Since January, K-12 education has undergone sweeping policy changes at the federal level. Hundreds of executive orders and the passage of the “” have led to the cutting of thousands of programs and a reduction in federal funding for schools. 

The U.S. Department of Education has been streamlined, Title IX regulations have been rewritten, and federal protections for LGBTQ+ have been scaled back. Immigration enforcement has increased in communities, leaving many students and teachers feeling unsafe on campus.

Fewer college students may be discouraged from pursuing careers in teaching. Yet, aspiring K-12 educators interviewed by EdSource reveal a continued commitment to the profession. 

Despite these challenges — alongside longstanding issues such as low pay, low morale and unruly students and parents — many remain dedicated to ensuring children across the state continue to have opportunities for learning in safe environments. They want to ensure they have access to safe learning spaces that promote growth, a love of learning, and guarantee that their basic needs are met, from dual-language to special education resources.

Determined to push onward

Peter Leonido, a first-generation education and sociology major who graduated from UC San Diego, said that as someone who believes in the success of his students, the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education was a full-circle moment for him. In high school, he was surrounded by mentors and teachers who believed in him. 

He said that what happens at the federal level impacts how students learn in school.

“Education is political because teaching students to be able to read, write and think critically will inherently have them question and challenge the status quo,” Leonido said. “By defunding it, by bashing on it, you create an uneducated generation that is doomed to fight back.”&�Բ�����;

He is pursuing a master’s degree in education at UCLA this fall. Still, he has taught high school and middle school students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, including lower-income and Latino students, in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Leonido said that teaching English and ethnic studies is especially important for students of color and immigrants to understand how to “read between the lines of everything they consume,” whether that’s on social media, local or national news, and even entertainment. This, he said, will “provide them the tools to empower and defend themselves” during President Donald Trump’s second administration. 

Growing up in a Spanish-speaking household, David Beam always recognized the power and complexity of the language. He was inspired to pursue a related degree in college so he could teach Spanish in grade school or high school. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Spanish with a minor in Spanish-English bilingual education from UC Irvine, and is now pursuing a master’s in the university’s teaching and credential program.

“I want to inspire other students to love the language and appreciate the language and grow in the language,” Beam said. 

Beam is focused on combating achievement and opportunity gaps that exist within education. Given Trump’s approach to eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, along with his threat to shut down the federal Department of Education, he said he is frustrated with the widening gaps. 

Tatum White, 22, a Long Beach State alumna who has completed multiple-subject and education specialist credentials, agreed with Beam’s assessment regarding the importance of diversity in classrooms. 

“As someone who really prioritizes inclusion and supportive environments and love and nurturing future minds and nurturing spaces that include everyone, that’s always going to be something that I really strive for and really appreciate in every environment,” White said. “With the current administration and with current happenings around the world, I feel that is being threatened and that is unfair to a lot of people, and especially with identities that occupy the majority of our classrooms.”

‘I feel like I can instill hope in students’

Both Beam and White say these roadblocks will not deter them from becoming teachers.

“I know that I can make more of a difference inside of the classroom and by being an example to students and teaching them,” Beam said. “Of course, it’s difficult to approach those controversial topics [such as DEI], but I really want to teach students to develop that sense of empathy or develop that sense of understanding.”

Similarly, Christine Tran, a recent graduate from San Jose State, witnessed the effects of inequitable education firsthand. Tran, a Bay Area native, said she attended an underfunded middle school and often struggled with English due to a lack of support.  

“Heading into high school, I was not at the same level as my peers,” Tran said. “I felt super behind. There were a lot of times where I felt like maybe I wasn’t smart, or maybe I wasn’t good at English.”&�Բ�����;

It was Tran’s eighth grade English teacher, however, who sparked her passion for both the subject and education. Tran said that her teacher introduced her to new books, and now she has an English degree and is preparing for a teaching career. 

Tran is currently an English teacher at Breakthrough Silicon Valley, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing college access in underserved communities. She attended a similar program in high school. 

“I feel like I’ve always wanted to teach on paper, but now, actually interacting with the kids, teaching them lessons every day, it’s really eye-opening,” she said. “I feel like I have already grown so much [as an educator].”&�Բ�����;

However, she also fears for the safety and future of her students, many of whom are Latino. Many of her students feel defeated and have lost motivation to further their education, she said. 

“I think that teachers are the cornerstone of a student’s success,” Tran said. “I feel like I can instill hope in students.”&�Բ�����;

The hits to education keep coming

On July 14, the U.S. Supreme Court  to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and fire 1,400 members of the department’s staff can move forward.

“We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press statement. “As we return education to the states, this Administration will continue to perform all statutory duties while empowering families and teachers by reducing education bureaucracy.”

In addition to the constantly shifting policies, the Trump administration has left California school districts scrambling to fill funding gaps in K-12 classrooms. 

Further, the U.S. Department of Justice is attempting to dismantle decades of protections for undocumented students with the reversal of the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe,  The  held that “denying undocumented children access to free public K-12 education” violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. 

In California, approximately 15% of K-12 school districts and 45% of the state’s student population are in urban areas, according to the , where a majority of the students are not white, a concern Anna Ortiz, the dean of the College of Education at Long Beach State, said is exacerbated by the Trump administration’s continued threats and actions against DEI programs in classrooms. Ortiz worries that progress toward making education more equitable and students feeling represented is falling apart under Trump.

“I think we’re afraid of going backwards because we’ve made a lot of progress in serving students from diverse backgrounds,” Ortiz said. “Whether they have come from immigrant backgrounds or from different cultures, whether they have different languages as their first language at home.”&�Բ�����;

Most of the layoffs in the Department of Education were in the , which handles disability and discrimination cases in school districts. Without this office handling these cases, Erika Hope, a first-year special education high school math teacher, is concerned that the 7.5 million students with disabilities in K-12 could face increased discrimination and abuse.  

“I had a stepbrother who had [an] intellectual disability, and he was secluded and put into a home at a young age. And I hate the idea that that is where we’re heading, where we’re not talking about inclusion of all people into classrooms,” said Hope, who added that she is afraid special education could be privatized and wouldn’t be free for all people.

The joy of teaching

Despite the challenges that future educators face, even in these difficult times for education, the future remains bright. 

Beam said he hopes there will be greater respect for the process within schools, enabling students to graduate as well-informed individuals with the skills to discern different viewpoints and formulate their own opinions. 

“I was not going to let the current challenges that exist in education stop me from achieving or executing this kind of dream,” Beam said. “Or realizing this dream that I have always had for myself.”&�Բ�����;

 Leonido added that he wants to ensure students can be the ones making change.

“Learning the histories and social patterns of social justice movements, the movements of people of color and other marginalized communities, and the political patterns and impacts of U.S. imperialism on national and global politics will plant a seed for this next generation of youth,” Leonido said. “To challenge the status quo, to be proactive and make change in their communities.”&�Բ�����;

For Ortiz, it’s simply a matter of reminding students about their passion for becoming educators, even when things can be difficult. 

“I think the most important thing is to remember why you wanted to be a teacher and always try to channel that purpose and that joy in teaching,” Ortiz said. “As long as you focus on what’s in your classroom and try to let this noise not get you down, then I think you’re going to have a better experience, and you’re going to persist in the profession.”

Groshell, a former Seattle-area fourth-grade teacher, had to laugh: “Nobody knows me here in the U.S.,” he said in an interview.

But in Britain, lots of teachers know his name. An in-demand speaker at education conferences, he flies to London “as frequently as I can” to discuss , his 2024 book on explicit instruction. Over the past year, Groshell has appeared virtually about once a month and has made two personal appearances at events across England.

The reason? A discipline known as cognitive science. Born in the U.S., it relies on decades of research on how kids learn to guide teachers in the classroom, and is at the root of several effective reforms, including the Science of Reading.

In nearly a dozen interviews, educators and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic said that while it’s caught fire in England, from the classroom to the halls of government, the idea has made little traction in its home country. Benjamin Riley, founder of , a Texas-based group that has pushed to make cognitive science more central to U.S. teacher training programs, jokingly refers to it as a “reverse Beatles” effect, with British educators pining for American insights.

“Cognitive science gives you a vocabulary and a language, a common framing, to talk about how minds work,” said Riley. “That is one of the hallmarks, typically, of professions: There’s an agreed-upon body of knowledge that constitutes the things that professionals need to know in order to be practitioners in that space. And education, at least in the United States, has never really done that.”

The result, observers say, is slow, steady academic progress for 9 million English students, even as U.S. results falter.

From 2011 to 2021, English students’ average scores in the International Benchmarks of Reading Achievement, a key global comparison, rose six points, placing them fourth worldwide, while U.S. students’ dropped eight points, ranking the U.S. just below England. Essentially, American fourth-graders in 2021 read nearly as well as English students did .

In the bargain, English schools cut students’ gender gap in reading by more than half.

Other commonwealth countries have taken notice, with policymakers in , and working to duplicate England’s progress.

Is U.S. system ‘too big for things to catch fire’?

Developed in the 1950s, cognitive science essentially explains how we learn, think, remember and process information. Applied to education, it allows teachers to maximize learning by incorporating key principles, among them:

• working memory and cognitive load: Students have limited capacity to remember several important things at a time, so teachers should break down complex information into smaller chunks to avoid overwhelming them. For instance, a teacher introducing a lesson on multiplying fractions should first ensure that students’ recall of multiplication facts is solid and that they can multiply numbers automatically in their heads.
• spaced practice and retrieval: Rather than cramming a lot of information into a single session, teachers should space out learning over time and regularly ask students to retrieve information from memory via review sessions and low-stakes quizzes.
• prior knowledge activation: Teachers should explicitly connect new concepts to students’ existing knowledge and experiences before introducing unfamiliar material. For instance, in a lesson about how seeds grow into plants, teachers should begin by asking students if they’ve ever planted seeds in a garden and what they noticed.
• metacognition: Teaching students to “think about their thinking” helps them become more effective learners. For instance, in a lesson that features a word problem, a teacher might say, “Let’s slow down and figure out what to do first, second and third.” When students make errors, a teacher can ask, “Walk me through your thinking. What steps did you take?” 

In England these days, said Groshell, the Seattle teacher, such jargon is now mainstream: “It’s impossible now to find a teacher who doesn’t know about retrieval practice, cognitive load theory or explicit instruction.”&�Բ�����;

What began as a grassroots movement among teachers coalesced into national policy around 2010, when a series of structural reforms made it easier to embrace cognitive science.

That is when Michael Gove, education secretary under Prime Minister David Cameron, allowed virtually any public school to convert to “academy” status — British educator Dylan Wiliam calls them “charter schools on steroids.”

Freed from local authority, but funded centrally, these schools can pool resources to hire research advisors, directors of teaching and learning and the like. “These people have really engaged with the research,” Wiliam said.

In an interview, former Minister of State for Schools noted the irony that most of these ideas are American-made, developed by U.S. researchers. In 2006, Gibb recalled first encountering . Authored by E.D. Hirsch, a University of Virginia scholar, it argued for a content-rich curriculum, traditional math and phonics-based reading lessons.

“It just explained everything I was instinctively feeling about our school system,” said Gibb, who recalled that English schools at the time were steeped in more progressive methods. He made everyone he met read the book — including Gove, the education secretary.

“That really formed the basis of our reform programming from 2010 onwards,” said Gibb. It gave rise to universal phonics screening and adoption of the more traditional, step-by-step . 

The movement really bloomed in 2013, when Scottish educator Tom Bennett created the first in a series of affordable research conferences for teachers. Dubbed , the conferences, which continue 12 years later, have built an international appetite for scientifically proven classroom practices.

In 2019, the government introduced an for teachers, which standardized training on “very practice-focused” principles, said Wiliam, the British educator. Since then, every school that recruits a teacher out of a university training program must report how well they succeed in classrooms. If programs don’t get positive reports about trainees, they can lose accreditation.

“There’s a really strong alignment between the needs of the system and what is being provided in initial teacher preparation programs, in a way that doesn’t actually happen in the U.S. at scale,” he said

It’s a source of frustration for Wiliam, who now works as an independent consultant in northern Florida. Despite the movement’s success in England, he said, just 10% of his work is based in U.S. schools. “I find it quite difficult to get any American school districts to engage me,” he said. But he’s got three scheduled trips to Australia this year, among others. 

Riley, the Deans for Impact founder, noted that American public schools are governed by 50 different state agencies that rarely row in the same direction. The U.S. may just be “too big for things to catch fire” the way they can elsewhere, especially in centralized systems like the United Kingdom.

Beyond state control, he said, most U.S. teachers’ colleges “are not designed with learning science principles at their core — quite frankly there’s just a lot of stuff in schools of education that is not very good from a research standpoint, but that nonetheless has become ingrained. It’s a generational battle to try to change that.”

Like Groshell, Riley laughed at the contrast with the U.K. “I am beloved over in England, and increasingly [in] Australia, in a way that just is simply not true here in the United States,” he said. 

Sarah Oberle, a Delaware first-grade teacher who is active in research and training, said U.S. teacher prep doesn’t typically focus on cognitive science because many think it favors a kind of “authoritative and cold” approach. “But when you really understand science, you realize just this knowledge gives me the power to make changes within my practice that will actually protect and support my students.”

Oberle stumbled upon cognitive science about five years ago, when the Science of Reading movement started building momentum in the U.S., and wondered why she never learned about it during her training. She went back to school and earned a doctorate in education science.

“Our business is learning,” she said. “How do we facilitate learning when we don’t understand how learning happens?” 

‘Comrades in arms’ 

While much of England’s progress is traceable to shifts in national policies, several British teachers described moments early in their careers when, like Oberle, they got a taste of cognitive science and began questioning their training.

Daisy Christodoulou, a former London high school English teacher, began her career in 2007 as a member of , the international iteration of Teach For America. She had an inkling that much of her training wasn’t just unhelpful but wrong, with discredited ideas held up as best practices with little evidence they worked. “I was just looking at [them], going, ‘Really? Is this really best practice?’”

In 2010, she came across Daniel Willingham’s book Subtitled, “A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom,” it revolutionized how Christodoulou thought about her work. Over the past 15 years, Willingham’s book has been “enormously influential here,” she said, turning the genial scholar into another American celebrity.

In an interview, Willingham agreed that many U.S. teaching candidates are exposed to views about how children learn that aren’t all accurate. For instance, he said, “This phrase that you hear so often, ‘Every child learns differently,’ is, in one sense, true. But it’s kind of true in a trivial sense, and in a more important sense, it’s really not true.”

Peps Mccrea, a former teacher in Brighton, on the southern British coast said blogs written by colleagues have become another way for educators to share research, finding “comrades in arms” in a movement that continues to grow. More than 20 years after he first entered a classroom, Mccrea hosts a that unpacks research-based teaching methods. 

And Gibb has taken to touting England’s advances more widely. Last month, he met in Washington, D.C., with U.S. Education Secretary , raising hopes that the British reforms might find an audience here. A spokesperson for McMahon did not reply to a request for comment.

Actually, said Oberle, the Delaware teacher, the Trump administration is moving in the opposite direction from U.K.-style national policies, pushing to abolish the U.S. Education Department and creating the potential for “even more individuality between states.”

If we’re ever to see cognitive science advance here, Oberle said, it’ll take both a top-down and bottom-up approach: word-of-mouth influence among teachers, via events like researchED, as well as federal and state pressure on training programs to bring the research to teachers. 

“Once they have it clearly and don’t have misconceptions about it, the benefits they will see in their own practice very quickly will make them want more — will make them demand more. It’s just gaining that entry point.”

But she added, “It’s such a long process. There are so many minds to change.”

“Big picture, AI is not very good at math,” said Alex Kotran, co-founder and CEO of . “Language models just predict the next word. You get mixed results using language models to do math. It’s not yet mature enough to where it can be trusted to be scaled.”

And even if it were to improve, critics worry it might hurt kids’ ability to try — and fail — on their own. Much would be lost, Kotran said, if “we get rid of productive struggle and we build this instinct where the first thing you do is go to AI for help.”

But students in the United States and the United Kingdom have a different view. found 56% believe AI could go a long way in reducing math anxiety. 

Fifteen percent of the 1,500 16- to 18-year-old students surveyed said they had already experienced this relief themselves and slightly more than 1 in 5 said their math scores improved because of the technology. 

The survey also included . Sixty-one percent suggested students view AI as “a mentor or study partner rather than a crutch”, while nearly half “see value for students in using AI for help with the process of learning math concepts, rather than to give answers.”&�Բ�����;

Nicole Paxton, principal of Mountain Vista Community School in Colorado Springs, said her teachers use AI in many ways. Tools like MagicSchoolAI analyze student responses to math prompts, with AI generating “specific, standards-aligned feedback for each student, focusing on their reasoning, accuracy, and math vocabulary.”&�Բ�����;

Paxton said the tool highlights strengths and misconceptions, “which helps teachers give timely and targeted next steps.” The practice saves educators time so they can “more easily differentiate their re-teaching or follow-up, especially when addressing common errors across the class.”

Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, recently looked at the evidence base for using AI in math instruction, including whether it can help the “shocking number of students” with foundational skills’ gaps like those identified in a recent study. 

The May 13 analysis by TNTP found that almost half of the students sampled started the class with only one-third of the concepts and skills needed from earlier grades. Lake said AI can be used by schools to identify children who are struggling — and, at least to some degree, by the students themselves. 

“AI can be very helpful in analyzing data and identifying gaps in student learning,” she said.

And, if a student wants to learn a mathematical concept in a different way than what they’ve experienced in class, she said, AI can provide a valuable alternative. 

“A lot of students are already doing this,” Lake said. 

to use the technology, though many educators Terrie Galanti, associate professor at the University of North Florida, said AI success in student learning depends on how teachers are prepared to use it. 

“AI can be more than an explainer or an answer giver,” said Galanti, who teaches secondary mathematics and STEM integration/computational thinking. “With thoughtful prompts, AI can become part of interactive, collaborative conversations to deepen mathematics understanding.”&�Բ�����;

​​The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics said in that teachers have long been accustomed to technological advances that change the way students learn. 

They had already adjusted to the availability of pocket calculators in the early ’80s and, more recently, to the widespread use of , a mobile app that recognizes and solves math problems. 

It notes that advancements in AI make teachers more, not less valuable, in student learning. 

Latrenda Knighten, the organization’s president, told in March that students will still need to rely upon their own discernment to solve mathematical problems — regardless of what tools become available.  

“We know that children learn math from being able to problem-solve, being able to use reasoning skills, critical thinking, having opportunities to collaborate with each other and talk about what they’re doing,” Knighten said. 

Irina Lyublinskaya, professor in the department of mathematics, science, and technology at Teachers College, Columbia University, distinguished between chatbots like ChatGPT and computational knowledge engines like She noted math specific AI-powered applications — including WolframAlpha and Symbolab — work very well. 

“AI chatbots can help students learn math, and they can help teachers to support students, but this is not about asking ChatGPT to solve a math problem,” she said. “I know of research-based initiatives that use AI to adapt learning materials to students’ learning styles and abilities and these definitely help students learn.”

One, she noted, was , developed by researchers and educators in Europe, and is now being tested in NYC. 

“Chatbots can be trained as teaching assistants or tutors that can provide students proper scaffolding and feedback, helping them to learn math the same way they would with a real person,” she said. 

Zachary A. Pardos is an associate professor of education at the University of California Berkeley where he studies adaptive learning and AI. He found, in conducted a year ago, that 25% of the answers provided by ChatGPT in algebra were incorrect. 

“That’s pretty high,” he noted. “Much higher than you would want.”

But the technology has improved since then. 

“With the right techniques — at least in algebra — from an error perspective, I feel it is ready for real-time intervention in math,” he said.

“There are clear priorities that overwhelming numbers of Americans on both sides of the aisle can support,” said James Lane, CEO of PDK International, a professional organization for educators that administers the annual survey. “If I were a candidate for any office at the federal level, I would want to know those things that have broad support because they’re likely to have an opportunity for success.”&�Բ�����;

But beyond those narrow avenues of agreement, the country is separated by large partisan differences on issues from student mental health to paying for college. Eighty-six percent of Democrats want the next administration to focus on mental health and college affordability, compared with less than two-thirds of Republicans.

American voters also vary widely on their views of Washington’s role in education. Former President Donald Trump says he would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, push for universal private school choice and expect schools to promote patriotism, according to his . On the Democratic side, Vice President Kamala Harris would push for more “stringent guardrails” on charter schools, revive an effort to pass and expand the to provide up to $6,000 for families with a newborn. 

Less than half of Americans — 45% — approve of how the Biden administration has handled education policy, the same they gave former President Donald Trump in 2020. But less than a third say they’d trust Trump on education if he’s elected again in November. Their views on a potential Harris-Walz administration are unclear — the poll was conducted before the disastrous debate that sparked President Joe Biden’s departure from the race. 

Lane, who served as acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education at the U.S. Department of Education in the Biden administration before joining PDK last year, declined to comment on the president’s education track record. Attitudes toward the candidates might have shifted slightly if the poll had been conducted after Harris became the nominee, he said, but views on the major issues likely wouldn’t have changed much. 

The large partisan gaps are surprising given that many issues “don’t really have a straightforward partisan connotation,” said David Houston, an education professor at George Mason University. Public pre-K, for example, has long held bipartisan support at the state level, but a federal role in expanding access is a much higher priority for Democrats than Republicans, 71% and 48% respectively. 

The poll also shows that 54% of Americans overall — and 70% of public school parents — say education will play an extremely or very important role in the upcoming presidential election. But Houston is skeptical. 

“I would be surprised if education was the top-of-mind issue that would be deciding those votes,” he said. That could change, he said, if the race is really close. “Anything that moves the vote count a fraction of a percent matters in a head-to-head race.”

Across the sample of over 1,000 participants, there are also striking differences in responses by race. Support for a greater focus on helping students catch up in school, addressing mental health and reducing college costs is roughly 20% higher among Blacks than whites. 

The largest gap is on the issue of protecting students from discrimination, with 87% of Black respondents saying they want more attention paid to civil rights, compared to 51% of whites. Hispanic and Black Americans were nearly tied on wanting the next administration to strengthen access to public pre-K — 66% and 67% respectively — but just half of white respondents viewed it as a priority.

The Trump platform doesn’t mention early learning, but a for his potential second term, released by the conservative Heritage Foundation, would eliminate Head Start, the federally funded program for low-income families. While for 3- and 4-year-olds remains a plank in the Democratic platform, Biden was not able to win Congressional support for the issue when he ran on it in 2020.

Views on charters

Charter school expansion was the only issue where less than half of Americans — 35% — want an expanded federal role. Surprisingly, just half of Republicans called it a priority, perhaps reflecting the party’s increasing shift toward education savings accounts, which allow parents to pay for private school tuition or homeschooling costs with public funds.

“[GOP] interest in charter schools has really petered out, compared to their heyday in the 2010s,” Houston said. “The school choice wing of the party has its energies focused elsewhere.”

Among Democrats, who often accuse such schools of siphoning students from traditional outlets, less than a quarter wanted more federal attention on charter expansion.

Enrollment trends tell a different story, said Sonia Park, executive director of the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition, a network that encourages socioeconomic and racial diversity. Charters overall have seen continued growth — a 2% increase last year, — during a time when the student population in district schools was flat or declining. 

“Parents want quality public school choice, regardless of where they are, and charters are part of that,” she said.

Democrats promise to pick up where the Biden administration left off on charter policy. According to the 2024 , additional federal funding for charter expansions or renewals would hinge on whether local districts determine they “systematically underserve the neediest students” — a change that goes beyond restrictions the Biden administration adopted in 2022. 

‘Harrowing’ results on teaching

With Harris’s selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school teacher, as her running mate, education is likely to get frequent attention during the fall campaign. But Lane, with PDK, wants to hear specific plans to address ongoing in the teaching workforce. Relief funds that allowed districts to hire more staff will soon expire, a reality that already contributed to a wave of . Some districts are still starting the school year with , and another shows just 16% of teachers would recommend the profession to their friends.

For the first time, the survey also asked the public about AI in education, a subject that often generates mixed reactions. Over 60% of Americans support AI for tutoring, test preparation and lesson planning. But only 43% favored students relying on AI for help with homework.

In keeping with its focus on teaching, PDK International routinely includes a question in its poll that asks parents whether they’d support their children going into education. The organization runs , a nationwide program that aims to get middle and high school students interested in the profession.

Just four in 10 parents say they’d like to see one of their children become a teacher — a significant drop from the three-fourths of parents who favored that choice when the question was first asked in 1969. The primary reason: low pay. 

​​”We’re going to have to address salaries,” Lane said. “The fact that 60% of folks wouldn’t even recommend a teaching career to their own children is harrowing, considering the needs that we have.”

You won’t get rich, but teachers earn more money than you might think. Plus, you’ll have a much easier time landing (and keeping) a job than many of your peers. 

This might sound like counterintuitive career advice given the current of the teaching profession. But here are two reasons more young people should consider a career in education: 

Teachers have an easy time finding good jobs 

This year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published an looking at the labor market outcomes of recent college graduates. Among the 74 majors included on the list, elementary education had the sixth-lowest unemployment rate, at 1.5%. To put that in perspective, industrial engineering came in first, at 0.2%, and art history came in last, at 8%. 

Education majors also did well on the rate of underemployment. Essentially, were college graduates working in jobs that required a degree? On this measure, special education teachers came in second overall, just behind nursing. Elementary education, early childhood education and general education majors all landed in the top 10. 

The data from the Federal Reserve represent just a snapshot in time, but the economic advantages of becoming a teacher have persisted for decades. The National Center for Education has run regular surveys of recent college graduates, and it has that education majors regularly report higher early-career employment rates than graduates in other fields. They are also more likely to work in a job closely related to what they studied in college. As a result, new college graduates with an education major are less likely to be looking to change jobs than peers in other fields. 

Now, it’s true that teaching doesn’t pay as well as some professions. This has been the case for years, though, and the NCES data shows that the early-career gap hasn’t changed much over time. Again, it’s all relative, because beginning teachers consistently make more money than early-career psychology or humanities majors, for example. 

Teachers are satisfied with their jobs 

A recent looked at whether better information could nudge more young people to consider teaching. The researchers asked freshmen at the University of Michigan to guess how much teachers and non-teachers earned and how satisfied they were with their jobs. 

About two-thirds of the students underestimated how much the average teacher earns. But almost all the students — 99% — guessed that teacher satisfaction was lower than it had been historically. 

Using a large sample of data from the , the authors looked at data from 2010-19 and found that 91% of teachers reported being satisfied with their jobs (compared with 88% of non-teachers). Moreover, 97% of teachers were satisfied with their job’s contribution to society, compared with 88% of non-teachers. 

After being presented with more accurate information about teacher pay and satisfaction, the college students become more interested in pursuing a career in education. Males were particularly responsive to the new, accurate data about the profession. (In a test of other types of messages, female and Black students were more influenced by statements supporting the importance of diversity and the way teachers can serve as role models for youngsters.)

The last couple of years have been a particularly good time for job hunters in the education sector. With widespread shortage areas, particularly in urban and rural schools and in subjects like math and special education, new teachers have had their pick of where to work.

With federal COVID relief funds expiring this fall, the balance is likely to shift back somewhat toward employers. But for candidates worried about their job prospects, a specialization in math, science or special education would strongly enhance their resumes. 

And anyone considering a teaching career should take solace in the fact that, historically speaking, students who earn education degrees have an easier time landing a full-time job than those who pursue other, riskier careers.

Although a handful of education issues still divide governors along partisan lines, such as whether to establish universal pre-kindergarten programs or allocate public funds for private schooling, governors from both parties want to increase teacher pay and target incentives to shortage areas, expand access to higher education and promote college and career readiness in high school. In some instances, they backed priorities that traditionally have been linked to their political opponents, with Republicans proposing initiatives to address youth mental health and Democrats supporting the expansion of reading reform.  

But governors from both parties gave short shrift to one the most pressing problems facing local school leaders: sharply higher rates of in the wake of the pandemic. Neither Democrats nor Republicans outlined new steps to spur students’ return to school.  

The states’ chief executives concentrated their 2024 education policy priorities in seven areas: child care and early learning, the teaching profession, school choice, curriculum and instruction, student mental health, higher education and workforce development.

Child Care and Early Learning

Early learning and child care were a bipartisan priority, with 17 governors proposing measures to enhance accessibility and affordability for working parents. 

Democratic governors in Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, New Jersey and Michigan championed statewide universal pre-K, while Maura Healey of Massachusetts proposed the strategy for 26 facing social and economic challenges. Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly proposed the largest single-year investment in the state’s early childhood system, while the governors of Missouri, West Virginia, Nebraska and Hawaii proposed new or expanded child care tax credits. 

The Teaching Profession

Echoing a trend from last year, governors are seeking to strengthen the ranks of public school teaching by increasing compensation, addressing shortages and expanding recruitment — three closely connected strategies. Twenty-one governors have proposed such initiatives.

While both Republicans and Democrats addressed the issue in their speeches, most concrete proposals to raise teacher pay came from Republicans in Southern and Western states, which are less unionized and where salaries tend to be lower. In more-unionized, Democratic-leaning states, proposals were generally more focused on recruiting and retaining educators. 

Democrat Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Republican Jim Justice of West Virginia proposed across-the-board 5% pay raises for teachers in their states. South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster called for raising the starting salary to $45,000 from $40,000 by 2025 and further raising it to $50,000 by 2026. Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds urged the legislature to allocate an additional $96 million, to raise starting pay to $50,000 a year — a 50% increase; establish a minimum salary of $62,000 for teachers with at least 12 years’ experience; and allocate $10 million for a merit-based grant program for educators.

Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy pitched a three-year incentive program that would offer hiring and retention bonuses ranging from $5,000 for teachers in urban areas to $15,000 for those working in rural schools. Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee announced plans to increase paraeducator pay and create incentives for more teachers to serve special-education students. Missouri Republican Gov. Michael Parson proposed an additional $6 million for the state’s teacher Career Ladder Program, a performance-based pay matching initiative — on top of new funds to raise starting teacher salaries to $40,000 statewide. 

Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced plans to launch a teacher apprenticeship program, and Kentucky’s Education First Plan provides funding for a teacher loan-forgiveness program.

Some governors are also looking for ways to lower regulatory hurdles to teaching. In Nebraska, Republican Jim Pillen proposed lowering “barriers for potential teachers to enter the workforce” by, among other things, allowing licensure reciprocity for teachers from other states. 

School Choice

School choice initiatives, particularly those involving private school options, emerged as one of the few starkly partisan issues in this year’s speeches. While both Democrats and Republicans offered charter school and public school choice initiatives, six Republicans advocated for vouchers and education savings accounts, while two Democrats strongly opposed such measures.

Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey announced legislation that would eventually provide $7,000 for every student to spend on private education, calling it her “No. 1 legislative priority.” Similarly, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee expressed support for universal private school choice through what he called “education freedom” accounts, as he in November. If they succeed, Alabama and Tennessee will join with universal or near-universal private school choice programs. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp also pledged to push through private school choice this year.

Democrats, on the other hand, attacked public funding of private schooling. “I will continue to reject vouchers and any attempt to send public education dollars to private schools,” declared Kansas’s Laura Kelly. “Vouchers will crush our rural schools, plain and simple.” In Arizona, where Republican state leaders enacted universal education savings accounts with few limitations on the use of the funding and few reporting mandates, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs pledged to work for greater accountability, as well as a requirement for students in the program to have attended public schools for at least 100 days before they can use an education savings account. Otherwise, Hobbs said, “the current projected price tag of $1 billion is only the start.”

In a departure from last year’s addresses, several governors pledged new support for public charter schools. Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little announced plans to introduce legislation “to cut more red tape to support charter schools while providing taxpayers transparency,” as a way of expanding school choice without diverting resources from public schools. Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis pledged to provide charter schools their full share of public education funding. And Oklahoma’s Kevin Stitt, a Republican, proposed moving high-performing charter schools into vacant public school buildings, especially in communities with underperforming district schools.  

Curriculum and Instruction

Governors signed a wave of literacy-reform legislation in 2023 rooted in the science of reading, and the leaders of nine states, both blue and red, have pledged similar initiatives this year. Healey, of Massachusetts, announced Literacy Launch, a $30 million to ensure that districts have high-quality curriculum and teacher training tied to the science of reading. New York’s Hochul called for legislation mandating evidence-based reading instruction and to train 20,000 teachers. 

New Mexico Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham announced plans for a $30 million statewide literacy institute and a free summer reading program for 10,000 students. And Iowa’s Reynolds proposed requiring education majors to pass a test of reading instruction as a way to hold education schools accountable for teaching the science of reading and ensure graduates’ competence in early literacy instruction for teacher licensure.

Other curricular initiatives were also sprinkled among the governors’ addresses, including a $10 million investment in math education in South Carolina; a proposal by North Dakota Republican Gov.Doug Burgum to require financial literacy instruction; Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb’s proposal to require computer science for high school graduation; and Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s plan to assemble toolkits on digital literacy and critical thinking to help students discern fact from fiction.

Student Mental Health

Eleven governors on both sides of the aisle addressed student mental health and youth behavioral concerns, supporting both school and community-based approaches. In Idaho, Little proposed a statewide student behavioral health initiative and doubled funding for school advisers. Reynolds proposed a new youth behavioral health facility. And Evers and Hochul pledged increased funding for school-based mental health services. 

Hochul was also among the governors who addressed the impact of social media, pledging to advance legislation to safeguard children’s privacy online and to regulate the algorithms that target them on social media feeds. Lee of Tennessee pledged to mitigate the negative impact of social media on children by enhancing parental involvement, and Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont announced plans to send guidance to local school boards regarding smartphone and social media use in schools. 

Higher Education

Governors from across the political spectrum proposed steps to improve college access, starting in high school. The leaders of 17 states announced plans to expand dual high school-college enrollment, lower the cost of associate degrees and increase scholarship opportunities. Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed making two years of community college tuition-free for all high school graduates. South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem advocated free tuition for National Guard members at private colleges within the state, building upon last year’s initiative to extend free tuition at state universities. And in South Carolina’s McMaster asked the General Assembly to freeze college tuition for in-state students and increase appropriations to higher-education institutions. 

Some governors are rethinking how their states structure and fund higher education, including two that hope to shift to an outcomes-based model. In Pennsylvania, Shapiro announced a Blueprint for Higher Education that would unite state universities and community colleges under a single governance structure, funded through “a predictable, transparent, outcomes-based funding system.” Oklahoma’s Stitt similarly wants to shift to an outcomes-based model, urging legislators to “stop subsidizing institutions with low enrollment and low graduation rates.”&�Բ�����;

Several governors announced investments in evolving and emerging job markets. Arizona’s Hobbs announced plans to expand the state’s medical schools and open new ones, and Democrat Dan McKee of Rhode Island proposed expanding a cybersecurity program into a full-fledged cybersecurity institution. Not surprisingly, governors are looking to higher education to spearhead work on artificial intelligence. New York’s Hochul announced the formation of the Empire AI Consortium, a $400 million research and development network of seven public and private universities. New Jersey Democrat Phil Murphy announced a similar initiative — what he called an . 

Workforce Development 

Fifteen governors from both sides of the aisle argued that college shouldn’t be students’ only postsecondary option and proposed ways to provide alternative pathways after high school. In at least five states, that work begins in high school. Healey wants to increase investments in “innovation pathways” that provide high school students with hands-on, skill-based learning. Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin told legislators that all high school students should graduate with both a diploma and a credential setting them up for high-paying jobs. And Missouri’s Parson proposed allocating $3 million toward expanding youth apprenticeship programs, alongside a $54 million investment in employer-driven education and training.

Some governors want to see specialized high schools focused on career readiness. Alabama’s Ivey asked the legislature to prioritize funding the Alabama School of Healthcare Sciences, a residential high school designed to address the medical field’s workforce shortage. The school would offer a unique STEM-focused curriculum, along with hands-on clinical training. 

Hobbs wants to double the number of postsecondary apprenticeships in construction and trades such as plumbing, while Shapiro intends to establish a new Career Connect program to link employers with talented youth, creating thousands of internships over the next decade.

This report was produced through a partnership between and ����Ӱ��.

Meghan Gallagher of ����Ӱ�� developed the interactive maps. FutureEd Research Associate Jingnan Sun contributed to the analysis.

Hundreds of are pending in 44 states, and laws or executive actions have been passed in 18 states that are intended to restrict or ban teaching about race, racism, gender and sexuality. Virulent attacks have targeted districts, school boards, schools, libraries and individual administrators, teachers and librarians. They are often led by non-parents and outside agitators working for political groups such as Moms for Liberty.

Whether these efforts are understood as the ,  or  targeting supposed woke education, the  on teachers and school leaders is real. Educators are confused about whether their state has passed laws that restrict teaching, what those laws say and how they might be affected by them. They are getting mixed messages as restrictions on teaching contradict the charge to strengthen the teaching of ,  and .

How can educators navigate often unanticipated attacks and strengthen curriculum, teaching and safe spaces that truly benefit all students and a democratic society? 

We recommend an approach called . This involves working toward democratic aims in education while managing the risks of controversy. Teachers and school leaders promote about significant issues so students learn how to examine, think critically about and discuss these issues with open minds. The curriculum teaches honest history that includes the experiences of traditionally excluded groups. At the same time, educators use strategies, such as selecting and framing for classroom inquiry and discussion, carefully choosing resources and pedagogical methods, and guiding discussion, to manage the risks that accompany teaching in this political climate. 

This , derived from a on preparing teachers for controversial issues, embodies contained risk taking and encapsulates these strategies. The research examined how four educators at universities in Northern Ireland, England and the Midwestern U.S. prepared teacher candidates for controversy in history, social studies and citizenship classes, and what those student teachers learned and put into practice. The framework is now used by K-12 teachers, school leaders and teacher educators. Here is specific guidance for educators based on five of its elements.

1. Prepare Thoroughly: If your state, local government or school district has relevant laws or policies, make sure you read them completely. Also know your state standards and be able to cite them as a guiding document. If your teaching or curriculum is ever challenged, you’ll have the standards, legal text and/or local policies to show that what you are teaching is justifiable. Know your students and school community. Anticipate potential challenges and rehearse your responses to them.
2. Communicate Proactively: Keeping open lines of communication with stakeholders, including students, parents and administrators, can head off many potential challenges before they begin. Be transparent about your goals, their educational purposes and the standards they align to, and respond to any concerns before teaching. Collaborate with colleagues and enlist support from school leaders. Turn potential challenges into active parental engagement and address misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of your curriculum directly.
3. Choose Resources and Teaching Methods: Use sources and approaches to inquiry and discussion that foster an exchange of ideas among students and develop their . Discussion formats such as seminars or , which provide models for exploration of texts and deliberation on issues, are effective at cultivating student voice and evaluation of different perspectives. Be sensitive to which formats are best for different kinds of issues, especially those connected to student identities. Clear goals for the discussion and procedures that keep students focused on those goals help develop vital skills and knowledge while limiting derailing comments from students. 
4. Cultivate a Supportive Environment: Safe and supportive classrooms and schools make students more open to learning how to engage in civil discourse across differences on significant issues. Take time to develop expectations (with student input), relationships and community. Creating room for students’ opinions and emotions, and pausing if rhetoric becomes potentially harmful or offensive, makes students feel heard and welcome. An in which students feel they can express themselves and discuss concerns with educators demonstrates caring helps to ward off complaints from students and families and contributes to development of young people’s civic participation.
5. Think Through Teacher Stance: Given accusations of indoctrination, educators must reflect on their own perspectives and consciously decide when and how to express them. As moral leaders, they must stand up for human and civil rights. But on specific issues requires ethical and practical judgment about the purpose and how those opinions will be received. Individuals react toward information that aligns with their own beliefs, and educators are no different. Knowing your own perspectives and understanding other viewpoints can help you respond to comments you disagree with in ways that educate and seek common ground rather than alienate people. 

We understand the confusion, anxiety and outrage educators are experiencing. We hope these steps will help teachers and school leaders be especially thoughtful, strategic and mutually supportive while they continue to serve the best interests of all young people and a diverse democratic society.

The response shocked her.

The staff member in the room at Bear Creek Middle School in Fulton County, Georgia, was a substitute, there to monitor behavior and ensure students completed their work. His actual teacher was hundreds of miles away, delivering instruction virtually for an Austin, Texas-based company called Proximity Learning. 

“We didn’t know our kids had virtual teachers,” Wright said. “Parents need to be aware that that is the type of learning [students] are getting.”

Live, online instruction in school has long linked students to subjects they couldn’t otherwise take, like A.P. Calculus or Latin. But as districts struggle to fill teaching vacancies, they are increasingly turning to companies like Proximity to teach core subjects. Districts are spending thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars on virtual teachers, according to ����Ӱ��’s review of purchase orders in , a data service. The practice — derided at the height of the pandemic as “Zoom-in-a-room”— is raising eyebrows as students return to school and continue to grapple with the lingering .

“This is happening all over,” said Jennifer Carolan, co-founder and partner at Reach Capital, a firm that invests in education companies. She estimated that roughly a dozen companies offering virtual teaching have reached “meaningful scale.”

But she balked at investing herself after a member of her team visited a high school English class at a school near San Jose, California, taught virtually by a teacher from , another provider. “Ultimately, I could not stomach funding this because I would never send my kid to a school where they’re in ,” she said. “It doesn’t align with how I see education evolving.”

Given shortages, however, district leaders insist a virtual teacher is better than none at all.

“At the end of the day, you’ve got to find a way to get instruction in front of those children,” said Andy Pruitt, spokesman for the Charleston County schools in South Carolina.

Charleston paid over $450,000 for Proximity teachers in math, language arts and social studies for 22 classes across seven schools last year — and sent an email to parents informing them of the practice prior to the start of school, Pruit said. But the district, which is using federal relief funds to give each of its almost 3,600 teachers this year, doesn’t expect to need Proximity again this fall. 

The picture looks different in Colleton County, about an hour to the west. The 4,900-student district will once again fill positions with teachers from New York-based . Last year, students had virtual teachers for in algebra, biology, English and history. 

The practice sparked some disarray, including students wandering out of class during lessons. led the school board earlier this year to approve $18,000 for high-tech cameras that allow virtual teachers to see the entire classroom. 

During a June board meeting, Wilsey Hamilton, the district’s human resources director, that with more than 60 open positions, her team is trying to lure back retired teachers and is advertising job openings on social media and digital billboards. But she couldn’t rule out using Fullmind for another year.

“We don’t see any other option but to continue that partnership to help fill some of our vacancies,” she said. 

No shame

More than 40% of the nation’s schools reported teacher vacancies last year, according to the most recent data from the , with the worst shortages at high-poverty and high-minority schools. Heading into the new school year, many large districts, including and , are scrambling to fill positions. 

Like Charleston, at least 13 other South Carolina districts have used Proximity over the past two school years to fill gaps. 

Representatives from Education Solution Services, which owns Proximity, did not return calls or emails seeking comment on this article. 

Catherine Schumacher, executive director of Public Education Partners, a Greenville-based nonprofit, said keeping pace with in the state is likely one reason for the vacancies. Negative sentiment toward teachers could be another.

“It is really important that we do not shame districts for doing the absolute best they can to get qualified teachers,” she said. “We have systematically underpaid … educators for years, and we have been tolerating a climate that is demonizing teachers and public schools.”

GovSpend reflects the mushrooming demand for virtual teachers. Yearly spending by districts on Proximity, for example, increased from $6.3 million in 2020 to over $21 million last year. And while Reach Capital didn’t fund Coursemojo, , another education sector investor, did. A third venture firm, General Catalyst, is betting on Chicago-based Elevate K-12, contributing last year to in the company. 

“It seems to be developing into a behind-the-scenes boom industry,” said Kerry Chisnall, principal of Hawley Middle School in Creedmoor, North Carolina, which used four Elevate K-12 teachers last year. Located on the fringes of the Research Triangle, Chisnall said his district can’t pay teachers as much as larger districts, like nearby Durham. Elevate K-12, he said, is “a godsend, absolutely.”

Over 100 districts or charter networks, including at least 40 in Texas alone, have paid Proximity a total of more than $31 million for virtual teachers since the fall of 2021, GovSpend shows. They include the , which spent $546,000 for science and math courses, and the Jefferson Parish school system in Louisiana, which has spent $570,000 and recently signed a with the company for $861,000, to be financed with federal relief funds. 

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools in Tennessee is one of Proximity’s best customers — spending $6.63 million since January 2022. 

When the district first contracted with Proximity in 2019, Keith Williams, head of the Memphis-Shelby County Education Association, dismissed it as a and “another fly-by-night program.” But now on the school board, he voted in June with the rest of the board in favor of a for 600 “live sessions.”

Williams didn’t return calls or emails seeking comment, and the district declined to respond to questions about Proximity.

Before school started last week, Interim Superintendent Toni Williams told that the company is one way the district is addressing vacancies.

But virtual teaching outposts also struggle with shortages, and a contract for remote instruction doesn’t guarantee a teacher will be there when students come back to class. “Proximity has challenges recruiting teachers just like brick-and-mortar schools,” said Rachael Spriggs, a former teacher in the district who ran unsuccessfully for school board last year. The model, she said, is also “extremely expensive because you are funding two positions per Proximity class.”

Danette Stokes, president of the United Education Association of Shelby County, another union in the district, said with classes taught by substitutes and virtual teachers throughout the year, it’s often unclear who is accountable for student performance.

“The children don’t care; they’re in and out,” she said. And she echoed concerns about transparency. “The principal is not going to introduce the Proximity teacher at a parent-teacher conference.”&�Բ�����;

‘This problem isn’t going away’

While researchers are still examining the impact of pandemic-era on students, there’s ample evidence that it set achievement back decades. Unreliable internet access, financial distress, disengagement from school and the health effects of COVID all limited students’ ability to learn while schools were closed. 

But done well, virtual teaching has the potential to accommodate educators’ increasing demands for and offer a better way to handle vacancies, said Shaily Baranwal, who founded Elevate K-12. “Schools were just putting kids in front of software or doing anything they could as a Band-Aid,” she said. “Our pitch to school districts is that this problem isn’t going away. It can’t be about filling a shortage; it has to be real teaching.”

Over 260 districts across 33 states now use the program. The students don’t wear headphones, allowing them to interact more easily, and Baranwal expects districts to commit to an Elevate K-12 teacher for a full school year to provide consistency. 

But for Wright’s son in Fulton County, the in-school, virtual learning experience was frustrating. When a substitute wasn’t available, the school dispatched Proximity students to empty desks in other classrooms. From January to March, he took his remote math lessons in a regular social studies class, trying to block out distractions and listen to the Proximity teacher through headphones. The math teacher would sometimes mute the students’ microphones and only let them communicate through the chat function, Wright said.

Wright, herself a fourth grade teacher in another Atlanta-area district and head of a organization, isn’t opposed to virtual instruction. In fact, she considered applying for a Proximity job because she enjoyed teaching remotely during the pandemic.

“I understand what it takes to have engaging instruction,” she said. “When the child disappeared [from the screen], I was able to immediately text that parent.”

Brian Noyes, a spokesman for Fulton schools, said the district tries to keep disruption to a minimum, but splitting up Proximity students is sometimes unavoidable when a substitute can’t be found. While the district is now “99% staffed,” he said, some students will still get Proximity teachers this fall.

Wright hopes her son isn’t one of them.

“The environment wasn’t conducive to learning,” she said. “Coming out of the pandemic, it doesn’t support them being able to function in the classroom.”

Editor’s note: Reporter Alex Baumhardt worked almost exclusively on this series for more than four months, starting in January. The project involved extensive research and interviews with more than 80 people, including state and local leaders, teachers, parents and students. She collected data and historical documents through records requests with state agencies and school districts, and visited schools across the state.

Carl Cole was alarmed by the growing number of students sent to him for special education in the late 1990s. He was director of special education for the Bethel School District near Eugene, and he doubted that so many kids had learning disabilities. 

One of the district’s elementary schools was referring nearly one in five students to special education, and most of them were struggling readers. When he went to visit their classrooms, he realized why.

“Many kids were what we later coined ‘instructionally disabled,’ not special education,” Cole said in a recent interview. In other words, they weren’t being taught to read in ways that many experts, especially those in the field of special education, knew all kids needed to be taught.

The Capital Chronicle determined that Oregon has spent more than $250 million in the past 25 years on reading. But that money has failed to help more than a generation of students. Over the last 25 years, nearly two in five fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words. Today, few Oregon fourth and eighth graders are proficient readers, according to the report card.

To address this, Gov. Tina Kotek is backing the state’s single largest reading investment in two decades, the Early Literacy Success Initiative, a $140 million grant program to get “evidence-based literacy instruction” methods into classrooms in districts that apply for the funding. Kotek and the bill’s supporters have said it will finally get the “science of reading” into Oregon classrooms, though it’s yet to pass the Legislature that’s been stalled by a Republican-led walkout. 

Since the 1960s, hundreds of studies have been conducted to find the most effective ways to teach kids to read. There is today a large body of cognitive and neuroscience research, and evidence — often referred to as “the science of reading” — that has shown that the human brain does not learn to read or write naturally, but relies on explicit instruction in a specific set of skills. Everyone needs these skills to read, but they learn them at different speeds.

Among the first and most fundamental skills kids must develop is learning to decode written words by mapping sounds to letters and letter combinations, known as phonics. It’s a skill around 60% of kids will struggle with unless they are given frequent and explicit instruction in the earliest grades. And among the most studied instructional methods for developing those phonics skills — proven to help all kids learn to read, especially those struggling most — was one developed by education psychologists and special education experts at the University of Oregon in Eugene 60 years ago. 

Yet in many classrooms in Oregon and across the country, kids have been taught in ways that do not reflect all of that research. Instead, in many districts, curricula and instruction are based on theories popularized in the last few decades that rely less on robust phonics instruction, and instead favor teaching kids to read whole words on sight through memorization, and to use context clues and pictures to make guesses about words. 

Proponents of these methods, which assume that kids will grow into reading if they’re exposed to good books, were pitted against proponents of robust phonics instruction in the mid-1990s in what’s known as “the reading wars,” which took over schools and state legislatures.

Decades of Investments

That reading would come naturally to kids was the assumption among teachers in Bethel back in 1999 and it was having detrimental effects, Cole said. 

He tapped special education and education psychology experts at the University of Oregon to help him create, over three years, a sea change in reading instruction in the district’s six elementary schools. Cole and those experts went on to play roles in the largest federal investment in elementary reading instruction in U.S. history. 

At the turn of the millennium, Oregon and the University of Oregon were poised to become models for the nation of how an entire state could change reading instruction to align with the decades of reading science. 

Since the late 1990s, more than $250 million in state and federal tax dollars have been invested in programs to boost reading ability among Oregon students, according to an analysis of financial reports, reports from the Legislative Policy and Research Office and public records requests by the Capital Chronicle. More than a dozen committees, boards and councils were created by four governors, tasked with improving reading among Oregon students.

But those governors, legislators and education agency leaders failed to implement and sustain wide scale-teaching and curricular change that would improve outcomes for the kids struggling the most. 

The Oregon Legislature has never put the state Department of Education in charge of wide scale reform or given it the authority to hold schools accountable when students fail to show improvement year after year, despite the Legislature being in charge of two-thirds of state school funding. Instead, it’s used the education department to distribute state and federal reading investments to districts, along with recommendations for spending the money. Both the Legislature and education department continue to leave decisions about reading instruction, reading curriculum and teacher training to individual teachers, school district administrators and school boards. 

At no point in the last 25 years have state leaders moved to override local control — a foundational principle of Oregon education for decades — from the state’s 197 districts to uniformly improve reading instruction for all students. 

The state’s latest attempt to get the science of reading into Oregon classrooms is not the first proposal of its kind. There was the Oregon Early Reading Initiative a decade ago, and the Early Success Reading Initiative a decade before that. There was the 2002 plan sent from the state education department to the federal education department for millions in funding titled: “.”&�Բ�����;

In an interview with the Capital Chronicle, Kotek said she wasn’t aware of that 21-year-old plan. Her two education policy advisors, Pooja Bhatt and Melissa Goff, declined interview requests from the Capital Chronicle.

‘The reading wars’ in Oregon

Oregon was not immune to the reading wars of the 1990s, which had become not just educational, but political. Phonics instruction was a favorite topic of former state Sen. Charles Starr, a conservative Republican from Hillsboro known for controversial proposals such as allowing schools to post signs of the Ten Commandments. But Starr was onto something with reading instruction. He tried at least three times between 1998 and 2003 to propose legislation that would mandate Oregon school districts provide explicit phonics instruction in the earliest grades and ensure schools had access to curricula that included phonics instruction. According to meeting minutes from a hearing on one of Starr’s bills, in May 1999, just 15 of the state’s 197 districts had K-5 literacy instruction that included direct phonics instruction. 

“The failure to learn to read is the most serious problem facing education in the U.S. today,” he told his peers in the Legislature 24 years ago. 

Passage of Starr’s phonics proposals through the Republican controlled House and Senate were largely divided along party lines, and Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber vetoed two of Starr’s three proposals that made it to his desk. Mandating phonics nationwide had come to be seen as Republican dogma, an attempt to standardize and regulate teachers and teaching. An article in the Willamette Week from 2001 quoted one lobbyist saying Starr had become obsessed with phonics. 

“Nearly every bill that came up in committee he attached a phonics amendment to. There was the phonics game, a phonics pilot program, it was silly,” the lobbyist said. 

It’s unclear if Kitzhaber had any strong political feelings about Starr’s bills. The then-governor was arguably more preoccupied at the time with keeping schools financially solvent than he was with reading curriculum. There wasn’t any money for massive educational reform. Voters had passed Measure 5 in 1991 and Measure 50 in 1997, both of which capped the state’s ability to tax property to help pay for schools. School funding from those taxes had dropped by two-thirds. The state education department didn’t even have a reading specialist at the time to oversee a curricular shift or any major investment in phonics. Kitzhaber had cut the position to save money.

Bethel Reading Project

To transform reading instruction in Bethel in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Cole tapped three heavy hitters from the University of Oregon. Edward Kame’enui, Deborah Simmons and Beth Harn were all experts in reading and specifically, special education reading instruction. 

Cole and the experts discovered there was no continuity in how reading was taught across classrooms, grades and schools in Bethel, because of local control. Many students were not being taught according to the science. Students might get some phonics instruction, but not enough to fully develop those decoding skills. Some students were taught to read and memorize whole words before they had learned to decode them, akin to learning how to multiply before learning to add. 

The philosophy was, according to Cole: “Kids will read when they’re ready.”&�Բ�����;

With a $700,000 federal grant, they launched the Bethel Reading Project. They began retraining teachers and educational assistants in reading science, providing frequent assessments and extra instruction for students struggling most. Teachers agreed to switch to curricula focused on explicit phonics instruction. Within three years, Bethel went from about 15% of students leaving first grade unable to read, to less than 2%. By 2003, the proportion of third graders meeting state standards in reading rose from 79% to 92%. School employee associations and leaders in other districts asked Cole’s staff and the UO researchers to give presentations about what they’d done in Bethel, but there wasn’t any major effort from Oregon education leaders to fund or scale the experiment elsewhere, he said.

“I actually got tired of doing Oregon presentations because we did so many of them,” Cole said. “There wasn’t any strong support from the Oregon Department of Education.”

Reading First

While the Bethel Reading Project was wrapping up, the federal government was rolling out its single largest investment — $6 billion over six years — in improving reading proficiency called “Reading First.” It was part of the No Child Left Behind Act that Congress passed in 2001, which required states to get all students to “proficient” levels on state tests by the 2013-14 school year. If schools wanted a piece of the $6 billion, they needed to get reading instruction in their classrooms aligned with the reading science. 

Kame’enui and Simmons would become major architects of Reading First and of the program’s rollout in Oregon. Leaders at the state department of education submitted a 220-page application for Reading First money, including the seven-point plan titled “.”

Edward Kame’enui gives a presentation in 2002 on the importance of preparing teachers to teach reading according to the reading science during the White House Conference on Teacher Training and Recruitment.

In 2002, UO became one of three universities in the nation that was designated a “” to retrain teachers, train reading coaches for schools and facilitate research to instruct teachers across the U.S. on the most effective instructional methods rooted in scientific research.

“We would develop all these materials and hold these institutes for three, four, maybe five days — all day long — training teachers on the big ideas of beginning reading,” Kame’enui said. 

For many districts, Reading First was the first time there was money to hire reading specialists and reading coaches for schools. It was also, for many, the first time students got explicit and direct phonics instruction, especially kids who struggled the most. 

The rollout wasn’t perfect across the country, and some studies would later find that gains didn’t materialize or were not sustained in schools where implementation was poorly done. But in many places where Reading First was implemented well, it seemed to be working.

Before Reading First, only 18% of students at Humboldt Elementary School in Portland were at grade level for reading. After four years of Reading First, nearly 75% were.

Kame’enui and Simmons went on to consult with the U.S. Department of Education. Cole, the special education director at Bethel, went to work for the Western Regional Reading First Center to help spread Reading First across the West and to support schools with its implementation. 

But by 2008, Reading First had imploded. Academics whose curriculum did not meet program standards accused Kame’enui, Simmons and other prominent Reading First figures of using their positions to promote their own textbooks and materials for financial gain. The two professors resigned from advisory positions in the program, and from work they were doing with the U.S. Department of Education. Kame’enui returned to the University of Oregon. He maintains that he and Simmons did not try to promote their work to districts to earn more money. 

“It was very painful, but it was political,” Kame’enui said.

By the end of 2008, the reading first money had dried up and a financial crisis and recession hit.

Jamila Williams was principal at Humboldt Elementary during Reading First. The school closed in 2013, and Williams lives in Arizona now, but she remembers the fallout vividly.

“We ended up having to really cut things that were important for the kids,” she said, “but we didn’t have the money for it.”

Well-intentioned failures

Despite efforts to sustain gains from Reading First, then superintendent of instruction, Susan Castillo, and then-Gov. Ted Kulongoski remained resistant to instructional mandates, and sustaining funding for schools continued to be the central educational challenge for the Legislature. 

Castillo resigned in 2012, and Kitzhaber, who had been elected governor after a seven-year hiatus, appointed former Tigard-Tualatin Superintendent Rob Saxton to the position. Saxton had overseen a successful reading intervention program based on direct instruction and scientifically proven reading methods that targeted students struggling most in his district. It had been so successful that reading experts from his district went on to offer voluntary training to school staff in 90 other Oregon districts.

Saxton began developing a proposal for the single largest state investment in state history in reading instruction: $180 million for the “” to get kids reading by third grade. It would have provided schools, much like Reading First did, with grants to pay for reading coaches, teacher training and curriculum rooted in the reading science. 

“Governor Kitzhaber promised me that he would not sign the budget bill into law until this literacy initiative was funded,” Saxton told the Capital Chronicle. 

But in February 2015, Kitzhaber abruptly resigned following ethics violations and the attempt died. Saxton resigned several months later to take a job leading the Northwest Regional Education Service District. 

“Eight years have gone by,” Saxton said. “Fifty thousand students per class go through Oregon schools. That means 400,000 students have not had the kind of exposure to literacy instruction that they should have had in the intervening time.”&�Բ�����;

In those eight years that followed, the Legislature focused on initiatives that would balance the state school fund after decades of disinvestment. Then-Secretary of State Kate Brown became Oregon’s governor, and was focused on raising the state’s graduation rate, which was among the lowest in the nation. She tapped a former Bethel Schools superintendent, Colt Gill, to become her education innovation officer and eventually to lead the education department. 

Graduation rates in Oregon rose under Gill’s leadership, but according to state assessments, it’s not because students improved in their reading abilities. Gill, whose tenure ends this month, continued to consult with Kame’enui and other experts at the University of Oregon while at Bethel and at the department of education, he said. But any attempt at instructional reform in reading took a backseat to his priorities as director of the department when, a year into the job, COVID hit. 

He said he hopes to see the Early Literacy Success Initiative signed into law. It is, in many ways, a carbon copy of what his predecessor, Rob Saxton, had proposed eight years ago, with about $40 million less than what Saxton had wanted at the time. Gill, like his predecessors, trusts districts to be in charge of improving reading instruction without the state education department taking the lead. 

“We’re going to have to continue to work on it over the next several biennia to be able to get the outcomes we’re looking for,” he said. “We didn’t get here overnight.”

Major reading investments in Oregon

Over the past 25 years, Oregon has spent millions of dollars on improving reading in schools. And yet, many students still struggle.

Here’s a look at the investments:

1998: Oregon gets $8 million between 1999 and 2002 under the federal Reading Excellence Act of 1998 to launch Oregon READS. It aimed to get kids ready to learn to read once they entered kindergarten and first grade, and to teach every child to read by the end of third grade. It paid for teacher professional development, family literacy programs and literacy interventions to reduce the number of children being inappropriately referred to special education.

1999: Funded by state and federal and private grants, the Oregon Reading Initiative distributed money to districts for evidence-based teacher training in literacy and promoted reading programs.

2001: The Legislature passed the Early Success Reading Initiative. It authorized the Department of Education to award grants to 30 specified school districts for pilot projects to establish early success reading sites in individual schools.

2001: Under the federal Reading First program, Oregon got $48.3 million over six years. Of the state’s 660 primary schools, 50 were chosen throughout that time to become Reading First Schools.

2001: The state Legislature allocated $140 million to the Department of Education for schools to improve reading.

2001-2002: Oregon received $2.5 million from the federal government under the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Project to pay for research-based reading programs in 19 elementary schools and six secondary schools.

2005: The Oregon Department of Education received funding to expand a reading intervention program “Response to Intervention” in schools. More than 100 districts benefitted over the following 17 years.

2010: Oregon received up to $15 million under the federal Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program to advance literacy skills for students from birth through 12th grade. Under the federal program, states must provide clear standards and “evidence-based reading and writing curricula,” as well as “evidence-based teacher preparation and professional development aligned with standards.”

2013: The state Legislature passed the Oregon Early Reading Initiative, which allocated $8 million for improving early literacy, with a goal of getting all students at grade level for reading by the end of third grade.

2019: The state Legislature passes the Student Success Act, directing more than $2 billion every two years to improving outcomes for historically underserved students, including targeted investments in early literacy.

2023: Gov. Tina Kotek backs the state’s single largest reading investment in two decades, the Early Literacy Success Initiative, a $140 million grant program to get “evidence-based literacy instruction” methods into classrooms in districts that apply for the funding. The initiative is yet to pass the Legislature due to a Republican-led walkout.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Better yet, his students were discussing “,” a 1909 E.M. Forster story in which future humans live in isolation, even from family members, forever in fear of toxic air and human contact. The characters see each other only through screens.

Forster’s story frames the narrative of , the debut graphic memoir by Bessie, along with the artist Peter Glanting, which offers a surreal, often grim take on the pandemic and its effects on both Bessie and his students. The book also bemoans the “diaspora” that the pandemic brought forth, concluding that while it didn’t create “inequality, standardization and corporatization” in public education, it made them more “painfully visible” than ever.

So far the book is garnering lavish praise: Publishers Weekly gave it a , calling it “poignant” and one of the chapters. It also named it one of graphic novels and adult comics. 

Bessie entered the Spring 2020 semester in the middle of a personal crisis, returning to campus as he recovered from chemotherapy after surgery to remove a brain tumor. He had long enjoyed the infectious energy and “electrical current” that flows through a good classroom, invoking educator ’ observation that students are “the power in the room.”

So he naturally mourned the loss of face-to-face instruction and dreaded the flattening that took place on Zoom. Once distinctive, quirky individuals, his students quickly became “identical in size, dimension, proportion, equal tiles in a perfect grid.” They often showed up with cameras and microphones turned off, “black boxes on mute.”

That sudden absence gave Bessie the opportunity to step back and see the transformation taking place not just in his classroom but in his life, as he continued cancer treatments. He began to see himself as an experimental subject whose day job was guiding his own students through another kind of experiment, as his college broadened its pre-pandemic reliance on technologies like Zoom, Canvas and Google. While these tools tethered the community together during the crisis, he writes, they also came with their own strict demands: access to a computer, stable wifi and a quiet study space, all parameters “set by the software requirements,” not educators. These demands soon overwhelmed many students, some of whom never returned. 

In an interview, the longtime English instructor said giving in to these demands could threaten community colleges’ open access mission, squeezing out the neediest students — the very students they’re designed to uplift. In a way, he said, the book is an exploration of this question: “To what degree are we ceding public control of the Commons to corporations?”

The narrative in Going Remote, Bessie said, “was immediately a comic. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to express this story in a graphic form.” As soon as the pandemic began, he found himself “writing and drawing to myself about this, because I said, ‘There is going to be something new after this.’ … I had this feeling like, ‘This is going to be a major shift.’” 

He’d always been drawn to comics, largely for their ability to translate abstract, complex concepts into visual form — early on, Glanting, the artist, illustrates Bessie’s lingering brain cancer as a pint-sized, white-eyed blob, leaning against a stack of books on a shelf in Bessie’s office. 

Bessie also drew inspiration from the graphic adaptation of University of Illinois scholar William Ayers’ memoir.

Like Ayers, Bessie writes from a distinctly leftist perspective, making the case that community colleges from the beginning were both profoundly democratic and “steeped with the virus of classist and racist contempt” for their students, part stepping stool and part gate-keeper.

Community colleges play a big role in Bessie’s own family history: His father, a penniless Korean War veteran who suffered a “profound hearing loss,” enrolled in a California community college and found educators who believed in his potential, despite his disability. He eventually found his way to the University of Southern California, training to become a physical therapist and going on to a successful career.

“When I come into the classroom, I still have that feeling: Each one of these students is somebody that could have been my own father, is somebody that society didn’t think would be educated,” he said.

Yet he also warns that there’s a dark side to community colleges’ legacy. Founded more than a century ago, the system began with an intentional design, he said, that, just as often as it uplifted marginalized students like Bessie’s father, excluded others from the mainstream of elite higher education. 

So in the winter of 2020, when his students — starting with his “most marginalized” and ending with his best, most outgoing students — began disappearing altogether from Zoom, Bessie was, in a way, not surprised. Whether beset by technical problems, work and family obligations, or something else altogether, he concluded that they were really the victims of a kind of longstanding neglect that systematically deprives them of opportunities.

Even now, three years after the first lockdowns, with students slowly returning to campus (Bessie never reveals the name of his Bay Area institution, Diablo Valley College), he said he and his colleagues must take on more responsibilities, becoming “frontline emotional workers” to students in crisis: Since late 2020, he has served on his campus CARE (Campus Assessment, Response, and Evaluation) team, which works with students experiencing homelessness, mental health issues, family crises, and even spousal abuse. Since the pandemic, he said, CARE reports “have gone through the roof.”

He sees this as a key function of institutions like Diablo Valley.

“When I’m looking at the future of community college, to me, I want us to put as much energy in these systems of care as we do in these systems of technology. … All of us were trained in how to use online technology. But none of us were trained in what to do when a student says, ‘I attempted suicide.’”

Now back in the classroom roughly half-time — Bessie is teaching two fully in-person classes and two hybrid classes — he feels “more optimistic than I did in finishing the book.” Classes, he said, have “amazing energy,” with engaging conversations about readings that resemble those he and his students enjoyed pre-pandemic.

And he’s doing his best to remain open-minded about technology. The series of remote semesters, he said, actually forced him to consider not just how students can shine in an online classroom, but also the limitations of face-to-face teaching. When he’s teaching online, for instance, students who didn’t hear something the first time — he’s a very fast talker, he’ll admit — can go back and rewatch the lesson.

Excerpt from Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey, published by Seven Stories Press

But he still has concerns. Enrollment, for one thing, has dropped “precipitously” since the pandemic, forcing the college to reduce offerings. Ironically, even though Zoom proved to be difficult for many students, a fair share are now clamoring for remote, fully asynchronous classes. He worries that, given the hybrid schedule, many new students will never get “that campus experience … of being pulled into community.” Between lower enrollment and online coursework, he estimated, the college seems about one-fourth as populated as in 2019. 

In the end, though, it’s “more vibrant than when I finished the book,” he said. A few days ago, for the first time in months, he smelled the aroma of someone vaping tobacco outside his office building. And then he heard someone else playing music a bit too loud. “And I was just like, ‘Yes, we’re back!’”

In the last two years, have passed laws or policies limiting if or how race and gender are discussed in the schools. The details of these restrictions vary, but most are . Kentucky law, for example, states that tying racial disparities to slavery is “destructive to the unification of our nation.” Tennessee prohibits public schools from promoting notions of unconscious bias. 

When RAND U.S. teachers about these policies last spring, one in four reported that such limitations have influenced their curriculum choices and instructional practices. Replying to a follow-up question asking for more detail, many described veering away from any discussion of race and gender, regardless of whether a topic was specifically banned by law. 

“The past two years have made me nervous about teaching Frederick Douglass because I don’t think the people in my community know the difference between teaching [Black] history and teaching critical race theory,” one teacher told us. Another teacher wrote this: “While it was never explicitly stated by my district not to discuss gender or race-related topics in the classroom, I know that my district would not have my back should I choose to add instruction on these important issues.”&�Բ�����;

For students of color, the psychological phenomenon to be concerned about is called identity threat. This is defined as feelings of fear and danger that can arise from the of one’s group through stereotypes, marginalization or discrimination.

Stanford social psychologist Claude Steele has studied identity threat for decades. In he undertook with colleagues, college students watched videos advertising a STEM leadership conference: one version had three times as many men as women, while the other showed gender parity. Sensors attached to the viewers’ wrists captured significantly faster heart rates, blood pressure and sweating among female students who viewed the video with fewer women, while men’s physiological reactions were the same in both cases. The women also reported less desire to attend the leadership conference than the men. led by Columbia psychology professor Valerie Purdie-Vaughns found similar heightened anxiety among African American professionals after viewing recruiting materials from various corporate workplace settings showing predominantly white people.

When a school eliminates courses, lessons or books featuring women and people of color, it sends a similar message of identity threat. Ruby Bridges’ “,” Angie Thomas’ “” and Ashley Hope Peréz’s “,” all stories about students of color, were banned in public schools across the U.S. this year. Girls and children of color could take this as a cue that they aren’t valued or don’t belong in school — and that can create stress that harms their ability to learn. 

The most direct way to mitigate identity threat, of course, is to integrate learning material that sends messages to students of color that they matter. of at-risk ninth-graders in San Francisco, for example, showed that taking an ethnic studies course increased attendance by 21 percentage points, grade-point average by 1.4 points and credits earned by 23. That, however, is exactly the type of course that could generate the negative attention many schools and teachers wish to avoid in this turbulent moment.

Although race and gender bans are leaving many teachers uncertain about what is safe to teach, their hands are not completely tied. There are other ways to support students of color and offset identity threat.

have demonstrated that specific classroom interventions — invoking high standards, prompting students to reflect on their own core values and helping them develop optimism in the face of adversity — can give children experiencing identity threat the encouragement they need to succeed at school and beyond. The effects of these interventions include a greater sense of belonging, improved and .

Self-affirming activities, like asking students to choose their most important values from a list and explain why they are essential, can by 12 percentage points among students who complete this exercise three to four times in one year. In one , African American college freshmen were given narratives that portrayed social adversity as common but transient and short-lived, and they were then asked to write an essay—and then make a video—that considered their own experiences alongside those narratives. The experiment raised participants’ grade point averages, relative to a control group, and cut the achievement gap in half.  

By conveying to girls and students of color that they are individually capable of overcoming adversity — and that who they are matters — educators might soften the blow of public laws and policies that send the opposite message.

If you went to high school in the United States anytime since the 1960s, you were likely assigned some of the following books: Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar” and “Macbeth”; John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”; and William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.”

For many former students, these books and other so-called “classics” represent high school English. But despite the efforts of reformers, both and , the most frequently assigned titles have never represented America’s diverse student body.

Why did these books become classics in the U.S.? How have they withstood challenges to their status? And will they continue to dominate high school reading lists? Or will they be replaced by a different set of books that will become classics for students in the 21st century?

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The high school canon

The set of books that is taught again and again, broadly across the country, is referred to by literature scholars and English teachers as “the canon.”

The high school canon has been shaped by many factors. Shakespeare’s plays, especially “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar,” have been taught consistently , when the curriculum was determined by college entrance requirements. Others, like “To Kill a Mockingbird,” winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, were ushered into the classroom by current events – in the case of Lee’s book, . Some books just seem especially suited for classroom teaching: “Of Mice and Men” has a straightforward plot, easily identifiable themes and is under 100 pages long.

Titles become “traditional” when they are passed down through generations. As the education historian Jonna Perrillo observes, of having their children study the same books that they once did.

The last period of significant change to the canon was during the 1960s and 1970s, when the largest generation of the 20th century, the baby boomers, went to high school. For instance, in 1963, at Evanston Township High School in Illinois revealed that “To Kill a Mockingbird,” first published in 1960, was by far the “most enjoyed book,” followed by two books that had been published in the 1950s, J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.” None of these books were yet traditional, yet they became so for the next generation.

A comparison of national surveys conducted in 1963 and 1988 shows how several books that were introduced to the classroom when the boomers were students had become classics when boomers were teachers.

During the 1960s and 1970s, teachers even reframed “Romeo and Juliet” as a contemporary work. Lesson plans from the era referred to its adaptations into “” – a musical that – and Franco Zefferelli’s of Shakespeare’s story of star-crossed lovers. It became the perfect hook for ninth graders in a study of Shakespeare that would conclude in 12th grade with “Macbeth.”

Efforts to diversify

English education professor that, since the 1960s, “leaders in the profession of English teaching have tried to broaden the curriculum to include more selections by women and minority authors.” But in the late 1980s, according to his findings, the high school “top ten” still included only one book by a woman – Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” – and none by minority authors.

At that time, a was underway about whether America was a “melting pot” in which many cultures became one, or a colorful “mosaic” in which many cultures coexisted. Proponents of the latter view argued for a multicultural canon, but they were ultimately unable to establish one. A 2011 survey of Southern schools by Joyce Stallworth and Louel C. Gibbons, published in “English Leadership Quarterly,” found that the five most frequently taught books were all traditional selections: “The Great Gatsby,” “Romeo and Juliet,” Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

One explanation for this persistence is that the canon is not simply a list: It takes form as stacks of copies on shelves in the storage area known as the “book room.” Changes to the inventory require time, money and effort. Depending on the district, replacing a classic . And it would create more work for teachers who are already maxed out.

“Too many teachers, probably myself included, teach from the traditional canon,” a teacher told Stallworth and Gibbons. “We are overworked and underpaid and struggle to find the time to develop quality lessons for new books.”

The end of an era?

Esau McCauley, the author of “Reading While Black,” describes the list of classics by white authors as the “.” At least two factors suggest that its dominance over the curriculum is coming to an end.

First, the battles over which books should be taught have become more intense than ever. On the one hand, progressives like the teachers of the growing call for the inclusion of books by – and they question the status of the classics. On the other hand, conservatives have challenged or successfully banned the teaching of many new books that deal with gender and sexuality or race.

PEN America, a nonprofit organization that fights for free expression for writers, reports “” in book bans. The outcome might be a literature curriculum that more resembles the political divisions in this country. Much more than in the past, students in conservative and progressive districts might read very different books.

Second, English Language Arts education itself is changing. State standards, such as those , no longer make the teaching of literature the primary focus of English class. Instead, there is a new emphasis on “.” And while preceding generations of teachers voiced concerns about the distractions of and then , books may have an even smaller share of students’ attention in .

“We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world,” the National Council of Teachers of English proclaims in . The group calls for English teachers to put less emphasis on books in order to train students to use and analyze a variety of media. Accordingly, students across the country may not only have fewer books in common, but they also may be reading fewer books altogether.

Why teach literature?

Over generations, English teachers have voiced many reasons to teach books, and the canon in particular: to instill a , foster , build and cultivate . These goals have little to do with the skills emphasized by contemporary academic standards. But if literature is going to continue to be an important part of American education, it is important to talk not only about what books to teach, but the reasons why.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

The front door of the house was ajar when Domanic Castillo and Julia Madera approached. They were looking for a teenager named Jason who’d missed the first five days of school at Northridge High in Greeley.  

The boy wasn’t there, but his father was — dusty from working on renovations inside. 

After Castillo explained that they hadn’t seen Jason at school yet, the man quickly dialed the boy’s mother and handed over his cell phone. Madera took the call and, speaking in Spanish, learned that the family planned to send him to one of the district’s alternative schools.

“She said she meant to call,” Madera said as she and Castillo returned to her SUV, ready for the next stop on their home visit list.

Castillo and Madera are on the front lines of a push to get kids back in school after a pandemic that compounded many of the problems that contribute to , including student disengagement, , and financial insecurity. The rationale is simple: Students have to be in class to learn. 

The Greeley-Evans district in northern Colorado is one of many districts nationwide using  to fund attendance-boosting efforts. The 22,000-student district is in the second year of a three-year, $644,000 contract with the Denver-based consulting company  to track down missing high schoolers and help them catch up on coursework or credits.

Castillo, the Northridge cheer coach, and Madera, a former secretary at the school, are among 14 Zero Dropouts employees, also known as attendance advocates, embedded in the district’s five high schools this year. They have a host of responsibilities, from helping out in classes and monitoring hallways to calling and visiting the homes of absent students.

The job is part detective work, part social work, and part paperwork. 

Before the pandemic, 35% of Greeley-Evans students were chronically absent, meaning they missed 10% or more of school days. That number rose to 40% during 2020-21, well above the state rate of 26%. 

Lanny Hass, special projects manager at Zero Dropouts, said advocates help intervene quickly when warning signs pop up: an increase in absences, a grade that’s fallen to a D or F, or problematic behavior. The team works in tandem with counselors, mental health specialists, and other school staff.  

“Attendance and course recovery are probably your two biggest challenges at a high school,” said Hass, who formerly served as a high school principal in nearby Loveland.

“The challenges are the same pre- post- and during the pandemic,” he said. “They’re just more pronounced now.”

No falling through the cracks

The four attendance advocates at Northridge High use a small room connected to the main office as their home base. It’s rimmed with computer workstations that often display color-coded spreadsheets showing period-by-period absences and other metrics that help them flag kids in danger of slipping away.

Along the wall is a cardboard box of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookie packs. Students zip into the room occasionally to grab a snack from the box.

On a recent morning, Erin Eckenrode, an advocate who previously worked as a juvenile probation officer, made phone calls looking for 54 students on that day’s no-show list. She  talked to some parents, left messages for others, and sometimes hit dead ends. 

She did solve a few mysteries. She found that two families had moved out of the district — one, refugees from Ukraine, had relocated to California, and another had moved to a nearby district.

Like high schoolers everywhere, Northridge students struggle for many reasons. They may find their classes boring, face chaotic home lives, or hold jobs that leave them too exhausted for school. About two-thirds of the school’s 1,200 students are eligible for federally subsidized meals, a measure of poverty. 

“We have students here that work at the meat factory,” Eckenrode said. “They come to school and then they go home and sleep from four to eight and then they work the overnight shift cleaning the meat plant.”&�Բ�����;

JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, operates a plant in Greeley.

Attendance advocates say the pandemic has also eroded students’ social and self-advocacy skills. Teens are dialed into the digital world, but can be muted when it comes to real-life interactions. 

Castillo, who helps monitor a class where students work online to catch up, said he’s seen students stare at a locked computer screen rather than raising their hands to ask for help. 

“I just stopped going”

Last year, Angel, now a 10th grader at Northridge, missed lots of school — more than 300 class periods last time he checked. 

Some of his friends had already dropped out, joining their fathers on construction jobs. 

“I started ditching a lot towards the end,” he said. “Sometimes, I just feel school ain’t for me so I just stopped going.”

But Angel eventually came back, and he counts Shena Lopez, one of the school’s attendance advocates, as someone he can relate to at Northridge. Often, he’ll stop by to see her three times a day. 

“We’ll just have a good conversation about my day or her day,” he said. “She’s nice to me, so I really like her.”&�Բ�����;

Connecting with kids in a non-teaching role creates a different relationship, said Lopez. 

“It’s different work. We’re their friends. We’re here for them,” she  said. “I always tell them I’m going to do whatever it takes to help you succeed.”&�Բ�����;

Sometimes, the moments that mean the most aren’t what attendance advocates expect.

When a girl named LaWren, a senior cheerleader, recently stopped by, she mentioned how surprised she was when Eckenrode pronounced her name right on the first try during an advisory class. 

“Wow, you remembered that?” Eckenrode asked.  

“That was like a life-changing moment,” LaWren said. “That’s the first time someone’s gotten my name right in my whole life, my whole 17 years.”&�Բ�����;

When calls and visits fail

Even when attendance advocates track students down, it can be difficult to get them back in class. Madera recalled one student she worked with last year who stopped coming to school completely after a couple months, his absences a long red stripe on his attendance chart.

The 10th grader didn’t seem to want to go to Northridge or anywhere else. When she dropped off an application for an online program, he threw the papers on the floor. She ended up calling the family more than 20 times, visiting their home four times, and texting the boy’s mother a few times. 

Nothing changed until she referred the teen to truancy court. 

“I didn’t want it to be like that,” said Madera.

But the move worked, and the teen returned to Northridge last April — at first shy, with his hood pulled over his head. He attended consistently for the last two months and made up some of his missed work. This year, Madera spotted him on the first day of school, Aug. 11. 

“Oh my God, he’s here,” she thought.

This originally appeared at and is published here in partnership with the .

Hartford, Connecticut is a $5,000 signing incentive for educators in high-demand subjects like math, science and bilingual education. Taos, New Mexico a $50,000 starting salary for any new teacher hire, plus a $10,000 bonus. Stanly County Schools in North Carolina also a $10,000 signing incentive.

“We wanted to give teachers [an] … incentive to come to beautiful Taos,” Superintendent Lillian Torrez told ����Ӱ�� via email. Funding provided by the federal government through the American Rescue Plan “has helped with this project,” she said.

In an extreme example, Gallup-McKinley County Schools in New Mexico is incentivizing teachers to join the district’s ranks by dangling bonuses ranging between , plus $2,500 to 4,500 for relocation — a grand sum that could top out around $25,000.

Bus drivers, too, are in short supply. Lower Merion, a school system outside Philadelphia, announced a for drivers to join the district’s ranks. California’s Eureka Union School District is offering .

“Hiring school bus drivers with BIG incentives!” one Eureka posting reads.

Burbio, a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic, said that while districts have been using incentives to attract workers for months, the dollar amounts recently have ballooned — perhaps reflecting a last-ditch effort to get fully staffed by the first day of school. 

“In the past few weeks, we have noted a marked increase in the size and duration of these payments,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche wrote in the company’s .

The generous bonuses are only the latest examples of the extreme lengths school systems are taking to handle what some experts are calling a staffing “.”&�Բ�����;

In Texas, several rural districts are due to lack of staff. In Florida, leaders are asking with no teaching experience to serve in classrooms. In Arizona, some children may soon receive instruction from rather than certified teachers. And in Buffalo, New York, a driver shortage has prompted leaders to consider providing a to parents who opt to drive their children rather than put them on the bus.

Throughout the pandemic, K-12 staff shortages have disproportionately affected impoverished districts. Yet even large school systems have felt the effects. In early August, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools in North Carolina announced they had — more than six times the number of open positions this time last year.

Nationwide, there were roughly 300,000 openings for education jobs in June, according to the most recent numbers from the . Other data indicate the total could be even higher: A representative sample of the nation’s nearly 100,000 schools reported an average of three teacher vacancies and another three unfilled non-teaching positions such as for custodial staff, cafeteria workers or bus drivers in a June survey from the National Center for Education Statistics — hinting there could be close to 600,000 openings.

Vacancies, however, do not necessarily mean that campuses are short-staffed. Unfilled positions can also arise because schools added new roles, explained Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.

“Districts are currently flush with cash thanks to the infusion of $190 billion in federal aid. As a result, many districts have ambitious hiring plans to add more teachers, mental health supports, instructional aides, or tutors,” he wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

More than three-quarters of school systems have increased their total number of employees above pre-pandemic levels, including both teaching and non-teaching roles, a recent from the Rand Corporation found. 

“In short, we believe it is districts’ increase in number of staff that they seek to employ rather than an exodus from teaching that is straining the teacher labor market,” the authors wrote.

Meanwhile, the economy added an unexpectedly large number of new jobs, according to the just-released federal report, including a seasonally adjusted in July. With unemployment rates down to just and a continued decline in the share of Americans working or actively seeking work, there’s no indication the hiring landscape will ease anytime soon.

“Unemployment rates are low, meaning almost everyone who wants a job already has one,” said Aldeman. “All this competition may be hard on employers, but it’s good for the workers who are on the receiving end of these stipends and bonuses.”

“Districts are going to have to be aggressive and creative to find and keep employees in critical shortage areas,” he on Twitter.

That’s been the name of the game for Supt. Torrez in Taos, New Mexico. On her district’s is a scrolling, full-screen slideshow of the benefits for new hires: 

“WE’RE HIRING! Receive a $10,000 Additional Recruitment Incentive” 

“LISTEN TO WHY TEACHERS LOVE TEACHING AT TAOS SCHOOLS! Click below for video and then click on the right arrow for the application!”

“WOULD YOU LIKE A $10,000 SIGN-ON RECRUITMENT INCENTIVE FOR A NEW JOB AS A TMS TEACHER? Click below for the application!”

She is not concerned with why the market is strained, but rather on how she can navigate those conditions and still ensure her district has a full teacher corps when her 2,100 students return to buildings Aug. 11. The $10,000 signing bonuses, she says, have enticed 10 candidates, but 7 open positions remain.

“We still have a few openings,” she said. “However, I would call [the incentives] a success, overall.”

Although navigating school during a global pandemic presented new challenges for almost all K-12 staff nationwide, some educators, like Jeffrey Wright of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, faced an additional difficulty that many others did not.

As the only Black male educator at Blackstone Valley Prep, where two-thirds of the student body is Black, Hispanic or Asian American, students and parents often would come to Wright with school-related questions and concerns — seeing him, perhaps, as an easier point of access than other teachers or the administration.

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“They look at me and they feel I’m someone they can identify with,” said Wright, whose job, officially titled “scholar support specialist,” is a cross between a dean of students and a dean of culture at his charter school, he said.

Wright relishes his connections with students. Helping youth thrive was the reason he chose to work in education. But being a go-to contact is also an “extra burden,” he said. Wright has frequently dealt with imposter syndrome, asking himself, “Am I doing this the right way?”

“That’s a lot for one person to carry,” he told ����Ӱ��.

That’s why, throughout the last school year, Wright looked forward to one evening a month when the experiences he usually shouldered on his own would be shared.

In monthly sessions, called EduLeaders of Color meetups, Wright would tune into a Zoom call full of teachers who understand the burden of being one of the few or only educators of their racial identity at their school. Hosted by a Providence-based nonprofit called the Equity Institute, which receives funding from the Rhode Island Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund, the meetings welcome anyone in the education space to tune in — regardless of race — but are designed particularly to help Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian-American educators connect with one another in a state where .

“They created a space for people like myself,” said Wright.

Research underscores the academic and social benefits that teachers of color deliver for all students, but . Many experts point to teacher diversification as a , yet nationwide, 79 percent of educators remain white compared to only 47 percent of students.

Rates of turnover are also , perhaps in part because many, like Wright, carry additional responsibilities or feel isolated in schools with majority-white staff. To help retain Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian-American educators, gatherings like the EduLeaders of Color meetups may prove a promising strategy.

“Programs like EduLeaders give teachers tools to navigate some of the challenging experiences that they have in their schools with their principals, with their colleagues,” said Travis Bristol, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education who was familiar with the Rhode Island sessions. The gatherings may not change the systemic conditions that can push teachers of color to leave the profession, he said, but “it gives them tools to cope. It gives them tools to stay day to day.”

Similar programs exist elsewhere, the Berkeley professor told ����Ӱ��, including in , and . The EduLeaders of Color programming differs from many others by focusing on growing participants’ professional networks and encouraging their leadership potential, according to its co-founders Karla Vigil and Carlon Howard.

When COVID-19 struck, it meant the EduLeaders meetups, which began in 2016, had to go virtual, forcing Equity Institute co-founders Karla Vigil and Carlon Howard to re-think the structure. Even online, 60 or more individuals, who work at traditional public schools, charter schools like Blackstone Valley Prep and or in higher education, regularly join the calls.

“Online it’s been a little different. We’ve had to change the format,” Vigil told ����Ӱ��. “We’re very particular about creating an environment that feels welcoming, that feels healing, that feels diverse in all ways.”

Immediately upon clicking into EduLeaders of Color events, it’s clear the meetings are a far cry from the stuffy Zoom calls filled with awkward silences and empty black rectangles that participants may be familiar with from professional settings.

Music plays in the background as people log in — usually hip hop, rhythm and blues or reggaeton. Participants each receive $20 Grubhub gift cards for their free registration, so they can enjoy takeout from their favorite restaurant alongside the conversation. Most of those who join keep their cameras on and some even pull up customized backgrounds for the event. The facilitators announce that there will be a prize awarded at the end to the participant who’s been the most lively in the chat box, and throughout the session, the messages continue to scroll steadily.

Vigil and Howard have read extensively about , which pervades many professional settings, its theorists posit, through an emphasis on time scarcity, valuation of the written word over the spoken word, and other structures — and they intentionally design their gatherings to counter those norms.

“It’s not that rigidity that you think of when you [think of school], like you have to dress a certain way, you have to look a certain way,” said Wright. “In this meetup … it’s a party. We come together. We come here, we can chill, we can laugh. It’s OK if you have a thought — you can blurt that thought out. To me, that’s exactly what a learning environment should be.”

The social side of the gathering can also double as a networking opportunity, said Wright. He himself landed a role as a board member for the Community College of Rhode Island, his alma mater, through a connection from the meetup’s organizers. The pandemic has made the natural interactions more difficult, said Vigil, but after each session, she and Howard still try to connect individuals via email who they think would benefit from being introduced to each other.

Each monthly session, advertised through social media and word of mouth, features a different theme: In February, the , in March, and in April, . The organizers carefully select panelists who will uplift the identities of those joining the call.

That means “making sure that the folks who are talking, taking up airspace, who are the main speakers all come from the backgrounds of many of our young people, and particularly our young people of color,” Howard told ����Ӱ��.

During the gatherings, while panelists or other participants speak about their experiences working in schools, Wright often thinks to himself, “Man, I went through that. I know what that’s like. Yes. I’m not alone,” he said.

That’s precisely the point, said Vigil.

“[Participants] feel like they’ve come to share common ground with somebody so they don’t feel like they’re in a silo — because many do feel like they’re in a silo in schools.”

She understands Wright’s burden as one of the only Black teachers in his school. (Another Black man is joining the ranks at Blackstone Valley Prep this year, Wright noted.) The isolation of having been one of the only teachers of color in her Providence school, Vigil explained, in 2016.

During his teaching days, Howard said he was repeatedly called upon by other educators to deal with misbehaving children, many of whom were Black. For his white colleagues struggling to get through to young people of color, “I was their connecting piece,” he recalled. Not only was the extra responsibility tiring, but because he was mostly tapped to discipline students acting out in a system he understood to be fundamentally slated against them, Howard began to feel like an Uncle Tom, he said. “I didn’t want to be in that type of position.”

“The tax that we carry is large. It’s heavy. It’s felt,” added Vigil.

With widespread access to vaccines, the Equity Institute is now gearing up for its first in-person meetup since the pandemic struck. The Sept. 23 session will be held in Providence with in-person attendance capped at 40 and dependent on proof of vaccination, said Howard. It will also don a new name: Converge — a representation of the group’s purpose as a space to gather.

But regardless of the rebranding, regardless of whether the meetups continue in person or return online as the Delta variant causes COVID-19 cases to surge, Wright is confident that the demand will persist.

“I think that there are a lot of educators who can really benefit from this,” he said.