That’s when a large suburban school district in Texas, flush with COVID relief funds, signed a contract with a virtual tutoring provider to deliver extra help to students in 28 schools who had fallen below grade level. Research showed that could produce significant gains for students and was far more effective than on-demand models.

But the district’s program , according to a recent study from Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator, which focuses on studying and expanding effective tutoring. Students even lost ground in reading and would have been better off with “business-as-usual” support, like small group instruction or using a computer program for extra practice. 

Experts view the findings as a cautionary tale of how tutoring can go wrong.

The district had to wait on background checks for tutors, many students were still chronically absent and the tutoring sessions often conflicted with other lessons or special events. As a result, students didn’t receive the 30 hours or more required under a mandating tutoring for those who failed the annual state test. Instead of five days a week as planned, 81% of the students attended tutoring three or fewer days, and most students worked with a different tutor every time they attended a session.

The findings reinforce the importance of protecting the time students are supposed to receive tutoring, said Elizabeth Huffaker, an assistant professor of education at the University of Florida and the lead author of the study.

High-dosage models — featuring individualized sessions held at least three times a week with the same, well-trained tutor — can still “drive really significant learning gains,” she said, “but in the field, things are always a little bit more complicated.”

For parents, the Stanford study can help explain why children might not make gains, even when their district offers extra help, said Maribel Gardea, executive director of MindShiftED, a nonprofit advocacy group and network of about 5,000 parents in the San Antonio area. Despite the billions states received in relief funds, many students still haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels of performance.

“We knew that high-dosage tutoring was one of those things that was proven,” Gardea said.  “There was research, but we never saw those results.”

She urges districts to include parent groups like hers in planning tutoring and choosing providers. But she added that too many parents are unaware their children are behind, much less equipped to judge whether a program is set up for success. 

“The trust has been lost for such a long time,” she said. “Parents just send their kids to school and they hope for the best.” 

‘It’s logistics’

The results add to a growing body of research at a time when tutoring has shifted from being viewed as an emergency stopgap to an ongoing teaching strategy, according to released last week from Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting organization. 

The authors’ interviews with state and local education leaders, researchers and tutoring providers showed that while many schools lean toward in-person tutors, “effective virtual models persist” in many districts. Going forward, they expect more schools to use tutoring as a pipeline for recruiting and training new teachers.

Districts have learned a lot about tutoring since that first, full year back after school closures, one in which districts saw staff shortages, record levels of absenteeism and disruptive behavior from students. have passed legislation to support tutoring or provide at least some short-term funding to keep programs running now that federal relief funds have expired. Some districts, including , are designing contracts that reward tutoring providers with more money when students pass tests or make other significant gains.

Recent shows an increase since December 2022 in the share of schools offering high-dosage tutoring, from 37% to 42% — especially in the South. But the results of the study show that just giving tutoring a high-dosage label doesn’t mean students will receive the help they need.

“It’s logistics,” said T. Nakia Towns, chief operating officer at Accelerate, which funds research on tutoring and other recovery efforts. “You have to have the scheduling. You have to have the identification of the students.”

High mobility, absenteeism

To encourage the tutoring provider and the Texas district to participate in the study, the researchers didn’t identify them. But an official with the district, who spoke on background, told ����Ӱ�� that one reason tutoring didn’t start until the middle of the school year was because leaders waited for winter test data to ensure they were selecting students who needed the most help.

The state required tutors to pass federal background checks, a process that added delays, and it took time to find bilingual tutors and those with special education experience. Students who were furthest behind academically “were also the same students who had high mobility or high absentee rates,” the official said. 

School assemblies interfered with the tutoring schedule, and some principals, the official said, were less supportive of virtual tutoring in general. Now, he said, the district offers in-person afterschool tutoring as one option, but also builds intervention time into the school day for all students.

Tutoring during school hours increases the chances that students will actually get the service, but the model creates some challenges, Huffaker said. Tutoring is now “competing with other instructional practices during the school day.” 

That includes lessons that teachers are presenting to the whole class and don’t want students to miss, the district official added.

Recent findings from another tutoring study, the , provides further proof that the more tutoring students receive, the greater their gains. But the “bad news,” according to the researchers, from the University of Chicago and MDRC, was that students often didn’t receive as much tutoring as originally planned.

“Conversations with the operators suggest schools felt they simply had too many competing demands on limited instructional time,” the authors wrote.

Another takeaway from the Stanford study is the “critical role” of relationships between tutors and students, said Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, a virtual provider with a network of over 6,800 certified teachers. In the , one of its largest clients, students are approaching pre-pandemic levels in reading, and nearly 70% of third graders passed a reading test this year required for promotion to fourth grade. 

Without “consistent, human-to-human connection,” Kalita said, results will be similar to on-demand “edtech tools” that researchers have found to be ineffective.

‘Start with the curriculum’

Not only did Texas students not receive enough tutoring, the research team found a weak relationship between their sessions and the material they needed to know for tests. Tutors covered about a third of the math standards and only about half that in reading. 

But this is an area where some tutoring companies have shown improvement, said Towns, with Accelerate. More successful providers, she said, “really start with the curriculum,” and hire experts with “deep knowledge around literacy or math.” 

now show that remote tutoring can be just as effective as in-person programs. That’s why she encouraged districts not to give up on virtual models.

“Coming out of the pandemic,” she said, “everybody was just like, ‘Let’s try anything. Anything is better than nothing,’ and in fact that’s not true.” 

Armed with $190 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds from the federal government, nearly every state spent at least some of it on tutoring, with more than half adopting standards to ensure districts and schools used high-dosage, high-quality programs. During the 2022-23 school year alone, of federal pandemic aid on tutoring, on top of an estimated spent by districts on such efforts. 

Five years after the pandemic dramatically disrupted learning, with the federal aid now spent, America’s education system is still struggling to regain lost ground. The latest reveal persistent academic gaps, underscoring the urgent need for effective interventions.

Amid all the setbacks, tutoring has broken through as one of the few recovery strategies that states and districts are strategically embedding into their budgets—expanding, refining, and solidifying programs that, in some cases, have delivered significant gains in student achievement. 

Even in these politically divisive times, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Every student deserves the opportunity to build foundational skills in reading, writing, and math that will serve them through life. With nearly $1 trillion spent on education each year, we must ensure that investment translates into real educational opportunities that lead to good jobs and meaningful lives. 

High-dosage tutoring delivered during the school day from a consistent, well-trained tutor is the . In Rapid City, South Dakota, a group of retired teachers come to Title I schools each day to work as tutors, one-on-one with predominantly indigenous students. In Harrison, Colorado, paraprofessionals tutor students — and become so inspired by the academic success that they become full-time teachers themselves through innovative educator apprenticeship models. In Springfield, Ohio, aspiring teachers tutor local elementary school students building their skills while shoring up those of their students.

Over the past two decades, our organizations have dedicated significant resources to studying, supporting, and scaling this approach. Not only are we optimistic about what we are seeing, but we are firmly convinced that school systems, policymakers, and philanthropic leaders must double down on their commitment and investment to this transformative work.

This belief is driven by significant progress and success across several key areas: continued on tutoring outcomes; from parents and teachers and schools; viable paths to affordable delivery at scale; new models that solve of time, people, and money; better understanding of policies and data systems that improve tutoring delivery; and a with the potential for significant breakthroughs.  

High-dosage tutoring is uniquely effective in helping students learn, including when implemented at scale. A by University of Virginia researcher Beth Schueler, along with Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and Grace T. Falken, analyzed 282 randomized control trials and found that large-scale tutoring programs yield months of additional student learning per year, though effectiveness diminished as programs scale beyond 1,000 students. Yet even large-scale tutoring results were stronger than educational interventions like summer school, class size reduction, and extended school days. Additionally, of continue to find , even in challenging learning conditions. 

Importantly, schools and parents want more tutoring in their schools. The most of school leaders found that high-dosage tutoring implementation increased again last year, growing from 39% of schools in 2022-23 to 46% of schools in 2023-24. This is not just a fleeting post-pandemic trend — schools are investing in tutoring even as federal relief funding winds down, because tutoring is wildly popular with parents. In Louisiana, high-dosage tutoring outperformed every other education policy polled, with an astonishing 90% approval. 

Despite our prevailing partisan politics, the push for more tutoring comes from red and blue states, from city systems and rural counties – with whether tutoring is the next big bipartisan school reform. 

Arkansas passed regulations outlining the characteristics of quality tutoring and requiring student-level reporting of delivery so that the state can manage implementation, elevate best practices, and support struggling schools. Baltimore City Public Schools is currently tutoring over 10,000 students through partnerships with external tutoring providers and a district-run program using paraprofessionals. 

Pitt County, North Carolina partnered with to provide critical tutors to multilingual learners, using technology to deliver services in students’ native languages, including even American Sign Language, in rural schools. And New Mexico is expanding virtual middle school math tutoring statewide, breaking down barriers to access for students in rural areas. 

Federal pandemic aid may be gone, but state appropriators are putting money where they’re seeing progress: Virginia added for academic recovery, with on high-dosage tutoring for its students who are furthest behind academically. Maryland stood up a $28 million middle school math tutoring program for underserved students. And in state funds last year for intensive tutoring.

Finally, we are at the very beginning of a wave of innovation fueled by emerging technologies like AI. Innovation through has helped of tutoring as well as . The months of learning from past studies will soon come from without losing the ability to personalize tutoring sessions, support tutoring quality, and maintain program effectiveness in student learning. 

Collectively, our organizations, and other like-minded organizations such as the National Student Support Accelerator and Saga Education, have supported tutoring delivery to hundreds of thousands of students, have launched and published dozens of studies on tutoring, and have infused tens of millions of dollars into the space to spur innovation and capture learning. But we still have more work to do. 

Five years after the pandemic began, students remain behind where they should be, and the gaps between Black and Latino students and their peers are . Federal relief funding that allowed districts to try new things has run out. And yet the evidence has never been clearer: High-dosage tutoring works and can help millions of students. But without action, this critical intervention risks being lost to politics, budget cuts and inertia. There is with continued investment in high-dosage tutoring. 

We must double down on evidence-based strategies, reject fatalism, and embrace the urgency of this moment. The latest NAEP scores confirm what’s at stake. States, districts, and funders must step up to ensure that every student who needs tutoring gets it. This isn’t just an investment in students – it’s an investment in our country’s future.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

But researchers with The University of Chicago say such data points represent a mere snapshot of student achievement for those still learning a new language, telling just a fraction of a greater story. 

They’ve been turning their attention instead to a different group of children: Former English learners who, by the time they reached ninth grade, had graduated from language support programs.

Their of 78,507 Chicago Public School students who started high school in the fall of 2014, 2015 and 2016 shows this group is thriving: They had better cumulative grade point averages and SAT scores and were more likely to graduate high school than the district average.

Their two-year college enrollment rate was also higher. 

“There is this perception that English learners are particularly struggling, that they don’t do well … that they are perpetually behind,” said Marisa de la Torre, a managing director and senior research associate at the . 

Incoming Vice President JD Vance furthered the notion that these students are a burden, when he pointed to the tens of thousands of school-age children in whose parents are undocumented.

“Now think about that,” he said in October. “Think about what it does to a poor school teacher, who’s just trying to get by with what they have, just trying to educate their kids, and then you drop in a few dozen kids into that school, many of whom don’t even speak English. Do you think that’s good for the education of American citizens? No, it’s not.”

Xenophobia and race-baiting were central to Donald Trump’s re-election efforts. The incoming president has said he will to drive millions of undocumented people from the country, a plan and  

de la Torre said the belief that all children associated with English learner programs are forever adrift is misleading and unfair to students and their teachers: It’s a far smaller subset of active English learners — those who struggle to make it out of English learner support programs — who tend to have lower grades, she said.

Jorge Macias, now a senior consultant to the Latino Policy Forum, led Chicago Public School’s multilingual program for years. He said the narrative must be changed to reflect reality. 

“State-level data and national data doesn’t capture this group properly,” Macias said, noting that 78% of English learner students in the Chicago school system transitioned out of the program by 8th grade, according to an earlier study. “And once the students exit, they actually show just as much success — if not more — in the factors that matter most for postsecondary success. “

UChicago researchers divided active English learners into categories, including long-term English learners. These students were in the program for at least six years: Many had learning disabilities and Individualized Education Programs outlining their mandated special education services.

The final category consisted of late-arriving students, those who came to the district after the third grade and remained active in the English learner program in their freshman year of high school. 

Former English learners represented 23% of the school system’s ninth graders in the years the study covered. Long-term English learners without IEPs made up 4%. Their performance was substantially lower than the district average. 

These students were more likely to enroll in a two-year-college and less likely to enroll in a four-year college — and when they did enroll in a four-year college, they had lower persistence rates., they had lower persistence rates. 

Long-term English learners with IEPs made up 3% of ninth graders in the study. Their high school performance and college enrollment and persistence rates were similar to non-English learners with IEPs. 

Late-arriving English learners, who also made up 3% of the study’s ninth graders, graduated high school at similar rates to their peers: 81% compared to the district average of 84%. But their college entrance exam scores were lower. 

Despite this, their two-year college persistence rate was markedly higher than most other students who enrolled in college.

Researchers found that while late-arriving English learners struggled with standardized tests, their grades were strong. And they were more successful than their native English-speaking peers — and former English learners — in college, suggesting their poor test performance was not predictive of later success. 

This new report builds upon earlier research in this area. Another de la Torre of Chicago Public Schools found that English learners who demonstrated English proficiency by eighth grade had higher attendance levels through elementary and middle school, better math test scores and core course grades compared to students never classified as ELs.

It found, too, that English learners who did not achieve English proficiency by eighth grade struggled with declining attendance by the middle grades and also had considerably lower grade point averages.

Rebecca Vonderlack-Navarro, the Latino Policy Forum’s vice president of education policy and research, said quality bilingual programs and other supports can help active English learners succeed. 

The achievements of former English learners, she said, are “a powerful reminder that bilingualism is not a barrier, but a bridge, to greater opportunities.”

“This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by the , a think tank, “We do not have our hair on fire the way it needs to be.”

That disconnect is the subject of a new released Monday that further explores what many have labeled an “urgency gap.” To pinpoint the extent of the gap, the authors talked to parents about the signals they’re getting from teachers and schools about their children’s progress. Parents expressed little concern about lasting damage from the pandemic and typically thought their children were doing well in school — a view that researchers say is belied by dismal state and national test scores. 

The issue is “genuinely vexing,” said Morgan Polikoff, an associate education professor at the University of Southern California and the paper’s lead author.  

“Parents are overwhelmingly getting the message from grades and teachers that kids are doing fine-to-great,” he said. He attributes that upbeat outlook to how little parents pay attention to standardized test scores — the “external measures” that matter most to researchers. “We just never heard anything about standardized tests from the folks we interviewed.”

The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed historic declines in math and flat performance in reading. According to this year’s spring test results, pandemic recovery remains elusive for some states. Several have continued to lose ground in reading and most have not surpassed pre-COVID performance in math. Last week’s release of international scores show U.S. students dropped 13 points in math between 2018 and 2022. 

Ludwig argues that U.S. students have made such little progress that the $190 billion Congress appropriated to address the COVID crisis is insufficient and lawmakers should find to fund high-dosage tutoring.  

“If we don’t remediate this pandemic learning loss, this cohort of 50 million kids will experience reduced lifetime earnings of something like $900 billion,” he said.

Those messages, however, don’t always get to parents. 

Given the gauntlet of tests schools administer, it’s easy for parents to get lost, said Meredith Dodson, executive director of San Francisco Parent Action, a group that advocated for schools to reopen and has recently pushed for improvements in the district’s reading program.

For many parents, “​​it’s hard to understand all the acronyms — this test versus that test, the state versus the national,” she said. “Parents just really want to trust their teachers. Is my kid on grade level or not?”

Even some parents who knew their children’s standardized test scores tended to put more stock in grades, Polikoff found. One parent interviewed for the study knew that a majority of students scored higher than her son on the NWEA MAP test in math. But, she said, “his knowledge is much greater than that” because he received a 3 on a scale of 1-3 on his report card, which “means they’ve achieved the mastery or whatever.” 

Researchers have documented  between grade point averages and , especially since the pandemic. from three organizations — EdNavigator, Learning Heroes and TNTP — showed an increase in B grades since the pandemic even among students who performed below grade level and were chronically absent.

‘Kids are not stupid’

Schools have also made it easier to do well, a vestige of pandemic-era incentives to get students to complete their work. Dan Goldhaber, director of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research — and the father of two school-age children — said he’s increasingly “astounded” at how many chances students get to bring up their grades.

“Kids are not stupid,” he said. “They’re going to learn that, ‘No, I don’t need to study real hard for this test because I can just correct it after the fact.’”

It’s not a surprise, he added, that there’s been a lackluster response to some academic recovery efforts. A lot of districts have spent relief funds on less-effective remediation efforts, such as optional on-demand tutoring. And those companies typically get paid whether or not students improve or even use the service, according to . 

In response to disappointing results, some states and districts have shifted course. A few have with large online tutoring companies. Some have turned to “outcomes-based” contracts — in which tutors earn more money for better results. But others are sticking with . 

If districts are going to spend funds on tutoring, Goldhaber said, officials should “have some control over” which students receive the help and when it’s delivered.

He and Polikoff are among the experts urging educators to make test score data a much larger focus of their conversations with parents. And there’s some evidence that hard facts about students’ scores can be a wake-up call.

A November showed that among parents who knew their children were below grade level in math, improving those skills became their number one concern, more important than curbing the effects of social media and protecting them from bullies.

Being honest with parents starts at the top, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of Education Policy Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. 

“Superintendents should not say, ‘We’re chugging along. We’re going to get there.’ They should say this is a huge problem,” he said at the Aspen event. Teachers, he added, need “political cover” to tell parents their children are behind. “It’s the truth and we need to deliver it.” 

But the news doesn’t always go over well. When Precious Allen, who teaches second grade at Betty Shabazz Academy, a charter school in Chicago, showed parents test results that indicated their children were a year or more behind, she said they grew “flustered” and complained about doing extra review sheets with their children after work. 

It was tough, she said, for them to “wrap their minds around” the data. She shared passages from that explains where children should be for their age to help parents understand how the pandemic threw their kids off track. “I had to bring a lot of science and research into it because sometimes the voice of a teacher is not enough.”

‘Worst possible time’

But not all educators believe assessments provide valuable or reliable information. Polikoff sees the separation between parents and the nation’s education scholars as part of a larger anti-testing movement that started brewing long . The pandemic pause on state assessments and accountability sparked a to limit the number of tests and try .

The Massachusetts Teachers Association, for example, is leading a to remove the state test as a graduation requirement, calling it “harmful.” The proposal drew sharp criticism from National Parents Association President Keri Rodrigues, whose organization trains parents to advocate for quality education.

“This is the dawn of a new era, where high school diplomas now become participation trophies,” she wrote in an . 

Testing critics complain that assessments take up too much instructional time and that the results rarely benefit teachers because they arrive after students have already moved on to the next grade. Others say high-stakes tests are racially biased against Black and Hispanic students. 

“There’s just very close to zero constituencies advocating for tests or that they matter,” Polikoff said. Republicans, he said, “want only unfettered choice” while the left is not defending the usefulness of tests “to ensure educational quality or equity.”

’The backlash against testing, he said, has come “at the worst possible time given the damage that’s actually been done.”

, led by researchers at the University of Chicago and New York University, highlights how the scramble to adopt new technologies in schools has served to create an $85 billion industry with significant data security risks for teachers, parents and students. The issue has become particularly pervasive since the pandemic forced students nationwide into remote, online learning. 

Students’ sensitive information is increasingly leaked online following high-profile ransomware attacks and user data monetization is a key business strategy for tech companies, including those that serve the education market, like Google. Yet student privacy is rarely a top consideration when teachers adopt new digital tools, researchers learned in interviews with district technology officials. In fact, schools routinely lack the resources and know-how to assess potential vulnerabilities.

Such a reality could spell trouble: In an analysis of education technologies widely used or endorsed by districts nationwide, researchers discovered privacy risks abound. The analysis relied on , a privacy inspector tool created by the nonprofit news website The Markup which scours websites to uncover data-sharing practices. Those include the use of cookies that track user behaviors to deliver personalized advertisements. Analyzed education tools, they found, make “extensive use of tracking technologies” with potential privacy implications. 

Most alarming to the researchers were the 7.4% that used “session recorders,” a type of tracker that documents a user’s every move. 

“Anyone visiting those sites would have their entire session captured which includes information such as which links they clicked on, what images they hovered over and even data entered into fields but not submitted,” the report notes. “This could include data that users might otherwise consider private such as the autofilling of saved user credentials or social network data.” 

����Ӱ�� caught up with report co-author Jake Chanenson, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student, to gain insight into the report’s findings and to understand why he believes that parents and students should be concerned about how ed tech companies collect, store and use their personal data. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why did remote learning pique your interest in digital privacy and what are the primary implications that worry you? 

Remote learning can be done well but we all had to get to it very quickly without a plan because we all suddenly got thrown at home because of the global pandemic. Suddenly schools had to scramble and find new solutions to reach their students, to educate their students, without being able to test the field, to think critically about it. They really were, with shoestring and gum, trying to keep their classes together. 

Whether you were in school, whether you were at work, whether you were at neither and still just trying to keep in touch with your friends, you were using anything that came your way because that’s what you had to do. I found that really interesting — and a bit concerning. It’s no one’s fault because we don’t understand the ramifications of these technologies and now that we’ve used them a lot of them are here to stay. 

I don’t want to sound like some sort of demonizing figure saying that all tech is bad — that is certainly not the case. It’s merely the fact that sometimes these promises are oversold, and now we have this added element of data privacy. 

When you interact with any of these platforms, tons and tons of student data — from how you interact with it, how well you do on their assignments, when you do it, if you’re a chronic procrastinator, if you’re always getting your work done, if you seem more interested in your art class than your math class. These are all data points collected by these companies and I wanted to know, ‘What is it they’re collecting? What are they doing with it,’ and, specifically for this study, ‘What are schools thinking about in this space if anything at all?’

This study took a two-pronged approach. You conducted surveys with experts in this space and then used technology to identify information that folks might not be aware of. Let’s discuss the surveys first. How did the school administrators and district technology officials you interviewed view privacy issues? 

Lots of them knew that something wasn’t quite up to snuff in their security and privacy practices. 

The best security and privacy practices that I saw in these school districts were entirely because someone, usually in the IT department, had an independent interest in student privacy. They were going above and beyond what their job descriptions required because they cared about the students. 

That’s not to imply that school officials don’t care about the kids —they care about them very much — but they’re so busy making sure the lights are on and making sure there are teachers for the classrooms, dealing with discipline issues, dealing with staffing concerns. They’re not necessarily focused on data privacy and security. 

Your research takes a unique approach to show the real-world impacts of education technology on student privacy. You identify that some of these tools raise significant privacy implications. How did you go about that?

We looked at the online websites of educational sites and tried to understand, what are the privacy risks here? What we found is that 7.4% of all these websites had a session recorder, which records everything you do when you’re interacting with a web page. How long you hovered over a certain element, how often you scrolled, what you clicked on and what you didn’t click on. 

That’s a scary amount of data collection for something that’s normally an education site. On top of that we found a high prevalence of cookies and other types of trackers that were being sent to third-parties, basically advertising networks, that were taking that data to track these students across the web. As a student, even while I’m doing my work, they’re creating an ad profile of me that not only encompasses who I am as a consumer in my spare time, but who I am as a student inside of school for this more comprehensive picture of who I am to sell me ads. 

That could be upsetting to somebody who thinks that what I’m doing in school is only the business of me and the teacher, my parents and the principal. 

Why would an education technology company use a session recorder? 

We were able to identify that these trackers, like session recorders, were running on these websites, but we don’t have any idea what they’re recording, which is a project that we’re currently working on and trying to understand. 

I can’t make any well-grounded assumptions to what this is being used for, whether it be nefarious or benign. It’s not uncommon for a session recorder to be used for diagnostic information for a technology company if they want to understand how their users use a site so they can improve it. That’s a legitimate use of one of these session recorders, but without knowing what data they collect, it could be that they’re collecting data that isn’t strictly relevant to improving the service or are over-collecting data in the guise of improving the service and retaining it for future use. 

There are, of course, but I won’t speculate on that because I don’t have definitive proof that’s what’s happening. 

Why should people care about districts’ technology procurements? School districts are using a huge swath of digital tools, some from Google and some from tiny tech companies. If school leaders aren’t putting privacy at the forefront of deciding which tools to use, what concerning outcomes can come from that? 

There are several concerning outcomes, the first being that the data these companies collect don’t necessarily sit on their servers. They sometimes are sold to third parties. Some companies state third parties ambiguously and others list out who they are selling it to and why. 

Just on a normative basis, I think that what you do in the classroom shouldn’t be harvested and sold, especially when many of these companies are raking in somewhere between five- and seven-figure contracts to license this technology. It’s not like they don’t have other sources of income, but the things they can take from students can be incredibly alarming: Information about socioemotional behavior, so if I act out in school, if I am in trouble for something that’s happening at home or I’m bullying another student, that data is collected by a specific service and that data is held somewhere. And of course, when you hold data, it’s a security risk. 

There was a big breach in New York City where hundreds of thousands of students had their personal information leaked because a company was holding onto all of this data. It was leaked to hackers who got that data and can do who knows what with it. That’s a huge privacy violation. Some of the things they stole in that particular breach were names, birthdays and standard things you can use to commit identity fraud, which is a problem. But it can also be more sensitive stuff, such as [special education] accommodation lists or if you qualify for free lunch. There’s stuff about disability or your economic status, stuff that is all collected by these ed tech companies and held somewhere. 

Learning management systems have incredible amounts of metadata. ‘Are you someone who procrastinates and only finishes an assignment one minute before it’s due? Did you do it early? Are you someone who didn’t do the reading but showed up to class anyway? Are you someone who took 10 times to get this quiz right or did it only take you one time’ 

These data are recorded and are available for teachers to see, but because teachers can see it, it’s sitting on a server somewhere. 

Because they’re being stored somewhere and they are not being deleted regularly and these companies are not following data minimization principles, it’s a potential privacy risk for these students should another breach happen, which we’ve seen happen again and again and again. 

Breaches have affected sensitive student information. In her book Danielle Citron argues for federal rules that would protect intimate privacy as a civil right. Why are such rules needed and how would they work in an educational context? 

There are certain types of information, like nonconsensual disclosures of intimate images, so-called revenge porn. I think you can make a straight analogy for student data. Just as there should be a zone of intimate privacy around your personal intimate life, your sexuality, whatever else, we should have a similar zone around your educational life. 

Education is a space where students should be able to learn and make mistakes, and if you cannot make those mistakes without being recorded, then that can have repercussions for you later. If you’re not perfect on your first try and someone gets a hold of that, I could see that affecting your college admissions or that could affect an employment record. If I am someone who wants to hire you and I have a list of every student in a school that turns in their assignments early and all of these people were either habitually late or always procrastinating then obviously I’m going to be more interested in hiring the worker that turned stuff in early. But what that list might not tell you is that it was one data point in eighth grade and that one of those students when they were in high school finally got on top of their executive dysfunction and started turning things in on time. 

It’s ultimately nobody’s business how you do in the classroom. You have final grades, but those fine-grained data are nobody else’s business but yours and the teacher’s. You have a safe space to learn and grow and make mistakes in the educational environment and to not be penalized for them outside of that classroom.

That’s the day Brandon Johnson, a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, will lay down the mantle of progressive insurgent and take the oath of office as mayor. Last month, in the city’s closest mayoral race in 40 years, Johnson prevailed by just 26,000 votes over former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, a technocrat who ran on a record of support for education reform. 

The win represented a generational breakthrough for Johnson and his union, which has waged a decade-long struggle against a regime of school choice and accountability that stretches back to Vallas’s tenure. That ambitious complex of policy and regulation was carefully installed over decades, including a lengthy interval during which Chicago saw some of the fastest academic growth of any major school district in the United States — but also a steadily building resistance from educators and community members over controversial policies like school closures.

The lessons of the long reform era are detailed in a new book, , released in April by Harvard Education Press. In five chapters, the text chronicles the genesis of Chicago Public Schools’ transformation — beginning with a 1988 state law initiating an unprecedented decentralization of autonomy from the district office to local school communities — and the adoption of stringent accountability measures that in some ways anticipated the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The book’s lead author, Anthony Bryk, offers a rare perspective on the city. A veteran researcher and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bryk previously served as a professor of urban education at the University of Chicago. In 1990, he helped found the , a data hub that has generated a host of influential studies on America’s fourth-largest district.

Bryk believes the evolution of CPS under leaders like future U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and long-serving Mayor Richard M. Daley helped spur a leap forward in student performance by engaging CPS families, improving the selection and development of teachers, and allowing administrators more latitude in running their schools. The results were revealed in by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, which found that Chicago elementary and middle schoolers gained six years of academic benefits from just five years in school.

But he has reservations about the future of the city’s schools, and particularly the gradual establishment of an elected board that will oversee them. In an interview with ����Ӱ��’s Kevin Mahnken, Bryk offered his views on what worked during Chicago’s turnaround; the warning signs ahead, including dramatically falling enrollment numbers and mounting debt; and the union’s overnight move from one of the district’s biggest critics to perhaps its most important actor.

“This might be as radical a reform in governance as one could envision,” Bryk said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: Your book depicts a long journey toward school improvement in Chicago during the 1990s and 2000s. But the years since have been marked by a great deal of tumult, obviously including the pandemic. How far has the district come, and where is it headed?

Anthony Bryk: I think about Chicago Public Schools within the broader context of major American school systems at the moment. We are clearly in an unprecedented time with respect to post-pandemic trauma and learning loss, which have been especially pervasive for those students who are most dependent on strong civic institutions. Of course, we’re also living through a period of racial reckoning as we come to better understand the vestiges of systemic racism that operate in big urban school districts. 

Then you bring in the Chicago-specific context of a new mayor and, perhaps even more important, the shift to a 21-person elected school board over the coming years. Most people don’t realize that Chicago has never had an elected board, and a 21-person board is just a huge change. Over the last number of years, there’s also been renewed conflict between labor and management in schools, and — like a number of other places, but maybe more so in Chicago — the district is experiencing a new round of budget shortfalls.

Together, these factors pose extraordinary challenges. Although the array is quite different, it appears to me in some ways like what Chicago felt like in the 1980s, at the beginning of the work to turn around local schools. [Then-Education Secretary] Bill Bennett visited Chicago and public school system in America. I doubt if it was the absolute worst, but it was clearly one of the most troubled public school systems in the country. And while the specific challenges that had to be confronted were different at that time, their scope certainly strikes me as comparable to what the city is facing now.

The big difference, as we write about in the book, is that there is now a civic architecture that grew up over the past several decades. It’s an interesting kind of architecture in that the politics of urban districts typically tend to focus on shaping what happens at the system’s center; but a lot of the energy in Chicago’s reform push was focused on making ideas work out in schools and finding new ways of developing teachers and school-based leadership. A lot of social learning emerged around the work of school improvement, and there was space for new ideas. The district, over the period of [Arne] Duncan, was open to partnerships with the business community, foundations and lots of new organizations. It generally kept things stabilized even through the period of 2010–2017, when we saw a lot of financial issues and . 

That’s what leads me to think that Chicago is still positioned well to take on these new problems. The improvement work in Chicago — keeping kids on-track through high school and onto college, developing a framework of essential supports and regularly reporting evidence — has created coherence among an incredibly diverse array of actors, and those will be resources in the years ahead. Having said all that, it’s really hard for me to discern how this shift to an elected board will unfold. In my mind, that’s the real wild card.

Can you be more specific about the steps that led to academic improvement over the last few decades?

We describe decentralization as the DNA of reform. Over the decades, there’s been a lot of attention paid to governance as a key lever for reform. What’s important to take from the Chicago story is what governance change did and the mechanisms it opened up. One of the things it did was to recognize schools as the principal unit for change: How do we get schools to get better at their core work?

The [the Chicago School Reform Act, which formed local school committees that gained authority over hiring and budgetary practices in individual campuses] made that critical. It helped reform the relationships between and within schools and local communities, and it brought a horizontal dimension to relationships where, traditionally, educators looked vertically up to bureaucratic actors to tell them what to do. And by virtue of the fact that there were real resources made available to schools, there were opportunities for innovation to occur; , but some very positive things emerged and eventually spread across the system. 

One of the key initiatives was all the attention to how principals were selected, supported and evaluated. Again, when you see schools as the prime mover for change, you focus carefully on the quality of leadership at school sites. Chicago is a huge district, but there are only about 600 people who do this work, and maybe 100 get replaced each year. That makes the task of identifying and developing school leaders a manageable one, and it did become a priority in CPS.

There were efforts to create more aligned instructional systems: curricular materials, professional development, assessment data to judge the progress of students and feedback systems to support teachers in their own improvement. In the past, it had been the task of central administrations to make all these pieces run and work together because it’s so hard to put them together in individual schools. Not impossible, but hard.

That’s where some tension plays out. It’ll play out, for instance, around that CPS has heavily invested in. From what I know of the design principles behind Skyline [an online compendium of learning resources that the district spent $135 million to develop], it’s an attempt to create a coordination environment across various systems and generate good, formative information to support improvement. But that’s a huge undertaking, and it runs the risk of the central office defining what’s to be taught, how it’s to be taught and what evidence should be used.

The tension lies in the fact that you need lots of capacity to build an integrated instructional system that has the promise of actually delivering more ambitious academic outcomes, both reliably and at scale. But then you confront this political issue that democratic localism was intended to solve, i.e., “We want to push these problems into local school communities to decide what they think is best for their own children.” So to some extent, we’re shifting back now to more centralized control.

You’re describing these organizational dynamics and players in a very different way than I’m used to hearing about them, which is always through the prism of reformers vs. unions. Do you think that debates over K–12 politics are cast too simplistically, both by the press and the combatants themselves? 

I do. When the second major reform act , it turned over control of the system to the mayor of Chicago, who appointed the board and the CEO. Since the mayor at that time [Richard M. Daley] also basically controlled the City Council, 49-1, you essentially had unitary politics in Chicago for a 15-year span. You just don’t see that in big, urban districts. And there from 1995 to around 2011.

There were a few things that established that peace. One was that in 1994. We had a Republican governor and a Republican legislature, which had been very rare, and downstate Illinois was intent on taking a sledgehammer to the Chicago Teachers Union by stripping out a lot of provisions around collective bargaining. But when the mayor took over, his office chose not to use a lot of the power it had been given. They didn’t bludgeon the union; Paul Vallas actually figured out how to negotiate a multi-year contract with decent wages for CTU members. In the early 2000s, there was an element within the union that emphasized professionalizing teaching, and the system sent some resources in that direction as well. 

At that time, there wasn’t a traditional labor-management conflict. In some regards, it looked more like a European system, where they’ve got than you tend to see in American cities. But it broke down after 2010, largely because enrollments were declining, and we had financial issues affecting both the city and the state. Those are what led to the closure of all those schools. The conflict is quite active again in Chicago, but there was a period of time when these forces were working together in a more productive fashion.

Those long-term declines in enrollment, combined with big deficits of academic and social-emotional skills following the pandemic, seem to pose the biggest problems to Chicago schools right now.

The situation is extraordinarily challenging. In big districts like Chicago, where revenues are predicated on a per-pupil basis, it’s all fine as long as the student margins are growing. But when you start subtracting, which is what the city has been doing for years, the fixed costs don’t go down with every person who walks out of the building. They closed a lot of schools, but they’ve still got a lot of schools that are already under-utilized and will probably become more so. The way we financially support school systems doesn’t really take that into account.

It’s going to be interesting to see a mayor coming out of the teachers’ union. With the move to an elected board, I would expect the teachers’ union to organize and have a significant voice within that new board. If you get this kind of progressive alignment — the union and the mayor and school board and the governor in Springfield — I’m curious to see whether these people can actually solve these challenges. It’s one thing to go around criticizing what others do, but they’ll now be in a position to do something. What would better look like, and how would they get to it?

Would you agree that, whatever the political configuration moving forward, the urgent question is whether the district can shrink its footprint to match the roughly 100,000 fewer students it now educates compared with 20 years ago?

From a purely financial point of view, CPS has got more buildings operating than it surely needs. But one of the results of that is that the typical school, particularly at the high school level, has gotten smaller. Of course, more personalized relationships to form between faculty and students and parents. Going back to the ’90s, we did see that smaller schools were more likely to engage in reform in productive ways. You tended to see stronger reports about relational trust in that students felt that adults knew and cared about them more. No one intended this, but in shrinking the size and population of schools, they actually created resources for improvement by making them less bureaucratic places. 

That certainly contributed to improved high school graduation outcomes: Reduced size has enabled more intimate relationships to form between adults and students which have, in turn, allowed more students to graduate. At the same time, you do have this financial squeeze that will almost certainly force the district to close more buildings.

Do you think that’s feasible, that school closures spawned during Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration? The shrinkage that you’re describing as almost inevitable is also a politically explosive scenario.

Without question, one of the most contentious issues in Chicago politics is that of closing schools. Emanuel closed 50 of them all at once, and there had been an initial threat of something like 130 candidates for closure. It fractured political alliances, and it was a key component of as a political force. 

If you go back to 1987, the union was broadly vilified across Chicago by parents and community leaders. In the opening pages of our book, we reproduce a very critical Chicago Tribune cartoon of the CPS from that era. If you fast forward to 2015 and the aftermath of the school closings, it was the union that organized parents and community members against the system. It was a fundamental realignment — but having said that, there was another shift of some dimension during the pandemic. The union was largely responsible for closed for a very long time, which didn’t necessarily work to the benefit of all parents and children. 

Another equally important factor is this period of racial reckoning. Race has always been a big issue in Chicago, but it’s gotten really heightened attention over these last four or five years. That has made it much more challenging to form the community relationships that supported improvement for several decades.

Is the CTU now the most important single actor in Chicago Public Schools?

In all likelihood, yes.

This is brand-new territory. Teachers’ unions have organized in other cities to get members elected to boards of education, but when a teachers’ union is recognized as being responsible for how a system operates, that’s really new. The elected board is structured to phase in over the next four years, such that half the seats are appointed — but they’re appointed by the mayor. In that sense, this is positioned to be as novel a governance reform as we saw in 1987, which was the most radical decentralization of public education that had ever been tried in the United States. Chicago is positioned to have a public school system run by its teachers’ union. 

As an aside, something on the horizon that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is . Whether that actually comes into play is an open question, but if principals organize, it’s not clear to me that their union will be on the same side as the CTU on all issues.

At the same time, is it fair to say that some of the measurements of school performance in the district — , which have relied to one degree or another on student test scores — are due to be refocused on different metrics?

I totally agree that these things are all being challenged. But they’re essentially written into regulations, and some of them are federally mandated by things like Title I and the Every Student Succeeds Act. While the existing assessments and their use will be challenged, they’re going to have to be replaced by something; I can’t imagine us going to nothing, no measures of achievement and school quality.

The question is, what are they going to replace it with? Over the last couple of decades, there’s been so much focus on being evidence-based in how researchers and policymakers do our work; but of course, that is predicated on evidence. So if you don’t like the evidence we’ve been using, what’s going to take its place? It might be hard to arrive at suitable replacements, especially in a heavily choice-based district like Chicago. In a choice district, parents have to have evidence to make their choices about where to send their kids to school — what are they going to use? 

Again, that’s the difference between being in a critic’s role, where you challenge the status quo, and being in the governance role, where you say, “Here’s what we’re going to do instead.” Right now, it’s not clear that there is an “instead.”

If you were designing a district from scratch, would you create a school board of 21 elected members?

No, I’d have to say I would not. 

Chicago Public Schools is something like a $9 billion operation. It’s a huge enterprise that has to be managed. A 21-member elected board managing a $9 billion enterprise — like I said earlier, this might be as radical a reform in governance as one could envision. There’s just no way to predict how it plays out. 

Could I imagine a scenario where this really works well? Yeah. I could imagine one where labor and management begin to come together because labor really has a stake in the success of the system. In the old days, they might have said, “Well, that’s management’s responsibility, not ours.” Now it’s all “ours.” So yes, this could evolve in a productive fashion. But would you want to be a superintendent accountable to a 21-member board? It just opens up challenges for which we have no precedent to suggest that it will work well. 

On June 25, President Biden signed the Keep Kids Fed Act of 2022. The law will extend some school meal waivers through the end of the 2022-23 school year.

With a massive, pandemic-era expansion of free school meals scheduled to expire on June 30, Democrats and Republicans around a possible compromise that would extend the federal program through the summer. Passed , the deal is expected to move through the Senate and be signed by President Biden in the next few days.

Authorized by Congress and the Department of Agriculture over the last two years, widened the category of students eligible to receive breakfast and lunch. Schools providing meals were also offered higher reimbursement rates for the costs of running their programs, as well as the flexibility to serve food off-site and substitute for items lost to supply-chain snags.Those benefits by proponents of renewing the waivers, or even following the pandemic’s end. But language to continue the program into next year was left out of the FY2023 budget signed by the president in March.

In the near term, the could ease classroom hunger and simplify the work of schools in the months to come. But research suggests that greater availability of free meals in public schools actually lowers grocery spending even for those without school-aged children. And at a time of sharply rising food prices, it’s conceivable that the end of the waivers would contribute to further inflation.

In circulated last fall by the National Bureau of Economic Research, academics from the University of Chicago and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that an earlier boost to free meals — through the Obama-era Community Eligibility Provision, which allowed certain schools to offer breakfast and lunch to all students without having to process individual applications — caused a significant decline in grocery sales at local retailers. Those chains responded by lowering prices across all their stores, leading nearby households to spend approximately 4.5 percent less in grocery bills in areas where the policy was adopted.

Jessie Handbury, a Wharton economist and one of the paper’s co-authors, called the effects “fairly sizable.”

“Because they’re responding across all their retail locations, the…drop in prices is going to affect all the households in the vicinity of that chain’s stores,” she said. “So you’ll have households that aren’t directly impacted by the demand shock, or that live nowhere near the communities that are taking up universal free lunch, but are still benefiting from it.”

The Community Eligibility Provision was introduced in select states through the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, before becoming nationally available in the 2014-15 school year. Participating schools (identified as those where over 40 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch) could choose to provide such meals to all of their enrolled students, whether they were eligible or not. 

To study the effects of the legislation on grocery spending, Handbury and UChicago professor Sarah Moshary gathered information from the National Center for Education Statistics showing school-level participation in the Community Eligibility Provision between the 2011-12 and 2015-16 academic years. They combined that with self-reported grocery purchase figures from the , which collected data from a representative panel of nearly 50,000 American households over the same timeframe. 

Finally, the pair added findings from a separate industry tracker of weekly grocery chain sales and sale quantity by product. In the five years under study, the system included responses from over 20,000 stores.

In all, the study found that homes with school-aged children reduced their grocery spending by an average of 7.5 percent (about $200 annually, or roughly two weeks of spending for families included in the sample) when a local school adopted the Community Eligibility Provision — the direct impact of their children receiving more meals for free in school. What’s more, that drop in sales led grocery chains to slash prices not just for the directly affected stores (i.e., the ones located near CEP schools), but in all of their locations. As a consequence, shopping costs in the median ZIP code affected by the policy were reduced by an average of 4.5 percent.

Handbury said it was plausible that a large number of families who were always eligible to receive free meals at school only began taking advantage of them once the provision was adopted. The sudden universality of the program may have reduced the social penalty sometimes referred to as “lunch shaming,” she surmised.

“You could imagine that when it costs money for their child to get lunch at school, they just automatically pack lunch for their children,” Handbury argued. “And when it became free, that was enough to induce them to at least send their kids to try free school lunch. Possibly because there was a reduction in the stigma associated with getting free lunch — or even getting school lunch — it just became what you did.”

Other studies have also shown clear consumer benefits accruing to families impacted by the program. , from researchers at Vanderbilt and the University of Louisville, showed that families with children spent between 5 and 19 percent less on monthly grocery purchases in areas that implemented the Community Eligibility Provision. Low-income households also experienced a meaningful improvement in dietary quality, and fewer were classified as food-insecure, in the wake of CEP adoption.

“The savings of $11 per month (or up to almost $39 for fully exposed ZIP codes) are realistic in magnitude and represent a meaningful change for low-income families that may face especially tight resource constraints,” said Michelle Marcus, one of the paper’s co-authors. “For the average household in our sample with two children, CEP provides about 8.25 additional meals per household for each of the eight academic months.”

Price discounts of that magnitude may not seem like much, but during a period of dramatic inflation — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by over 9 percent between April 2021 and April 2022 — they might make a significant difference. Since the COVID-era meal waivers operate essentially like an enhancement of CEP, Handbury noted, their potential expiration could be expected to have “weekly inflationary effects” on those prices.

That’s partly why advocacy groups are already praising the bipartisan deal to extend the waivers for another school year. Earlier this month, the Food Research and Action Center touting the effects of the Community Eligibility Provision and advocating further flexibility for provision of school nutrition going forward.

In an email to ����Ӱ��, a spokesman for FRAC said the group was “excited about the provisions included in the bill that will support access to summer meals, allow children who are eligible for reduced-price meals to receive free meals, and the additional funding for schools and child care.” 

Another group, the School Nutrition Association, was a vital resource at a time when the cost of kitchen essentials like wheat bread and dish gloves had risen by well over 100 percent.

“School nutrition professionals have withstood crippling supply chain breakdowns, rising prices and labor shortages in their efforts to provide students healthy meals, at a time when families are struggling with higher costs. With crucial federal waivers on the verge of expiring, this agreement offers school meal programs a lifeline to help build back toward normal operations.”

The program, called , founded in 2007, spans students’ junior and senior year of high school and their freshman year of college. It began with a class of 25 and now serves nearly 14,000 students nationwide — including in Chicago, Houston, New York City, Massachusetts, Metro Atlanta and the Bay Area — with plans for expansion.

The study, conducted by the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab, examined the outcomes of students who were slated to graduate from high school between 2011 and 2020. It found OneGoal students were also 46%  more likely to enroll in college, and 47%  more likely to come back for their sophomore year than similar students who did not go through the program. 

“I would tell any high school student who would listen, ‘Do not turn your back on OneGoal,’” said Mariam Ajose, 22 and a senior at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “They are a huge gateway to success in college or whatever goal you choose to pursue.”

Ajose credits the program for her success: Both of her degrees — the associate’s she has already earned and the bachelor’s she is working toward — will have been completely funded through sources she discovered through OneGoal.

Students learn about the program in informational meetings their sophomore year of high school. Some are selected for participation and others opt-in. 

Participants take a OneGoal class daily for two years: They spend their junior year reflecting on their own backgrounds and how they would like to use their talents to augment their communities. They close out the year with a list of colleges they’d like to apply to and spend their senior year examining each school even further before completing their applications — transcripts, recommendation letters, essays — and financial aid forms. Each OneGoal fellow is assigned a counselor to guide them through the process. 

Students’ freshman year of college is different: it consists mostly of individual check-ins with OneGoal staff tailored to participants’ needs.

Vanessa Lee, a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, started working with the program in 2013. She said many students who enroll in OneGoal see themselves and their life experience in a negative light and that the program helps them view their challenges as assets, proving they already have what it takes to overcome obstacles.

“There is a deficit model when we think of low-income, first-gen students,” she said. “OneGoal is flipping the script on that, telling students to look at all of the things they do possess and strengths they do have.” 

Melissa Connelly, chief executive officer at OneGoal, understands how students from low-income communities might lose faith in themselves and in their education. Connelly missed 53 days of 8th grade and was on the road to becoming a high school dropout. She suffered from depression and had an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness about her future: Like many of the students OneGoal serves today, she couldn’t imagine living past age 18. So why bother investing in her education? 

It wasn’t until she met a compassionate social worker that she was able to turn her life around.

“She helped me see what was possible for myself,” Connelly said, adding that it took time for the woman to earn her trust. “Like the old education saying goes, kids don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” 

After gaining her confidence, the counselor moved onto some of the more practical matters of shaping Connelly’s future by working on her financial aid documents. 

OneGoal, a nonprofit funded in large part by philanthropic contributions, works on that same principle, winning students’ trust before shifting to the academic tasks at hand. 

“That’s why OneGoal is so special,” Connelly said. “When you walk into a OneGoal classroom, you will hear the word ‘family’ at least once.”

Kelly Hallberg, scientific director for the Inclusive Economy Lab, said researchers compared OneGoal fellows to students who came from a similar demographic: They attended the same Chicago high school, had similar past academic performance, came from a similar neighborhood, were of the same race or ethnicity, and had the same rates of housing instability and Individualized Education Plans.

“There is a growing body of evidence that shows holistic programs that touch many aspects of kids’ lives — shaping their mindset, navigating the college selection process, the financial side — move the needle more than a program that targets one aspect, as in, just tutoring, application support or funding.”

The findings were so remarkable that Hallberg doubted their accuracy.

“When we first saw the results, I said, ‘We need to kick the tires on this, make sure these numbers hold up because they are pretty big,’” she said. “But, the results are consistent.” 

Ajose said the program taught her far more than she anticipated, including how to find the college that best suited her by considering the local cost of living, student-professor ratio, graduation rate and the quality of the program itself. OneGoal staff can take kids on college trips: The organization also partners with universities for tours. 

Most important, the kinesiology major said, she felt like her OneGoal instructors truly cared about her. They noticed, for example, when her grades fell and she could come to them to talk about problems at home. 

Their involvement didn’t end when she aged out: OneGoal still helps her pay for books even though she is in her senior year, Ajose said.

Elijah Wright-Jefferson, 23 and a student at Illinois State University in the town of Normal, hails from the South Side of Chicago. Resources in his community were few, he said: Nearly a dozen of his high school classmates died by the time he reached his mid-20s.  

“People get desperate and upset, which leads to violence, stealing and a lot of anger,” he said. “That was the environment I had been around my entire life. I had never been anywhere else.”

His high school counselor knew he could do better: She asked him five times to join OneGoal before he relented.

Not only did the program teach him about the college admissions process, but introduced him to all different types of people — including basketball legend and community investor Magic Johnson — with myriad jobs, who lived and thrived in various parts of the city.

“During college, they helped me a ton,” Wright-Jefferson said, adding he’s thrilled to participate in the program to this day, encouraging other students to join and stick with it.

Lee, who teaches in the Chicago Public Schools, credits OneGoal for its adaptability: The program has changed dramatically through the years, building on teacher and student feedback.

“It has become much more inclusive,” Lee said, broadening its focus, upon teacher and students’ request, from four-year colleges to other routes to success, including associate’s degrees, trade schools and the military. “It puts students at the center of their own plan. It validates that there are alternative pathways — and one is not better than the other.”

She attributes at least a part of its success to the fact that it utilizes teachers who already work inside the schools: They know and have relationships with the students they serve.

OneGoal is currently working with the Illinois State Board of Education to partner with 24 districts across the state. It is spending this first year providingstrategic postsecondary coaching for district and school leaders to build the infrastructure needed to launch the program before offering the class as an elective in those school systems. It will also add districts in the six states it already serves, plus Kentucky. 

Connelly estimated there are roughly 1.4 million low-income 11th graders in the nation’s schools. OneGoal hopes to reach half of them in the next 10 to 15 years: It aspires to grow from 14,000 to 50,000 students in the next three years.  

“They wanted more evidence that she had gone,” said the trans student’s father, Jeff Walker. “I said, ‘I’ll send you media, pictures, an invitation from the White House.’ They still did not excuse the absence.”

The episode would certainly be in keeping with the spirit of laws signed by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, that restrict trans students’ lives in and out of school. , similar to legislation in Texas and Arkansas, targets doctors who provide trans health services, like the prescription of puberty blockers, to minors. keeps trans students out of bathrooms and locker room facilities that match their gender identity. Like Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” legislation, it also prohibits discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the elementary grades.

Such legislation might soon be on a collision course with federal law, as the U.S. Department of Education puts the finishing touches on a long-awaited rewrite of Title IX. That update is widely expected to codify the rights of trans students for the first time. Department officials have already said that Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination and harassment in programs receiving federal funds, will echo the in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended protections against sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace to LGBTQ employees.

A department spokesperson said Tuesday that it expects to release the new rule in May. 

Alabama is among 15 Republican-led states it. In the last year, a dozen states have passed bills prohibiting trans females from competing in girls’ and women’s sports. But the wave of legislation targeting LGBTQ students has since spread to encompass “just about every moment of their daily lives,” Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs for the nonprofit Trevor Project, said earlier this month during a .

Experts expect the rule to put school districts in the center of what will likely be a long legal battle.

Max Eden, a research fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called it “a very unenviable place.”

“It sets up a big showdown between states and the federal government,” he said during a , “and schools will be caught in between the two forces.” 

Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit leading the campaign against what it calls districts’ “indoctrination” of students on issues of race and gender, organized the event to inform parents about the upcoming rule. Eden also warned of an unpleasant tug-of-war between schools that teach gender as a “fluid construct” and parents who oppose references to gender identity in the classroom.

“It gets to a fundamental question of what is a human being,” he said. “If a school says one thing and Mommy and Daddy say another thing, a kid has to pick, and that’s not a fun place to put an 8-year-old.” 

The public is clearly divided over such policies. A from the University of Chicago and the AP-NORC Center showed that allowing trans students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity receives the most support from Democrats (52%) Hispanic adults (35%) and those with a college degree (45%). Nine percent of Republicans supported such policies. Forty-seven percent of those who voted in a recent school board election and follow news about their local board were opposed, compared to 35% who don’t follow such issues.

The tension is already on display in Oklahoma, where Attorney General John O’Connor told the that it’s illegal to let a trans girl use the girls’ restroom, while state education officials say it’s a matter for the district to decide. 

For districts that could face similar directives in the future, “federal law always wins,” said W. Scott Lewis, co-founder of the Association of Title IX Administrators. “The writing is on the wall. This is a protected class.” 

That might change if federal courts weigh in against the department. Two current federal cases involving trans athletes — one in and another in — could work their way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite Republicans’ questioning, newly confirmed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declined to comment on the issue during recent confirmation hearings.

While the education department’s interpretation of the Bostock ruling doesn’t mention sports, the Biden administration made its position known in filed last year in a West Virginia case. The plaintiff, a transgender girl who wants to compete with girls on her middle school cross country team, is challenging the state’s 2021 law banning students born as male from participating in girls’ sports. 

“Although the regulations allow recipients to operate or sponsor separate teams based on sex, the regulations do not define ‘sex’ or address how students who are transgender should be assigned to such teams,” the brief said. “When assigning students to single-sex sports teams, a recipient must still comply with the statutory prohibition against discrimination based on sex in Title IX itself.”

In a year marking Title IX’s 50th anniversary, some experts say the administration’s position could undermine years of work toward achieving equity in women’s sports. 

“Imagine you go to a meet to watch an event called ‘the Girls’ 100,’ which includes both males and females — some of whom identify as girls, some as boys, some as nonbinary. Specifically, what is it that makes the assembled individuals all ‘girls’ so that having them compete in a separate event from the ‘boys’ is defensible?” asked Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and co-director of the Center for Sports Law and Policy.

Some of the males could be on testosterone suppression, while some of the females are taking testosterone, she explained, adding that “such a field would only rarely allow a female who is not taking testosterone to win in a category that was originally designed for her, to secure her equal access to the social goods that flow from competitive sport.”

Lewis, with the Title IX administrators organization, predicted the issue will reach the court during its next term.

“They can’t let it sit any longer,” he said. 

The issue could also play out in Congress if Republicans regain control during upcoming midterm elections. But any legislation aimed at Title IX “will be entirely symbolic,” because it would need 60 votes in the Senate to pass initially and President Joe Biden would veto it, said R. Shep Melnick, a political science professor at Boston College.

“Congress has rarely amended Title IX, and never on a major substantive issue,” he said. “The conflict will play out in the administrative and judicial arenas.”  

‘Breaking a confidentiality’

Even before Biden took office, he pledged to revise the Trump administration’s Title IX rule, which increased protections for those unfairly accused of sexual misconduct. Once in office, he ordered the department to begin the lengthy process of rescinding the rule and restoring elements of Obama-era guidance that directed schools and colleges to address sexual assault.​

Those changes, already controversial, were quickly overshadowed by the administration’s efforts to incorporate the rights of LGBTQ students into Title IX. During a weeklong public hearing last year, the department invited comment from those experiencing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, further signaling that the rule — which will be put out for public comment upon its release — would address those issues.

It’s unclear whether the regulation will include detailed guidance about issues like preferred names and pronouns or sex-specific school uniforms, but advocates for trans students hope the department will supplement the rule with examples of how districts can address those issues. 

Schools should “make it clear what nondiscrimination looks like” said Asaf Orr, senior staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “Dictating that teachers can’t discuss anything related to gender identity is fostering a school environment that is not welcoming to LGBTQ students.”

Walker, who described his daughter Harleigh as “100% girl,” is a plaintiff in challenging Alabama’s new Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which criminalizes transgender health services for children. He’s also concerned that requiring Harleigh to use the boys’ restroom will “open her up to assault.”

“My fear is some administrator at her school will try to make an example out of her,” he said. “They say this is going to protect my child. It’s not going to protect anyone.”

While the Alabama provision, which only applies to K-5, doesn’t affect Magic City Acceptance Academy, a Birmingham-area charter school that serves many LGBTQ students, Principal Michael Wilson said he’s concerned about a requirement for school officials to inform parents if students question their gender identity. 

“You’re breaking a confidentiality, a relationship that you have formed with kids,” he said, noting recent data showing increases in LGBTQ students seriously considering or attempting suicide.

The education department’s webinar highlighted what some schools are already doing to support trans students.

Sam Long, a trans biology teacher at Denver South High School in Colorado, talked about working with two other LGBTQ educators to “clean up” teaching materials on reproduction. 

“We can be more accurate and be more inclusive,” he said. “It’s ovaries that produce eggs. We’re acknowledging that not all women produce eggs, and also not all egg producers are women.”

Rebekah Bruesehoff, a trans student and activist from New Jersey, said she’s always “looking for clues” throughout her school — like preferred pronouns on a teacher’s ID badge — to see which educators are more accepting.

“I don’t just walk into class at the beginning of the year and announce that I’m transgender,” said the ninth grader, who described herself as a “total nerd” who loves school, plays field hockey and participates in musical theater. “It’s one tiny part of who I am, but there’s so much more to me.”

A significant share of respondents report being happy with the status quo regarding these hot-button subjects: 37% of Americans believe schools focus “about the right amount” on racism and 40% said the same about sex and sexuality, according to the survey released last week by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

“I would think elected officials already know, but it might be useful to be reminded of the fact that their constituents’ political opinions may not be so easy to know and may not be so clear from what they’re seeing in the press or from who happens to show up at school board meetings,” said Adam Zelizer, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who helped write the survey.

Efforts to and limits on classroom instruction about racism and gender have become staples of conservative electoral politics. Despite a surge in book bans, the move is wildly unpopular — at least in theory. Among respondents, just 12%, including 18% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats, supported policies prohibiting books about divisive topics from being taught in schools. Yet Zelizer cautioned the finding could be misleading. 

“In the abstract, no one really supports banning a book from the library or preventing teachers from teaching,” he said. “It’s just when you get to specific examples that almost anyone can be convinced that some books are not appropriate.” 

Stark differences do exist across party lines on a range of contentious education issues. Slightly less than half of Republicans — 47% — said that schools focus too much on racism in the U.S., compared with just 9% of Democrats. Similarly, 42% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats said schools focus too much on issues around sex and sexuality. Slightly more than half of Democrats support policies that allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity compared to just 9% of Republicans. 

On another topic that has dominated school politics, the question of who should control what is taught in the classroom, half of respondents, including a plurality of both Republicans and Democrats, said that parents and educators had too little influence on classroom curriculum. Yet for GOP respondents, that meant parents lacked adequate influence while Democrats were more likely to say that teachers had too little voice in classroom curriculum decisions. 

Local and federal governments fared far worse. Nearly half of respondents — 45% — said that state governments maintain too much influence over curriculum and 43% said the same about federal entities. The largest share of respondents — 44% — said that local school board members maintain about the right amount of influence over curriculum decisions. A fifth of respondents said that school boards had too little power over curriculum and a third said they have too much. 

Overall, a minority of respondents support COVID-19 precautions in public schools. While 43% favor vaccine mandates, just over a third support mask mandates for students attending school in-person. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the poll identified partisan differences for COVID-related questions, but also found a discrepancy between parents and those without school-age children. In fact, parents were less likely to support COVID-19 mitigation measures than those without kids. A third of parents with children in K-12 schools support vaccine mandates compared to 46% of those who are not parents of school-age children. Similarly, just 29% of parents support mask mandates for students attending school in-person compared to 39% of those without kids in school. 

“Parents want their kids in schools and apparently they’re willing to put up with some spread of COVID,” Zelizer said. “Meanwhile nonparents, everyone else in the public, are maybe only concerned with the spread of COVID and don’t care quite as much about whether kids are in schools or being homeschooled because it doesn’t affect them.”

Scenes of irate people at school board meetings have played out across the country over the last year as they protested COVID-19 mitigation measures like mask mandates and so-called critical race theory, an academic framework about systemic racism in legal systems that has become a catch-all for classroom instruction about race. 

Yet few Americans are actively engaged with their local school boards, the poll found. Just 12% of Americans said they attended a local school board meeting in the last five years and 15% communicated directly with a school board member. Fewer than half — 43% — reported following news about their local school boards. 

In some places, school board members have faced significant public scrutiny and in some cases, threats of physical violence. In the poll, however, about two-thirds of Americans said they’re at least somewhat confident in their local school board. Zelizer noted that Republicans and Democrats held similar confidence levels on their local school boards. 

“It’s not like all of this activism and advocacy and policymaking activity has led to one of the parties being more angry at school boards than the other, at least in our sample among regular voters,” he said. “The scenes of rowdy attendees at school boards to the point of harassing school board members or experts who are working with school boards doesn’t seem to be indicative of the broader population.”

Despite all of the partisanship, Zelizer said he was most surprised that many issues remained far less polarized. For example, just 38% of Democrats and 47% of Republicans support standardized testing to measure student achievement. While 64% of Republicans support a full-time police presence in schools, nearly half — 49% — of Democrats agreed. 

The national survey was conducted in mid-March using telephones and the web to conduct interviews with 1,030 adults for the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. 

The most popular, award-winning children’s books tend to shade their Black, Asian and Hispanic characters with lighter skin tones than stories recognized for identity-based awards, new research finds.

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The discovery comes on the heels of a half decade of advocacy to diversify the historically white and male-centric kids’ literature genre, leading to . But now, a recently published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute raises questions about what, exactly, that representation looks like.

“There may be more characters that are classified as, for example, being Black, but they’re being depicted with lighter skin,” explained ​​co-author Anjali Adukia, assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Adukia and her team used artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in the images and text of 1,130 children’s books totaling more than 160,000 pages — far more data than manual methods could possibly crunch. Their code identified characters’ faces, assigned race, age and gender classifications, and calculated a weighted average for their skin tone.

The researchers found that, among books that won the or awards, which comprise the lion’s share of purchases and library check-outs, the average shade for characters belonging to each racial category was lighter than those characters in books that won identity-based awards for race, gender, sexuality or ability representation such as the for African-American kids’ literature or the for LGBTQ books.

The color analysis also revealed that, across all collections, children were persistently depicted with lighter skin than their adult counterparts. The messages sent by those portrayals worry Adukia.

“There’s … this notion of equating youth or childhood with innocence,” she told ����Ӱ��. “But if innocence is equated with lightness or whiteness, what’s that implicit bias that gets baked into people’s minds?”

In many cases, said the professor, that pattern extends to adult characters that authors want to depict as moral or upstanding. Some books, for example, dilute Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige, she said.

“We live in … a world that still sends the message that to be closer to white is to somehow be at an advantage,” Sharon G. Flake, author of the award-winning book , told ����Ӱ��. “The whole notion that you are seen as … more valuable, more beautiful if you are lighter.”

The stories children read, said Flake, shape how kids come to understand the world and their place within it. Giving birth to an African-American daughter with a darker complexion inspired her to write a book featuring a dark-skinned Black girl as the protagonist to remind her child that she’s brilliant and beautiful.

“If you’re always left out of the story, then you start to think that you’re not important,” said Flake. But the power of books to reframe those societal messages, she added, is “huge.”

“When you’re able to read a book that actually does represent you, … you feel seen,” Edith Campbell, librarian at Indiana State University, told ����Ӱ��. “You connect with it in a different way.”

But despite trend-setting titles, authored by Flake and many others, the children’s literature genre still has “a really wide gap in [racial, color and gender] representation,” said Adukia.

The dataset her team analyzed includes every children’s book published in the past century that won one of 19 different awards. Even from 2010 to 2019, their figures show, Caldecott and Newbery winners saw upticks in the share of characters whose skin color fell into the lightest tone group. They also saw a modest increase in the proportion of characters in the darkest skin tone — though the share remains less than in books winning identity-based awards — and a reduction in the percentage of medium shades.

In 2018, , while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

“There are more books written with animal characters than there are with children of color,” said Campbell, remarking on the 27 percent share of stories with non-human protagonists in 2018.

The librarian, who launched the to boost diverse summer reading options, said she would give the recent progress to increase racial, gender and ability representation in the genre a D+/C-.

“There’s so much work to do,” she said, pointing to a string of new rules in red states and districts across the country ostensibly meant to limit critical race theory that the teaching of books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors.

In addition to racial and skin-tone patterns, the UChicago and Columbia Teachers College research team also identified concerning trends in the portrayal of female characters in kids books. Girls and women, their data showed, were more likely to be represented in images than text. Out of all the award categories, those dedicated to representing female voices were the only group to have more words gendered as female than male, the researchers found, and that proportion amounted to only a slight majority.

“There may be symbolic inclusion in pictures without substantive inclusion in the actual story,” said Adukia. “It is really striking, this illustration that women should be ‘seen but not heard.’”

“I don’t think that [the imbalance between female representation in images versus text] is something that people necessarily are doing on purpose,” added co-author Emileigh Harrison, a Ph.D student at the University of Chicago. “But making this finding more visible might help those who are writing future books or publishers … think about it more carefully.”

If those in the industry can turn the worrisome patterns in racial, skin color and gender representation around, the potential impact can be enormous, Flake believes.

“Books work a lot of magic and they do a lot of healing,” she said.