Statewide averages, while useful for tracking overall trends, often mask these disparities. Students who experienced the largest pandemic-era increases — Black and Hispanic children and those from low-income families — are generally the furthest from their pre-pandemic attendance levels. In many states, the gaps between these students and their peers have widened rather than narrowed.

Because chronic absenteeism — defined as missing 10% or more of the school year — is closely linked to academic achievement, engagement and long-term outcomes, these disparities carry significant equity implications. Without recovery, gaps in learning and opportunity are likely to persist.

This analysis examines trends in chronic absenteeism in 26 states and the District of Columbia, using data from the 2018-19 through the 2024-25 school years, broken down by income, English learner status and race. Together, the 27 jurisdictions educate just under half of the nation’s students.

Income

Low-income students had higher absenteeism rates in every state before COVID and experienced greater attendance disruptions than students overall during the height of the pandemic. Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the average state saw chronic absenteeism among low-income students increase by more than 17 percentage points, versus 13 points statewide. In all but one state, Nevada, increases among low-income students exceeded the state average.

In some states, the divergence was especially pronounced. In Nebraska, 26% of low-income students were chronically absent in 2018-19; by 2021-22, that number had jumped to 43%. Over the same period, the state’s overall absenteeism rate rose by about 9 points — roughly half as much.

Since the peak, chronic absenteeism rates have declined for all students, with 21 of 27 states seeing larger reductions among low-income students. Those have varied widely, with decreases ranging from just 1 percentage point in Oklahoma to nearly 20 points in Rhode Island.

Despite these somewhat larger decreases, low-income students remain further from pre-pandemic attendance levels in almost every state. On average, chronic absenteeism in this population in 2024-25 remains more than 9 percentage points above 2018-19 levels, compared with about 7.5 points statewide. In Tennessee, absenteeism among low-income students remains roughly 10 points higher than before COVID, while the state overall is about 5 points above its baseline. In Rhode Island, West Virginia, Nevada and Ohio, low-income student attendance is closer to pre-pandemic levels than the state average.

As a result of these trends, attendance gaps between low-income students and their wealthier peers have widened in 23 of the 27 states analyzed. The average difference increased from about 7 to 9 percentage points in 2024-25. In Oregon, the gap widened from roughly 5 points to more than 13.

Where data are available for wealthier students as well, the divide is often stark. In Ohio, roughly 33% of low-income students were chronically absent in 2024-25, compared with 11% of more affluent kids. Similar gaps persist in Rhode Island (30% versus 12%) and Washington state (35% versus 19%).

English Learners

English learners followed a similar, and in some ways more striking, pattern. Between 2018-19 and 2021-22, the average state saw their chronic absenteeism rise by 16.5 percentage points — 3 more than the statewide average increase. In Iowa, English learner absenteeism rose by more than 21 points, from nearly 15% to more than 36%, compared with a nearly 14-point statewide jump. 

Post-peak declines among these students have been roughly comparable to statewide averages, around 6 percentage points. But because they experienced sharper increases initially, they remain further from their pre-pandemic baseline. On average across the states analyzed, English learner absenteeism rates in 2024-25 are about 11 points higher than in 2018-19, compared with 7.5 statewide. Except in Rhode Island and South Dakota, English learners are further from recovery than their peers overall — and in Rhode Island they have not only recovered, but now post lower absenteeism rates than before the pandemic.

In several states, English learner absenteeism remains especially elevated: in Alaska, Hawaii, Missouri, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah, more than 15 points above pre-pandemic levels. In Utah, it is 17 points higher than in 2018-19, compared with a 9.5-point gap statewide. 

Perhaps most notable is how these students’ relative position has shifted. Before the pandemic, English learners were not consistently absent more than their peers, as were low-income students. In 14 of the 27 states, English learner absenteeism was below the statewide average or within 1 percentage point of it in 2018-19. By 2024-25, that was true for only six states, and in every state, the gap has widened. In Missouri, for example, chronic absenteeism among English learners rose from 12% in 2018-19, about 1 percentage point below the statewide rate, to 27% in 2024-25, more than 5 percentage points above the state average  of 21.5%.

Race and Ethnicity

Pandemic-era increases also varied sharply by race. White students experienced smaller hikes than the average in nearly every state, rising by about 10 percentage points between 2018-19 and 2021-22, compared with 13 points statewide.

Black and Hispanic students saw substantially larger increases. Across states, absenteeism among Black students rose by about 16 points on average, and among Hispanics by about 16.5 points. In every state analyzed, except Washington, D.C., the increase among Hispanic students exceeded the statewide average, and in 14 of the 27 states, Hispanic students saw the largest spikes of the three racial groups.

Recovery since 2021-22 has been somewhat stronger for Black and Hispanic students than for white kids. Across states, Black and Hispanic students have each seen average declines in chronic absenteeism of roughly 7 percentage points, compared with about 5 points for white students. But because absenteeism rose more sharply for Black and Hispanic students during the pandemic, these improvements have not fully offset the larger initial increases.

White students’ attendance remains closest to pre-pandemic levels, averaging about 5.5 points above baseline. Black students remain nearly 9 points above pre-pandemic levels, Hispanic students, nearly 10 points. In 17 of the 27 states analyzed, Hispanic students are the furthest from their 2018-19 attendance rates. Rhode Island again stands out as an exception; there, they now post lower absenteeism rates than before the pandemic. 

At the same time, Black students continue to show some of the highest absenteeism rates, leading in 14 states in 2024-25. In some cases, gaps are extreme: in the District of Columbia, absenteeism among white students is about 9%, compared with nearly 49% among Black peers; in Nebraska, the figures are roughly 15% and 43%, respectively.

Attendance has improved nationally since the pandemic, but underserved student groups remain further from their pre-pandemic attendance levels than others, and the gaps are wider than they once were. Rhode Island has bucked this trend, offering a promising example of what can achieve. Through a commitment to collecting and disseminating detailed, daily school-level data, and bringing together mayors, hospitals, business leaders and other community partners under the leadership of the governor’s office, the state has helped several student groups not only recover, but surpass their pre-pandemic attendance levels.

The persistent disparities in many states and Rhode Island’s progress in addressing them underscore the importance of timely, disaggregated attendance data. Without it, policymakers and educators risk overlooking which students are missing school and why, making it harder to direct supports where they are most needed.

FutureEd Policy Analyst Tara Moon and Research Associate Giana Loretta contributed to this analysis.

In late November, the leader of a Native American Head Start program on a reservation in Western Washington State opened an email from the federal government to see that her annual application for funding had been denied. 

The government shutdown had already delayed the much-needed funds by weeks, threatening a closure of her center, which serves toddlers and preschoolers in a tribe of less than 1,000. And now, a week after the government had re-opened, her application had been “flagged for containing language that is not allowable under current federal guidance.”

The culprit? Two trainings for teachers — one focused on inclusionary practices for kids with autism and the other on tools to support young children as they process trauma. Integral to both — and also part of the rejection — an acknowledgment that Native American children would receive priority enrollment in her Head Start classrooms and programming, as federal policy stipulates. 

“But we’re supposed to do those things,” the education director, who asked not to be identified because she fears retribution from the Trump administration, told ����Ӱ��. “So for them to pull them? I’m just — I’m not understanding.”

Ultimately, although she deeply believed the training sessions and prioritizing indigenous children were inherent to her center’s success and part of its stated mission, she wiped the offending language. Her updated grant was almost immediately approved.

Until last week such existential calculations were being forced on Head Start programs across the country by the Trump’s administration 2025 executive order banning practices involving diversity, equity and inclusion. On Tuesday, a federal judge issued temporarily halting the administration’s anti-DEI edict. 

“This is a huge victory for kids!” Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Head Start & Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program, said in a statement. “When a Head Start program has their funding withheld because of their efforts to provide effective education to children with autism, serve tribal members on a reservation, or treat all families with respect, it is an attack on the fundamental promise of the Head Start program.”

The federal early education and support program for low-income families turned 60 last year, a milestone that coincided with perhaps its most challenging and chaotic year. In 2025, the Trump administration  froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. And during the government shutdown, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services.

The administration also took aim at Head Start’s of better preparing young children in poverty for school by forbidding providers from overtly addressing issues of race, gender or disability, experts said. The banned word list for grant applications included “disabilities,” “underprivileged” and “Native American.”

The Washington State Native American Head Start director said on reservations “just about every one of our children have been touched by trauma” that relates to their race and the painful history of indigenous people in the U.S. 

“If we don’t know how to work with kids where things are being triggered,” she added, “then how are we going to move forward and have the best education for these kids so they are not shutting down all the time?”

Thrilled but cautious

The Jan. 6 injunction was part of a lawsuit filed in April 2025 against Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials, alleging that the administration was attempting to illegally dismantle Head Start, which serves roughly 700,000 children and families a year.

Roughly 80% of Head Start’s funding comes from HHS and it has long been a stated goal of the right wing to eliminate the program.

The ruling means that for the duration of the ongoing case, the administration can’t enforce the DEI ban nor can it punish Head Start providers for including DEI-related language in their applications or practices in their programs. The judge also ruled the administration cannot fire any more employees at the Office of Head Start, though the sweeping layoffs that have already occurred stand. 

Back in September, the same judge granted a temporary injunction halting the administration from banning undocumented preschoolers and other groups of immigrant children from enrolling in Head Start programs.

In a mandated announcement Friday afternoon, the federal Office of Head Start acknowledged the court’s ruling, saying, certain actions against “DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) … may not be implemented or enforced” for the time being, though they didn’t provide any guidance for providers who were forced to remove training and programming in past applications.

The Office of Head Start and HHS did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether further guidance was forthcoming. 

The Washington grantee expressed cautious optimism in response to the ruling, paired with significant anxiety about what comes next. Her approved application is a binding contract, she said, and since it does not include the trauma and autism trainings or prioritization of native kids, she fears she’ll be deemed out of compliance and forced to pay back the money if she proceeds in that direction anyway. 

She said she could try to re-submit an updated application that includes the previously banned words, but “that would be calling more attention to us, and I really am afraid of the retaliation,” especially given the non-permanent nature of  the injunction.

“Whenever you put ‘temporary’ on something, I’m always cautious,” she added. “Yes, if more things come out I feel like there will be support and it’ll take care of this, but you can’t be certain of that in this political climate.” 

It’s possible the Trump administration could appeal the injunction and it’s not clear how long it will take the underlying case to work its way through the courts.

In the meantime, Ryan, executive director of Washington’s Head Start Association, emphasized that the Trump administration “can’t enforce a contract that is going against the law.” But, he acknowledged, “what that means on the ground is different, because there’s so much fear of retaliation.”

“I’m getting a sense that people will move with a lot of caution at first here to see what happens,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re going to want to make wholesale changes right out of the gate.”

Linda Morris, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and one of the attorneys who filed the suit,  said that while this ruling “doesn’t undo those harms that the administration already inflicted,” it’s still “a huge win for families and it’s a huge win for Head Start providers.”

“We’re thrilled with the decision,” said Morris.

The initial DEI ban, she said, had put Head Start providers in “an impossible bind,” since they were being required to remove programming and words from their grant applications that were required by the statutory text of the Head Start Act. 

They were “in constant fear of being forced to comply with an unlawful directive and potentially be out of step with their mission and their obligations under the Head Start Act or,” she said, “they risk being punished and losing their funding and even being forced to close.”

‘If it weren’t real life, it would be hilarious’

Morris and her ACLU colleagues first filed the lawsuit last spring on behalf of a number of state Head Start Associations as well as parent organizations. Initially, the complaint challenged the mass layoffs and restructuring of the federal Office of Head Start as well as the DEI ban, alleging all were causing irreparable harm.

In July, they updated the complaint following the Trump administration’s unprecedented move to exclude families from Head Start based on immigration status.

The complaint was again updated after the executive director of a Head Start agency in Wisconsin had her Jan. 1 grant application returned with instructions to remove 19 words and phrases, including “institutional,” “historically,” “equity,” “belong” and “pregnant people.” Later that morning, the Office of Head Start followed up with a “complete least of [nearly 200] words” banned from Head Start applications.

In response, senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) issued a Dec. 18 to RFK Jr. expressing “outrage.”

“The chaos you are creating is already jeopardizing services for nearly 700,000 young children across this country,” they wrote, adding that “the ambiguous policy was not accompanied by clarification on what the Administration considers ‘DEI,’ and Head Start programs were left with no meaningful guidance on compliance.”

Ultimately, the Wisconsin provider updated her application to fit this new criteria, but, she wrote in a court record, “compliance is challenging because many of the words on the list are integral to Head Start programming requirements.” The grant application itself, she noted, “already includes some of these prohibited words in pre-populated text … and application questions specifically request responses that include these words.”

“This has put me in an impossible situation,” she continued.

Jennie Mauer, the executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, said this grantee was one of three in her state serving roughly 860 young children to have their applications returned this month because of the DEI ban. Another was accused of non-compliance for writing that they would make an effort to “utilize small businesses, minority businesses, and women-owned businesses.”

“If it weren’t real life, it would be hilarious,” said Mauer. “There are things that are in the form like, ‘Tell us how you’re going to serve children with disabilities,’ but then you can’t say the word ‘disability.’ How do you wrap your head around that? It’s infuriating. I’m just wringing my hands over here.”

The latest ruling, she said, “doesn’t necessarily mean that everything is better, but it means that these worst-case scenarios aren’t going to come to fruition,” at least not immediately.

And while she’s hopeful the government will comply with the judge’s order, damage has  been done to Head Start communities, she said, leaving program leaders, providers and families worried.

“You feel like we’re in this sort of Cold War environment where people are afraid,” she said. “You shouldn’t be afraid of your government.”

Note: ����Ӱ�� replaced two of the photos that ran in an earlier version of this story.

Scribbled in green marker, Reagan’s list already began with selfless requests: for her best friend to move back and a classmate to recover from a broken wrist. Then, the usuals: an iPad and boots.

But her last wish was for Santa to keep her school open. 

This fall, she and the community of Prescott, Washington, learned their school was in danger of being shut down due to financial mismanagement. In 2021, the district had a $2 million budget surplus. But this year, Prescott it had roughly $1 million in credit card and bank loan debt. The district — home to 219 students and 40 employees — was told by the state department of education in June that it needs about $1 million by the end of March to remain open for the 2026-27 school year. Otherwise, state officials will dissolve the district.

“We try not to talk about the big details, but she does know that the school could close, and she actually did her [Christmas list] on her own and brought it to me,” Fletcher said of Reagan, who is in second grade. “So it’s definitely affecting her — probably a little bit more than we thought.”

Fletcher is a member of a recently formed parent-teacher organization that has joined the district teachers union and local businesses to raise the to keep Prescott open. They created a , hosted auctions, dinners, sales and festivals, and have even planned a gala. The efforts have raised about $77,000 so far. 

Parents and staff say that if the district is dissolved, the town will lose a place that has not only educated a highly diverse farming population for more than a century, but is a cornerstone of the community.

The Prescott School District has always been small. Serving about 360 residents, it sits among rolling hills in southeastern Washington state, about 25 miles from the Oregon border. Pre-kindergarten through 12th grade classes are held in several buildings on a single campus. 

Most students are Hispanic, and English isn’t their first language. Many come from the nearby Vista Hermosa community, which has a large migrant population that works in a local fruit orchard. 

At a , the school board and then-Superintendent Justin Bradford said they discovered in fall 2023 that purchases were made with money that was already spent elsewhere, and that the district’s business manager at the time, who was working remotely from Seattle, had been providing inaccurate financial information since the pandemic began. Things snowballed from there, they said, and soon the administration discovered a stream of unknown overdue bills and unpaid taxes. 

A from the state education department recommended that the district be put under “enhanced financial oversight” after an investigation found accounting wasn’t supervised and invoices weren’t processed efficiently. A attributed the problems to repeated turnover in the business manager and finance director positions between September 2021 and August 2024. No employees were named, and no charges were filed.

The district was put under in March 2024 and for the 2024-25 school year by $750,000. After more budget cuts and staff reductions this summer, the district is still grappling with a $1 million deficit. 

When Bradford resigned earlier this year, school Principal Jeff Foertsch stepped in as district leader. He said he had no idea how much financial trouble the district was in. 

“There were a lot of people we did not know we owed money to — I was getting emails from them saying [we’re] a year past due, and there were no records on it,” he said. “We were spending more than we were bringing in, and whoever was in charge of reporting those numbers was not reporting it correctly.”

Prescott isn’t the only district in crisis because of alarming budget deficits. Six other Washington school districts are also in financial oversight, according to the . 

Money mismanagement and overspending has also plagued districts in , , and , among others. One school district in West Virginia is at after it went from having $9 million in the bank to a projected budget deficit in three years.

In Washington, districts under financial oversight can be dissolved if they can’t come up with a two-year plan that resolves debt while restoring a balanced budget, according to the state education department. The last time a district was shut down was in 2007, when the following financial struggles. 

On Dec. 10, a financial oversight committee recommended that Chris Reykdal, Washington superintendent of public instruction, begin the steps to dissolve Prescott while it searches for more revenue. The superintendent can stop the process if the district raises enough funds by the end of March.

“If the [Prescott] district is able to secure revenue that is measurable and reliable in the amount of at least $1 million by March 31, 2026, then the district will likely continue operations in the 2026-27 school year,” the department said in an email to ����Ӱ��.

Foertsch said the district’s plan for recouping the money includes selling teacher housing, which is worth $380,000; asking voters to approve a special tax; fundraising; and seeking help from the state legislature.

Last year, Washington’s Marysville School District was found to be in after a state audit and of the state’s risk management pool. Instead, the district was given money from a special to buy its own insurance. Foertsch said a local state senator is trying to revise the budget to allow any money left over in that fund to be distributed to districts like Prescott. 

“It would be a bailout, which doesn’t feel good to say,” he said. “But [there] is a possibility that we can get a little bit of money as well.”

Auctions and spaghetti dinners

For now, teachers, parents, staff and local businesses are stepping up to fill the funding gap.

Travis Zigler, president of the Prescott Education Association and a social studies teacher, said the reason behind the financial crisis is irrelevant with the school’s future hanging in the balance. 

“I don’t even like to think about blame in this situation, because we’re just in it and we need to move forward,” he said. “This community deserves to have their school.”

Zigler said he knows every kid’s name. Students in the first class he taught when he began his job five years ago are graduating in the spring. While he and the roughly 18 teachers in the union were unaware of the situation a few months ago, they’re now determined to raise the money needed to prevent dissolution.  

The union, community members, businesses and the parent-teacher organization have hosted auctions and spaghetti dinners. They’ve sold nameplates for bricks on school property, partnered with restaurants for fundraisers and created a Breakfast with Santa Claus. A formal gala is scheduled for March in hopes of bringing in an additional $100,000. 

The parent-teacher organization also collected donations to restore traditional extracurricular activities that were lost to budget cuts, like a fifth grade ski summit and a band trip.

“Despite what’s going on, the students are still the No. 1 priority, and we are massively focused on just continuing to provide the best education we can,” Zigler said. “We’re doing our best to be positive.”

Kaleb Young, a PTO member, said he worries about how the school closing could impact students and their families, especially those from vulnerable populations. Young graduated from the Prescott School District, and his daughter is in fifth grade there. His mother is a paraprofessional, his grandmother is a bus driver and his father was on the school board for 13 years.

Prescott School District is where kids get meal assistance in the summer. Young said the school is easy to get to on foot or by bike, and kids in the classes grow up together. If the district were dissolved, he said, friend groups would be broken up and students would be scattered among various districts several miles away.

“I wish that there was more time,” he said. “We’re working with what we’ve got, and people are scrambling and rushing, and we’re doing what we can.”

The decision came just a day after another U.S. district court judge in Rhode Island granted a that offered similar protections to preschoolers That ruling also means undocumented residents can still access adult and career and technical education and won’t be cut off from a range of federally funded emergency services, including for domestic violence and homelessness.

Linda Morris, an ACLU attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Washington state case, said she was elated by the decision, noting its sweeping scope. 

“This is an incredible victory, especially for Head Start providers and Head Start children and families,” she said. “Today’s ruling makes clear that every child, no matter their immigration status, deserves access to early educational support. We are extremely pleased with the court’s decision.” 

In issuing the national injunction, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez strongly rebuked the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees Head Start and funds 80% of its costs, for changing a longstanding legal interpretation and classifying it for the first time as a federal public benefit. 

Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for these supports, including food assistance and non-emergency Medicaid. The move to restrict Head Start access is part of a wider Trump administration effort to exclude the undocumented from all taxpayer-funded services and programs, including several that involve education and job training.

The ruling restores Head Start eligibility to children and families who have student visas and other temporary statuses and were also excluded by HHS’s . The move affected the eligibility of more than 500,000 kids, according to the agency’s own analysis, and impacted approximately 115,000 children currently enrolled in the program.

Andrew Nixon, the HHS communications director, said Friday his office disagrees with the injunctions and is evaluating next steps. 

Head Start associations from four states and two parent and caregiver groups sued the agency and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Washington case. 

Joel Ryan is executive director of one of , the.

“I feel relief. I feel like people can breathe a little bit more,” said Ryan, whose organization’s other legal claims against the administration are focused on confusion over its anti-diversity, equity and inclusion mandates and the mass firings of Head Start staff.

Martinez rejected the Trump administration’s assertion that Head Start is a welfare program because it provides other means of support, including meals. Public schools do the same and no one would argue they are not educational in nature, he wrote. 

“Providing services such as health care, nutrition and other social services does not make Head Start non-educational but, as the Head Start Act states, ‘promotes the school readiness of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, social and emotional development,’” he wrote, noting, too, that Head Start funds do not provide payments of benefits to individual households or families. 

In court Tuesday, U.S. Department of Justice attorney Micheal Velchik tried to parse the degree of learning and instruction that takes place in Head Start from what’s taught at the K-12 level. 

“It’s technically not school or education because it’s preschool. It’s what you do before school and so it’s not really education in that sense,” said Velchik, who mistakenly referred to the program as Head First several times.

Jannesa Calvo-Friedman, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said undocumented parents, families of mixed immigration status and others with full legal standing but who lack documentation told Head Start operators they were keeping their kids away out of fear or confusion.

“The children who are losing education at this time [in their lives] can never get it back,” Calvo-Friedman said, citing studies on the critical nature of early learning. “Unless the directive is stayed or enjoined, defendants will continue to communicate the message that immigrant families need not apply.”

Martinez agreed that allowing the directive to go into effect while the underlying case was being argued would impose imminent and irreparable harm.

“While actual loss of funding from under enrollment might be down the road, families losing access to Head Start due to the Directive’s unclear guidance and chilling effects appears anything but speculative and exists even prior to enforcement,” he notes.  

The judge expressed disbelief at the government’s contention that implementing the restriction immediately would discourage illegal immigration.

“The Court is floored by this argument,” he wrote. “Nothing on the record provides any means for this Court to infer that access to Head Start ‘incentivizes’ illegal immigration.”

Head Start was established in 1965 to help improve kindergarten readiness for low-income children and to support their families. It has served young learners  and their families in the 60 years since. 

Classes began Sept. 12 at Evergreen Public Schools in Washington state after a strike by support staff delayed the start of school for nearly three weeks. The Public School Employees of Washington SEIU Local 1948, which represents 1,400 paraprofessionals, bus drivers and other staff, reached a deal with the district Sept. 11. The  includes a 13.5% pay hike for paraprofessionals over the three-year contract, but union members won’t receive compensation for the month of September.

A week after school was supposed to start, classrooms in Washington state’s Evergreen Public Schools are still closed due to a staff strike.

The district of 22,000 students in Vancouver was supposed to have its first day of school Aug. 26. But the opening was delayed when Public School Employees of Washington SEIU Local 1948 announced a strike over contract negotiations that have gone on for six months. The district again Sept. 3 as the strike continued. 

The union represents roughly 1,400 paraprofessionals, bus drivers, security guards, maintenance workers and other staff. Members of the teachers union are and .

“The board and I had hoped that delaying school for a week would have allowed the district and the [union] bargaining teams time to reach an agreement without further disruption to families,” Superintendent Christine Moloney wrote in an Aug. 31 . “The [union] could opt to work under the previous agreement, which the terms of the contract allow for a full year. However, union leaders have opted to continue their strike.”

“We are not stretching this out — you are,” union President Mindy Troffer-Cooper said at an Aug. 26 school board . “This job is not sustainable for many, so they work multiple jobs. We need help to be able to continue.” 

The Evergreen chapter isn’t the only union whose negotiations went down to the wire before classes began this year. In June, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers voted if both parties didn’t agree on a contract before the first day of school Aug. 25. An agreement was reached hours before students returned to the classroom. 

The Mead Education Association, which represents more than 600 teachers in Mead, Washington, voted to if an agreement wasn’t reached by midnight Aug. 31 — two days before the first day of school. The union and district that day.

“We know the uncertainty of the last couple of days has been stressful for many, and we’re thankful to have avoided a delayed start to the school year,” Superintendent Travis Hanson wrote in an Aug. 31 parent .

On Tuesday, 1,800 teachers, paraprofessionals, counselors and other school staff in Romeoville, Illinois, submitted their 10-day strike notice. Union President Jared Ploger said in a that school day schedules and compensation are the top issues being negotiated. The earliest date for a strike is Sept. 15.

The Evergreen union has low wages, lack of retention policies and unpaid work hours as core issues during contract negotiations that began in March.

While the salary increases of between 2.5% to 4.5% for this school year, Troffer-Cooper said at the school board meeting that they won’t add up to a living wage. 

If the district’s current contract proposal were accepted, a paraprofessional with five years of experience would earn a salary of $32,707, according to its . A bus driver with five years’ experience would receive $39,661.

More than a third of educational support employees hold more than one job, according to a 2024 National Education Association . About 90% rate low pay as a moderate or serious concern.

Members of the Evergreen Education Association, which represents 1,700 teachers in the district, while classes were delayed last week. The union conducted a week-long strike in 2023, according to the .

“Evergreen Education Association supports PSE Classified in their negotiations for a fair contract,” the teachers union said in a Facebook .

George Dockins, executive director of the Public School Employees of Washington, also expressed support for the union on . He said in a Facebook video that members are “shoulder to shoulder demanding respect and fair pay” and are “raising the bar for every education support professional in Washington.”

“Evergreen, we see you, we stand with you, and together, as one union family, we will win,” he said.

The new rule was and published in the Monday by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, which oversees Head Start. Some immigrants, including refugees and those with a green card, would remain eligible to access Head Start services, but scores of others, including undocumented residents, DACA recipients and those with Temporary Protected Status or student visas, would not. Those on so-called U visas, typically survivors of domestic violence, drug trafficking or other serious crimes, would also no longer be eligible.

An estimated 115,000 Head Start children and families could be impacted, about 16% of the program’s total 2024 enrollment, according to an

“It’s incredibly inhumane what they’re doing,” said Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, “and it’s much more far reaching than undocumented people — not just because there are other populations [included], but it has a real chilling effect …  it’ll scare a lot of people that might have mixed status, or they may be perfectly legal, but they’re afraid.”

It’s not yet clear how the new restrictions would be implemented or tracked, and some lawyers and local Head Start leaders are encouraging providers to hold off on any changes until there is more clarity around their legal obligations. This is a particularly tricky moment to introduce such a radical change, experts noted, as many providers are currently recruiting students for the fall.

The new rule was enacted by rescinding a 1998 Clinton administration interpretation of the . That interpretation extended some federal public benefits to undocumented immigrants, which the Trump administration now claims “undercut” the original law, was “improper”  and “incentivize[d] illegal immigration.” The administration has embarked on an aggressive campaign to deport millions of undocumented residents, including by targeting students and attempting to end birthright citizenship.

The updated policy redefines Head Start as a “federal public benefit,” and in doing so, restricts access to early childhood education based on immigration status.

“This new rule is not only unprecedented in the program’s history, but it’s also completely at odds with the mandate for Head Start to provide early education to low-income children and their families,” said Linda Morris, an ACLU senior staff attorney and co-counsel on the lawsuit.

The administration’s stated goal is to, “restore compliance with federal law and ensure that taxpayer-funded program benefits intended for the American people are not diverted to subsidize illegal aliens,” according to an HHS Head Start is explicitly named as one of the impacted programs “to ensure enrollment … is reserved for American citizens from now on.”

At least 12 other federally funded programs are included in the new rule, such as the and the , which provides funds for people with serious mental illness experiencing homelessness.

The department’s announcement comes after months of layoffs, funding freezes and uncertainty for Head Start, which has reached more than and their families, the majority of them low income, since its inception in the 1960s. the $12 billion program served over 778,000 children from birth to age 5 and pregnant mothers and their families in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states and six territories.

Along with providing early education and resources to kids, Head Start also connects families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents. The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources.

The program has long been a target of the right, and the conservative playbook has called for its full elimination, arguing Head Start has “little or no long-term academic value for children.”

HHS estimates the new rule could lead to an increase of $374 million in services for American citizens, but that does not account for the cost to families losing services or to the broader economy as working parents lose access to child care, said the ACLU’s Morris.

“It’s important to remember that this new rule is not just an attack on immigrant communities. It’s also an attack on working families,” she added. “The social and economic impacts of this new rule will be felt beyond these families — it will be felt across communities, and really across the nation.”

In May, a coalition of parents and Head Start providers, represented by the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, the ACLU of Washington, ACLU of Illinois, the Impact Fund and others, filed in Washington state against the Trump administration. The plaintiffs alleged the federal government was seeking to illegally dismantle the Head Start program by shuttering half of the organization’s regional offices; laying off scores of staff; and implementing “sweeping and impermissibly vague bans on activities that promote or advance ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘inclusion,’ and/or ‘accessibility.’”

In this updated application, they also argue that expanding the definition of “federal public benefit” to include Head Start is an illegal attempt to rewrite statutory law, which violates the as well as the U.S. Constitution. They are asking the court to prevent the administration from enforcing or implementing this new directive.

“No agency, including HHS, has ever defined early education as a federal public benefit,” Morris said. “This new rule from the administration is completely at odds with how the agency has interpreted Head Start programs [historically], and the administration hasn’t followed any of the processes that it needed to follow in order to implement a change of this kind.”

The rule will also lead to “waves of kids that are unprepared for school” entering the public school system, according to Ryan. HHS’s updated interpretation does not impact undocumented K-12 students’ access to a free, public education, which is Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe, although that ruling has also become .

“These claims all stand together,” Ryan said, referring to the original lawsuit and this latest legal pushback.  “I really see it as a cumulative effort to destroy the Head Start program and to make lives harder for very low-income kids and families in the country.”

In the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s , our researchers heard from dozens of district leaders working to strike the right balance, moving with urgency while staying grounded in equity, transparency and their core mission of educating students. According to those leaders, districts need to slow down and figure out what parents and families want in terms of preparing their children for the coming AI-based economy. They should also make sure AI efforts help marginalized students and track district progress to see if their plans are working.

This starts with understanding the risks and opportunities of AI, including dangers around bias and misinformation. Leaders must also partner with families, educators and students to learn about AI and set shared goals to make sure everyone has basic information about these tools and how they work. Districts are doing this through community conversations with their superintendents, school-based AI information sessions and task forces.

Gwinnett County Public Schools, a diverse district outside Atlanta, began broad community engagement in 2017 and learned that families prioritized future-of-work readiness. The district used this to guide conversations on AI’s role in education, consulting industry leaders and experts and ultimately creating a districtwide plan for how the technology should be used. This included new , an and to build literacy, address bias and privacy concerns and evaluate generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT.

CRPE research shows that AI adoption is most successful when carefully planned. While schools and districts ultimately decide whether students can use AI, and to what end, teachers decline to use the technology in the classroom if they don’t see how it can benefit students. This is true even though they may have access to apps and professional development. Early Adopter districts that have seen the widest use of these tools by teachers and students start by reviewing their strategic plan and identifying a specific need to address with AI-enabled strategies — such as giving multilingual learners ed tech apps that help with translation or automating lesson planning so teachers have more time to connect with students.

California’s Santa Ana Unified School District formed a task force to explore how AI can support its framework, instructional and equity goals, and mission of multicultural readiness. The result: an that ensures the technology is used in accordance with districtwide values, like academic integrity and student well-being. For example, the compass specifies that the district will develop an ai honor code and instruct students on how to use AI as a learning partner, rather than as a substitute for their own effort.

Alongside engaging the community and making sure AI use serves broader goals, districts can encourage safe practices by using quick, low-stakes trials that can be rolled back if they don’t work. They can test across a variety of schools to better understand the necessary and variable conditions required for successful implementation. Small-scale pilots that test different solutions and are easy to wind down to reduce risk. They also allow districts that are taking it slow to verify whether new AI tools actually reduce teacher workload or help students learn.

After all, AI won’t improve learning unless districts can track where it’s helping — and where it’s not. That means building data systems that connect tools, platforms and insights across schools, so educators can see what’s changing. Right now, too much valuable data tracking things like attendance, assessments and student interests is stored across multiple apps that can’t interact with one another. This means district leaders and educators can’t get a complete picture of how AI is helping, or hurting, students. This data is also often inaccessible to the people who need it. Without integration, AI strategies are just guesses.

Districts should have a clear data strategy grounded in making sure already disadvantaged students don’t fall further behind. Investing in AI without a plan to close gaps risks giving well-resourced students more opportunities to interact with the technology than those who are historically marginalized — reinforcing the very inequities districts hope to resolve.

Issaquah School District in Washington state employed AI to address persistent achievement gaps for students with disabilities, and those who identify as Latino or Hispanic and/or black or African American. Grounded in strategies, Issaquah uses AI-powered ed tech tools that enable students to complete assignments in different ways, whether through voice recordings, written answers, video slideshows or other modes of expression. Issaquah is pursuing a multi-year approach to use emerging technologies to help close persistent achievement gaps through both professional development and in the selection of AI resources and tools.

Used wisely, AI can help tackle entrenched challenges like supporting multilingual learners, students with disabilities and those below grade level — but only if leaders stay laser-focused on serving those students, not chasing flashy tools. That’s why, over the next two years, EdTrust has committed to hearing what stakeholders want and need to know to ensure . 

But districts shouldn’t have to do this work alone (and many can’t afford to). States and the federal government will need to play a leading role in helping districts adopt AI technologies. States should start by providing clear guidance on AI use to help districts protect student privacy and avoid unintended harm. They should also establish funding streams for AI readiness, including support for modernizing data infrastructure — ensuring all districts, not just the wealthiest, can build what they need — and hold vendors accountable for ensuring their tools do not reinforce bias or widen opportunity gaps. States and the federal government must also expand access to broadband and personal computers so that all students, regardless of geography or income, can benefit from AI-enhanced learning.

If the government and private sector can afford to invest trillions in AI-powered technology, they can invest millions to help ensure all students, not just the privileged few, are ready for a new, AI-driven future and economy.

On Friday, several hours after ����Ӱ��‘s story published, the Washington state nonprofit that operates the seven shuttered Head Start and 11 Early Head Start programs received the Notice of Award it had been waiting for, confirming its funding was coming. Inspire Development Centers has since been “moving quickly to recall all children and staff for a Monday morning start,” CEO Jorge Castillo said in a text message.

On Tuesday afternoon, instead of welcoming her son’s Early Head Start teacher for their weekly home visit, Gricelda Valenzuela brought 2-year-old Abram to his teacher’s office to say goodbye. The mom said she got choked up as she gave the teacher a parting thank you gift and Abram reached out for a hug.

“He looked at her, and when she carried him to say goodbye, he kind of just put his head on her shoulder,” Valenzuela said. “I’m not sure how much he understands of this, but I know he built a great relationship with her. I’m not sure if in the weeks to come he will feel that void of not seeing her or getting out of that routine.”

Abram is one of the at least 400 children in eastern Washington state who abruptly lost access to their Head Start or Early Head Start programs Wednesday morning, and his teacher was one of nearly 75 staff members who were laid off. 

“I was just in shock,” said Valenzuela, who first learned about Early Head Start when she was pregnant with Abram and a blood test revealed he’d likely be born with Down Syndrome. “[The government can] just do that? It’s just gone? With no warning, nothing? There goes my son’s help.”

Jorge Castillo, CEO of , the nonprofit that operated Abram’s program and others, said the federal funding award they were supposed to receive in mid-February still hadn’t arrived — nor had any communication about its delay. Without his regional Head Start office to turn to and not knowing when, or if, he would be reimbursed for expenditures, Castillo was forced to close seven Head Start and 11 Early Head Start centers that served predominantly low-income and Latino kids and families.

While he hopes the move is only temporary, he has no idea how long it will last or if the teachers he just let go will still be there if can rehire them at some future date.

“I’d never thought we’d even see this day,” said the veteran early child care provider who has been with his organization for 31 years.

‘Programs will go under’

The Washington state closures are the outcome most feared since President Donald Trump took office and plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty. 

The administration has frozen — then quickly unfrozen, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. 

In interviews with over a dozen people currently or formerly affiliated with the early learning and wraparound support programs created in 1965 to combat poverty, it’s clear the last three months have left providers, educators, parents and staff scrambling and afraid.

Their sense of panic ratcheted up considerably after first and then reported that Trump’s 2026 proposed budget would fully defund and eliminate the Office of Head Start, reflecting a long-held wish of right-wing conservatives and a recommendation outlined in , the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for how the administration should dismantle the federal government.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, responded to requests for comment. Funding for the Office of Head Start can’t be eliminated without congressional approval. 

The prelude to the proposed elimination occurred on April 1 when approximately 500 employees under the Office of Administration for Children and Families, the HHS division that runs the Office of Head Start, received termination notices, according to a created and maintained by former ACF staff. 

They encompass the fired regional staff in Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco, who were employed across a number of divisions beyond Head Start. Those include Family and Youth Services, which works to put an end to homelessness, adolescent pregnancy and domestic violence, and the Office of Family Assistance, which administers grant programs, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. 

Overall, ACF’s footprint dropped from approximately 2,400 people in January to about 1,500 after April 1 — a greater than 35% reduction in staff in just three months, according to the tracker. 

“This administration is clearly taking a behind-the-scenes, death-by-1,000-cuts approach where they try to cut it off at the knees,” said Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden.

Before their firing, the six or so staffers assigned to Head Start in the Seattle office supported 58 Head Start and 53 Early Head Start grantees, serving over 28,000 children across four states, according to the Washington State Association of Head Start and the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program.

These employees were considered experts in their regions and had a wide range of responsibilities, including processing grants and providing child safety oversight. Program leaders say they have nowhere to go now with their questions, needs or grant applications beyond a generic federal email address many say they don’t trust based on the administration’s actions so far.

“Programs will go under” as a result of these closures, said one of the dozens of fired Seattle regional office employees, who asked not to be identified by name for fear of losing his administrative leave benefits. 

He pointed to Castillo’s organization as an example saying, “early learning programs are closing their doors. We’re going to lose out on child care slots — specifically in Tribal communities — because dollars are time limited and there’s just way too much work … to [get] money out the door. We’re going to see the work just not getting done and programs [not] being funded.”

Slashing the regional offices is like, “destroying the pipes that bring water to a community,” said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer of , a nonprofit advocacy organization. “If you’re gutting the staff that is overseeing and distributing the funding for a program, you’re going to end up restricting access to the end product, and in this case, that’s high-quality early learning for children. It’s going to be especially acute in rural areas and for children with disabilities.”

Valenzuela, the Washington mother and a high school math teacher, and her husband began looking for resources for Abram while she was still pregnant. Because of his disability, they were connected with Early Head Start. Since then, a teacher had been coming to their Sunnyside home for weekly visits to work with Abram on meeting his educational and developmental goals. Every other week, Abram would go to an Early Head Start classroom where he played with other kids and strengthened his sensory and fine motor skills.

“[He] has made great strides,” his mother said. 

While she’s devastated to lose the program, she knows she and her family are privileged to have the resources to support Abram in other ways. But she’s worried for fellow community members who may not have the same access.

Almost 1 in 5 Sunnyside residents About 87% are Hispanic and the most common employment sector is agriculture and forestry. Valenzuela said she knows many of these parents rely heavily on the Head Start program.

“How are we going to leave this whole section of students without the help that they need?” she asked.

Waiting for May 1

All of this is part of a larger effort to “implode the program from the inside,” according to Joel Ryan, executive director of the, which represents providers and families. “They’re basically trying to kneecap the program so that the Head Start programs can’t operate as effectively.”

Some providers reported “rolling blackouts” to the payment management system in the weeks following Trump’s Jan. 27 , later , calling for a temporary federal funding freeze to “grant, loan and other financial assistance programs.” The outages prevented them from accessing federal funds and for a number of days, according to Ryan. 

Then came the firings of federal probationary employees — those that were newly hired or promoted — which resulted in a loss of about 18% of the Head Start staff, according to Hamm, the former Biden administration deputy assistant secretary.

Two months later, on March 27, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a of HHS, which would reduce the workforce by about 10,000 full-time employees and consolidate 10 regional offices to five. 

Most program and support staff across the five shuttered regional offices were fired and only learned of their terminations hours before the work day on April 1 via a mass email, Ryan said. Some didn’t realize they had lost their jobs until they arrived at the office that morning, only to be locked out of the building.

In total, the staff — some of whom had worked at the offices for decades — served 22 states, a number of territories, and hundreds of thousands of children, pregnant women and their families. 

Head Start providers and grantees who report to those regional offices largely heard about the fallout through word of mouth and panicked texts and LinkedIn posts. They said they didn’t receive any official notice from the federal government until a boilerplate email arrived in their inboxes two days later.

Some providers are scared that if they call attention to their centers by asking for help they may face punishment from the administration so they’re avoiding official channels altogether and attempting to troubleshoot issues on their own. Others told ����Ӱ�� they were too anxious to share their stories with the media — even anonymously — out of fear the Trump administration might still identify them and withhold their funding in retaliation.

Since its inception in the 1960s, Head Start programs have reached and their families, the majority of whom meet federal low-income guidelines. the $12 billion program served over 778,000 children from birth to age 5, pregnant mothers and their families in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states and six territories.

Just over a third of those enrolled in were Latino, 29% were Black and just under a quarter were white. About 48,000 families served during the enrollment year experienced homelessness, and around 51,000 families received housing assistance through the program.

Head Start programs also connect families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents into early child care and education. The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources.

In arguing for its elimination, Project 2025 asserts that Head Start has “little or no long-term academic value for children.”

While research around Head Start has found the program appears to increase children’s economic opportunities and reduce poverty according to out of the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Nebraska. Kids who attended Head Start were 2.7% more likely to complete high school and 8.5% more likely to enroll in college. College completion rates rose by 12 percentage points — an increase of 39%. And participation in Head Start appears to have reduced men’s reliance on public assistance and adult poverty rates among women.

Providers across the country now have their eyes set on May 1, when a number of them are expecting approvals of their next round of grants. Experts are concerned that the closure of the regional offices could result in a backlog of processing, which could then lead to more service disruptions for kids. 

One program director said that even though her grant is not up for renewal quite yet, she’ll be closely watching those that are. 

“Those guys I feel like are going to be the canary in the coal mine to let us see what happens,” she added.

“I had nothing, no resources,” Defreese said. “I built the curriculum from scratch.” 

Though Defreese was the lead teacher in her 11th- and 12th-grade English classes — designing and delivering lessons, grading student work and offering feedback — she was not operating alone. Technically, she was still an apprentice. Her first year in Beech Grove was part of a partnership with local Marian University, a residency program where she’d agreed to be the “teacher of record” at the school while still receiving training and taking courses to earn her master’s degree in teaching. 

During her first year, Defreese had both a mentor teacher at the high school plus professors at Marian providing her with ongoing coaching and training.

Marian professors said the design of the program, which began in 2019, was intended to increase the skill set of new teachers by exposing them to the research on learning, but also to get teachers “on their feet” and into classrooms sooner. “We have a teacher shortage,” said Karen Wright, director of residencies and clinical experiences at Klipsch Educators College at Marian. The one-year residency, she said, “gives an opportunity for us to truly partner with our community as well as fully train our candidates.”

It covers the $21,000 tuition for a new teacher’s master’s degree, plus provides a living stipend that ranges from $18,000 to $39,000, depending on teacher qualifications.

Local schools and the university see the arrangement as a win/win: understaffed schools get qualified teachers into classrooms quickly, and new teachers get ongoing coaching and support to hone their skills.

Marian University is one of a growing number of programs overhauling how teachers get trained, moving away from short, uneven practical experiences in classrooms to something more closely resembling a medical residency. Residents do more of the day-to-day work of a licensed teacher but in a more junior position, under the supervision of more experienced teachers. 

Apprentice teachers take education courses at night and on weekends while spending their days working directly with students, through tutoring and academic intervention as well as full-time teaching. And unlike traditional programs, apprentice teachers often get paid for their time.

Though the number of residency, apprenticeship and mentorship programs is hard to quantify, experts say the model is not just in university programs, but in non-traditional, alternative certification and “” programs as well. 

Program leaders say longer residencies are happening in part due to the profession’s rising demands and changes in the field. Some residency programs focus on specific targets, like equipping teachers with the research— such as on the science of reading —  to understand how learning works; others look to create a more diverse workforce or address chronic teacher shortages. 

The apprenticeship model has promise, said Suzanne Donovan, executive director of the incubated at the National Research Council. Programs like SERP — the Strategic Education Research Partnership — are looking to add a research element to new teacher residency programs, making early teaching look much more like young doctors training in a research hospital.

“I’m convinced it’s the thing that could make education a system that continuously improves in the way that,” she said. 

New teachers now outnumber any other group

improving student teaching is one of the most efficient ways to strengthen student achievement and teacher retention overall. Over the last 30 years, novice and first-year teachers have grown to make up the of the workforce, researchers say, outnumbering teachers who’ve worked for five, 10 or any other number of years or more.

According to a 2017 analysis, about 7% of all teachers, or 245,000 out of 3.5 million, are either first-year or novice teachers. In 1987, by contrast, those just entering the field made up 3% of the teacher workforce. 

Since new teachers tend to be less effective than experienced ones, and leave in higher numbers, especially the that work in high-poverty schools, the student teaching experience becomes critical to success. Teachers in training who have positive student teaching experiences with effective, experienced mentor teachers to teach. 

But according to a 2023 report from EdResearch for Action, many state regulations come up short, offering bare minimum requirements ranging in quality. Only 27 states require at least 10 weeks of student teaching under a mentor teacher in the building; even fewer, the report says, mandate a student teacher work full-time during those weeks. Few programs set criteria for what student teaching should include. Mentor teachers often receive , and if they are paid at all, receive an average $200 to $250 stipend. 

 “The frequency and quality of support provided to teacher candidates by mentor teachers and field instructors vary significantly and are often inadequate,” researchers wrote.

“People are not paying enough attention to this issue,” Dan Goldhaber, director of the at the American Institutes for Research, told ����Ӱ��. “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to making student teaching better.” 

Studies have shown, for example, that a for novice teachers reduced teacher attrition within the first few years. 

�ҴDZ���󲹲����’s links mentor teacher quality to how effective new teachers are once they get in front of students. While only about 5% of working teachers volunteer to be mentors, student teachers who do get highly effective mentor teachers perform substantially better once they’re in classrooms. 

“If you work with a very effective, two-standard-deviations-above-average mentor teacher, you end up looking almost like a teacher who has two years of teaching experience instead of a novice,” Goldhaber said.

But several obstacles stand in the way of higher quality training for novices, said Matthew Kraft, an education economist at Brown University. Teacher compensation continues to be a factor, and districts and universities can’t pay for long training periods like in medicine. No such thing exists for educators. 

“It’s alluring to characterize teaching as medicine, but we’re not going to have anything close to that until we have something that even approaches medical pay,” Kraft said. “Those things go together. You train many, many years to become a doctor, not only because it’s necessary, but because there are returns to that multi-year investment in your education.” 

Getting into the nitty-gritty of teaching 

Some new residency and apprenticeship programs are paying more attention to breaking down the steps of teaching. They’re spending more time on research and practical tools in the way new doctors practice the “how” while learning the “why” of treating patients. 

When professors overhauled the student teaching program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in 2020, school of education dean Douglas Cost said they needed better measures to know whether their clinical teacher training was doing a good job preparing teachers for the classroom. Teacher licensure was the bare minimum.

“Accreditation is an important goal,” Cost said. “But it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of teaching. Understanding the science behind learning has given us a real lever to begin thinking about what makes a good teacher.”  

Cost and colleagues adopted , an evidence-based educator curriculum focused on improving student learning. It gives new teachers specific techniques like connecting students’ prior knowledge to what they’re learning, or how to make sure all students are thinking about the material. 

“Our professors gave us a template for designing our lesson plans, based on prior knowledge, gaps in knowledge, how to get students up to speed who might have gaps,” said Sarah Cardoza, a former resident and social studies teacher at Wasilla High School in Wasilla, Alaska. “What do you want students to know, and how do you know if they know it? It takes that simple concept and gives you a roadmap for it.” 

Cardoza said her first year as a resident teacher, her class had eight students with mandated special education support, three English language learners and several Ukrainian refugees  — a lot for a new teacher to handle. 

“I appreciated having a plan for how you are going to handle those situations when everybody’s needs are so different,” she said.

New teachers often don’t have the experience to know how to execute these techniques in a classroom full of students, said Zach Groshell, an independent coach and teacher trainer in Seattle, Washington. Giving them step-by-step specifics — like how to gather students on the rug in an organized way or how to capture attention with a simple arm gesture — might seem basic, but can make the overwhelming first days of teaching much more manageable. 

“The generalities of ‘build relationships,’ ‘have a positive classroom climate,’ ‘plan your lessons effectively,’—they’re just too nebulous and vague for new teachers to act on them,” Groshell said. “You need to get more specific.” 

A  ‘gradual release’ to full teaching responsibility 

Traditional student teaching offers new teachers two stark realities: practice lessons in controlled environments, and then full responsibility in a classroom of students. But residency models emphasize “gradual release” to full independence, especially in hard-to-staff areas like special education. 

“My first year as a teacher, I cried almost every day,” said Geri Guerrero-Summers, a special education teacher at Mariner High School in Everett, Washington. New teachers went from “you’re going to observe” to “jump right in,” she said. “Student teaching was unpaid. … It’s really a rough type of process in becoming a teacher.”

Guerrero-Summers now works as a mentor teacher with the Washington Education Association’s , the first teachers’ union to step into training and licensing teachers. Originally funded with federal pandemic relief money, the union residency launched in 2023 and has recently obtained status as a registered apprenticeship program with the U.S. Department of Labor, which comes with an investment of $3.4 million. 

“We strive to make sure our residents are classroom ready, no matter where they’re placed,” said Jim Meadows, dean and director of educator career pathways center at WEA.

Future educators begin with 18 weeks working as a paid assistant in special education classrooms, often called a paraeducator, followed by seven weeks of classes, finishing with 36 weeks of clinical rounds, slowly taking over responsibilities as full-time teachers. 

Apprentices spend time in a variety of special education settings and age groups. The residency was created to address a specific challenge, an of special education teachers in Washington state. A found that 1.5% of special ed teachers were unqualified to teach, nearly three times the state average for other types of teachers. in the state make up more than all other vacancies—including STEM teachers and English language teachers—combined. 

Gradual release has been critical for learning the detailed skills of a special educator, said current resident Beck Williams. For example, writing, reading and interpreting Individualized Education Programs, which lay out a student’s classroom supports and accommodations and their learning goals, are covered in coursework but look much different when working with families and young people.   

“In special education teacher training, there’s not enough practice with IEPs and parent interaction,” said Williams’ mentor teacher, Angela Salee. Special education teachers often have to play several roles in IEP meetings, advocating for the student’s best interest while explaining accommodations to other teachers, administrators and families. 

In Mississippi, where have a teacher shortage, alternative licensure programs like the Mississippi Teacher Corps offer two-year residencies and accompanying master’s degrees to get more teachers up to speed as quickly as possible. 

Residents jump right into classrooms and start teaching summer school. They plan lessons and figure out classroom management, all under mentors and supervisors, right away. 

“Part of the difficulty of teaching is that you can’t fully prepare someone for the classroom,” said corps director Joseph Sweeney. “So part of it is that experience they need in the classroom. You have to get them on their feet to show them what it’s like.”

At the same time, schools are struggling to bring down high absenteeism rates that undermine academic achievement and school climate. While there’s been some progress since the pandemic, far more students are missing a month or more of school than in 2019. The rates are particularly high among homeless students: of them were chronically absent in the 2022-23 school year, compared with about 28% of all students and 36% of those who are economically disadvantaged.

These results are hardly surprising: The constant moves that come with homelessness often leave children far from their schools and without an easy way to get there. Hunger, lack of clean clothes and mental or physical illnesses complicate the picture. 

Our organizations, SchoolHouse Connection and Attendance Works, spent the past six months interviewing school leaders across the country to learn how districts are bringing students without stable housing back to school. reflect common-sense approaches driven by data and cloaked in compassion.

The first step is to identify the students who need help. The federal provides school districts with money for transportation, staffing and other assistance to students residing in shelters, cars and motels, as well as those staying temporarily with other people. But many families and youth don’t realize they qualify for extra help from the school district, and others are afraid or embarrassed to say they are homeless.

School districts are adjusting their to reflect different sorts of temporary living arrangements. And they’re training all school staff, from attendance clerks to counselors to administrators, to recognize the signs of homelessness. Even tardiness or poor attendance can be a tipoff that families have lost their homes.

Some districts are going further. In Henrico County, Virginia, the McKinney-Vento team hosts summer events at Richmond-area motels where homeless families live and signs students up for services. In Albuquerque, team members visit homeless shelters and RV parks.

Once students are identified, districts need to track what’s happening with their attendance and update the data regularly. Many districts are using that focus on addressing the factors that keep students from showing up, such as transportation, hunger and depression. 

In California’s Coalinga-Huron Unified School District, for instance, officials at each school once a week with a list of homeless students and review academics, attendance and other indicators. They emerge with action items for helping students, whether it’s rearranging a school bus route, bringing in a counselor or connecting the family to food and other services. Coalinga-Huron’s efforts are supported by real-time data analysis from the Fresno County Office of Education. 

In the small rural district and elsewhere, transportation remains one of the biggest barriers to school attendance for homeless students. Recognizing this, the McKinney-Vento Act requires districts to provide eligible students with a way to get to their “school of origin” if it is in their best interest. This often creates logistical challenges. 

For students living beyond school bus lines, some districts use vans or car services with drivers vetted for safety. But the costs can be high, and drivers are sometimes in short supply. Others offer gas cards to parents or student drivers. The Oxford Hills School District in Maine paid for one student’s driver’s education course.

The challenges go beyond expenses. Henrico County created school bus stops for homeless children living at motels but found the kids were embarrassed for their classmates to see where they lived. The district then changed the routes so the motels were the first stop of the day and the final stop in the afternoon. 

Depression and anxiety can also contribute to absenteeism. Near Denver, Adams 12 Five Star School District matches youth experiencing homelessness with mentors for a 15-hour independent study focused on academic goals, social-emotional development and postsecondary options. Kansas City, Kansas, uses a “2 x 10” approach, with a staff member spending two minutes talking to each at-risk student for 10 consecutive days.

It’s also key to reach families, many of whom report feeling unwelcome at school or embarrassed by their living situations. Fresno Unified School District in California hosts parent advisories to discuss challenges that are keeping homeless students from attending school. Adams 12 hired a diverse team of specialists whose backgrounds include some of the experiences that their students are living through, including poverty, immigration and homelessness. Henrico County spent some of its federal COVID relief funding for two years of Spanish lessons that help the McKinney-Vento team members communicate with families more easily.

This work takes coordination across departments, so that district staffers who concentrate on homeless students work closely with those monitoring school attendance. It also requires strong relationships with community-based organizations.

Several districts use a approach that coordinates nonprofits and government agencies in supporting students and families. In Coalinga-Huron, where families often have trouble accessing social services located more than an hour away in the county seat of Fresno, the district offers nonprofit organizations space to provide immigration services and language instruction, as well as a food pantry, clothing closet and health clinic.

Several states have also launched grant programs or provide funding specifically for students experiencing homelessness. In Washington state, a funds North Thurston Public School’s student navigator program that connects each homeless student with a staff member. Adams 12 relies in part on Colorado’s to pay the salaries for some of the specialists on its team. 

These districts are using data-driven approaches to improve attendance for homeless students. And they’re doing it with compassion and heart. They recognize that these absences mean weaker academic performance and higher dropout rates. In some places, the absences affect school funding, leaving less money available.

As the homelessness rate continues to rise, districts should adopt these common-sense approaches to identifying students, tracking data and addressing barriers with community, state and federal support.

SchoolHouse Connection and Attendance Works are hosting to explore the findings at 1 p.m. Eastern March 13 and 18. A SchoolHouse Connection-University of Michigan database provides for homeless students at the district, county and state levels.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation and Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to Attendance Works and ����Ӱ��.

As a freshman in high school, I could never have imagined where I’d be today. All I knew was that I preferred working to studying in the classroom, and I was not sure if college was the right path for me. I worried about how the rest of my four years would go and if my future would be as bright as those of my peers who seemed set on pursuing higher education. 

Through my own research, the support of my teachers and access to classes that allowed me to explore my passions, I was able to find and prepare myself for a path that was a better fit and gave me the foundation to launch a career as an entrepreneur. 

Though of teens are open to non-college options, only 13% feel prepared to choose their path after high school. Stories like mine show that it doesn’t have to be this way.

My school offered classes that allowed me to explore my interest in the arts, including videography and photography, and learn about topics of my choice, such as how to run a business. Talking to my friends at other schools, I learned that this was very unusual.

My teachers were a crucial source of support. I initially worried that they would judge me or think I wasn’t as ambitious as my peers who were set on pursuing higher education. Instead, they provided me with guidance and explored with me which career I wanted to pursue, so I could figure out whether college was necessary in getting there.

As I narrowed in on a career in photography, a hobby I’d been passionate about since I was young, I started feeling more and more sure about my initial instinct. College didn’t excite me and would have required me to take on significant loans. Meanwhile, I was starting to learn the skills needed to run my own business, such as how to speak to clients in a powerful and meaningful way, project manage a company, handle digital assets and get along well with co-workers.

During my junior year, my teachers encouraged me to reach out to local business owners to hear about their career paths and gain their advice to prepare me to start my own company.

My high school had a program that let me study topics of my choice. I learned how to use business management platforms like Adobe Portfolio and Google Workspace to track customer relationships, and to improve user interfaces to make my business website easy to navigate. My statistics class went over debt-to-income ratio and how to apply that to my future career. One of my teachers even hired me to take portraits of him and his family, giving me hands-on practice as a photographer.

The fact that my school offered a robust arts program was also helpful in helping me fine-tune my photography skills. In my digital media class, I learned visual marketing techniques, while my sewing class introduced me to color theory, which enhanced my attention to detail. 

At the end of senior year, when I walked across the stage to receive my diploma, I truly felt ready to set up my own photography and video production business.

Like me, the majority of high school graduates in 2023 to pursue a four-year college degree. But many do not have access to the sorts of programs and resources I had that helped set me up for success — about said they would have gained from more career exploration in middle or high school.

That needs to change. Every student deserves the opportunity to thrive and thrive, regardless of the path they choose. By providing diverse pathways, whether through expanded career and technical education classes that integrate technical skills taught in the classroom, entrepreneurship programs or comprehensive college guidance, schools can ensure that all students can find their own routes to success.

I’ll be back at my high school soon, this time not as a student, but as a professional videographer. I’ll be filming students and teachers as part of a promotional video that my school is making. I take pride in being able to use the skills I have learned to give back to my school, helping it support future students just as it supported me. I hope my story encourages other schools to add skills-focused programs that prepare students for a wide range of careers — whether they pursue higher education or not. 

Jessica Heavner describes it as the hardest decision she’s ever had to make.

Heavner, of Federal Way, was working in accounting at the local school district, and when it came time for her annual cost of living raise two years ago, she realized the pay bump would put her over the state’s income limit for subsidized child care.

She would be making too much to get help from the state for care for her three children but too little to pay for care on her own, given the high costs.

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Heavner, a single parent, opted to find a lower-paying job with fewer hours in order to keep the subsidy – even though her previous job had better pay and benefits.

“I feel like I’m trapped in poverty,” Heavner said.

She’s not alone in her predicament. from Child Care Aware of Washington found that a lack of child care in the state costs families and employers billions of dollars annually. Employee turnover and absenteeism and lost family income associated with child care cost about $6.9 billion last year, or around $870 per resident.

The report analyzes survey data from Zogby Analytics, which sampled 606 parents in Washington, and applies the findings to the state’s 1.5 million parents with children 12 years or younger.

Nearly 40% of parents surveyed reported quitting work or getting fired since their children were born. About 62% reported missing at least one day of work in the last three months, and one in 10 had been out of work for at least a year since their children were born.

The cost of care, disruptions in availability and a lack of care options are all problems.

Parents who cannot secure care may not be able to find employment or take part in job skills training. Those who are employed can face reduced hours or missed promotion opportunities.

This lost productivity translated to a $1.5 billion dent last year in federal, state and local tax collections, according to the report. It also reduces Washington’s economic output by an estimated $6 billion each year, the report said.

Last year, the report said, employers lost $1.5 billion due to employee turnover because of child care and another $2.6 billion because of employees missing work due to child care issues. Meanwhile, families lost $2.9 billion in income because of child-care-related time off.

“This really puts into stark numbers that this is not just a problem for a handful of families, and not just a problem that child care providers need to face and deal with,” said Genevieve Stokes, director of government relations at Child Care Aware of Washington. “This is something that’s hurting the overall economy.”

The problem is not going to go away unless there is more state spending on child care, Stokes said. Recent investments in this area through the capital gains tax and the Fair Start for Kids Act have been helpful, but she added Washington needs to do more to make sure the families and providers are not just “treading water.”

As part of the Fair Start for Kids Act that passed three years ago, the Legislature is supposed to increase eligibility for the state’s child care subsidy program for those who make 70% of the state’s median household income starting next year. Subsidies are currently available for those who make 60% of the state median income. for a household of two is $6,892. For a household of three, it’s $8,514, and for a household of four, it’s $10,136.

Stokes said she hopes the state honors that commitment next year as doing so could help many families who can’t quite afford to pay for care on their own.

Advocates, providers and families are also pushing for a statewide cap on what all families in Washington would pay for child care, likely set at 7% of their income. That change, however, would be expensive for the state, and as lawmakers are looking at this upcoming legislative session, it likely won’t become a reality anytime soon.

After struggling to find a child care that she felt comfortable with, Heavner said she finally found someone who she trusts to care for her kids and who understands her financial situation. In order to continue affording this care, Heavner said she will likely have to stay in her current job and work minimal hours until her kids are older.

But she said she’s still scared of accidentally making too much money one year and losing her subsidy. She said a statewide cap on child care costs would be a blessing.

“It would make me not worry about making so much money,” Heavner said. “It’d make me not worry about improving my life while having young children.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

In Washington state, about 8,500 fewer children than typically expected — enough to fill 450 classrooms — in grades K-5 were identified as needing special education between March 2020 and the start of the 2021-22 school year, according to from CALDER, the American Institutes for Research’s Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. Compared to 2018-19, the identification rate was 23% lower in 2019-20 and 20% lower in 2020-21. 

The findings mirror other early analyses showing substantial drops in the number of children with disabilities who began receiving crucial support during the pandemic. Using Michigan data, for example, last year found that identification rates fell by 19% in the 2019-20 academic year and 12% in 2020-21. 

It’s too soon to know whether these dips mean support for the students was delayed or whether many have simply fallen through the cracks. to pre-pandemic levels, with no indication the children who were not evaluated during COVID have since been identified.

Whether crucial supports are delayed or denied, the data is alarming, says Roddy Theobald, CALDER deputy director and one of the report’s authors: “There are going to be long-term consequences. At the very least, probably those students are missing out on two years of needed services. But it’s also possible that this means they will miss 13 years.”

Here are five things to know about likely implications: 

Identification matters

Two decades ago, Texas education officials illegally ordered school districts to cap special education enrollment at 8.5% of students, or slightly more than half the average rate. After the policy was brought to light, economists of special education services. Among other ramifications, they found that children denied services were 52% less likely to graduate high school and 38% less likely to enroll in college than those who received special education support. 

The earlier services start, the better the outcomes 

Substantial evidence shows children with disabilities go on to learn more and advance more quickly when they are identified in early grades, so they can acquire the foundational skills that will set them up for future academic achievement. For example, students with reading disabilities who get specialized help in first or second grade make gains in literacy that are nearly twice as big as children who start special education in third grade. They also continue to learn at faster rates in later years.

In addition, early intervention reduces the need for intensive services in later grades. 

The numbers may be an undercount

Given the number of students who stopped attending public school during the pandemic and the sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism among pupils with disabilities in the years since schools reopened, there are likely more children who need services than show up in the data, CALDER notes. 

Children of color and economically disadvantaged students are likely disproportionately impacted

The Michigan researchers found the fewest students were evaluated in districts with remote schooling and concentrations of Black, Asian and impoverished families.

The data is dire, but there is little urgency about addressing the crisis

With special ed teachers, occupational and speech therapists and other specialized staff in perennially short supply, there is little evidence school systems are making up lost services for existing students, much less seeking out and evaluating kids they might have missed.  

“In a situation where districts have a hard time staffing special education, workload is a real issue for special education teachers,” says Theobald. “This creates a real problem in terms of catching up. And if they do catch up, it can make for untenable caseloads for special education teachers.” 

The number of students in Washington’s school system experiencing homelessness climbed last year, a new report finds.

Data from the shows that 3.8%, or 42,436 students, experienced homelessness during the 2022-2023 school year.

That’s up from around 37,000 students during the 2021-2022 school year and roughly 32,000 students the year prior – though the report notes that remote learning policies during the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to identify and serve these students during those years.

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The increase could reflect both an overall rise in homelessness and school districts’ improvements in tracking these students, according to a spokesperson at OSPI’s Education of Homeless Children and Youth program. Access to more federal funding during the pandemic made it easier for districts to identify and work with students who are homeless.

Identifying students can help districts best serve them in what the report found to be one of the most stable and supportive places for those experiencing housing instability.

“Schools are a safe place for kids,” spokesperson Katy Payne said. “It’s consistent, it’s reliable.”

Federal law requires all school districts to annually report the number of enrolled students experiencing homelessness. Nationally, there are 1.2 million homeless youth in public schools.

In Washington, 9% of all students who identify as Gender X – meaning they do not identify as male or female –  are experiencing homelessness. That’s compared to 3.9% of all female students and 3.7% of all male students.

Nearly 12% of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander students and more than 7% of American Indian/Alaskan Native students are homeless.

More than 87% of unaccompanied youth, those who are not in the physical custody of a legal parent or guardian, are as well.

The majority of students experiencing homelessness – 76% – share housing with other people due to loss of housing or economic hardship. More than 10% live in shelters, and another 6% live in hotels or motels. Almost 7% are considered unsheltered, living in cars, parks, campgrounds or abandoned buildings.

Students who are homeless often suffer academically and are more likely to drop out of school or get suspended or expelled than their peers. They also tend to have higher absentee rates, worse test scores and lower graduation rates, according to the report.

Payne said some of these poorer outcomes have shown signs of improvement. “Part of that is because districts have a better understanding and more awareness about what they’re responsible for providing for students,” she said.

Although the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction administers state and federal grants to schools, it’s up to local districts to determine how to coordinate services, like free meals or special funding and programs for low-income or homeless students.

One option is to fund a who works with students to ensure they stay on track toward graduation and participate in extracurricular activities.

Many districts used pandemic-era federal grants to pay for these liaisons and training to help teachers spot students who might not have stable housing.

As that money runs out, it could be up to the state Legislature or Congress to find other ways to fund similar initiatives, according to OSPI.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

About a quarter of Washington’s students with disabilities don’t find employment or enroll in higher education within a year of leaving high school.

Outcomes are even worse for students with autism or intellectual disabilities: 54% of graduates with intellectual disabilities are not engaging in employment or higher education within a year, and 41% of those with autism fall into the same category.

The data comes from a from the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, which analyzes information collected in 2022 from students receiving special education services who left high school in the 2020-2021 school year.

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Joshua Taylor, a professor at Washington State University who studies transitions from school to employment for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, said the reported outcomes for those students are “really troubling.”

“These rates of trying to improve employment outcomes for people with disabilities — and particularly for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities — have been stuck for 30 years or so,” Taylor said. “We just haven’t seen a lot of positive change.”

That’s reflected in the report: In the past five years, the lowest rate of “no engagement” in higher education or employment was 25% for students who left during the 2017-2018 school year. The highest rate of “no engagement” was 30% for students who left in the 2019-2020 school year, which may also reflect the effects of COVID-19, Taylor said.

Washington students with intellectual disabilities also have lower rates of competitive employment, defined as a part-time or full-time job with similar wages as non-disabled workers.

At around 12% for students with intellectual disabilities and 15% for students with autism, rates of competitive employment in Washington are even lower than the national average, Taylor said — although he cautioned that it’s difficult to compare state and national datasets due to how the information is collected. found rates of competitive employment for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities nationwide was 20% in 2014.

The report also includes rates of “other employment,” which includes employment of disabled workers at salaries below minimum wage. That’s still legal in 37 states, including Washington, from the National Partnership for Women and Families. Congressional lawmakers to end that practice in February.

Taylor said there’s a lot being done on both the federal and state levels to improve rates of employment and education among youth with disabilities transitioning to adulthood.

It’s been 10 years since the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 was implemented, which requires state vocational rehabilitation agencies — which provide employment services to people with disabilities — to use at least 15% of their federal funds on making sure students with disabilities have access to services that help them find employment after school.

States are given a lot of leeway as to how they attempt to meet that goal, but Taylor said one of the most promising ways is through facilitating paid work experiences before students leave school. Research shows students are much more likely to pursue further employment or education if they’ve already experienced what paid work is like, he said.

In Washington, Taylor’s own work with Washington State University, for example, includes developing the , which helps students determine what services are available to them.

“The idea is really to impact the numbers that we’re seeing here, and to bend these trajectories of students that have been stuck…sort of all across the country,” Taylor said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com. Follow Washington State Standard on and .

The percentage of charter school students in Washington state scoring proficient in math went up nearly 15 points in the latest round of state tests compared to those administered in the 2020-21 school year, a marked sign of improvement in a subject whose pandemic-era scores nosedived.

The gains were heralded by the Washington State Charter Schools Association and follows the state’s September release of the latest . The association has 18 charter school members serving some 5,000 students: A majority hail from low-income families and are children of color. 

“In terms of math recovery, we saw schools really double down on practices like differentiation,” said Rekha Bhatt, the association’s co-president of innovative schools, referring to the practice of designing and delivering lessons to students at their ability level.

Bhatt also cited targeted intervention for those needing help and a reliance on data-driven instruction. The students themselves, association spokesperson Maggie Meyers said, take ownership of their work: They are made aware of their academic standing and encouraged to improve. 

While less than half of all charter school students scored proficient in math, 39.1% reached that benchmark on the 2023 spring tests compared to the 24.2% who did in the fall of 2021. Statewide, students also showed improvement in math but not as dramatically, with the share scoring proficient going up 8.7 percentage points between 2020-21 and 2022-23, from 30.4% to 39.1.%.

Statewide, all students were climbing out of an in math scores between 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic struck, when roughly 49% tested proficient and 2020-21, the first time the tests were given following school closures and the forced switch to remote learning, when the number fell to 30.4%.

There have been alarming and widely reported declines in math scores on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress test results and, at the state level, some others have not yet shown the post-pandemic improvement that Washington has.

California reported in its 2022 Smarter Balanced math scores statewide from 2018-19 — the last year it required the test — with 33.38% of students scoring proficient or better. For Black students in California, the percentage meeting or exceeding the standards in math in 2021-22 was slightly

Charter schools in Washington state serve a more diverse population than the state’s traditional public schools: 62% of their students are Black, Indigenous or other students of color compared to . And 56% of charter students come from low-income households versus .

Charter schools in Washington state also have far more teachers of color — vs. roughly — which has proven important in boosting outcomes, Meyers, the spokesperson, said. 

“E����� having one teacher that reflects a student’s cultural and racial identity can make a big difference,” she said.

Washington state administers the Smarter Balanced tests annually in grades 3 through 8 and in grade 10. The most recent results showed better-than-statewide improvements for charter school students in English as well. Just 46% reached proficiency in 2020-21 versus 52.4% in 2022-23. Some 50.7% of students statewide were labeled proficient in English in 2022-23 — a smaller, 3 percentage-point jump from the 47.7% who were in 2020-21. 

“We’re excited about the gains we’ve observed over the past two years,” said the charter association’s Bhatt.

Statewide, there was an between the of students who tested proficient in English in 2018-19 and the 47.7% who did in 2020-21, less precipitous than the nearly 20-point slide in math proficiency during those years. A recently released compilation shows the same trendline playing out across the country, with math scores bouncing back from a deeper recess in more places than English scores, which fell off less sharply but have been slower to recover.

A National Alliance for Public Charter Schools spokesperson was not able to say whether charter school students nationally outpaced their traditional public school peers in improving their most recent state test scores. But, she said, charter schools’ mixture of accountability and flexibility — including expanded school days and social and emotional learning support — played a big role in mitigating the pandemic’s challenges for their.

Washington state voters first approved opening charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, in 2012. A long legal battle ensued over the constitutionality of their financing, which was resolved in favor of charter schools in 2018. With the exception of Summit and Impact public schools, most of the state’s charters are not part of large networks but are operated by smaller, independent school leaders. 

State law has not allowed charter schools to grow beyond the number that existed in April 2021. Charter advocates are pushing for a policy change that would permit more schools to open, Meyers said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to the Washington State Charter Schools Association and ����Ӱ��.

“This was an incredible effort by the … bargaining teams. We want to thank everyone on both teams who worked hard to come to a resolution,” .

“Our solidarity on the picket lines and the enormous community support we received made all the difference,” .

If comments on the are any indication, members are upset that they were asked to vote to suspend the strike without seeing the full tentative agreement. The Seattle union used the same process , and there were similar complaints.

The vote results highlighted member frustration. After hours of debate, only 57% voted to suspend the walkout and return to work. But that was enough. Schools reopened Sept. 14.

Union members may be upset about a lack of transparency, but the citizens of Seattle, who have to pay for whatever provisions have been negotiated, have yet to hear a single word about the contract’s contents. Such secrecy after an agreement is reached is unwarranted.

The union deemphasized its salary demands in public statements, saying it wanted “.” It claimed the sticking points concerned inadequate staffing for the English learners and special education students the district seeks to place in mainstream classrooms.

Seattle Public Schools spends nearly it receives on employee wages and benefits. Pay ranges from a minimum of $63,180 to a maximum of $123,506. The average salary for a Seattle public school teacher was reportedly .

The legislature allocated a 5.5% inflation pay hike for K-12 employees statewide, and the district offered an additional 1% on top of that.

That all sounds pretty respectful, but teachers in nearby Kent just settled their eight-day strike with an 8% raise, so I suspect that’s what the Seattle union aimed for.

As for staffing, of Seattle’s enrollment and staffing since 2013-14:

There are roughly the same number of human beings roaming the halls of Seattle’s schools today as there were in 2013-14. The difference is there are 1,725 fewer students and 1,711 more employees.

that the district budgeted for 501 more full-time equivalent teachers’ aides for next year, which more than doubles the increase from the previous eight years combined.

The Seattle union set up its understaffing message months in advance, releasing a member survey indicating that .

This might sound alarming, until you check to see what percentage of school employees left over the previous five-year period. . So losing one-third in the next five years would actually be a marked improvement in retention.

These details probably won’t figure into the settlement, however. The union boasted of the positive coverage it received and even used paid advertising for its positions.

At least one member of the school board laid the blame for the impasse on the legislature. “We can’t squeeze the water that we need to live out of the rocks they’ve given us,” .

State law requires 180 days of instruction, so the strike days will be made up one way or another. But for students who have already missed almost two years of classroom time, the strike put them even further behind.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

An earlier start date, a later end date and numerous, elongated breaks throughout the year could allow more timely remediation for children in need — and enrichment for those who are not.

New York City’s new schools chancellor , has proposed that children in the nation’s largest district report to class on Saturday and during the summer. In neighboring Connecticut, Hartford Public Schools have already started opening several buildings on Saturdays, offering some 800 students who have fallen behind a chance to accelerate their learning.

Such thinking has received at least tacit support from . “Why do we go back to the same system that gives kids two months without engagement in the summer?” he asked in November. “We need to rethink that.”

The suggestion comes as the fast-spreading Omicron variant is again forcing Even before the latest surge hit, districts had begun — moving to four days of instruction per week and adding days off to their calendars — in an effort to curb .

While any change to the school calendar typically involves negotiation — and possibly opposition — from the teachers union, Banks said he’d gladly employ members of the community if New York City’s United Federation of Teachers pushes back. 

“People think that means 300-plus school days. That is not the case.”
—David G. Hornak, National Association for Year-Round Education executive director

Schools throughout the rest of the country are considering their options: An influx of federal dollars meant to address long-standing achievement and opportunity gaps could bring about real change.  Meanwhile, a less-rigid calendar might lead to greater flexibility for COVID-related emergencies, allowing districts to more easily consider closing for a week or two to quell an outbreak, knowing they could make up the time later.

Harris M. Cooper, Hugo L. Blomquist Distinguished Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, said it’s too early to make predictions about whether more schools will switch to balanced or modified calendars. But the chaos of the last two years might make it more attractive to families that have already weathered major shifts in scheduling, he said. 

“They’ll say, ‘Hey, the kids were home in the wintertime and it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing,’” Cooper said.

Still, a fundamental shakeup to the traditional calendar might be a tough sell. David G. Hornak, superintendent of Holt Public Schools in Michigan and executive director of the , said many who are new to the concept are left with the wrong impression.

“People think that means 300-plus school days,” he said. “That is not the case.”

Instead, most districts that implement the program still operate on a 180-day schedule. The additional or elongated breaks, called “intersessions,” are optional: Districts can’t mandate that children return to the classroom — nor can they demand teachers lead these lessons. All are invited to participate, but some will no doubt choose to stay home. 

is so taken by the prospect of curbing learning loss by modifying the school calendar that it’s offering grants of up to $75,000 to districts to examine its feasibility. So far, 22 have been awarded pilot funding, using the money to in their community, organize stakeholder groups, conduct surveys and visit campuses that already have the plan in place.

“COVID gave us a chance to think outside the box, to look for different ways to reach students, moving away from the cookie-cutter approach,” said Jon Ram Mishra, assistant superintendent of elementary education, early learning, special programs and federal accountability for the Washington state education department.

A former special education teacher, Mishra believes all children would benefit from the type of individualized learning plans he once crafted for his own students. A balanced calendar, one with built-in flexibility in how it rolls out the typical 180 days of instruction, allows kids an opportunity to spend more time in the classroom if needed, offering them a more tailored experience than the traditional model, he said.

Kevin Chase, superintendent of Educational Service District 105 in Washington’s Yakima County, which serves some 66,000 children, points to yet another benefit: He said the plan allows schools to provide remediation closer to the time when a student first struggles, rather than months later during a summer session.

“This is my 30th year in education,” he said. “I know the need for intervention is for it to be timely.”

And, Chase said, longer breaks throughout the year — many participating districts shave six or seven weeks off of the typical 12- to 13-week summer vacation — help teachers recharge. They also allow families to spend more time together during the holidays, with, oftentimes, a full week off for Thanksgiving.

Hornak estimates 4 percent of the nation’s roughly 50 million public schoolchildren attend so-called “balanced calendar” schools. Several campuses within the Dallas system operate under this model, as do those in and .  Other schools around the nation are considering the idea, including those in , and

Hornak said the approach has many merits, including that it cuts down on the amount of time teachers spend reteaching the previous year’s curriculum, which, using a traditional calendar, could take up to 40 days.

The cost of remediation in grades K-12 can bleed into a student’s future: Those who graduate unprepared for college for remedial courses covering topics they should have already mastered.

The balanced calendar is particularly helpful for economically disadvantaged students who suffer mightily during the summer with few opportunities to learn, Hornak said. It also allows those educators who choose to participate a chance to make additional cash — and student teachers to sharpen their skills.

But not everyone seems eager to make the switch: 66 percent of 1,500 parents nationwide in November said they did not support a longer school year. Seventy-three percent opposed longer school days and 67 percent spoke out against a shorter summer vacation. San Diego, which had 134 traditional and 39 year-round schools, paid millions in recent years to its year-round campuses to a traditional calendar, citing, among other factors, scheduling conflicts for families with children in different schools with differing breaks.

“My sense of both our data and other people’s data is that parents pretty much just want things to be normal,” said Morgan Polikoff, associate professor of education at the University of Southern California, who co-directed the study. “They felt like the school calendar worked for them and their kids.”

Polikoff attributed parents’ attitude to a lack of understanding and awareness about learning loss: Many schools lowered standards and suspended letter grades and testing during the shutdowns, so they didn’t see evidence that their children had fallen behind. A full 84 percent of parents in that same survey said they were not at all concerned or only a little concerned about the amount of time their child spent learning.

“If that is the case, why would they support a radical change in the school calendar?” he asked.

Still, he said, he believes extending the time a child spends learning is greatly beneficial, especially after a year of staggering loss. According to one study, students in majority-Black schools are now a full year behind those in mostly white schools, widening an already persistent achievement gap by a third, according to by McKinsey & Co.

“The more time kids are in class, the better,” Polikoff said, adding that schools that have a also tend to see losses in terms of student achievement.

“Teachers said the intersession provided a break for people who needed it. Others worked the intersession and felt a passion again for teaching.”
—Mark Anderson, Highland School District 203 schools superintendent

Highland School District 203 in Cowiche, Washington, roughly 150 miles southeast of Seattle, implemented a modified calendar for the first time this school year. More than 50 percent of its 1,200 students participated in the Oct. 25-29  intersession with kindergarteners building catapults to launch mini-pumpkins, first and second graders constructing weight-bearing bridges and high schoolers working on coding and robotics.

School Superintendent Mark Anderson said the program is off to a strong start: It scored high among participants in a recent survey earning a 4.5 out of 5.

“Teachers said the intersession provided a break for people who needed it,” he said. “Others worked the intersession and felt a passion again for teaching.”

But the cost — approximately $300,000 per year — remains a concern in a district with a roughly $20 million annual budget. The superintendent hopes the state will continue to fund the plan long after COVID dollars dry up.

“We would hate to see that this is a success and we can’t continue it,” he said.

Vanessa Williams, a high school English teacher who has been with the district for 27 years, said she feels less burned out now as compared to this same time period in years past — even though she taught during intersession.

She said the current model is better for children — it gives them a sense of control after nearly two years of disruption — and teachers. And she doesn’t speak only for herself: She’s head of the teachers union.

“Since intersession did not add days to the teachers beyond what was contracted, and because it allowed teachers to make extra money … the union was on board,” she said, adding, “it helps that they had a say in what the balanced calendar was going to look like.”

Melissa Benicio Jimenez said her 6-year-old took part in the October session and relished the opportunity to learn in a more creative and relaxed setting. Her high school-aged children were not as enthusiastic.  

“I chose to stay home because I still wasn’t adjusted to the new schedule and I didn’t like it at the time,” said 15-year-old Andrew.

But, he said, he’ll likely attend the January intersession because it will give him a chance to visit area colleges in preparation for a possible career in law enforcement.

“Now that I’m used to it and I see how it helps,” he said, “I kind of like it.”

Lead Image: Elementary students at Highland School District 203 in Cowiche, Washington, work on STEM-related projects during an October break in which children were invited to class to continue their education. (Mindy Schultz)

At some community colleges, the losses are minor. At others, however, they are dramatic. At in Memphis, fully half of the Black male students enrolled in the spring of 2020 and still working toward graduation did not enroll this fall. That’s about 830 men who did not return to Southwest, which enrolls 10,227 students, 63 percent of whom are minority.

Where are they? Community college leaders at Southwest and other community colleges have several theories.

Many young men were forced to take jobs to help their families. Others were always academically fragile students prone to put off college or drop out and the pandemic pushed them over the edge. Yet others were derailed by online applications and courses or lacked technology to cope.

One factor often cited: The dramatic spring shutdown of K-12 schools severed students from the college advisers who keep them on a college track. The sharpest drop was among first-time freshmen, a plunge of nearly 19 percent, which is 19 times higher than the pre-pandemic loss rate.

All those observations are undoubtedly valid, but in truth they are more anecdotal than research-based. This cratering of male enrollment at community colleges — just updated in November — is a fresh development; everyone is scrambling to figure it out.

Southwest, for example, mobilized a task force of male faculty and staff to reach out to the 830 men to identify the barriers that caused them to leave and help them re-enroll. “We know they didn’t start school to quit,” said Jacqueline Faulkner, vice president for student affairs at Southwest.

What we do know nationally from the by the National Student Clearinghouse is that Black males make up the biggest portion of these losses, a 19.2 percent enrollment drop from the previous fall, followed by Hispanic males, who experienced a decrease of 16.6 percent. Interestingly, white males aren’t far behind, at 14 percent.

Native American students had the largest drop, at 20 percent, but they make up only .6 percent of enrollments, compared to nearly 10 percent for Black students.

Again, where are they?

Interviews with community college leaders point to the theories cited above. “Most of our students come from Hispanic households, where it is expected that men have to get out there to provide,” said Rick Miranda, vice president for academic affairs at in the Los Angeles area.

That was the case for Cerritos student David Rosales, 21, who was a full-time student there while working part-time as a security guard. When the pandemic hit, his sister lost her job as a waitress and his mother fell ill and had to cut her hours working at a grocery store.

When Rosales was offered full-time work as a guard, he accepted and dropped his classes. “I wanted to make sure we were set, and I couldn’t do full time work and school.” This January, however, he plans to pick up his studies in marketing again.

In Memphis, the technical and financial obstacles appear to be major players. Based on a survey, only 35 percent of Southwest’s students were fully technology-equipped to handle online courses. That led to the college buying and distributing 3,500 laptops. Plus, the college used state and federal pandemic funds to boost the usual $100,000 emergency assistance fund to $500,000, money that went to tuition, food and housing assistance and restoring home utility cutoffs.

It’s possible that the soon-expected vaccine will restore normalcy, prompting males to return to college-and-career tracks. But few college leaders I spoke with expected a substantial return to normalcy.

Nationally, the male enrollment drops appear to signal two separate trends playing out.

The first trend is the scary one, a possible lost generation of males from low-income and working-class families. While Black males make up an outsized portion of that group, it’s important to keep an eye on white males as well, who also disappeared at very high rates.

Before COVID, there was already a severe shortage of jobs for young people with only a high school diploma; the drying up of service sector jobs during the pandemic means far fewer of those jobs. What happens to these young men over time?

To date, the Black Lives Matter movement has focused mostly on policing. This development could shift more attention to a focus on education and jobs.

The second trend is not scary. Several community college leaders say the pandemic has accelerated a trend that was building before the coronavirus crisis, an emphasis on getting specific job training, with or without attaining college credit or a degree.

That appears to be playing out in Louisiana, where there were only slight enrollment losses at in Lafayette, which has strong workforce programs in maritime and computer science, but steep losses at in Monroe, where the emphasis is more on earning degree credits, pointed out Monty Sullivan, president of the Louisiana Community & Technical College System.

Sullivan, who serves as board chair of the National Student Clearinghouse, watches these developments at both a state and national level. “There’s a movement of students, who are voting with their feet. They are engaging with colleges, but they are not engaging with the semester system. They don’t have four years to finish a degree. They need a skill set to go and get a paycheck.”

The need to find jobs immediately probably can’t explain all the male enrollment losses. Wouldn’t women have to seek work as well? In part, the gender differences can be explained by the gender makeups of chosen fields. Health care jobs, which draw more women than men, require traditional degrees.

But there’s another player here, one brought up by college leaders, and a factor that proved to be significant 11 years ago when I was researching . In brief, I discovered a K-12 education system that suddenly veered to ramping up literacy skills in the very early years, a time when boys are far less capable than girls of handling those demands. The idea behind the shift, getting students on an early track to college, was noble, but educators never adjusted to those early-learning gender differences.

Many boys, especially in middle- and upper-income families, adjusted quickly and caught up in literacy skills before the end of elementary school. But many did not, thus concluding that school was “for girls.” That helps explain the twin phenomenon: fewer men than women enroll in college, and fewer men than women are equipped with the intense literacy skills demanded in college, regardless of the major chosen, thus making them more fragile students.

Although all boys were impacted, including white boys from blue-collar families, the worst hit were Black males, who were more likely to face additional headwinds such as dangerous neighborhoods, troubled schools and less-stable families. The pandemic just made all that even worse.

“The pandemic highlighted so many inequities,” said Ivan Harrell II, president of Washington state’s . “Traditionally marginalized populations were impacted more by COVID, and they are now figuring how to support their families, which means they have to step away from education for a little while.”