he and a few students jump in his car after school to deliver math and science materials and meals to the doorsteps of students learning from home.

“I got into this out of a love of teaching,” said Arthur, whose parents wanted him to become a doctor. “I believe in public service, and never will that service mean more than it does this year.”

Arthur — along with Alejandro Diasgranados of the District of Columbia, Maureen Stover of North Carolina and Juliana Urtubey of Nevada — are candidates for National Teacher of the Year, which the Council of Chief State School Officers is expected to announce this week. In their own way, each would likely echo Arthur’s sentiment: Even the best educators had to learn new skills this past year to connect with students.

“We are welcomed guests in families’ homes. We got to peek in and see what it looks like,” said Urtubey, a pre-K-5 special education teacher who supports 10 classrooms at Booker Elementary School in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas.

She watched a mother, father, grandmother and cousin take turns helping a student with autism during distance learning so the responsibility wouldn’t fall on one family member, and witnessed other parents upend their work schedules to stay home with their children.

“Not a day goes by that a teacher doesn’t tell me something awesome their families did,” Urtubey said.

She was trained as a bilingual teacher in Arizona — just as the state implemented Proposition 203, requiring English as the only language of instruction.She gravitated to special education because of a provision in the law allowing students with disabilities to receive bilingual services.

One day, she had an “aha” moment about the potential of all students to learn: She caught a fifth grader, who couldn’t read at a kindergarten level, “running a business out of his backpack.” He sold pencils, erasers and snacks, keeping a balance sheet to track revenues and expenses.

“He planted a seed,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, let’s figure out a way to use this for academic intervention.’”

Unlocking the magic

At Cumberland International Early College High School, located on the campus of Fayetteville State University, a lot of Stover’s students enter ninth grade needing intervention. The state’s early college high schools target students from underrepresented minority groups in line to be the first in their families to attend college.

The students who thrive in the model are “motivated, but behind,” Stover said. “There is magic in them that we can unlock.”

A former intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force who served in the Middle East, Stover teaches biology, environmental science and a class that prepares students for college. When her students transitioned to distance learning, the casual interactions she shared with them in the classroom and eating lunch together in the student union stopped.

Over Zoom, many clammed up. She encouraged them to bring their pets on screen and gave them a virtual tour of the raised beds in her backyard, using the outdoors to spark conversation and teach a lesson on photosynthesis.

One outcome of remote learning, she said, is that students have learned some “digital citizenship,” such as not showing their house number on social media and recognizing that a classmate’s joke in the chat field can sometimes be taken the wrong way.

They’ve collaborated on projects remotely through videos and documents. For years, educators would talk about 21st century skills, but “it always felt really forced,” Stover said. “Now my kids have those skills.”

‘Their voice can make change’

In northeast D.C., Diasgranados’s fourth and fifth graders at Aiton Elementary School have sharpened advocacy skills they’ve been learning since second grade when he began moving with them from one grade to the next.

A letter from the students explaining that many lacked devices for remote learning caught the attention of a producer for The Drew Barrymore Show on CBS. In October, Barrymore featured Diasgranados as a guest and for every student and staff member.

In past years, his students have written to the Washington Football Team, explaining how unwashed clothes contribute to chronic absenteeism. The $10,000 for a school laundry. And when Washington Capitals forward Devante Smith-Pelly faced racist taunts at a game in Chicago, the students wrote him letters of support. Smith-Pelly visited the school and donated coats to the students.

“My students are activists,” Diasgranados said. “They really understand their writing and their voice can make change.”

Unlike most teachers this school year, Diasgranados didn’t have to form new relationships with students he’s never taught before. He already had numbers for grandparents, aunts and uncles he called when he couldn’t find students during the early months of the pandemic.

But teaching remotely in one of D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods — even with the laptop donation — was no less challenging. As children of essential workers, a lot of his students have had to connect to school from their parents’ jobs or a city bus.

Aiton was holding a talent show March 13 last year when texts about school shutting down began pouring in. Diasgranados started to get emotional and gave more hugs and took more selfies than normal.

“They didn’t really understand what was going on,” he said. “I remember telling them to take as many books home as they could.”

Lead Art: Alejandro Diasgranados, Juliana Urtubey, John Arthur and Maureen Stover. (Council of Chief State School Officers)

It was the weekly full-cohort meeting for the “TA to BA” fellowship, a group of 13 Rhode Island paraprofessionals studying to earn bachelor’s degrees and teaching certifications after spending years — or, in many cases, decades — in the classroom. Launched last year by a Rhode Island-based nonprofit called the Equity Institute, the program enrolls fellows in courses at College Unbound, a local higher education institution built for adult learners, providing scholarships to defray the costs.

This evening, discussion had landed on a topic near and dear to the hearts of many participants: racial diversity in the state’s teaching force.

Courtney Price, a teaching assistant in Providence, unmuted herself.

“We need to see more faces like the kids that we serve,” she said, reflecting on difficult conversations she’s had with the — mostly white — teachers at her school. “These are our babies.”

The chat box popped like popcorn with affirmations and agreement.

“Well said Ms. Courtney!”

“Very well said, Court.”

More than an observation shared in an online classroom, Price’s comment also spoke to the very reason each participant was on the call that evening. All people of color, and many fluent Spanish-speakers, the group is on a mission to increase the racial and linguistic diversity of the Rhode Island teaching force.

Despite research documenting the , there is a stark racial disconnect between the state’s teacher and student populations — an imbalance shared nationwide.

of Rhode Island educators are white despite over 4 in 10 learners identifying as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous or Asian. In Providence, the largest district, of students are kids of color while of the teaching force remains white, the exact same share as the nation on the whole. of Providence students come from homes where English is not the primary language.

It’s a completely different story, however, for paraprofessionals. Approximately 61 percent of non-teaching staff in Providence schools are people of color, according to information provided by the district, and teaching assistants comprise 31 percent of that pool. At all the schools Price has worked at in her 18 years in Providence, the paraprofessional staff has always been predominantly women of color while the teaching staff has always been predominantly white people, she told ����Ӱ�� — a skew echoed by TAs working elsewhere.

In addition to impacts on students, there’s also a deep wage gap. After nearly two decades in her role, Price said she earns $18.65 an hour, but would be making three times as much per year if she had worked that span of time as a classroom teacher.

The Equity Institute designed their fellowship to help people like Price transform their deep classroom experience into certifications to become full-time classroom teachers. Their model draws on examples from , and . Next door in Massachusetts, an emergency licensure program created to prevent teacher shortages during the pandemic has — and has successfully moved the needle on teacher diversity in the process.

Now, nearly a full school year into the Equity Institute’s program, with rave reviews from the inaugural class, all of whom are on a path toward graduation, and with already over 60 applications for next year, early signs show their Rhode Island effort is working.

As the pandemic causes upheavals in education that have many young professionals , programs like the Equity Institute’s TA to BA fellowship that harness the untapped potential of paraprofessionals may be a key to building a strengthened, more diverse educator workforce.

‘Diversity is quality’

Carlon Howard, co-founder of the Equity Institute and mastermind of the TA to BA program, understands that his approach represents something of a revolution in the world of teacher preparation.

The broad goal is, “How do we change the system as a whole so that it is more inclusive?” he told ����Ӱ��.

Normally, teacher licensure involves jumping through a series of hoops — each of which can present a barrier for low-income and historically underserved candidates. Applicants need to hold a bachelor’s degree and meet specific GPA requirements (2.75 in Rhode Island). They need a passing score on an exam like the Praxis Core, which has . And, in many cases, they need to go through an like a master’s degree in education or Teach For America, which can be prohibitive for those supporting themselves or their families.

But experts say that such requirements don’t always translate into success as a teacher. A 2017 study found when it looked for links between educators’ scores on their licensure tests and the impact they had on students down the line.

In education, the trend is to pile on “more assessments, more credentials, more degrees,” explained Constance Lindsay, assistant professor of education at the University of North Carolina and co-author of . “All of those things are not necessarily related to classroom effectiveness.”

She recommends removing some of the hurdles in the licensure pathway to open the field for new applicants. Students need to see themselves in their teachers, she argues.

“Often, quality is placed at odds with diversity,” said Lindsay. She sees that view as an unfortunate misconception. “Diversity is quality.”

Credit where credit is due

Rather than test scores, studies show that it is . By that measure, then, paraprofessionals with over a decade in the classroom should be well-positioned to become effective teachers.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t get them very far when they seek licensure.

“They’re incredible educators,” Christine Alves, head of the Rhode Island School for Progessive Education and instructor for the TAs, said of the cohort. “But they don’t see a clear pathway to become a teacher.”

The irony is not lost on Price, who is going on 19 years as a teaching assistant. She frequently steps up to run lessons, knows how to write individual education programs for students with special needs, and once in 2019, spent two full months at the helm of a ninth-grade science course after the teacher left unexpectedly.

“I’m kinda good at what I do,” she jokes. But still, “any of the time that I’ve spent in the educator space is not considered.”

The Equity Institute’s partnership with College Unbound changes all that. The institution has a process for measuring and issuing credit for their students’ prior learning experiences. Students document their past work and present it to experts in the field. One student in the TA to BA cohort even drew on her training as an ordained minister.

“Most of our students have done some amazing stuff,” said Dennis Littky, founder and president of College Unbound. “[The prior learning evaluation process] helps them give themselves more credit for what they’ve been doing.”

Armed with a few credits already on their transcript, students in the TA to BA cohort enroll in two classes per semester, plus a full-group lab component. This term, Price is taking an applied statistics course and a course on trauma-informed teaching. The content dovetails nicely with her real-world experience.

“I’ve been able to take every piece that I’ve learned and relate it to a situation that I’ve dealt with [in the classroom],” she said.

After accruing the 120 credits necessary to earn their bachelor’s degrees, a process that takes TAs one to three years depending on their prior schooling, fellows still need to earn their teaching certifications. College Unbound has submitted an application for approval as an alternative licensure program, and though the proposal is still under review, the Rhode Island Department of Education has indicated interest in the model.

“[W]e are excited about College Unbound’s commitment to building a diverse pipeline of Rhode Island educators,” department spokesperson Emily Crowell wrote to ����Ӱ��. “RIDE will be providing guidance and support with getting new educator preparation programs off the ground that reduce barriers into the profession for candidates of color.”

If the proposal falls through, fellows will use the Equity Institute’s collaboration with the Rhode Island School for Progressive Education, which is an approved institution for licensure in the state, to pursue certification after their BAs.

But still, the Praxis and GPA requirements will remain.

“The barriers,” said Equity Institute co-founder Howard, “we haven’t fully been able to knock down.”

‘There’s a desire for this’

Conceived in a note-to-self that Howard jotted down on his computer — and inspired by his own mother, a longtime paraprofessional who made life-changing impacts on the kids at her school — the TA to BA program came from humble beginnings.

At its fall 2020 launch, interest was lukewarm. The Equity Institute opened 15 seats for the fellowship and received just 16 applications.

“We practically took everybody,” Howard said, laughing.

But since then, word has gotten around. This spring, the response has been quite different. In March, their first two information sessions had over 100 sign-ups each, and the fellowship has already received over 60 applications. Those numbers send a message.

“This is needed,” said Alves. “There’s a desire for this.”

Originally planning to scale up to 30 fellows, Howard is now looking for a way to expand further. Money, though, is tight.

To launch the program, the Equity Institute received a $200,000 grant from the New Schools Venture Fund, which allowed them to support the inaugural class. Tuition at College Unbound comes to around $10,000 per year. While students can get a little over half of that sum paid for by federal Pell Grants, the Equity Institute foots much of the balance, aiming to leave each student with less than $1,000 to cover themselves. To scale up further, despite having received some additional funding since their launch, the program will have to find more cash.

A family of learners

But as Howard works behind the scenes to balance the ledger, the success of his program in the eyes of current students is undeniable.

Learning together with people who all worked years in the classroom has spurred tremendous growth, said Price. “We feed off of each other.”

“They have such shared common experience,” added Alves. “It fuels the energy. It fuels the conversation.”

The group has gelled into a cohesive learning community. Angel Soares, a fellow who works as a paraprofessional in Providence, uses one word to describe her cohort: Family.

“When we see each other, it lights our day up,” she said. “You can’t physically touch each other. But by the time you come out [of the Zoom session], you feel like you’ve been hugged. You feel like you’ve been supported.”

The group has a WhatsApp chat they use to communicate with each other. Sometimes they touch base about assignments. Other times they send new recipes they found or check in after long days.

The support comes not just from peers, but also from instructors. Howard and Alves, the professors of their lab section, double as advisors. Knowing that his fellows have a lot on their plates — in addition to working full time, many are raising families — Howard’s message is always, “Make sure that things don’t ever get too much for you,” said Soares. When she’s having a tough day, he’s there saying, “I got you. Just let me know. I’ll send a GrubHub your way or whatever you need.”

“It’s like having a brother,” Price added of her advisorship with Howard. “I always hear his voice like, ‘You can do it.’”

Now Price is on track to get her teaching certification in about a year. Other fellows, too, are on a similar timeline. Their principals, they say, chase them down at school asking when they can hire them as full-time teachers.

In the meantime, Price tells everyone she can about the TA to BA program.

“There’s a lot of people that have the same story as me,” said Price. “Given the opportunity [they] would be excellent teachers.”