Like most kids, Aahil Valliani has been frustrated by the filters that his school uses to block inappropriate websites. Often, he has no idea why certain sites are blocked, especially when his web browsing is tied to his schoolwork.

Many students in this situation find a way around their districts’ web filters. They access the internet on their phones instead, or use proxy servers or virtual private networks to essentially access a different, unfiltered internet. Aahil, searching for a more systemic solution, teamed up with his younger brother and father to start a company called Safe Kids, raise almost $2 million in venture funding, and design a better filter.

As The Markup, which is part of CalMatters, reported in April, almost all schools filter the web to comply with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act and qualify for discounted internet access, among other things. Most schools The Markup examined used filters that sort all websites into categories and block entire categories at once. Others scan webpages for certain off-limits keywords, blocking websites on which they appear regardless of the context. In both cases, the filters are blunt tools that result in overblocking and sometimes keep kids from information about politicized topics like sex education and LGBTQ resources.

Aahil, now 17, points out that schools’ overly strict controls disappear as soon as kids graduate. “That’s a recipe for disaster,” he said. Kids, he contends, need to learn how to make good choices about how to use the internet safely when trusted adults are nearby so they are ready to make good decisions on their own later.

The Safe Kids filter turns web blocking into a teachable moment, explaining why sites are blocked and nudging students to stay away from them of their own accord. It uses artificial intelligence to assess the intent of a student’s search, reducing the number of blocks students see while conducting legitimate academic research. One example: if a student searches for Civil War rifles for a class assignment, Safe Kids would allow it. If a student tries to shop for an AK-47, it wouldn’t. Other filters would block both.

The filter also keeps student browsing data private, storing only categories of websites accessed, not URLs or search terms themselves. And it works through a Chrome browser extension, which means students can’t simply get around it with a proxy server or VPN while using that browser.

Safe Kids got its start during the early COVID-19 lockdowns. Sitting around the dinner table with his father, a tech entrepreneur; his mother, a self-employed fashion designer; and his younger brother Zohran, a budding computer scientist, Aahil got his family to strategize how to help all the kids getting sucked into dark corners of the web and battling the mental health consequences of their internet use.

Their idea, building off of the invasive and ineffective filters the brothers saw in school, essentially puts better training wheels on the internet. Aahil said his father did a bit of hand-holding in these early days, helping find board members and angel investors, as well as the data scientists who would train the AI machine learning model behind the filter and psychologists who could craft and test the filter’s hallmark pop-ups directing students toward more appropriate browsing. The company also spent time and money getting their designs patented. Aahil has three patents under his name and Safe Kids has five.

As Aahil and his family were preparing to chase seed funding for Safe Kids, the ACLU of Northern California was demanding the Fresno Unified School District a product called Gaggle, which districts use to monitor students’ internet use, block potentially harmful content, and step in if student browsing patterns indicate they may need mental health supports. The problem, according to ACLU attorneys, was that Gaggle amounted to intrusive surveillance, trampling on students’ privacy and free speech rights.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation levied similar accusations against another web filter called GoGuardian after getting records from 10 school districts, including three in California, that revealed the extent of the software’s blocking, tracking and flagging of student internet use during the 2022-23 school year, when Aahil was piloting Safe Kids. Jason Kelley, a lead researcher on EFF’s GoGuardian investigation, , looked into Safe Kids in response to an inquiry by The Markup. Accustomed to pointing out how bad filters are, he offered surprised praise for Safe Kids, commending its focus on privacy, its open source code that offers transparency about its model, and its context-specific blocking.

“This is, really, I think, an improved option for all the things that we are generally concerned about,” Kelley said.

So far, Safe Kids has not been able to break into the school market. Still, Aahil hopes to one day sign a contract with a school district, and he is marketing to parents in the meantime, offering them a way to put guardrails on their kids’ home internet use. While Safe Kids started out charging for its filter, Aahil said an open source, free version will be released next month.

One of the company patents is for a  “pause, reflect, and redirect” method that leans on child psychology to teach kids healthy browsing habits when they try to access an inappropriate website.

“When kids go to a site the first time, we consider that a mistake,” Aahil said. “We tell kids why it’s not good for them and kids can make a choice.”

For example, if a student tries to play games during a lesson, a pop-up would say, “This isn’t schoolwork, is it?” Students can click a “take me back” button or “tell me more” link to get more information about why a given site is blocked. When students repeatedly try to access inappropriate content, their browsing is further restricted until they address the issue with an adult. If that content indicates a student might be in crisis, the user is advised to get help from an adult, and in a school setting, a staff member would get an automated alert.

The teen expects to keep building the company, even as he shifts his focus to college admissions this fall. A rising senior at the selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the nation’s best public high schools, Aahil plans to major in business or economics and make a career out of entrepreneurship.

Safe Kids stands out in a web filtering market where products’ blunt restrictions on the web have barely become more sophisticated over the last 25 years.

Nancy Willard, director of Embrace Civility LLC, has worked on issues of youth online safety since the mid-1990s. She submitted testimony for the congressional hearings that resulted in passage of the Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2000 and describes the filtering company representatives that showed up as snake oil salesmen, selling a technology that addresses a symptom, not the root of a problem.

“We need to prepare kids to manage themselves,” Willard said. When traditional filters block certain websites with no explanation, kids don’t learn anything, and they’re often tempted to just circumvent the software.

“This approach helps increase student understanding, and hopefully there’s a way also in the instructional aspects (to increase) their skills,” she said about Safe Kids.

Students on Chromebooks in particular can’t circumvent Safe Kids and its design aims to keep them from wanting to. Now Aahil and his family just need to find buyers.

Kelley said he’s not surprised Safe Kids hasn’t been able to yet, given the “hardening” of school security and student safety efforts over the last decade. “We’ve gone from having cameras and some pretty standard filters to having metal detectors, and locked doors, and biometrics, and vape detectors in the bathrooms, and these much more strict filters and content moderating control software,” he said, “and all this is hard to undo.”

This was originally published on .

It was a busy month here at ����Ӱ��, covering schools and students amid the crisis. Here were our 11 most shared and circulated reports: 

Kids Left Schools Last Year Because of the Switch to Remote Classes; Early Numbers Suggest They May Not Be Coming Back Soon

Enrollment: With the release of new data in recent months, a much clearer picture is emerging of how K-12 enrollment responded to the pandemic. First, a working paper released in August drew a direct line between the reopening choices districts made at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year and families’ education decisions, showing that hundreds of thousands of students left schools that offered remote-only instruction. The findings echo those of other publications, which have pointed to huge enrollment drops from traditional public schools — heavily concentrated in kindergarten and the earliest grades — alongside surges in homeschooling, private schooling and charters. What’s more, the early indicators from several districts suggest that enrollment isn’t bouncing back to the pre-pandemic status quo. Read Kevin Mahnken’s new report.

Gaggle Surveils Millions of Kids in the Name of Safety. Targeted Families Argue it’s ‘Not That Smart’

School Safety: After a bout of depression and a suicide attempt, Minneapolis student Teeth Logsdon-Wallace shared intimate details about his mental health in a class assignment last month. It was one of thousands of Minneapolis student communications that got flagged by Gaggle, a digital surveillance company hired by the district. The company contacted school officials even though Logsdon-Wallace was making the point that his mental health had improved — a detail seemingly lost in the transaction between Gaggle and the district. An earlier investigation by ����Ӱ�� exposed how Gaggle, which saw rapid growth after the pandemic forced schools into remote learning, subjects students to relentless surveillance and raises significant privacy concerns. But technology experts and families with first-hand experience with Gaggle’s surveillance dragnet have raised a separate issue: The service is not only invasive, it may also be ineffective. “If it works, it could be extremely beneficial. But if it’s random, it’s completely useless,” said a 16-year-old Connecticut student mistakenly flagged for her work as a school literary journal editor. ����Ӱ��’s Mark Keierleber digs in. 

A New Kind of Curriculum Night: Armed With Protest Signs and Data, Diverse Group of Minneapolis Parents Demands Better Reading Instruction for Their Kids

Curriculum: Frustrated by years of rock-bottom literacy rates, an unlikely coalition of families has begun staging protests at Minneapolis Public Schools headquarters, hoping to push district leaders to acknowledge that the way the city’s schools teach reading runs counter to what science shows about how children learn. While there’s nothing new about angry parents raising their voices at school board meetings, what’s different about the situation in Minneapolis is that the protesters are armed with a trove of research, the district’s own data and an understanding of strategies that have made children proficient readers in other places. In this story, Beth Hawkins describes how families of color, National Parents Union organizers and affluent parents of struggling readers have joined forces to demand change. Read the full feature. 

Exclusive Data: Absenteeism Surged Among English Learners During Pandemic

Chronic Absenteeism: Before COVID-19, Mia Miron almost never missed class. Her parents, who had immigrated from Mexico, instilled in her a belief in the value of education as the path to a better life. But when the pandemic hit, her absences began to pile up — sometimes because of a faulty laptop charger and sometimes because she was marked absent even when she had logged in. Her grades fell from B’s and C’s to D’s and F’s. “[School] was no longer our primary concern. We had to do anything to survive — to pay bills, rent, everything, before anything else,” Miron’s mother told ����Ӱ�� through a translator. Across the country, the obstacles posed by remote learning appear to have triggered a disproportionate jump in absenteeism among English learners like Miron, new data indicate. The numbers, delivered to ����Ӱ�� through public record requests, offer further insight into the devastating effects of the pandemic on the education of America’s 5 million English learners. Asher Lehrer-Small brings you the exclusive report.

Long-Term NAEP Scores for 13-Year-Olds Drop for First Time Since Testing Began in 1970s — ‘A Matter for National Concern,’ Experts Say

Student Learning: Over the past few years, education observers have grown accustomed to downbeat news from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, with multiple rounds of the test pointing to largely stagnant scores across various subjects. The release this month of results from NAEP’s 2020 long-term trends assessment offers revelations that are startling as well as discouraging: For the first time in the half-century history of that test, reading and math scores for 13-year-olds significantly declined. Black and Hispanic students in that age group both lost ground in math since the test was last given, in 2012, and the lower performance of 9-year-old girls opened up a gender gap with boys that did not exist nine years ago. Worst of all were the plunging scores of low-performing students — especially those scoring at the 10th percentile, who declined an astonishing 12 points in eighth-grade math. “It’s really a matter for national concern, this high percentage of students who are not reaching even what I think we’d consider the lowest levels of proficiency,” said George Bohrnstedt, a senior vice president at the American Institutes for Research. Kevin Mahnken reports.

‘We Are Going to Hold You Accountable’: Just 1 in 5 Families Was Asked for Input into School Stimulus Fund Spending, New Poll Finds

School Funding: Despite a congressional mandate to draw on parents, students and a broad range of community and advocacy organizations as they draft plans for spending $122 billion in stimulus funds, states and school systems have failed to ask the vast majority of families what their priorities are, according to a new poll. Just 1 in 5 parents queried in a new National Parents Union survey said they were asked for their input by their schools as leaders make plans for spending an unprecedented infusion of recovery funds. Affluent households were more likely to report being consulted than low-income families, while half had heard little or nothing about the money. “Black and brown families throughout the pandemic have been more engaged than ever,” parents union President Keri Rodrigues tells Beth Hawkins. “To now turn your back on them and say, ‘We’ve got it from here’ really underestimates these families.”

How Many Kids Are Attending NYC Schools? As America’s Top District Refuses to Disclose Numbers, Growing Concerns About a Mass Exodus

New York City: More than a month into the academic year, it’s still not clear how many students are attending school in the nation’s largest district. The New York City Department of Education has not yet released data on the number of young people enrolled in its roughly 1,600 schools, nor has it confirmed exactly how many show up each day. Officials say the DOE has the data on hand but is keeping the numbers under wraps amid fears that as many as 150,000 students have not yet set foot in a classroom this year. School officials say they will release the figures after the Oct. 31 deadline for reporting to the state. The nation’s second- and third-largest districts, Los Angeles and Chicago, have already reported drops of over 27,000 and 10,000 students, respectively, compared to last year. Asher Lehrer-Small has the story.

An Experiment at the Crossroads: In Year Two, Pandemic Pods ‘Find Their Legs’ — and Face Their Limitations. Will They Endure Beyond COVID-19?

Learning Pods: Wichita Public Schools lost roughly 2,400 students last year, including Megan Monsour’s two boys. They joined a nature-focused microschool, where they get one-on-one reading help and have no plans to return to the district. They are among 1.5 million students expected to be participating in pods this fall — a movement that started in response to school closures but has now expanded to accommodate families’ desires for culturally relevant education and frustration with their children’s public schools. One parent said she’s gone from “a place of extreme anxiety” over her decision to join a microschool “to a total place of liberation.” But as pods enter their second year, some organizers are recognizing their limitations and have started linking up with larger, established networks of homeschoolers for support. “Now that they have a year under their belt, they are starting to find their legs,” Kija Gray, a coach who advises mostly Black families in Detroit, told reporter Linda Jacobson. But some remain skeptical about pods’ staying power: “They’re not likely to scale substantially post-pandemic,” said FutureEd’s Thomas Toch. “Free public schools, we learned … play a central role in most families’ lives.” Read our full report. 

����Ӱ�� Interview: Colorado Springs Superintendent Michael Thomas on Being a Black Leader Working to Change a White System

Equity: When Colorado Springs School District 11 appointed Michael Thomas as its new superintendent, school board members gave him two big tasks. He needed to make the district — the increasingly diverse center of an affluent city — more culturally affirming for families. And he had to stop a decade-plus exodus of 700 to 1,000 students a year. A Black man who came up in predominantly white schools and then went on to work in them, Thomas firmly believes that if you take care of the first task and make schools welcoming and relevant, families will stay. As tall an order as that is, the first thing Thomas had to do was to convince the adults in the system that there was a problem. In an interview for ����Ӱ��’s recent series on the ways in which COVID’s inequities are showing up in schools, Thomas talked to Beth Hawkins about continuing to push hard changes even in a pandemic, recalling his own George Floyd moment and persisting as a Black leader without “committing cultural sacrifice.”

—Special Report: After a K-shaped recession, a classroom crisis?

When Graduating Isn’t Enough: New KIPP Scholarship Will Help First-Gen College Grads At Risk of Being ‘Underemployed’

Social Capital: Closing the opportunity gap for low-income, first-generation college students is a moving target. Author and 74 contributor Richard Whitmire has been writing about the evolution for years — from the initial push to get these students into college, which morphed into getting them through college and is now focused on securing appropriate post-college career paths. To that end, the KIPP charter school network announced the Ruth and Norman Rales Scholars Program, which will provide four years of mentoring, summer internship assistance, financial literacy training, networking advice and funding to defray college costs. The supports are valued at $60,000 per student, and the grant covers 50 students a year, up to 250 students over five years. Whitmire rounds up what some of the nation’s other big charter networks are doing to help launch alumni careers. Read the full report. 

The Great Shortage: Explore How Districts in All 50 States Are Grappling With Missing Teachers, Nurses, Cooks, Bus Drivers & Other Essential Workers

Interactive Map: A month into the academic year, schools in all 50 states are experiencing staff shortages, ����Ӱ�� has found. The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show there were 460,000 state and local education job openings in July, and schools report that they need more cafeteria and afterschool workers, school safety agents, custodians and nurses. Across the country, schools have asked parents to provide transportation to school for their children and ordered in pizzas when there were no cafeteria workers to make lunch. A bus driver shortage described as “severe” pushed one Minnesota superintendent to get her bus driver’s license, while a Nebraska district canceled class for a “rest and reset” day due to shortages, burnout and illness. “I fear the worst is yet to come,” said Superintendent Susan Enfield of the Highline Public Schools, outside Seattle, where central office staff are filling teaching positions. Scan through a sampling of the staffing shortages districts are currently experiencing nationwide in a new interactive map, compiled by ����Ӱ��’s Meghan Gallagher.

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Here were our most popular and important articles of the month:

Student Safety: When the pandemic forced Minneapolis students into remote learning, district officials partnered with Gaggle, a digital surveillance company that uses artificial intelligence and a team of content moderators to track the online behaviors of millions of kids across the U.S. every day. Now, public records obtained by ����Ӱ�� that saw rapid national growth during the pandemic but carries significant civil rights and privacy concerns. The data highlight how Gaggle puts children under relentless digital surveillance long after classes end for the day. In Minneapolis, officials say the tool helps identify youth at risk of suicide. But some worry that rummaging through students’ personal files and conversations on their school-issued Google and Microsoft accounts could backfire. .

—B��������ٴǰ���: How the Minneapolis School District is spending big on new student surveillance technology, raising ire after terminating police contract (Read more)

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‘Everyone Had Their Heads in the Sand’: Push To Reopen Schools Leaves Many Quarantined Students Without Remote Learning Options

Learning Loss: The Delta variant is spoiling leaders’ best-laid plans for a full return to school, with some now shifting back to remote learning and others leaving families hanging over how their children will stay on track. Facing pressure from parents and the Biden administration to get students back in classrooms, state and district leaders, some argue, have now “overcorrected,” making it harder to give students in quarantine real-time access to instruction. States, such as Ohio and North Carolina are now considering policies that would bring back remote options, and some districts are tapping federal relief funds for online tutoring programs. But others, such as Texas lawmakers, want to limit virtual options only to higher-achieving students. It’s a reversal in some ways from where schools were a few months ago, fully intending to leave remote instruction behind. “I really can’t believe our schools are as unprepared for remote learning as they seem to be,” Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education told reporter Linda Jacobson. “Everyone had their heads in the sand, and kids will pay the price.” Read the full article.

Four-Day Work Weeks, Big Signing Bonuses and Paid Moving Expenses: See How Districts Across the U.S. Are Luring Subs, Special Ed Teachers

Interactive — School Staffing: Districts nationwide are experiencing a shortage of special education and substitute teachers, exacerbated by the pandemic and rolling quarantines. So how are they addressing these challenges? From $15,000 bonuses in Detroit for special education teachers to four-day work weeks in a small Colorado district to extra pay on Mondays and Fridays for subs in Las Cruces, Texas, administrators and state governments are innovating to fill gaps and bring eligible educators into the classroom. Retirees are returning to work in Nevada and California, parents are being recruited for full-time positions in Georgia and college graduates in all fields are in high demand to support students returning to class and prevent school closures. Marianna McMurdock and Meghan Gallagher created interactive maps to show which recruitment and retention solutions are popping up nationally. See our full report.

From Tragedy to Triumph to Failure: How 9/11 Helped Pass No Child Left Behind — And Fueled its Eventual Demise

20th Anniversary: Two decades have passed since the morning that changed America forever — a morning that found President George W. Bush in a Florida elementary school, reading with students and attempting to jump-start the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. Within months of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a collective sense of grief and purpose led the federal government to declare war on terrorism, even as it pledged to provide an excellent education for every child. But while it is generally acknowledged that Congress passed the landmark legislation partially as a demonstration of national unity, some believe the Bush administration’s emphasis on the global war on terror set back the mission of education reform, as attention waned and bipartisanship dissolved. “That whole sweet thing that was put together in the ’80s and came together in various states and then saw this incredible peak in Washington in 2001 — all of that largely fell apart because of 9/11, and the failure of everyone on all sides to hold it together in the wake of 9/11,” former Bush adviser Sandy Kress told ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken. Read our full report.

Schools Didn’t Plan for Online Classes This Year. Then Delta Struck, Demand Is Surging & Districts Are Scrambling for Virtual Options. Will They Be Good Enough?

Student Quarantines: As COVID-19 threatens a return to “normal” for a third academic year, the number of quality online schools is growing — but not as fast as the number of districts and charter school networks inking contracts with education technology companies to provide services ranging from digital curriculum to “turnkey online school systems.” Yes, mask and vaccine mandates and families’ reactions to the Delta variant’s surge are moving targets, say researchers, but unless education leaders make the quality of online instruction a priority, last year’s lackluster experience with remote learning is likely to repeat itself. Beth Hawkins has some background on why districts are again scrambling to provide online learning alternatives and what the new academic year might look like in places where school leaders started thinking about quality early on. Read our full report.

Curriculum: Arnold Ambers was still a teenager himself when he woke up early each morning and drove a school bus that took local children to a nearby segregated elementary school. Then, he arrived late to his own segregated high school classroom despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found such isolation unconstitutional years earlier. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, Ambers experienced first hand how many white Americans fought tooth and nail to stop integration, a movement that became known as “massive resistance.” These days he’s on edge as racial strife engulfs the country and the community of his childhood — Loudoun County, Virginia — , opposition to the catch-all and now-ubiquitous phrase critical race theory. “It’s painful to realize that we’ve come a long way, but in the last five years we’ve really gone backwards quite a bit,” Ambers said. “And I guess the painful reality is that racism has always been there.” ����Ӱ��’s Mark Keierleber explores the historical connections between education in America post-Brown v. Board and the current controversy, a showdown one Loudoun County official called “the massive resistance of our generation.” .

‘Staggering’: New Research Shows that Child Obesity Has Soared During Pandemic

Student Health: Since COVID-19 first shuttered schools last spring, K-12 students have been subjected to a kind of natural experiment in inactivity, with exercise and time spent outdoors declining as screen use has skyrocketed. Now, the physical effects are becoming clear: According to a study released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children’s body mass index (a common measure of weight relative to height) increased twice as fast during the early months of the pandemic as it had previously. The findings match the results of several existing studies, all of which have found that kids are increasingly overweight or obese as they’ve been largely confined to home. Dietitian Michelle Demeule-Hayes, the director of a clinical weight-loss program at Baltimore’s Mt. Washington Pediatric Hospital, called the trends “staggering”: “It’s never been this bad,” she told ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken. “So the research is definitely accurate.” Read our full report.

As the Pandemic Set In, Charter Schools Saw Their Highest Enrollment Growth Since 2015, 42-State Analysis Shows

Enrollment: Charter schools experienced more growth in 2020-21 — the first full year of the pandemic— than they’ve seen in the past six years, according to preliminary data released today from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. While traditional public schools saw sharp declines in enrollment during the tumultuous year, charters in 39 states saw an influx of 240,000 new students — a 7 percent increase over last year. “Families are sending a clear message. They want more public school options,” Nina Rees, president and CEO of the alliance, told ����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson. Those options include virtual schools, which in Oklahoma accounted for much of the state’s nearly 78 percent growth in charter enrollment. While it’s too soon to tell whether the enrollment shifts will last, the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli suspects many of the families who opted for virtual charters will find their way back to district schools — “once things return to ‘normal,’ whatever the heck that is.” Read the full story.

‘Something Was Missing’: 97% of North Carolina Survey Respondents Never Taught About State’s Grim Eugenics History

History: Down the road from Joseph Palko’s North Carolina high school stood a spooky, deserted old campus. Classmates would sneak onto the grounds and scare each other with ghost stories about the run-down buildings. His curiosity piqued, Palko turned to the internet for answers and quickly learned that six teenage boys at the reform school — some as young as 14 — had been ordered to undergo vasectomies by the state’s eugenics board in 1948. “That was really shocking,” Palko told ����Ӱ��. “It’s scarier than anything anyone said was going on.” On further investigation, he found that from 1929 to 1974, the state sterilized over 7,600 people in an effort to weed out so-called “feeblemindedness.” But Palko, like the vast majority of North Carolinians, was never taught about the state’s eugenics past — and its later, overt targeting of poor, Black women. Previous reporting from ����Ӱ�� uncovered that, despite a 2003 state-level directive that eugenics history be included in North Carolina’s K-12 curricula, none of the state’s 10 largest districts require that students learn about the tragic episode. Now, responses from 175 individuals to a reader survey by ����Ӱ�� help quantify the impact of those untaught lessons. Read what we found.

—Genocide ‘In My Own Backyard’: North Carolina educators ignored state’s eugenics history long before critical race theory pushback (Read more)

With Up to 9 Grade Levels Per Class, Can Schools Handle the Fallout From COVID’s K-Shaped Recession?

Achievement Gaps: Wealthy newcomers from expensive cities like New York and San Francisco propelled housing prices in Austin, Texas, into the stratosphere in 2020, pushing out families of modest means and sending demographic shockwaves through the area’s schools. It’s just one manifestation of the pandemic’s K-shaped recession, a downturn barely felt by the affluent people at the top of the K but devastating to the people at the bottom. As schools prepared to reopen in August, research showed COVID has put the most disadvantaged students even further behind while propelling privileged children ahead and hollowing out the middle. Meaning the span of academic mastery in individual classrooms — seven grade levels in “normal” times — is likely to widen even further, to as many as nine grade levels. In this installment of ����Ӱ��’s series examining the link between the pandemic’s economic turmoil and challenges in classrooms, Beth Hawkins takes you inside an Austin school that’s poised to meet the needs of its “bookend students” — the kids furthest ahead and behind — and may be a model for addressing the COVID classroom crisis. Read the full feature.

—Explore Our Special Report: After a K-shaped recession, how will America’s schools avert a COVID classroom crisis? (Read more)

Homeschooling Is on the Rise. What Should That Teach Education Leaders About Families’ Preferences?

Analysis: With school closures, student quarantines and tensions over mask requirements, vaccine mandates and culture war issues, families’ lives have been upended in ways few could have imagined 18 months ago. That schools have struggled to adapt is understandable, writes contributor Alex Spurrier. But for millions of families, their willingness to tolerate institutional sclerosis in their children’s education is wearing thin. Over the past 18 months, the rate of families moving their children to a new school increased by about 50 percent, and some 1.2 million switched to homeschooling last academic year. Instead of working to get schools back to a pre-pandemic normal, Spurrier says, education leaders should look at addressing the needs of underserved kids and families — and the best way to understand where schools are falling short is to look at how families are voting with their feet. If options like homeschooling, pods and microschools retain some of their pandemic enrollment gains, it could have ripple effects on funding that resonate throughout the K-12 landscape. Read our full report.

When Climate Change Forces Schools to Close: Fires, Storms and Heatwaves Have Already Kept 1 Million Students Out of Classrooms This Semester

Photo Essay: An elementary school burned to the ground as wildfires scorched Northern California. In New Jersey, a tornado destroyed a high school’s stadium. Floods from multiple hurricanes and historic storm systems damaged or destroyed school buildings, paralyzed campuses and, in Louisiana, have forced 45,000 students out of classrooms until October. Twenty schools in Columbus, Ohio, had to start remotely because of excessive heat. And just this month, as Hurricane Nicholas shuttered schools in Texas, a mid-September heat wave forced Baltimore to shorten school days for lack of air conditioners. In a third school year already complicated by COVID, as in-person learning resumes, in fits and starts, for the first time in 18 months, extreme weather exacerbated by climate change has led to closures affecting more than 1 million students across the country. ����Ӱ��’s Meghan Gallagher looks back at the disruptions from the first month of the school year and offers a snapshot of the chaos and obstacles that one California superintendent dubbed the new normal. See our full gallery.

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