Chalkbeat

Illinois education advocates grow more divided on Pritzker’s impending federal tax-credit program choice

2026-08-27T20:12:37+00:00

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An increasingly vocal contingent of Illinois education advocates, including a Chicago school board member, are calling on Gov. J.B. Pritzker to opt into the Trump administration’s federal tax-credit scholarship program.

Pritzker has about four months to decide whether he plans for Illinois to join the federal program, which offers tax credits to individuals who make donations toward private and public schools. The looming decision has created a growing schism between school advocacy groups, as some see the program as an opportunity to better fund Illinois schools while others worry it will just funnel more money into private schools.

One of the most prominent declarations against Illinois joining the Trump administration’s initiative was from the Chicago Board of Education itself. Earlier this year, it decisively passed a non-binding resolution urging the state not to opt in. However, in a noteworthy break from most of the school board, Angel Gutierrez — the only member who was absent from the vote — came out in support of Illinois’ program participation at a Thursday news conference outside South Loop Elementary School.

“I think it was politically driven,” Gutierrez told reporters, referencing the board’s resolution. “But I think that, in the space and place that we’re in now, we have to be really cognizant of any type of potential dollars that may help and directly benefit the students.”

Republican lawmakers included the creation of the federal tax-credit scholarship program in President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” last year. The initiative, called the “Education Freedom Tax Credit,” is meant to promote school choice nationwide. Taxpayers can choose to contribute up to $1,700 originally owed in federal income taxes to an education-related scholarship organization.

But the major caveat to the program that has fueled debate is the critical role of governors in choosing to opt into the program. If a governor — or whatever government entity has authority to make the choice — doesn’t decide to join, students in that state won’t be eligible to receive money generated from the program.

In Illinois, a Democratic stronghold, many advocacy groups approached the program with skepticism. Those who have come out against participating point to the intentions behind the initiative — creating an environment that drives more families toward private schools — as evidence that it will not provide equitable outcomes for public schools. It could also exacerbate existing disparities in funding, as wealthier school districts are more likely to get contributions from their families than poorer districts.

Some Illinoisans may be familiar with previous efforts this year to sway Pritzker to join, most notably a ballot measure campaign in more than 20 counties from Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. Other education officials at Gutierrez’ news conference argued that the program will roll out with or without Illinois’ participation, meaning donations for education organizations would wind up out-of-state.

“It indeed is a set, settled, and passed law at this point. We’re not interacting with it in terms of advocating for or against it, “ said Joshua Stafford, superintendent of Vienna High School in southern Illinois. “Instead, each state now gets to make a determination, and that determination really boils down to whether boys and girls and schools are going to be able to participate in this opportunity.”

Joshua Stafford, superintendent of Vienna High School in southern Illinois, speaks at a press conference in support of Illinois’ participation in the tax-credit program at a Thursday, Aug. 27, 2026, news conference outside South Loop Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois.

Statewide education advocacy organizations are also backing Illinois’ participation in the program, including Stand for Children Illinois, a group that aims to improve children’s access to public schools.

Jessica Handy, Stand for Children’s executive director, acknowledged in a virtual news conference earlier this month that the federal initiative was not made with educational equity in mind. Instead, Handy suggested Illinois avoid using the program as designed and implement “creative and innovative approaches” to prioritize equitable access for all students. Illinois school districts will need to make sure they establish a scholarship granting organization to receive tax credit money, which Handy emphasized as a key reason to opt in sooner rather than later.

Further guidelines and regulations for the program’s implementation are expected to be released this fall. The governor’s office said earlier in this summer that it is waiting to see what the federal rules look like before deciding whether to join.

So far, it has been a slow trickle of Democratic governors who enrolled their states in the program. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis led the pack to opt in, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has indicated that she plans to, as well. There have also been flat-out rejections from some Democratic governors, including in Hawaii, Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon, according to the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit resource website.

Makiya Seminera is a reporter covering how the state and federal government affect education in Chicago and across Illinois. Contact Makiya at mseminera@chalkbeat.org.

School funding’s surprising U-shape, the future of work, digital tests, and more: A Chalkbeat Ideas roundup

2026-08-11T15:04:09+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas. This is our semi-monthly roundup of interesting takes, tidbits, and links. Feel free to send along links and ideas for the next one.

America’s strange U-shaped school funding system

Conventional wisdom holds that property taxes create deep inequities in school funding between rich and poor school systems. Across the country as a whole, this is not true and hasn’t been for some time, concludes a recent Brookings Institution analysis.

In reality, American school funding is U-shaped, with high- and low-poverty school systems tending to spend more money than those in the middle. In the below graphic from the report, funding per student is broken down by poverty rates from low to high.

Click here to continue reading.

Education Department limits civil rights investigations into racial disparities in schools

2026-07-23T21:19:12+00:00

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Schools that discipline students of color at higher rates than white students won’t be in violation of federal civil rights law for that disparity alone, the U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday.

The Education Department’s regulatory changes prohibit the agency’s civil rights investigators from using broad demographic statistics — such as data about discipline, Advanced Placement class enrollment, and school admissions — to demonstrate discrimination.

“A child is so much more than a number in a data set,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey wrote in a press release. “The left’s notion of ‘equity’ should never prevent teachers from keeping their classrooms and students safe.”

The change is part of a wider effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to eliminate what’s called disparate impact regulations across federal agencies. The Trump administration says President Barack Obama’s administration wielded such data improperly in discrimination investigations.

Experts and civil rights advocates decried the agency’s decision to abandon what they described as an important tool in civil rights investigations, one that they said can help illustrate more subtle and even unintentional systemic discrimination on the basis of race or national origin. Critics of the move also said the department’s announcement exaggerated the impact of data on such investigations.

“This kind of severs the guardrails that protect from those scenarios in which unjust, unnecessary burdens literally cause kids to face discrimination at school,” said Michael Pillera of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former civil rights attorney for the Education Department.

Civil rights advocates also rebuked the Education Department’s lack of process in making the regulatory change. The agency bypassed some rulemaking procedures, which let the public weigh in before adopting a rule, said Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates civil rights complaints about federally funded schools, has been at the center of a lot of upheaval. The office has been decimated by layoffs — some of which were then rescinded — and the agency announced earlier this summer that the Justice Department would play a role in some aspects of civil rights enforcement in schools.

Experts said civil rights investigations have often looked for unlawful discrimination through two lenses, either differential treatment or disparate impact. Differential treatment occurs if a student is intentionally subject to different treatment based on their race. Disparate impact applies to policies that may seem neutral, but impacts certain groups disproportionately.

“It helps us kind of shine a light on what are the hidden inequities in our systems that our public policy or our practices writ large might have inadvertently perpetuated,” said Amy Loyd, CEO at All4Ed, a nonprofit education advocacy group.

Discipline has often been central to arguments around disparate impact. In a 2014 letter to schools, the Obama administration laid out guidance that called statistical analysis of disciplinary data “an important indicator of potential violations.” The first Trump administration rescinded that letter in 2018.

Conservatives have argued the practice of linking disparate impact to civil rights violations or discrimination is flawed. In 2018, Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute said that in addition to legal questions, the approach outlined in the 2014 letter “will tie the hands of teachers and school administrators when it comes to maintaining discipline, possibly leading to greater disorder and even violence.”

Jonathan Butcher of the Heritage Foundation said just because statistics may show a certain policy disproportionately affects one group doesn’t make the policy wrong.

“I don’t think the answer to that is adjusting policies so that we get the numbers we want,” he said.

But civil rights investigations don’t solely hinge on data, said Robert Kim, an attorney and the executive director of the Education Law Center. The numbers often represented a starting point in an investigation, and schools had the opportunity to explain statistical differences.

“You would never lurch to a conclusion of discrimination subject to government-imposed remedy without looking further at all,” he said.

Discipline isn’t the only area where officials have used statistics to look for possible discrimination in education. The Office for Civil Rights, in previous administrations, had also cited disparate impact in the following investigations:

Advanced class access: In 2016, the Education Department cited a significant disparity between the proportion of white students and Black and Hispanic students identified as advanced learners in the Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wisconsin. Nearly 40% of white middle school students were considered advanced, compared with 9% of Hispanic and 6% of Black middle schoolers. The district agreed to a settlement to review its advanced programs, among other changes.
Special education placement: A 2013 investigation letter noted that Black students were overrepresented in special education in the Iowa City Community School District. About 29% of students in special education programs were Black, even though they made up 17% of the district’s overall population in the 2012-13 school year. The district agreed to review its screening processes and get assistance from experts.
Admissions policies: A 2014 letter noted that some schools in a Texas charter school network enrolled a significantly lower proportion of English learners than local public schools. The charter school network, Harmony Public Schools, agreed to review and modify its enrollment processes.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org. Lily is on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook.

Why digital tests are helping keep Chromebooks in classrooms

2026-07-16T20:40:07+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

Even some educators skeptical of technology say they can’t go cold turkey on Chromebooks. Why? Because standardized testing is now widely done via computer.

“Third grade is the first year of testing, and we wouldn’t want that to be the first time kids are getting exposed to devices,” Los Angeles school board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin told me recently, explaining why the district isn’t banning screens after first grade.

Similarly, Baltimore cut back on tech in early grades, but will continue to provide devices to third graders because of testing, the Banner reported earlier this year. A North Carolina superintendent also said the district must maintain some tech to prepare students for assessments. “But if I had the choice, I’d say bubble sheets please,” Stan Winborne, the superintendent of Granville County Public Schools, told the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, digital testing has had the unintended consequence of promoting tech-powered instruction. This raises a pointed question that more schools and policymakers may soon have to grapple with: Should the mode of testing be driving key instructional decisions?

Scott Marion, a psychometrician at the Center for Assessment, isn’t convinced that there should be a broad tech rollback. But he says it’s concerning when assessment alone is shaping pedagogy. “I don’t like when people do things just for testing purposes,” he says.

Standardized testing has become increasingly digitized over the last couple decades for the same reason many things have: convenience. Instead of massive sheaves of paper shipped to and from schools, tests can be done on devices, which are plentiful these days. Online tests were also promoted as a way to more precisely measure student learning since questions can adapt to student skill level.

A downside, though, is that internet outages and other tech glitches can derail testing, as recently occurred in New York and has repeatedly happened in Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in the last several months, a remarkable backlash to tech in schools has swept the country. Some local school leaders and teachers have cut back on screen time. They’ve been able to move so quickly because there are few school tech mandates — except through testing. The federal government requires math and reading tests in grades three through eight; the format of those tests is set by states. Local leaders don’t control this.

Some research shows online testing can affect how well students perform. “There is a learning curve” to digital testing, says Marion, although he suspects that these days it’s not that steep.

Jared Cooney Horvath — a researcher, consultant, and ed-tech critic — argues that brief practice with online assessment is enough to prepare students. “Just because digital testing is the new norm, it does not follow that schooling needs to be redesigned around this format,” he wrote recently on his blog.

It’s an open question how much tech familiarity students need for such tests, especially in early grades. Regardless, perception appears to be holding some districts back from bigger tech reductions. “We want to limit screen time,” one Texas superintendent told a local news outlet. “We also know that we have to give students the opportunity to learn the skill of using technology, so that they can use it to demonstrate learning.”

States may also have an incentive to keep tech in their classrooms if officials think it can help boost scores on online tests. Although the federal NAEP exams don’t have formal stakes attached, state leaders are eager to use scores to claim success of their policies. In 2018, after NAEP tests went digital, Louisiana’s state chief complained that students there might have seen scores drop because they were unfamiliar with computers. (NAEP officials said then this was carefully accounted for.)

Could states go back to paper-and-pencil tests if they wanted? Sure, though it would add logistical challenges and perhaps costs. Whether it’s worth it depends on what you think of general tech use in the classroom. The evidence at this point is ambiguous and in the eye of the beholder.

But with the ed-tech backlash showing no signs of slowing down, digital testing could become the next target.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Iowa school districts quietly agreed to new limits on undocumented students’ course access

2026-07-15T18:31:12+00:00

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Most Iowa school districts have quietly agreed to exclude undocumented high school students from certain federally funded career and technical education programming, according to records obtained by Chalkbeat.

The move follows the Trump administration’s controversial interpretation of a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plyler v. Doe, guaranteeing children a free K-12 education regardless of immigration status. Trump officials argue that the ruling protects only a “basic public education,” but not “postsecondary” education. That distinction affects high school students as dual enrollment and career training programs have become increasingly common.

The Iowa records reveal how Trump has made notable headway limiting the educational rights of immigrants without legal permission to be in the country and in chipping away at Plyler. Iowa is at least the second state under Republican control to adopt such a policy — Virginia did so but then changed course after electing a new Democratic governor.

“There is a very strong argument that Plyler as written forbids what Iowa is doing,” said Aaron Tang, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. Yet, he said, there’s a plausible counterargument, and the conservative Supreme Court might well agree with this novel interpretation, if the issue were to reach the high court.

Tang said that if the Trump administration’s interpretation wins out it will be difficult to determine what constitutes a “basic public education.” Does calculus class? What about precalculus?

It’s not clear how many, if any, students in Iowa or elsewhere have been affected by this provision. Schools don’t typically ask students about their immigration status so there’s no simple way to know who to exclude.

Trump pushes limits on undocumented students’ educational rights

Last year, the Trump administration announced a sweeping new legal interpretation of a federal law on unauthorized immigrants’ access to public benefits. States were not immediately required to follow this interpretation, but the Education Department could take action to enforce it.

The Iowa Department of Education soon said that under the new rules undocumented students should be kept out of federally funded early college experiences and community college classes “even if the course occurs at the high school.” (This restriction does not apply to concurrent enrollment courses that high schools use to meet basic course offering requirements under state law.)

The state soon began requiring school systems and community colleges to agree to these new terms in order to access federal funding for career and technical education.

The vast majority of Iowa school districts have done so, either directly or through a CTE consortium that they are a part of, according to the records obtained by Chalkbeat. A handful of systems have not submitted reimbursement requests recently, so they have not agreed to those terms, the records indicate. Heather Doe, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education, said the state has not denied any schools funding over the issue.

Among other things, Iowa schools have used CTE dollars, known as Perkins funding, to help students attain industry-recognized credentials in a variety of fields.

It is not clear how school systems could enforce these new restrictions on undocumented students or if they have any intention of doing so. “The Iowa Department of Education does not require the reporting of immigration status but rather confirms the institution’s awareness of federal funding restrictions,” Doe said.

Spokespeople for a number of Iowa-based immigration and Latino advocacy groups did not respond to inquiries about whether any student has been denied programming under this new rule. None of several large school districts in the state responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Iowa superintendents’ association said it has not heard concerns or questions from members about the new rule.

A federal judge has halted enforcement of the federal legal interpretation in a number of states where Democratic officials have challenged its legality. Iowa is not one of them.

A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson downplayed the likelihood of taking action against states or schools that didn’t comply, saying the agency was focused on “litigation developments rather than on patchwork enforcement” of the guidance.

Still, confusion remains about the policy. On a recent call hosted by the Trump administration for state CTE and adult education officials, at least two people asked for clarification about the current status of the immigration rule, according to an excerpt of the chat obtained by Chalkbeat.

Officials on the call did not respond to those questions, according to a transcript of the conversation.

The Trump administration’s actions here are a small part of a massive campaign to deport unauthorized immigrants and restrict the public benefits available to those who remain. For instance, Trump and a number of Republican governors have prevented undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition at public universities in a number of states.

At the same time, conservatives have been strategizing about how to undermine and reverse the Plyler ruling. Earlier this year, state legislators in Tennessee seriously considered a law meant to challenge the ruling, but the legislation ultimately died.

This story has been updated to clarify that Iowa’s restriction does not apply to courses used by schools to meet certain basic course offering requirements.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Test scores have plunged, but voters aren’t making schools a top political issue

2026-07-14T20:44:41+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

While running for governor of California, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan was eager to talk about the challenges in the state’s public schools. He even compared California unfavorably to Louisiana and Mississippi, which have recently made gains on national exams. “With all of our progressivism, all of our resources, we are failing far too many of our kids,” Mahan said at one point. Few other candidates prioritized education during the campaign.

But Mahan’s pitch didn’t seem to resonate much with California voters. He received less than 4% of the vote in last month’s primary.

Many factors go into election results, but the limited traction Mahan received is a neat encapsulation of a broader phenomenon. The unprecedented recent declines in American students’ test scores have barely registered politically.

“Most voters don’t really care very much,” says Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University. Perhaps that’s why most politicians aren’t prioritizing the issue, at least during political campaigns.

A recent Gallup poll found that just 2% of Americans ranked education as the country’s most pressing challenge. While most people say they’re dissatisfied with the country’s public schools, a strong majority of parents are reasonably happy with their own child’s school.

Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat, has sought to make education a bigger political issue by arguing that his own party has not done enough to improve schools. This pitch has drawn a great deal of attention from journalists, including me, but so far has not drawn much interest from regular voters. In a potential presidential primary, Emanuel is polling between 0%-2%.

In Colorado, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet campaigned to be an “education governor.” The former superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Bennet presided over notable gains in student outcomes there. Tellingly, though, the campaign did not focus on education, and Bennet was upset in the primary by Attorney General Phil Weiser.

In Iowa, Democratic candidate for governor Rob Sand has successfully put education at the center of the race by offering a sharp critique of taxpayer funding for private schools. In a recent interview with me, he was less specific on how he would improve public schooling. Despite being a Democrat in a red state, Sand has led in a number of early polls.

In general, most nationally prominent Democrats don’t appear eager to talk about the state of learning in U.S. schools. Yet voters don’t seem to mind. The party has held a clear edge on education in most polling for the last few years, including several recent surveys.

On the other hand, President Donald Trump has been happy to talk about perceived failings of the country’s public schools, including falling test scores. Still, the energizing focus of Trump’s campaign and now presidency has not been to raise achievement but to limit DEI and close the Education Department. (Officials suggest this will help improve schools, but haven’t spelled out how moving the same programs to different federal agencies would do so.)

Unlike policy wonks, Americans may not be all that focused on test scores. In one poll, parents ranked test scores as the least important measure among several for judging their children’s success in school. In school board elections, researchers have found that voters don’t seem to weigh tests heavily when deciding whether to reelect incumbents.

In 2024, Massachusetts held a referendum on whether to allow students to graduate high school without passing a standardized test. Critics across the political spectrum argued this would exacerbate the achievement issues facing the state, yet voters still backed the measure overwhelmingly.

Americans’ seeming nonchalance has come despite the substantial media attention to the country’s achievement woes. Some news stories even offer a clear nudge to voters and politicians that they should care more. “What happened to learning as a national priority?” pointedly asked a New York Times essay last year.

There has also been no shortage of policy advocates, nonprofit executives, and educational researchers clamoring to make this a bigger issue.

Here at Chalkbeat we’ve published dozens of pieces on the state of learning. I’ve been writing about the potential and the reality of learning loss since March 2020. There’s a reason for this focus: Test scores aren’t perfect measures, but they tell us something meaningful about how well American students are learning basic skills.

To be clear, politicians have not been entirely indifferent to the learning challenges. Some governors and legislators have made a number of moves designed to bolster achievement. In particular, they’ve banned cellphones in school and promoted the science of reading, often on a bipartisan basis.

But it’s certainly true that the quality of American education is no longer the center of national political debates in the way it once was. The 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” turned school performance into a national issue for the next few decades. In 2000, voters ranked education as the number one issue in some polls. Nearly one third of all presidential ads that cycle were about education, according to a recent study.

By contrast, a quarter century later, “federal education politics is now increasingly detached from the widely recognized challenge that helped sustain bipartisan action: improving student outcomes,” wrote political scientists in the study. They find that both parties’ platforms have in recent years steered away from a focus on standards and accountability, which were once staples.

What’s changed? Political polarization may have given politicians less of an incentive to appeal to moderate voters, which a commitment to education reform once served to do. Media fragmentation and distrust might have limited the influence of alarming news stories describing learning declines. Grade inflation could have reduced parents’ demand for reform. Perhaps other pressing issues have simply overtaken education.

There may also be a chicken and the egg issue. If more politicians were talking about learning, maybe more voters would care. Or perhaps those who have talked about it have failed to offer solutions that most voters find compelling.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration: Long-delayed data crucial to understanding America’s schools is coming soon

2026-07-10T18:58:56+00:00

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Did student behavioral issues worsen after the pandemic? How many students have been suspended or expelled in recent years, and what proportion of those students have disabilities? How many enroll in Advanced Placement courses — and where?

The federal data that could help answer these questions is now six months late. It’s not entirely clear what the hold up is, but it’s one of many data sets that the federal government hasn’t updated amid widespread layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education.

Researchers, advocates, and civil rights attorneys say the Office for Civil Rights data for the 2023-24 school year is critical, not only because it provides a national picture around pressing education issues such as discipline, but because it also digs into district by district data in a consistent way.

The Education Department estimated it would be available to the public by December 2025. In an interview with Chalkbeat reporters in late June, Assistant Secretary Kimberly Richey, said the release of the national civil rights data will come “later this summer.”

And the department appears to have already reviewed the data. A press release Friday cited the unreleased 2023-24 numbers as reason to open more than a dozen investigations into school districts, because their submissions to the data collection “contained responses that suggest that districts might not be addressing staff on student sexual misconduct appropriately.”

That’s just one possible use for the Civil Rights Data Collection, or CRDC, which the department typically conducts every two school years.

The information represents a wellspring of statistics about a variety of important topics. The CRDC has long been a tool for proponents of school equity to understand how well students of color, students with disabilities and other historically disadvantaged groups are faring in schools across the country, particularly when it comes to expulsions, suspensions and arrests.

While some states collect some of this data, it’s not always consistent or readily accessible to the public. Jennifer Rainville, an education attorney with the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, said in her state, disciplinary data isn’t publicly broken down by disability status. Parents can make a public records request, but few might take that extra step.

Rainville often cites statistics from the last batch of data, including that South Carolina suspends more preschool students than any other state, based on the most recent CRDC. Seeing disciplinary actions broken down by race and disability status helps inform broader policy and bolster arguments for reform, she said.

The last time the data was released was by the Biden administration in 2023, with numbers from the 2020-21 school year.

“We are disciplining kids at a high rate, and so it’s important to know what those kids look like,” she said. “Having the breakdown of that is important to know exactly where we’re falling short, right, because we are falling short.”

Academics also rely on the data due to its consistency. It is “the only source of information” covering every school and district in the nation using the same definitions, said Daniel Losen, senior director for education at the National Center for Youth Law.

“It’s vitally important,” he said. “It really gives you a good sense of what’s going on.”

A lot has changed in education since the last data collection, including the aftermath of the pandemic, a rise in school cell phone bans, and a continued plunge in academic achievement. Researchers are particularly interested in disciplinary data from the years immediately after students returned in-person, in which teachers reported a surge in disruptive behavior.

While the 2020-21 data showed suspensions and bullying had plunged, it reflected a time when about 88% of schools were providing a combination of in-person and remote instruction due to the pandemic. In 2020, the Education Department delayed the CRDC scheduled for the 2019-20 and moved it to 2020-21.

“There are lots of really basic questions that we have limited insight into, because we haven’t gotten any data since really the times that schools were, you know, deep in the weeds of the pandemic,” said Erica Frankenberg, an education professor at Penn State.

Advocates are watching not only for the data’s release but for how the administration might interpret the numbers. In an executive order last year, President Donald Trump discouraged schools from considering whether students of color are subjected to disproportionate levels of discipline.

The Office for Civil Rights, which administers the data, has been at the center of a flurry of action. The department announced in June that some of the work in that office would be shifted to the Department of Justice, as part of an interagency agreement. The agency has been slowly shifting more and more work out of the department.

However, in announcing the agreement, a senior department official said civil rights data collection would continue under the Education Department.

Erica Meltzer and Matt Barnum contributed reporting.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Why a new federal school choice program may require a massive marketing budget

2026-06-30T20:48:41+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

A new federal tax credit is designed to unleash a spigot of funding for school choice, particularly private schools. But getting those dollars may, ironically, require spending a great deal of money. That’s because individual taxpayers must be convinced, one by one, to redirect a portion of their tax bill toward this effort.

Staff at American Federation for Children, a school choice group, have said that it could cost $300 or more in marketing to persuade each taxpayer to donate, according to three school choice supporters who described this estimate to me.

If accurate at a national scale, these figures suggest that billions of dollars could be required to get a large swath of Americans to participate. In other words, it could be harder and pricier to grow the program than many realize.

This new tax provision, adopted in the Trump-backed tax-and-spending bill passed last year, serves as a complicated way to subsidize school choice.

Starting next year, the federal government will reimburse taxpayers who donate to nonprofit scholarship-granting organizations, or SGOs, which issue educational stipends for students. Both private and public schools can receive these grants, although the uses in public schools are more limited since they don’t typically charge tuition.

States must opt in for SGOs within their boundaries to receive the tax-credit subsidy. Virtually all Republican-led states have done so, while most Democratic governors have not made a decision either way.

“Donations” of up to $1,700 — for people who owe at least that amount in income taxes — cost nothing on net to the taxpayer. The federal government effectively foots the whole bill.

But most Americans don’t know much about this obscure new tax provision. And even if they learn about it, some will be wary of handing an SGO what amounts to an interest-free loan. That’s why SGOs and their allies are preparing marketing efforts to educate people about the program and persuade them to participate.

The American Federation for Children, which was co-founded by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was an advocate for the tax credit and recently started its own SGO. The group said it has already raised over $10 million for an “ambitious national awareness campaign.”

Brian Jodice, a spokesperson for AFC, declined to comment on the organization’s internal estimate of $300-plus per donor. But he said that AFC is aiming to match “industry standards” of $1 in spending to generate $5 in donations. For a $1,700 donation that would be $340. Jodice emphasized that “it’s too early to pinpoint donor acquisition costs.”

Estimates vary widely on how much money will be raised via the tax credit. The Trump administration recently pegged the figure at $24 billion, based on the assumption that 30% of eligible taxpayers, about 14 million people, will donate. If each donor requires $300 in marketing, then it would cost over $4.2 billion to reach that benchmark — roughly twice what the state of Wyoming spends on its public schools.

Marketing costs may come down over time as awareness grows about the program.

By law, SGOs are limited to spending 10% of the money they raise through the tax credit — or $170 on a $1,700 donation — on expenses outside of scholarships. This indicates that the AFC figure of $300 or more could not be supported through tax credit money alone. Organizations may be able to raise separate dollars for marketing.

Some in the school choice community believe that will be necessary. “Ten percent is not a lot to do what people would imagine it would take to scale the program up a ton quickly,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN and an advocate of school choice.

Some public school districts and their allies are also considering raising money through the tax credit to support after-school and tutoring programs, among other things. They may also find that this requires a significant up-front investment.

Darla Romfo, president of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, an SGO, said she’s looking at a variety of approaches to share information about the tax credit without a large marketing budget. She wants to keep overhead low to ensure as much money goes to scholarships as possible.

Jim Blew, an adviser to a coalition working to implement the tax credit, thinks it may cost more like $100 in marketing per donor.

Blew and Romfo have heard the AFC acquisition cost estimate. So did a third school choice advocate who did not want to be named to share a private conversation.

An obvious concern is that SGOs’ marketing efforts will amount to time and resources that detract from the main purpose of the scholarship program and drive up overhead costs.

Blew doesn’t see it that way. In his mind, a marketing campaign is a way to cultivate political support for school choice and the tax credit. “I don’t think we look at it as wasted money,” he said. “This is part of a larger effort to change the culture around education in this country.”

The marketing cost is also the price of trying to avoid government regulation.

That’s why school choice supporters and Congressional allies favored the more convoluted tax-credit over a voucher program in which the federal government issues grants to parents and schools.

Schools that receive direct federal funding must comply with various rules including civil rights laws. School choice supporters say this shouldn’t apply to private schools that receive tax credit scholarships, even though they are 100% subsidized by the federal government.

This argument may prevail. But the upside of direct government funding is that money doesn’t need to be spent persuading individual taxpayers to participate.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

The rhetoric and reality of ‘returning education to the states’

2026-06-18T10:31:12+00:00

The Trump administration’s big idea for American education is to “return” it to the states.

In practice, though, these efforts have been limited and contradictory — limited because there’s not all that much to return and contradicted by the administration’s own expansion of federal power. This became clear at a recent Chalkbeat Ideas event that I moderated with two state education leaders.

Indiana Education Secretary Katie Jenner praised the Trump administration’s effort to reduce strings attached to certain federal dollars. But she noted that “our states have always had control of standards, curriculum, [and] assessment.”

Rhode Island commissioner Angélica Infante-Green was more pointed: “Returning it to the states? It’s always been here.” She’s faced more roadblocks from the federal government under this administration, she said.

Here’s why state and local school leaders have seen, at best, only a modest increase in control over their schools.

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CPS CEO Macquline King testified before Congress. Here are 3 key takeaways.

2026-06-10T23:27:27+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King’s summer is already off to an unconventional start — testifying in front of Congress just a few months after officially landing the superintendent role.

The Republican-led U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing Wednesday morning where King answered a litany of questions on the district’s policies on gender identity, sex education, abortion, and religious freedom. It’s the latest in an ongoing saga that has placed CPS under federal scrutiny for its efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

CPS has had an especially strained relationship with the Trump administration over the past year and a half. Two months after Trump took office, conservative groups filed federal Title IX complaints with the U.S. Department of Education, alleging CPS’ LGBTQ protections violated the anti-discrimination clause. Then in September, federal officials pulled magnet school grant funding. The district is also under investigation by the Office for Civil Rights for its Black Student Success Plan — an initiative meant to improve conditions for Black students and teachers — for alleged race-based discrimination.

“Whether it’s building community partnerships, advocating for our schools or testifying before Congress as she’s done today, we applaud [Dr. King’s] unwavering commitment to keeping students and families at the center,” Chicago Board of Education President Sean Harden told reporters after the hearing Wednesday.

Alongside King, two other superintendents spoke before the committee — Maria Su from San Francisco Unified School District and Aaron Spence from Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools. All three school districts are located in largely Democratic-leaning areas and implement progressive policies.

But King’s appearance was under different circumstances from Su and Spence. The committee ordered King to answer its questions in person by subpoenaing her last month. King acknowledged the legal order in her opening statements, attributing it to “complicated scheduling issues and some underlying privacy concerns.”

Earlier this week, America First Legal filed federal complaints to the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice calling for investigations into each of the school districts in question. The organization, co-founded by White House senior advisor Stephen Miller, largely focused its grievance on issues regarding gender and sexuality in schools.

Questioning lasted for about three hours. Here are the noteworthy takeaways from King’s testimony.

King’s testimony style? An even tone with brief responses

Heading into Wednesday’s hearing, it was no surprise that King was called to testify on the district’s policies. Chicago already found itself in the hot seat about a year ago when Mayor Brandon Johnson was called to testify in front of Congress about the city’s immigration laws.

King’s testimony approach wasn’t nearly as combative as previous exchanges between the district and the Trump administration. Instead, King kept a steady tone and took several opportunities to affirm that CPS values parental input.

She kept most of her answers concise, and at times, didn’t answer “yes” or “no” to questions she was asked to do so. King answered many questions by saying: “CPS is in compliance with Illinois state law.”

“Dr. King emphasized that CPS policies are rooted in law, the District’s mission and values. Above all else, Dr. King emphasized the District must always prioritize the best interests of students and their families,” CPS said in a written statement after the hearing.

Those blunt answers sometimes elicited frustration from Republicans, who cut King off a few times. It also led to several reprimands about CPS’ academic performance and massive budget deficit.

“CPS has shown it is far more interested in sidelining parents and advancing radical gender ideology than ensuring students can read, write, and perform math at grade level,” said Republican Rep. Mary Miller, Illinois’ sole member on the committee.

Most Republicans focused on gender identity and sexuality, while Democrats pointed to other issues

All three superintendents fielded questions on school rules related to gender identity and sexuality. For CPS, policies about transgender students’ sleeping situations for overnight field trips and their ability to use the locker room for the gender they identify with came under fire.

“If a student is transitioning and they have gone through the eligibility process and it has been approved according to Illinois policy, that would be considered on a case by case basis,” King said, when pressed by North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx on transgender girls being allowed to sleep in the same room as cisgender girls.

Republicans also raised concerns about Chicago’s sex education curriculum teaching about puberty blockers, as well as school staff calling students by a different pronoun or name than they use at home. Several referenced recent actions by the U.S. Supreme Court that expanded a parent’s authority over their child’s education as evidence that the school districts in question Wednesday were not complying with federal laws.

The Democratic committee members used their time to bring up other issues in education they saw as more pressing: budget cuts, immigration enforcement, and school shootings. Several Democrats also apologized to the superintendents for some of the fiery statements made by Republican lawmakers.

“You know what you do, you’re good at what you do,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Democrat from Connecticut. “Do not be intimidated by this committee.”

May Day protests scrutinized

One topic that got fewer mentions in committee — but more in-depth answers from King — was the district’s approach to May Day.

In an agreement last month between the Chicago Teachers Union and CPS, the city’s schools stayed open that day and provided a full day of instruction, which included lessons on civic engagement and labor.

As part of May Day, CPS approved and provided transportation for 40 field trips — with about 2,200 of the district’s 315,000 students involved. Some of those trips was to a downtown pro-labor, anti-Trump rally, which was called into question during Wednesday’s hearing.

King defended CPS’ handling of May Day, saying it was part of the district’s goal to “engage students civically.” When asked if field trips would be approved for protests aligned with conservative causes, King emphasized that the day of instruction was “not a politically slanted event.”

“The curriculum was expansive and there were options,” King said. “The curriculum was still decided at the school level, and so were the field trips.”

King also tentatively agreed to a lawmaker’s demand that the district investigate a May Day field trip permission slip that said students would “engage in political advocacy.”

Reema Amin contributed to this report.

Makiya Seminera is a reporter covering how the state and federal government affect education in Chicago and across Illinois. Contact Makiya at mseminera@chalkbeat.org.

Can states run schools better than local boards?

2026-06-09T14:52:55+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas, a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here.

This is our monthly roundup of interesting takes, tidbits, and links. Feel free to send along links and ideas for the next one.

Do state takeovers of school districts work?

This question is increasingly relevant at a moment when more states are taking over or weakening traditionally elected school boards, as Chalkbeat’s Lily Altavena has reported. Recent examples include Houston, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, and Memphis.

There’s good evidence that prior takeovers have not improved students’ performance, on average. A detailed study examining 45 takeovers undertaken between 2010 and 2018 found that, if anything, test scores inched slightly downward afterwards. “I find no evidence that state takeover improves student academic achievement over the long run,” wrote Stanford professor Beth Schueler.

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Michigan education board opposes Trump’s tax credit scholarship program

2026-05-12T22:46:58+00:00

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Michigan’s State Board of Education voted Tuesday to oppose the federal tax credit scholarship program that allows people to receive tax credits for donations they make to organizations that provide private school scholarships.

Congress approved the program last year as part of the federal budget bill. It provides up to $1,700 in annual tax credits for people who donate money to eligible scholarship-granting organizations that give students money for private school tuition, tutoring, and other educational expenses.

The State Board resolution urges Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to not opt into the federal program.

The eight-member board, which is controlled by Democrats, voted 6-2 to oppose the scholarships, with the two Republicans on the board voting not to oppose. The resolution is only an advisory. Whitmer has the power to opt Michigan into the program.

Around 30 governors, most of them Republicans, have done so already. While several Democratic governors have opted in or said they plan to, Democratic support has been slow. A spokesperson for Whitmer didn’t respond to a question about whether or when she will decide on the program.

Critics of the scholarships have said they are no different than giving parents publicly funded vouchers to send their kids to private school.

“It has been made clear that Michigan voters have already decided this in two votes,” said Pamela Pugh, the board president, referring to statewide votes in 1970 and 2000 that were clear in prohibiting public funds from going toward non-public schools. Michigan’s Constitution includes the prohibition.

“Public resources should strengthen public schools,” Pugh, a Democrat from Saginaw, said Tuesday.

The resolution says that public resources should serve schools “that are open to all children and accountable to the people of Michigan, not toward subsidizing private education systems that are not subject to the same public governance, transparency, admissions obligations, and civil rights protections.”

Supporters including board member Tom McMillin, a Republican from Oakland Township, countered the argument about Michigan’s Constitution prohibitions, saying there are “zero constitutional concerns.”

“We’re not talking about tax dollars,” McMillin said, who called support for the tax-credit scholarships “a no-brainer.”

Here’s what the Michigan Constitution says:

“No public monies or property shall be appropriated or paid or any public credit utilized, by the legislature or any other political subdivision or agency of the state directly or indirectly to aid or maintain any private, denominational or other nonpublic, pre-elementary, elementary, or secondary school.”

It goes on to say that “no payment, credit, tax benefit, exemption or deductions, tuition voucher, subsidy, grant or loan of public monies or property shall be provided, directly or indirectly, to support the attendance of any student or the employment of any person at any such nonpublic school or at any location or institution where instruction is offered in whole or in part to such nonpublic school students.”

Timothy Schmig, executive director of the Michigan Association of Christian Schools, noted that Indiana and Ohio have signed on to the program. If Michigan doesn’t, he said, there is concern that Michigan would “lose students and tax base moving to states that are tax friendly.”

Schmig was one of several people who urged board members to oppose the resolution. The board also heard from Susan Campbell from the Michigan Education Justice Coalition, which is urging Whitmer not to opt in to the program.The coalition is an education advocacy group made up of dozens of organizations across the state.

“Michigan has a long history of folks fighting to protect public education because strong public schools strengthen communities and give everyone, every child, the opportunity to succeed,” Campbell said.

Lori Higgins is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Detroit. You can reach her at lhiggins@chalkbeat.org.

School data goes stale after Trump administration cuts Education Department research arm

2026-05-07T00:33:39+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

If there was one thing the Education Department did that seemed apolitical and effective, it was compiling basic facts about American schools.

But now the work of disseminating this information has effectively ground to a halt. Since the Trump administration decimated the research arm of the Education Department, it has not updated a large swath of data that is part of the Digest of Education Statistics. This means we no longer have easily accessible, relatively up-to-date information about the basic realities of American schools.

“The role of the national government is to collect statistics on K-12 [education],” said Amber Northern, the Fordham Institute’s vice president for research who is on contract with the Education Department to suggest ways to improve its statistical work. “Absolutely the Digest is integral to that. And we need to get it restarted.”

Ellen Keast, a department spokesperson, said in a statement that this process has begun and a new contract for the work will be awarded before the end of this fiscal year in September.

Until that happens, our shared knowledge about schools will continue to deteriorate.

Consider just a handful of examples of data tables that have not been updated since at least January 2025:

Spending and revenue per public school student
Federal funding for education
School enrollment among children ages 3-5
The share of students receiving special education services, qualifying as English learners, and participating in gifted and talented programs
The typical student-to-teacher ratio
The number of people enrolled in teacher prep programs
Teachers’ perceptions about the quality of their schools
Average teacher salary
How often school principals leave their jobs
How many students take the SAT and ACT
The number of homicides and suicides in schools
The rate of disciplinary incidents in public schools
The share of recent high school graduates immediately enrolling in college

The stale data is not surprising. DOGE canceled Education Department contracts for this work in February of last year. Most of the staff members at the research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, were also laid off.

Keast, the department spokesperson, notes that key data collection about schools has continued. But since the raw data has often not been turned into accessible tables, it is difficult for the public to access or use it.

Tom Snyder, who oversaw the Digest and other annual reports until he retired in 2020, says this work has been widely used. Some tables might get thousands of citations in a single month. “This I would put as an inherent government responsibility to get information into the public’s hands,” Snyder said. “It needs to be accessible.”

Some of this information can still be found from other sources, like school spending figures in a different federal report or teacher salary numbers from the National Education Association. Even in these cases, the Digest serves two functions: It is a one-stop shop of reliable data, and it often features results over a long time horizon.

Still other information is no longer available to update at all. The Trump administration has canceled surveys about crime and safety in school, high school coursetaking, and the experiences of teachers and principals.

The federal government has been collecting and sharing basic facts about schools since 1870; the Digest of Education Statistics began in 1962. The Digest has marshaled a vast array of data to offer a comprehensive picture of the sprawling, decentralized American system of education.

This work forms the basis of what we know about schools in both the past and present. One widely cited department report, “120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait,” documents the growth of high school education, the opening up of schooling to Black children, and reformulation of school funding systems.

Northern recently released a report defending the necessity of the Education Department’s research and statistics work but recommending a number of changes. Her report does not mention the Digest by name. Northern told me there’s clear value in it, although she would like the data released more quickly.

Meanwhile, a recent analysis estimated that nearly $300 million allocated by Congress for the Institute of Education Sciences is at risk of going unspent. “The Department is committed to using appropriated funds to meet our statutory obligations while supporting high-quality research,” said Keast, the spokesperson.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat Ideas Roundup: Did education reform work? Plus research, reading, and politics

2026-04-28T21:50:33+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

Earlier this month, I wrote about efforts to revive the bipartisan school reform coalition that dominated Washington circa 1996 to 2015. It was this coalition that ushered in No Child Left Behind, test-based teacher evaluations, the growth of charter schools, and the Common Core standards.

According to education historian Diane Ravitch, these efforts decisively failed. “The reformers look back to their glory days with nostalgia. Parents and students don’t,” she wrote in response to my piece. Mike Petrilli, of the Fordham Institute, offers a different gloss on the same history: “Reform did work, until we stopped doing it.”

Interpretations of the past can shape how people proceed in the future. That’s why this mini-debate matters. So, who’s right?

Click here to continue reading.

Trump administration push to change program’s focus from college to workforce meets bipartisan resistance

2026-04-24T10:00:01+00:00

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The Trump administration should abandon its push to dramatically revise a program that helps students from marginalized communities attend college, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators has told federal officials.

At the center of their request are the federal government’s Talent Search grants, which typically go to hundreds of colleges and community organizations focused on higher education. Talent Search falls under the umbrella of the federal TRIO programs, a $1.2 billion network. The Trump administration has cut TRIO grants as part of its anti-DEI purge and proposed eliminating the program entirely.

But the most recent grant applications posted by the Department of Labor, on behalf of the Department of Education, instead prioritize programs that focus on workforce development, including those that promote apprenticeships and job credential programs.

The change in grant priorities comes amid a larger debate about the value of higher education and how much help students should have in accessing and completing college. The Trump administration has emphasized preparation for the workforce as the primary purpose of education.

The 12 senators sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon on April 9, calling for the department to rescind the application and work with Congress to “protect the integrity of the Federal TRIO programs.”

In a statement, the Education Department showed no indication it plans to change its approach.

“We must break the cycle that assumes every student needs a four-year degree to succeed, and instead promote additional postsecondary alternatives that provide students and families with more choices,” spokesperson Ellen Keast said by email. “The Department is confident in our approach to this year’s competitions and encourages eligible entities to apply.”

The Labor Department posted the revised applications on March 17, giving programs less than two months to apply for these grants — not enough time to remake such a big program, policy advocates said. Existing Talent Search programs now risk losing their funding if they don’t align with the application’s new priorities.

In Talent Search programs, middle and high school students from low-income families attend college tours and receive tutoring and other counseling, part of the broader effort to encourage their journey to higher education.

Supporters of the changes to Talent Search argue that it’s time to widen TRIO’s net, and that the revisions are well within the Higher Education Act, the federal law that authorizes Talent Search. Backers of the new application raise a common refrain: Not every kid needs to go to college.

But others say that approach runs counter to TRIO’s core mission, which is to provide students with options they might otherwise not realize they have.

“We’re very concerned, very troubled, that the administration would take one of the foremost vehicles for helping low-income Americans move into higher education and to alter that mission,” said Kimberly Jones, president of the Council for Opportunity in Education, a TRIO advocacy center.

New priorities raise questions about Talent Search’s mission

Integrating workforce programs into TRIO’s program can help broaden and improve TRIO’s scope by helping more students, said Adam Kissel, a fellow in education policy at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

“The argument that TRIO is only for college-going students has a certain inequity built into that argument, whereas, if TRIO is helping people do any post-secondary ed … it’s a better way to help all students who may be qualified,” said Kissel, who worked at the Education Department on higher education programs during the first Trump administration.

But there’s some doubt that workforce development programs are the right path for the students Talent Search serves, said Wesley Whistle, student success project director for New America, a left-leaning think tank.

A 2025 report from the University of Chicago found students from low-income families attaining a bachelor’s degree or higher tended to earn the most among their demographics.

About 51% of students from low-income families go to college, according to the Brookings Institution, far below the rate for their wealthier peers. But 68.5% of Talent Search participants enrolled in a postsecondary education program immediately after high school in the 2022-2023 school year, according to an Education Department report.

“By narrowing TRIO’s focus to just workforce outcomes and programs, you are effectively closing doors rather than opening them,” Whistle said.

Still, a GAO report published in 2020 found the department needed to do more to assess if TRIO programs work.

The new application also prioritizes proposals from state agencies, intensifying fears from some TRIO supporters that hundreds of programs funded by Talent Search could be at risk.

The Higher Education Act says Talent Search should “identify qualified youths with potential for education at the postsecondary level and to encourage such youths to complete secondary school and to undertake a program of postsecondary education.”

It’s still unclear whether the revised applications will change Talent Search to the dramatic extent that advocates are fearing.

Curtis Blackwell founded Sound Mind Sound Body Foundation in Detroit, a community organization that runs a program funded with a Talent Search grant. The program includes mentoring, skills workshops, and college application help. Blackwell said he hopes broadening his program’s mission will reach more students.

Blackwell said they’re looking into partnering with a local vocational center to meet the new priorities.

“Sometimes I feel like we don’t do a good enough job of expanding, of exposing them to other options,” he said. “For me, our number one goal within our program is to meet students where they’re at. … So if they’re at vocational school, that’s great.”

Still, TRIO’s supporters worry that a new direction for Talent Search could portend bigger changes for the eight programs under the TRIO umbrella.

Matt Meyers is president of the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, a private junior college attended by roughly 600 students. His college has a TRIO grant of $379,377 for student support services.

Meyers said these changes show the administration doesn’t understand TRIO. At his college, TRIO programs help get students from low-income backgrounds into the workforce. Sometimes that means taking them to a nice dinner so they can learn how to conduct a business lunch.

“It sounds silly, but giving them those experiences are the things that that expose them to to also want more and have more experiences, more positive experiences, and grow,” Meyers said.

The senators asking McMahon to rescind the application also requested that the department ensure there’s no lapse in Talent Search funding, which is set to expire at the end of August.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat who co-chairs the Congressional TRIO Caucus with Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, wrote in a statement to Chalkbeat that he believes the changes to Talent Search would “disenfranchise the exact students TRIO was created to uplift.” (Both Collins and Warnock signed the April 9 letter to McMahon.)

“The summers I spent on campus at Savannah State as a young man enrolled in Federal TRIO programs exposed me to new worlds and helped me see myself on a college campus as a real college student,” he wrote.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s how the school choice tax credit could affect public schools

2026-04-23T19:27:35+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

In the last decade, enrollment in California’s public schools has fallen by about half a million students, or 8%. At the same time, funding for the students who have remained in public schools has shot up, as the state implemented a new funding formula. California once lagged behind the national average in education funding per student; now it’s above average.

These seemingly paradoxical trends are worth considering at a moment when many state governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom, are deciding whether to participate in a school choice program subsidized by a new federal tax credit.

Public education associations are urging states to stay away. They say that offering this voucher-like credit will drain students, and thus resources, away from public schools. That could happen, especially if political support for funding education falls.

But the California experience suggests it’s not inevitable. Fewer students in public schools doesn’t necessarily result in less funding. “As enrollments decline, we tend to see total spending at least stay constant and in many cases still increase,” says Bruce Baker, a school funding expert who has tracked school funding patterns for years.

The fiscal impact of the tax credit remains a source of intense debate, confusion — and uncertainty. Here’s how to think about this question.

The federal tax credit is effectively “free” money for states.

The federal school choice tax credit, passed by Congressional Republicans in the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” works like this: Americans will soon be able to redirect up to $1,700 of their income tax bill to nonprofits that provide stipends for private school tuition or other educational expenses. This is similar, in many ways, to a government-funded voucher.

But the program includes a loophole. States have the option to participate or not. Nearly every Republican governor has said they will join the program, while most Democrats have not publicly made a decision, according to a tracker from Education Week. The undecided governors are currently facing an intense lobbying campaign from both sides.

A key selling point for advocates: The money comes entirely from federal taxes. States don’t have to put in any funding.

The tax credit could also be used to pay for certain extra programming offered in public schools, like after-school care or tutoring. Observers say it’s unclear how successful public school systems will be at tapping into this money.

Lower enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean less funding.

Even though it doesn’t cost the state money, public school advocates fear that the credit — a new subsidy for private education expenses — will induce some number of students to leave public schools.

It’s not clear this would result in less money for public education, though. Think of school funding as a pie that is divided among students. If there are fewer students, and the size of the pie remains the same, each remaining student could actually get a slightly bigger slice. In recent years, school funding in states like Illinois and Vermont have increased even as enrollment has fallen.

That’s not guaranteed, of course. A state could slash its overall education budget — shrink the pie — in response to declining enrollment. It’s possible that fewer students could weaken political support for public schools, although that may be less likely in the left-leaning states that are still considering whether to participate in the choice program.

In California, there’s an additional backstop: The state Constitution requires a certain amount of state funding to go toward education. “To the extent there actually is any measurable exodus from public schools it would mean more money per kid,” says Julien Lafortune, a school funding expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.

This doesn’t mean every district is financially secure. Even if the overall pie of funding holds steady, districts that lose an especially large swath of students might get a smaller slice. This can lead to layoffs or school closures.

Some critics of the tax credit also say there are other reasons to oppose it beyond its budget implications. “Significant growth of a voucher program could slowly dismantle public education, and I don’t think that’s what most voters want, even if it does save the state some money,” says David Knight, a professor at the University of Washington.

So far Congress hasn’t cut public school budgets either.

The tax credit critics have an additional concern. Every dollar spent on this program is a dollar less in federal tax revenue. The more states opt in, the larger the cost of the program. Estimates vary, but some predict this will amount to several billion dollars.

The money has to come from somewhere. This could leave federal funding for public schools “more vulnerable to cuts,” warns Education Trust’s Augustus Mays, who is urging states not to participate in the program.

But K-12 education is just a tiny fraction of federal spending, and the federal government can, and does, run budget deficits. Recently Congress rejected efforts by the Trump administration to cut school budgets. So while it’s true the tax credit will add a small hole to the federal budget, there’s little reason to assume it will be filled by cuts to public schools.

Correction: April 27, 2026. A prior version of this story misattributed a quote to Denise Forte of Education Trust. The comment was made by Education Trust’s Augustus Mays.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Will bipartisan education reform make a comeback? 3 reasons it could — and 3 obstacles

2026-04-14T21:04:58+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

These days there’s a new energy around an old idea: bipartisan school reform.

Reviving this was the quaint but ascendant goal of a recent Washington D.C. event that I attended last month. The Bipartisan Policy Center convened a group of influential education leaders from both parties to sketch out a new agenda for school reform.

“The moment is now,” said former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings during the opening panel. “We have not recovered from COVID fully. We really need to light the fire of urgency.”

This was the sort of thinking that used to dominate Washington D.C. Presidents from both parties once insisted on a muscular federal role to hold schools and teachers accountable for raising test scores. These advocates have been on the outs politically for over a decade, but some see an opportunity to revive the old coalition. A flurry of reports, compacts, commissions, events, and essays have made the case that politicians of both parties need to come together to address the striking declines in student learning and center education as a national priority.

Whatever you think about this mini-resurgence, it’s worth paying attention to. Bipartisan school reform upended schools once before (with a much debated legacy). Could it happen again? Maybe. In many ways the ground is ripe, but it’s not clear advocates have a clear constituency or reform agenda.

Drawing from recent history, here are three reasons this particular brand of reform could return and three obstacles this effort faces.

Why bipartisan reform could be revived: There really is a learning crisis.

Modern bipartisan school reform has its roots in a 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which claimed (with disputed evidence) that the country’s schools were in dire shape. These days the data is clear: Test scores have been on an alarming trajectory for a decade. This has again led to widespread concerns among policymakers, academics, and journalists.

The aspiring reformers are driving the mainstream media narrative about education.

Centrist education advocates and politicians, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have offered a clear theory to explain these recent learning declines. Emanuel argues that Democrats deserve blame for backing COVID-era school building closures, focusing on culture war issues, and downplaying the importance of test scores. He says Democrats should look to Republican-led states in the South, like Mississippi.

A remarkable slew of articles have endorsed versions of this narrative. That includes several pieces in the New York Times. Not many other prominent Democrats are echoing Emanuel, but we can be sure they are reading the Times. Crucially, those Democrats more sympathetic to teachers unions and public education have not articulated a clear alternative theory to explain recent learning declines.

Both parties may have political incentives for moving to the center on education.

The prior iteration of bipartisan reform came at a moment where both parties used education as a strategy to appeal to centrist independent voters. Bill Clinton promised to be a different type of liberal who would take a tough-minded approach to schools, while George W. Bush pitched himself as a “compassionate conservative” who would champion the education of disadvantaged children.

Once again Democratic reformers say the party faces a similar political imperative. Emanuel and many others have claimed the party has lost its edge on education with voters. This isn’t true, according to the vast majority of recent surveys, but the talking point has nevertheless proven deeply influential at a moment when Democrats have been casting about for answers following Trump’s election in 2024.

Republicans are not at this soul-searching stage — they’ve leaned into school choice and parents’ rights. But Trump is quite unpopular at the moment, and so is his effort to close the Education Department. Depending on the midterm results, it’s possible that the GOP will make efforts to tack away from Trump’s combative approach to education.

Why bipartisan reform might not happen: Reformers don’t have a clear bumper sticker.

Although the centrist reformers are aligned on what’s gone wrong, their solutions are a bit less clear. This was apparent during a Bipartisan Policy Center panel on education, which I moderated. The group released a number of recommendations about improving schools. These ranged from broad goals (“reimagine the high school years”) to very specific policies (“require transparent, consistent annual reporting” on teacher pension plans). But there wasn’t an overarching idea or takeaway, as best I could tell.

So I asked each participant on the panel what their bumper-sticker pitch for school reform would be.

“Responsive systems and better information,” responded Andy Rotherham, the co-founder of Bellwether, an education consulting firm, and a former Clinton White House staffer.

“Locals lead; feds fund, measure, and evaluate,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard education professor.

“Education is the way out of your parents’ basement,” said Katie Jenner, the Indiana education secretary.

This range of responses is in contrast with the relatively clear bumper stickers from the political right and the left. (“More choice, less wokeness, no U.S. Department of Education,” on the right. “More money,” on the left.)

Without a snappy message for what bipartisan reformers want to do, I suspect advocates will struggle to coalesce policy elites or regular people around their ideas.

There is little clear grassroots demand for this sort of reform.

Indeed, the push to address learning declines has seemingly not broken through to voters. While Americans have an increasingly negative view of the quality of K-12 schools, very few rate education as a top issue. This is quite different than in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Remarkably, in the 2000 presidential campaign, voters sometimes ranked education as the top issue facing the country.

And despite years of headlines about bad test scores, most parents still give their child’s school relatively high marks.

Bipartisan reform may require presidential leadership.

Starting with George H. W. Bush and continuing through Barack Obama there were four straight presidents who championed an overlapping agenda of school accountability and school choice. Each made education a central national issue. In a number of cases, these presidents brought along reluctant members of their own parties. The bipartisan coalition crucially depended on this presidential leadership. In turn, bipartisan school reform has collapsed under Trump and Biden since neither bought into this agenda.

To succeed, the bipartisan reformers may need a like-minded president. That could, of course, be tough to get. Right now, Rahm Emanuel is polling at 0%-1%. The question for these aspiring reformers is whether they can find other presidential candidates to carry their mantle.

This piece was about whether bipartisan school reform will return. It’s a different question than whether it should. What do you think? Share your thoughts with me at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

New study finds special education changes students’ academic trajectories for the better

2026-03-30T11:04:55+00:00

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act turned 50 last year. Many advocates and politicians heralded the anniversary. At the same time, some observers have been wondering how well the law has succeeded in helping students.

A study released Monday sheds new light on this question, offering among the most comprehensive and rigorous answers to date. The findings were strikingly positive. Across three states, access to special education services changed students’ academic trajectories for the better.

The gains were “immediate, quite large, and sustained,” says Marcus Winters, lead author of the paper and a professor at Boston University.

The results indicate that special education is working to a meaningful extent for many students who are gaining access to additional services. What the study doesn’t answer, however, is whether special education can work even better, considering the significant costs involved.

To continue reading, click here.

U.S. Education Secretary McMahon says Michigan should join Trump’s school tax-credit plan

2026-03-27T22:46:27+00:00

This story was originally published by Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from Bridge Michigan, sign up for a free newsletter here.

HAMTRAMCK — U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon urged Michigan to “unleash educational excellence for every child” by participating in a new federal school choice program.

On Friday, McMahon called on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to opt the state into a program that would give donors tax credits for contributing to scholarship funds for K-12 students, including those attending public schools, religious schools, other private schools and home-schools.

Students could use the money for tuition or other educational expenses. Whitmer has previously said the program is a “high-level talking point” and that she needs more information before making a decision.

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“The Education Freedom Tax Credit isn’t some distant idea, it’s a homegrown solution that puts Michigan families in charge,” McMahon said at Hamtramck Academy, a charter school that enrolls about 550 students.

Under the program approved by Congress last year, people can donate to scholarship-granting organizations and receive up to $1,700 in tax credits. There’s no cap on how much scholarship money a student can receive, according to a fact sheet from the federal Treasury and Education departments. The scholarship organization will determine the amount “based on the mission” of the organization, the fact sheet states.

The tax credit is available starting in 2027. Proponents of the program emphasize that if Michigan does not join, donations from Michigan taxpayers would go toward students in other states.

Michigan House Speaker Matt Hall, a Republican from Richland Township, and state Rep. Tim Kelly, a Republican from Saginaw, also spoke. Hall said he is working with Whitmer on efforts to improve literacy, and the federal program is another way to improve student achievement.

“If they’re in a failing school, this could be the lifeline for their family with these scholarships to go into another school that will help unlock their potential,” Hall said. “So this is another tool that Michigan needs, and I’m very hopeful that Gov. Whitmer will see that, to see what other governors have seen and opt us in.”

Shortly before she spoke, McMahon posted on social media urging the state to act and linking to a Detroit Free Press opinion piece she wrote about why the state should join.

Republican state Reps. Matt Maddock, of Milford, Alicia St. Germaine of Harrison Township, Joseph Pavlov of Kimball, and Mike Harris of Clarkston also attended McMahon’s event.

Kelly said the only reason to not opt into the program would be “spite.”

Previously, Whitmer has vetoed similar state efforts to pass a tax-credit scholarship program.

A Whitmer spokesperson said Friday she had nothing to add from Whitmer’s previous comments about the program. State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko did not directly answer whether he wants the state to opt in.

“My priority is adequate and equitable funding for public schools in Michigan,” Maleyko said in a statement to Bridge Friday. “I believe federal resources should be devoted to those priorities.”

School choice in Michigan

Critics liken the federal program to school vouchers.

Katherine Nitz, media relations coordinator for the Michigan Education Justice Coalition, told Bridge the program would “weaken public schools” and “sets the stage for privatization.”

“This would wind up gutting public school funding, which is already tenuous in Michigan,” Nitz said.

The Michigan Constitution prohibits using public funds for private school attendance.

So far, 27 states have opted in, McMahon said Friday.

Support for the program has largely been from Republicans. Only two Democratic governors — in Colorado and North Carolina — have said their states will likely join, according to Chalkbeat.

There are income restrictions for which children could benefit from the program.“Students eligible to enroll in a public elementary or secondary school and from a household with income not greater than 300% of the area’s median gross income qualify for a scholarship through the Education Freedom Tax Credit,” the fact sheet says.

While Michigan does not have a state private school choice program, roughly 1 in 4 Michigan public K-12 students attend a charter school or use the state’s choice program to attend a school outside their local district, according to a previous Bridge analysis.

Michigan families are also allowed to home-school their children and do not have to notify the local district or state about this choice. Last September, McMahon visited public charter schools in Detroit and nearby Redford, Renaissance High School in Detroit, and Hillsdale College, a private college that does not accept federal funding. That evening, she touted the benefits of the tax-credit scholarship program at an event hosted by the Midland County Republican Party.

Isabel Lohman is a reporter for Bridge Michigan. You can reach her at ilohman@bridgemi.com.

Trump pressured states to limit undocumented high school students’ access to career education programs

2026-03-27T15:51:45+00:00

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At least three states have taken steps to restrict undocumented high school students’ access to dual enrollment and career-technical education programs, according to documents reviewed by Chalkbeat. In one state, the policy was reversed following Chalkbeat inquiries.

These moves come as efforts to limit educational funding for undocumented immigrants ramp up nationwide. They build on controversial guidance from the Trump administration that restricted federally funded preschool and adult education programs to citizens and legal residents.

But these state actions are particularly striking because they chip away at protections based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Plyler v. Doe decision, which requires public schools to serve all students, including those who lack legal permission to be in the country. They suggest the Trump administration has made more progress than previously reported in eroding the protections enshrined in the ruling, long a conservative target.

In Virginia, nearly every school district quietly agreed to exclude undocumented students from participating in certain federally funded career-and-technical education programs, according to records obtained by Chalkbeat.

It is not clear how many undocumented students actually lost access to programming. But at least one school district in Virginia was denied $150,000 in federal funding because it didn’t agree to exclude those students.

On Thursday, after repeated Chalkbeat questions, the state education department said it was abandoning the policy. School districts will no longer be required to restrict undocumented students’ access. The original policy came under the state’s previous Republican administration. The department is now led by a Democratic appointee.

Other Republican-led states have maintained similar policies. The Iowa Department of Education said it expects schools not to offer college-credit courses to undocumented students with federal funds. Georgia recently announced new restrictions on undocumented students’ access to dual enrollment courses paid for with state money.

It is not clear how many other states have taken similar actions. In response to an ongoing lawsuit, a federal judge blocked Trump’s legal guidance in 20 states with Democratic attorneys general.

A U.S. Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat this week that the department is not focused on “patchwork enforcement” while litigation is ongoing. But the initial notice has already had a significant effect on state policy.

Conservative activists have argued that undocumented immigrant students use resources that by right should go to Americans.

The presence of large numbers of English learners “impacts the entire school and American citizens who are losing out on resources,” Mandy Drogin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, told a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee during a recent hearing devoted to criticizing the Plyler decision. “The taxpayers are left holding the bag for it.”

Immigrant and civil rights advocates have strongly defended the value of educating undocumented students. Not doing so, they say, would carry far greater social costs.

“Denial is not just a denial of equal access,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Denial is an injury to the whole community because you are then taking away the investment in kids who could make very strong contributions.”

Districts agreed to exclude undocumented students despite concerns

In July of last year, the Trump administration issued new interpretations of a 1996 federal law that restricted certain immigrants’ access to welfare programs. Trump’s changes sought to go further, by blocking undocumented immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, adult education, and postsecondary education programs.

In its legal notice, the administration also said it believes Plyler does not protect programming that goes “beyond providing a basic public education,” suggesting that undocumented students might not have access to the full slate of services offered in many public schools. The change targeted career-technical education programs that often involve partnerships between school districts and community colleges, sometimes blurring the lines between higher ed and K-12.

The next month, an email from Virginia’s then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Emily Anne Gullickson, arrived in the inboxes of school leaders across the commonwealth. It was labeled “URGENT READ.”

To continue to receive federal career-and-technical education funding, known as Perkins, school districts would have to promptly sign an “attestation” that “non-qualified aliens” are “not provided or receiving services funded by the program.” Virginia was allocated $32.5 million in Perkins funding this school year.

Some district leaders were wary of signing. Scott Worner, the superintendent of Mecklenburg County Public Schools in southern Virginia, wrote in an email obtained by Chalkbeat that he had “big concerns.” In Virginia Beach, school board member Melinda Rogers told local media that “it has always been the right of all students to have access to education.”

The Virginia school superintendents association quickly provided legal guidance in a webinar, which warned schools they could lose funding if they didn’t sign, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by Chalkbeat. Scott Braband, the group’s executive director, said during the meeting that there was some legal argument against signing but recommended that districts do so, according to meeting notes obtained by Chalkbeat. He emphasized the funding that was at stake.

In an interview, Braband suggested that districts were unlikely to actually exclude students based on their immigration status. “We don’t have knowledge that we have undocumented kids because we don’t check,” he said. ”It’s a compliance exercise.” He declined to speak about his comments from the legal webinar.

Ultimately, over 120 school districts, including Mecklenburg County and Virginia Beach, signed the attestation form, according to information obtained through a public records request. Most school districts signed the document months ago, but their decision to do so has not been previously reported.

Chalkbeat sought comment from every school district in the state. Virtually all declined to comment or did not respond.

Rogers, the Virginia Beach board member, said she was not aware that her district signed. “It is a concern,” she said. “I would ask why the federal government would impose that kind of restriction on a child when it is not our responsibility to get involved.”

Only seven Virginia school districts did not sign, according to state records and Chalkbeat reporting. “We can’t attest to that because we don’t collect that information,” Loudoun County Superintendent Aaron Spence said in an interview, referring to students’ immigration status.

In January of this year, the district was denied $150,000 in Perkins funding, including for a program promoting entrepreneurship to students. An email to Loudoun from the Virginia Department of Education, obtained by Chalkbeat, said funding requests would be rejected for school systems that had not signed. The district’s loss of funding was initially reported by local news outlet Loudoun Now.

Gullickson, who served as state superintendent during Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration, wrote in a statement to Chalkbeat, “Schools should only spend taxpayer money on students as intended.” She added, “Virginia was unwilling to put federal funds at risk.”

This week, Holly Coy, chief of staff at the Virginia Department of Education, said the agency “has determined that submitting the attestation is no longer a necessary requirement.” She said the state was still determining the logistics for releasing money to districts that had not signed.

The chain of events in Virginia shows the compromises school districts were willing to make to keep federal money flowing, as well as the ways in which student rights are dependent on states’ partisan make-up.

The U.S. Education Department did not explicitly require states to get assurances from districts, but warned it “may conduct a review” to ensure federal funding doesn’t go to “serve illegal aliens.” The department acknowledged that “this guidance is not binding.”

Organizations that represent career education and community colleges sent a letter to the department in August with urgent questions about how to comply, since Perkins funds often go to program costs that benefit large groups of students. They have not received a response, according to two groups who signed the letter.

Meanwhile, the Iowa Department of Education told districts that they cannot use Perkins dollars to pay for undocumented high school students to take college-credit classes “even if the course occurs at the high school.” Although schools are not required to report students’ immigration status, districts “should be prepared to demonstrate that ineligible students are not being served using Perkins funds,” the agency said.

A spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education did not offer comment.

In Georgia, the state announced that beginning this summer, high school students participating in a state-funded dual college enrollment program must prove that they are citizens or legal residents. The state did not provide a public rationale for this move. According to a memo obtained by Chalkbeat, the Georgia Department of Law cited the recent Trump administration guidance as reason to exclude undocumented students.

A spokesperson for the Georgia Student Finance Commission, which administers the dual enrollment program, did not respond to a request for comment.

One high school in the Atlanta area noted that undocumented students may still participate, but now “must self-pay for courses.”

National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Fordham Institute’s Amber Northern says federal education research is worth rebuilding after DOGE cuts

2026-03-05T22:46:45+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

It was a move that stunned many in the world of education research. Nearly a year ago, the sleepy, wonky, somewhat obscure research arm of the Education Department was rapidly decimated by Elon Musk’s DOGE. The Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, saw a slew of research contracts canceled and most of its staff laid off.

IES had for two decades funded research, collected basic data on schools, produced guides on “what works” in education, and run the national testing program. You may not know much about IES, but you’ve likely encountered its data.

In the year since the DOGE decimation, parts of IES have been restored and recently the administration released a report with recommendations on “reimagining” its work. The report was authored by Amber Northern, who took on a temporary role with the Education Department and whose day job is as vice president for research at the Fordham Institute, a center-right education think tank.

The lengthy report features a combination of high-level ideas (like making research more accessible and actionable) and wonkily detailed recommendations (like improving procurement processes). It also offered a staunch defense of the value of federally funded research.

Continue reading this article here.

Trump aims to shrink the Education Department — while Washington tightens its grip on schools

2026-03-03T21:45:00+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has offered a consistent message: It’s getting the feds out of the way of schools by trying to abolish the Education Department. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has vowed to “break up the federal education bureaucracy,” “return education to the states,” and “empower local leaders.”

Yet many local and state leaders whose politics differ from Trump’s are not feeling empowered — quite the opposite. “We have seen unprecedented federal interest,” says Aaron Spence, the superintendent of Loudoun County schools, a suburban Virginia district outside Washington D.C. that has been at the center of a number of high-profile culture-war controversies.

In July of last year, the Education Department found Loudoun and a number of other Northern Virginia districts had violated Title IX by allowing transgender students to access bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. The decision was startling to Spence because Loudoun was following a 2020 appeals court ruling that required bathrooms in Virginia schools be made available to trans students.

The federal government had reopened an issue that seemed settled. This has taken up “an inordinate and significant amount of staff time,” says Spence. Now Loudoun is threatened with a loss of federal funding as the issue plays out in court. The district wants to follow federal law but doesn’t know how, Spence says: “We would frankly love some resolution.”

Loudoun’s experience underscores Trump’s efforts to stamp out local school policies that the administration disagrees with and the challenge that’s created for local school leaders. Despite his promise to reduce federal involvement in education, D.C. influence hasn’t gone away.

In response to a request for comment on this story, a spokesperson for the Education Department pointed to a website touting the administration’s accomplishments.

The Trump administration has launched a flurry of investigations into local school systems and states. That includes probes into a California law prohibiting teachers from being required to disclose students’ gender identity to parents and Black student achievement programs in Chicago and Portland. The Education Department has also sought to restrict a gender-neutral bathroom at a Denver high school and to restore a Native American mascot at a Long Island high school.

Some state and school leaders say they’re monitoring federal policy more closely than at any point in recent memory.

“The Trump administration will keep coming after us because that’s their values, and I understand that,” says Chris Reykdal, the superintendent of Washington state. “But it’s totally inconsistent with their idea of returning education and policy back to the states.” Trump is investigating Washington, and a number of other states, over policies to allow transgender girls to compete in female athletics.

To be clear, many voters agree with Trump’s approach to these social and cultural issues. Some observers also contend turnabout is fair play: Democrats wielded federal power in aggressive ways, so it’s more than fair for Republican presidents to do the same.

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, who has criticized some of Trump’s moves, says it was predictable that conservatives would use the tools pioneered by progressives. “There’s a degree of schadenfreude,” he says.

For their part, administration officials say they are simply following civil rights statutes. “As long as this agency exists, we need to be sure we’re enforcing the law,” the Education Department’s Lindsey Burke said at a recent Chalkbeat event.

But the administration is going further than enforcing existing law; it is seeking to reinterpret and create new law, often in ways that maintain a powerful federal role in education.

Consider, for instance, the interpretation of Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education. The Biden administration contended this protects transgender students, which infuriated many conservatives and was struck down in a number of courts.

Others argue that the law is silent about gender identity and that the issue should be left up to states. “Why would we at this point … jump in and try to constitutionalize a rule for the whole country while there’s still uncertainty and debate?” said Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral arguments in a pending case on transgender athletes.

The Trump administration is taking a third position, which is that Title IX broadly prohibits transgender students from sex-separated spaces and sports. In Virginia, it’s pushing that view even where an appeals court decision says otherwise. (The administration did notch a win this week after the Supreme Court said parents likely have a right to know if their child’s gender identity changes in school.)

Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College, has criticized Democratic presidents for what he sees as too much federal meddling. But he says Trump has taken federal power to a new level. “The more you reinforce that these tools can be used in a heavy-handed partisan way, the more you’re going to make sure that happens the next time the administration changes,” he says.

Trump has sought a vast swath of changes from universities including on antisemitism, DEI, grade inflation, intellectual diversity, admissions practices, transgender accommodations, and more. The administration has aggressively, and often successfully, leveraged federal funds to push colleges to change some of their practices.

Meanwhile, Congress and Trump have enacted a large school choice tax-credit program through the “big beautiful bill.” This means the federal government will now provide subsidies to private schools and perhaps certain public schools. States don’t have to participate, but the Trump administration is seeking to limit what rules states can put in place if they do opt in.

This law could ultimately lead to more federal regulation of private schools, which is one reason some conservative groups have historically opposed federal choice measures. The Trump administration has indicated it will include few if any regulations, but future administrations may not do the same. Just ask private universities, which have grown accustomed to federal funds and are now facing unprecedented federal pressure.

The persistent, and even growing, federal power over education has been obscured by Trump’s high-profile effort to close the Education Department. This gives the impression that the federal role is shrinking. It’s true that there are fewer people doing education research and investigating civil rights claims in schools. There’s also no longer a health clinic at the Education Department building, which officials have repeatedly touted. The administration has issued guidance on how schools can use federal funding more flexibly and recently granted modest funding flexibility to the state of Iowa.

Yet some school officials say the overall effect of all this so far has been minimal.

“The promise was deregulation,” says Sasha Pudelski, advocacy director of AASA, the association of school superintendents. “The reality has been paperwork, guidance, and reminders.”

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Community schools oversight, emergency response grants moving from Education Department to HHS

2026-02-23T22:06:42+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Education is moving oversight of several programs to the Department of Health and Human Services, as the agency continues to offload responsibilities to fulfill the president’s vow to dismantle the federal education department.

The move announced Monday includes transferring management of grants schools receive after traumatic events — such as school shootings, natural disasters or major bus accidents — disrupt learning. It also shifts oversight of major grant programs meant to foster more community and wraparound services in schools in vulnerable neighborhoods.

The Education Department still has not made any announcements about whether special education oversight will move to Health and Human Services. Disability advocates are nearly unanimous in opposing that change.

The department already announced in November that it would move administration of major K-12 and higher education programs to the Department of Labor, including management of both the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Postsecondary Education. And before that, the department moved career and technical education to Labor.

Education advocates and others criticized these moves for sidestepping Congress. While the Trump administration wants to eliminate the agency entirely, only Congress can shutter the department.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon repeated the administration’s promise to “return education to the states” in a news release sent Monday announcing the latest interagency agreements. She said the change would represent “a practical step toward greater efficiency, stronger coordination, and meaningful improvement” and should not disrupt any programs.

Programs moved over the federal health department include:

School Emergency Response to Violence: Known as Project SERV grants, these emergency funds go to schools where students have experienced traumatic and tragic events, including school shootings.
Ready to Learn Programming: Promotes creation of educational content, including television and digital media. Public broadcasting companies have received this grant funding. For instance, Twin Cities PBS used the funding to create an animated series focused on skill-building for the workforce.
Full Service Community Schools and Promise Neighborhoods programming: Helps schools and other institutions provide comprehensive resources (such as mental health, nutritional health, and other supports for students) to low-income communities.
Statewide Family Engagement Centers: This funding goes to education institutions for training and development of programs to stoke family engagement in schools.

The Education Department also announced that the State Department will monitor foreign donations to universities through a separate interagency agreement.

The administration has framed the use of interagency agreements to parcel out functions to other departments as a continuation of longstanding practice. Advocates have raised questions about the legality of these agreements.

Democrats pushed unsuccessfully in the most recent spending bills to limit the Education Department’s ability to move programs to other agencies without congressional approval.

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat and vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, called the latest agreements illegal in a press release and lamented that her Republican colleagues won’t constrain the Trump administration’s actions.

“These illegal agreements aren’t just creating pointless new bureaucracy that burdens our already-overworked teachers and schools,” Murray said in a Monday statement. “They are actively jeopardizing resources and support that students and families count on and are entitled to under the law.”

National Editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

As more states opt in, Republican senators tout Trump-backed school choice tax credit

2026-01-29T00:50:43+00:00

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School choice promotes creativity and competition. School choice unfairly siphons funding from public schools.

Both are well-worn arguments in the battle over public and private K-12 education.

But those arguments took on new importance Wednesday as U.S. senators made the case for and against the new federal tax-credit scholarship program during a hearing Wednesday.

The landmark program was established by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill and enthusiastically supported by President Donald Trump. The tax credit could potentially generate billions for families’ private school tuition, as well as homeschooling and academic enrichment costs. But states have to opt in.

At least 23 states, mostly led by Republican governors, have officially opted into the program, according to a tally from the Education and Treasury departments released Tuesday. State-level voucher programs are also proliferating across the country.

Now the pressure is on Democratic governors to either opt in or stay out. So far just two — Gov. Jared Polis in Colorado and Gov. Josh Stein in North Carolina — have said their states will likely participate. Other Democratic governors are facing pressure from both supporters and opponents of the program, which is set to launch in January 2027.

“It’s not about public school versus private, not about teachers versus parents, not about Republicans versus Democrats,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “It’s about giving the parent access to the innovative educational program best for her child.”

But Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, used the hearing to blast the program, saying it would deepen educational inequality.

“We should not be creating a two-tier education system in America, private schools for the wealthy, and well-connected, and severely underfunded and under-resourced public schools for low-income, disabled and working class kids,” he said.

Nearly all 23 states that have opted in are led by Republican governors: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Virginia’s situation stands out: Former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin said his state would opt in, just before successor Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, took office in January. Spanberger’s office did not respond to a request for comment about whether the state would change course.

In addition to the Democratic governors of Colorado and North Carolina, the GOP governors of Florida and Utah have also indicated their states will opt in, Education Week reported.

Shelby Wieman, a spokesperson for Polis, wrote in an emailed statement that Colorado still plans to opt in and will formally notify the federal government “shortly.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, is getting pressure from both ends of the political spectrum. Republican lawmakers say the state shouldn’t leave money on the table for children’s education. But advocacy groups that are urging the governor to reject the program have cited concerns about transparency.

Pritzker’s office has said the governor is still considering the issue, local station 25NewsNow reported.

Under the program, families can donate up to $1,700 to scholarship-granting organizations and receive an equivalent tax credit back. But key aspects of the program must still be determined by the federal government.

The Treasury Department is developing draft rules for how much authority states will have over the program. Those rules could determine how easily donations made under the tax credit could be used to benefit public school students alongside private school students. Such decisions could influence whether Democratic governors get on board.

Wednesday’s hearing took place during National School Choice Week, an annual event celebrated by groups that support programs like vouchers and charter schools nationwide.

Proponents of the tax credit said in Wednesday’s hearing that it will fuel innovative models of education to serve vulnerable kids.

John Kirtley, the chairman of Step Up for Students, which administers scholarships through Florida’s Education Scholarship Accounts program, said the state has become a “hotbed of innovation” for unique education programs, such as science lessons from a marine biologist for home-schooled children. Parents not satisfied with public schools have used education savings accounts successfully, he said.

“Giving the parent the flexibility not just to find a different school, but to customize their education with the education savings account to a great degree really is a lifesaver for them,” he said.

But in Arizona, which has several private school choice programs, there’s an “illusion of choice” because private school is still more easily available for wealthy families than low-income families, said Marisol Garcia, an educator and president of the Arizona Education Association.

“Private school tuition in Phoenix has exceeded $20,000 a year, leaving families thousands of dollars short,” she said.

Organizations have been working to increase the tax credit’s impact. Earlier this week, the American Federation for Children, an organization that’s long supported voucher programs, announced the launch of its own scholarship fund to accept donations via the federal tax credits.

Estimates for how much money Americans will claim under the tax credit have been as high as $51 billion, but it could be much less.

Updated: This story was updated to add a comment from a spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

Correction: Jan. 28, 2025: A previous version of this story misidentified Sen. Bernie Sanders’ political affiliation. He is an independent who caucuses with Democrats.

Lily Altavena is a national reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Lily at laltavena@chalkbeat.org.

Project 2025 author and top Trump official: Special education protections and funding will remain

2026-01-14T23:07:59+00:00

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The future of special education remains up in the air, but the Trump administration is feeling pressure to assuage the concerns of parents of students with disabilities that efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education could put their children at risk.

That was one of the key takeaways from Chalkbeat’s conversation with Lindsey Burke, a Department of Education official and author of the education chapter of the conservative blueprint Project 2025.

Burke, though, said that some of Project 2025’s most controversial ideas, including deep budget cuts to schools, aren’t currently on the table. She also said there’s “no reason to anticipate” funding freezes similar to the temporary withholding of $7 billion that threw school districts into chaos last summer.

But the Education Department is just one “decision point” on federal spending, and the department remains committed to ending grants it deems wasteful or not aligned with their priorities, Burke said. In her confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon indicated the department would not cut funding to schools, but is currently seeking cuts to a number of programs and has already cancelled $2 billion in funds, according to Burke.

A year in, the Trump administration has surprised many observers with its far-reaching efforts to close the Department of Education, often a conservative hope but rarely a presidential priority. Late last year, the administration moved a number of education programs to the Labor Department. These efforts face ongoing legal challenges and sharp criticism from congressional Democrats.

The administration has also invited state leaders to seek waivers from federal requirements. It recently approved a waiver in Iowa, though the changes were relatively modest. At the same time, Trump’s Education Department has aggressively used its civil rights arm to target left-leaning education policies related to race and gender.

Burke, the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, acknowledged that the administration’s efforts to move education functions to the Labor Department might seem like a “blunt instrument.” Ensuring that education supports the development of a strong workforce is an important federal role, she said, but it’s not the only purpose of education.

“Education really is about forming human souls,” Burke said in response to an audience question, “and about really preparing individuals, preparing students to inherit the blessings and liberties of a free society.”

Here are some of the most interesting things we heard in our conversation with Burke.

The administration wants parents of students with disabilities not to worry

The administration has no plans to cut federal funding for special education and may even increase spending, Burke said.

“Fully funding IDEA has been of interest to many people on both sides of the aisle over the decades,” Burke said.

Burke said she didn’t want to preempt budget negotiations, but the administration plans to fund IDEA at “the current levels that are out there now, and potentially additional support moving forward.” She strongly disavowed the idea of cuts: “There is no world in which anybody’s talking about any reductions in support for IDEA.”

The federal government provides about $15 billion a year to help districts cover special education costs. Under the 50-year-old Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, school districts are required to educate all students, regardless of disability, but the federal government has never lived up to its obligation to pay 40% of the cost. Trump’s most recent budget proposal called for flat funding for IDEA.

Money is just one concern for advocates for students with disabilities, who also oppose any plan to move oversight out of the Education Department. The administration’s reorganization push has not affected special education yet — though most of the staff who work on special education were fired during the government shutdown only to be brought back later in response to a lawsuit.

“We are still evaluating the future of things like special education programs,” Burke said. “We do not have an answer yet.”

Regardless of what happens, current protections for students will remain in place, she said.

Burke tacks away from some controversial Project 2025 ideas

Burke said there are no current plans to convert federal special education money into vouchers or to do away with Title I funding that supports schools serving low-income communities. Both those ideas appear in Project 2025, a flashpoint for critics of the administration.

“I’ve written on many ed policy areas over the years, and that’s not something that we are currently contemplating here at the agency,” she said of converting IDEA dollars into education savings accounts. “And of course, anything like that is something that would have to go through Congress.”

And asked whether, in her ideal world, Title I would be phased out, Burke said “no.”

That money currently provides about $18 billion in Title I money that funds extended school days, teacher training, reading tutoring and more.

“Speaking on behalf of the department, what our priority is right now is making sure that these grants are serving families well,” she said.

Nor, Burke said, has the administration taken any steps to prevent children who are undocumented immigrants from attending public school at no cost to their parents. Back in 2024, Burke was the co-author of a separate Heritage Foundation memo that proposed that states charge immigrant parents tuition — a step that would set up a challenge to the landmark Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision.

Burke is still hoping to persuade Congress to fully dismantle the department

Congress created the Education Department and Congress would need to approve its elimination. Burke acknowledged as much, and said the hope is that the administration can provide “proof of concept” by moving key functions to other agencies.

“Congress does have to codify this,” she said. “And so we’re hoping they look at what has transpired so far and see that it’s been effective.”

Yet Burke did not point to any concrete engagement with Congress and demurred when asked to name any Democrats who supported the effort. Some bipartisan support would be needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.

The administration has leveraged robust interpretations of executive authority to go around Congress. Litigation about the department remains pending, but the U.S. Supreme Court allowed initial cutbacks at the Education Department to move forward.

It’s unclear if department officials will follow recommendations to re-envision its research arm

Last year, the department temporarily brought on Thomas B. Fordham Institute Senior Vice President for research Amber Northern to help reimagine the department’s research arm, known as the Institute for Education Sciences. IES was decimated by early cuts from DOGE.

Northern, who has returned to her prior role at Fordham, recently delivered the recommendations to department officials, Burke indicated.

Burke said there have not been any decisions made on the future of IES. She also would not say what the recommendations were or whether Northern’s report would be publicly released. Burke did praise Northern’s work and the value of IES generally. It’s “the gem in the crown” of the Department, Burke said. Northern declined to comment.

Watch the full event here or in the recording below.

National editor Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat’s ideas editor. Reach him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

The Future of the Education Department with Lindsey Burke: A Chalkbeat Ideas event

2025-12-22T18:04:04+00:00

Join us for our next Chalkbeat Ideas event, where our journalists examine the big ideas and debates shaping American schools.

The Trump administration has taken unprecedented steps to unwind the U.S. Department of Education, in line with a long-standing conservative goal and President Trump’s campaign promises.

On Jan. 14, we’ll explore the department’s past, present, and future with Lindsey Burke, deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Education Department. Chalkbeat editors Matt Barnum and Erica Meltzer will discuss with Burke why the administration wants to eliminate the agency, how officials are already working to do so, and what all this means for students, educators, and parents.

RSVP to join this important conversation. There will be time for audience-submitted questions. Please share yours upon registering.

Charter school advocates fear their future at the Labor Department

2025-12-18T12:35:16+00:00

Unlike many other education advocacy groups, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools stayed publicly silent after the Trump administration announced last month that it was outsourcing key parts of the Education Department.

Privately, though, leaders there were worried — and busy.

In an initial email to supporters, which I obtained, National Alliance CEO Starlee Coleman listed a string of “concerns that are top of mind.” One fear, Coleman wrote, was that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose department would manage a number of education programs, was too aligned with labor unions.

Click here to read the full story.

Would more emphasis on high-stakes testing help address America’s learning woes? Here’s what the evidence says.

2025-12-02T22:30:36+00:00

Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

A striking wave of nostalgia is rippling through the education world these days.

A number of commentators and advocates have harkened back to the early aughts when test scores were rising and No Child Left Behind was the law of the land.

“This was an era when elected officials from both political parties came together around a reform agenda,” Harvard University professor Marty West said at a U.S. Senate hearing earlier this year. “That approach had plenty of critics and, as implemented, some real flaws, but it produced results.”

Federally imposed high-stakes testing kept the heat on schools, but after the repeal of No Child Left Behind, we’ve let them off the hook, say these accountability hawks. This is one reason, they argue, why test scores were stagnant before the pandemic and have fallen since.

To keep reading click here.

Trump gave the Labor Department more control over career-technical education. Will students benefit?

2025-10-03T22:58:16+00:00

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Career and technical education is a lot more than learning to weld or draw blood.

It can expose kids to jobs they didn’t even know existed and help them figure out what they want to do with their lives.

It can also teach students concrete skills they can use on the job right after they graduate high school. But high school programs haven’t always lined up well with what employers are looking for, or prepared students for jobs available in their communities.

The Trump administration wants to see career and technical education, or CTE, focus more on preparing students for jobs. To do that, last month it took money and programs that have been under the Education Department’s purview for decades and moved them to the Labor Department, which has historically focused on short-term job training for unemployed adults.

Trump officials say the end goal is to boost participation in the labor force, especially for the millions of young adults who are not in school or working. The change, they say, will reduce the administrative burden on states and make it easier for states to centralize their own workforce development programs.

‘The kids everyone forgot’: The faltering post-pandemic push to reengage teens and young adults not in school, college, or the workforce

Jason Tyszko, a senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, said there could be some short-term disruption, as well as some hard questions to work through. But if the end result is more accountability for programs and more young people in jobs, that would be a “win for families and learners.”

“We think the more alignment, the better,” Tyszko said.

But many career-technical education advocates, as well as Democrats in Congress, say this move is another step toward dismantling the Education Department. They fear there are simply too few staff in both the Education and Labor Departments to manage the transition, and they worry the change will end up steering kids toward short-term job training with fewer paths to advancement.

High school CTE programs can help create “a springboard for lifelong opportunity,” said Amy Loyd, who served as the assistant secretary over career and technical education during the Biden administration.

For example, students who take advanced manufacturing classes in high school can set themselves up for admission to a trade school, while teens who take college-level health care classes can often earn credit toward an associate or bachelor’s degree.

“One of the challenges that we in the career and technical education community have been working to combat is the still-pervasive stigma of career and technical education being for ‘those kids,’” she said. “I think by focusing on the shorter-term credentials we are again rebuilding this narrative that CTE is for kids who are not college material.”

Two agencies in charge of career-technical education

The Education Department says this change is in line with the president’s April 23 executive order calling for the consolidation of “fragmented Federal workforce development programs that are too disconnected from propelling workers into secure, well-paying, and high-need American jobs.”

In May, Trump officials signed an interagency agreement that maintains the Education Department’s oversight authority for career-technical education, but hands over the day-to-day operations to the Labor Department. That includes distributing over $1 billion to states in Perkins funding, which pays for CTE programs in K-12 schools and community colleges, making compliance monitoring visits, and helping states and schools with technical questions.

High-ranking Democrats in Congress have said this transfer of funds and responsibilities is illegal, and the proposal should have gone to Congress. Others in the career and technical education field say the Education and Labor Departments already work closely together and this move isn’t necessary to improve collaboration.

Anna Chappelle, the executive director of the Alabama Workforce Board, hopes what happens at the federal level resembles the transformation happening in her state. The share of young people who were not working or in school in Alabama was the highest in the nation in 2019, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

In recent years, Alabama has worked to align its education and workforce programs, and has seen the share of people age 16 or over who are employed or actively looking for work tick up. In June, the Trump administration tapped Nick Moore, who led that work under Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, as the second-in-command for CTE at the Education Department.

Alabama launched a state apprenticeship agency that offers tools to connect young people to training opportunities. The state also developed a detailed system for identifying which job credentials and career pathways are most valuable in different parts of the state — whether that’s the space industry in the north or the maritime industry in the south.

“When we have this separation, that keeps states siloed,” Chappelle said. “Being able to have credentials of value and workforce pathways in Labor, that is going to help people get the education and training that they need.”

Philadelphia's Thomas Edison High School leads a welding demonstration at a CTE summer program. Skilled trades programs in high schools can set students up for apprenticeships or admission at a technical college.

She thinks the federal change will lead to more money for training and education programs, “rather than the bureaucratic red tape.”

But Loyd, who is now the CEO of All4Ed, a nonprofit that advocates for equity in education, worries there aren’t enough federal staffers left to provide the kind of “personalized and intensive” guidance her team of 80 once did.

The office “was really leaning into helping states think differently, to not just rubber stamp what always has been,” Loyd said. “I worry that all of that capacity-building, all of that partnership with the field, is ultimately hindered and gutted.”

The Education Department said it would send some staff to the Labor Department, but how many is unclear. The Education Department did not respond to questions. Chalkbeat received out-of-office automatic replies from multiple spokespeople due to the government shutdown.

Some advocates fear states and schools won’t get clear answers to questions about whether new ideas are allowable under the law or how to make sure CTE programs serve all students.

“If we had a question about kids with disabilities and CTE, we knew where to go,” said Braden Goetz, who served in the CTE office during the Biden administration and is now a senior policy advisor at the Center on Education and Labor at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “I’m concerned that in the Department of Labor they won’t have those resources.”

Some fear overemphasis on short-term job training

The Education Department has said its agreement with the Labor Department will integrate education and job training programs “with an employment first perspective, which places employers at the forefront of workforce development programs.” The document mentions “upskilling” students — a term that’s typically used to refer to retraining adults in the workforce, not kids in K-12 schools.

Some education advocates worry that sends the wrong messages to students about the purpose of career-technical education programs, and harkens back to a time when many low-income Black and Latino kids were tracked to lower-level vocational classes.

Loyd, the former Biden official, worries that folding CTE into the Labor Department’s work will lead to an overemphasis on helping students earn industry credentials that often don’t translate to higher wages in the workforce.

Federal law requires CTE programs to prepare students for jobs that are “high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand.” A heavier focus on short-term job outcomes could steer more students toward in-demand jobs that don’t pay very well, Loyd said, such as certified nursing assistants or home health care aides.

“I love programs like phlebotomy programs in high schools where students can earn meaningful certificates that can get them a job,” Loyd said. “But again, this should be a stepping stone,” she said, not the end game.

Tyszko, of the Commerce Foundation, says time will tell if kids get steered like that. He notes that the Labor Department does have experience connecting young people with apprenticeships, which generally do help workers earn more than their peers.

“They’re very capable of supporting a set of activities in the field that promote career awareness and aren’t directly tied to job placement,” Tyszko said, adding it would be wrong to assume the Labor Department’s focus on short-term job training “would entirely consume” career-technical education.

The Labor Department also may be better positioned to hold CTE programs accountable for their outcomes in the workforce, and whether they actually match what employers want and need, he said.

Chappelle in Alabama says what programs kids have access to also affects whether they can make an informed decision about their path. The kind and quality of CTE programs offered at schools varies a lot depending on where kids live, and states and businesses share in the responsibility of closing any gaps.

“We are all working together to make sure we have what’s available for our students and our citizens to go up in life,” she said. “We’re not trying to keep people down. That doesn’t serve anybody.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration push to cut support for English learners turns spotlight on states

2025-09-23T23:28:16+00:00

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Even if the federal government renounces its role in educating English learners, Cheruba Sophia Chavez knows what’s in the fine print.

A federal toolkit helped the New Orleans educator support new immigrant students. Federal guidance helped her train teachers to avoid common violations of English learners’ civil rights. And U.S. Department of Education resources have shown her how Louisiana’s instruction stacks up with other states.

So when the Trump administration reduced the office that oversees English learners to a single person, revoked that guidance, and took the toolkits offline, she pointed teachers to the expansive footnotes on the now-rescinded guidance chock full of “precedent, and law, and case studies, and rulings.”

“Those are still standing,” said Chavez, who has worked with English learners for over a decade. “Our obligation to serve these children remains the same.”

Under President Donald Trump, the federal government is systematically retreating from helping educate English learners and protecting their civil rights. In addition to yanking federal guidance and resources, the president is seeking to eliminate all $890 million in federal funding for English language acquisition programs in schools.

All of that puts more responsibility on states and local schools to educate English learners. Their track record of doing so is mixed.

Some say states can and will fill the void, and may do a better job without federal oversight. But many educators and experts fear that setup will leave English learners and their families behind. Services and protections for English learners will become more scattershot, they say, and students whose rights are violated may have no recourse other than to file lawsuits — an expensive and uncertain proposition for families and schools.

Already, about 1 in 5 teachers say their school rarely or never meets the needs of children learning English, according to a 2023 nationally representative survey.

“We have states who will make sure that the students keep receiving the resources and the instruction that English learners need, but we have other states who aren’t necessarily going to,” said Montserrat Garibay, who led the federal Office of English Language Acquisition during the Biden administration. She worries “we’re going to go back to the ’90s ‘sink or swim’ methods, where you have students who are not going to learn the language and are going to fail.”

Should the feds pay for students to learn English?

All schools must help English learners overcome language barriers so they can access a meaningful education. It’s a requirement under the 1974 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Lau v. Nichols.

Right now, states get federal Title III dollars for English language acquisition programs based on census counts of children learning English. School districts apply for that money, and states award it based on how many English learners and immigrant students they enroll.

Immigrants are generally more successful in the U.S. if they acquire English skills, said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates for lower rates of immigration. And public school programs that teach kids English are “an investment that’s generally understood as worth it,” Vaughan said, especially for younger children.

But she understands why taxpayers might be “frustrated by having to bear the cost” of programs for older children who arrive with little formal schooling and may need more intensive support.

To Vaughan, the Trump administration is doing the right thing by moving away from influencing what states provide with offers of federal funding.

“I would expect states to support local communities that are dealing with it,” she said. “States are going to have to work this out within their own budget.”

States already dictate what kind of instruction they offer to English learners and how much native language support schools provide.

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says eliminating Title III funding would rightly reduce the federal government’s role in education.

“I don’t believe that we need Title III in order to have programs for English language learners,” Butcher said. States should be able to identify on their own which student needs deserve the most support, he said. “This is the kind of freedom that we should be giving state officials.”

And if a state chose not to spend anything to help English learners become proficient in English? “There would be a civil rights lawsuit,” Butcher said.

Others say the federal government sets immigration policy, so it should help states pay for the K-12 education of new arrivals, and that the federal government has a vested interest in helping English learners — most of whom were born in the U.S.

“If they’re not well-equipped with the skills that they need for the 21st century, who’s going to pay for my retirement?” said Garibay, the former Biden official. “I hate to say that it’s an economy thing, but it is.”

Congress currently puts $890 million annually toward English language acquisition. That Title III money is meant to pay for extra support like after-school tutoring, family outreach, and teacher training.

But many educators and advocates say those federal funds have failed to keep pace with the growth of the English learner population and fall far short of what schools need.

Still, Trump has proposed eliminating Title III funds from the fiscal year 2026 budget, a move that his administration says would “end overreach from Washington.” After the president signed an executive order designating English as the nation’s official language, Trump officials said the English language acquisition program should be eliminated because it “actually deemphasizes English primacy” and encourages bilingualism.

The broader political climate is also a factor. Many children from immigrant families are experiencing heightened stress and fear as the Trump administration’s deportation campaign intensifies. That makes it harder to show up regularly to school and stay focused in class.

Federal law and court decisions say states can choose what kind of instruction they provide to English learners. Some states lean more heavily on helping children become proficient in their native language first, which research has shown can help them transfer skills and develop stronger English abilities.

The Senate appropriations committee passed a bipartisan bill that would hold Title III funding steady at $890 million. But the House appropriations committee approved the elimination of Title III, citing “funding constraints.”

Leslie Villegas, a senior policy analyst at New America, a left-leaning think tank, says ending Title III would be a general funding cut that would “hurt all students.” And it would put educators in “a really difficult position to make hard choices that they shouldn’t have to make.”

Becky Trammell, a special education teacher in Minneapolis Public Schools, knows what that’s like.

Recent waves of immigration brought more Spanish-speaking families to her elementary school, in addition to Somali- and Hmong-speakers. After splitting an English learner teacher with other schools, her school now has two full-time.

But Trammell said she still has to rely on apps and phone interpretation services that don’t always work.

Students at a New York City high school for newcomers work on a history essay using resources in the hallway.

Once, a Somali-speaking parent thought she was being pranked because the phone interpreter didn’t actually speak Somali. And one of her students told her he doesn’t like the phone translation app, so she reads it aloud in her broken Spanish.

“We’re already working at a deficit when it comes to staffing and money,” Trammell said. If her school were to lose Title III dollars, she worries “they’re going to cut positions or what little supports we do have, we’re not going to have those.”

What are key state policies for English learners?

States already set many of their own policies for educating English learners and see a wide range of outcomes.

English learners in Texas, for example, are much more likely to be enrolled in bilingual education programs where they receive native language support than in California, which has a complicated history with English-only instruction. Texas’ English learners consistently outperform English learners in California on key national tests — though state test scores in Texas have raised concerns.

With less federal involvement and oversight, Villegas at New America worries families of English learners and their advocates will find it harder to seek redress for their complaints.

“Leaving it up to the discretion of states to do that, that’s really troubling,” she said. That is “not the point of civil rights.”

The Trump administration has released several school districts, including Boston and Newark, New Jersey from settlement agreements meant to correct inadequate services for English learners. In Newark, the end of government monitoring came just months after the Biden administration flagged the district for failing to consistently use qualified interpreters.

Chavez, the Louisiana educator, fears that if Title III goes away, there will be less federal monitoring, and that English learners will only get their needs met if they make up a “critical mass” at a school.

One moment sticks in her memory: When Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry was sworn in last year, one of the Republican’s first actions was to veto a new policy Chavez and other educators lobbied for to help more English learners get their diplomas.

“We know their posture toward English learners,” Chavez said, adding that she and others aren’t “looking to the state for anything affirmative to protect our children and to close the disparate outcomes for English learners in our state.”

Still, advocates for English learners say there is a lot states can do.

They can enshrine the Supreme Court ruling that gave children the right to receive a free public education regardless of their immigration status in state law, as Illinois and Massachusetts recently did. Or they can bolster requirements for how English learners are taught in their state, as Michigan recently did.

School boards could also adopt policies that add oversight and consequences if goals aren’t met, Villegas said.

When Garibay worked in the federal English learner office, she saw “a lot of great work” happening in dual language programs and parent engagement.

“That gives me a lot of hope,” she said. “In these very uncertain times, the most important work happens at the local level.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration rolls back pivotal guidance about educational rights of English learners

2025-08-20T20:01:44+00:00

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The Trump administration has quietly rescinded guidance spelling out the educational rights of the nation’s more than 5 million English learners that educators say was crucial to serving children from immigrant families.

In recent weeks, a Dear Colleague letter issued in 2015 by the Education Department and Department of Justice was stamped with a red message saying the document had been formally rescinded. Neither agency issued a public notice explaining the rationale for the change as they usually do when they roll back federal guidance.

The rescission comes after the Trump administration laid off nearly every staffer in the Education Department responsible for serving English learners and looks to wind down a federal website that provides toolkits for helping English learners. The administration has also proposed zeroing out dedicated Title III funding for English learners and issued an executive order declaring English the official language of the United States.

Trump officials also cleared the way for immigration agents to make arrests at or near schools, child care centers, and after-school programs, undoing a longstanding precedent to treat those places as sensitive locations. The administration’s mass deportation campaign has left many school communities shaken and lowered student attendance in some parts of the country.

Unlike students with disabilities, whose rights are clearly spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the rights of English learners stem from multiple Supreme Court cases and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin, which courts have interpreted to mean schools must take steps to help children overcome language barriers so they can obtain a meaningful education.

The 40-page Dear Colleague letter was groundbreaking when it was released under former President Barack Obama and remained a critical resource, according to educators who relied on the guidance. It gathered various case law, legal precedents, and federal requirements regarding English learners in the same place and provided clear examples about how students should be served.

Rescinding the guidance doesn’t change those laws, but advocates for English learners worry it will now be harder for schools to know if they are complying with the law and to hold schools accountable when they are not.

“A lot of people are very worried at the state and district level,” said Montserrat Garibay, the advocacy chair for the National Association for Bilingual Education. Without clear guidance, “there’s a high risk that EL students are not going to be receiving their linguistic and their academic support that they need.”

Trump Education Department decimates office serving 5 million English learners in public schools

Garibay, the former director of the Office of English Language Acquisition during the Biden administration, likened the guidance to a “bible” for educators who work with students learning English. Her organization is hosting a training next month to help schools navigate its loss.

Garibay said she used to print out the 40-page guidance document when she was a teachers union leader in Texas and use it to train teachers. She knew teachers who would highlight the pages and bring it to their principal to ensure they assessed English learners properly and provided families with documents in their native language.

An Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat on Tuesday that the department had rescinded the guidance “because it is not aligned with Administration priorities” but did not respond to followup questions about what exactly was out of alignment.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency had no comment on Wednesday.

But the agency referred the Washington Post to a July memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to all federal agencies offering guidance to comply with Trump’s order that English be the official language.

That memo says the Justice Department would rescind any guidance that interprets the federal ban on national original discrimination to require language services for people who aren’t proficient in English. It also said the agency would “lead a coordinated effort to minimize non-essential multilingual services” and “redirect resources toward English-language education and assimilation.”

The 2015 guidance document says that schools must, to the extent practicable, translate certain notices for parents into a language they can understand and provide free oral translation when a written translation isn’t possible.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Schools do not have to follow Trump administration’s DEI order, federal judge rules

2025-08-15T20:57:58+00:00

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Schools do not have to abide by or certify compliance with the Trump administration’s contested interpretation of civil rights law laid out in February, after a federal judge overturned the policy and related guidance on Thursday.

In an opinion that applies to schools nationwide, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote that the Trump administration had failed to follow the proper administrative procedures to make such a sweeping change, and that both a Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter issued by the Education Department and a related certification requirement were unlawful.

Multiple lawsuits against the rules already had resulted in a patchwork of injunctions. However, Gallagher’s decision will likely bring some relief to many school leaders and state education officials who had worried they would lose federal funding if they did not certify compliance with the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal anti-discrimination laws — and that complying could mean dropping commonly used diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

“The government did not merely remind educators that discrimination is illegal: it initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished,” Gallagher wrote.

The Feb. 14 guidance and certification requirement had been put on hold as three separate lawsuits worked their way through the courts. That included the case brought by the American Federation of Teachers and others that led to the Thursday ruling, as well as lawsuits from a coalition of state attorneys general and the Legal Defense Fund on behalf of the NAACP.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the AFT, said in a statement on Friday that the judge’s ruling represented “a huge win for students, families and educators” and a rebuke of the government’s attempt to “chill teachers’ duty to create safe and welcoming classrooms where critical thinking is valued and history is presented in an open and honest way.”

In an email, a spokesperson for the Education Department said the department was disappointed in the judge’s ruling, but that getting rid of the guidance “has not stopped our ability to enforce Title VI protections for students at an unprecedented level,” referring to the federal law that bans discrimination based on race, skin color, and national origin in schools.

“The Department remains committed to its responsibility to uphold students’ anti-discrimination protections under the law,” the spokesperson wrote.

The spokesperson did not respond to a question about whether the Trump administration intends to appeal the decision.

The Trump administration continues to advance its opposition to DEI on several fronts. It is conducting civil rights investigations into states and school districts over practices ranging from the launch of a Black student success plan in Chicago to the use of race-based affinity groups for staff and students. Officials have slashed federal grants designed to expand opportunities for students of color or that were awarded with student diversity in mind.

And Attorney General Pam Bondi recently issued a memo to all federal agencies with similar intentions as the Education Department’s now-defunct guidance, noting that DEI programs can be discriminatory and that relying on certain race-neutral criteria, such as “cultural competence,” “lived experience,” or geography, can violate federal law if it’s used a proxy for a protected characteristic, like race, to create advantages for some people.

Gallagher, who was nominated to her position by President Donald Trump during his first term, did not weigh in on whether the Education Department’s DEI policy was “good or bad,” but said that the agency could not go “leapfrogging” over important procedures in federal law.

The judge held that the Education Department’s guidance and certification requirement amounted to new legislative rules — not a restating of existing federal laws and requirements, as the Trump administration has said — and that the Education Department should have explained why it changed course and offered a public notice and comment period to give schools and others adequate time to weigh in.

The department’s Feb. 14 guidance also interprets the Supreme Court ruling that bars affirmative action in higher education admissions “far more broadly,” the federal judge wrote, to include much more than “preventing using race as a factor in ‘zero-sum’ opportunities like admissions, hiring, promotions, or awards.”

“The administration is entitled to its own views, including on how court cases and laws should be interpreted,” Gallagher wrote. “But it is not entitled to misrepresent the law’s boundaries, and must at a minimum acknowledge and consider the relevant legal framework as it is. It cannot blur the lines between its viewpoint and existing law.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Are federal tax-credit scholarships ‘free money’ for Democratic governors, or a poison apple?

2025-08-13T22:23:22+00:00

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North Carolina’s Josh Stein recently became the first Democratic governor to embrace a new federal school choice tax credit — right after vetoing a bill in support of it.

Stein’s veto statement rebuffing Republican lawmakers’ effort to enroll North Carolina in the program described the tax credit, which Congress included in a budget bill backed by President Donald Trump, as bad policy that would funnel “billions in tax giveaways to wealthy parents” whose children already attend private school.

But the program could also help public school students, he said. And the law gives governors the final say over whether their states participate.

“I see opportunities for the federal scholarship donation tax-credit program to benefit North Carolina’s public school kids,” Stein wrote on Aug. 6. “Once the federal government issues sound guidance, I intend to opt North Carolina in so we can invest in the public school students most in need of after school programs, tutoring, and other resources.”

Many Democratic governors have opposed vouchers as diverting public money to private schools. But the tax-credit program doesn’t touch state budgets — instead the federal government reimburses taxpayers for donations to scholarship-granting organizations. And the law allows donations to pay for tutoring and other educational expenses for both private and public school students, not just private school tuition, at a time of growing budget uncertainty.

Chalkbeat asked all 23 Democratic governors whether they plan to opt into the federal tax-credit scholarship. Only two said no, saying it would hurt public schools. Stein’s veto statement represents the first tentative yes. Another indicated he’s “excited” about the program’s potential to help kids from low-income backgrounds. Others declined to comment or said they were waiting to learn more about the program while reiterating their support for public schools.

The hesitation of so many governors underscores the challenges facing the Democratic Party in defining its own education agenda and reconnecting with key constituencies. The gap leaves room for lobbying and political realignments.

Among the groups trying to sway the conversation is Democrats for Education Reform, which for nearly two decades opposed vouchers. CEO Jorge Elorza this year called on Democrats to embrace private school choice as a progressive value.

“What we are trying to do is get Democratic governors to see the possibilities in this,” Elorza said. “A lot of Democrats are choice-curious. Part of the work we’re doing is providing political cover, but we’re also trying to help them see how this advances their own priorities.”

Whether the tax-credit scholarship does, in fact, advance Democratic priorities could depend on rules the Trump administration still needs to develop. They could end up limiting governors’ ability to steer money to the neediest students.

In that scenario, given Democrats’ argument that the budget bill mostly helps the wealthy, “why would they then support a tuition tax program that essentially does the same thing, that gives money disproportionately to wealthy families who already have their kids in private schools?” said Thomas Toch, director of the think tank FutureEd. “Is that an argument that a Democrat wants to run on?”

Tax-credit program gives school choice supporters a foothold

Starting in 2027, the tax-credit scholarship program will offer taxpayers a dollar-for-dollar credit on their federal income tax for donations up to $1,700 to eligible scholarship-granting organizations. The money can go toward any expense allowed under Coverdell education savings accounts, which includes tuition, tutoring, specialized services for children with disabilities, and computers.

Families earning up to 300% of area median income qualify. That threshold includes well-off families in expensive urban areas but might exclude middle-class families in some rural communities.

Because of how the bill evolved in Congress, scholarship groups will need to raise a lot of money from small donors to generate significant revenue, and they’ll need to fight state-by-state battles to expand the program’s reach.

“The original goal was to bring school choice to all 50 states,” said Rob Enlow of the advocacy group EdChoice. “This does not do that. It brings the potential for school choice to all 50 states. It gives the advocates in those states something to grab onto.”

Vouchers are booming, but lack of rural private schools that accept them means students miss out

Norton Rainey, CEO of ACE Scholarships, is happy to grab on. Over 25 years, ACE has given out some 110,000 scholarships to students from low-income backgrounds worth a collective $333 million. He’s prepared to make the case to donors and governors that these scholarships transform lives and deserve their support.

“It’s a game changer for our parents, our kids, our communities, our country,” he said. “I think this is opening up the flood gates.”

Greta Alexander sent four boys to Fort Worth public schools where they struggled to learn in crowded classrooms and where they “sometimes had to fight.” Her youngest son got caught up in drugs. She wanted something different for her daughter Miracle — and an ACE scholarship provided it.

Miracle got one-on-one attention, a safe learning environment, and advanced academics at Temple Christian School, Alexander said.

“That she had the opportunity to be in an environment where she could thrive meant the world to us,” said Alexander, who testified in support of Texas’ voucher expansion and hopes the federal program helps even more students. “I’m so excited that other children will have the opportunity for that.”

Federal rules could sour Democrats on tax credits

Stories like Alexander’s highlight the crux of the school choice debate, said Elorza of Democrats for Education Reform, which is that “across the country, too many schools are just not getting it done for kids.”

School choice also polls well among working class parents of color, a key Democratic constituency where Republicans have made inroads. The tax credits represent “literally free money” to help these families, he said.

But governors like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, who once supported vouchers, are waiting on federal regulations that won’t be finalized by the Treasury Department for some time. They could dictate the extent to which Democratic governors can steer money towards certain student groups, or put conditions on private schools that ultimately benefit from the tax credits.

Education advocates also wonder whether these rules will let a scholarship-granting organization raise money for public-school tutoring programs, or only for private services. Or could states find a way under the regulations to turn the money into a public school enrichment fund?

“The Shapiro Administration is reviewing potential impacts of the new federal school tax credit provision, which does not go into effect until 2027, and awaiting additional federal guidance,” spokesperson Manuel Bonder said in a statement.

It's not yet clear how much authority governors would have to steer money from federal tax-credit scholarships toward some groups and away from others.

While the law requires participating governors to submit a list of eligible scholarship-granting organizations each year, federal rules are unlikely to grant governors the ability to pick and choose among them, said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank.

Governors could encourage the formation of groups that align with their values and help them raise money, Blew said — but the price will be accepting organizations they disagree with.

In Illinois, where lawmakers let a state tax-credit scholarship program expire a few years ago, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he’s concerned about enabling discrimination. But he didn’t rule out Illinois participating.

In response to a reporter’s question last month, Pritzker said the program would have to be inclusive, and “not just a program that’s about private schools, sometimes religious schools, and sometimes schools that would reject having an LGBTQ member as a teacher.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who supported versions of a state voucher proposal early in his political career, “is excited by the possibility of unlocking new federal tax credits for donations to help low-income kids achieve,” spokesperson Eric Maruyama said. “He encourages the administration to ensure these tax credits lead to improved student outcomes and maintain maximum flexibility for states who choose to participate in this program.”

Other governor’s offices did not respond to Chalkbeat, said they had no comment at this time, or said they were reviewing the federal legislation to understand it better.

So far, only Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said they would not opt in.

Michael Coleman, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham, said she is concerned students with disabilities might be shut out of the program because private schools aren’t required to admit them; that public schools could lose more students; and that there is no guarantee schools receiving vouchers would provide a high-quality education.

Critics also fear the tax credits could be used to justify cutting federal education spending in the future.

Voters have yet to support vouchers at the ballot box. But Blew believes the opt-in decision could become a potent issue in 2026 gubernatorial races and force a conversation about school choice that puts foes of the tax credits at a political disadvantage.

“You’ll have the education freedom candidates,” he said, “and they will be both Democrats and Republicans.”

Purple states could see power struggles over participation

Education politics can be particularly complicated in states with divided government, such as North Carolina.

Voters there backed Donald Trump in the last three presidential contests and at the same time elected Democratic governors. Republicans lawmakers overrode the veto of the previous Democratic governor to launch a major voucher expansion in 2024. Some Democrats have broken ranks to join Republicans on school choice bills.

Partners/Parents for Educational Freedom said in a statement that Stein’s veto “protects the status quo, deflects from real solutions, delays greater opportunity for students, and signals to every parent that their child’s educational opportunity depends on their zip code, their parents’ income, and political games.”

The advocacy group wants lawmakers to override Stein’s veto.

Heather Koons, communications and research director for the advocacy group Public Schools First NC, sees the federal tax-credit scholarship as “just another voucher program” and fears that any money for public school students will amount to “crumbs.”

“Gov. Stein has been a great friend to public education, and I don’t want to second guess him,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll do everything he can to make lemonade out of lemons, if lemons are going to be shoved down our throat anyway. Ultimately I wish this never existed.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump wants to put money for homeless kids into a block grant. School staff are wary.

2025-07-31T20:03:55+00:00

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Federal funding for homeless students has helped Metro Nashville Public Schools meet kids’ evolving needs for decades.

It has sent tutors to family shelters to help children with their school work. It has paid for transportation when families got priced out of their homes and suddenly had to move cross-county.

And it pays for liaisons like Catherine Knowles, who for 28 years has listened to what homeless families say they really need and tried to respond. That’s why the district has a hotel-friendly food pantry filled with items like shelf-stable milk, microwaveable mac and cheese cups, and just-add-water cereal bowls.

“We’re giving that recognition of: We really do see what you’re going through,” Knowles said, “and we then have the flexibility to be responsive to that because we have funding and we have dedicated resources.”

The Trump administration has proposed doing away with this dedicated funding. The president’s Education Department budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 consolidates money for homeless students and 17 other programs into a single, much smaller K-12 block grant.

States would get $2 billion, down from the roughly $6.5 billion the federal government spends now. Schools could keep spending that money on the students and activities envisioned in federal law, or on a range of other activities, such as “promoting patriotic education,” or improving instruction in math, reading, science, and history.

For America’s 250th birthday, Trump champions ‘patriotic education’ in schools again

In the current federal budget, Congress allocated $129 million to support homeless students with McKinney-Vento funding, named for the 1987 federal law that guarantees homeless children certain educational rights. That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly $18 billion the federal government spends specifically on high-poverty schools. Liaisons like Knowles worry homeless students will fall down the priority list if schools no longer get funding specifically to serve them.

“There is such increasing need among students in public education, in general,” Knowles said. “Without McKinney-Vento dedicated funding specifically spelling out our responsibilities and the rights of students experiencing homelessness, I’m just afraid it could kind of all get lost in the shuffle.”

Why Congress set aside money for homeless students

The Education Department has said the block grant would give states and schools the ability to spend federal funds more in line with their needs, “without the unnecessary administrative burdens imposed under current law.”

Several Republican governors have said they’d welcome education block grants. And some states, such as Iowa, that are seeking more flexibility in how they spend their federal education dollars have said they would continue to meet the needs of unique student groups, including homeless students.

Right now, the federal government gives each state money for homeless students based on their share of Title I funds, which support students in poverty. Then the state awards the money to districts on a competitive basis, because the sum is too small to divide among all of them. Around 1 in 5 school districts nationally get McKinney-Vento funding, which means many districts are required to hire homeless liaisons and meet homeless students’ needs without dedicated funding.

But school liaisons and advocates for homeless youth are calling on Congress to maintain funding for students experiencing homelessness as a standalone program.

In the early days of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, Congress tasked states and schools with rewriting policies and collecting data about students experiencing homelessness. That work exposed gaps in support, and prompted Congress to set aside money specifically for these students in 1990.

“The dedicated funding was about responding to those barriers,” said Barbara Duffield, the executive director of the nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection. In addition to legal protections, “you also have to have somebody who goes out looking for you, makes sure you have a ride, actually makes sure you can get enrolled.”

Since then, McKinney-Vento funding has played an outsized role in under-resourced communities that lack shelters, and “where the school literally might be the source of services for these families,” Duffield said.

Volunteers stack the shelves of the hotel-friendly food pantry in Metro Nashville Public Schools.

Researchers and school staff also point out that students experiencing homelessness have specific needs and greater academic challenges than even other children from low-income families. Homeless students have higher rates of absenteeism and are less likely to graduate from high school than their housed peers, even when compared with other kids living in poverty.

“Just imagine: If you go to a school that has high poverty, you’ve already been in poverty your whole life, and now you’re also unhoused,” said Jessica Smith, a social worker who is the McKinney-Vento coordinator for Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools. “It looks completely different than a student who just is low-income. Those babies need assistance, too, but our babies need just a little bit more of a focus.”

Smith, for example, uses part of her district’s McKinney-Vento funding to take high schoolers who live on their own without help from a parent to visit colleges and trade schools.

In Tennessee’s Robertson County Schools, McKinney-Vento funding provides students experiencing homelessness with clothing that meets the district’s dress code. And recently, it allowed the district to hire a translator to work specifically with Spanish-speaking homeless families, said Jennifer Dusky, a social worker who also serves as the district’s homeless liaison.

The rural community 30 miles north of Nashville is a major tobacco producer and attracts many migrant families. As that population has grown, the translator who handles requests from across the district couldn’t meet all the needs of homeless families and still get her other duties done, Dusky said.

“It was a need, for sure, to have a dedicated translator,” Dusky said. “Homelessness is not a comfortable thing for anyone to talk about, it’s very vulnerable and very scary. And then, of course, you add in the fact that you’re in a new country, you don’t speak the language. There’s all these fears and they’re very hesitant to talk with us. I totally get that.”

When the district hired a Spanish-speaking translator who had experienced homelessness herself, she helped identify, and provide support to, more homeless children.

“You can almost see the comfort just come over their face whenever they see her and talk to her,” Dusky said.

But when the district got half as much McKinney-Vento funding from the state this year as it has in years past, Dusky got a preview of the tough trade-offs schools nationwide would face if standalone funding went away. Her district had to decide if it could afford to keep the translator and the person who maintains McKinney-Vento records. For at least the next year, the district will dip into its own pocket to do so, but Dusky isn’t sure how long that will last.

“What can our program realistically withstand?” she said. “What can our community support?”

Congress will decide if block grant proposal advances

It is unclear whether Congress will approve the block grant proposal for homeless students and other programs.

The Senate Appropriations committee rejected the block grant in the bipartisan education budget bill they approved Thursday, and kept McKinney-Vento funding at $129 million a year. The House Appropriations committee won’t consider the education portion of the president’s budget until it returns from recess in September.

Some worry that Congress could repeal all or part of the law that authorizes McKinney-Vento funding to make the block grant legal, potentially leaving homeless students with fewer protections. Just a handful of states guarantee homeless students the same main educational rights outlined in federal law; most do not have any spelled out in state law, according to a recent report by SchoolHouse Connection.

Smith in Kansas City, Kansas, worries what that could mean for her students, many of whom stay over the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, because there are no shelters in her community. When that happens, both districts share the cost of transporting the child to school, Smith said, but she’s not sure what would happen if Missouri and Kansas decided to spend their block grants differently.

“If we don’t have something that focuses on this particular population they’ll get overlooked — as they often do already,” Smith said.

Correction: This article has been updated to accurately describe how federal funding for homeless students is determined. It’s based on each state’s share of Title I funds, not on how many homeless students they identify.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump administration’s changes to Head Start sow uncertainty among Illinois child care providers

2025-07-23T15:58:38+00:00

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In DeKalb and Kane counties west of Chicago, more than 240 low-income families depend on Two Rivers Head Start Agency for child care, a food pantry, car repairs, baby items, and other services. But over the last six months, since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Executive Director Kelly Neidel has seen families stop coming out of fear of being deported.

Now, she worries that a new Trump administration directive, which bars undocumented children from accessing Head Start, will further erode the bonds between families and providers.

“Head Start is all about building trust,” said Neidel, whose organization operates three centers across the two counties and receives funding from Head Start and the Community Service Block Grant among other funds. “And I think this will do the opposite.”

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced earlier this month that it is rescinding an almost 30-year-old guidance from the Clinton administration that allowed undocumented immigrants to access Head Start and other programs because they were not considered federal public benefits. Under the change, Head Start is now classified as a public benefit, meaning undocumented immigrants do not qualify for the program.

The change has caused confusion among Illinois Head Start providers and advocates who are concerned for the families they serve, unsure what they are expected to do, and worried about a drop in student enrollment that would mean losing funding.

Head Start serves almost 29,000 children and pregnant women across Illinois, according to the Illinois Head Start Association.

Under current Head Start rules, providers are responsible for checking a family’s eligibility to enroll in the program. But they’ve never been required to collect citizenship data, according to some Illinois Head Start providers. While the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has yet to say how Head Start providers should check for immigration status, some providers are concerned that it will place an administrative burden on staff at child care centers.

Nadia Gronkowski, program manager of advocacy and policy at Start Early, an early childhood advocacy group and Head Start grantee that distributes federal funding to community-based organizations, worries about the consequences of having this policy and its impact on staff.

“It sort of all depends on how it’s implemented, but there’s a possibility that [staff] would now need to be checking out citizenship verification for every student,” said Gronkowski. “That’s a significant amount of staff time and costs to do that sort of verification.”

Other Head Start providers are concerned about a possible drop in enrollment. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Head Start rolled out a “full enrollment initiative,” which required providers to keep enrollment levels at or above 97% every year. If enrollment drops below that, the federal Office of Head Start can reduce annual funding.

Brenda Berman, spokesperson for the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, a Head Start grantee that reaches over 15,000 children and adults through direct service and community partnerships and runs three child care centers in Chicago, said withholding funding could create a “spiraling effect.” If the Carole Robertson Center loses funding, it would lose slots for children, impacting families and communities.

For now, Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, said her organization is encouraging Head Start providers not to implement any new policies until there is further guidance from the Trump administration. However, she doesn’t know when that will happen.

“From what we hear, the Office of Head Start has been told by the administration to work on guidance,” said Morrison-Frichtl. “It’ll be weeks before any guidance comes out, or months. I’d be surprised if we have it by the end of the summer.”

There has been pushback to the Trump administration’s policy changes. The Illinois Head Start Association along with other state Head Start associations are a part of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union arguing that changes to Head Start are “unconstitutional and unlawful” and requesting a stop to all “actions to dismantle Head Start.” The lawsuit was originally filed in late April, and the ACLU is seeking to amend the lawsuit this month to include a challenge to the recent directive barring undocumented children from the program.

Additionally, 20 states, including Illinois, and the District of Columbia announced on Monday they are suing the Trump administration over new rules to restrict undocumented immigrants and some visa-holders from federal programs that provide early childhood education, health care, and other services saying the administration did not follow procedures to establish new rules, misinterprets federal welfare laws, and puts an excessive burden on Head Start providers to verify immigration status of students and their families.

Head Start has provided access to child care, preschool, and other services for low-income families for 60 years and historically received bipartisan support. Now, the program is facing challenges under Trump’s second term and is at risk of being eliminated.

Earlier in April, the federal Department of Health and Human Services closed five of ten regional Head Start offices around the country, including one in Chicago that served Illinois and states throughout the Midwest.

When Trump ordered a freeze on federal grants in January, child care programs were unable to access funds used for their day-to-day operations. Even when the decision was reversed within days, child care providers still struggled in February to access funding. Some even had to close their doors temporarily to families.

Despite the uncertainty, some child care providers and advocates are staying optimistic.

“Earlier this year when Head Start was proposed for elimination, the Head Start community rallied like we have never seen it rally before,” Gronkowski said. “They stood up and said, ‘You can’t do this, this is important to our communities, and this is important to our families.’”

She hopes people will continue to rally around the program.

Neidel, of Two Rivers Head Start Agency, said she wants to ensure kids are safe and to maintain relationships with families, but it’s hard with the changes happening at the federal level.

“You just want to, sometimes, break down and cry,” said Neidel, describing her worries about the families she serves. “Because you’re looking at them and thinking, ‘God, what’s going to happen to them?’”

Correction 7/23: This story has been updated to include the full name of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning and clarifies how the center reaches 15,000 children and adults.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois Gov. Pritzker and 16 state leaders demand the release of $7 billion in federal funds for schools

2025-07-17T20:37:50+00:00

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Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, along with 16 other Democratic governors, sent a letter Thursday to federal education and budget officials demanding the Trump administration release almost $7 billion in funding for K-12 schools that was expected to go out by July 1.

The billions of dollars was approved by Congress in March as a part of a continuing budget resolution. However, the Trump administration told state education officials on June 30 it was halting funding meant to be released the next day, pending further review of how funds are being spent.

The White House Office of Management and Budget told Chalkbeat in early July that initial findings show funds were being used to “subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.”

In a press release announcing the letter sent by the group of governors, Pritzker said, “The Trump administration is not only openly flouting the law, they are abandoning their responsibility to our students.”

The letter, sent to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, called the Trump administration’s freeze in funding “unacceptable.” In addition to Illinois, the 16 other states whose governors signed onto the letter were Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.

The funding freeze “disrupts school operations, undermines student services, and violates the Department’s obligation to administer funding in a timely and responsible manner,” said the letter.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy sent a similar letter to McMahon and Vought last week, urging the federal officials to distribute the money to prevent delays in “critical services” for schools.

Several states are also suing the federal government over the halting of the education funds. Twenty-four states, including Illinois, and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit earlier this week claiming that withholding these funds violates the Constitution and federal laws and calling for the money to be released immediately.

Illinois was expecting to receive about $218.7 million in federal funding for services supporting English learners, migrant education, teacher professional development, student enrichment programs, and after-school programs, according to a spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Education earlier this month.

The federal funding now frozen included $160 million for Michigan, $70 million for Colorado, $118 million for Tennessee, $230 million for Pennsylvania, and $107 million for Indiana.

Around the country, state education officials have also called out the Trump administration for withholding funding. Earlier this month, Illinois State Superintendent Tony Sanders called the move “deeply disruptive.”

Becky Vevea contributed to this report.

A federal program helps NYC families eat healthy meals. Trump’s new legislation cuts it.

2025-07-11T19:30:47+00:00

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On a sweltering afternoon this week, Ana Garcia, 41, and her 3-year-old son, Elliott, arrived at the Goodhue Community Center on Staten Island to pick up their weekly haul of fresh, affordable produce.

Garcia tasted a sample of tabbouleh salad. She and her son surveyed a spread of leafy greens, zucchini, summer squash, and peaches. For eight years, her family has returned regularly to buy a box of locally sourced produce. This week’s box — priced at $14, or $7 for those with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits — included a bounty of fresh fruit and vegetables, plus a recipe for tabbouleh.

“It’s awesome,” Garcia said. “We love coming here.”

But the Food Box program, administered by the nonprofit Children’s Aid, may not exist much longer. President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” — passed by Congress and signed by Trump last week — eliminated funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education, or SNAP-Ed, and made other changes to SNAP. SNAP-Ed, which funds nutrition education and anti-obesity initiatives nationwide, is set to expire on Sept. 30.

That will mean the disappearance of programs that help people on a limited budget eat healthier and shop smarter, teach children and families how to cook meals from scratch, and promote physically active lifestyles. Those efforts seem to align with the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, initiative, but will be impacted nonetheless.

Advocates are bracing for how the legislation will affect childhood hunger across the city and state. Changes to SNAP, including new eligibility rules, could result in hundreds of thousands of parents losing their food benefits. In all, New York state is facing up to $1.4 billion in annual SNAP cuts and cost shifts, with the state expected to start covering $1.2 billion for the program by October 2027.

“Not just in New York, but nationwide, we will see increases in child hunger,” said Dr. Jennifer Cadenhead, a research assistant professor at Columbia’s Teachers College, who focuses on diet, food quality, and food insecurity issues. “That really makes me sad.”

While SNAP cuts might affect free school meals in other districts, New York City’s universal breakfast and lunch program is safe because the city’s high poverty rate will continue to qualify the whole school system for the program. But individual families will likely be hit hard, which could in turn lead to higher absenteeism rates and affect student performance.

On Staten Island, Garcia said that the end of the Food Box program would mean less fresh produce in her family’s diet — a loss for her two children.

“I want my kids to have all the vegetables,” she said.

Small program has a big impact

A roughly $536 million annual program with a 30-year history, SNAP-Ed is among the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s largest nutrition education programs. In a 2024 paper from the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, researchers described it as a “critical pillar in the nation’s public health infrastructure.” Still, it’s a fraction of SNAP’s $99.8 billion in total spending in fiscal year 2024.

By offering evidence-based nutrition and food education, SNAP-Ed pays dividends for families’ long-term health, said Cadenhead, of Teachers College.

“A lot of times, a doctor will say, ‘You need to eat better,’ but people don’t know how,” she said. “They don’t know how to prepare a balanced meal. They may not have time. They don’t understand what they need to do, they can get overwhelmed in the grocery store.”

Funded with $29 million in federal dollars, New York’s SNAP-Ed programs reached over 2.2 million individuals across the state last fiscal year, through efforts like Eat Well Play Hard. That program educates preschoolers on how their food is grown and encourages their caregivers to prepare and serve local produce to their families.

Fresh produce is displayed at the Food Box pickup site run by Children's Aid at the Goodhue Community Center on Staten Island on Tuesday.

Darren O’Sullivan, a spokesperson for the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said in a statement that the federal legislation eliminating SNAP-Ed “increases the risk that New Yorkers in need will experience food insecurity, health issues, and economic hardship.”

Through the $1 million grant Children’s Aid gets through SNAP-Ed, the organization operates Food Box sites throughout the city, as well as programs in schools. Currently, the organization is running youth nutrition workshops and cooking demonstrations at Summer Rising sites, the city’s free summer school program.

“We hear from parents that their kids are coming home and asking, ‘Can we make this recipe at home?’” said Taisy Conk, director of food and nutrition programs at Children’s Aid. “This is opening up their palettes and their minds and getting them excited about it. It really makes an impact on children’s health.”

Through SNAP-Ed, Children’s Aid brought nutrition education to 20 sites, including 11 schools last year. The organization analyzed its programs’ impacts for the year before, and found that across its 176 workshops that reached nearly 430 kids, young people improved their vegetable consumption by 35%, with more than 60% reporting eating at least two fruits a day at the end of the course.

Conk said she worries that changes to SNAP will have far-reaching effects, with people assuming they’re no longer eligible or struggling with new requirements. She said Children’s Aid is urging the city and state to explore some bridge funding to keep the programs going and is looking to philanthropy to help plug the gaps.

Families brace for reductions in fresh produce

On Staten Island, the Food Box stand was open during dismissal for a summer camp at the Goodhue Community Center. Some families stopped by to learn about the program or buy armfuls of corn.

“It’s been great to have affordable produce,” said Tara Messenger, 50, as she and her 9-year-old daughter collected their Food Box.

Without the Food Box program, Messenger, an art teacher, said she’d have to rely more on her local grocery store, and they’d likely eat more processed food.

“It wouldn’t be as fresh, as local, as affordable,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t have as many vegetables and fruits in our diet.”

This "Food Box" includes fresh produce, including ingredients for tabbouleh salad and the recipe for it, at the Goodhue Community Center on Staten Island on Tuesday.

Sarah Kabalkin, 46, a local culinary educator, said she worried that cuts to SNAP would have a “devastating” impact on her community, with more residents going hungry.

Losing the Food Box program would affect her family, she said. Without their weekly boxes of fresh produce, Kabalkin said she’d have to find a way to grow more in her community garden plots.

“I can’t produce this kind of variety,” she said. “So it will limit what we’re eating at home.”

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter covering public health in New York City for Healthbeat. Contact Eliza at efawcett@healthbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

How Trump’s sweeping tax and domestic policy bill will affect children and schools

2025-07-03T18:33:47+00:00

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Republicans in Congress have approved President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax and domestic policy bill that will ramp up spending on immigration enforcement and make deep cuts to social safety net programs, with major ramifications for children and schools.

The bill, which the president is expected to sign by Friday, slashes spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to some 37 million children and is a critical revenue source for schools. It also limits eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food assistance to over 13 million children and makes kids automatically eligible for free meals at school.

The legislation significantly raises spending on immigration enforcement, which will likely translate to more immigration arrests and deportations. The president’s deportation campaign has already left schools working overtime to assure families it’s safe to send their children to school.

“When you take it all together it’s kind of like an assault on children and families policy-wise,” said Megan Curran, the director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. “We’re going to see that the effects reverberate well beyond what we’re even understanding” right now, she said, “and schools are going to be on the front lines.”

The nearly 900-page bill also creates a new voucher-like program that will pay for private school scholarships — a major victory for school choice advocates who have successfully expanded similar programs in several states, but have previously failed to enact a nationwide version. States will be allowed to opt out, however, and it’s likely many Democrat-led states will.

Here is more on how what the president calls the “big, beautiful bill” is likely to affect children and schools:

Medicaid cuts will hurt school budgets

Trump’s policy bill makes historic cuts to Medicaid, which is the fourth-largest source of federal funding for schools. If millions of children lost their health insurance, it would undoubtedly reduce funding for schools, though it’s unclear by how much.

“Cutting Medicaid is equivalent to cutting school district budgets,” said Jessie Mandle, the national program director at the nonprofit Healthy Schools Campaign. “School districts are very much aware of how important Medicaid dollars are to serve students with disabilities, address the youth mental crisis, [and] address students’ behavioral health needs.”

In March, Mandle’s organization and other education groups surveyed 1,400 school staffers and officials from across the U.S. about how they rely on Medicaid. Around 9 in 10 respondents used Medicaid to pay the salaries of school health staff, such as school nurses, psychologists, and speech therapists. A little under half relied on Medicaid to buy assistive technology and other specialized equipment for students with disabilities.

Cuts to Medicaid would likely require schools to lay off staff and make cuts elsewhere in their budgets, the survey found.

And schools in rural communities, where a higher share of kids are enrolled in Medicaid and schools often play a big role in providing health care, are likely to feel the cuts more acutely.

SNAP cuts could limit free school meals

The federal legislation makes a series of changes to the SNAP program, including requiring more parents of school-aged children and teens aging out of foster care to work, scrapping eligibility for refugees and people who’ve been granted asylum, and raising how much states have to kick in.

The changes could result in hundreds of thousands of parents losing their SNAP benefits, which could have ripple effects on schools — though earlier provisions that would have more directly targeted the school meal program were stripped out of the bill.

When kids are enrolled in SNAP, they automatically qualify for free breakfast and lunch at school. And when a high share of kids are enrolled in SNAP, it’s more financially viable for schools to provide free meals to all students. That has a number of academic and social benefits for kids.

If families fall off the SNAP rolls, they may not realize they have to fill out paperwork at their child’s school to get free meals. And if fewer kids qualify for free school meals, schools will get a lower reimbursement from the federal government, which will make it harder to cover the cost of providing free meals to all kids.

“The cuts to SNAP that are currently proposed will increase hunger in homes and in classrooms,” said Erin Hysom, the senior child nutrition policy analyst for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center. “It’s really going to be this kind of double whammy for families.”

Boost for immigration enforcement likely to affect schools

The president’s policy bill includes $31 billion in additional funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hire more agents and cover the cost of deportations. The legislation also includes $13 billion in grants for states and local communities to assist with immigration enforcement.

An increase in immigration enforcement is likely to put additional burdens on school communities, many of which have already spent time and resources tending to students whose family members were arrested, advocating on behalf of students who were detained, and adding transportation and safety measures to assuage the fears of immigrant parents.

Recent research from Stanford University found that raids carried out by the Trump administration earlier this year in California’s Central Valley notably increased daily absences from school, especially for younger children. And earlier research has found that immigration raids have significant effects on children’s physical and mental health, as well as on broader school climate.

New voucher-like program will pay for private schooling

Tucked into the bill is the creation of a tax-credit scholarship program that will pay for private school tuition. Individuals can knock $1,700 off their tax bill if they donate that amount to an organization that awards scholarships to kids who attend private school.

The inclusion is a win for private school choice advocates who have long championed an idea like this.

But the program will be optional for states, after the Senate parliamentarian ruled states could not be required to participate. That will probably curb the program’s impact, because it’s unlikely that Democrat-led states — where officials have vociferously opposed using public money for private schools — will opt in.

It is unclear exactly how much the federal voucher-like program will cost, as there is no cap on the amount of tax credit payouts. (An earlier House version would have capped those costs at around $5 billion to $6 billion a year.)

Many states have their own tax-credit scholarship or voucher program.

Pell Grants now available for workforce training

Starting with the 2026-27 school year, students from low-income backgrounds who’d normally qualify for a federal Pell Grant to pay for college can get aid for short-term workforce training.

Known as a Workforce Pell Grant, the money could be spent on training programs that last eight to 15 weeks and lead to some kind of credential or academic credit toward a degree or certificate program. The idea has gotten bipartisan support in Congress, and has been endorsed by both Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

The training would need to prepare students for jobs or industries that are high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand — in line with the federal Perkins Career and Technical Education Act — and governors and state school boards would decide which programs qualify.

The Congressional Budget Office expects the program will be relatively small to start: Just $17 million in the first year and $20 million the following year.

Child tax credit bump excludes many low-income families

The bill increases the size of the credit from $2,000 to $2,200 a year, but does nothing to ensure more low-income families can benefit.

That means the child tax credit is actually “less generous” in today’s dollars than when the $2,000 credit began in 2018, because it was never adjusted for inflation, said Curran of Columbia University.

A July analysis by Curran and others found that 19 million children are in families who would get only some, or none, of the revised tax credit because they don’t earn enough money. That’s up from 17 million children who don’t fully benefit from the current child tax credit.

The final result is “head-scratching,” Curran said, after all of the bipartisan enthusiasm to expand and increase the child tax credit.

During the pandemic, the federal government temporarily raised the credit to $3,000 per child and $3,600 for younger children, and made it available to many more families with low or no income. There’s solid evidence that helped many families stay on top of household bills and pay for school supplies and other items for their children.

But the bill Trump is about to sign does not include those changes.

“It’s a huge pendulum swing,” Curran said. “The child tax credit doesn’t really do anything extra for families.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Money for Indiana after-school programs, professional development in limbo after Trump freeze

2025-07-03T17:43:01+00:00

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An estimated $107 million in federal funds to support after-school programs, academic enrichment, English language learners, and more in Indiana are in limbo following a decision by the Trump administration to withhold the funding as it completes a program review.

States expected to receive more than $7 billion in federal K-12 education funding on July 1, but were told on Monday that the applications were still under review. The pause is part of an ongoing push by the Trump administration to ensure that no federal funds are flowing to programs that support what it describes as illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

On Thursday, Indiana education officials said in a weekly newsletter that additional information “will be shared with schools as we know more about these allocations.” The department reiterated the statement in response to questions from Chalkbeat.

In a statement announcing the pause to states, the U.S. Department of Education said “decisions have not yet been made concerning submissions and awards for this upcoming academic year.”

Funding could have an impact this school year

Indiana has already taken steps to verify that the state’s schools do not engage in diversity, equity and inclusion practices in order to preserve federal funding.

It’s not clear yet how the latest decision by the administration will affect Indiana, where students return to schools as early as July 24.

The allocations for the affected programs in the 2025-26 school year, as approved by Congress in March, were expected to stay the same as in the previous year. Here’s what they totaled in 2024-25:

$41.2 million for Title II-A, which supports professional development for teachers and administrators;
$20.7 million for Title IV-A, which supports academic enrichment and can include STEM, music, and arts education, technology access, as well as programs to prevent bullying and abuse;
$19.9 million for Title IV-B, which is for before- and after-school care programs known as 21st Century Community Learning Centers;
$12.8 million for adult basic and literacy education;
$10.1 million for Title III-A, which supports English learner programs; and
$2.5 million for migrant education

The announcement blindsided out-of-school care providers, which were counting on the funds being released in order to hire staff and prepare for the upcoming school year, said Brent Wake, senior vice president of engagement for the Indiana Afterschool Network.

The 21st Century Community Learning Centers serve 20,000 students in 200 communities in Indiana, Wake said. Many offer free or low-cost care, which includes academic enrichment, homework help, and social emotional learning.

“We’re taking programs that work and removing necessary funding and saying ‘good luck,’” Wake said.

If the funds are not released quickly, some providers may face decisions about cutting staff or hours, or eliminating programs for the upcoming school year, Wake said. Others may need to close their doors.

The Title IV-B grant is the largest source of dedicated funding for before- and after-school programs, Wake said. The centers may be supplemented by private donations, tuition charged to families, or the state’s two childcare assistance programs — the Child Care and Development Fund and On My Way Pre-K. Both state programs currently have waitlists.

Wake said providers had been preparing to advocate to preserve a dedicated funding stream for 21st Century Community Learning Centers in the 2026-27 budget, which sought to consolidate many federal grant programs into block funding for states.

Indiana agreed to strip DEI, racial and ethnic studies to save funding

This is not the first time this year that federal education funding has been at risk over concerns that programs it funds do not align with the new administration’s goals.

In April, the Department of Education told states that in order to receive federal funding, they must certify that their schools do not engage in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Indiana education officials said they would comply.

During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers also stripped state requirements related to racial and ethnic studies electives, citing a request by the Indiana Department of Education amid concerns that the state could risk losing its federal funding.

The state previously required high schools to offer one semester of a racial or ethnic studies class each school year, but did not require students to take it.

Republican lawmakers said during the session that $1 billion in federal funding was at risk if lawmakers did not remove the course requirement. Democrats pushed back on the change.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Illinois schools chief denounces Trump administration decision to withhold federal education funds

2025-07-02T21:19:30+00:00

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Illinois schools chief Tony Sanders called the Trump administration’s decision to withhold almost $7 billion in federal education funds “deeply disruptive” for the state’s 1.9 million public school students.

The U.S. Department of Education notified states on Monday about the hold on funds, Sanders, the state superintendent of education, said in a weekly message Tuesday. According to news reports, most of the funding was to support English learners and children of migrant workers, while a smaller part was supposed to go to afterschool programs, teacher training, and enrichment programs.

The funds were approved by Congress earlier this year and were expected to go out by July 1. However, the Trump administration claimed that the money was being used to “subsidize a radical leftwing agenda” and ordered a halt, pending a review.

Sanders said the administration’s move “forces local districts to deal with unnecessary uncertainty and places an undue burden on teachers, administrators, and families alike at the exact moment when they should be focused on preparing for the next school year.”

A spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Education said in a statement to Chalkbeat on Thursday that the board expected to receive around $218.7 million in federal funding across five programs on July 1.

Afterschool advocates have also voiced concerns about the withholding of federal funds for afterschool and summer programs. Susan Stanton, executive director of the ACT Now Coalition, said in a statement on Tuesday that the decision was a “profound and direct attack on children.”

“It is a cold, calculated move to rip away the vital network of high-quality services from diverse communities,” Stanton said. “We can’t hold hostage the safety and future of our children in the name of partisan politics.”

School districts around the state already have to deal with tighter budgets for the coming school year since federal COVID relief dollars have expired. The state’s overall education budget increased slightly, with $307 million more going to the state board’s evidence-based funding formula to support K-12 schools. This fiscal year the state board’s education budget increased to almost $11.2 billion, from $10.8 billion in fiscal year 2025.

In recent years, school advocates have been asking for the state to put in an additional $550 million to help schools reach “adequate funding” sooner.

Without more state funding, and with federal funding at risk, school districts will have to adjust to a new fiscal reality. Chicago Public Schools recently reported having a $734 million budget deficit. The district has so far decided to lay off about 161 employees, including many crossing guards, and will not fill over 200 vacant positions. More cuts could be in store.

A district spokesperson said CPS does not yet know the impact of the federal funds being withheld. For the last school year, CPS was expecting to receive at least $90 million in the federal funding streams that the state said are currently on hold, according to CPS’s website.

Updated July 3: This story was updated with new information from the Illinois State Board of Education on the amount of federal funding that has been withheld, and a clarification on changes to state funding for the current fiscal year.

Reema Amin contributed to this report.

Samantha Smylie is the state education reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago covering school districts across the state, legislation, special education, and the state board of education. Contact Samantha at ssmylie@chalkbeat.org.

Congress usually snubs private school choice expansion. Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ embraces it.

2025-05-16T22:54:03+00:00

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A big Republican budget bill in Congress would establish a nationwide, federal school choice program — a potential political breakthrough that conservative lawmakers and advocates have discussed for years but which has consistently stalled.

The $5 billion, 50-state school choice expansion would bring taxpayer-subsidized private school scholarships to dozens of states that have resisted the voucher movement.

The tax-credit scholarship proposal would establish a one-for-one annual tax credit worth up to 10% of adjusted gross income for taxpayers who donate to eligible scholarship-granting groups. That makes the donation essentially free to the taxpayer, with the federal government paying them back.

Longtime proponents of private school choice, who see their movement as expanding educational opportunity, are ecstatic that a federal tax-credit scholarship program has a viable path to become law.

“What it will do is help thousands and thousands and thousands of families with opportunities they never had before,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, an advocacy group.

The proposal comes as private school choice has expanded dramatically at the state level in recent years. Texas and Tennessee are among the states that passed universal or near-universal programs this year. Pro-voucher governors tapped outside money to oust anti-voucher rural Republicans from their state legislatures, reshaping the political landscape in favor of private school choice.

At the same time, the increasing polarization of education politics coupled with the questionable track record of voucher programs in improving student outcomes have made private school choice a tougher sell in Democrat-led states. Illinois let its tax-credit scholarship program expire in 2023. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who previously expressed support for vouchers, has not backed recent efforts to expand existing tax-credit scholarships in that state.

Although the federal government supports vouchers for District of Columbia students, previous attempts to provide broader backing for school choice have run aground on Capitol Hill. Backers say the rise of the parental rights movement in the aftermath of COVID and growing momentum at the state level have created a political moment where a new federal program is possible.

But supporters like Enlow aren’t popping champagne corks just yet. He said that “we’ve got to see the final version before we say, ‘hey, this is something we really support.’”

Already the bill has been modified to require that schools accept students with disabilities, while still allowing them to maintain their own admission policies. Enlow and other voucher proponents say such requirements would interfere with schools’ independence and deter schools from participating.

Voucher skeptics fear a major change to education policy is side-stepping the normal legislative process, where it would face more debate and scrutiny and where it would be unlikely to earn sufficient votes.

The House budget reconciliation bill includes a host of higher-profile changes to tax policy and major federal programs like Medicaid that have divided Republicans. President Donald Trump and others have said the legislation represents a chance to pass a “big, beautiful bill.”

If enacted, opponents worry it would enable discrimination and further erode the idea of public education as a common good.

“It ends up being a very quiet and sneaky way to fund a voucher program and impose it on states because it’s just wrapped up in this gargantuan and confusing tax bill,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The budget legislation incorporates the tax-credit scholarship program described in the Educational Choice for Children Act, a bill authored by Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican who leads the Senate education committee, and other GOP senators.

That bill would require 60 votes to pass the Senate on its own, a near impossibility. A similar proposal in Trump’s first administration failed to get much traction even with Republicans. Including the proposal in the House reconciliation bill as a tax policy means it only needs 51 votes to pass.

How the tax-credit scholarship program would work

For some potential donors to the proposed scholarship program, the tax credit would be quite generous. Taxpayers could donate stock to avoid paying capital gains on investments, saving even more than the face-value of the donation.

While most of the revenue reduction would be borne by the federal government, an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that states that tax capital gains would also lose out on millions of dollars.

“This is a tax shelter-voucher hybrid,” said Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor who has studied voucher programs and is the author of “The Privateers,” a book about the voucher movement.

Tax credits would be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis, up to $5 billion a year. Each state would be guaranteed at least $20 million.

Scholarship-granting organizations would distribute the money to eligible students, who could use scholarships not just for tuition but also for books, homeschooling supplies, fees, and educational therapies. These organizations might support certain types of schools, for example Catholic or Jewish religious schools, or serve certain student groups.

Families earning more than 300% of their region’s gross median income would not be eligible. That excludes the most well-to-do families. But an analysis from the Brookings Institution found that threshold would mean wealthy families in areas with high median income would still qualify, while middle-class families in poorer areas might be excluded.

Rural families would be particularly affected because median incomes in rural areas tend to be lower than in urban areas. Rural families also have less access to private schools.

The original tax-credit scholarship proposal from Cassidy called for a $10 billion program, which would have made it one of the larger federal education programs. Title I, which provides extra money to schools serving lots of students in poverty, provides about $18 billion a year, while the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act provides about $15 billion.

Even the $5 billion version included in the House reconciliation bill would be larger than federal spending on charter schools, English language learners, teacher training, and civil rights enforcement combined.

Opponents question why the federal government would throw that much support behind programs that have not consistently improved the test scores of students from low-income backgrounds. (Some studies have found that such students who received vouchers earned a college degree at higher rates than similar peers who stayed in public school, but those studies couldn’t fully account for the fact that voucher students might be different in other ways that benefitted them.)

They fear there won’t be any accountability for whether schools do a good job educating students and that both schools and scholarship-granting organizations would be able to exclude LGBTQ students, those who are not religious, or students with disabilities.

The proposal doesn’t include any requirements that students take tests or that schools meet certain quality standards. It also allows schools to maintain their own admissions policy. For proponents like Enlow, that light regulatory touch is a good thing. Parents need flexibility to find the best fit for their children, and schools need independence to craft their programming, he said.

“We’ve got to make sure that private schools’ voices are being heard so they’ll be there to participate in the program,” he said. “That’s a real key factor.”

In states with vouchers, some parents of students with disabilities report being turned away from private schools. At the same time, EdChoice found that specialized options for students with disabilities expanded in Arizona, where the state offered substantially more money for students who needed special education services. LGBTQ-friendly private schools have also emerged.

Cowen said he doesn’t blame individual parents for using vouchers, but from a policy standpoint, these programs move away from the idea of public schools as places where people from different backgrounds come together.

Greatest impact expected in states without vouchers

The tax-credit scholarship program would supplement state efforts in places that already have education savings accounts or vouchers. But the greatest impact would likely occur in states that don’t have such programs.

When Illinois let its tax-credit scholarship program expire in 2023, organizations like Big Shoulders, which provides scholarships to help low-income families send their children to Catholic schools, had to scramble to maintain support for as many families as possible.

While some individual donors dug deeper, according to Big Shoulders President and CEO Josh Hale, the group has “a lot less” money and is serving fewer students today than a few years ago.

Hale continues to have conversations with Illinois lawmakers about restoring the program. Private school choice often polls well with Black and Latino voters. But it’s an uphill battle politically in a Democrat-controlled state.

A federal program would make more resources available much more quickly.

“Sometimes it’s shown as, this is wealthy people trying to get a break,” Hale said. “I see it as more resources going to underresourced, underrepresented communities, however that shows up. This is to help the least among us find pathways for their children. If that’s an incentive for people to give more, I think we’re all cheering for it here.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica atemeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

After Uvalde, school mental health grants had bipartisan support. Now Trump is cutting them.

2025-05-02T23:18:36+00:00

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Schools will likely have to lay off social workers and counselors, and college programs designed to train mental health providers may shut down after the Trump administration decided it would stop funding grants created under a bipartisan law passed in response to mass school shootings.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act came on the heels of the devastating 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas where an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 elementary schoolers and two teachers. Gun control remains a deeply divisive issue, but Democrats and Republicans agreed: Schools should get more money to address students’ mental health needs. They set aside $1 billion to do that.

When it came time to distribute that money, the Biden administration gave applicants the option to show how they planned to diversify the mental health profession and prepare educators to work with kids from diverse backgrounds — in a bid to help students who often have higher needs but struggle to access care outside of school. Now schools that tailored their proposals to meet that criteria appear to be among those losing their funding.

“The Department has determined these grantees are violating the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law; conflict with the Department’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education; undermine the well-being of the students these programs are intended to help; or constitute an inappropriate use of federal funds,” Brandy Brown, the deputy assistant secretary for K-12 education, wrote in a Tuesday night email to members of Congress.

The Education Department has the authority to stop funding multi-year grant recipients, but it rarely does so.

The state education agencies in Colorado, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin were among the grantees that lost their funding. So did the San Diego County Office of Education, Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska, and Teachers College at Columbia University, which was supporting efforts in New York City schools.

“Grant recipients used the funding to implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could hurt the very students the grants are supposed to help,” Madi Biedermann, an Education Department spokesperson, wrote in an email to Chalkbeat.

The Trump administration is objecting, in particular, to the Biden administration’s decision to give schools more points on their grant application if they planned to increase the number of mental health staffers from diverse backgrounds or who were from the communities where they’d be working with kids. The federal notice didn’t say what counted as “diverse,” and it noted that any hiring strategies used by schools had to follow federal civil rights laws.

“We were not there to say that this meant there had to be any type of racial quotas, or it had to be along the lines or race, or ability, or language,” said Mary Wall, who until January served as the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for P-12 education. “We simply said it would be wise and we encourage applicants to make hires of school-based mental health professionals that are reflective of the communities that they’re serving.”

Many schools expected to get three or four more years of funding, but now the grants will run out in December. Wall said schools were well on their way to hitting the goal of hiring and training 14,000 mental health professionals, but these cuts put that at risk.

“Not giving grant continuations has an extreme impact on whether or not the work can continue,” she said.

That’s already happening in some places. Teachers College had begun training five graduate students to provide mental health services in schools, and was preparing to send offer letters to eight more when the college found out it had lost its $4.9 million five-year grant. The Trump administration ended it back in March when it terminated $400 million in funding for Columbia University.

Those trainees, many of whom were bilingual or first-generation college students who couldn’t otherwise afford graduate school were slated to work in high-need schools in Harlem and East Harlem — parts of New York City where many newly arrived immigrants live and families often struggle to find stable housing. Now, schools won’t get the year of free services those trainees were going to provide, such as therapy and parent training. And there will be gaps in the future pipeline, too.

“We were going to be producing professionals who would be working in these settings delivering school-based mental health services for years to come, ideally their entire careers,” said Prerna Arora, an associate professor of psychology and education at Teachers College who was overseeing the grant. “We are in desperate need of these types of professionals.”

Cuts to mental health grants part of anti-DEI push

The cuts appear to be part of the Trump administration’s broader attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and exemplify how the administration is using the Supreme Court’s ruling that barred affirmative action in higher education to target a much wider set of DEI practices in K-12 schools.

Already, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal education funding from states that won’t sign off on its contested interpretation of what constitutes racial discrimination under federal civil rights law — a policy that’s currently on hold as several legal challenges work their way through the courts.

The Trump administration is investigating Chicago Public Schools for launching a Black student success plan and has sought to dismantle other practices, such as forming staff affinity groups based on race or allowing college students to participate in separate graduation ceremonies that celebrate their race or heritage.

It is unclear exactly how many of the 265 grantees listed on the Education Department’s website lost their funding and how much money was clawed back. On Thursday, an Education Department spokesperson said they could not provide a list of which school districts, states, or colleges lost their funding.

The Education Department told members of Congress that the terminated grants were worth $1 billion, but that is almost certainly an overestimate, Wall said, as many grantees had already spent a chunk of their money. The grants paid for 1,500 to 2,000 new mental health providers to work in schools across the U.S. in the first year alone, Wall said.

It also appears some schools kept their grants. The Indiana Department of Education, Fort Wayne Community Schools in Indiana, and Normal Public Schools in Oklahoma all told Chalkbeat they hadn’t been contacted about changes to their funding.

The pandemic helped bring the need for more school-based mental health workers into sharp relief as many schools saw a spike in children experiencing depression, anxiety, or other kinds of stress. So did the many unaddressed warning signs exhibited by the teenage gunman in Uvalde, who spoke often of violence and targeted the classroom where he was once bullied. That, and similar cases in other school shootings, led Congress to invest in mental health staff as a school safety measure.

With the help of federal COVID relief funds, many schools launched teletherapy services to address in-person staff shortages and to connect kids with bilingual therapists, male counselors, or mental health workers of color — who are often in especially short supply, but can form close connections with kids who look like them or who faced similar challenges growing up.

While there isn’t much research on the effects of pairing school-based mental health workers with kids of similar backgrounds, “we do know in research outside of the school environment that it’s actually really beneficial for students of color to have therapists or mental health supports from folks within their own communities,” said Nancy Duchesneau, a senior P-12 research associate who studies children’s social and emotional well-being at the nonprofit EdTrust.

“If you have students of color in a school, you really do want adults in the building — teachers, school counselors, mental health supports — who are of the same race and ethnicity to be able to better understand where students are coming from and make sure that the interventions or supports that they receive are not based on bias, but are truly based upon the needs of the students,” Duchesneau said.

Chris Rufo, the influential conservative activist, was the first to publicize the mental health grant cuts, the Associated Press reported. Rufo’s social media posts have prompted the Trump administration to cancel other education spending.

This time, Rufo posted examples from the grant proposals on the social media site X that he said were being used to “advance left-wing racialism and discrimination.” The Education Department pointed to some of those same examples when explaining what it found objectionable about the grants.

One grantee planned to hire 24 new school counselors and set a goal for eight to be people of color, an Education Department spokesperson told Chalkbeat. Other grantees said they would train therapists to address racial trauma or help mental health workers use a “critical compassion perspective,” instead of a colorblind perspective that assumes race and skin color don’t matter.

Another grantee wrote that they were training the next generation of school counselors “to recognize and challenge systemic injustices, antiracism, and the pervasiveness of white supremacy.”

State officials condemn — and applaud — the cuts

Some officials agreed with the move. In a statement, Ryan Walters, the superintendent of Oklahoma’s schools, said he applauded the Trump administration for “taking bold action to eliminate these misguided programs.” Oklahoma had planned to spend $1.9 million a year to help teachers, community members, and clinicians get retrained to work as mental health staff in schools before the state lost its funding.

“These grants were never about addressing real mental health needs, they were about pushing a political agenda into our classrooms,” Walters said in the statement, adding that his education agency was “forced” to apply for the money by state lawmakers. “We made our opposition clear then, and we stand by it today.”

Other state officials condemned the cuts. In Colorado, Jeremy Meyer, a spokesperson for the state’s education agency, said the state was “deeply disappointed” by the Trump administration’s decision to end Colorado’s grant, which was expected to total $7.5 million over five years.

Now the state will get just $1.5 million. The state was still rolling out its program to help schools recruit and retrain mental health staff so “no funds had yet been distributed to the field,” Meyer wrote.

Jill Underly, Wisconsin’s state superintendent, said in a news release that the decision to eliminate $8 million of the state’s planned $10 million grant was “indefensible” at a time “when communities are urgently asking for help.”

Already, she wrote, the federal grant had helped Wisconsin schools hire an additional 350 mental health staffers and helped enroll 500 new graduate students in the University of Wisconsin’s certification program.

“Kids don’t get a chance to do-over their school experience while the federal government recalibrates its political agenda,” Underly wrote. “These disruptions need to stop.”

Chalkbeat’s New York bureau chief Amy Zimmer contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

A Maine pole vaulter cleared the bar to win the state title. Waiting below was Donald Trump.

2025-04-12T00:05:31+00:00

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The winning pole vault at Maine’s Class B girls’ track and field championship in February missed the state record by 7 inches. But it was high enough to catapult Maine to the top of President Donald Trump’s enemies list.

Two weeks before that competition, Trump had signed an executive order aimed at “keeping men out of women’s sports.” The order threatened to withhold federal funding from any school that allowed athletes assigned male at birth to participate in girls’ or women’s sports.

The pole vaulter who clinched the girls’ state title was a trans athlete from a school district of 1,850 in the suburbs of Portland on Maine’s southern coast.

That same day, a Republican state legislator shared the 10th grader’s picture on Facebook, later calling it “unfair, unsafe, and unacceptable” that she had been allowed to compete. Conservative news outlets boosted the story.

The issue came to a head a few days later at a White House governors luncheon, where Trump told Maine Gov. Janet Mills that she better comply with his executive order or Maine wouldn’t get any federal funding. “See you in court,” Mills replied curtly.

That viral exchange set off a battle over not just who is protected by Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination in education, but how far the president can take his aggressive and unusual approach to civil rights enforcement to reshape American education.

The Trump administration launched two overlapping civil rights investigations that rapidly determined Maine had violated Title IX. Maine officials say they are complying with their state’s human rights law, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, and don’t plan to back down. Now the Trump administration is taking Maine to court and moving to strip the state of its K-12 education funding — an unprecedented step.

That move could instill fear in states and schools that have policies similar to Maine’s. Educators and officials could now be wondering if they’ll be the focus of such an investigation themselves, and whether they’re ready to risk hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to hold onto those rules and beliefs.

What’s happening in Maine comes as the Trump administration wages war with numerous colleges and several state K-12 leaders over antisemitism on campus and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, respectively.

Federal officials are conducting at least 18 other investigations into school districts, state education agencies, and state athletics associations over policies involving transgender students, according to a tracker compiled by Education Week. There’s now a Title IX special investigations team tasked with wrapping up investigations quickly and preparing them for litigation.

Those backing the Trump administration’s actions say the president’s position — far from being radical — is supported by the law, common sense, and the general public.

Teresa Manning, the policy director at the National Association of Scholars, a nonprofit that advocates for conservative education policies, said the phrase “on the basis of sex” in Title IX should be interpreted by its “plain meaning” that there are two sexes, male and female, and those don’t change.

“What the Trump administration is doing is simply maintaining the status quo of how Title IX has been interpreted for 50 years,” Manning said. “It’s not like the executive orders are anything new.”

Seth Galanter, who served in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights during the Biden and Obama administrations, said a big reason the Maine case matters is how it will “affect trans athletes and their lives, and their ability to participate in sports.”

But he also believes the outcome of the dispute matters for all kinds of students.

“This is really an administration that is trying to bully people and schools to do what they want by discarding all the protections and norms that usually accompany a civil rights investigation,” said Galanter, who worked in the Education Department until January. “If they can do that successfully around trans kids, then they can do it around kids with disabilities, or English learner kids, or other kids who really need federal protection.”

Why trans girls playing sports is key issue for Trump

Trump made the participation of trans athletes on girls’ and women’s sports teams a signature issue of his presidential campaign. He and his supporters have said that athletes who were assigned male at birth have an unfair physical advantage over their competitors whose birth sex was female.

When trans girls medal in sporting competitions, they say, it takes honors away from cisgender girls and could reduce their shot at a college scholarship. Some cisgender girls feel uncomfortable undressing in front of trans girls in the locker room.

“A sport I had loved and had put my heart into became a sport that was painful and a constant reminder of the physical abilities that I do not have,” the Maine 12th grader who tied for second place in the girls’ pole vault championship wrote in an opinion piece for the Portland Press Herald. “How were we expected to compete with someone who would always physically dominate?”

Advocates for trans athletes, meanwhile, say it’s crucial for kids to be able to play on teams that correspond with their gender identity so they feel included at school. Trans kids are at a much higher risk for depression and suicide, and playing sports can help with self-esteem and mental health.

“Leadership, teamwork, being a good loser and a good winner — all those great benefits that sports provide, which is why sports are an important part of your education — that needs to be available to all of our students, including our transgender students,” said Sarah McDaniel, who has a trans son and is the president of the Portland chapter of PFLAG, which supports the families and friends of LGBTQ people.

Trump’s executive order focused on student athletics wasn’t his only directive focused on gender. On the first day of his second term, he also signed an executive order stating that the federal government would recognize only two sexes, male and female, and that the definition of “sex” under federal law did not include gender identity.

That helped form the policy backbone for his early February directive about trans athletes.

In addition to its threat to strip federal funds from any educational program with policies deemed “unfair to female athletes”, the executive order expressed the Trump administration’s opposition to “male competitive participation in women’s sports more broadly, as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth.”

President Trump signed an executive order in early February seeking to ban trans girls from playing on girls' and women's sports teams. He was joined by supporters like Riley Gaines (center), a former competitive swimmer who has advocated for excluding trans women from women's athletics.

That executive order also urged athletics organizations and states to change policies that allow trans girls to compete in women’s sports, even if they “reduce the testosterone in their bodies below certain levels or provide documentation of ‘sincerely held’ gender identity.”

Manning said the Trump administration’s swift approach to enforcing Title IX matches the issue’s urgency: “The threat to these women is happening right now. It is, right now, a violation of Title IX.”

It’s also a “political no-brainer,” Manning said, pointing to polling from January by the New York Times and Ipsos that found 79% of American adults do not think trans women should be allowed to compete on women’s sports teams. That finding mirrors other recent polls.

Trump administration takes unusual civil rights approach

The federal government’s treatment of Maine is unprecedented, multiple legal experts told Chalkbeat, from the way it carried out its investigations to the severity of the consequences it has imposed.

The Education Department has a backlog of civil rights cases and recently fired hundreds of civil rights attorneys. But it chose to open the Maine investigation unprompted by any complaints.

While any agency that gives federal funds to an educational institution can enforce Title IX, the Education Department typically leads the charge because it has the most expertise. But in this case, the Department of Health and Human Services, which usually investigates medical schools and hospital training programs, opened the first investigation, followed by the Education Department.

Both decided Maine had violated Title IX within a few weeks — though these kinds of investigations typically take many months to conclude.

Neither federal agency requested any data or documents or attempted to interview anyone from the Maine Department of Education before issuing their findings, said Danna Hayes, a spokesperson for the Maine attorney general’s office, which is representing the state’s education agency.

The Education Department’s draft agreement contained five pages of demands, including stripping any trans girl who’s ever placed in a Maine girls sports competition of her title and giving it to the athlete behind her with an apology letter. Maine should have received 90 days to consider that proposal, according to the agency’s manual. Maine got just 10.

There’s a clear process for investigating potential civil rights violations, said R. Shep Melnick, a professor of American politics at Boston College who’s studied Title IX and civil rights. The Trump administration has “done none of that.”

“I’ve been critical of OCR in the past under Biden and Obama for using investigations basically to get schools to do what they want without following these procedures, but this is far worse,” Melnick said.

The Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies targeted Maine, too.

Neither the Education Department nor the Agriculture Department responded to Chalkbeat’s questions regarding the Trump administration’s Title IX enforcement strategy and its probes in Maine.

In response to a list of questions, Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for HHS, directed Chalkbeat to a two-sentence social media post from March 28 in which the department said it had referred its Maine Title IX investigation to the Justice Department. “HHS will continue to protect women’s sports and keep the promises of Title IX,” the post states.

Who gets to define ‘sex’?

Many biologists now think sex is more complicated than the male and female binary. But Title IX is “completely silent” on the issue of transgender athletes and does not spell out whether schools should require trans athletes to play on teams that correspond with their birth sex or their gender identity, Melnick said.

Congress could pass a law to define sex under Title IX. Or the Trump administration could go through the lengthy formal rule-making process. The Biden administration tried to define sex to include gender identity in a rule, but a federal judge threw it out. A separate Biden administration proposal that ultimately could have allowed high schools and colleges to restrict the participation of trans athletes never made it across the finish line.

The Trump administration has said Title IX “forbids” trans girls from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams, and allowing them to do so is an outright violation of the law.

But multiple civil rights experts told Chalkbeat that’s not how Title IX is enforced under the 1979 policy interpretation that governs the Education Department’s civil rights investigations.

It’s a Title IX violation if girls lack equal access to athletics in the aggregate. For example, an investigator concerned about whether girls had the same access to athletic gear as boys would look at the equipment used by all teams, not just the tennis team.

“Identical benefits, opportunities, or treatment are not required, provided the overall effects of any differences is negligible,” the 1979 policy states.

On top of that, there are federal court rulings in two cases, one in the Ninth Circuit and another in the Fourth Circuit, that have upheld the rights of trans girls to play on teams that correspond with their gender identity.

Those cases are ongoing. But the Trump administration hasn’t said why the 14 states bound by those decisions should not follow them, Galanter said.

“It’s just completely unclear what their legal theory is here,” Galanter said.

Issue of trans athletes continues to divide Maine

On Friday, the Maine attorney general’s office told the Trump administration that the state wouldn’t agree to the Education Department’s Title IX resolution. Maine offered no counter-proposals.

“Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams,” Maine’s assistant attorney general, Sarah Forster, wrote.

In response, the Education Department said it had referred the case to the Justice Department and would start the administrative process to take away Maine’s K-12 education funding. That includes discretionary grants and formula funds, the department said, which covers Title I dollars for high-poverty schools and IDEA grants for children with disabilities.

“Governor Mills would have done well to adhere to the wisdom embedded in the old idiom — be careful what you wish for,” Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said Friday in a statement. “Now she will see the Trump Administration in court.”

Hayes, of the Maine attorney general’s office, declined to comment further, and the Education Department did not respond to follow-up questions from Chalkbeat.

Galanter worried a Justice Department lawsuit against Maine could make even school districts and states with gender-affirming athletics policies “really scared to have trans kids play sports, or even worse, have kids who people think are trans play on sports teams.”

“There is no way to enforce gender that isn’t gross, weird, a complete invasion of privacy,” said Bre Danvers-Kidman, the executive co-director of MaineTransNet, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of transgender people in Maine. Kids think: “I don’t want to have to show somebody my junk to play softball.”

The issue continues to divide people in Maine.

Republican state lawmakers introduced several bills to restrict the participation of trans athletes on sports teams. Mills, Maine’s Democratic governor, said the issue is “worthy of a debate” but that for now, she will defend the state’s current laws.

Maine's Greely High School was thrust into the national spotlight after a Republican state legislator posted a photo on social media of a trans student at the school who won a state pole vaulting championship.

Hundreds of people recently turned out to a rally to support trans youth outside Greely High School, where the winning pole vaulter is a student, including several of her classmates.

Maine School Administrative District 51, which includes Greely, did not sign a resolution agreement with HHS, but the school district responded to the Education Department’s probe.

The district had less than two weeks to reply to dozens of requests, said Melissa Hewey, the attorney representing the district, including for rosters of every girls sports team and any trans athletes playing on them, and a breakdown of how the district’s fields and equipment compare for boys and girls.

Maine has a long tradition of standing up for what it believes in, “even in the face of political pressures,” said Danvers-Kidman, who’s listened to how angry this situation has made trans kids in meetings across the state.

For their sake, Danvers-Kidman hopes Maine stands its ground.

Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump moves to strip Maine of federal education funding in unprecedented tactic

2025-04-11T20:09:05+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Education said it is moving to strip federal K-12 education funding from Maine due to what it called the state’s refusal to comply with Title IX, the law that bans sex discrimination in education.

The Friday announcement followed a department investigation into the state’s policies governing transgender athletes. Those investigations determined that the state was in violation of Title IX, which the state has denied.

“The Department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” the department said in a statement announcing the move.

A Maine pole vaulter cleared the bar to win the state title. Waiting below was Donald Trump.

The move represents an unprecedented attempt by the federal government to speedily take away K-12 funding that has been appropriated by Congress and is firmly grounded in federal law. President Donald Trump has made trans athletes a major political issue and has used the federal government to root out gender-affirming policies in the early days of his second term.

The federal Education Department said it is starting an administrative proceeding to take away Maine’s K-12 funding, including formula grants — which include funding streams like Title I for high-poverty schools and IDEA grants for students with disabilities — as well as discretionary grants. Maine’s state education department has spent nearly $400 million in federal funding on elementary and secondary education in recent years, the Maine Monitor reported. In addition, the federal department said it has referred the results of its Title IX investigation to the U.S. Department of Justice for “further enforcement action.”

The Department of Health and Human Services had already referred its investigation that found Maine in violation of Title IX to the Justice Department.

Earlier on Friday, the Maine state attorney general’s office told the federal Education Department that the state would not sign a resolution agreement drafted by the Trump administration in the wake of the investigation. That proposed agreement features several pages of demands, including that Maine must strip any trans girl who’s ever placed in a Maine girls sports competition of her title and give it to the athlete behind her, along with an apology letter.

The federal Education Department did not immediately respond to several questions from Chalkbeat.

Andrew Ujifusa is a story editor at Chalkbeat.

Colorado won’t comply with Trump anti-DEI demand, state schools chief says

2025-04-10T19:03:34+00:00

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Colorado will refuse a demand from the Trump administration to certify that its schools have eliminated what the federal government says are illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, state Commissioner of Education Susana Córdova said Thursday.

“I am not signing that,” Córdova said. “I am not asking our districts to sign that.”

However, Córdova told the State Board of Education she will sign a new assurance that the state is in compliance with Title VI, which bans discrimination on the basis of race, “so that my name, in addition to the department’s previous commissioner who signed our previous assurance, is on file and on record to be able to indicate that we are fully enforcing Title VI.”

The U.S. Department of Education told state education agencies on April 3 that they must certify they are in compliance with the Trump administration’s contested interpretation of federal civil rights law when it comes to such programs. States that don’t sign will lose their federal funding, including Title I dollars for high-poverty schools, the federal department said.

Colorado received about $800 million in federal funding this school year, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Education said. That included about $168 million in Title I funds.

The deadline for states to sign the certification is April 24. States’ reactions have been mixed.

New York officials have said they won’t comply. Illinois’ school chief is also pushing back. Pennsylvania officials are signaling they will not order schools to eliminate DEI initiatives. But the Indiana Department of Education said it “fully intends to sign the certification.”

Córdova said the Trump administration’s request runs afoul of a federal law called the Paperwork Reduction Act. The law says that when federal agencies want to collect information, they must follow a process that includes posting a public notice and holding two public comment periods — one for 60 days and one for 30 days — to gather feedback on the request.

When a collection request has gone through that process, it’s assigned a number from the federal Office of Management and Budget, Córdova said. The April 3 request has no such number, she said, “and so it would be unlawful to restrict federal funding because somebody declines to sign a document that we’re not legally obligated to sign.

“And frankly I would be uncomfortable signing a certification that binds us to federal guidance that doesn’t have the force of law,” Córdova added. “I would be uncomfortable signing a certification that lacks definitions and clarity around what is and is not prohibited.”

There is significant confusion about what the Trump administration considers discriminatory DEI practices. The Education Department put out guidance earlier this year that clarified that schools could, for example, teach African American History and celebrate Black History Month. But programming that “acts to shame” students based on their race or “accuse them of being oppressors” could create a hostile environment, the department said.

In addition to discussing the matter with the State Board of Education, Córdova sent a letter to school district leaders outlining the state’s position in which she recognized “how critical federal funding is for the conditions every child needs to learn, grow, and thrive.”

State Board members did not vote Thursday on whether to support Córdova’s stance. A state attorney said it’s up to Córdova how to respond to the Trump administration’s request.

Republican and Democratic members of the State Board said they agreed with Colorado’s interpretation of the Paperwork Reduction Act.

“We should not consider who’s in charge and who’s running the administration, but whether or not under any administration we believe the system should be followed,” said Kristi Burton Brown, a Republican who represents the 4th Congressional District.

Burton Brown said it’s important that Córdova will sign a separate certification that Colorado is complying with Title VI, which includes an assurance that Colorado will follow “all regulations, guidelines, and standards” issued by the federal education department.

Republican Steve Durham, who represents the 5th Congressional District, said he too believes the Paperwork Reduction Act should be followed. But, he added, “the real reason, I think, behind not signing this is political rather than legal.

“There can be significant debate or disagreement about what DEI actually is,” Durham said. “But there is plenty of evidence of its misuse.”

He said the real issue is whether Colorado is complying with Title VI — and if it is in compliance, “there’s no reason not to make the certification.”

Democrat Karla Esser from 7th Congressional District said the state should not sign the certification and agreed that DEI is hard to define. “If you ask 15 people to define DEI, all 15 would define it differently,” she said. “So because we have no definition, I wouldn’t sign it to begin with, even if it did have an OMB number.”

Democrat Kathy Plomer, an at-large board member who represents the entire state, emphasized that the stakes are high and that Colorado risks losing its federal funding if it signs the certification and is then found to be in violation of Title VI.

“If you mistakenly sign and then somebody says, ‘Oh, I think they violated it,’ and somehow we’re in a position where we’re in a different legal status, that really scares me,” Plomer said.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

‘I’m just so worried’: Newark educators fear federal funding cuts will have devastating consequences

2025-04-09T21:22:26+00:00

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Jennie Demizio, a special education teacher at Park Elementary School in Newark, stood in a crowd full of dozens of educators and union members and listened to speakers talk about the Trump administration’s threats to cut funding for education.

One by one, speakers listed the potential impacts of federal cuts on programs at New Jersey’s universities and colleges, health care, and research. Protesters yelled “shame” and “boo” after speakers detailed the effects of funding cuts on schools.

After the rally on Tuesday, Demizio held back tears and her voice cracked as she told Chalkbeat Newark how her students with disabilities rely on federal funding to get to school and for services such as speech therapy and classroom aides.

“Half of my students arrive in ambulances. They’re on oxygen, they have seizure disorders, and just their transportation alone to get to school costs thousands of dollars a year,” said Demizio as her voice cracked while holding back tears. “I’m just so worried we’re going to lose this funding.”

Demizio’s fears echo those of many educators in Newark and across the state who feel that students will lose essential resources because of the administration’s threats to education. The protesters hope school districts, higher education institutions, and local leaders will band together to fight looming cuts and protect students and staff.

The protest in Newark was part of the “Kill the Cuts” demonstration, a national day of action with protests in over 30 cities across the country. About 50 city educators and labor unions gathered in front of a bust of John F. Kennedy at Military Park on the windy Tuesday afternoon, where they held signs that read “hands off my students” and chanted “stand up, fight back.”

The protest in Newark centered on threats to health care, immigrants, research, and the Trump administration’s threat to withhold federal funding from school districts and universities that don’t eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs deemed unlawful by the administration.

Last week, federal officials gave state education agencies 10 days to certify the elimination of DEI efforts in schools or risk losing federal funding. That directive threatens roughly $1.2 billion in federal funding for New Jersey schools, including $77 million for Newark Public Schools, the state’s largest district. That funding makes up around 5% of the district’s $1.5 billion budget for the upcoming school year.

“There’s no way that municipalities can totally foot that bill,” said Demizio.“I’m in a classroom where there are nurses, aides, and, you know, I think I feel like special education teachers, especially, are vulnerable at this moment.”

Last week’s attack on DEI programs in schools comes days after federal education officials also announced they would revoke deadline extensions to spend federal COVID aid that had been approved by the Biden administration.

As a result, 20 school districts across New Jersey could lose an additional $85 million in federal funding for infrastructure projects already in progress. That includes Newark Public Schools, which was approved for a $17 million extension to finish installing artificial intelligence cameras last fall. Paul Brubaker, the district’s director of communications, did not respond to questions about the status of the district’s AI cameras project or budget plans if federal funds are cut.

For Shelby Wardlaw, a professor and vice president of non-tenure track faculty at Rutgers University, the attacks feel personal. International students are worried about getting their visas revoked, and immigrant students fear they might be targeted due to their legal status, Wardlaw said.

In recent days, roughly a dozen Rutgers students “in good academic standing” learned their visas were revoked “without explanation,” according to an April 6 letter from Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway. Across the country, more than 300 international students and recent graduates have had their legal status changed by the federal government.

Additionally, some Rutgers faculty members are concerned about cuts to DEI initiatives and the impact that could have on teaching and learning.

Melissa Rodgers, a professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, spoke to the crowd on Tuesday about the devastating effects funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health and anti-DEI initiatives will have on medical and scientific research. Rodgers, a biomedical professor, has been investigating the impacts of sex on kidney disease, research that’s now at risk under proposed cuts, Rodgers said.

Wardlaw and her colleagues want Rutgers and other universities in the Big Ten Academic Alliance Conference to band together to share legal resources and funds to combat federal funding threats to higher education. Last month, the Rutgers University Senate passed a resolution calling on those universities to form a “Mutual Defense Compact” to protect and defend “academic freedom, institutional integrity and the research enterprise,” according to The Daily Targum, Rutgers student-run newspaper.

“Universities are bastions of knowledge and resistance that would oppose an authoritarian overreach, and they’re going to come after us first,” Wardlaw told Chalkbeat on Tuesday. “They’re trying to break us as a potential site of resistance.”

Newark educators gathered on Tues., April 8, 2025 to protest drastic federal funding cuts for schools, research, and health care.

Protesters at the Newark rally also heard from union leaders, civil rights activist Larry Hamm, and gubernatorial candidates Sean Spiller and Mayor Ras Baraka, who urged educators, laborers, and immigrant rights activists to band together to fight federal threats.

“We must resist,” all three speakers urged the crowd on Tuesday.

“The same people that were trying to stop [workers] from having fair working conditions and a rise in their wages were the same people who were opposed to ending Jim Crow Laws, opposed to civil rights, and opposed to democracy and justice,” Baraka told protesters.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, also spoke on Tuesday and called the Trump administration’s move to cancel funding for Johns Hopkins University and $400 million in grants to Columbia University an assault on education. The AFT is a party to eight lawsuits against the Trump administration’s attacks on education, access to records, and public health, according to the group.

“We have young people engage in critical thinking and problem solving so they can discern fact from fiction, so they can stand up for themselves, so they know how to think,” Weingarten said. “That is what we do and what this administration is so fearful about.”

Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

U.S. lawmakers want to know what is next for Head Start amid Chicago office closure

2025-04-09T18:35:39+00:00

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Democratic U.S. senators from the Midwest want to know the Trump administration’s plans for Head Start programs in their districts after it closed a key office in Chicago this month that provided support and funding to workers and families.

Six senators — Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both of Illinois, Gary Peters and Elisa Slotkin, both of Michigan, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — sent a letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , secretary of Health and Human Services, on Wednesday. They said that federal employees and grantees did not receive any notice that the Chicago-based regional office, which serves several states, was closing, or receive any guidance for what’s next.

The senators worry that the abrupt closure of the office will lead to disruptions in service for families, many of whom are low-income, relying on Head Start for child care.

“Head Start centers run on tight budgets, and without a regional office, grantees will not be able to receive approval to draw down funds, forcing many to consider laying off staff — or even shuttering their doors,” they wrote in the letter.

The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, closed five of its 10 regional Head Start offices in several cities, including Chicago, last week, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. According to the letter from the Midwestern senators, the Chicago-based regional office served 125,000 children, employed 40,000 child care workers, and provided support and funding to 2,600 Head Start centers across Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

The senators asked HHS to provide more information about whom child care providers should reach out to for guidance and accessing federal funds. They also asked if federal workers will be given the option to relocate to one of the five remaining offices.

Lawmakers want a response from HHS by April 22.

As mentioned in the letter, prior to HHS closing the regional Head Start office, the federal program experienced challenges to funding at the start of the year. President Donald Trump froze federal grants in January through an administrative order, which was rescinded a few days later. For Head Start providers, it meant that they were unable to access funds needed for daily operations.

However, child care providers still struggled to access funding throughout February, impacting around 21,000 students. Some Head Start providers in New York and Wisconsin had to temporarily shut their doors to families.

Hundreds of millions of federal dollars for Colorado schools at risk amid Trump DEI threats

2025-04-04T22:45:02+00:00

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About $800 million dollars in federal funding, or roughly 10% of Colorado’s K-12 education budget this year, could be at risk related to the latest demand from the Trump administration.

The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday gave state education agencies 10 days to certify that their schools do not engage in practices that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those that don’t, the department said, will not receive any federal funding.

At issue is Title VI, a provision of federal civil rights law that bars discrimination on the basis of race or shared ancestry. The Trump administration’s interpretation is controversial. Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement that “too many schools” use “DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another based on identity characteristics in clear violation of Title VI.”

Schools must also certify that they comply with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the use of race in college admissions decisions but which the Trump administration has interpreted more broadly.

Colorado Department of Education Commissioner Susana Córdova sent a brief letter to the state’s school district superintendents Thursday that said the department is “conferring with our legal counsel” to understand the new federal requirement.

“We will let you know the next steps; please do not take any actions until we provide you with further guidance,” Córdova wrote in the letter, which the state education department provided to Chalkbeat. “We understand that you may be receiving questions about the impact of this; as soon as we have more information, we will reach out to you all.”

All federal funding appears to be at risk if states don’t comply, though the Trump administration’s letter specifically names Title I funding that supports high-poverty schools.

Colorado received about $168 million in federal Title I funding this year that it then distributed to school districts, according to the state education department.

One other Democrat-controlled state has already responded to the Trump administration’s demands. On Friday, the New York State Education Department said it will not comply.

Denver Public Schools, Colorado’s largest school district, received the most Title I funding in the state: about $35 million, according to state data. In total, Denver Public Schools expects to receive $96 million in federal funding this school year, according to district budget documents. Federal funding makes up about 6.7% of the Denver district’s budget.

Denver Public Schools has already found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. In January, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights announced it was investigating DPS for converting a girls’ restroom at East High School into an all-gender restroom.

In February, Denver Public Schools sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in an effort to keep immigration enforcement away from schools. A federal judge sided with the Trump administration in March, rejecting the district’s attempt to reinstate a federal policy that treated schools as “sensitive locations” for the purposes of immigration enforcement.

Denver Public Schools is a diverse district. About three-quarters of its 90,000 students are students of color. About 38% of Denver students are English language learners, and 63% qualify for subsidized lunches, a measure of poverty. Nearly 15% are students with disabilities.

Equity is one of the Denver district’s core values, and its school board and superintendent have passed policies and created internal departments that aim to close academic gaps between white students and Black and Latino students.

Other efforts include advisory groups for families and community members, such as a Latine Education Advisory Committee and a Black Family Advisory Committee. The webpage for the Black Family Advisory Committee says, “You do not need to be Black to participate, just need to be focused on the needs of Black students and their families in DPS.”

It’s unclear whether the education department’s edict would affect such programs.

Denver Public Schools spokesperson Scott Pribble said in a statement that, “We are assessing the situation, but DPS is already in compliance with Title VI.”

“It is too early to determine the exact impacts this could have on Denver Public Schools,” Pribble said. But he noted that the $96 million in federal funding that the district expects to receive this school year “are funds that support students and teachers.”

“Without these funds, we would need to reduce services or look for other local funding sources,” he said.

Reporter Jason Gonzales contributed to this story.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Schools must share child gender identity info with parents, Trump Education Department says

2025-03-29T18:54:26+00:00

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Schools cannot withhold documents that discuss a child’s gender identity from parents, the U.S. Department of Education said in a Dear Colleague letter to educators.

The Friday letter said many schools and states have misinterpreted federal student privacy laws in ways that prevent parents from knowing when their child is going by a different name or pronouns at school.

Advocates for LGBTQ youth say that most schools try to involve parents but not all parents are safe or supportive.

The letter said many school districts have formal or informal policies of treating “gender plans” — plans that support students who want to socially transition at school — as something other than educational records so that they do not have to share them with parents.

That practice violates the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which lays out students’ privacy rights in school and also gives parents access to students’ educational records, according to the letter from Frank Miller Jr., acting director for the Student Privacy Policy Office in the Education Department. All information that a school maintains about a student, with a few narrow exceptions, should be considered an educational record and shared with parents, Miller Jr. wrote.

The letter also addresses how schools should handle cases in which one student makes a serious threat against another.

The line between parental rights and students rights has been a fraught one in the debate over transgender rights at school. The letter comes as the U.S. Department of Education has opened investigations into California and Maine for alleged FERPA violations related to policies that call for schools to respect students’ chosen names and pronouns. President Donald Trump has also used executive orders to attack transgender rights on numerous fronts.

Dear Colleague letters are not equivalent to federal law or regulations, but do represent a presidential administration’s interpretation of the law.

In a cover letter, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said some schools, by using students’ preferred names and pronouns and generally respecting their new gender identity, have set children and teenagers on a path toward medical transitions that they later regret.

“The practice of encouraging children down a path with irreversible repercussions — and hiding it from parents — must end,” McMahon wrote. “Attempts by school officials to separate children from their parents, convince children to feel unsafe at home, or burden children with the weight of keeping secrets from their loved ones is a direct affront to the family unit. When such conduct violates the law the Department will take swift action.”

Written records related to a student’s gender identity, as well as school counseling records, would be considered educational records, said LeRoy Rooker, who oversaw FERPA administration at the U.S. Department of Education for 21 years and is now a senior fellow at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. That means parents have the right to see those records at the K-12 level until a student turns 18.

That’s not a new interpretation of the law, Rooker said, though the issue is more prominent now than in the past. FERPA doesn’t require schools to notify parents about changes in a student’s gender identity or reveal information that isn’t part of a written record, but schools can’t withhold records that parents request.

California law prohibits school districts from requiring parental notification. Maine’s policies, which are guidelines and not requirements, state that schools should respect students’ gender identity, even if parents don’t agree. The guidelines don’t directly address parental notification or withholding information.

Sarah McDaniel, president of the Portland, Maine, chapter of PFLAG, an advocacy group for parents and allies of LGBTQ people, said it’s not true that schools are encouraging children to become transgender behind their parents’ backs.

Any policy on parental notification has to prioritize students’ safety, she said.

“Parents who are unsupportive can be extremely unsupportive, to the point that they kick their kid out of the house,” said McDaniel, who is the mother of a trans son who came out in high school. “A high schooler who is scared to tell their parents what their pronoun is, they know their parental situation and they should not be forcefully outed.”

The Education Department has also targeted Maine for policies that allow transgender athletes to compete on teams that align with their gender identity and threatened to withhold federal funding.

Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of GLSEN, a group that supports the legal rights of LGBTQ students, called the letter “the latest intimidation tactic” to suppress support for gay and trans youth in school.

“When Linda McMahon says ‘parents’ rights,’ she’s not talking about every parent,” she said in a statement. “LGBTQ+ students and their parents are wondering why what’s left of the Education Department is so focused on pushing a climate of exclusion instead of advancing a vision where every student is set up for success.”

Schools’ approaches to gender identity vary

Around the country, states and school districts have adopted a range of policies and laws about students’ requests to change their names and gender identity.

Indiana requires schools to notify parents of any student request to use a different name, pronoun or gender. Some school districts there won’t use a different name or pronoun without parental permission.

Colorado state law requires school districts to respect non-legal name changes. But school districts have a range of policies on parental notification. In some conservative communities there, school districts still require parental permission for a child to go by a different gender at school.

New York City policy says situations in which students don’t want parents to know about their gender identity should be handled with care on a case-by-case basis.

Michigan’s non-binding state guidance has a similar provision, noting that privacy considerations vary by age.

A number of parents have sued their school district, alleging that officials withheld critical information about their child. The courts have generally sided with the school districts, and in some cases, the situation has been more complicated than initially presented.

Trump used his joint address to Congress to highlight the case of January Littlejohn, a Florida parent who accused her school district of carrying out a “secret gender transition.”

According to Politifact and other media accounts, court records later revealed that Littlejohn informed her child’s teacher that the child identified as nonbinary and wanted to use they/them pronouns. In an email, Littlejohn said the child could take the lead at school, even though she and her husband would not change what they called the child at home.

The school initially denied Littlejohn access to a support plan that had been developed but eventually shared the document.

A federal judge dismissed Littlejohn’s lawsuit. The family is appealing.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case that involved a Wisconsin school district’s gender support polices because none of the plaintiffs had a child in the school district who had changed their gender identity without a parent’s knowledge. The case involved a theoretical harm, rather than an actual family.

Through executive orders, the Trump administration has attempted to ban transgender service members from the military, refused to issue identity documents with updated gender markers, and threatened hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. All of these orders have been challenged in court, with litigation ongoing.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with information from LeRoy Rooker, an expert in FERPA.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

A big change for kids with disabilities is underway, Trump says. Critics say it’s against the law.

2025-03-24T14:52:06+00:00

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President Donald Trump made a brief announcement Friday morning of a policy that could upend how the nation serves its 7.5 million students with disabilities.

Offering virtually no details, Trump said he’d decided that the Department of Health and Human Services would handle students’ “special needs” instead of the Education Department.

“Rather complex,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “I think that will work out very well.”

But many legal experts and advocates for children with disabilities say the president does not have the authority to move funding or oversight of special education to another agency. That would require an act of Congress, they say.

Many educators, parents, and disability rights advocates worry that the president will try to move forward anyway, and that this plan could end up stripping children with disabilities of legally required educational support and services — and sideline them in an agency that doesn’t have the expertise, staff, or training to properly serve them.

“There was a recognition that the education of students with disabilities should occur alongside non-disabled students,” when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, was signed into law in 1975, said Robyn Linscott, the director of education and family policy at The Arc, which advocates for children with disabilities.

“To be able to say that students with disabilities are this monolith and we can just pluck them out of the general population of students and plop them into a different agency,” Linscott said, “is just bonkers.”

What the law says about Education Department’s role

IDEA predates the creation of the federal Education Department by four years, and was enacted when education fell under what was then known as the Health, Education, and Welfare Department.

IDEA would remain on the books even if the Education Department ceased to exist. But advocates said enforcement of the law is bound up in the infrastructure of the Education Department, as the two evolved together. Students with disabilities are part of nearly every other education law, from school accountability to higher education access.

In the hours since Trump’s announcement, neither the Education Department nor the Health and Human Services Department has offered any concrete details, including exactly what responsibilities would move to HHS and when.

In response to a list of questions, an Education Department spokesperson referred Chalkbeat to a short video clip of a Friday afternoon interview with Education Secretary Linda McMahon, in which she said that “some” of the programs that fall under IDEA would be given to Health and Human Services. She did not specify which ones, and the Education Department did not respond to follow-up questions.

Emily Hilliard, the deputy press secretary at HHS, responded to a list of questions by pointing Chalkbeat to a social media post by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in which he said his agency “is fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs” and that his agency would “make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.”

Multiple laws say the Education Department is responsible for overseeing and funding the education of children with disabilities.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act established the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services within the Education Department and said that it must include an Office of Special Education Programs, “which shall be the principal agency in the Department for administering and carrying out” IDEA, along with “other programs and activities concerning the education of children with disabilities.”

The law that created the Department of Education said the department must include an Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

IDEA also says the education secretary is responsible for administering IDEA grants. The most recent budget laws give control of IDEA funds to the Department of Education and say those funds can’t just be transferred to another agency.

“If they’re trying to just completely eliminate ED’s responsibility to oversee IDEA and the things that are required in statute, they can’t do that,” said Blair Wriston, the senior manager of government affairs for EdTrust, a nonprofit that advocates for students’ civil rights. “That’s illegal. It would require an act of Congress.”

McMahon has said she would work with Congress to shrink the Education Department.

It’s unclear what part of HHS would oversee special education. Some disability rights advocates say it could be the Administration for Community Living, which supports adults with disabilities, or the Administration for Children and Families, which includes the federal preschool program Head Start and child welfare.

Would special education become an afterthought at HHS?

Many advocates for students with disabilities, some of whom spoke to Chalkbeat before Trump’s comments Friday, have significant concerns about moving special education to HHS.

The department is a massive agency whose responsibilities include approving new drugs, responding to emerging diseases, and administering Medicare and Medicaid. Advocates fear that special education would be an afterthought at the agency and that employees there lack the necessary expertise to interact with state education agencies and school districts about the services kids are legally entitled to receive.

Several education advocates expressed concern that Kennedy would oversee services for children with disabilities. Senators were not able to press Kennedy during his confirmation hearing about his knowledge and approach to educating children with disabilities, as they were McMahon.

“RFK Jr. has repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of autism as a real diagnosis,” Keri Rodrigues, the president of the National Parents Union, said in a statement. “Putting someone with this perspective in charge of children’s services — especially for children with disabilities — is a betrayal of families who have fought for decades to secure educational rights and protections for their kids.”

Denise Marshall, the CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, said that her members oppose moving special education to Health and Human Services.

“That department does not have the expertise or the knowledge, not only about what the law requires but about best practices, about what works, and about ensuring that students with disabilities learn to read and write and do math and graduate at higher percentages,” she said.

Education Department staffers understand how IDEA money is supposed to be spent and have experience providing guidance and support to states on how to use their funds legally and effectively, said Lindsay Kubatzky, the director of policy and advocacy for the nonprofit National Center for Learning Disabilities.

A large share of cases filed with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights — more than half in many years — involve students with disabilities.

Nicole Fuller, a policy manager who works with Kubatzky, said the special education and civil rights offices work closely together to make sure schools have the resources and knowledge to appropriately serve students with disabilities. She doesn’t trust that states would do the same.

Texas, for example, maintained an unofficial cap on identifying students with disabilities. The result was that many students missed out on services they were legally entitled to and struggled in school.

State education officials denied there was ever a cap, but the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights under the first Trump administration found widespread violations and ordered the state to rectify the situation.

“It did really take that oversight and insistence for Texas to do the right thing,” Fuller said.

Advocates also fear it represents a return to viewing disabilities as medical problems that need to be fixed.

“It feels like moving your public school district from the leadership of a superintendent to the leadership of your local hospital CEO,” said Jennifer Coco, the interim executive director at the Center for Learner Equity, a nonprofit that advocates for students with disabilities. “It fundamentally misunderstands disability.”

Public schools have not always lived up to the “bold, significant” promise in IDEA that every child should get a free and appropriate education, Coco and other advocates acknowledge.

“I don’t think that’s grounds to throw out the promise or to throw out the systems that make sure that promise is fulfilled,” Coco said.

This story has been updated to reflect a change in Jennifer Coco’s title. Nicole Fuller is based in Washington, D.C., not Texas.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump Education Department decimates office serving 5 million English learners in public schools

2025-03-21T19:35:02+00:00

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President Donald Trump has declared English the official language of the United States.

But his administration has fired nearly every Education Department staffer who ensured states and schools properly spent the hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked to help over 5 million students learning English.

It appears that just one staffer remains from the Office of English Language Acquisition, or OELA, after the Trump administration announced last week it would cut the Education Department staff in half.

“Your organizational unit is being abolished along with all positions within the unit – including yours,” an official with the department’s human resources team told the laid-off OELA staffers in a March 12 email.

Two days later, an administration official told state officials that the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education would take over the OELA.

Advocates for English learners and outgoing Education Department staffers worry the deep cuts to OELA will have serious effects on students, families, and school staff. Without a dedicated office to keep an eye on spending, they fear federal dollars won’t reach the English learners they’re intended to serve, and that the quality of teacher training will suffer.

“There won’t be any more staff to provide guardrails on the federal funding,” said one laid-off OELA staffer who spoke with Chalkbeat on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation from the Trump administration. “Ultimately, it will affect the quality of education that English learners get across the nation.”

Among those expressing concerns is an official who led the OELA — and helped maintain it as a standalone office — during Trump’s first term.

Adding to the uncertainty is Trump’s executive order that he said will close the Education Department. The president said Thursday before he signed the order that the federal government will preserve high-profile programs at the department, but did not mention its office for English learners.

OELA staff have played a key role in monitoring how states and schools spend $890 million in federal Title III funds, which are allocated based on the number of newly arrived immigrant children and students learning English. When states and schools have questions about whether they can use their money on a certain after-school program or a new family liaison role, OELA staff track down the answers.

The office supports dozens of universities, nonprofits, and others who train bilingual education teachers. It oversees a grant program that helps Native American and Alaska Native children learn English alongside indigenous languages.

And the staff maintain the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition, a hub for data, research, and best practices that many schools rely on. Some resources, like a recently released dual language playbook, take over a year to produce.

OELA had 15 staffers in January, according to a staff list posted on the Education Department’s website. The team already had more work than it could handle before the mass layoffs, said Montserrat Garibay, who led OELA during the Biden administration and left her role as the assistant deputy secretary shortly before Trump took office.

“They were overworked,” Garibay said. “It was almost impossible to keep up.”

Hayley Sanon, the acting assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, told state education officials in a March 14 letter that her office would manage Title III funds for English learners, as it did prior to December 2023.

She also said formula funding under the nation’s main federal education law, which includes money for English learners, “will continue to flow normally, and program functions will not be disrupted.”

“The Department is committed to fulfilling its statutory obligation to prepare English learners attain (sic) English proficiency and develop high levels of academic achievement in English,” wrote Sanon, who is also the principal deputy assistant secretary at the department.

In response to questions from Chalkbeat, Madi Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, reiterated that Title III and OELA would now fall under the elementary and secondary education office. But Biedermann did not respond to questions about why or how many OELA staff are left.

Students learning English have often been denied help

In addition to decimating the English language acquisition office, the Trump administration has eliminated nearly 200 civil rights attorneys who would make sure school districts meet their legal obligations to support English learners.

Some see the elimination of staff who oversee Title III as a precursor to bundling up that money in block grants that states could spend with fewer restrictions. Several Republican governors have championed that idea, but advocates for immigrant children worry that could divert resources away from kids learning English.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon, center, attended the March 20 ceremony at which Trump signed an executive order seeking to close the Education Department. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, center second row, has championed the idea of giving states education block grants.

“There’s plenty of districts and states who would do the right thing,” said David Holbrook, the executive director of the National Association of English Learner Program Administrators, which represents state and district staff. “But the reason we have laws, and the reason we see all the regulations, and the reason we have watchdog agencies” is because some would not.

In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Lau v. Nichols that the San Francisco Unified district violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act by failing to provide supplemental English language classes to students of Chinese heritage who did not speak English. The ruling led to significant changes in federal law and regulations, and spurred nationwide efforts to help English learners.

Several school districts, including Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco, entered into court-ordered settlements, known as consent decrees, to better serve English learners. But progress has been slow and uneven, and many English learners are still denied the services they should receive.

Three decades after those court orders, Chicago schools still did not have enough teachers or materials in native languages for English learners. In Denver, nearly 1 in 3 students failed to improve their English skills after two years in the district, test results showed.

Concerns about such issues aren’t confined to students’ English language skills and academic proficiency. Some advocates for English learners worry that Trump’s executive order declaring English as the official language of the United States could lead schools to put less effort into translating documents and conversations for immigrant families.

Then there’s the backdrop of how the president is enforcing immigration policy and who gets to remain in the country legally.

Trump is seeking to deport millions of immigrants who do not have legal status in the country, and he cleared the way for immigration arrests to happen at schools. He’s taken away the temporary status that protected hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians from deportation. And Trump has pledged to strip birthright citizenship from children born to undocumented parents on U.S. soil.

Office helped train teachers and supported immigrant families

A dozen OELA staffers got notices that they would be placed on administrative leave as of Friday and terminated in June, according to the union that represents Education Department staffers who are not supervisors.

Two staffers listed in the January directory whose names did not appear on the union layoffs list had phone numbers that no longer worked. Another staffer had an email autoreply saying she was on extended leave.

“I looked at that list and I looked at all of the names on it and I realized: Oh that’s our entire office,” the laid-off OELA staffer said.

That seems to leave only the deputy assistant secretary, Beatriz Ceja, who was still responding to emails from organizations that work with English learners as of last week. Ceja did not respond to an email message or a voicemail from Chalkbeat seeking comment.

The Education Department layoffs are being challenged or questioned on multiple fronts. Twenty-one state attorneys general filed a lawsuit on March 13 challenging the staff cuts, and several members of Congress are probing them. Sheria Smith, a civil rights attorney who was among the laid-off Education Department staffers and president of the union that represents a dozen fired OELA staffers, said she did not think the layoffs complied with the law.

The first Trump administration tried to fold OELA into the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education back in 2018, but the plan ultimately did not come to fruition.

José Viana, who led OELA during the first Trump administration, told Chalkbeat in a written message that he is concerned about the cuts to OELA and “engaged in diplomacy efforts” with the new Trump administration.

“My focus right now is on providing guidance regarding the decisions that have been made, outlining the legal requirements, and working toward solutions that best support multilingual learners,” he wrote.

Oversight of Title III returned to OELA just over a year ago during the Biden administration. The Office of Elementary and Secondary Education oversaw Title III funds for 15 years before that.

Garibay led that transition and added four staffers to the team that handled Title III. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona saw the previous staffing level of two as “unacceptable,” Garibay said.

“We put systems in place so we could have better communication,” Garibay said. “Every time I would go to a state, they were just so grateful to have technical assistance.”

There can be benefits to the elementary and secondary education office overseeing Title III, because it can make federal program monitoring more consistent and cut down on some duplicative tasks, Holbrook said. But he also highlighted fears that existing staff won’t have the capacity to take on OELA’s workload.

One of the key roles OELA plays is in supporting universities, nonprofits, and others who train teachers who work with English learners.

Belinda Gimbert, an associate professor in education administration at The Ohio State University, has experienced that firsthand.

Gimbert is the project director for HELPERs, a program that helps pre-service teachers and paraprofessionals get their bilingual education teaching license and that trains existing teachers to work with English learners in small groups.

It also provides support for immigrant families, such as family-school connectors who translate over video chat — a key strategy for engaging Somali parents in central Ohio who speak Maay Maay, which is primarily an oral language. The program received a $3 million, five-year grant from OELA.

When Gimbert had a technical or financial question, she could shoot an email to OELA and they were quick to respond. If she didn’t understand a legal requirement, OELA staff would translate it into plain English and explain what it meant for her program.

Several times, OELA helped Gimbert quickly add a partner so she could serve more Texas schools without going over her original budget. That helped meet the sudden demand for adults to provide English language acquisition services when a wave of immigrant children moved to an area or military families relocated near a base.

“We’ve always had a person to lean on to be able to administer this grant,” Gimbert said. “Everybody is really concerned about making sure that we are in compliance.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump signs executive order that aims to close U.S. Department of Education

2025-03-20T21:43:36+00:00

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President Donald Trump has signed a much anticipated executive order that he said is designed to close the U.S. Department of Education.

The order Trump signed Thursday tells Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” At the same time, the order says McMahon should ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

Despite polling to the contrary, Trump said in his speech Thursday that closing the department is a popular idea that would save money and help American students catch up to other countries. He also said his order would ensure that other federal agencies take over major programs now housed at the Education Department, like those for students from low-income backgrounds and students with disabilities.

“Beyond these core necessities, my administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said. “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good. We want to return our students to the states.”

President Donald Trump speaks during an event at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, when Trump signed an executive order intended to close the U.S. Department of Education.

The executive order represents a symbolic achievement for Trump, who for years has expressed a desire to close the department. Yet the president has already radically transformed the department without relying on such an order. McMahon announced massive layoffs and buyouts earlier this month that cut the department’s staff nearly in half.

Beyond the rhetoric, it’s unclear how exactly the order will impact the department’s work or existence.

By law, only Congress can eliminate a cabinet-level agency authorized by Congress; White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to acknowledge as much Thursday before Trump signed the order, when she said that the Education Department will become “much smaller.” And during his Thursday remarks, Trump expressed hopes that Democrats as well as Republicans would be “voting” for the department’s closure, although prominent Democratic lawmakers have blasted the idea.

The order does not directly change the department’s annual budget from Congress. And federal law dictates many of the Education Department’s main functions — changing those would require congressional approval that could be very hard to secure.

Still, Trump’s move to dramatically slash the department’s staff could impact its capacity and productivity, even if officially its functions remain in place.

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon promised to work with Congress on a reorganization plan. Project 2025, a prominent blueprint for conservative governance from the Heritage Foundation released before Trump’s second term, says that along with closing the Education Department, the federal government should move the department’s education civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice, while the collection of education data should move to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In a statement on Thursday, McMahon said closing the Education Department does not mean cutting off funds from those who depend on them.

“We will continue to support K-12 students, students with special needs, college student borrowers, and others who rely on essential programs,” she wrote. “We’re going to follow the law and eliminate the bureaucracy responsibly by working with Congress and state leaders to ensure a lawful and orderly transition.”

The executive order could be challenged in court. Many of Trump’s efforts to remake the federal bureaucracy are already tied up in litigation, including the Education Department layoffs.

The executive order notes that the Education Department does not educate any students, and points to low test scores on an important national assessment as evidence that federal spending is not helping students.

“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the order says.

Trump order is triumph for department’s foes

The Republican governors of Florida, Texas, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Idaho, and Nebraska were present during the signing ceremony. Trump said they “badly” wanted the federal government to give their states more control over education.

“Probably the cost will be half, and the education will be maybe many, many times better,” Trump said. States that “run very, very well,” he said, could have education systems as good as those in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — countries that tend to outperform the United States on international reading and math tests.

The Education Department administers billions of dollars in federal assistance through programs such as Title I, which benefits high-poverty schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which offsets the cost of special education services.

The department also administers financial aid for college students, shares information about best practices with states and school districts, and enforces civil rights laws. And it oversees the school accountability system, which identifies persistently low-performing schools to extra support.

States and school districts already make most education decisions, from teacher pay to curriculum choices.

Conservatives have wanted to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education since it was created by President Jimmy Carter and Congress in 1979, and Trump talked about doing so in his first administration. But those efforts never gained traction.

Conservatives say that for decades the department has failed to adequately address low academic performance. They also see the department as generally hostile to their political and ideological perspectives.

The executive order says that McMahon must ensure that “any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology,” a reference to policies intended to make schools more welcoming for students of color and LGBTQ students.

The department has moved to publicly target and root out diversity-focused practices in schools in recent weeks. And the department has already threatened to withhold federal funding from Maine for allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity.

Public education advocates say critical expertise will be lost and students’ civil rights won’t be protected if Trump further diminishes the department. They also fear that a department overhaul could endanger billions in federal funding that bolsters state and local education budgets.

They say they’re already seeing impacts from layoffs, which hit the Office for Civil Rights, Federal Student Aid, and the Institute of Education Sciences particularly hard.

Even before McMahon took office, the U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting initiative run by billionaire Elon Musk, canceled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research grants and contracts.

The Education Department already was one of the smallest cabinet-level departments, with around 4,100 employees, before the layoffs. With buyouts and layoffs, the department now employs just under 2,200 people.

Chalkbeat senior national reporter Kalyn Belsha contributed reporting.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Andrew Ujifusa is a story editor at Chalkbeat.

How a Republican plan to cut universal free school meals could affect 12 million students

2025-03-12T18:34:41+00:00

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Every school in Kentucky’s LaRue County provides free breakfast and lunch to any student who wants it.

It’s been that way for a decade, ever since the federal government launched a program allowing LaRue County Schools, and thousands of other districts nationwide, to skip the paperwork asking how much families earn.

In these communities, lots of kids already receive other kinds of assistance for low-income families. Federal officials saw a way to make the subsidized meals program more efficient: Cover meal costs based on how many children are in similar assistance programs, rather than verify every family’s income.

But LaRue County Schools won’t be able to do that anymore if sweeping changes to social programs proposed by congressional Republicans become law. GOP lawmakers say they want to ensure only eligible families get help and that taxpayer dollars are reserved for the neediest students, so that federal subsidies for school meals remain sustainable. But by one estimate, the Republicans’ plan would affect nearly a quarter of the students in the nation’s public schools.

Research has found that universal free school meals can boost school attendance, increase test scores, and decrease suspensions, likely because it eliminates the stigma students often associate with the free meals. Taking them away from students on a large scale could also have downstream effects on everything from families’ household budgets to local unemployment.

Stephanie Utley, the LaRue County district’s director of child nutrition, said that inevitably, fewer kids would eat school meals, either because their families no longer qualify for free breakfast and lunch or because they cannot produce documents to verify their income.

When fewer kids eat school meals, it’s harder for districts to cover their costs. To save money, Utley would likely swap higher-quality foods for cheaper ones, she said.

Apples and beef from local farms would go. The high school would serve fewer salads — they’d be too labor-intensive to prep. And a popular chicken breast sandwich would become a ground chicken patty.

Utley may have to lay off staff, too, she said, which would hurt the rural community’s economy.

“We’re the biggest restaurant in town,” she said. “It would be a nightmare.”

GOP school meals proposals would impact states

Republican lawmakers are considering a trio of proposals to help offset tax cuts sought by President Donald Trump that would be “devastating” to children and schools, said Erin Hysom, the senior child nutrition policy analyst for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center.

One proposal would dramatically increase the share of students who need to be enrolled in aid programs — such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — for schools to be eligible to serve free meals to all kids through the Community Eligibility Provision.

Right now, schools need to show 25% of students are enrolled in those kinds of assistance programs to participate in community eligibility. The House Republican proposal would raise the share to 60% — higher than the threshold has ever been. That would kick more than 24,000 schools off of community eligibility, and some 12 million students would no longer automatically qualify for free meals, Hysom’s organization estimated.

Essentially, only communities where nearly every child qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch could serve free meals to all kids.

“They’ve really moved the needle to the upper echelon of poverty,” Hysom said. “You couldn’t get any higher than that.”

Another proposal would require all families who don’t automatically qualify for free school meals through programs like SNAP to submit documents to verify their income with their application. That would burden families and schools with time-consuming added paperwork. Schools could end up cutting staff who serve food and work on school menus to hire more people to process applications.

Together, those changes would save $12 billion over 10 years, according to the list of proposals circulated by U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, the Republican chair of the House budget committee.

A third proposal would change how families qualify for SNAP and likely make over 1 million students no longer automatically eligible for free school meals. That would increase the paperwork burden even more.

All of that would make it more costly for states with universal free school meals to run their programs, because they rely heavily on federal reimbursement. Some states were already weighing whether they could afford to keep up free meals for all.

These three proposals are part of a process known as budget reconciliation that GOP lawmakers are using to make long-term changes to federal spending and revenue. As of Wednesday, Congress was considering a separate, stopgap budget that would keep funding essentially flat for the Agriculture Department, which pays for the school meal program, through the end of September.

School staff and child nutrition advocates are taking the House’s budget reconciliation proposals seriously. The Trump administration has already cut a $1 billion Agriculture Department program that helped schools buy food from local producers.

Free school meal cutbacks would have ripple effects

If fewer kids have access to free meals at school, more families would likely struggle to afford groceries at home. Many families who don’t qualify for free meals struggle to pay for food. This school year, a family of four qualified for free school meals if they made under $40,560 a year.

When schools eliminated free school meals for all following the pandemic, there was a surge in unpaid school meal debt, an issue school staff say will only intensify if these proposals go through.

Right now, schools typically have to verify the family’s income for 3% of their applications. If schools had to check income for every application, the burden would be enormous, school staff and child nutrition advocates said.

Many families who eke out a living working multiple jobs would have a hard time gathering up all the required documents to show how much they earn. Though children can participate in the school meals program regardless of their immigration status, undocumented parents may be afraid to hand over personal documents when Trump is threatening mass deportations.

“Eligible children are going to fall through the cracks,” Hysom said.

Many schools are already facing financial pressures from higher-than-usual food and labor costs, a 2024 survey of nearly 1,400 school nutrition directors showed. On top of that, schools are navigating new and stricter requirements for how much salt and sugar can be in food served by schools.

Schools have to buy most of their food from American sources, but if Trump puts certain tariffs in place for the long term, that could create new financial constraints.

“Cost is absolutely a concern,” said Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, which represents school nutrition directors and conducted the survey. “When avocados or tomatoes from Mexico become much more expensive, that will cause an increase in demand for domestic produce, and an increase in price, as well.”

Shannon Gleave, the president of the School Nutrition Association, understands the need to make sure the school meal program runs as it should.

In Arizona’s Glendale Elementary School District, where Gleave is the director of food and nutrition, kids can speed through the lunch line because everyone qualifies for free meals. But staff scan student ID badges to make sure each kid only takes one meal, and that children with dietary restrictions get the right food.

Upping the verification requirements a little could work, she said. But verifying 100% of applications “is not an efficient use of time.”

“There is no way my existing staff could do that now,” she said. “You have to figure out a way to be good stewards of resources, but also look at the amount of administrative burden that it’s going to entail.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Teens with disabilities were getting help with life after high school. Then DOGE started cutting.

2025-02-26T00:43:05+00:00

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When teens and young adults with disabilities in California’s Poway Unified School District heard about a new opportunity to get extra help planning for life after high school, nearly every eligible student signed up.

The program, known as Charting My Path for Future Success, aimed to fill a major gap in education research about what kinds of support give students nearing graduation the best shot at living independently, finding work, or continuing their studies.

Students with disabilities finish college at much lower rates than their non-disabled peers, and often struggle to tap into state employment programs for adults with disabilities, said Stacey McCrath-Smith, a director of special education at Poway Unified, which had 135 students participating in the program. So the extra help, which included learning how to track goals on a tool designed for high schoolers with disabilities, was much needed.

Charting My Path launched earlier this school year in Poway Unified and 12 other school districts. The salaries of 61 school staff nationwide, and the training they received to work with nearly 1,100 high schoolers with disabilities for a year and a half, was paid for by the U.S. Department of Education.

Jessie Damroth’s 17-year-old son Logan, who has autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other medical needs, had attended classes and met with his mentor through the program at Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts for a month. For the first time, he was talking excitedly about career options in science and what he might study at college.

“He was starting to talk about what his path would look like,” Damroth said. “It was exciting to hear him get really excited about these opportunities. … He needed that extra support to really reinforce that he could do this.”

Then the Trump administration pulled the plug.

Charting My Path was among more than 200 Education Department contracts and grants terminated over the last two weeks by the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service. DOGE has slashed spending it deemed to be wasteful, fraudulent, or in service of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility goals that President Donald Trump has sought to ban. But in several instances, the decision to cancel contracts affected more than researchers analyzing data in their offices — it affected students.

Many projects, like Charting My Path, involved training teachers in new methods, testing learning materials in actual classrooms, and helping school systems use data more effectively.

“Students were going to learn really how to set goals and track progress themselves, rather than having it be done for them,” McCrath-Smith said. “That is the skill that they will need post-high school when there’s not a teacher around.”

All of that work was abruptly halted — in some cases with nearly finished results that now cannot be distributed.

Every administration is entitled to set its own priorities, and contracts can be canceled or changed, said Steven Fleischman, an education consultant who for many years ran one of the regional research programs that was terminated. He compared it to a homeowner deciding they no longer want a deck as part of their remodel.

But the current approach reminds him more of construction projects started and then abandoned during the Great Recession, in some cases leaving giant holes that sat for years.

“You can walk around and say, ‘Oh, that was a building we never finished because the funds got cut off,’” he said.

DOGE drives cuts to education research contracts, grants

The Education Department has been a prime target of DOGE, the chaotic cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to Trump.

So far, DOGE has halted 89 education projects, many of which were under the purview of the Institute of Education Sciences, the ostensibly independent research arm of the Education Department. The administration said those cuts, which included multi-year contracts, totaled $881 million. In recent years, the federal government has spent just over $800 million on the entire IES budget.

DOGE has also shut down 10 regional labs that conduct research for states and local schools and shuttered four equity assistance centers that help with teacher training. The Trump administration also cut off funding for nearly 100 teacher training grants and 18 grants for centers that often work to improve instruction for struggling students.

The total savings is up for debate. The Trump administration said the terminated Education Department contracts and grants were worth $2 billion. But some were near completion with most of the money already spent.

An NPR analysis of all of DOGE’s reported savings found that it likely was around $2 billion for the entire federal government — though the Education Department is a top contributor.

On Friday, a federal judge issued an injunction that temporarily blocks the Trump administration from canceling additional contracts and grants that might violate the anti-DEIA executive order. It’s not clear whether the injunction would prevent more contracts from being canceled “for convenience.”

Mark Schneider, the recent past IES director, said the sweeping cuts represent an opportunity to overhaul a bloated education research establishment. But even many conservative critics have expressed alarm at how wide-ranging and indiscriminate the cuts have been. Congress mandated many of the terminated programs, which also indirectly support state and privately funded research.

The canceled projects include contracts that support maintenance of the Common Core of Data, a major database used by policymakers, researchers, and journalists, as well as work that supports updates to the What Works Clearinghouse, a huge repository of evidence-based practices available to educators for free.

And after promising not to make any cuts to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, the department canceled an upcoming test for 17-year-olds that helps researchers understand long-term trends. On Monday, Peggy Carr, the head of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees NAEP, was placed on leave.

The Education Department did not respond to questions about who decided which programs to cut and what criteria were used. Nor did the department respond to a specific question about why Charting My Path was eliminated. DOGE records estimate the administration saved $22 million by terminating the program early, less than half the $54 million in the original contract.

The decision has caused mid-year disruptions and uncertainty.

In Utah, the Canyons School District is trying to reassign the school counselor and three teachers whose salaries were covered by the Charting My Path contract.

The district, which had 88 high schoolers participating in the program, is hoping to keep using the curriculum to boost its usual services, said Kirsten Stewart, a district spokesperson.

Officials in Poway Unified, too, hope schools can use the curriculum and tools to keep up a version of the program. But that will take time and work because the program’s four teachers had to be reassigned to other jobs.

“They dedicated that time and got really important training,” McCrath-Smith said. “We don’t want to see that squandered.”

For Damroth, the loss of parent support meetings through Charting My Path was especially devastating. Logan has a rare genetic mutation that causes him to fall asleep easily during the day, so Damroth wanted help navigating which colleges might be able to offer extra scheduling support.

“I have a million questions about this. Instead of just hearing ‘I don’t know’ I was really looking forward to working with Joe and the program,” she said, referring to Logan’s former mentor. “It’s just heartbreaking. I feel like this wasn’t well thought out. … My child wants to do things in life, but he needs to be given the tools to achieve those goals and those dreams that he has.”

DOGE cuts labs that helped ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in reading

The dramatic improvement in reading proficiency that Carey Wright oversaw as state superintendent in one the nation’s poorest states became known as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast, based out of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University, was a key partner in that work, Wright said.

When Wright wondered if state-funded instructional coaches were really making a difference, REL Southeast dispatched a team to observe, videotape, and analyze the instruction delivered by hundreds of elementary teachers across the state. Researchers reported that teachers’ instructional practices aligned well with the science of reading and that teachers themselves said they felt far more knowledgeable about teaching reading.

“That solidified for me that the money that we were putting into professional learning was working,” Wright said.

The study, she noted, arose from a casual conversation with researchers at REL Southeast: “That’s the kind of give and take that the RELs had with the states.”

Wright, now Maryland state superintendent, said she was looking forward to partnering with REL Mid-Atlantic on a math initiative and on an overhaul of the school accountability system.

But this month, termination letters went out to the universities and research organizations that run the 10 Regional Educational Laboratories, which were established by Congress in 1965 to serve states and school districts. The letters said the contracts were being terminated “for convenience.”

The press release that went to news organizations cited “wasteful and ideologically driven spending” and named a single project in Ohio that involved equity audits as a part of an effort to reduce suspensions. Most of the REL projects on the IES website involve reading, math, career connections, and teacher retention.

Jannelle Kubinec, CEO of WestEd, an education research organization that held the contracts for REL West and REL Northwest, said she never received a complaint or a request to review the contracts before receiving termination letters. Her team had to abruptly cancel meetings to go over results with school districts. In other cases, reports are nearly finished but cannot be distributed because they haven’t gone through the review process.

REL West was also working with the Utah State Board of Education to figure out if the legislature’s investment in programs to keep early career teachers from leaving the classroom was making a difference, among several other projects.

“This is good work and we are trying to think through our options,” she said. “But the cancellation does limit our ability to finish the work.”

Given enough time, Utah should be able to find a staffer to analyze the data collected by REL West, said Sharon Turner, a spokesperson for the Utah State Board of Education. But the findings are much less likely to be shared with other states.

The most recent contracts started in 2022 and were set to run through 2027.

The Trump administration said it planned to enter into new contracts for the RELs to satisfy “statutory requirements” and better serve schools and states, though it’s unclear what that will entail.

“The states drive the research agendas of the RELs,” said Sara Schapiro, the executive director of the Alliance for Learning Innovation, a coalition that advocates for more effective education research. If the federal government dictates what RELs can do, “it runs counter to the whole argument that they want the states to be leading the way on education.”

Some terminated federal education research was nearly complete

Some research efforts were nearly complete when they got shut down, raising questions about how efficient these cuts were.

The American Institutes for Research, for example, was almost done evaluating the impact of the Comprehensive Literacy State Development program, which aims to improve literacy instruction through investments like new curriculum and teacher training.

AIR’s research spanned 114 elementary schools across 11 states and involved more than 23,000 third, fourth, and fifth graders and their nearly 900 reading teachers.

Researchers had collected and analyzed a massive trove of data from the randomized trial and presented their findings to federal education officials just three days before the study was terminated.

“It was a very exciting meeting,” said Mike Garet, a vice president and institute fellow at AIR who oversaw the study. “People were very enthusiastic about the report.”

Another AIR study that was nearing completion looked at the use of multi-tiered systems of support for reading among first and second graders. It’s a strategy that helps schools identify and provide support to struggling readers, with the most intensive help going to kids with the highest needs. It’s widely used by schools, but its effectiveness hasn’t been tested on a larger scale.

The research took place in 106 schools and involved over 1,200 educators and 5,700 children who started first grade in 2021 and 2022. Much of the funding for the study went toward paying for teacher training and coaching to roll out the program over three years. All of the data was collected and nearly done being analyzed when DOGE made its cuts.

Garet doesn’t think he and his team should simply walk away from unfinished work.

“If we can’t report results, that would violate our covenant with the districts, the teachers, the parents, and the students who devoted a lot of time in the hope of generating knowledge about what works,” Garet said. “Now that we have the data and have the results, I think we’re duty-bound to report them.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump attacks on DEI could impact Philly African-American history class, admissions, charters

2025-02-25T18:59:30+00:00

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In 2005, Philadelphia became the first major city in America to mandate that all students take an African American history course in order to graduate. That landmark class could now be on shakier ground due to national politics.

Philadelphia district leaders haven’t said much about the impact of President Donald Trump’s actions on city schools. But the African American history course mandate is one of several city policies — covering issues like selective admissions and charter schools focused on Black students — that are potentially threatened by the Trump administration.

Early in his second term, Trump has pushed to reshape K-12 schools through a flurry of actions. One of his executive orders seeks to ban policies that could be construed as promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, which the president called “radical indoctrination.”

A subsequent “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s top acting civil rights official warned education leaders that school diversity efforts could violate federal civil rights laws, even if such efforts don’t rely directly on race. Both the letter and Trump’s executive order threaten schools with the loss of federal funding if they don’t comply.

And in her mid-February confirmation hearing, Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for U.S. education secretary, would not tell senators whether schools or districts might put their federal funding at risk by teaching an African American history class or other ethnic studies course — a response that U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, called “chilling.”

Amid the rapid-fire Trump education news, the biggest concern among educators is that the administration will try to withhold federal aid from districts that don’t follow its directives. Such aid is primarily intended to help students from low-income backgrounds and those with disabilities, and to bolster career and technical education programs, among other priorities.

Opponents of Trump’s policies scored an early win late last week when U.S. District Court Judge Adam Abelson issued a preliminary order blocking parts of the DEI ban, calling it vague, unconstitutional, and “pernicious.”

“If an elementary school receives Department of Education funding for technology access, and a teacher uses a computer to teach the history of Jim Crow laws, does that risk the grant being deemed ‘equity-related’ and the school being stripped of funding?” he wrote.

Even with that initial court victory, the potential for the Trump administration to wreak havoc on school budgets and policies is still worrying officials.

If federal funding were revoked, “it would be nothing short of catastrophic,” acting Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Carrie Rowe told state lawmakers Monday during her department’s House budget hearing. The loss of millions in funds for students with disabilities “would cause irreparable harm,” she said.

But federal funding isn’t the only concern.

Another Philadelphia policy that could come in for scrutiny is the admissions process to the district’s four most selective high schools — Central, Masterman, Palumbo, and Carver High School for Engineering and Science. The lottery system adopted three years ago gives automatic admission to all qualified students from certain ZIP codes that rarely send students to those schools. Most of the residents in these ZIP codes are from low-income backgrounds and are Black or Latino.

In addition, several of the city’s charter schools, including Sankofa and Imhotep, were founded specifically to prioritize Black history and culture in their curriculum and to focus on combating racism. Charter leaders are planning to discuss this topic at their next meeting, said a spokesperson for Philadelphia Charters for Excellence.

Then there are the worries of teachers and principals about students in their schools who may be undocumented immigrants or have undocumented family members, and are on the alert for possible ICE arrests.

Other districts have already entered the harsh new political spotlight on schools. In Chicago last week, an outside group immediately challenged the district’s new Black Student Success Plan, a long-awaited blueprint meant to address persistent disparities in test scores, graduation rates, and other student outcomes.

“My concern is about what it means to teach African American history,” said Ismael Jimenez, Philadelphia’s social studies curriculum director. “Are we not able to talk about systemic racism? We can’t tell students that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves when we talk about the country’s 250th anniversary next year?”

Jimenez said he can’t imagine that the federal government would prohibit educators from teaching about Black people in America and leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.

“Structural or institutional racism still exists,” Jimenez said. “They are viewed as divisive concepts. I guess that’s the argument why [Trump officials] don’t want those things taught.”

Educators fear ‘chaos’ driven by Trump directives

Tim Boyle, the principal of Science Leadership Academy Middle School, recalled that mandating African American history was a “big deal” two decades ago. Now he worries about the scrutiny such a class could draw from unsympathetic federal officials and others, especially as Philadelphia becomes the center of attention during America’s 250th anniversary celebration in 2026.

“The fact that we are celebrating America’s [250th] birthday next year … folks who would not normally be paying attention to Philadelphia are paying attention to Philadelphia. And that presents opportunities and challenges,” Boyle said.

In interviews, other educators said that they feared that any initiative focused on equity, such as transgender rights and even what books are stocked in libraries, could be subject to a federal civil rights challenge like the one against the Chicago plan for Black students.

“How safe is it for us to continue doing what we’re doing?” said Boyle. He wondered whether he’d have to worry about the district’s general counsel “giving me a call because some person is complaining about something I do here? It’s fuzzy now, and it was not fuzzy a year ago.”

Some are focused on ways to resist Trump’s actions. Kristina Moon of the Education Law Center said the Trump orders violate a congressional statute prohibiting the federal government from dictating local school curriculum, as well as safeguards against the withholding of federal funds for political reasons.

“Chaos, confusion and fear, that is really the purpose here,” Moon said of the executive order and the “Dear Colleague” letter from Acting Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Craig Trainor. “It’s important to note that there is a long process for rescinding federal funding as a punishment, and it has rarely been invoked.”

There is a legal difference, she said, between discriminating against an individual due to race and acknowledging that systemic racism exists.

In a press conference Monday, Gov. Josh Shapiro made it clear that he would aggressively fight against any attempt to withhold federal aid due the state, although he did not specifically discuss education funding.

He said that as a result of his mid-February lawsuit and his personal engagement with Trump’s team, the administration has unfrozen $1.2 billion in aid that it sought to withhold, mostly for environmental projects.

Federal education aid accounts for about 10% of the Philadelphia district’s budget of more than $4.5 billion. The biggest program is Title I, which prioritizes school districts with high levels of poverty; Philadelphia received over $193 million in Title I aid in its most recent budget.

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon declared that “it is not the president’s goal to defund the programs,” but that he wanted more efficiency.

Even if the attempt to tie federal education aid to curriculum mandates fail in court, education funding is still under threat, To help pay for tax cuts Trump has promised, a budget framework introduced by House Republicans would reduce federal education aid by $330 billion over 10 years, although much of it would focus on higher education, Inside Higher Ed reported.

The GOP budget blueprint would also cut money for Medicaid, which the families of many students rely on for health care.

Policies on admissions, equity could be scrutinized

A variety of other Philadelphia district policies could also come under scrutiny.

The district implemented the revamped admissions lottery at four of its most desirable schools in 2022, declaring it to be more fair and equitable than the prior system that relied heavily on principals’ judgement.

Some parents have filed a legal challenge against the lottery, arguing that the ZIP code preference is racially discriminatory. When the lottery was adopted, some parents noted with dismay that white, privileged residents in gentrifying pockets within these ZIP codes would also benefit from the new policy. But the ZIP code strategy was adopted by the Board of Education precisely to avoid accusations of racial discrimination.

In a decision last October, a judge with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania sided with the district, stating that the process was “race-blind.”

However, the “Dear Colleague” letter interprets current law to mean that schools cannot use non-racial criteria to meet diversity goals, a legal position many say is misguided. In theory, that could put the 2022 admissions changes in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, the Philadelphia school district has not scrubbed its website of references to DEI, and it still employs a chief equity officer.

Its website maintains information about its diversity, equity and inclusion work and says its purpose is to “cultivate prosperity and liberation for students and staff, starting with historically marginalized populations.”

But since Trump’s election, some educators feel that a lot of work they’ve done in that vein over the past few years might be at risk.

“We’re in an era where a family can call downtown and say, there’s a Pride flag that’s not allowed,” said Boyle, the principal of SLAMS. “Or, my kid is reading this book, and I wasn’t given an opt-out form.

“There’s not a lot of terra firma now,” he added.

Philadelphia Bureau Chief Carly Sitrin contributed to this story.

Dale Mezzacappa is a senior writer for Chalkbeat Philadelphia, where she covers K-12 schools and early childhood education in Philadelphia. Contact Dale at dmezzacappa@chalkbeat.org.

Linda McMahon’s nomination heads to full Senate after education committee gives OK along party lines

2025-02-20T18:00:05+00:00

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Linda McMahon is one step closer to becoming the secretary of education in charge of dismantling her own department after the Senate education committee moved her nomination forward Thursday.

McMahon’s nomination will be taken up by the full Senate, where she is likely to be confirmed. In a 12-11 party line vote, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee advanced her nomination with a favorable recommendation.

During her confirmation hearing last week, McMahon stood firmly behind President Donald Trump’s calls to gut the U.S. Department of Education, potentially by doling out its responsibilities to other federal agencies. McMahon pledged to work with Congress to dismantle the department, but said she did not intend to slash federal funding for high poverty schools, low income college students, and others who depend on federal education dollars.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the education committee, praised the “strong vision” McMahon laid out for the Education Department, including a commitment to empowering parents and upholding Title IX, the federal civil rights law, based on the Trump administration’s interpretation, which acknowledges the existence of only two sexes.

“If confirmed, Ms. McMahon has the tall task of reforming a Department of Education that has lost its purpose,” Cassidy said. “We need a strong leader at the Department who will get our education system back on track.”

Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire who led some of the most intensive questioning of McMahon during her hearing, said the vote boiled down to “whether we support a nominee and president who believe that dismantling the U.S. Department of Education is in the best interest of kids, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that doing so will improve academic outcomes.”

For much of the country’s history, Hassan said, Black and brown children and children with disabilities often were excluded and denied equal educational opportunities. The Education Department was created to address those “deep divides” and elevate education as an issue, she said.

The Trump administration is expected to issue an executive order detailing its plans for the department.

President Trump campaigned on reducing the role of the federal government in education, but in recent weeks he’s moved to consolidate power in the executive branch and wrest control over how certain issues are taught and how schools run programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at preventing schools from teaching about topics like systemic racism and white privilege and removing certain protections for transgender students.

The Trump administration’s cost-cutting DOGE initiative has cut dozens of contracts and grants related to education research, teacher training, and more over the last week.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Education Department reorganization won’t hurt funding, McMahon promises in confirmation hearing

2025-02-13T22:36:02+00:00

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Linda McMahon said she stands firmly behind President Donald Trump’s calls to gut the U.S. Department of Education at her confirmation hearing to lead the department.

But she promised to work with Congress to do so — acknowledging some limits on the president’s authority as Trump seeks to remake the government through executive orders. And she tried to reassure teachers and parents that any changes would not jeopardize billions in federal funding that flows to high-poverty schools, special education services, and low-income college students.

“We’d like to do this right,” McMahon said. “It is not the president’s goal to defund the programs, it is only to have it operate more efficiently.”

Trump has called the Education Department a “con job” and said that McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive and billionaire Republican donor, should work to put herself out of a job. McMahon called this rhetoric “fervor” for change.

The Trump administration’s chaotic approach to spending cuts so far raise questions about whether McMahon’s statements — an effort to neutralize the most significant criticism of plans to get rid of the Education Department — will prove true over time.

Thursday’s hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, punctuated by occasional protests, served as a referendum of sorts on the value of the Education Department. Republicans said it had saddled schools with red tape without improving student outcomes. Democrats said the department protects students’ civil rights and funds essential services.

Democrats also pressed McMahon on Trump’s threats to withhold federal funding from schools that violate his executive orders and on the details of a potential reorganization — questions that McMahon largely deflected as ones she could better answer after she takes office.

“It’s almost like we’re being subjected to a very elegant gaslighting here,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire.

McMahon pressed on what DEI orders might mean

Even as Trump has called for the Education Department to be eliminated and schooling to be “returned to the states,” he’s also sought to expand its mission with executive orders threatening the funding of schools that employ diversity, equity, and inclusion practices or teach that racism and discrimination were part of America’s founding. The federal government is barred by law from setting local curriculum, as Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska pointed out during the hearing.

In a tense exchange, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who’s championed school desegregation and diversity efforts in education, asked McMahon how schools would know if they were running a program that violates Trump’s executive order seeking to root out “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools. Many schools have no idea what’s allowed, Murphy said, because the order doesn’t clearly define what’s prohibited.

McMahon said in her view, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month should be permitted, after Murphy noted that U.S. Department of Defense schools would no longer celebrate Black History Month in response to Trump’s order.

But McMahon would not say that running affinity groups for students from certain racial or ethnic backgrounds, such as a Black engineers club or an after-school club for Vietnamese American students, was permitted. She also would not say whether schools might put their federal funding at risk by teaching an African American history class or other ethnic studies program.

“That’s pretty chilling,” Murphy said. “You’re going to have a lot of educators and a lot of principals and administrators scrambling right now.”

Later in the confirmation hearing, McMahon agreed schools should teach “the good, the bad, and the ugly” parts of U.S. history, and that it’s up to states, not the Department of Education, to establish curriculum.

McMahon’s record on DEI has sometimes been at odds with the Trump administration. She backed diversity issues when she served on the Connecticut State Board of Education, the Washington Post reported.

During her hearing, McMahon said DEI programs are “tough,” because while they’re put in place to promote diversity and inclusion, they can have the opposite effect. She pointed to examples of Black and Hispanic students attending separate graduation ceremonies — though those are typically held to celebrate the achievements of students of color, not to isolate them.

Republicans see McMahon as an outsider who can overhaul department

McMahon told the committee that many Americans are experiencing an educational system in decline — she pointed to sobering national test scores, crime on college campuses, and high youth suicide rates — and said it was time for a renewed focus on teaching reading, math, and “true history.”

“In many cases, our wounds are caused by the excessive consolidation of power in our federal education establishment,” she said. “So what’s the remedy? Fund education freedom, not government-run systems. Listen to parents, not politicians. Build up careers, not college debt. Empower states, not special interests. Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats.”

Republican Senators reiterated these themes, arguing that bureaucrats in Washington had had their chance and that it was time for a new approach.

They asked McMahon about Trump administration priorities such as expanding school choice, including private school vouchers, and interpreting Title IX to bar transgender students from restrooms and sports teams aligned with their gender identities.

McMahon said she was “happy” to see the Biden administration’s rules on Title IX vacated, and she supported withholding federal funds from colleges that did not comply with the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law.

Teachers unions and other critics of McMahon have said she lacks the proper experience to lead the Education Department, though McMahon and others have pointed to her time serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education, as a trustee of Sacred Heart University, and her role as chair of the America First Policy Institute, where she advocated for private school choice, apprenticeships, and career education.

A protester yells in defense of public schools during Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing. Protesters interrupted the hearing several times.

McMahon also ran the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first administration. Her understanding of the federal bureaucracy is an asset, supporters say.

Sen. Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina, said McMahon’s background made her uniquely suited to tackle the pressing challenges facing the American education system today.

“For the poorest kids in our country, disillusioned about the American dream, the answers they are looking for rarely come from Washington,” Scott said. “With all of our good intentions, the Department of Education has simply failed the poorest kids in the United States of America, the greatest nation on the planet. To turn that around, we need someone who’s already succeeded in business and in government.”

Funding, protections for students with disabilities at stake

McMahon said multiple times that parents of children with disabilities should not worry about federal funding being cut for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, though she said it was possible that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would administer the money instead of the Education Department.

But it appeared that McMahon had limited knowledge of the rights outlined in IDEA, the landmark civil rights law that protects students with disabilities. And she said it was possible that civil rights enforcement — a large portion of which is related to complaints about children with disabilities not getting the services to which they’re entitled — would move to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Dismantling the education department by moving key functions to other departments is a tenet of Project 2025, the playbook the conservative Heritage Foundation developed for a second Trump administration. Most of these functions are mandated in federal law, and moving them would require congressional approval.

McMahon struggled to articulate the goals of IDEA beyond saying students would be taken care of and get the assistance and technology they need.

“There is a reason that the Department of Education and IDEA exist, and it is because educating kids with disabilities can be really hard and it takes the national commitment to get it done,” Hassan, the New Hampshire senator, said. “That’s why so many people are so concerned about this proposal to eliminate the department. Because they think kids will once again be shoved aside, and especially kids with disabilities.”

McMahon also could not name any requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal law that replaced No Child Left Behind. ESSA requires states to identify low-performing schools and intervene to improve student learning, but it gives states more flexibility in how they do so than the previous law.

McMahon seemed open to reversing some of the cuts enacted by the U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting initiative led by billionaire Elon Musk.

She said, if confirmed, she would look into whether staff who’d been placed on administrative leave — including some who investigate civil rights complaints — should return. She also said she’d assess the programs that were cut when DOGE terminated 89 contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences and 29 training grants.

Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said her office had heard from a former teacher who developed an intensive tutoring strategy that was used in a dozen schools in the state. The teacher had a pending grant application to evaluate the program and its effect on student outcomes, and the teacher worried it would be in jeopardy. Collins asked if the department should keep collecting that kind of data so it could help states determine what’s working for kids.

“I’m not sure yet what the impact of all of those programs are,” McMahon said. “There are many worthwhile programs that we should keep, but I’m not yet apprised of them.”

The Senate education committee is scheduled to vote on McMahon’s confirmation on Feb. 20.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Crucial research halted as DOGE abruptly terminates Education Department contracts

2025-02-12T00:38:42+00:00

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The Trump administration has terminated dozens of contracts worth nearly $900 million at the U.S. Department of Education, halting crucial education research and data-gathering efforts.

The canceled contracts are part of an ongoing effort led by the U.S. DOGE Service, a cost-cutting initiative headed by billionaire Elon Musk.

The contract terminations come as the Trump administration looks to significantly scale back the size and scope of the Department of Education, with an executive order to that effect reportedly coming soon.

On Monday night, DOGE announced on X, the social media platform owned by Musk, that it had terminated 89 Education Department contracts totaling $881 million.

Many of those were for education research and program evaluation work done by the Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, the research arm of the Department of Education. U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat who sits on the Senate education committee, said in a statement the cuts amounted to a “gutting” of IES.

When asked for comment, Alberto Bentacourt, a spokesperson for the Department of Education told Chalkbeat: “We kindly point you to the X post from DOGE.”

Madi Biedermann, another Education Department spokesperson, told ProPublica that 90 contracts had been identified as “waste, fraud, and abuse” and that canceling them was “in line with the department’s goal of making sure it is focused on meaningful learning.” Biedermann would not provide specifics about which contracts were cut short.

Several contractors for the Education Department told Chalkbeat they got notices on Monday saying that their contracts had been terminated and that work must stop immediately.

Dana Tofig, a spokesperson for the American Institutes for Research, said the nonprofit research organization had received termination notices for several IES contracts related to education statistics and evaluation work. The terminations were “for convenience,” he said, a clause that allows the federal government to end contracts without cause regardless of the contractor’s performance.

“If the purpose of such cuts is to make sure taxpayer dollars are not wasted and used well, the evaluation and data work that has been terminated is exactly the work that determines which programs are effective uses of federal dollars, and which are not,” Tofig wrote, noting several contracts were nearing their completion.

John Hutchins, a spokesperson for MDRC, which also conducts education research, said the nonprofit had two IES contracts canceled as of Tuesday.

The first was to conduct the ReSolve Math Study, a sweeping effort to help kids who are struggling in math following the pandemic. The second was to assist external evaluators who conduct research for the What Works Clearinghouse, a federal repository of best practices and education research that schools and lawmakers often rely on.

Some research projects had the plug pulled after they’d already collected years of data. It’s unclear if any of that information will be salvaged or if it will be destroyed. One person who worked on a contract that was canceled mid-project — who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to prevent retaliation by the Trump administration — likened it to having their work flushed down the toilet.

It’s unclear exactly how many of the Education Department’s hundreds of active contracts were terminated. In a statement, Felice Levine, who directs the American Educational Research Association, said 169 IES contracts had been terminated, including some for the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of IES that publishes key reports, some of which are mandated by Congress.

EdTrust, a prominent civil rights organization that relies on disaggregated education data by race, income, and other demographics to help identify disparities and inequities in schools, condemned the contract cuts.

“The sudden halting of these contracts jeopardizes our collective responsibility to identify and address the inequities that affect a variety of student populations, including students from low-income families, students of color, English language learners, students with disabilities, student parents, and students from rural communities,” the organization said in a statement.

In a conversation that aired Tuesday on LinkedIn, Mark Schneider, the director of IES for six years under President Joe Biden and during Trump’s first term, said he viewed what was happening not as a “tragedy” or a “catastrophe,” but as an opportunity to significantly overhaul research at the Education Department.

He saw room, for example, for IES to build a better statewide longitudinal data system that states could customize, instead of reinventing the wheel on their own.

He admitted the process had been chaotic, but said what happens next is more important.

“These guys came in with a sledgehammer and they just broke shit,” Schneider said of the DOGE staff. “They probably swung the sledgehammer too fast and too hard because they broke things like [the Common Core of Data] that actually are important. … What you really need is a crew that comes in there and has more knowledge than the DOGE people that are committed to rebuilding the education R&D infrastructure.”

Some programs were spared. ProPublica reported that the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a key test often called the nation’s report card, would not be affected by the cuts. The Trump administration pointed to disappointing NAEP scores, released earlier this month, as a rationale to invest more in private school vouchers and other school choice programs.

The College Scorecard, which helps high schoolers compare college offerings and cost, is also unaffected.

The cuts also will not affect contractors working in IES’s Small Business Innovation Research Program, which helps develop and evaluate new ed tech products, Education Week reported, or the Regional Education Laboratory Program, which has 10 outposts that help school districts, state education departments, and others gather data and make decisions about education policies and programs.

On Monday, DOGE announced the Education Department had also canceled 29 training grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. It singled out a grant that trained teachers to “help students understand / interrogate the complex histories involved in oppression, and help students recognize areas of privilege and power on an individual and collective basis.”

Trump has issued executive orders seeking to prevent federal agencies from carrying out work related to DEI initiatives, and to stop K-12 schools from teaching students about concepts like white privilege and unconscious bias.

Already, the Education Department has scrubbed hundreds of documents from its website and put at least 50 staffers on leave.

This story has been updated to add more information about canceled contracts and comments from former IES Director Mark Schneider.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump Education Department revives DeVos-era Title IX sex discrimination rules

2025-01-31T18:19:41+00:00

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President Donald Trump’s administration told schools Friday that Title IX law barring sex discrimination will once again be subject to federal regulations from over four years ago.

The move effectively eliminates protections for gender identity in schools adopted by former President Joe Biden’s administration.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter intended for school leaders, an official with the U.S. Department of Education wrote that enforcement of Title IX is now based on “the principles and provisions of the 2020 Title IX Rule.” That means Title IX enforcement will no longer be based on the regulations adopted in 2024, Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor wrote.

The Trump Education Department’s guidance comes in the wake of a Jan. 10 ruling by a federal judge that tossed out Biden Title IX rules.

In explaining the department’s rationale, Trainor cited an executive order Trump signed earlier this month that defined sex as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” The 2020 rules developed under then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos treated sex as a binary, but did not define it.

“President Trump ordered all agencies and departments within the Executive Branch to ‘enforce all sex-protective laws to promote [the] reality’ that there are ‘two sexes, male and female,’ and that “[t]hese sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” Trainor wrote. “Title IX must be enforced consistent with President Trump’s order.”

The 2024 regulations were praised by transgender students and LGBTQ advocates as enshrining critical protections related to student pronouns and transgender students’ school facilities such as restrooms. But critics said Biden’s rules improperly distorted and expanded Title IX’s stated protections against discrimination “on the basis of sex.”

Trump made criticisms of transgender rights a key element of his 2024 campaign, and schools have become a battleground for LGBTQ rights and related cultural issues in recent years.

Trainor’s letter technically does not carry the same force of federal law or regulations. But it does indicate the administration’s general view of the issue, and also conveys how the department’s Office for Civil Rights will approach relevant Title IX investigations into schools. Those two factors could heavily influence how school districts approach the matter.

In his letter, Trainor said open Office for Civil Rights investigations initiated under the Biden Title IX rule “should be immediately reoriented to comport fully with the requirements of the 2020 Title IX Rule.”

The 2020 regulations were controversial due to how they addressed sexual assault complaints. Unlike the Biden administration, the 2020 rules did not say that Title IX protections extend to gender identity.

In his letter, Trainor said the January decision from U.S. District Court Judge Danny Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky correctly ruled against the Biden administration’s position that “discrimination on the basis of sex also includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, and sexual orientation.”

However, discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes has been struck down in previous court rulings. Those decisions have also formed the basis for legal protections for gender identity.

It remains to be seen how the Trump Education Department’s view of sex stereotypes, which could cover a broad set of issues in schools, influences its enforcement of Title IX.

Andrew Ujifusa is a story editor at Chalkbeat.

Trump wants to withhold money from schools teaching ‘discriminatory equity ideology,’ gender identity

2025-01-29T23:39:54+00:00

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President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Wednesday seeking to withhold federal funding from K-12 schools that teach “discriminatory equity ideology” or “gender ideology.”

The order defines discriminatory equity ideology as anything “that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups” rather than as individuals. That includes the idea that people can be inherently privileged or oppressed because of their race or gender, which likely targets concepts such as white privilege.

The language is similar to the text of several state laws that have sought to limit teaching about systemic racism and sexism and targeted “critical race theory” — though the order does not use that term.

“Gender ideology,” as defined in an earlier executive order, includes any acknowledgement of gender identities besides the male or female sex that a person is assigned at birth.

The news was first reported early Wednesday by the Daily Caller.

Federal funding accounts for about 8% to 10% of funding for K-12 schools but can represent a much larger portion in high-poverty schools and districts.

It’s unclear what exactly would rise to the level of teaching these concepts. But the executive order’s targeting of education issues related to race and gender illustrates the administration’s keen interest in pushing schools away from teaching certain subjects in certain ways — a desire Trump began expressing strongly towards the end of his first term.

Trump executive order seeks to steer federal funds to private school vouchers

Trump and other critics of critical race theory often have used the term as a catchall for everything from efforts to diversify the teacher workforce to curriculum revisions that better incorporate the perspective of Black Americans in lessons about slavery and the founding of the country. Some conservatives see course materials that refer to systemic racism or white privilege as evidence of critical race theory in K-12 schools — a viewpoint that would likely carry over to “discriminatory equity ideology.”

Trump and his supporters have used the phrase “gender ideology” to describe teaching about gender identity and the existence of transgender people. In an earlier executive order, Trump sought to define sex as a binary — male or female — that cannot be changed. On Tuesday, Trump issued another order seeking to curtail gender-affirming care for trans children and teens.

It’s also unclear whether the federal government has the authority to do this. Federal law prohibits federal officials from telling schools what they can and cannot teach. The American education system is set up such that decisions about what kids should learn are made at the local level.

On top of that, several states require schools to teach ethnic studies and to include a diverse range of perspectives in their lessons. Seven states require schools to include lessons about LGBTQ history or issues, according to the Movement Advancement Project, which tracks such laws. Trump has previously said he wants to shift authority over education to the states, in tandem with his stated desire to close the U.S. Department of Education.

Similar efforts to restrict lessons about sexism, racism, and bias at the state level have faced legal challenges at the state level for being too vague. A settlement in Florida over the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law found that students and teachers couldn’t be prohibited from discussing LGBTQ issues, so long as it wasn’t part of formal instruction.

The order could stoke fear and confusion among educators and school officials, many of whom already operate under a state law or district policy that limits what they can teach about certain hot-button topics. Eighteen states have laws or official policies limiting lessons on racism and sexism, according to a tracker maintained by Education Week. Some states also restrict lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, or require parents to give permission for their children to learn about these topics.

How exactly the federal government would monitor what’s being taught in classrooms across the nation’s some 13,000 school districts is also an open question. Some states with laws limiting instruction about racism, sexism, and gender identity have set up websites or processes where parents can review curriculum and report lessons or teachers that they think are out of compliance.

On Tuesday, the Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into a Denver high school that converted a girls’ restroom to an all-gender restroom based solely off a local news report, rather than a formal complaint. That probe could be a preview of how the federal government might deal with schools that the Trump White House believes are ignoring or somehow flouting the executive order, without a time-consuming complaint or investigative process.

The order directs the incoming secretary of education to provide the president with a plan within 90 days on how to end lessons on these topics.

Trump nominated Linda McMahon, the former CEO of the WWE professional wrestling franchise, to head the U.S. Department of Education, though her confirmation hearing has yet to be scheduled.

The order also reinstates the 1776 Commission, which was set up during the first Trump administration to promote “patriotic education” and to challenge lessons that present “America’s story solely as one of oppression and victimhood rather than one of imperfection but also unprecedented achievement toward freedom, happiness, and fairness for all.”

Experts said the report produced by the commission, composed of conservative thinkers and academics, whitewashed and distorted American history. Former President Joe Biden disbanded the commission shortly after he took office.

This story has been updated to reflect the contents of the executive order signed by Trump.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump freezes federal grants. What does it mean for schools?

2025-01-28T22:31:13+00:00

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Update: The Trump administration on Wednesday rescinded the memo freezing federal grant programs. Read more.

A Trump administration order freezing all federal grants is fueling widespread confusion among schools, nonprofits, and state governments even as the White House scrambles to clarify that the freeze shouldn’t affect key programs such as Head Start preschool and Title I funding for high poverty schools.

A federal judge temporarily blocked the order from going into effect Tuesday evening amid multiple legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed by a coalition of Democratic attorneys general.

“There is no question this policy is reckless, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said at a press conference announcing the states’ lawsuit.

She described funding freezes impacting Head Start in Michigan, child development block grants in Maryland, and Medicaid reimbursement systems in 20 states including New York — even though the Trump administration clarified later in the day that none of those systems should be affected by the pause. “When Congress dedicates funding for a program, the president cannot pull that funding on a whim,” James said.

The stated purpose of the freeze is to find grants that could run counter to Trump administration priorities of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as those that recognize the existence of transgender people and offer them support. Until just a few weeks ago, many federal grants required recipients to incorporate equity measures.

Experts said the order is illegal and violates federal laws that describe how and when a president can block spending authorized by Congress. Federal officials say the pause is temporary and doesn’t trigger requirements to notify Congress or get approval.

Tuesday’s developments were the latest example of President Donald Trump following through on his campaign pledge to use executive authority to dramatically remake the federal government. Many of the executive orders issued from the White House in the past week have generated confusion and fear about their impact, as well as legal pushback.

A memo signed Monday by the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget orders a temporary pause on all grants, loans, and federal assistance, other than spending that goes to individuals, such as Social Security checks. The pause is necessary, Matthew Vaeth wrote, to ensure that money does not go to programs that aren’t aligned with the priorities and values of President Donald Trump.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the memo states.

Education organizations, Democratic leaders, and others condemned the move.

“Virtually any organization, school, state, police office, county, town or community depends on federal grant money to run its day-to-day operations, and are all now in danger,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at a press conference Tuesday. “The blast radius of this terrible decision is virtually limitless.”

Education, child care leaders criticize Trump funding freeze

Federal grants fund everything from charter school start-up costs to teacher training to emergency response. The school superintendents association said in a blog post that the school lunch program, which depends on ongoing payments, could be affected.

On Tuesday morning, it was unclear whether the pause could hit major programs like Head Start or IDEA, which funds special education. The only exception carved out in the original memo was for payments to individuals, such as Social Security checks. A education department spokesperson said the allowance for individual payments included financial aid for college students, such as Pell grants, but did not elaborate further on the potential impact.

By Tuesday afternoon, additional guidance from the Office of Management and Budget said the freeze on federal funds was never intended to be an “across-the-board” freeze and that pauses on funding could be as brief as a day. The pause does not affect Head Start and SNAP, the memo said. An Education Department spokesperson said grant programs will be reviewed by leadership “for alignment with Trump Administration priorities,” adding that the temporary pause won’t impact Title I, IDEA, and other programs.

The pause on targeted programs was supposed to go into effect at 5 p.m. Tuesday. The memo calls for agencies to submit detailed information about affected programs to the Office of Management and Budget by Feb. 10. The memo also describes a new oversight process in which political appointees will have more control over grant spending.

Those changes aim to ensure money doesn’t go to programs that are found to violate other executive orders. It’s not clear how broadly those mandates might be interpreted or whether they will withstand separate legal challenges.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the Trump administration likely believes the pause is necessary because former President Joe Biden used executive orders to attach additional requirements to many spending programs, such as requiring equity plans and prioritizing communities based on race or gender.

“If one administration is going to use executive authority to condition distribution of funds on politically fraught criteria, we’re seeing this administration say we want to figure out how to strip some of that out,” he said.

How big of a deal the freeze actually is will depend on how long it lasts, how many programs are affected, and what changes the administration requires to resume funding, he said. Until that is known, “the furor and the panic seems to be a bit overwrought.”

But to Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, the order violates federal law that dictates when and how a president can decide not to spend money.

“It’s a brazen power grab,” she said. “There is no possible justification because the president doesn’t have the authority to impound funds authorized by Congress.”

Perera said the order amounts to impoundment, a legal process that requires notification to Congress, which hasn’t happened in this case. Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act in 1974 to address overreaches by the Nixon administration that were eventually found to be unconstitutional.

The National Head Start Association said child care providers, who already operate on tight budgets, could not draw down funds Tuesday morning.

“It’s been a scary day,” said Nora Moran, the policy and advocacy director for United Neighborhood Houses, an organization that represents social service providers running afterschool and child care programs in New York City.

Moran said she fielded panicked calls and emails all day from multiple operators of federally funded Head Start child care programs who said they couldn’t access their payment portals, though one later said the portal was open. Roughly 19,000 students across the city attend Head Start programs, according to a December report from the city comptroller. Another $500 million in federal child care block grant money is slated to help fund some 80,000 extended day childcare seats this fiscal year, according to the report.

“Everybody’s now doing calculations about … what this means for their cash flow,” Moran said. Depending on when they were last paid and what other sources of funding are coming in, a two week pause in payments could “absolutely” be enough to shutter a program, she added.

Even if funding is restored quickly, she said, “everyone is just going to be questioning, every day, is this the day this program is turned off.”

William Browning, president and CEO of Denver’s Clayton Early Learning, said he’s not panicking even though he receives $10 million from Head Start, 45% of his annual budget. The Colorado Department of Early Childhood said that the Head Start payment management portal was shut down and no one could pull money until early afternoon. But Clayton recently drew down his monthly allocation and has enough money to continue programming for about two months.

Before he learned that Head Start funding would continue uninterrupted, Browning said he wasn’t worried about additional requirements.

“We’ll happily comply,” he said, “because we … feel like we’re a good steward of the resources.”

SchoolHouse Connections, which helps schools support homeless students, said funding for homeless students under the McKinney-Vento Act likely is not affected, but many programs that serve homeless youth and vulnerable families expected to lose funding. In addition to funds that go to schools, many nonprofit service agencies that support children outside of school rely on federal funding.

State education departments said they are working to understand the potential impacts.

“We are aware of the OMB memo and are communicating with the federal government to gather further guidance,” said Brian Blackley, a spokesman for Tennessee Department of Education. “The Lee administration is committed to serving Tennesseans and working with federal agencies to ensure essential services continue.”

Republican Gov. Bill Lee has welcomed the Trump administration’s approach to education issues in hopes there would be fewer strings attached to federal funding.

Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly, a Democrat, had stronger words.

“Federal grants and funding are essential to giving Wisconsin students the support they need to succeed,” she said in a written statement. “For too long, our public schools have been underfunded by the state, and many rely on federal resources to fill the gap — funding critical areas like special education, school nutrition, programs that support our most underserved learners, technology, and more.”

Chalkbeat journalists Ann Schimke, Michael Elsen-Rooney, Marta Aldrich, Kalyn Belsha, and Samantha Smylie contributed reporting.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Denver mayor: The city will sue the Trump administration if ICE agents detain immigrants at schools

2025-01-27T16:39:30+00:00

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Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said this week that the city will sue the Trump administration if it instructs federal immigration enforcement agents to detain Denver residents at schools, churches, hospitals, and other “sensitive locations.”

“If individuals are scared to go to the hospital if they’re sick or scared to take their children to school, it can have devastating impacts on the entire community,” a mayoral spokesperson wrote in response to questions from Chalkbeat about a Wednesday press release from Johnston’s office called “ICYMI: Denver’s Commonsense Approach to Trump Mass Deportation Plan.”

“If President Trump instructs ICE to begin going into the sensitive locations, Denver is prepared to take the administration to court and do everything within our legal authority to keep them safe,” the mayoral spokesperson wrote.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials announced Tuesday that they had rescinded a decades-old policy that treated schools and child care centers, among other institutions, as sensitive locations where immigration enforcement should generally not take place. Instead, the department is instructing immigration agents to use “common sense.”

Asked whether the city would sue proactively to prevent raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, at schools or whether its legal action would be in response to an incident, Johnston’s office said that “[s]hould the Trump Administration take any action in Denver we believe is unlawful, we will respond with legal challenges.”

Denver Public Schools has issued its own guidance to schools on what to do if ICE agents show up. The guidance says school staff should at first deny the agents entry and place the school on a secure perimeter, which means no one is allowed in or out.

School staff should then ask the agents for their identification and whether they have a warrant or court order, the guidance says, and then call the school district’s lawyers. Federal agents would only be allowed inside if they had a proper warrant.

“Although staff are expected to operate in accordance with these policies, staff will not physically impede, interfere with or obstruct a government official in performing their duties," said a letter that Superintendent Alex Marrero send to district staff Friday.

If students’ parents are detained in the community by immigration enforcement while their children are at school, educators will have to help decide where those children should go once the school day is over and who should be allowed to pick them up.

DPS is advising families to update their children’s emergency contact information in the district’s data portal to include someone who is not a parent or guardian. Parents should designate a trusted adult to care for their child if they’re not able to do so, the district’s guidance to families says. It encourages parents to discuss that plan with their children.

The Johnston administration said it is “preparing for the heartbreaking risk of children being separated from their parents.” The city is working on a plan to take custody of any children whose parents are detained or deported and placing the children with relatives or in foster care.

A spokesperson wrote that Denver will ensure children can visit with their parents “whenever legally possible” and work with immigration attorneys to navigate the legal process. The city will also notify consulates to begin “working across borders to identify a compassionate solution.”

This story has been updated to reflect clarified guidance from Denver Public Schools.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Under Trump, immigration arrests at school could be a step too far for some Tennessee conservatives

2025-01-24T10:00:00+00:00

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State Sen. Todd Gardenhire is a conservative Tennessee Republican who credits his anti-abortion stance and support of gun rights for his recent reelection to a fourth term.

In recent years, he’s fended off attempts to tighten the state’s lax gun laws, pushed for a state law to curb “implicit bias” training for educators, and supported a border crackdown to keep people from illegally crossing into the United States.

But when it comes to the children of people who came to the country illegally, the Chattanooga Republican is a bit of an outlier, even as many in his party are cheering President Donald Trump’s aggressive push against illegal immigration.

Since taking office in 2012, Gardenhire has sponsored several bills to try to give all Tennessee students access to in-state college tuition, regardless of their immigration status. A supporter of private school vouchers, he voted “no” on Gov. Bill Lee’s limited 2019 voucher plan because he didn’t like how it excluded undocumented students from participating.

This year, he’s sponsoring a bill to exempt school-based officers from a new state law that requires law enforcement agencies to alert federal immigration authorities if they discover people are in the United States illegally.

“When you look at the Old Testament, it’s clear: Scriptures say you don’t punish children for what their parents did,” Gardenhire said.

“We don’t need to involve our school resource officers in any enforcement policy that makes children afraid to go to school,” he added. “School should be a safe place to learn and be educated.”

Tennessee State Sen. Todd Gardenhire listens during a meeting at Chattanooga City Hall. The Chattanooga Republican, now in his fourth term in office, represents most of the city and three surrounding rural counties.

Gardenhire is among some Republicans who believe that the schoolhouse door is a step too far for any measures aimed at mass deportation.

It’s an issue that could divide the GOP over whether to shield school communities or go all out on immigration enforcement, as Trump’s administration takes steps to deliver on his campaign promises.

Hours after the new president took office, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security rescinded a 30-year policy preventing immigration agents from making arrests in or near “sensitive” areas like schools, churches, and hospitals. Instead, an agency memo instructs its agents to use “common sense” in carrying out their duties.

Depending on how it plays out, the change could affect every school in America — and shift public opinion on Trump’s immigration agenda.

“This isn’t just about immigrant families,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition.

“It will affect students who are worried about their classmates and friends, teachers who are worried about their students, and citizens who are worried about their neighbors,” she said.

Her organization believes that enforcing immigration laws by making arrests in or near schools and children would be traumatic and distracting for all students and teachers.

“I think there will be immense pushback from the public, and it could be a step too far for conservative Republicans, too,” said Sherman Luna.

Nationally, an estimated 4.4 million U.S.-born children have at least one parent who is not in the country legally, and an estimated 733,000 school-age kids are undocumented themselves. In Tennessee, an estimated 12,000 school-age kids are undocumented.

While most Americans say they support deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, many are uncomfortable with using harsh measures to accomplish that goal, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll this month. For instance, most don’t favor expedited removals that separate families, or deportation for immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children, the poll says.

Local and state officials are navigating the new politics of immigration

The Trump administration’s quick moves on immigration have both the public and policymakers trying to understand the complexities of mass deportation. The new president’s policies appear to be aimed at all people who are in the country illegally, not just those who commit crimes while in the U.S.

This week, the Justice Department ordered U.S. attorneys to prosecute local officials who refuse to help the Trump’s administration carry out the president’s immigration agenda.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has called the legislature into a special session on Jan. 27 to take up immigration enforcement and other issues, including his statewide private school voucher proposal. This week, the Republican governor and GOP leaders unveiled a package of bills that, among other things, would appoint a state-level immigration enforcement officer and make it a crime for public officials to resist new federal and state immigration policies.

Advocates for immigrant families hope that conservative elected officials like Gardenhire will continue to support them on education matters in a state where Republicans hold firm control on government at most levels.

The 76-year-old Gardenhire — sometimes gruff, sometimes poetic — has become an unlikely ally of one of Tennessee’s most historically underserved student groups. His district includes most of urban Chattanooga, but also the rural counties of Bledsoe, Marion, and Sequatchie.

Gardenhire and Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson listen during a Senate Finance Committee meeting on Feb. 15, 2022, in Nashville.

“Sen. Gardenhire is incredibly principled, and he represents an interesting district where the immigrant student population is growing,” said Sherman Luna.

Ten years ago, when she was a policy director for the state’s oldest coalition for immigrant rights, Sherman Luna worked with Gardenhire on the in-state tuition bill. It passed in the Senate but came up just short of the votes needed in the House.

“He’s got a big heart for immigrant families,” said Sherman Luna. “He understands not only the humanity of these children and families, but also that the success of Hamilton County depends on our ability to educate students so they can graduate and become successful contributors to their communities.”

The Tennessee Sheriffs' Association supports Gardenhire’s proposal to exempt school resource officers from the new law requiring law enforcement agencies to help federal authorities identify, detain, and deport people who are in the country illegally.

“The goal of a school resource officer is to keep schools safe and to build trusting relationships with students and faculty,” said Jeff Bledsoe, the association’s executive director. “Children shouldn’t be afraid of their SROs.”

As for Gardenhire, he’s studying how the new politics of immigration might affect his bill — while also reflecting deeply on his religious, moral, and economic principles.

Labeled a RINO — or Republican in name only — by far-right conservative groups, he describes himself as an old-school Reagan Republican, a “fixer” with an independent streak. Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, in reappointing Gardenhire this month to chair the Senate’s powerful judiciary committee, called him a “strong conservative who understands the need for a tough-on-crime approach.”

“People can differ with me on these matters, and I respect that,” Gardenhire said regarding his advocacy for the children of immigrants at risk of deportation.

“I just feel called to work to educate as many children as possible, no matter who they are and what their backgrounds are, and to protect them,” Gardenhire said. “On Judgment Day, all of us will have to answer to somebody on how we treated the little children.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Districts share plans in case immigration officials show up at schools

2025-01-22T00:45:31+00:00

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As reports spread Tuesday that schools are no longer off-limits for immigration enforcement action, school leaders in the Denver metro area had just shared plans for how to respond if immigration agents show up at schools.

DSST, the local charter school network with schools in Denver and Aurora, shared its plan with families last week.

Over the last several weeks, the Denver and Aurora school districts have been sharing information with and training staff on how to respond.

“We’re trying to create an inclusive community,” said Danielle Felder, chief external affairs officer for the DSST network. “We wanted to offer as much reassurance as we can.”

The districts and charter network’s protocols for what to do are similar.

Building leaders are to gather information from agents including asking for a warrant before calling the district’s legal or security teams, or both.

Aurora and Denver’s plans suggest that ICE should wait outside the school. Or, “if it appears the officer is being cooperative, you can ask them to wait in an appropriate area of the front office,” Aurora’s guidance states.

If ICE has a valid judicial warrant, DSST’s plan states that the school hallways will be cleared and the building will be placed on hold, meaning everyone will stay in classrooms until ICE has left the building. Parents of any affected students will be contacted immediately.

“We will not encourage mixed status families or undocumented relatives to come to the school or otherwise interfere,” the plan says.

DSST’s and Denver’s plans remind staff that parents should be encouraged to update their emergency contact information and suggest that emergency contacts include one person who is not an immediate family member.

The school communications to staff and families include resource lists and links to other community organizations, including “Know your rights” booklets and information on how to create a family preparedness plan.

The communications to school leaders from Denver, Aurora, and DSST reiterate that schools cannot and should not be asking about a student or family’s immigration status. Aurora asks staff not to make guesses about which families need resources, either.

Denver’s communication also asks schools to encourage families to opt out of the school’s directory by filling out a form. According to the DPS statement, government agencies can ask for a school’s directory without a warrant or other legal justification.

Felder said that DSST also wanted its plan to reassure its staff, which includes Dreamers and people in the country on visas.

Unlike during the first Trump administration, Felder said school leaders feel more prepared this time.

After Trump took office in 2017, the Aurora school board voted on a resolution that May. Community organizations worked with parents and students to write it and asked the board to adopt it.

That resolution included a request that the district translate a February 2017 memo that outlined how to respond if ICE agents showed up at a school or requested information. The current memo dated Dec. 5, 2024 is an updated version of the 2017 guidance.

The 2017 resolution also asked the district to ensure there is a protocol for supporting students if a parent or caregiver does not show up to pick them up from school for whatever reason and calls on the district to make sure that family contact information is updated every year.

The resolution was meant as a declaration of support for the diverse community in Aurora.

In the current school year, more than 86% of Aurora district students identify as students of color, up from 82% cited in the 2017 resolution, and the district serves more than 40% students learning English as a new language, up from 36% in 2017.

Aurora has been cited as a possible target for early immigration enforcement because of national media attention on crime tied to Venezuelan gang members.

This year, the Aurora school board has been silent. Neither the Denver or Aurora school board has voted on any new resolutions in support of immigrant students or other marginalized students who may have concerns about policy changes during the new presidential administration.

A session at the Colorado Association of School Boards last month prompted school leaders to also think about how they may prepare to serve students and families if a large immigration raid is conducted in the community. Schools have shared little about plans for those scenarios.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Immigration arrests at schools loom after Trump changes longstanding policy

2025-01-21T20:04:44+00:00

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The Trump administration has cleared the way for immigration arrests at or near schools, ending a decades-old approach.

Republican and Democratic administrations alike have treated schools and child care centers, along with churches and hospitals, as “sensitive” or “protected” locations where immigration enforcement should only take place when there is an immediate danger to the public.

But U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials announced Tuesday afternoon that they had rescinded the latest version of the policy, which was issued in 2021 by the Biden administration. The news was first reported early Tuesday by Fox News.

A copy of the Homeland Security memo was not immediately available for review.

But in a statement, a Homeland Security spokesperson said that Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman issued a directive on Monday that rescinded the sensitive locations policy. The spokesperson said the action would help federal authorities enforce immigration law and catch criminals who entered the country illegally. Immigration agents will be asked to use “common sense” in enforcing the law.

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” the statement read.

Since Trump’s reelection, observers anticipated the end of treating certain locations as “sensitive” with respect to immigration enforcement. News reports surfaced in mid-December that the incoming Trump administration was planning to get rid of the policy. Since then, schools have been bracing for the possibility of immigration agents showing up at their doors.

Even before this policy existed, large-scale immigration raids weren’t conducted at schools. But Trump’s policy change paves the way for immigration agents to detain parents during dropoff or pickup, as has happened occasionally in the past.

Immigrant rights advocates worry that could lead to more absenteeism among children with immigrant parents, who may now fear being stopped by immigration agents while driving or walking their kids to school. That happened during the first Trump administration. Advocates also worry about the potential for routine interactions with school police to reveal a student or family’s immigration status, and lead to their deportation.

Some school districts have issued explicit instructions to educators and parents about how school staff should handle an immigration agent’s presence on campus. Some districts have also said they will not permit a federal agent on school premises without a judicial warrant, and that staff will be instructed to call the school system’s lawyer if these agents do show up.

Some of the nation’s largest districts, including Los Angeles and Chicago, have re-upped or expanded existing policies meant to protect immigrant students and families. New York City is scheduled to vote on a resolution this week that would reaffirm a policy preventing school safety agents from collaborating with federal immigration authorities in most cases.

Others, including several Texas school districts near the U.S.-Mexico border, are taking a “wait and see” approach to avoid causing confusion or fear among families. At the same time, immigrant rights advocates say it’s helpful to inform families of their rights and show them how to make a plan in case a parent is detained.

The end of treating schools as sensitive locations is just one of many executive actions on immigration that the new Trump administration has taken since taking office on Monday.

Trump also signed an executive order that seeks to end the automatic right to citizenship for any child born in the U.S. On Tuesday, 18 states announced they were suing to block the policy change.

This story has been updated to include confirmation and comments from the Department of Homeland Security about the policy change.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Many schools used COVID aid on long-term needs like curriculum and buildings, new report says

2025-01-15T14:00:00+00:00

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When schools were handed an unprecedented $129 billion in federal pandemic aid, it wasn’t surprising that COVID-related equipment topped the shopping list as schools rushed to snap up hotspots, laptops, desk dividers, and air filters.

But another widespread pattern is emerging as federal officials tally up the spending: Many districts also used their one-time funding to take care of longstanding needs, like replacing aging infrastructure and outdated textbooks, that schools previously wanted to tackle but could not afford to do so.

Around 1 in 3 school districts and charter operators nationwide, or some 5,200, used COVID relief during the 2022-23 school year to adopt new curriculum or learning materials, a report released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Education found. That made it the most common strategy to address learning loss, which schools spent $11 billion on that year.

Schools spent some $6 billion in federal pandemic aid that same year to upgrade and maintain their facilities. That meant 1 out of every 10 COVID relief dollars spent during the 2022-23 school year went toward a school building. It was six times more than what states spent on tutoring.

And half of all COVID relief dollars schools spent that year, or just under $25 billion, were spent on staff salaries and benefits. A good chunk of that went toward paying new social workers and school nurses, which schools added to their ranks in droves with the aid.

Now that the COVID aid is mostly gone — schools have until the end of this month to spend it, unless they seek an extension — schools are confronting big questions about how they will cover curriculum overhauls and critical building repairs going forward, as well as how many of those additional staffers will lose their jobs. Many school districts, especially those with declining enrollments, are considering closing schools or cutting programs to balance their budgets.

The report looks at how the nation’s roughly 16,000 school districts and charter operators spent just over $49 billion in COVID relief dollars during the 2022-23 school year. Nearly all of the first two COVID relief packages had been exhausted and schools were halfway through spending their last and largest aid package by the end of the 2022-23 school year. Schools had spent some $117 billion in pandemic aid by that point.

Investing in people and projects with the potential for long-term payoffs made sense, federal officials say, and the Biden administration encouraged this type of spending.

Federal officials also believe provisions in the COVID aid laws that required states to maintain their own school funding will help schools return to more usual levels of funding more easily than they did following the Great Recession. When stimulus packages enacted in the wake of that financial crisis expired, many states slashed education funding and schools cut hundreds of thousands of jobs, dramatically shrinking the size of the K-12 education workforce.

“There are certainly difficult decisions that are going to get made after $130 billion is fully invested,” said Adam Schott, the principal deputy assistant secretary in the Education Department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. “We are just not seeing the type of fiscal cliff that we saw 10, 12, 15 years ago.”

Part of the reason for that, Schott said, is that the Biden administration urged schools to spend the pandemic aid on both immediate needs but also long-term academic goals.

To the administration, investing in school buildings — and getting rid of issues like asbestos, mold, and lead — was also crucial.

“For decades, we’ve known that a classroom that’s 90 degrees in May or in September is an impediment to in-person learning,” Schott said. “We saw this as really core to academic recovery.”

Pennsylvania's New Kensington-Arnold School District, like many across the U.S., used COVID aid to make long-term improvements to school buildings.

Many schools spent on curriculum amid worrying test scores

The new data about spending on curriculum and classroom materials comes as many states and districts overhaul their approach to teaching reading and math, opting for materials that better align with the science of how children learn.

That spending also coincides with several years of national and international test score data showing that American children are academically stagnant or falling behind their earlier counterparts. That was true even before the pandemic. But the trend is especially stark for kids who score the lowest on math and reading tests.

And while recent state test scores have shown some students are rebounding to pre-pandemic levels, “We are clearly not where we ought to be,” Schott said.

Federal COVID relief dollars improved student test scores, two new studies find

Now that the federal COVID aid is gone, “states have to be ready to grab the baton,” he added, whether that’s finding new ways to spend existing federal funding, or adding money to state education budgets. “We’re going to keep beating that drum with every minute we’ve got left.”

The new federal report also comes as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to start his second term in a few days. It’s unclear how or if top education officials in his administration will push schools to continue pandemic-era programs.

On the campaign trail, Trump and his supporters said they wanted to get rid of the federal education department or shrink its powers, and give more responsibility to state officials — who already largely control what and how kids learn.

By the 2022-23 school year, most students were back to learning in person for a second school year. The pandemic was declared officially over halfway through the school year. But many students were struggling to follow the routines of school. Student absenteeism rates were still abnormally high.

Expanded summer programming was a very common investment — though it’s unclear if some of these programs helped kids improve academically. About 2 in 5 school districts or charter school operators used COVID aid on summer programs that school year, reaching around 4.5 million students.

A smaller number of districts and charter operators — around 1 in 10 nationally, or around 2,100 — used pandemic money to add instructional time. Researchers were a fan of that strategy, but educators often found it was difficult to pull off.

Meanwhile, states spent $1 billion on tutoring that school year, and districts ran intensive tutoring programs that reached some 3 million kids, or around 6% of public school students. Of those students, around half were from low-income families, while 13% were students with disabilities and 14% were learning English as a new language — suggesting that many students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds did not receive tutoring.

Earlier estimates have suggested less than 10% of students were getting tutoring thanks to COVID aid — a figure researchers have already said was likely much smaller than the share of kids who needed extra academic help after the pandemic’s disruptions to learning.

The report points out that COVID aid helped to put “more people working in America’s schools than at any time in the last decade.” As of October 2024, the report notes, schools had added some 643,000 jobs since 2021, with a 43% increase in social workers and a 23% increase in school nurses.

Some school finance experts have criticized schools for adding many new staffers or programs that they couldn’t afford to keep after the COVID aid ran out. They’ve said the hiring and firing is destabilizing, especially for schools that already had more staff turnover prior to the pandemic.

Still, Schott defended that use of the money. He pointed out that some of the added spending helped to raise low teacher pay or invest in gummed-up educator pipelines. Other spending got “more caring eyes on kids” at a chaotic time.

“You couldn’t maintain consistency for kids, you couldn’t deliver instruction, you couldn’t get core nutrition services flowing without people,” he said.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Potential for immigration arrests at schools under Trump spurs push to shield families

2024-12-18T22:05:03+00:00

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For three decades, federal policy has limited immigration arrests at or near schools, treating the places where children learn as “sensitive” or “protected” areas.

But President-elect Donald Trump likely will rescind that policy soon after his return to the White House, according to recent reporting from NBC News.

That could open the door for immigration agents to more frequently stop parents as they drop their kids off at school, or for interactions with school police to lead to students and their parents being detained.

Educators and advocates for immigrant children worry that would create an environment of fear that could deter families from bringing their children to school or participating in school events. That could, in turn, interrupt kids’ learning and make it harder for educators to build trusting relationships with immigrant families.

“The implications would be enormous,” said Patricia Gándara, an education professor at UCLA who’s researched how immigration enforcement affects children and schools. When families know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has “the authority to move in on the school, it starts rumors. And you don’t even have to have this happen for it to spread throughout the community that the ICE are around the school, don’t take your kid to school.”

An estimated 4.4 million U.S.-born children have at least one undocumented parent, and an estimated 733,000 school aged-kids are undocumented themselves. Other students may have authorization to live in the United States but hold temporary immigration statuses that Trump has threatened to revoke. Researchers estimate that half a million school-age children have arrived in the U.S. just in the last two years.

Federal law generally overrides state and local statutes, and immigration agents have broad authority to detain people they suspect of being in the country illegally. Nonetheless, several large school districts already have reupped or expanded policies they crafted during the first Trump administration to reassure students and parents. And lawmakers in California — where 1 in 5 children are part of a family with at least one undocumented member — have put forward bills that seek to protect immigrant students.

Viridiana Carrizales, the CEO of ImmSchools, a nonprofit that’s training school leaders and educators on how they can support immigrant students as Trump takes office, said she’s been advising school districts that even if the sensitive locations policy ends, students still have certain rights.

“It doesn’t mean that we’re going to have an immigration official come, and if they ask for a student’s record, that doesn’t mean that the school has to comply,” Carrizales said. “I want to make sure our families don’t feel like they can’t even go out of their homes. Because that’s not a way to live.”

But those efforts aren’t the same as guarantees of safety at or near schools.

In 2020, immigration agents arrested Verónica del Carmen Lara Márquez shortly after she dropped off her 4-year-old daughter at a Philadelphia elementary school. The arrest stemmed from a court order for failing to appear at immigration hearings out of state. She was detained at a bus stop but released shortly after on humanitarian grounds — Lara Márquez was three months pregnant at the time.

Advocates: Schools need clear policies, training on immigration

Federal officials have limited arrests and investigations on school grounds since at least the early 1990s. Under President Barack Obama the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a memo in 2011 that limited immigration enforcement at or near “sensitive locations,” which included schools, daycares, colleges, school events, and bus stops with children waiting at them.

The policy was expanded to additional “protected areas” under President Joe Biden in 2021. That included any places where children gather, such as playgrounds, recreation centers, and after-school programs.

Even so, agents can and have conducted enforcement near schools. Generally, immigration officials need to get permission from a supervisor before making an arrest or conducting an interview near a school, though there are exceptions for matters of national security or threats to public safety.

Trump left the sensitive locations policy intact during his first term, but won re-election with a series of hardline immigration proposals, including a plan for mass deportations. Project 2025, a policy playbook drafted by several former and incoming Trump White House officials, called for rescinding any memos that identify “sensitive zones” where immigration enforcement should be limited.

The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

With that likely change on the horizon, Carrizales said now is a good time for schools to make sure they have clear policies outlining how school staff and school police interact, or don’t, with federal immigration officials. School staff should know, for example, if they’re supposed to ask for a warrant or judicial order, or if they should immediately direct any inquiries to the district’s superintendent and legal counsel.

All school staff — from the front office clerks to school principals — should be trained on the policy. It also should be translated and shared with families.

Schools can also check to see if commonly used forms, such as applications for free or reduced-price school meals, ask for information that conveys immigration status, like a Social Security Number. (Schools generally aren’t supposed to ask families about their immigration status because it can scare undocumented families and violate their children’s right to a public education, as laid out in Plyler v Doe, a landmark Supreme Court ruling.)

Families are likely to be on high alert. Carrizales said she’s even heard from families worried about their child being enrolled in a dual language program, because they fear that information could signal they’re from an immigrant family.

Schools may consider changing their forms, or making it clear to families that immigration information isn’t required, Carrizales said.

Some states and school districts are trying to add additional layers of protection.

California’s schools superintendent, Tony Thurmond, for example, is backing two pieces of legislation that would limit immigration enforcement near schools in that state.

The first would prohibit immigration officers from entering school buildings without a valid ID, a court order, a statement of purpose, and approval from the school district’s superintendent. Even if they met those requirements, agents couldn’t enter while kids were present. The second bill, introduced earlier this week, would prohibit local police from cooperating with immigration officials within one mile of a school, in an attempt to make families feel safe dropping off and picking up their children.

Chicago’s school board passed a resolution last month doubling down on a commitment to protect immigrant students, including blocking immigration officials from entering schools or interacting with school staff without a criminal warrant. The Los Angeles school board passed a similar resolution about training district staff on how they’d respond if a federal official tried to enter a school campus.

New York City, meanwhile, reissued its longstanding policy that prevents non-city law enforcement from going into school buildings except in specific cases, and is training principals and school safety agents about the protocols.

Still, it’s likely the Trump administration or others will try to challenge so-called “sanctuary” policies like these. Already, advisers to the incoming president are looking to withhold federal funds and other resources from Democrat-led cities if they refuse to participate in deporting undocumented immigrants, the Washington Post reported last month. Where exactly a school district’s power starts and a federal immigration official’s authority ends is unclear.

“There is wide and longstanding latitude for states to shape educational policy, and that includes things like what it takes to create a safe and welcoming school environment,” said Nicholas Espíritu, a deputy director at the National Immigration Law Center. “There are at times a gray zone about when that federal power can supersede or preempt the state power, but states do, in fact, have wide latitude to establish policies about school safety.”

Case in point: A Nebraska school superintendent who weathered an immigration raid in his community in 2006 recently said his biggest regret was telling families that immigration officials wouldn’t be allowed on school property.

He later got a call from an immigration official telling him: “I want you to know you’re wrong, we have jurisdiction. If we want to go into your schools we can.”

Minor offenses can prompt immigration arrests

Even with a sensitive locations policy in place, there were high-profile cases of parents who were stopped on their way to or from their child’s school during the first Trump administration.

In 2017, for example, immigration agents arrested Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez a few minutes after he dropped off his 12-year-old daughter at a Los Angeles middle school. His other daughter, then 13, recorded a video of the encounter while sobbing. Two misdemeanor convictions prompted the stop: a decade-old DUI and another for receiving a stolen vehicle registration sticker.

The father was released after six months in detention, but the arrest spread fear throughout his community.

Living under the threat of deportation has had ripple effects. During Trump’s first term, some immigrant parents in Florida’s Broward County started walking their kids to school instead of driving, in order to avoid committing traffic infractions leading to interactions with police. Others sent their kids to school with immigration paperwork tucked in their backpacks.

In New York City, schools that serve new immigrant students had to coax in parents who were afraid to attend parent-teacher conferences and open-school nights.

To quell those fears, schools can work with community-based organizations or local immigrant rights groups to host know-your-rights workshops so parents know what to do if they’re stopped on their way to or from their child’s school.

“We’re reminding our families that: Yes, they may be limited, but we still have rights, and it’s important for us to know what those rights are,” said Carrizales, who used to be undocumented herself. “One of the biggest things is if anybody comes and asks you what your immigration status is, for our families not to respond and not to sign anything.”

There’s also concerns that routine interactions with police could lead immigrant students and families to get caught up in deportation proceedings.

In 2007, a ninth grader in Arizona’s Tucson Unified School District was deported with his family after school officials found a small amount of marijuana in his backpack. The school called local police, who notified the Border Patrol of the family’s immigration status. Immigration agents showed up at the boy’s high school and took him and his family into custody.

School officials later said police should have waited to call immigration agents until the family was off campus because their arrival sparked rumors of an immigration raid at the school.

Andrew Hairston, who directs the education justice project at the nonprofit Texas Appleseed, worries cases like this could become more common if Trump rescinds the sensitive locations policy. In Texas, for example, public schools are required to have an armed officer on campus during school hours.

“My great fear is that with this police state that exists on school campuses, young people are often deprived of their inherent dignity just to go to school and do their best to learn,” Hairston said. “Then when you add this rhetoric on, that ICE might come in and enforce immigration laws, then you really just have this environment of trepidation.”

Carrizales, of ImmSchools, says school districts that have their own police departments should have clear protocols for how school police would interact with an immigration agent and communicate those with families.

If the sensitive places policy goes away, that doesn’t mean “district police get to become immigration agents or get to operate with immigration officials,” she said. “It’s really important for districts to make that very clear for families.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org

Jeffco, Adams 12 among districts that could see fewer Title I schools after Medicaid cuts

2024-12-11T05:40:52+00:00

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This fall, fewer students at some Colorado schools are being counted as at-risk because pandemic-era rules for Medicaid left many families suddenly unenrolled by spring 2024.

Students enrolled in Medicaid are automatically counted as at-risk students in calculations about funding. A drop in the number of at-risk students can cause some schools to lose federal Title I funding used to help those students, who generally have higher educational or social-emotional needs.

The Jeffco district, the second largest in Colorado, told its school board last month that 6,000 of the district’s approximately 75,600 students were unenrolled from Medicaid.

At some schools, the decrease in at-risk students may be enough to drop a school below the required threshold to receive Title I money. Currently in Jeffco, that threshold is 55%, but may change for next year.

Title I funding varies between schools and districts, but in Jeffco, on average schools get about $900 extra for each at-risk student. The money is used to hire additional staff and provide extra resources.

Some families are worried that their children’s schools could lose that funding. Edgewater Elementary School parent Angela Cryan took her concerns to the Jeffco school board last month.

“We are so concerned, and the families that are here tonight with me are so concerned, about losing the funding that is critical even for one year,” Cryan told school board members and the superintendent. “Whatever that amount is, it is too much to lose for our students.”

Superintendent Tracy Dorland told Cryan not to fear. Dorland said Edgewater Elementary would still qualify for Title I funds next school year.

District officials have refused to share school-level data, saying that everything is still being reviewed for accuracy. Official enrollment demographic data is usually published by the state in January.

For students who were unenrolled or those who aren’t eligible for Medicaid, including students from families that may not have legal status, parents can still fill out free and reduced-price lunch forms and, if eligible, be counted in at-risk figures that way.

The district has shared the number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The figures are usually similar to at-risk numbers. At-risk counts include all students who are eligible to receive subsidized meals, but also other students including those who receive Medicaid. Overall, the district projects the percentage of students eligible for subsidized meals will be 31% this school year, down from 34% last school year.

The trend of having fewer students eligible for subsidized meals, and fewer at-risk students, is not unexpected, Jeffco leaders told the school board.

“That’s actually about what we thought was going to happen over time,” said Brenna Copeland, chief financial officer for Jeffco Public Schools. “The reality is the counts district-wide are going down, and that’s going to impact, over time, our Title I district-wide.”

Kym LeBlanc-Esparza, deputy superintendent in Jeffco, said the district has not set the percentage threshold that determines which schools will get Title I funding next year.

“We’re still going back and forth, making sure we have exactly what those numbers are,” she said.

Title I trends were worrying districts before the pandemic

Before the pandemic, districts were having to adjust the bar for which schools receive Title I status. Despite declining enrollment and overall stable numbers of students from low-income families, the distribution of those students was not even within districts. Students from high-poverty households tended to be concentrated in select schools. That meant that more schools were more likely to hit the thresholds of 65, 70, or 75% of students in poverty, for example, to qualify for the funding.

More schools qualifying for Title I status in a district can be a problem, because it doesn’t necessarily mean the district is receiving more federal funding for those schools. The federal government has a different calculation based on census data for determining how much funding to send districts.

That data doesn’t take into account school choice laws that allow Colorado students to attend schools outside their neighborhoods, changing the demographic makeup of students at schools when compared to their community.

Districts also have flexibility to determine which schools will receive the money. They specify the percentage of at-risk students schools must have to be considered Title I.

In Jeffco, that bar is currently set at 55%, and this year, 31 schools are receiving Title I funding.

Pandemic-related demographic changes and the state’s 2023 decision to use Medicaid eligibility to determine the number of at-risk students in a school initially made the numbers rise, but those numbers could decrease now in districts like Jeffco and Adams 12.

Jeffco leaders wouldn’t say how many schools could lose the funding if the current threshold of 55% was used for next year. Officials are deciding whether or not to change it.

If the decision causes some schools to lose eligibility, the district can do a phase out so that schools don’t immediately lose the funding when their demographics change, LeBlanc-Esparza said.

In Adams 12, Gina Lanier, the district’s chief financial officer, said the district is seeing a drop of about 3,900 students who qualify as at-risk based on Medicaid eligibility. Last year, about 50% of the district’s nearly 35,000 students qualified for subsidized meals, meaning they were counted as at-risk students.

Overall, Lanier predicts the number of students who qualify for free meals in Adams 12 will have dropped this school year by more than 6%.

Lanier said if Adams 12 keeps the thresholds it currently has for Title I eligibility, five schools will no longer qualify for the funding next school year.

As budget planning gets underway, Lanier said the district will discuss whether to change those thresholds or create a plan to support schools that would lose funding so that it’s phased out instead of immediately going to zero.

In the Aurora school district, leaders have pushed the threshold for how many at-risk students a school must have to receive Title I to the federal government’s maximum allowed limit of 75%. The district had 14 new schools qualify last year and is now at 31.

But Aurora, and other metro area school districts, said they’re not expecting declines in the number of schools qualifying for Title I status.

How one Jeffco school uses Title I funding

Although Title I money is important, it’s not the only source of extra funding for schools with lots of at-risk students. Many districts also direct state and local dollars to these schools.

In Jeffco, for example, the district money given to schools for at-risk students is significantly more than what the schools get for having Title I status. The money is given on a per-student basis regardless of whether a school meets a threshold, which can make the total funding amount less likely to change by large amounts from one year to the next.

Principal Megan Martinez of Deane Elementary in Jeffco said her school in Lakewood has had Title I status for several years, and that the funding is helpful in supporting the needs of her students.

Enrollment at Deane this fall is up compared to what was expected, and Martinez is seeing a major increase in the number of students who are learning English as a new language. Many of the new students are newcomers and English learners.

The percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced-price meals appears to be holding steady. Last year, about 82% of Deane’s nearly 300 students qualified for subsidized meals. Martinez said the school helps families fill out the free lunch applications and explains other available benefits.

At Deane, Martinez said she uses the Title I funding primarily to hire teachers to keep class sizes small, or to avoid having to do combined-grade classrooms. The funding also pays for a restorative practice liaison, two interventionists helping teachers work on reading and math instruction, and supplements the school’s mental health resources.

This year, that means that in addition to the full-time social worker paid for by the district based on the number of students who have special needs, Deane’s Title I funds pay for an additional social worker to come in at least two days per week.

“They might support with setting lessons around behavior expectations, they might pull a friendship group or lunch bunch or another targeted group working on relationship skills, or do crisis response,” Martinez said. “We wouldn’t be able to do that without Title funding.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Trump picks Linda McMahon to lead, and possibly dismantle, Education Department

2024-11-20T04:27:24+00:00

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Former professional wrestling executive and billionaire Linda McMahon is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Education, an agency Trump has pledged to dismantle.

McMahon would come to the post with sparse education experience. She led the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first administration and also led a pro-Trump spending group and think tank before serving as transition team co-chair. McMahon reportedly was in the running for commerce secretary but was passed over for Cantor Fitzgerald Chief Executive Howard Lutnick.

McMahon is the co-founder and former CEO of the WWE professional wrestling franchise with her husband Vince McMahon.

Trump announced the selection Tuesday evening on Truth Social after multiple news outlets reported it. He cited McMahon’s business and administrative experience and called her a “fierce advocate” for parents’ rights and school choice.

And he seemed to reference a much reduced role for the Education Department, if not its actual elimination.

“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump wrote. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

In a podcast interview this fall, McMahon said her entry into politics began after she read about how students in the Greenwich, Connecticut, school district were falling short of expectations spelled out in No Child Left Behind. That 2002 federal law, championed by President George W. Bush, held schools accountable for student performance through test scores and other measures. Many Republicans have since moved away from that type of federal oversight.

“I’m sitting there thinking, ‘How could that be possible in Greenwich, Connecticut?’” McMahon said. “It’s a very wealthy community. We pay a great deal of our taxes toward education. How can that happen?”

She described a period of visiting charter, public, and private schools before Gov. Jodi Rell, a friend, invited her in 2009 to fill a vacancy on the Connecticut State Board of Education.

“I said, ‘Look … I’m certainly not in the world of education,” McMahon said on the podcast. “I don’t know if this is what you’re looking for. And she said, ‘I’m looking for exactly who you are: somebody from the outside who could come in, and I want feedback from that.’”

When McMahon was nominated, she told Connecticut lawmakers she had originally aspired to be a teacher and said interest in education had been “a significant constant” in her life. She pointed to her involvement in her own children’s education. And she spotlighted several WWE programs, including one that sent wrestlers into schools to deliver positive messages and another, the WrestleMania Reading Challenge, which featured posters of wrestlers encouraging students to read.

McMahon left the State Board after a year in office to pursue an unsuccessful Senate bid.

She also served twice on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University, a private Roman Catholic university in Connecticut.

Trump has made a series of startling choices for his initial cabinet picks, often favoring loyalists with little experience or advocates whose goals are opposed to the agencies he wants them to lead.

In choosing McMahon, Trump passed over experienced Republican state superintendents like Cade Brumley of Louisiana and dedicated culture warriors like Tiffany Justice, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty whose name was floated as a potential education secretary.

Trump campaigned on getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education, expanding school choice, rolling back Biden-era Title IX changes that expanded legal protections for transgender students, and punishing “woke” schools.

McMahon echoed concerns about “woke” thinking in the podcast interview this fall while also saying diversity is important.

“There’s too much of our woke environment,” she said. “There’s too much emphasis on DEI. Now, diversity, equity, and inclusion is important. I believe everybody should have the same opportunity, everybody should be treated equally. There is no room in our society for prejudices, like we are seeing now with anti-Semitism or … the racial inequality we’ve seen over the years. But I think we’ve continued to make strides.”

Getting rid of the U.S. Education Department would require congressional action and careful administration to determine which programs to end and which to move to other departments. Most observers expect that to be a substantial task that would divide Republicans and require significant political will to carry out. The idea has been proposed before and never gotten much traction.

On the other hand, some of Trump’s other ideas, like using federal funding to pressure schools to adopt more patriotic curriculum or end diversity initiatives, would require a bureaucracy — like that provided by the U.S. Department of Education — to carry out.

Ending the U.S. Department of Education: What it would mean and why Trump and Project 2025 want it

The Republican Party platform, which Trump shaped, also called for better connecting education to work opportunities, an issue that could be a rare point of bipartisan cooperation on education policy. In a September op-ed published in The Hill, McMahon supported a bipartisan bill to expand access to Pell grants for short-term credential programs.

The early reaction to Trump’s selection was mixed and fell along some expected ideological lines.

Justice, of Moms for Liberty, praised the pick, posting on the social media site X that McMahon “understands the assignment.” Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said he looked forward to learning more about her but otherwise withheld judgment.

In an emailed statement, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also said she wants to know more about McMahon and hopes Trump is serious about improving career and technical education and expanding apprenticeships, even as she urged him not to get rid of the Education Department.

National Education Association President Becky Pringle took a different tack, decrying McMahon as “grossly unqualified.”

“By selecting Linda McMahon, Donald Trump is showing that he could not care less about our students’ futures,” she said in a statement.

If nominated and confirmed, McMahon would replace Miguel Cardona, President Joe Biden’s education secretary. Cardona oversaw pandemic recovery efforts, a beleaguered student loan forgiveness initiative, and the bungled revamp of the federal financial aid process.

During his first term, Trump chose Betsy DeVos, a staunch supporter of private schools and school choice, as his education secretary. She had some impact on K-12 education policy, most notably by scaling back civil rights investigations, rescinding guidance that spelled out protections for transgender students, and installing new rules about how schools should handle allegations of sexual assault.

But she failed to achieve her major policy goals, including offering federal tax credits to help families pay for private school tuition and shrinking the size of the federal education budget. She lacked congressional support for both proposals — a barrier the next education secretary may not face.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump plan to ax the Education Department might affect kids with disabilities a lot — or a little

Trump has won a second term. Here’s what that means for schools.

Special education staffing shortages put students’ futures at risk. How to solve that is tricky.

2024-11-20T00:31:39+00:00

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Every year, more special education teachers quit than graduate from the nation’s teacher preparation programs, even as the number of students diagnosed with disabilities keeps rising.

Without enough qualified teachers and therapists, students don’t always get the help they need to be successful in school. Shortages also contribute to serious situations where kids are locked in small rooms, teachers physically hold down students, or children disrupt their classmates’ learning because they haven’t learned how to regulate their own behavior.

There was broad agreement that special education staffing shortages are a dire problem at a public briefing held by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on Friday. But there were widely divergent ideas about how to solve the issue and what role the federal government should play.

Some educators and experts said the solution is for the federal government to fulfill its decades-old pledge to cover more of the costs of special education. In their eyes, the Education Department should be flooding the special educator pipeline and offering training to all teachers to better support students with disabilities.

Others said it’s about incentivizing the job, and that special education teachers should be paid more than their colleagues and offered retention bonuses. Still others said that states should ease licensing rules and expand private school voucher programs to give desperate families more options.

The briefing, meant to inform the president and Congress, was held as President-elect Trump prepares to start his second term in office. Trump has vowed to expand school choice and dramatically scale back the federal role in education — a move panelists said could affect students with disabilities a lot or a little, depending on how the plan is executed.

The briefing did not include testimony from the U.S. Department of Education, which Trump has said he would abolish. Stephen Gilchrist, the Republican Trump-appointed commissioner who called for the briefing, said the department’s absence was “unconscionable.” An Education Department spokesperson said scheduling conflicts prevented the agency from being there in person, but it would send written responses.

The debate comes as the number of students with disabilities is growing. Some 7.5 million students required special education services as of the 2022-23 school year, the latest federal data shows, or around 15% of students. That was up from 7.1 million or 14% of students in the 2018-19 school year, just before the pandemic hit.

It’s unclear if the rise is due to schools getting better at identifying students with disabilities or if more children have needs now. Many young children missed early intervention and early special education services during the pandemic, and many educators say they are seeing higher behavioral needs and wider academic gaps in their classrooms.

“Students are arriving in our classrooms with a high level of dysregulation, which is displayed through their fight, flight, or freeze responses,” Tiffany Anderson, the superintendent of Topeka, Kansas’ public schools, wrote in her statement. “Students are also displaying more physically aggressive behavior.”

All of that has trickle-down effects. When kids disengage or act out, schools often remove them from class, said Dan Stewart, the managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network. That could be a suspension or something more informal, like cutting a child’s day short. Then the burden of providing educational support falls on families, said Ariel Simms, the president of Disability Belongs, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of people with disabilities.

“Parents and caregivers have had to step in to fill gaps in areas like tutoring, therapy, and learning accommodations, resulting in heightened stress and financial strain,” Simms told the commission in her statement.

Why special education teachers are in short supply

There are many reasons for the shortages. While the number of special education teachers has risen over the past two decades, the demand still outpaces the supply, writes Chad Aldeman, who researches teacher labor markets. Around 16,000 more special education teachers leave public schools each year than teacher prep programs train to replace them.

Special education teachers are more likely to change jobs or quit teaching than their general education colleagues. On top of that, many districts struggle to hire and keep paraprofessionals, whose crucial but low-paid work helps teachers meet the needs of students with disabilities. All of that increases workloads and contributes to burnout.

To get by, many schools increase class sizes or rely on substitutes and emergency credentialed teachers who often lack the proper training to work with students with disabilities.

“We had to hire virtual teachers and those on special visas, which complicated matters for our special needs students who were already facing academic and social challenges,” Karen Lockerman, a special education teacher in rural South Carolina, told the commission of how her district handled pandemic staffing shortages. “Language barriers and virtual instruction added further difficulties to their learning.”

Some say more funding; others want voucher expansion

To some advocates, the solution is obvious: The federal government needs to pay a bigger share of schools’ special education costs. Back in 1975, when federal lawmakers passed what would become the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, they said the government would cover 40%.

But “actual federal funding for IDEA has never come close to that and is usually well below half of this ‘full funding’ amount,” Jessica Levin, the litigation director at the nonprofit Education Law Center, told the commission. Without adequate funding, Levin said, “it is impossible to meet the educational needs and legal rights of students with disabilities, including ensuring there are sufficient numbers of qualified teachers.”

Anderson said that underfunding means her district has to pull money from the general education budget to cover the costs of educating kids with disabilities. Kansas gave schools an extra $75 million to pay for special education this year, but there aren’t any plans to keep that up as of now. Federal pandemic aid that helped is about to expire.

The federal government and states also could do more to knock down financial barriers to becoming a special education teacher, said Julian Vasquez Heilig, the director of the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, by offering more scholarships, stipends, and loan forgiveness. Investing in the expansion of “grow your own” initiatives, which often produce too few teachers to change overall staffing levels, could also help.

Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the federal government could elevate examples of states like Indiana, which created a program that pays for licensed teachers to go back to school to get their special education license and condenses their coursework. The pandemic aid-backed program has produced over 600 licensed special education teachers since 2021 and has become a go-to strategy for some districts to fill vacancies.

In Topeka, Anderson has tried recruiting paraprofessionals, career changers, and international teachers. Through a state program, parents who hadn’t gone to college or worked in a classroom before got on-the-job training from experienced teachers. Still, all of that effort hasn’t really made a dent.

“These programs have given us additional alternative pathways; however, the shortage is so significant, it has not eliminated the need and the crisis school districts like Topeka Public Schools continue to face,” Anderson told the commission.

Butcher, of the Heritage Foundation, also floated another idea: changing federal law so that families can take the portion of IDEA funding that would normally go to their child at a public school and use it however they see fit — an idea that’s similar to creating a national voucher program for students with disabilities.

“By making IDEA ‘portable,’ families could purchase services from education therapists, private school tuition, or other education products that fit their child’s needs,” Butcher told the commission in his statement. “This policy would help alleviate the pressure on public school officials to find special education personnel while also giving families private education choices when frustrating legal battles with school districts prevent students from receiving the services they require.”

Many advocates for students with disabilities worry such an idea would strip kids of their right to a free and appropriate education, as families typically have to waive that right to participate in a private school voucher program at the state level.

The idea would require action by Congress and buy-in from Trump. Still, some are taking Butcher’s proposal seriously, as the Heritage Foundation published Project 2025, a policy playbook written by several former Trump White House officials. That plan calls for turning most funding for special education into block grants that states would control.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Trump plan to ax the Education Department might affect kids with disabilities a lot — or a little

2024-11-15T21:11:54+00:00

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A federal hearing about special education teacher shortages turned into a debate about how the potential elimination of the U.S. Department of Education would affect students with disabilities.

The exchange, which occurred Friday during a public briefing of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, speaks to how Donald Trump’s election is already shaping education policy discussions amid widespread uncertainty about how his proposals could play out.

Trump vowed on the campaign trail that he would dismantle the federal Education Department and hand more control over education to the states. The federal law that guarantees students with disabilities a right to a free and appropriate public education dates back to 1975, before the Education Department existed as a standalone entity. That law would remain on the books even if the department were disbanded, but it’s less clear how funding would change or who would be responsible for protecting students’ rights.

Eliminating a federal department would require an act of Congress. Trump has not spelled out exactly how special education funding or administration would change if that happens, but some have made suggestions.

Project 2025, a political playbook written by former Trump White House officials, for example, calls for turning most federal funding for special education into “no-strings” grants for school districts distributed by another agency altogether: the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic with no education experience, to lead that agency.

Project 2025 also calls for moving the Office for Civil Rights and any “assets” in the federal special education office that work on discrimination to the Department of Justice. There, civil rights enforcement would be done through lawsuits, not investigations, as they’re done now in the Education Department.

At the briefing, Commissioner Mondaire Jones, a Democrat and former congressman, asked a panel of experts whether eliminating the Education Department would have an effect on students with disabilities and the shortage of educators to teach them.

Several panelists said the federal government still needs to fund education, even if the Education Department no longer exists.

Eric Hanushek, a prominent education researcher of school funding and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said he thought the proposal was more of a “political statement about how much we want Washington to be intruding in state education policy,” and that it wouldn’t actually change much for students with disabilities.

It would still be Congress’ job to decide how much to spend on fulfilling the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Hanushek said, even if funding were disbursed through another agency, like a revamped Health and Human Services Department.

“I don’t think it has any obvious impacts on IDEA funding,” Hanushek said. “I personally think that the federal government should have a larger responsibility in special education funding.”

But he cautioned that students with disabilities could get less immediate attention without an education secretary calling attention to their needs from the bully pulpit. Eliminating the department and moving its work elsewhere could also jeopardize data collection and research about students with disabilities, Hanushek said.

William Trachman, the general counsel at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that’s suing the Biden administration over its Title IX rules, said the answer would depend on what replaces the Education Department.

“It is not going to happen that there is no federal role in special education whatsoever,” he said. Whether the Department of Justice takes over civil rights enforcement, whether special education moves to HHS, or whether states get block grants to use for special education, “a lot of the impact of what happens is going to be revealed through those details.”

Others said eliminating the Education Department would have serious consequences for students with disabilities.

Tuan Nguyen, an associate professor at the University of Missouri who studies teacher labor markets, said he worried that without a federal Education Department putting pressure on states to require certain standards for teaching, who ends up working with students with disabilities would be a “free-for-all.”

“Years of evidence have shown that when states don’t have a mandate to make sure that our teachers are licensed and qualified, they’ll put anybody they can in the classroom,” Nguyen said.

Amanda Levin Mazin, a senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said she worried that without an Education Department, there would be cuts to incentives that help people enter the special education teaching profession. The Education Department has the discretion to award a variety of grants to school districts, universities, and others to support teacher recruitment and pipeline development.

Jessica Levin, the litigation director of the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of students with disabilities, said she worried that eliminating the department would hurt the enforcement of students’ civil rights. Historically, most federal civil rights complaints in education are related to a student’s disability.

“The Department of Education and the experts within it play a crucial role in enforcing those civil rights for students with disabilities across the country,” she said. “This is an incredibly dangerous proposal, both on a practical and symbolic level.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee governor backs Trump plan to abolish U.S. Department of Education

2024-11-14T01:44:47+00:00

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Gov. Bill Lee said Wednesday that he’d welcome closing the U.S. Department of Education under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, adding that states can do a better job of deciding how to spend federal dollars on students.

“I believe that Tennessee would be more capable than the federal government of designing a strategy for spending federal dollars in Tennessee,” Lee told reporters when asked about the prospect.

“We know Tennessee. We know our children. We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. does,” Lee said.

The Republican governor’s comments come as Trump assembles his cabinet after soundly defeating Vice President Kamala Harris last week to win a second term in office. As of Wednesday, he had not named his choice to be U.S. secretary of education.

During his campaign, Trump said one of his first acts as president would be to “close the Department of Education, move education back to the states.” The Republican Party’s platform also calls for shuttering the federal agency, as does the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Tennessee’s governor called it “a great idea” to dismantle the agency, which was created under a 1979 federal law during President Jimmy Carter’s administration.

“I think the federal bureaucracy that was built into the Department of Education starting in 1979 has created just that: a bureaucracy,” Lee said.

Tennessee has a template for spending federal funds

Trump has not provided a detailed plan for what would happen to federal funding or particular programs if the U.S. Department of Education were shuttered — a move that would require an act of Congress.

Lee suggested that education funding could be distributed to states similar to how Tennessee negotiated a Medicaid block grant waiver program with the first Trump administration, giving the state government more control over how it spent the money.

“We saved Tennesseans a billion dollars in taxpayer money over four years,” Lee said, “and we split the savings with the federal government.”

Federal funds typically make up about a tenth of a state’s K-12 budget. For Tennessee, that amounts to about $1.8 billion distributed to local districts for its public schools, most of which supports students from low-income families, English language learners, and with disabilities.

Lee said Tennessee would continue to spend that money to support its neediest students.

“I think that Tennessee is incredibly capable of determining how dollars should be spent to take care of kids with disabilities, to take care of kids that live in sparse populations, or with English as a second language,” he said.

Asked about the federal agency’s enforcement of civil rights protections — which some have suggested could pivot to the U.S. Department of Justice — Lee said the state would have a role in that work, too.

“The complaint process could and would still exist,” Lee said. “We would make sure that it happens in this state.”

Critics question the state’s commitment to special student groups

Tennessee doesn’t have a very good track record of educating and caring for its students who need significant additional support.

It was one of many states, for instance, that once had laws excluding children with disabilities from public schools. The premise was that those kids would not benefit from a public school education. Before the passage of a 1975 federal law establishing the right to a public education for kids with disabilities, only 1 in 5 of those children were educated in public schools.

Recently, the Tennessee Disability Coalition gave the state a “D” grade on its annual performance scorecard that includes education services.

Students with disabilities comprise a significant part of Tennessee’s public education system.

About a tenth of the state’s public school students use an individualized education plan, or IEP, that’s intended to ensure that the student receives specialized instruction and related services for their disability.

Federal laws protecting students with disabilities would remain on the books even if the education department went away, but it’s not clear how enforcement would work or what would happen to funding. The authors of Project 2025 suggested that funding be turned into something resembling a voucher and given to families.

Federal education funding has been hotly debated in Tennessee

Tennessee has gone further than any other state in recent history in exploring its relationship with the federal government.

A year ago, after House Speaker Cameron Sexton suggested that Tennessee should look into the idea, a legislative task force spent months studying the feasibility of saying no to federal dollars.

Citing testing mandates, Sexton had complained of federal strings attached to those dollars. And the governor voiced support for the panel’s work and complained of “excessive overreach” by the federal government.

But some critics said the bigger issue was the U.S. education department’s role in enforcing constitutionally guaranteed civil rights protections for students.

Ultimately, the panel’s Senate and House members disagreed about their findings and issued separate recommendations. The Senate report highlighted the risks of taking the unprecedented step of rejecting federal funding, while the House report recommended taking incremental actions to further explore the idea. Nothing specific happened in the ensuing months.

Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat who served on the panel, said the Senate’s conclusions should give the governor pause.

“There are reasons why we have the U.S. Department of Education — to make sure that all kids have the opportunity to receive a public education and to have their civil rights protected,” Akbari said.

She noted that segregated schools existed less than 75 years ago across the nation.

“It’s unthinkable that we would move away from these very sacred and important protections, not just regarding race but gender, children with special needs, the handicapped community,” Akbari said.

Alexza Barajas Clark, who heads the EdTrust advocacy group in Tennessee, said the federal role in education is “to level the playing field for all students,” especially those from rural communities and low-income families or who have a disability.

“Let’s not lose focus about what is at stake,” Clark said. “At the center of every education policy decision is a student.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee’s costly, disruptive school turnaround work didn’t help students long term, says research

2024-11-01T10:00:00+00:00

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New research shows middle school students exiting Tennessee’s two primary school turnaround models experienced few educational gains in high school, raising new questions about the much-scrutinized strategies.

In fact, there’s evidence that assignment to a school operated by the state-run Achievement School District, the more ambitious and aggressive of the two models, generally worsened high school test scores.

And assignment to a middle school campus in the Innovation Zone, a locally run school improvement program in Memphis and other cities, led to worse math scores in high school.

Neither initiative made a significant dent on ACT scores or high school graduation rates. Data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either.

The research, published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, offers the biggest indictment so far of the Achievement School District, where most students didn’t show short-term gains either.

And it fills a crucial gap in data about the Innovation Zone, where early achievement gains faded as middle school students moved on to non-iZone high schools that offered fewer interventions and support.

“Our findings suggest that reform policies may need to be designed in a way that is connected across school levels to support students throughout their K-12 educational experience,” the paper says.

Long-term effects of school turnaround reforms have been understudied

Both of Tennessee’s turnaround programs launched in 2012 during the Obama administration’s push for systemic reforms to improve teaching and learning in America’s public schools.

But so far, most research on their effectiveness has focused on short-term results such as annual standardized test scores.

The latest analysis looked at how students performed in high school after attending a turnaround middle school up through the 2017-18 school year. It’s based on data from test scores, attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary actions, dropouts, and graduation.

The research should inform imminent state and local decisions about changes to turnaround work across Tennessee. It also has national implications for reforms aimed at making swift and dramatic improvement to persistently low-performing schools. The models pioneered in Tennessee, with Memphis as their hub, overlap with ongoing turnaround work in states such as Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and North Carolina.

Such reforms have received billions of dollars in federal funding through the Race to the Top competition and school improvement grants, plus from philanthropic groups. Their success is especially important to students of color and from low-income families, who are disproportionately served by those campuses. These students also experienced the largest decreases in student achievement as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lam Pham, who led the research team’s work in Tennessee, said a major takeaway is that school improvement work needs to broaden its focus beyond raising annual test scores.

Lam Pham

“Educators respond to the accountability system that’s set for them, which in this case was test scores,” said Pham, an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

“If we’re thinking about how to model this in the future, yes, we want improved test scores, but we also want a better schooling experience for our students,” he continued. “Our accountability systems need other measures so that educators respond more holistically to improving long-term student outcomes.”

The paper also suggests a more comprehensive approach that supports students’ social-emotional learning, engages surrounding neighborhoods, and includes resources like mentoring, mental health services, out-of-school programming, and family assistance.

Tennessee’s school takeover district was controversial from its outset

The Achievement School District, the most controversial of Tennessee’s two turnaround programs, introduced dramatic changes to school governance by removing chronically low-performing schools from their local school systems in Memphis and Nashville.

The state placed them in its own district and typically used a charter management organization to relaunch the campuses. The thinking was to remove bureaucratic oversight and give school leaders flexibility to adapt staffing and curriculum to individual school needs.

Students and parents line a Memphis street in 2015 to protest the proposed takeover of Sheffield Elementary School by the Achievement School District. The state-run district later removed the school from its takeover list for 2016-17.

The ASD is still in operation, though significantly smaller.

As charter operators have cycled out of their 10-year contracts, the initiative has shrunk from a peak of 33 schools serving more than 10,000 students in 2016 to currently three Memphis schools with a total enrollment of 1,300 students.

Many lawmakers, including top Republicans who have stuck by the model, acknowledged earlier this year that the ASD has mostly failed.

“This new research just confirms what we’ve known for some time — that we need to be doing something different,” said Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat who sponsored legislation to phase out the ASD and shift its schools to state-approved but locally managed intervention models.

The legislation passed in the state Senate this year but not in the House, where Rep. Antonio Parkinson, also a Memphis Democrat, advocated for a different approach that would turn the ASD into a school improvement resource hub for the entire state.

Akbari plans to reintroduce her legislation in January.

“We really need to get on the same page and get this one done,” she said, “because ultimately it’s the kids who suffer.”

Under federal education law, the state can’t close the ASD without replacing it with a new rigorous improvement plan for its “priority schools” that are academically in the bottom 5%.

This week, a spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Education said the agency “will continue working with the General Assembly and the governor’s office to evaluate the best way to serve students in priority schools as we finalize next year’s legislative agenda.”

Locally run iZone fared better initially

The Memphis iZone, which remained under the control of the local school district, also gave its principals charter-like autonomy over staffing and curriculum but offered an extra hour of instructional time every school day and additional pay for educators.

The model has operated in the state’s four largest cities, with the largest program by far in Memphis. It began there with eight schools under the leadership of turnaround specialist Sharon Griffin and a team of coaches, then peaked in size this year with 36 schools.

The iZone showed early promise in improving student test scores. But its gains began to stall by 2015 as its portfolio of schools grew quickly, partly to stave off ASD takeovers. Funding became more difficult to sustain, and the churn of iZone leadership was another challenge.

But perhaps most significant was the limited supply of teachers who are rated as highly effective and willing to transfer to and remain with low-performing schools.

“It’s a pitfall we see in many turnaround models in many places,” said Pham, the researcher. “There are usually strong plans for improvement, but virtually no plans for sustaining and growing and expanding.”

One reason might be that federal school improvement grants that helped launch such programs lasted for only three years.

“As soon as you take your foot off the pedal on school turnaround, the gains go away.”
Lam Pham, assistant professor, North Carolina State University

“When you get one of these grants to start with, you’re not thinking about eventual expansion. You’re thinking about whether it’s going to work in the first place,” Pham said.

The iZone is now being phased out of Memphis-Shelby County Schools as part of a district-wide reorganization under its new superintendent, Marie Feagins. She hired Roderick Richmond, an early iZone architect, to work with low-performing schools but offered few details about the kinds of resources they would receive.

“It may be time to reassess the iZone,” said Akbari, the state lawmaker, “but I would like to see the model as the foundation for what comes next for school improvement work in Memphis-Shelby County Schools. This model was working. But it matters who’s at the wheel and how much support that leader is getting from the district.”

Human capital is the most important factor in turning schools around

Low-performing schools that relaunched under both the ASD and iZone replaced their principals and at least half of their teachers as part of coordinated, schoolwide changes aimed at achieving swift and dramatic improvements in student performance.

The changes didn’t translate into higher test scores at ASD schools, where researchers surmise that the reforms “likely disrupted the schools’ staffing, culture, and daily operations” and created “instabilities in students’ instructional experiences” without adding effective interventions and support.

But the changes at iZone schools told a different story in the program’s early years.

Its leadership recruited highly effective principals and teachers with a long tenure and a track record of success to staff the turnaround schools. And they rewarded them with sign-on, retention, and performance bonuses, plus compensation for the added hour of instruction.

Principal Rodney Rowan works in 2015 with reading teachers on instructional strategies at Cherokee Elementary School, an iZone school in Memphis that posted big gains in student test scores that year.

“Staffing is the most expensive part of schooling, and you get what you pay for,” Pham said. “If I were going to invest in one thing to really improve low-performing schools, it would be the teachers and principals — first to get them there, then to support them well and keep them there.”

Unfortunately, the Memphis iZone model changed through the years, probably contributing to its students’ achievement fade in high school, Pham said.

“It’s also possible,” he said, “that the improvement that students experienced during middle school just wasn’t big enough to last into high school. Or students may just need more time under these interventions. Middle school only lasts three years.”

Another factor: the pandemic. The sudden rush of overwhelming needs in lots of schools systemwide diverted attention and resources away from low-performing schools.

“As soon as you take your foot off the pedal on school turnaround, the gains go away,” Pham said.

He said the disappointing long-term data shouldn’t take away from early successes by both programs, whether boosting test scores or creating a sense of urgency to improve education in a city that also struggles with widespread intergenerational poverty. It’s a position echoed by some local education advocates.

“You have to remember that the circumstances were dire in 2012, with so many of our schools in the bottom 5%,” said Terence Patterson, CEO of the Memphis Education Fund, which helps coordinate local philanthropic work.

“I would make the case that the ASD wasn’t a failure,” he continued. “As a whole, the ASD certainly didn’t perform as we had hoped, but there were pockets of success, several schools did have gains, and many students benefited.”

Patterson has called school turnaround “heavy, hard heart work” that doesn’t result in magical outcomes, but offers lessons for the future. Among them: the need for collaboration at all levels and a greater emphasis on interventions and wraparound supports like social-emotional learning across the K-12 continuum.

“We’ve learned a lot together,” he said. “We also know that there are things we can do better.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Kids like free school meals. States are trying to reel in the costs.

2024-10-03T11:50:00+00:00

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A few years ago, so few high schoolers ate breakfast in Vermont’s Essex Westford School District that the cafeteria looked like “a ghost town” in the morning, recalls Scott Fay, the director of child nutrition.

But now that breakfast is free for all students, kids are packing the cafeteria to talk, munch on fresh cranberry-orange bread, and finish homework before the first bell.

“It’s really amazing to see that transition,” said Fay, who helped lobby for the Vermont law that expanded free meals. That’s “what real equity looks like in our cafeterias,” he said. “It’s all these kids coming together in the morning, eating.”

Fresh-baked breakfast bread has been a hit with students in the Essex Westford School District.

The number of kids eating breakfast and lunch has jumped in the eight states that now have universal free school meals. The policy has attracted extra attention since Vice President Kamala Harris named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who helped bring universal free school meals to his state, as her running mate.

Proponents say that rise in participation is a success story because it means fewer kids are hungry at school and that families have more money to spend on groceries at home. But it’s also brought some logistical challenges and — perhaps more importantly — higher-than-expected costs. That’s raising concerns in some states about the long-term sustainability of these programs. In their first year of operation, universal free school meal programs came in over budget in at least six of the eight states that offer them.

And there may be a limit to how far universal meals can expand. There’s a federal bill in Congress, but so far the policy has passed only in Democratic-controlled legislatures. Republican-led states have generally opposed universal meals due to concerns about cost and parental responsibility.

“The Legislature has added $20-30 million in property tax pressure to pay for school meals for all students, including those from affluent families,” Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott said in a statement last year when he allowed the bill to pass into law without his signature. “This will be paid for by all Vermonters, including those with low incomes.”

Why universal meal programs cost more than expected

The main reason several states’ programs are over budget is that more kids ate breakfast and lunch than expected. Most of the kids who are new to eating for free would have paid full price in the past, and now states are picking up their tab.

Some states had a more sophisticated method for devising a budget, while others used estimates from the pandemic — when the federal government paid for all students to eat for free. That didn’t turn out to be great predictors of demand because so many kids were absent during that time. On top of that, the cost of food is high, and federal reimbursement rates for meals aren’t keeping up.

“Anytime you are trying something new and bold like this — and this is bold and big — it’s going to take awhile to really get the modeling down of how much things cost,” said Alexis Bylander, who oversees child nutrition programs and policy for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center. “We’re learning a lot from these states that are implementing first.”

Related: Quesadillas, fajitas, tacos: Parents helped create 15 new recipes this Colorado district is trying this year

When Michigan launched its program last school year, for example, the state budgeted $160 million, but needed an extra $30 million to cover the actual costs. This school year, the state budgeted $200 million.

New Mexico’s program ended up costing twice as much as the $20 million budgeted by state lawmakers. State education officials, who said they knew that estimate was too low, expect to spend $49 million this year.

Colorado’s program cost $162 million last school year. State lawmakers had to dip into state reserves to add $56 million after an unexpected shortfall.

Vermont lawmakers, meanwhile, allocated $29 million for the first year of their program, but the state needed less: only $24 million.

State officials say they are doing a lot to rein in costs, including signing up more schools for the federal program that reimburses for meals at the highest rate. That program recently expanded which schools are eligible. Colorado hired a consultant to help districts figure out steps they could take to get the most federal money possible, and formed an advisory group that’s working to lower state costs.

No state is looking to get rid of universal free school meals due to higher costs. But some officials are expressing worries about their fiscal impact.

Vermont's Essex Westford School District has been able to provide students a greater variety of fresh and locally sourced foods under the expanded school meals program.

Minnesota Sen. Zach Duckworth, a Republican who voted in favor of the law, told Minnesota Public Radio last month he worried about whether the state could afford its program long-term without a new revenue source. The state initially thought it would need around $200 million a year for universal meals, but costs came in around $40 million higher.

If the state can’t keep that up, he said, school districts may have to “pinch pennies” to fund their own programs.

Diane Golzynski, the deputy superintendent who oversees child nutrition for the Michigan Department of Education, worries that right now universal meals aren’t guaranteed in state law. That means they’re vulnerable to the annual budgeting process that could “rip this rug out from underneath the feet of our families,” she said.

Earlier this year in Vermont, where the program did not go over budget, the governor proposed repealing universal free school meals to save the state $20 million as part of a bid to curb an expected property tax hike. But that idea didn’t go anywhere.

Schools see many benefits from universal free meals

Breakfast and lunch participation has continued to rise in several of the states that offer free meals to all students. That trend is especially notable because many other states were not able to sustain their pandemic-era participation rates and saw big drops when the national free meals provision ended.

When California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont rolled out universal free meals during the 2022-23 school year, they saw increases in the average number of kids eating breakfast each day ranging from 8% to 13%. Students eating lunch went up by 4% to 7%, according to data compiled by the Food Research & Action Center.

States that launched universal meals more recently have seen similar upticks. New Mexico, for example, saw a 4% increase in kids eating breakfast and lunch last school year, state education officials said.

Related: Food for thought: Museum exhibit highlights Philly’s crucial role in the history of school lunch

The increase in breakfast consumption is an especially big deal, educators and state officials say, because it can set kids up for success for the rest of their school day. Now, more schools put grab-and-go kiosks in the hallway, allow kids to eat breakfast in the classroom, or serve a “second chance” breakfast later in the morning.

“Breakfast and learning are so closely tied,” said Deanne Kelleher, Michigan’s director of health and nutrition services.

Her state has seen the biggest increase in breakfast consumption among middle schoolers, who often have an early start time but are too sleepy to eat before school.

Some research has found that universal free school meals can boost students’ test scores and attendance rates. It also can decrease stigma and bullying in the lunchroom.

Some schools have faced challenges stemming from serving more students, such as longer lines and kids not having enough time to eat. Some schools are considering longer lunch periods or limiting how many kids line up at once.

And though more kids eating for free can throw off the state budget, it generally means that at the district level, schools are taking in more money. That often means they can afford to cook more from scratch and offer more options to kids.

April Liles, the director of food services for Waltham Public Schools in Massachusetts, was able to use her extra funds to hire a part-time dietician who helps adapt meals for kids with gluten allergies or who need a vegetarian meal. Her high schools now offer 15 options for lunch each day — from a panini to a grilled veggie burger to a taco bar — to help guarantee kids can find something that meets their needs.

Rosie Krueger, Vermont’s director of child nutrition programs, said now that districts in her state have guaranteed revenue coming in and aren’t chasing after unpaid meal debt, they’re able to put higher food quality standards in their contracts. Instead of asking: “What is the bare minimum that you can offer for the lowest possible price?” she sees schools include requirements for more fruits, vegetables, and locally sourced food.

Universal free school meal programs have allowed many schools to offer more fruits, vegetables, and locally sourced food. Colorado's Jefferson Junior/Senior High School recently set out apples for students.

In the Essex Westford School District, Fay’s school nutrition budget typically ran a deficit of $70,000 to $100,000 before Vermont launched universal meals. Now he can afford to buy local beef to make homemade meatballs. Kids liked them so much that the kitchen staff got sore hands from all the scooping. With the extra funds, Fay was able to buy a $25,000 machine that could shape those meatballs more quickly.

The programs can also help families trust schools more. Fay found that when the district stopped calling families asking for unpaid meal debt, that school principals were able to get through to those families more easily to talk about things like their child’s behavior or a support they could offer.

“The more phone calls we made collectively, made them less and less apt to pick up the phone when the school called,” Fay said. “It was driving a wedge between the district and some of those families who needed us the most.”

Will more states offer free school meals to all?

Proponents for universal free school meals, like Bylander, say they don’t think the higher-than-expected price tags have deterred supporters or created new opposition to the policy.

“The people that really balked or were upset about the policy costing more than expected probably weren’t the people who strongly supported it to begin with,” she said.

Still, efforts to create a permanent universal free school meals program at the national level haven’t gone anywhere. And while former President Donald Trump approved the pandemic program that temporarily made school meals free for all, it’s unlikely he would support that again.

Other efforts to make pandemic-era policies that expanded the social safety net permanent have been polarizing.

When federal officials created a permanent Summer EBT program, for example, some Republican-led states said they didn’t want to pay the administrative costs or that their families didn’t need the extra food assistance.

Opponents often say the state shouldn’t cover the cost of feeding kids whose families can afford to pay and that limited state funds could be better spent elsewhere. Proponents counter that many families who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals also struggle to afford food. This school year, a family of four that makes over $58,000 didn’t qualify for any school meal aid.

Some Republican-led states have taken steps toward expanding free school meals without making them universal. In South Carolina, Republican State Sen. Katrina Shealy was able to convince her colleagues to make previously reduced-price meals free, since it had a much smaller price tag than the universal program she initially wanted.

In South Dakota, House Rep. Kadyn Wittman, one of 11 Democrats in the state legislature, introduced a bill to make all school meals free, but that swiftly died in committee.

“I got my ass handed to me,” she said.

So she went back to the drawing board and built a coalition of school staffers and other advocates who lobbied lawmakers to support a different bill to make reduced-price meals free. That came with a price tag of around $630,000. But the bill still failed.

“I don’t think it was the price tag,” Wittman said. “There is still this belief that we should not be ‘raising other people’s kids.’”

Wittman is trying again. She plans to highlight the origins of the school lunch program — one of which was making sure kids were well-fed and healthy enough to defend the country in times of war — and how this financial investment could pay dividends later for academic achievement and attendance.

“How do you eat an elephant?” she said. “One bite at a time.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

COVID money countdown: Schools exhaust pandemic aid as federal help winds down

2024-09-19T22:07:12+00:00

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Over the last three years, an influx of pandemic aid has been transformative for many schools.

Some were able to hire social workers or give every child a laptop for the first time. Others fixed up old buildings, tutored struggling students, or revamped summer school programs.

But that era is quickly drawing to a close. And this month marks an important stop on the way toward the end of COVID relief.

Schools have to say by the end of this month how they plan to spend the last of their $123 billion from the American Rescue Plan, the third and final batch of schools’ COVID aid from the federal government. Then they have until Jan. 28, 2025 to spend the money.

The deadline at the end of September matters a lot: Schools that have any money not earmarked by then could eventually have to return the funds to the federal government. And some states have said they are concerned that schools may be at risk of not meeting that deadline.

Schools can seek an extension to spend their remaining aid until March 2026. But that won’t give them more time to officially decide how to use it — leaving some scrambling to come up with a plan before the deadline in 11 days.

“We have been in contact, in many cases multiple times, with districts and charters to remind them of their responsibility to obligate these funds,” Tom Horne, Arizona’s state superintendent, said in a news release earlier this week. “Most are showing the ability to do this, but a number of them are at great risk of reverting funds.”

Some Arizona school districts or charter schools had yet to commit any of their funds to a specific purpose, Horne said, and many others have earmarked only a fraction of their aid.

Michigan said it expected some federal aid would be returned by schools, but noted it had left less than 1% of the first two aid packages on the table.

“We do anticipate that some school districts and subgrantees will not be able to obligate funds by the end of the month and may revert funds back to the federal government,” Jeremy Meyer, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education, told Chalkbeat in an email.

Still, federal officials told reporters on Thursday they were confident that little if any money was at risk of being returned by schools. Schools across the country have already spent and been reimbursed for 87% of their American Rescue Plan dollars, officials said. Much of the remaining money has been spent, too, but hasn’t yet shown up on spending trackers due to record-keeping lags.

Schools can’t use the aid to pay staff salaries after this month. But they can continue using it to do things like pay tutors to work with their students, finish up a construction project, or contract with a community organization to help with attendance outreach.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona spoke with Detroit high schoolers about how pandemic aid helped schools invest in student mental health earlier this month.

Federal officials have said they would look especially favorably on applications to spend the money beyond the usual timeline on Biden administration priorities, such as intensive tutoring, efforts to boost attendance, and extra instructional time.

Delaware, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Puerto Rico have already applied for and received spending extensions on behalf of some districts and schools. These extensions cover some $1.1 billion in aid, federal officials said.

Several other states, including Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., told Chalkbeat that they intended to apply for spending extensions in the coming weeks or months.

Nationwide, schools have already spent about $1.5 billion beyond original deadlines after getting extensions on their first two aid packages, federal officials said.

Schools have struggled for a number of reasons to spend down their pandemic aid, though often not for lack of need.

Construction delays held up spending in Mississippi, where schools spent a large share of aid on building projects. Meanwhile, supply-chain issues slowed spending in Tennessee and Illinois.

In Colorado, some schools had trouble filling certain educator positions amidst national shortages, or they planned to hire a company to provide training and were still waiting for that service to come through, Meyer wrote.

In other cases, not as many students or staff showed up to certain activities like summer school or after-school programs as originally anticipated, so they ended up costing less than expected.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

A bigger child tax credit could help students a lot. Will Harris or Trump make it happen?

2024-09-10T21:31:39+00:00

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The child tax credit’s expansion during the pandemic cut child poverty nearly in half — but that more-generous credit expired in 2021. Research indicates poverty hurts children academically and in other ways. And many families worry about the cost of living.

All of that has spurred the campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump to talk about once again making the child tax credit more generous.

The two candidates differ on who should benefit and how much money families should get; Trump’s campaign in particular has been short on details. But an expanded child tax credit has the potential to cut down on the housing instability and food insecurity that disrupts kids’ lives and hurts their schooling.

“People get very frustrated about education achievement in our country, and teachers get very frustrated that the solution is always for them to do more,” said Elizabeth Ananat, an economics professor at Barnard College who’s studied how an expanded child tax credit could help kids.

When families don’t get the help they need, schools are expected to step in as the “sole providers of basically every social program.”

That’s why “advocates, for a long time, have been thinking that one way to address the income education gap,” Ananat added, “is by giving more supports to low-income families.”

But Republicans have sunk similar proposals to expand the child tax credit in Congress. How much children benefit from this kind of assistance depends a lot on how the policy is designed. And some teachers in high-poverty schools say the more generous pandemic-era child tax credit barely scratched the surface of families’ needs.

“Even with the tax credit, they were impoverished,” said Phylicia Butler, who taught music at an Arkansas elementary school in 2021 when Congress temporarily raised the child tax credit and gave it to more families.

Parents in North Little Rock used the payments for food and rent, she said. But kids were still coming to school wearing the same shirt three days in a row, or with their feet poking out of their shoes.

The history of the child tax credit

The child tax credit has long had bipartisan support and is popular among voters.

Just before the pandemic, families could get a tax credit of up to $2,000 per child, but the policy excluded many of the nation’s poorest families who pay little or nothing in taxes. Then, in 2021, Congress significantly expanded the child tax credit through the American Rescue Plan.

That law gave families up to $3,600 for kids under 6 and $3,000 for other children under 18. Crucially, it was “fully refundable,” which meant families could get that money even if they didn’t have any income or didn’t make much. And half of the money could be paid in monthly installments, which especially helped families living paycheck to paycheck.

That temporary policy helped lift some 2.9 million children out of poverty and cut the child poverty rate nearly in half — the biggest single-year drop in at least 50 years. Poverty rates fell most sharply for Black and Hispanic children.

Nick Bates, who directs the Hunger Network in Ohio, a faith-based nonprofit that advocates for anti-poverty programs, remembers how the extra cash helped his family of four cover the rising cost of food. Other parents used it to pay for things benefiting their children’s physical health and social connections after the pandemic’s disruption, like the swim team or the local YMCA.

“People were like: ‘Oh, thank God we got that this month, because I didn’t know how we were going to afford groceries next week, or be able to pay off the credit card,’” Bates said. “This kept a lot of families from spiraling out.”

When the pandemic policy expired, the credit reverted back to $2,000 per child and again excluded the lowest-income families. If Congress takes no action, the credit will drop down to $1,000 per child at the end of next year.

The child tax credit: What Harris and Trump say

The impending expiration of the current child tax credit, plus the ongoing financial hardship many families are experiencing, has created an incentive for politicians to highlight the policy.

“People like the child tax credit,” said Ashley Burnside, a senior policy analyst at The Center for Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit that supports expanding the child tax credit. Through surveys, her organization has seen this kind of policy can “reach voters and show them that the government cares about them as they raise their kids.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has said she wants to reinstate the pandemic-era policy and raise the credit to $6,000 for families with children less than a year old. Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, helped to enact a child tax credit in his state after the federal pandemic-era policy expired. It’s the largest in the nation for lower-income households.

Trump hasn’t released a detailed policy, but his campaign said he would consider raising the credit to $5,000 per child for families of all income levels after his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, proposed the idea. But the Republican Party platform, which Trump backed, calls for a $2,000 per child credit that excludes many low-income families.

Republicans in Congress have blocked efforts to expand the child tax credit, including a bill last month that would have helped some 16 million children from low-income families. Vance missed that vote.

Still, experts say competing proposals to increase the size of the child tax credit will have little effect on child poverty if the nation’s poorest families can’t benefit from it. That means how the credit is structured can matter more than how much the credit is worth.

Expanding who’s eligible — for example to parents who make less than $3,500 or who are undocumented — is “the meat of the benefit,” Ananat said.

The pandemic-era child tax credit helped kids

The pandemic provided ample evidence of how an expanded child tax credit benefits kids.

Families with children reported on multiple surveys that they used the money to pay for essentials like groceries, rent, utilities, and clothing. Food insecurity among families with kids dropped sharply. Many families also used the money to pay for child care — and likely were able to enroll in centers they couldn’t afford before.

Surveys showed that the expanded child tax credit in 2021 helped low-income families buy more fruit and meat.

The payments also helped low-income families stay in their homes and avoid moving due to unpaid rent or mortgage bills. Low-income families who got the credit were less likely to say they were living “doubled up” with other family or friends — a living arrangement that typically leads schools to designate children as homeless.

Hunger, housing instability, and an unexpected move can all negatively affect a child’s ability to learn and regularly attend class.

Nagali Campos, a case manager who supports students experiencing homelessness in New Mexico’s Santa Fe Public Schools, recalls that some families in her community donated their payments to mutual aid groups so they could help undocumented parents who’d lost their jobs, some of whom struggled to access the payments they were newly eligible for.

Black and Hispanic families were especially likely to say they used the credit to pay for extracurricular activities and tutoring for their kids.

Many Black and Hispanic families also said the credit helped them save for college or send their child to a different school.

An expanded child tax credit’s benefits for society

A permanent expansion of the child tax credit could also have lasting effects on kids’ lives.

Research recently released by Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, a research scientist at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, comes to the conclusion that a permanent version of the 2021 pandemic-era child tax credit would likely shrink racial and socioeconomic gaps in educational attainment.

Historically, decreases in child poverty have narrowed gaps between how kids of color and white students perform academically at school.

A paper released last month by researchers at the University at Albany, SUNY, for example, found that household income explains more than half of the gap in reading scores for Black and white students, and just under half of the gap for Hispanic and white students. When Michael Petrilli, the president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which commissioned the study, laid out the findings, he described an expanded child tax credit as one possible solution.

The program would more than pay for itself, because those kids would likely go on to earn more at work, pay more in taxes, be healthier, and require fewer social services.

A permanent expansion would likely help more of the hardest-to-reach families, too. During the temporary boost, some families missed out because they don’t file tax returns each year and didn’t know to do so.

If the program stuck around, it would be easier to tap “trusted messengers” to do intensive outreach, said Nikhita Airi, a research associate at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center who’s studied the child tax credit.

That would be especially helpful for immigrant parents who may worry that filling out tax paperwork could affect their immigration status, and for new parents, who may not know about the credit.

“It’s a pretty decent way to get cash out to families fast,” Airi said. “We did see in 2021 some of the flaws in that. There are gaps.”

Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

All-charter no more: New Orleans opens its first traditional public school in nearly 2 decades

2024-09-09T10:05:00+00:00

This story about New Orleans schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

More than 300 students started the school year in the first traditional school run directly by the New Orleans school district since 2019. This August was the first time the district has opened its own school since Hurricane Katrina swept through the city nearly two decades ago.

The pre-K-8 school, named after New Orleans cultural and civil rights icon Leah Chase, came together in just a handful of months. Its opening ends the city’s five-year run as the only all-charter school district in the nation. Charter schools receive public funding but are independently run.

For some, the opening of the Leah Chase School is a symbol of stability. In a district that’s been out of the business of directly managing schools for five years, it is a tentative step toward a new era in the city where permanent, traditional neighborhood schools are more commonplace. NOLA Public Schools, the district’s official name, has about 41,600 students, 75% of whom are Black.

The decision to open the school in a short time also reflects shifting attitudes in the community and on the Orleans Parish School Board, which was once committed to having only charter schools in the district. What happens with the Leah Chase School is a litmus test for a school system that was once considered failing in most metrics, and it will likely determine how it operates future schools, and when.

“I think the opening of the Leah Chase School does mark a new period for New Orleans public schools,” said J. Celeste Lay, a political science professor at Tulane University who studies education policy. “I think they are more willing to consider directly running schools in ways we haven’t seen, certainly since Katrina.”

The dispute over who runs schools in Orleans Parish goes beyond the national debate over school choice. What happens when a city with a struggling school system gets swallowed by the sea, and how does that system recover when the waters recede?

The idea to open Leah Chase cropped up in January after a tense board meeting over the future of Lafayette Academy. That charter school, in New Orleans’ Uptown neighborhood, received an F rating on the state’s report card. Superintendent Avis Williams recommended revoking the school’s charter in November. Typically, a different charter group would offer to step in.

But when the December deadline for a new operator came and went with no charter group stepping up, Williams recommended that the board keep the school closed, requiring parents to find another option for their children.

At that time, she presented the obstacles to opening a district-run school, from the abbreviated timeline to hire staff and adopt curriculum to planning for the city’s declining birth rate and drop in district enrollment.

Board members ultimately approved the superintendent’s recommendation, but they made it clear: If the school is closing, the district should have a plan to replace it.

Avis Williams, superintendent of NOLA Public Schools, cuts the ribbon for the district’s new Leah Chase School in August.

New Orleans district lacks experience operating schools

A day after the January board meeting, the superintendent made a sharp turn. The district would run the school after all, in the building that had been occupied by Lafayette Academy.

Williams said the decision to open the school was what the board, and community, wanted.

“That was just something the community has impressed upon our board members, and they did vote unanimously for us to direct-run the Leah Chase School and for us to direct-run more schools,” Williams said.

Both the Recovery School District — a special statewide district created to manage underperforming schools — and New Orleans Public Schools had poured money into renovating and abating asbestos in the building that housed Lafayette Academy that is now the site of the Leah Chase School. That was one factor in wanting to keep this particular building open.

But more than anything, the decision stemmed from a growing sentiment in the community, and among newer board members, that it’s time for the district to have a traditional school again, said Carlos Zervigon, a member of the Orleans Parish School Board whose district includes the Leah Chase School.

“There’s a sense that if we’re a system of choice and a system of innovation, one choice should be a school run in a traditional way by the school district directly, with a focus on the neighborhood,” Zervigon said. “That should be one of the choices, and there’s a strong feeling about that.”

In its first week open, the Leah Chase School had already met the goals district leaders outlined for it. The school has a full staff, a principal, a bus transportation system, and more than 300 students enrolled — many of whom transferred from Lafayette.

“My expectation was certainly that there would be some glitches, but it was a seamless day,” said Williams, the superintendent.

The district still has logistical questions to answer. School enrollment in New Orleans has dropped by about 5% — 2,400 students in five years, according to the district — and if enrollment continues to fall, more school closures are on the horizon. That’s something the superintendent has been tasked with addressing in a five-year plan she’s set to present to the board this fall, along with goals for future traditional public schools.

“That’s part of the optimization plan — we’re looking at size of schools, number of seats available,” said Leila Jacobs Eames, vice president of the Orleans Parish School Board and one of the board’s more vocal advocates for traditional schools.

Financially, the district will need to open more traditional schools to cover the cost of district office staff that are required to run schools. The district is currently using its fund balance to cover much of the start-up costs for the Leah Chase School.

“The question is, with their skeleton crew, can they do all that and create the internal capacity to operate schools again?” said Douglas N. Harris, a professor at Tulane University and director of the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice. “And the larger question — will they be good at it?”

Charter-focused district emerged from Hurricane Katrina aftermath

Hurricane Katrina was the catalyst that resulted in New Orleans’ charter-focused district, but the district’s poor performance, and the city’s broken trust in the school system, predates the devastating storm. In 2004, one year before Katrina, only half of high school students were graduating, and under a quarter of seniors were enrolling in college. School board members and officials were indicted on corruption charges stemming from millions of unaccounted-for dollars. The 2005 hurricane pushed a district already on the brink into collapse.

When Katrina destroyed nearly 90% of the public schools in the city, the state’s Recovery School District took most of them over, while the Orleans Parish School Board still had control of a few schools. The years immediately following Katrina were chaotic — schools opened, and closed, on a dime.

Related: PROOF POINTS: New study shows controversial post-Katrina school reforms paid off for New Orleans

“You had kids that were switching schools every other year because their school would close or their school would transition” to a charter school, “would take on new grades or close certain grades. It was a crazy, terrible time,” said Lay.

Slowly, the few remaining non-charter schools transitioned into charter schools. The arguments in favor of a charter system were numerous: Academic and school management decisions would be left to schools instead of to a district with a history of corruption; charters gave students the opportunity to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods; and the new system brought the promise of change for a city that desperately needed better options.

But it also left a bitter taste. There were concerns about shifting power from a majority-Black, locally elected school board to a majority-white state board — many of whose members had no direct ties to New Orleans. And the district’s entire teaching staff, which was 71% Black, was fired. By 2014, fewer than 50% of public school teachers in New Orleans were Black.

“You have a Black majority constituency that is being told your elected officials cannot directly control your schools, and it feels a lot like disenfranchisement,” said Zervigon, the school board member.

Because charter schools were no longer merely an option for families but the main source of public education in New Orleans, the Recovery School District created rules that charters elsewhere don’t have to follow: Enrollment in schools was handled by the district, charters had to provide transportation options, and they had to have district permission before expelling a student.

The state passed legislation — Act 91 — enshrining those rules into law before the Recovery School District handed its schools back to the New Orleans public school district in 2017. By 2019, every public school in the parish was a charter, and most of those schools are Black-led, Zervigon said.

Latanya Evans teaches a first grade class at the Leah Chase School.

Community tires of cycle of school closures

Overall, schools in the district are performing better now than they were before Katrina. The high school graduation rate has risen to 78% in 2022, from 54% in 2004. The college entry rate rose to 56% in 2021, from 37% in 2004.

“Test scores went up, high school graduation, college graduation, ACT scores — everything improved, which is really unusual,” Harris said. “A lot of them improved quite considerably, which is also very unusual. It’s generally the most successful district school reform that we’ve ever seen — of any kind, not just a charter district.”

Schools have stabilized compared to the years after Katrina, but the framework of a charter system requires closing poor performing and financially struggling schools. Though the number of schools closing each year is far lower than it was in the years directly after Katrina, it is not uncommon for a charter to get revoked. Along with Lafayette Academy, the school district rescinded the charter of the 180-student Living School, which didn’t reopen this fall.

Related: New Orleans finally has control of its own schools, but will all parents really have a say?

Ultimately, people are sick of that cycle, Zervigon said.

“It’s just not reasonable to tolerate closing schools anymore,” he said. “This idea of closing your way to improvement — no one wants to do that.”

There’s disagreement on how successful the city’s charter model has been for students more recently. In 2019, New Orleans schools were among the top in the nation for academic growth according to a Stanford University report. But annually, most of the city’s schools get a C, D, or F rating on state report cards. A 2016 study from a different department at Stanford University said the quality of schools in the city varies greatly depending on the school, and the main mode for addressing this — closing failing schools — hurts achievement for displaced students.

“There’s a lot of disagreement around whether the schools are better and what better means,” said Lay, the Tulane professor. “There are people who will certainly point to increases in test scores and graduation rates as solid evidence of improvement. But I think many others look at that as a very narrow way to measure transformation or success, and instead would prefer a holistic view of success of the district: inclusion of students, stability in terms of being able to attend schools, and know those schools are going to be open for the next several years of their education.”

The five-year plan that Williams, the superintendent, will present to board members in October will include plans for new traditional schools and how the district will address declining enrollment.

Board members and the superintendent have said they are still committed to charters. But the school system will likely add more traditional schools to join the Leah Chase School.

“They’ll probably operate a couple more, but still fundamentally remain a mostly charter school district,” Harris said. “I think that partly because a big change can only happen slowly.”

Federal review of Memphis school district cites dozens of cases of alleged sexual harassment and assault

2024-08-30T19:17:13+00:00

Memphis-Shelby County Schools violated federal civil rights law by not adequately responding to complaints of sexual harassment and assault of students over a three-year period, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced on Friday.

The office said that the state’s largest school district has agreed to a number of corrective steps to resolve the office’s compliance review, which began in March 2020.

According to the agency, district documents reflect reports that teachers or substitute teachers sexually assaulted students in seven incidents across three school years at all school levels in the district: elementary, middle, and high school. District documents reflect 53 more cases of reported staff-to-student sexual harassment, not including sexual assault, as well as a total of 88 cases of student-to-student sexual harassment during the same time period, the OCR said.

The violations occurred over three years starting in 2017-18, according to the OCR’s letter to Superintendent Marie Feagins, who took the helm of the district earlier this year.

Those records and witness interviews “reflect clear district violations” of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, and raise “serious concerns” about the district’s response, which is subject to the same law, the OCR said.

“Students in the Memphis-Shelby County School District deserve the safety and freedom from discrimination that Congress promised them in Title IX, and the District now commits to fulfill its Title IX obligations to these students,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said in a statement. “The Office for Civil Rights will monitor the school district in the coming years to be sure it complies with Title IX.”

A statement issued later Friday by the MSCS media relations department said the district is “committed to ensuring the safety, dignity, and equal educational opportunities for all students” and recognizes the importance of Title IX compliance. The administration is addressing issues identified by OCR while “actively collaborating to establish corrective actions regarding past reports,” it said.

The school board, meanwhile, is in transition and without a chairperson as four new members were sworn in on Thursday.

“Any time a person is violated, the school board is very concerned,” Stephanie Love, who was reelected to the board this month, said Friday. “I want to talk to the superintendent and our general counsel to see what we can do to right the ship.”

The Office of Civil Rights, which according to its letter to the district began its investigation in March 2020, determined that the district violated Title IX by:

Not having a designated Title IX coordinator for substantial portions of the office’s compliance review period.
Not coordinating its response to reports of sexual harassment, including sexual assault, through its Title IX coordinator as required during the time that a coordinator was designated.
Not involving the Title IX coordinator in the majority of sexual harassment files reviewed for the investigation, including not involving a Title IX coordinator in any of the incidents involving staff.
Not maintaining a nondiscrimination statement and harassment policies that comply with Title IX.
Not fulfilling the Title IX obligation to maintain records sufficient for the district or for the Office of Civil Rights to make compliance determinations, including inconsistent reporting to the office for its Civil Rights Data Collection and for the compliance review itself.

The OCR’s 20-page letter to the district says files generally showed that staff members overseeing employee relations approached the cases primarily as personnel matters, focusing on whether the accused employee violated a school board ethics rule or engaged in conduct that implicated state laws regarding education, rather than on whether there was a potential Title IX violation.

The OCR spotlighted one case in particular involving an elementary school teacher who was ultimately convicted of soliciting sexual exploitation of a minor and who was reported to have encouraged boys and girls to touch each other inappropriately during class, in addition to other alleged misconduct.

The agency said the record does not reflect any involvement of the Title IX coordinator in investigating the teacher’s conduct, any support provided by the district to affected students to ensure their equal access to education, or any notice to the parties regarding any district determination under Title IX.

The resolution agreement requires the school district to take a number of steps, including: to adopt and publish a compliant notice of nondiscrimination; revise its policies; review all sexual assault cases from the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years to make sure each were resolved or, if not, take steps to do so; conduct district staff training; survey parents and students on how sexual harassment in schools is handled; and “designate, train, and publicize the contact information” for its Title IX coordinator.

The district has taken some steps already. In the budget for the 2024-25 school year, the district general counsel’s list of priorities start with two bullet points.

One is to “establish a strong team” to handle Title IX issues and revise policies and workflows as appropriate.

The second: to implement training in student and employee civil rights “to ensure compliance with duties to respond to, investigate, and decide complaints” concerning federal laws.

Eric Gorski is Chalkbeat’s managing editor for local news. You can reach him at egorski@chalkbeat.org.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tim Walz helps Democrats make the ‘prairie populist’ case for public schools

2024-08-11T23:08:54+00:00

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The photos have emerged as perhaps the most iconic image of Tim Walz.

The Minnesota governor and longtime high school teacher had just signed into law a bill making school breakfast and lunch free to nearly all children in the state. In the pictures from last year, Walz is surrounded by children who happily embrace him, and he beams with joy.

Teachers and teachers unions have embraced Walz as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee with similar joy. The last major party candidate to previously have led a K-12 classroom was Lyndon B. Johnson.

And they say they’re excited about not just his background but his record.

As governor, Walz focused on providing schools with more money and resources, addressing the affordability of child care and college, and working to reduce child poverty. Walz has connected these policy priorities to his time in the classroom, and Democrats increasingly have embraced them as the solution to what ails public education.

This emphasis on resources and social factors outside the classroom sidesteps education issues that have divided Democrats and differs in key respects from former President Barack Obama’s tenure, when Democrats backed education reform policies like merit pay for teachers and pushed low-performing schools to improve or face closure. It stands in even sharper contrast to Republican attacks on public schools as places where children are at risk of indoctrination.

Critics of the Walz pick say it reflects Harris’ deference to teachers unions and likely closes the door on any major push to improve school performance through federal policy. But many political observers say Walz represents a chance for Democrats to embrace a positive vision of public schools and the teaching profession, after several years in which conservatives claiming to represent parents’ rights have largely driven education politics.

“It feels like an opportunity to turn the page on the way education has been discussed for the last few years,” said Jon Valant, who heads the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. “Democrats have been reluctant to engage on some of these issues, and now we’ll have someone on the forefront who is very natural and compelling when he talks about it.”

Walz’ ability to listen and respond to what he hears by working for solutions has struck Joe Nathan, who heads Minnesota’s Center for School Change and has worked on education policy and charter school issues in the state for years.

One example that stands out to Nathan emerged from the aftermath of pandemic disruptions. When many businesses shuttered in 2020, Minnesota at first issued unemployment benefits to some teenagers who applied. But then, citing a 1939 law, the state tried to take back thousands of dollars that, for students from low-income families, had already gone to rent and utility bills. To qualify for assistance, the students would need to drop out of high school, curtailing their education to help parents and siblings.

Students organized and successfully sued the state, then worked to change the law. Walz met with the students and became an ally in their cause.

“It’s a very rare politician who listens to kids and says ‘you’re right’ and then does something,” Nathan said.

Why Walz resonates with teachers and students

Since Walz became Harris’ running mate, stories have poured out from former students who’ve described how Walz connected with them when other teachers couldn’t, how he noticed something they were trying to say, or stood up for them. Yes, he coached Mankato West’s winless football team to a state championship, “but he was a pretty great coach even when we weren’t winning,” one former player told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

“We’ve all had that teacher. We’ve all known that teacher,” said Mark Sass, a retired high social studies teacher in Colorado. “That’s very relatable.”

Teachers respond to Walz on yet another level, said Sass, who serves as policy director for Teach Plus Colorado and works every year with cohorts of teachers doing policy research.

“They feel like there’s somebody who’s been through this, and they feel like there is someone who will go in and fight for them,” he said. “And it will be interesting to see what happens. There’s a difference between fighting for the teachers and fighting for the kids.”

It’s rare for someone with extensive classroom experience to have such a seat at the table where decisions get made, said Jal Mehta, a Harvard education professor.

“Teachers feel really excited that they might have one of their own in the White House,” he said.

It might also appeal to voters in general. Poll after poll finds that large majorities of parents like their kids’ teachers, said Jennifer Berkshire, an education researcher and author of the book “The Education Wars.”

“That is the mainstream view, and Walz reminds us of that,” she said.

That excitement could yield benefits beyond the campaign trail. Teachers report working longer hours for less pay than their peers who also do jobs that require college degrees. Teacher turnover is high. Polls find that most parents wouldn’t want their children to enter the teaching profession.

Harris campaigned on raising teacher pay back in 2019, and the federal government could leverage its money to improve pay and working conditions, Mehta said. But he also noted that at their first rally together in Philadelphia, Walz thanked Harris for “bringing back the joy” to the campaign.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, leaned into her VP pick Tim Walz's background as a teacher and coach when she introduced him at rally in Philadelphia on Aug. 6, 2024.

“We’re also missing a lot of joy in the classroom, and they could channel that joy into how they talk about schools,” Mehta said. “If it’s just that and no policy proposals, it will feel light after a while, but the combination of the rhetoric and some policy could be really invigorating for the teaching profession.”

Walz not shying away from culture war issues

A key point in Walz’s biography is that he served as the first faculty advisor to Mankato West’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). Such clubs were once controversial, and Walz thought it was important that a straight married military veteran who coached the football team take on that role.

GSAs, now more commonly known as Gender and Sexuality Alliances, are federally protected under the same law that allows Bible study groups to meet on school grounds. But they’re under renewed scrutiny as Republican-led states pass laws restricting how teachers talk about gender and sexuality at school or what books students have access to.

With Democrats already taking the blame for extended school closures and mask mandates that were unpopular with some parents, they were slow to respond to the conservative parents’ rights movement to a certain extent.

But as governor, with the help of a supportive legislature, Walz has tackled so-called culture war issues head on instead of evading them. He made Minnesota a “trans refuge” state for people fleeing restrictive laws, banned book bans, and expanded ethnic studies and Indigenous history.

Related: In Tim Walz, many teachers see themselves — and an opportunity

These issues could be front and center in a future Trump administration. The Republican platform calls for removing federal funding for schools teaching “inappropriate” lessons on race and history, and for rolling back new Title IX rules that expand protections for LGBTQ students and staff. Already, Republican-led states have sued to block implementation of the Title IX rules.

Conservative parent groups were quick to blast Walz. On Fox and Friends, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice called him “the most anti-parent candidate that Kamala Harris could have chosen.”

Some Republicans have mocked Walz as “Tampon Tim” for backing a law that requires schools to make period products available at no charge to all menstruating students in the restrooms they regularly use. The law’s wording covers transgender boys who use the boys’ restroom.

If Walz were a teacher today stepping up to sponsor his school’s GSA, Berkshire said, the GOP would “demonize him as a groomer” and then argue: “This is why we don’t need schools, and we should have education savings accounts.”

Walz helps Democrats link public schools, family policy

Johnson’s time teaching impoverished students in South Texas influenced his Great Society initiatives, which significantly expanded the social safety net, said Kal Alston, professor at Syracuse University’s school of education. Johnson also spoke up for the value of public school as a place where people from different backgrounds come together in common purpose.

“He spoke from the White House about how being a teacher really shaped his view of the opportunities that came to him from attending public school,” Alston said.

Similarly, Walz’s “experience in the classroom may have informed why he thought it was important that kids not come into the classroom hungry,” said Sass, the retired Colorado teacher. “He understood the impacts that economic conditions can have on student achievement, and it seems like he took that to heart when he became governor.”

Cole Stevens was one of the Minnesota students who faced the loss of unemployment benefits back in 2020. He said Walz’s administration encouraged students to hold the line on their priority, which was ensuring that students were treated just like other workers whose employers had paid into the state’s unemployment fund.

Stevens, now the director of impact at Bridgemakers, a youth-led organization he co-founded, said he appreciated that Walz took young people seriously and didn’t patronize them. Stevens, who was speaking for himself and not for Bridgemakers, hopes that Walz takes that approach to Washington and helps find bipartisan solutions to education problems.

“Our schools are still not effective as a whole,” he said. “If you live in a low-income ZIP code, your whole life trajectory is determined at that point. We need to fund schools differently. We need to hold schools accountable in different ways, with more practical skills for youth and more personalized learning opportunities for students to unlock their full potential.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz attends the Farmfest agricultural forum in August 2023. Democrats hope that Walz's small-town bonafides broaden the ticket's appeal.

Few observers expect substantive K-12 policy to come out of the federal government any time soon, though there is work to be done. Pandemic recovery is woefully incomplete even as federal COVID assistance is expiring. The Every Student Succeeds Act, which is supposed to hold schools accountable for student achievement, is overdue for reauthorization. So is the federal law that governs special education but provides a fraction of the promised funding.

Policy on charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently run, is also in flux. Once embraced by many Democrats, charter schools have not found the same kind of support in the Biden administration. But Nathan, the Minnesota education advocate who helped pass the state’s first-in-the-nation charter school law in 1991, said he’s always found Walz to be “fair-minded” and that the governor ensured charter schools shared in increased school funding.

“There is no question he is a very strong union guy and a very strong public education guy, but he is also fair-minded,” Nathan said. “He understands charter schools are part of the public school system, and he understands that a significant percentage of charter school students are low-income students of color.”

Walz’s emphasis on child poverty, wraparound services, and increasing resources for schools aligns with Harris’ “care economy” agenda that focuses on child care, elder care, and family leave. Valant, of the Brookings Institution, said Democrats for too long ceded the language of “parents’ rights” to conservatives, while Walz’s approach offers a new way of talking about building education systems that meet parents’ needs.

Making that case might have been more complicated had Harris picked Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. A top contender for the VP slot, Shapiro last year publicly backed vouchers; Republicans have made school choice a crucial part of their education platform.

Having Shapiro on the ticket would have elevated “a candidate who makes the same argument that Republicans are making” when “we’re having this key debate about whether we should have public schools,” Berkshire said. It also would have upset key constituencies, like the two national teachers unions. But that calculation is one reason Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, was disappointed Harris chose Walz.

“People would say, ‘Wow, she showed some real courage in breaking with some parts of her base,’” he said. “That doesn’t mean a Harris-Shapiro administration would have promoted private school choice. But it would have been an important indicator she was really fighting for the center.”

In Walz, Petrilli said he sees “a lot of love for kids, and that’s great, but I don’t see any tough love for schools that are doing a poor job.”

A decade ago, Democratic candidates might have been talking about test scores and charter schools, Berkshire said, but no longer: “We’re not going to hear that. We’re going to hear the prairie populist argument for public schools.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

For a second year, FAFSA will again be delayed in the fall

2024-08-07T23:25:04+00:00

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For the second year in a row, students and families won’t have access to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid on Oct. 1, when it’s traditionally released, but federal officials have promised a fully functional form on or before the start of December.

In a news release, the U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday it would start testing the system in October with a limited number of students, colleges, and universities. This process will allow the Federal Student Aid Office to address issues before the 2025-26 FAFSA is widely released nationwide, according to the news release.

This announcement follows the problematic rollout of the 2024-25 FAFSA form. After a late release last year, ongoing technical glitches made completing the form difficult.

“The Department listened carefully to the input of students, families, and higher education institutions, made substantial changes to leadership and operations at Federal Student Aid, and is taking a new approach this year that will significantly improve the FAFSA experience,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in the news release.

The plan doesn’t fully satisfy national advocacy groups who said they’re disappointed the form won’t be ready on time. But they said the late release of a functional system is better than families suffering through another glitchy FAFSA season.

“The fact that we are still, to this day, dealing with the aftershocks of this year’s FAFSA rollout shows just how imperative it is that the process is thoroughly tested from end to end and launched as a system, not in a piecemeal manner,” said Beth Maglione, interim president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, in a written statement.

The federal government revamped the form last year. For students who don’t encounter problems, the so-called Better FAFSA is much faster and easier to fill out than the previous version. But technical problems with the revamped form caused widespread delays and frustrations and slowed down when students received financial aid awards. It has created worries that fewer students, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, will show up in the fall.

Students whose parents don’t have a Social Security number encountered the most problems.

In response to problems in the spring, many higher education institutions nationwide delayed enrollment dates to help students have more time to understand their financial aid awards. Yet problems with the FAFSA have persisted even into the summer.

The National College Attainment Network said the federal government’s latest update is not what they hoped. About half of all students who fill out the FAFSA do so before the end of the calendar year, making it important to launch as scheduled.

However, the nonprofit’s CEO Kim Cook said the FAFSA must be reliable, especially because college officials nationwide needed to adjust numerous times during the last year to help students. NCAN has a mission to help more students make it to and succeed in college.

“We acknowledge this is a difficult trade-off between functionality and the release date,” Cook said. “We appreciate the certainty and transparency that this announcement provides to the college access field. Counselors and educational leaders can now plan their FAFSA support strategies with the understanding that students who complete the form will receive financial aid awards in a timely manner.”

The education department has also promised more information about how the testing will work and will share regular updates. It will also continue to gather feedback and officials said they will release additional tools for students and families, counselors, institutions and others about the FAFSA.

Students who submit FAFSA during the testing phase will not need to re-submit once the form is live, and the Federal Student Aid Office will use their data to identify software issues ahead of the larger launch.

Due to issues this year, FAFSA completion is down over 10% from the previous year — or over 232,600 fewer students finished the form compared to last year, according to data from NCAN.

The true impact of this year’s problems will become more clear in the fall. Financial aid experts worry that although some students might have filled out the form, they might opt to skip college in the fall.

That’s because many students graduated high school without the financial award information they typically use to select a college. Importantly, high school counselors also help advise students after they enroll, such as filling out paperwork or signing up for orientation.

Many also left high school without counseling support to understand how much college would cost them and help to understand the next steps to showing up on a college campus in the fall.

Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

Cómo una nueva coalición defiende los derechos educativos de niños indocumentados

2024-08-05T18:24:00+00:00

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Una nueva coalición está en alerta máxima ante las violaciones de una sentencia histórica del Tribunal Supremo que garantiza a los niños el derecho a una educación pública y gratuita independientemente de su estatus migratorio.

Conocida como Educación para Todos (Education for All en inglés), la campaña está trabajando para contrarrestar la retórica antiinmigrante y las propuestas políticas conservadoras que buscan limitar el derecho a la educación de los niños indocumentados, que está protegido por la decisión del Tribunal Supremo de 1982 Plyler v. Doe.

La campaña, lanzada en mayo, está sucediendo en un momento en el que la Fundación Heritage, un think tank (instituto de investigación) vinculado al expresidente Donald Trump, está presionando a los estados a que cobren a los niños indocumentados una colegiatura, o matriculación, para asistir a la escuela pública. Esto, según Heritage, podría llevar al Tribunal Supremo a reconsiderar la sentencia de Plyler.

Los que respaldan la idea dicen que el costo de educar a niños indocumentados ha aumentado demasiado y que los estudiantes inmigrantes están utilizando recursos que pertenecen a los estudiantes estadounidenses. Los críticos sostienen que estas políticas negarían a cientos de miles de niños el derecho fundamental a una educación — y puede conmover a toda la economía de la nación, la red de seguridad social, y el sistema de justicia penal.

Desde el 2022, legisladores de al menos cuatro estados han intentado aprobar dichas medidas. Algunos distritos ya han impuesto barreras que impiden a los recién llegados matricularse, mientras que algunos miembros de la junta de la escuela han sugerido recopilar datos acerca del estatus migratorio de los estudiantes.

“Queremos tomarnos todo en serio,” dijo Will Dempster, vicepresidente de comunicaciones estratégicas del Centro Nacional de Leyes Migratorias, que lidera la coalición. “Están poniendo a prueba los límites de lo que es posible.”

Unas treinta y seis organizaciones se han unido a la coalición, entre ellas grupos pro inmigrantes, defensores de la educación y asesores legales, y los dos sindicatos de docentes más grandes de todo el país. Su trabajo abarca a estados fronterizos como Arizona y Texas, y estados que han inscrito a una gran proporción de estudiantes migrantes en estos últimos años, como Nueva York, California, Colorado, e Illinois.

Juntas van a estar vigilando las reuniones del consejo escolar, presionando a los legisladores estatales, educando familias acerca de sus derechos, y asegurándose que los funcionarios escolares entiendan la decisión Plyler. La meta es “coordinar cuando surjan problemas en algún estado y estar listos para movilizarnos,” dijo Dempster.

En medio de las preocupaciones por los costos, las escuelas apoyan a los estudiantes migrantes

La coalición también se opone a las declaraciones de Trump y de otros políticos conservadores acerca de los niños migrantes recientemente llegados.

“Están tomando nuestras escuelas,” dijo Trump el mes pasado durante el debate presidencial. A comienzos de este año, Trump falsamente aseguró que los niños migrantes habían desplazado a otros estudiantes en las escuelas de la ciudad de Nueva York, aunque en realidad el distrito tiene cupos vacíos que está intentando ocupar.

Del mismo modo, en junio, el representante de los Estados Unidos Aaron Bean, un republicano de Florida, llevó a cabo una audiencia educativa llamada “Las Consecuencias del Caos Fronterizo de Biden para las escuelas K-12″ en donde habló acerca del costo “impresionante” de educar a niños indocumentados.

“Se requiere una cantidad importante de recursos para poder educar a niños inmigrantes ilegales, esto altera el entorno de aprendizaje de todos los estudiantes,” dijo Bean. “Aulas saturadas, la necesidad de tener nuevas instalaciones, y las proporciones de alumnos por maestro son sólo algunos de los desafíos.”

El señaló que Colorado le está otorgando a las escuelas unos 24 millones de dólares adicionales este año para ayudar a cubrir los costos de educar a estudiantes recientemente llegados, y un par de escuelas en Austin, Texas en dónde los maestros dieron clases en los pasillos después de que hubo un gran aumento en estudiantes refugiados.

A algunas escuelas les ha costado poder satisfacer las necesidades de los estudiantes inmigrantes recientemente llegados. Esto es porque frecuentemente no disponen de suficiente personal bilingüe o reciben financiación limitada para educar a los estudiantes inmigrantes.

En el 2022, el gobernador de Texas, Greg Abbot dijo que la sentencia Plyler debe ser reconsiderada “porque los gastos son descomunales” y él pidió al Gobierno Federal que pagara los costos de los estados. Un legislador en su estado intentó prohibir que los estudiantes se matriculen en las escuelas públicas a menos que el gobierno federal hiciera precisamente eso, pero el proyecto de ley no prosperó.

Propuestas similares estaban siendo consideradas en Utah, Oklahoma y Tennessee, pero ninguna pasó — lo que indica que la idea sigue siendo algo controversial, inclusive entre conservadores.

Las necesidades de los estudiantes recientemente llegados no son únicas. Muchos niños nacidos en los Estados Unidos también necesitan apoyo lingüístico, terapia especializada en traumas, o ayuda para ponerse al día tras una interrupción de los estudios. Y algunas escuelas se están esforzando capacitando al personal para que ofrezca apoyo adicional de salud mental o al agregar programas de verano para ayudar a los niños a que se acostumbren a la vida en los Estados Unidos.

La coalición también tiene previsto destacar los numerosos beneficios que los estudiantes inmigrantes pueden aportar a sus compañeros y a sus comunidades de la escuela.

“Una de las cosas que podemos hacer es demostrar que los estudiantes inmigrantes pueden ser exitosos cuándo se les da el apoyo adecuado,” dijo Liza Schwartzwald, directora de justicia económica y empoderamiento familiar en la Coalición de Inmigración de Nueva York que pertenece a Educación para Todos. “No se trata de niños que están poniendo en peligro nuestro sistema educativo”.

Trabas para la matriculación, la recopilación de datos podría violar los derechos de los estudiantes

Aún, inclusive sin las restricciones estatales oficiales, los niños indocumentados frecuentemente se enfrentan a barreras para matricularse en las escuelas, inclusive en estados liderados por demócratas.

El verano pasado, el fiscal general de Nueva York supo acerca de políticas escolares qué hacían que fuese “difícil o imposible” que los estudiantes indocumentados se inscriban — probablemente violando las protecciones estatales o federales. Algunos distritos exigían a los estudiantes o a sus padres que proporcionaran sus tarjetas de identificación electoral, que no están disponibles para personas que no son ciudadanas, o amenazaban con ir a sus hogares si un estudiante no podía establecer su residencia con un contrato de alquiler, el cual puede ser difícil de obtener para las familias indocumentadas.
En toda la ciudad de Nueva York, los jóvenes inmigrantes recientemente llegados se han encontrado con listas de espera o se les ha dicho que no hay cupos cuando intentaban matricularse en la escuela, City Limits informó. Por otro lado, algunos estudiantes de secundaria recientemente llegados han sido presionados a abandonar sus estudios cuando necesitaban más apoyo para graduarse.
En Massachusetts, algunos distritos dijeron que no tenían previsto matricular a niños migrantes que viven en refugios temporales, hasta que el estado les dijera que tenían que hacerlo.
Cientos de escuelas de docenas de estados recientemente dijeron a The 74 que no permitirían matricular a un estudiante venezolano de 19 años con un inglés limitado a pesar de que legalmente tenía derecho a matricularse.

Los miembros de la coalición están en alerta ante estos y otros ejemplos de escuelas que posiblemente estén violando los derechos establecidos en Plyler.

Alejandra Vázquez Baur, encargada de dirigir el National Newcomer Network, que incluye a 250 maestros, líderes escolares, defensores comunitarios, e investigadores de todo el país, dijo que los miembros comparten acerca de ciertas infracciones cuando se reúnen cada dos meses.

Su organización ha presentado denuncias federales de derechos civiles en nombre de los estudiantes o ha ayudado a que las familias las presenten por cuenta propia, aunque ella sabe que el proceso generalmente es muy lento para poder ayudar a un niño antes de que este decida matricularse en otra escuela o no matricularse en absoluto.

Tessa Petit, directora ejecutiva de la Coalición de Inmigrantes de Florida, dijo que su organización le está pidiendo a sus 80 organizaciones miembros a “estar alerta” ante posibles violaciones de Plyler. Eso incluye trabajar con socios que organizan estudiantes de secundaria para ver si han escuchado acerca de casos de niños indocumentados que no pueden matricularse para la escuela.

Están pendientes de las escuelas del condado de Sarasota después de que Bridget Ziegler, integrante del consejo escolar y cofundadora del grupo político conservador Mamás por la Libertad, hizo preguntas sobre la posibilidad de que el distrito podría recopilar datos de los estatus migratorios de los estudiantes.

“He escuchado tanto del personal como a los miembros de la comunidad en general acerca de preocupaciones de poder responder a las barreras lingüísticas, pero también de que se está convirtiendo en una carga más pesada de lo usual,” ella dijo durante una reunión del consejo escolar en marzo. “Es solo una percepción? ¿Hay alguna manera de evaluar eso?”

El plan de la Fundación Heritage pide a las escuelas que recopilen los estatus migratorios de los estudiantes para llevar a cabo un análisis de costos. Generalmente no hacen esto porque puede asustar a las familias y hacer que no envíen a los niños a la escuela, lo cual sería un incumplimiento de Plyler.

Simpatizantes de los estudiantes indocumentados trabajan para convencer a los votantes

La Coalición de Inmigrantes de Florida también está contactando a los sindicatos de docentes y a miembros del consejo escolar para informarlos acerca de este tema, y está reuniéndose con legisladores para que se comprometan a no apoyar leyes que puedan perjudicar a los estudiantes migrantes.

“Nos damos cuenta que hay mucha educación que tiene que llevarse a cabo”, dijo Petit. “La reacción que estamos teniendo es ‘No, guau, eso no sucedería.’ La gente ni siquiera puede concebir la idea de que los estudiantes no vayan a la escuela.”

La coalición nacional también está buscando estados o comunidades que estén dispuestos a aprobar políticas que apoyen los derechos educativos de los niños inmigrantes.

Un ejemplo es una ley reciente de Connecticut qué garantiza a las familias inmigrantes que los niños tienen derecho a la educación pública y que deberían recibir ciertos servicios de traducción.

Y La Coalición de Illinois pro Derechos de los Inmigrantes y Refugiados ha tenido conversaciones preliminares acerca de pasar una ley estatal con respecto a la decisión Plyler para que sea “sumamente claro” que los estudiantes indocumentados tienen derecho a una educación pública, dijo Fred Sao, abogado senior de políticas de la organización.

Además, la coalición está actuando de forma proactiva sin recurrir a los estatutos.

La organización de Vázquez Baur llevó a cabo entrenamientos acerca de cómo contar su propia historia estos últimos meses para ayudar a sus miembros a hablar de su trabajo con los estudiantes recién llegados. La idea es compartir las experiencias “en el territorio” en los meses previos a las elecciones presidenciales.

“Eso es lo que muchas veces hace cambiar de opinión a la gente,” dijo Vázquez Baur. “Para aquellas personas podrían estar tomando una decisión al votar que podría perjudicar a esta comunidad, contar estas historias y decir ‘Estos son tus vecinos’ — es impactante. Así es básicamente como estamos luchando.”

Traducido por Flavia Melisa Franco

Kalyn Belsha es una reportera nacional de educación senior basada en Chicago. Pueden ponerse en contacto con ella: kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

As Kamala Harris ascends to Democratic presidential frontrunner, get to know her education record

2024-07-25T14:33:43+00:00

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Vice President Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the most likely Democratic nominee for president, securing dozens of endorsements within hours of President Joe Biden announcing he would end his reelection campaign.

If Harris becomes the nominee, she’ll face a Republican opponent in former President Donald Trump who has promised to cut federal funding for schools that teach “inappropriate” lessons on race, gender, and politics, and to roll back protections for gay and transgender students.

While the economy, immigration, and foreign policy have received far more attention this election cycle, the parties differ sharply on education.

Harris almost immediately secured the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union. The National Education Association followed on Tuesday, with President Becky Pringle posting on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that “Kamala has delivered for students & educators.”

Here’s what we know about Harris’ education record so far:

Harris has backed Title I, Head Start funding increases

Like Biden, Harris has called for “significant” increases to Title I, the federal program that sends money to schools serving higher shares of students from low-income families. As a presidential candidate in the last election, she also called for more funding for Head Start, which provides federally subsidized preschool to low-income children.

Biden has tried several times to pass a budget that would more than double Title I. But Congressional Republicans have blocked those proposals and pushed for dramatic cuts to the program.

That puts Harris at odds with Trump, whose education platform includes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and giving states full control over the nation’s educational programming. Project 2025, a blueprint developed by several former Trump officials that would likely inform policy under a second Trump administration, calls for phasing out Title I and eliminating Head Start.

Harris could reenergize school desegregation efforts

One of the most striking moments during the Democratic presidential debates in 2019 came when Harris challenged Biden about his record on school desegregation. Biden had opposed busing children to attend different schools under a court order, and Harris raised her personal experience as a child who took part in a voluntary integration program in Berkeley Public Schools.

“There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said in 2019. “And that little girl was me.”

Given that, Harris could be an advocate for school desegregation and racial equity initiatives, though she would face stiff opposition. Congressional Republicans and Republican-controlled state legislatures have fiercely opposed diversity and equity efforts in K-12 schools and colleges in recent years.

Harris has championed the idea of giving school districts grants to fund voluntary desegregation efforts. But the Biden administration struggled to secure modest funding for a similar effort. The administration quietly launched a scaled-back version last year.

Trump, meanwhile, defunded a similar school desegregation grant program shortly after taking office, saying the initiative was “an unwise use of tax dollars.”

Harris would bring civil rights experience to Title IX

As a candidate, Harris pointed to her experience enforcing children’s civil rights as California’s attorney general, and said she would bring that to bear as president.

In 2019, she called for adding staff to the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination, and protect LGBTQ students from discrimination and harassment at school.

If elected, Kamala Harris' administration would likely have to defend new Title IX rules about sex-based discrimination from legal challenges and Republican opposition.

The Biden administration recently issued new rules that say Title IX protects students from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — an interpretation that’s drawn intense opposition from Republican officials. More than two dozen states are suing the Biden administration to block those rules, which are temporarily on hold in at least 15 of them, according to a tracker compiled by Education Week.

If elected, her administration would likely be in the position of defending those Title IX rules against any ongoing or future challenges — and may be tasked with finalizing rules about the rights of trans athletes to play on certain school teams. The Biden administration has indefinitely delayed releasing those.

Teachers would likely have a friend in Harris

Harris made raising teacher pay a centerpiece of her education platform when she was a presidential candidate. She proposed closing the pay gap between teachers and other professions that require a college degree, a move that would have meant an average raise of $13,500 a year at the time and would have cost an estimated $315 billion over 10 years. Such a proposal would have represented a major expansion of the federal role in education.

Since then, many states and districts have raised teacher pay, but those raises often have not kept pace with inflation. A recent RAND report found that in addition to earning less than their peers in other professions, teachers are also more likely to say that their pay feels inadequate. It’s among the reasons teachers cite for leaving the profession — especially Black teachers, who are already underrepresented in American classrooms.

Harris also called for a $2.5 billion investment in teacher preparation programs at historically Black colleges and universities — or HBCUs — in a bid to diversify the teaching profession. She also supported more investment in teacher residencies and “grow your own” programs, which generally provide financial support and mentoring for teachers aides, substitute teachers, and others who live in communities of color.

Roughly 80% of public school teachers are white, compared with only about half of students. Studies find that students of color taught by teachers of color are more likely to be referred to gifted programs and go to college.

Harris backed plans for free college

Harris has supported proposals to make two-year colleges free for most students and to make four-year colleges free for many students from lower- and middle-income families as both a senator and a presidential candidate.

From Votebeat: What's next in the process to replace Joe Biden?

Biden came into office with his own plans to make two years of college free for many students, but those policies failed to advance in a challenging political environment. Instead, the Biden administration pushed to expand Pell grants that reduce college costs for many students from low-income backgrounds. The bungled rollout of a new federal financial aid form means fewer students may benefit from those changes.

Public service workers’ loan forgiveness a Harris priority

As a prosecutor in California, Harris backed debt forgiveness for students defrauded by for-profit colleges. As a presidential candidate, her debt forgiveness plan was narrower than those from progressives such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

But during internal Biden administration debates, Harris was reportedly an advocate for more generous relief. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Biden’s initial student debt forgiveness plan, the administration pursued a variety of strategies that have wiped out an estimated $168 billion in debt for more than 4 million borrowers, with a focus on public service workers such as teachers.

But Republicans have challenged portions of Biden’s plans in court, most recently securing an injunction against the Saving on a Valuable Education income-based repayment plan.

Harris seems likely to continue to pursue debt forgiveness and defend those policies against challenges. But it’s unclear how much political or legal room there is to enact broader loan forgiveness.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect that both NEA and AFT have endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Summer EBT delays have left families waiting weeks or months for crucial food benefits

2024-07-17T18:23:17+00:00

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Millions of children in six states won’t get federally backed summer food benefits they’re eligible for until just before school starts. And in Delaware, Montana, and Nevada, half a million kids won’t get them until the new school year begins.

Summer EBT, also known as SUN Bucks, provides low-income families with $120 per school-age child to buy groceries over the summer. It’s a rare example of a pandemic-era program that Congress made permanent, and most states are offering it for the first time this year.

But delays and start-up challenges have dogged the program. Some states have identified hundreds of thousands more children who are eligible for Summer EBT than they initially expected. That’s underscored the widespread need for food assistance and will bolster the program’s impact. But it’s also complicated getting the program off the ground. Such problems have left families who were initially told the aid would arrive sooner scrambling to make ends meet.

Many states and schools did so little to publicize Summer EBT that families have no idea when or how their benefits will arrive.

“This hurts families who were counting on the benefit to be deposited by a certain date, and now they have to wait several weeks or months,” said Kelsey Boone, who’s monitoring the Summer EBT rollout for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center.

Still, many states did manage to get their programs up and running on time. Officials there say the aid that’s reached families is making a difference, especially at a time when food prices remain high. Families will have four months to spend the benefits, even if it arrives late.

There’s been “a very massive response to this program,” Boone said. “It really just shows how much this program is needed by so many families.”

Felina Romero’s three kids eat breakfast and lunch for free at school. But during the summer, her food benefits often run out mid-month. The cereal and juice she gets from food pantries often last just a few days.

The Colorado mom had planned to use Summer EBT to buy bottled water and snacks to help her kids stay full.

But after weeks of calls to her state’s helpline — “It’s delayed, it’s delayed,” she kept hearing — Romero recently found out that families may not get their benefits until August, when many schools are back in session.

“If they would have gave us that during the summer,” she said, “it would have helped us so much.”

Summer EBT has roots in pandemic aid

Anti-hunger advocates have long considered summer one of the toughest times to reach children.

Many schools serve free summer meals. But parents often struggle to get to them, either because they’re far away or open only during work hours. Families who rely on food banks say they often can’t find staples their kids need, like milk. And often, the food is nearly expired.

Summer EBT allows families to shop for themselves — part of a pandemic-era trend to provide families with more direct aid.

“Only parents and families know what’s best for themselves and their children — what they’re actually going to eat, what they’re capable of eating,” said Hope Lane-Gavin, who directs nutrition policy and programs for the Ohio Association of Foodbanks, which is helping get the word out about Summer EBT. “Most food pantries can’t really tailor a box to a gluten-free kid.”

Pandemic EBT, which launched when schools were closed, helped lay the groundwork. States found that families liked that program, and it helped agencies set up new systems they’re now tweaking for Summer EBT.

Thirty-seven states signed up to run Summer EBT this year, while the other 13 opted out. Some Republican governors objected to providing families with more government assistance. Other states said they didn’t have the funds or capacity to stand up a new program in a few months’ time.

Why Summer EBT benefits are arriving late

States that chose to participate were supposed to start distributing benefits around the time that most schools let out for summer break. But many states reported a number of complications that led to benefits not going out on time.

In Montana, a third-party contractor backed out at the last minute. In Nevada, the legislature didn’t approve funding for administrative costs until June. In Pennsylvania and Illinois, officials said it took time to develop new systems, and benefits will go out earlier next year.

Colorado had to hire a new team and identify kids who automatically qualified for Summer EBT through their participation in other programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the free and reduced-price school meal program.

Colorado ended up identifying 550,000 children who qualified for Summer EBT — a whopping 190,000 more than the state initially estimated.

An example of the Summer EBT card that Colorado families will get in the mail.

It was a “very happy problem,” said Laura Kriebel, who’s overseeing the program for the Colorado Office of Economic Security, but also a “pretty big lift.”

For example, the state had to work with schools to get up-to-date mailing addresses and run data checks to make sure it didn’t mail out duplicate benefits.

It also had to set up an application process for families who didn’t automatically qualify through other programs. That represented a big change from Pandemic EBT, which had no application.

The state started sending out letters to let families know if they were eligible last week. Benefit cards could arrive later this month. But families may not get them until later in August, when many students are already back in school.

“I realize how tough it is to get the question mark from Colorado of: Where are my benefits?” Kriebel said. “But we are just trying to be thoughtful about this since this first program year does have a lot of challenges with getting the benefits out the door accurately.”

How some states rolled out Summer EBT smoothly

North Carolina is one of around a dozen states that successfully distributed benefits earlier in the summer. The state identified an additional 266,000 eligible children, but still got benefits out in mid-June.

Madhu Vulimiri, a deputy director at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, attributes the state’s ability to stick to its timeline to the “constant communication” between the state and its benefits issuer. Communication breakdowns contributed to delays elsewhere.

Relationships built through Pandemic EBT with North Carolina’s education agency and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians helped get student data to Health and Human Services quickly.

And crucially, North Carolina took the extra step of identifying families that would likely qualify but needed to fill out paperwork. Then the state sent them invitations to apply via text, email, and phone in June — something other states did not do.

“We’ve been seeing a good response to that,” Vulimiri said. “Given that it’s the first year, we wanted to make sure we got the word out and tried to minimize the chance that we might miss somebody.”

In Arizona, early planning helped the state get benefits to families that automatically qualified through SNAP or another program in early June. For kids that needed a new card, the state also decided to group benefits by family unit, which sped up mailing times.

“If you wait too long, before you know it, the summer is here and no one is committed to doing the program,” said Ernest Baca, a deputy administrator in Arizona’s Department of Economic Security.

One big goal now is to make sure families know they have only 122 days to spend Summer EBT benefits once they receive them — a shorter timeline than other forms of food aid.

That’s especially important after hundreds of millions of dollars in Pandemic EBT aid expired without being spent, according to data compiled by education consultant David Rubel. Often that was because families never got their cards, or had trouble using them.

To head that off, Colorado set up a system to see which families have yet to spend their aid and will send out reminders before Summer EBT expires, Kriebel said.

Going forward, officials across the country say their states plan to issue benefits earlier. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced it would award $100 million in grants to help states and tribal nations make updates to their technology systems to run Summer EBT more smoothly.

Families still waiting for their benefits say they hope states can do better in the future.

That includes Stephanie Hall in New Mexico. Her state isn’t planning to send out Summer EBT benefits until early August — just before most New Mexico kids go back to school. The aid would have been especially useful for buying snacks for her 15-year-old daughter, who is pre-diabetic and needs to eat every few hours to regulate her blood sugar levels.

“I’m actually fighting to sustain my family,” Hall said. “They let us down.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

COVID aid funded big repairs at high-poverty schools. Will that give academics a boost too?

2024-07-01T10:00:00+00:00

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When the air conditioning broke in a Terrebonne Parish school, it sometimes got so hot that kids fainted or had asthma attacks, and the school had to call an ambulance.

More often, the school sent kids home early. In the best-case scenario, students packed into classrooms with working AC or relocated to the gym or cafeteria to escape the southeast Louisiana heat.

So when the school district got its final federal COVID relief package in 2021, school officials made fixing the AC a top priority. Nearly $23 million — more than 40% of the district’s aid allotment — went to replace the most dire HVAC systems in seven schools.

“It gives us the confidence that we’re not going to have to cancel school, the kids are not going to get sick,” Superintendent Bubba Orgeron said. “When it’s either too hot or too cold … kids are focused on that instead of learning.”

Handed billions of dollars with few strings attached, thousands of school leaders made a similar calculation that year. Across 21 states with publicly available data, schools on average planned to spend 18% of their third and largest COVID aid package on facilities, a Chalkbeat analysis found. That’s nearly as much as they were required to spend on academic recovery.

In Mississippi, schools put nearly 40% of their final aid package toward buildings. In South Dakota, it was more than half.

As the nation takes stock of its return on this massive one-time investment, many school leaders stand behind their decision to go big on facilities, and say this will pay dividends for academics and student engagement. A growing body of research suggests a child’s learning environment affects their test scores and attendance.

But recent research points to a potentially troubling trend: High-poverty districts, like Terrebonne Parish, were more likely to budget a greater share of their final aid package for facilities and operations, especially costly projects like new construction and building repairs. That left them less to spend on academic recovery — even though they educate the kids who’ve had the most academic ground to make up.

Those patterns speak to how the pandemic and months of school closures collided with decades of deferred maintenance and underinvestment in school facilities. Those same high-poverty districts were especially in need of major building upgrades, a 2023 Urban Institute report found.

If districts felt like they had to use this money to fix school buildings even in the face of “a massive learning loss challenge,” said Christopher Brooks, an education researcher who analyzed how thousands of districts planned to spend their third relief package, “I think that’s really telling.”

Why schools spent COVID aid on facilities

U.S. schools got a total of $190 billion in federal pandemic aid. The American Rescue Plan, the last and largest package, provided $123 billion to K-12 schools, and required them to put 20% toward academic interventions for kids.

Federal officials said that money was meant to help reopen schools and make up for interrupted learning. But local leaders had broad discretion to decide what that looked like.

Some schools used the money to hire social workers, expand summer school, and stand up new tutoring programs. But other school leaders gravitated toward improving facilities, worried they could not maintain added staff or programs once the “fiscal cliff” arrived and the aid ran out.

Some politicians and school finance experts encouraged schools to spend pandemic aid on one-time costs. That argument resonated with certain state and local officials.

Amaya Hayden works in the library at Valley High School, part of the New Kensington-Arnold School District. The district spent some of its federal COVID aid on new furniture.

“South Dakotans are practical people,” Mary Stadick Smith, a state education agency spokesperson, wrote in an email explaining why schools there budgeted roughly $183 million to repair buildings and improve air quality. “School leaders made investments that they believed would provide sustained benefits to students and positively impact their schools for the long term — without imperiling budgets with unsustainable spending.”

The lack of guardrails led to some questionable spending on things like relaxation rooms with massage chairs and football fields. But many districts used their biggest pandemic aid package for more pressing facility needs.

A Chalkbeat review of 7,000 district spending plans compiled by the company Burbio, for example, found that more than 3,300 planned to spend some of the aid on HVAC or air filtration. Hundreds of districts budgeted more than half of their final aid package on air quality improvements.

The need was widespread: More than a third of all public schools had HVAC systems requiring repairs when the pandemic hit, a 2020 Government Accountability Office report estimated. Terrebonne Parish’s ACs were so old, for example, that maintenance workers struggled to find replacement parts.

“Everything was hanging on by duct tape,” Orgeron said.

Federal officials pushed schools early on to improve ventilation, and have continued to endorse that spending.

When Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was asked in late May if he thought spending on facilities had taken away from the priorities he laid out earlier this year — tutoring, summer school, and attendance — he said no.

“We are seeing that the dollars were used on what they were supposed to be,” he told Chalkbeat at an Education Writers Association event. Improving air quality so kids could return to in-person learning was part of that equation, he added.

New student desks purchased with pandemic aid have helped facilitate classroom conversations in the New Kensington-Arnold School District.

To some school leaders, investing a lot in certain highly touted academic recovery strategies, such as intensive tutoring, felt risky because they saw other districts struggle to get it right.

But they trusted building repairs would pay off.

Arkansas’ Decatur School District considered hiring tutors with its last COVID aid package. But a committee of staff, students, and parents ultimately decided against it because schools wouldn’t be able to afford their salaries after the money ran out.

The rural district serves 570 students, nearly 80% of whom come from low-income families. It spent almost 70% of its biggest aid package on facilities, including air conditioning, ventilation, windows, and doors.

“Do you want to spend it on technology that’s obsolete in two or three years, or do you want to spend it on staff who, once the money sunsets, you have to let that staff go?” Superintendent Steven Watkins said. “We took that money and looked at the long-term goals.”

High-poverty school districts spent big on buildings

Across Arkansas, higher-poverty districts like Decatur spent COVID aid on facilities more frequently than wealthier districts. They also spent a bigger share of the aid on building needs.

High-poverty districts spent more often and more extensively on facilities in North Carolina and Delaware, too, a Chalkbeat analysis found. Bella DiMarco, a policy analyst at FutureEd, found similar patterns in Mississippi. There, at least 20 districts spent more than 70% of their final aid package on facilities.

Still, it’s hard to draw broader conclusions, since many states don’t make enough data publicly available to analyze patterns.

Some states where districts spent a lot of COVID relief on facilities — such as South Dakota and Mississippi — provide no state money at all to support school infrastructure. In poorer communities, the local tax base may not generate enough money to pay for extensive repairs or new construction.

Climate change has heightened some infrastructure needs. Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, which borders the Gulf of Mexico, maxed out borrowing to rebuild schools destroyed by increasingly strong hurricanes and to raise up schools on pillars as coastal flooding risks rise.

As a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brooks analyzed how nearly 3,000 school districts planned to spend their final COVID aid package. The sample isn’t nationally representative, but those districts educate 1 in 3 public school students.

The average district planned to spend just over a quarter of its final aid package on facilities and operations. High-poverty districts, smaller districts, and rural districts were more likely to budget a bigger share for facilities.

Spending big on facilities isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Brooks said, but it could exacerbate learning gaps. Pandemic aid helped high-poverty districts make strides in reading and math, recent research found, but those students are still behind their more affluent peers.

The concern is that “higher-wealth districts with more spending on academic learning interventions” may be able “to recover their learning at higher rates,” Brooks said. “Whereas districts that needed this money to meet their infrastructure needs they were never going to meet otherwise — they’re just going to fall farther behind.”

Sara Haas works with Carl Sabol, a ninth grader in the New Kensington-Arnold School District. The district used COVID relief money to improve classroom air ventilation.

One school district’s big bet on its buildings

In Pennsylvania’s New Kensington-Arnold School District, school leaders thought improving their buildings could boost student engagement.

The suburban Pittsburgh district, where nearly every student is from a low-income family, spent nearly 80% of its largest COVID aid package on facilities — essentially every dollar the district was legally allowed to.

Much of that went toward replacing classroom air handlers, which cycle in fresh air. Before those upgrades, Superintendent Chris Sefcheck said, teachers often turned off their lights hoping to pep up sluggish students.

The district also bought new classroom furniture and renovated a planetarium that had been out of use for 30 years. Now it’s an air-conditioned “brain space” where students collaborate on projects and teachers gather for training.

Chris Sefcheck, superintendent of the New Kensington-Arnold School District, has seen how the newly renovated planetarium has spurred student and teacher collaboration.

Eighth grade English language arts teacher Erika Felack-Bucci is glad she no longer has to kick her noisy air vent to “fix” it. She likes her new furniture, too. With high-top tables, no one hides in the back of the room, while movable desks encourage more classroom conversations.

She hopes the improvements send students the message that what happens at school matters.

“For a long time, that was ignored,” she said. “To see that people are putting money into it, and that there is value in this building and what we’re doing, I think is really important for our kids.”

Districts that spent big on facilities say they haven’t neglected academic needs.

Decatur, Arkansas, for example, pulled struggling students out of class for extra help and directed teachers to focus on early elementary schoolers who did not learn certain foundational skills. Terrebonne Parish is relying on small-group instruction time with teachers. Last year, schools also reworked their schedules to give younger kids an extra hour of reading instruction to focus on missing skills.

And New Kensington-Arnold schools used COVID aid to hire three extra school counselors and boost after-school programming.

Still, Felack-Bucci wishes the district had done more to help “the kids that really disappeared during the pandemic.”

Valley High School's new cafeteria, funded in part by COVID relief dollars, has become a place where students like to gather.

Early on, many students tried to learn from phones with cracked screens or had no device at all. When the district ran a hybrid schedule in the fall of 2020, many kids never attended remote classes.

That shows up in Felack-Bucci’s eighth grade classroom. When her class read the poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” last year, students needed two weeks to master finding prepositions — twice as long as usual. Many kids couldn’t identify the verb in a sentence.

“There are a lot of skills gaps between the kids,” Felack-Bucci said. “The kids who participated the whole time, they’re great. But the kids who didn’t, they’re much farther behind.”

At one point there was talk of launching an intensive summer program for kids who were most behind. But the district had trouble staffing the program, and it never materialized.

But classrooms are cooler, the new furniture is a hit, and kids are hanging out in the new cafeteria.

Chalkbeat’s Mia Hollie and Kae Petrin contributed data analysis.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Federal COVID relief dollars improved student test scores, two new studies find

2024-06-26T04:07:23+00:00

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Did federal pandemic relief dollars improve student achievement?

It’s the $190 billion question hanging over American schools as the deadline looms for them to spend the last of the money intended to help them weather pandemic disruptions.

Two new research papers released Wednesday attempt to isolate the effects of federal relief spending on student test scores. Both analyses, which were conducted independently, find that spending under the relief programs known as ESSER improved test scores in reading and math, and that the improvements were in line with other research showing that more spending boosts student achievement.

But the studies could not answer which specific spending decisions — which approach to tutoring or summer school, how many social workers and counselors, what investments in better attendance and student engagement — actually made a difference. That’s because the federal government gave districts significant flexibility and did not require detailed reporting on how the money was spent.

The studies come as education activists and politicians debate the impact of federal spending, and as states and school districts consider which programs to continue. Many students’ test scores remain below pre-pandemic levels, and educational inequality has grown.

“We learned that no-strings-attached dollars do have some positive effect on student achievement,” said Thomas Kane, an economics professor at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research and co-author of one of the studies. “But to have bigger impacts on student achievement, we need to know more about which interventions are working. And we blew an opportunity to learn more.”

Independent studies found COVID relief improved achievement

Kane wrote his paper with Sean Reardon, a professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. The other paper came from Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, or Calder, and University of Washington researcher Grace Falken. Both teams of researchers hope to inform short-term debates about continuing pandemic-era programs as well as the larger debate over whether money matters in education.

Congress sent schools $190 billion through three separate aid packages. Money from the largest and final package — the $120 billion American Rescue Plan package — must be spent or committed by September. Schools were required to spend at least 20% of that package on academic recovery, but local leaders had broad discretion about how to define academic recovery and how to spend the rest of the money. District officials generally know how they spent their allotments, but that information hasn’t been collected centrally or in a consistent fashion.

The money was distributed through the same formula as the federal Title I program, which gives extra money to schools serving more students living in poverty, but the total aid package was about 10 times as large as the annual Title I allocation. That magnified quirks of the Title I formula, meaning that districts serving similar populations with similar academic profiles received very different amounts of money, with some receiving thousands of dollars more per student than others.

Both sets of researchers took advantage of these differences to isolate the effects of ESSER spending, though there were some other differences in their methodology.

Kane and Reardon found that each $1,000 in ESSER spending was worth about three-hundredths of a grade level of student progress in math and two-hundredths of a grade level of student progress in literacy. The effects were larger in high-poverty districts that received more money and where students on average suffered more academic setbacks, as well as more economic and family disruptions and more death and serious illness from COVID, the analysis found.

The analysis found that between a third and a half of academic recovery in the highest-poverty districts could be attributed to ESSER. That means federal money helped reduce inequality, Reardon said.

The analysis also found that school districts that had spent a larger share of their ESSER money in the 2022-23 school year showed more academic recovery on tests given that spring than those that received a similar allocation but hadn’t yet spent it. Test results from spring 2024 are not yet available in many states, nor are 2024 national standardized test results.

Previous research from Kane and Reardon found that students in high-poverty districts lost more ground during the pandemic and remain further behind their peers in more affluent districts, despite making greater than average progress in many cases. Students in more affluent districts are ahead academically despite their districts receiving less money, but Kane and Reardon said that doesn’t mean they spent their money more efficiently. Those students didn’t fall as far behind in the first place.

Goldhaber’s analysis found similar effects in math and more progress in literacy than Kane and Reardon’s, though the literacy results were not statistically significant. He found that ESSER dollars had a greater impact on districts that previously had lower spending per student and on districts that served fewer Black and Hispanic students. Goldhaber also found the dollars had a greater impact in towns and rural districts, which often serve more white students than larger cities, which may explain some of the difference. Kane and Reardon did not break down results by race or ethnicity.

Goldhaber found that the impact of ESSER dollars appeared smaller once differences among states were accounted for, something he hasn’t been able to explain yet by looking at differences in state policies or other factors. States were not allowed to tell districts how to spend their money but did have to approve plans and could still have influenced local decisions.

“It might be something as simple as the fact that states have different orientations around these test-based measures of academic achievement, and so the districts in those states invested their money in different ways,” he said.

Goldhaber said it’s hard to say whether the impact of ESSER dollars was large or small.

“I think it is disappointing to have spent so much money and not see greater recovery,” he said. “If there was more focus on academic recovery and some specific measures of what that means, then we probably would have seen larger academic effects.”

At the same time, the impact was greater than some other research on the effects of increased funding, most of which involves smaller funding increases that are spread out over a longer time frame, he said. And Goldhaber noted his study doesn’t measure other benefits like improved mental health or student engagement.

Based on the impact of previous spending, Goldhaber estimated that it would take $9,000 more per student to see a full recovery in reading scores and $13,000 more to see a full recovery in math. Kane and Reardon estimated that it could take as much $904 billion to pay for a full recovery — five times the original relief packages.

In contrast, President Joe Biden’s budget proposal calls for $8 billion to extend tutoring, summer school, and attendance outreach. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly rebuffed efforts to increase Title I spending.

Reardon said future support for schools most likely will have to come from the states and should be more targeted to students and districts with the most needs. It should also be better tracked, not just at the district level, but at the state and federal level so that policymakers can better understand what’s working.

“States’ challenge now is to generate even more growth per dollar spent,” Kane said. “And the way to do that is with targeted funding, rather than across-the-board funding.”

Where the dollars made a difference in Birmingham, Alabama

For Mark Sullivan, superintendent of Birmingham City Schools in Alabama, federal relief dollars meant an opportunity to finally meet his students’ needs and to transform the orientation of his school district, where the large majority of students are Black and live in poverty.

Kane and Reardon’s Education Recovery Scorecard previously had found that Birmingham students made significantly more progress on math than the national average, while state test scores showed elementary students making significant progress on reading.

That outcome hardly seemed inevitable when Sullivan was looking at “horrific” state test scores in spring 2021. The district had toggled between virtual and hybrid settings, eight staff members had died of COVID — including two at the same school within a week of each other — and students learning at home were caring for siblings while their parents worked.

Sullivan originally wanted to move to year-round school using federal relief dollars, but it was clear that no one else did. Instead he started the school year weeks early and built into the calendar four week-long “intersessions” that offered voluntary academic remediation and enrichment. He offered teachers $60 an hour to work the sessions. The district paid for transportation, food, and afterschool care.

For the first session, just 1,800 of the district’s 20,000 students showed up. But by summer, fully half of students were participating. Research commissioned by the district found that students who attended intersessions surpassed classmates who had started the school year ahead but did not attend.

The district also partnered with local universities to have college students do high-dosage tutoring; hired social workers, counselors, and instructional coaches; and invested in iReady assessment programs and trained teachers in how to use the data to adjust instruction.

“Without this funding, we would not have been able to make the progress that we’ve made,” Sullivan said. “People often say you just can’t throw money at the problem. We were able to show that with additional funding and it being used wisely and for it to be used based on the needs of our students, you can see this type of progress.”

With COVID aid expiring, Sullivan said the district is going down to three intersessions, planning to charge again for afterschool programs, and cutting coaches, while looking for grants and community partners to maintain some programs.

“We will not be able to do things at the scale in which we’ve done it over the last three years and provide the kinds of supports that we provided for students,” he said. “And the thing that is most difficult and disheartening is that the needs are still there.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Long-awaited FAFSA fix means students from immigrant families can finally finish aid applications

2024-03-18T20:41:17+00:00

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Many students breathed a sigh of relief last week when federal education officials announced critical fixes to the federal application for financial aid that allows parents without Social Security numbers to contribute information to the form.

The change means tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others who are eligible for federal financial aid can finally complete their FAFSAs. But it also leaves families and college counselors scrambling to get through the process months after other students. And some families are still encountering problems.

“It can be very discouraging for students and families who feel like they’re doing all the right things and yet are still coming up against barriers,” said Amanda Seider, who oversees the Massachusetts branch of the college access group OneGoal.

Chalkbeat reported in January that a technical glitch had blocked students with undocumented parents from completing their financial aid applications for over two months. That left many educators and college access groups worried that students who already face higher barriers to college would be deterred by the delays — piled on top of an already difficult rollout of the new, supposedly easier FAFSA. Some colleges and scholarships award aid on a first-come, first-served basis, so students who apply later are at a disadvantage.

During that time, students were left to navigate a confusing array of options, including whether they should just sit tight and wait for a fix, or try a partial workaround that could put them at a higher risk of making a mistake on their application or would require them to come back and fill out more paperwork later.

And there are still outstanding issues. As federal officials put the new fix in place, they uncovered two more issues affecting the same group of students that still need to be resolved.

That means parents without Social Security numbers will have to enter their financial information manually, instead of having it pulled directly from the IRS. And in some cases — when a parent enters a name or address that doesn’t exactly match what their child put down, for example — parents are still getting error messages that block them from filling out the form. Federal officials said last week they would work to fix the issue “in the coming days.”

Federal officials estimated that around 2% of financial aid applicants were affected by the original Social Security number glitch, which would equate to hundreds of thousands of students in a typical year.

The issue caught the attention of dozens of Democratic House members, who sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging the department to fix the problem quickly. In a press release issued last week, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman of California said the glitch was a “completely unacceptable error” that had caused “fear, stress, and missed opportunities for many kids across my district and the country.”

“I hope to see the Department take the steps necessary to ensure issues like this never arise again,” Huffman said.

The rollout of the new FAFSA has been riddled with problems and delays. Education department officials have blamed insufficient funding and significant technical challenges in updating old systems. Republicans have accused the administration of being distracted by dealing with student loan forgiveness. Outside observers have said all these factors and more played a role, according to news reports.

FAFSA applications are down 33% compared with this time last year, according to federal data tracked by the National College Attainment Network.

In the meantime, many colleges have pushed back deadlines as they wait for student financial information that will help them assemble aid packages. And families are waiting.

Now, college counselors and advisers say they’re working to make sure students know what to do if they continue to encounter glitches. They’re also trying to keep students’ spirits up and getting them ready to compare their financial aid and acceptance packages when they come in.

“The most important thing we can do is to share information about how to go about entering information manually, how to make sure that as they are completing those steps that it requires a lot of precision,” Seider said. “We really want to make sure that students and families are being proactive, and not experiencing this as their shortcoming, but rather saying ‘Hey, this system has been a little confusing, we need some help with it.’”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden education budget proposal includes $8 billion to extend pandemic recovery work like tutoring

2024-03-11T21:56:58+00:00

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With a deadline looming to spend pandemic education dollars, the Biden administration has proposed making another $8 billion available to states and school districts to encourage better attendance and support academic recovery through tutoring and summer school.

The idea is a key component of President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for the U.S. Department of Education for fiscal year 2025, and represents an acknowledgment that schools still have a lot of work to do to recover from pandemic learning disruptions. The proposal comes a few months after the Biden administration called on schools to prioritize spending remaining COVID relief funding in these same areas.

The president’s budget proposal, announced Monday, also calls for modest increases to federal programs supporting high-poverty schools, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities. The administration also wants more money to support the Office for Civil Rights, and a $750 increase in the maximum Pell Grant award to help make college more affordable.

The White House budget plan will almost certainly not be adopted as written. It heads to a dysfunctional Congress that has careened between threats of government shutdown and short-term spending resolutions. The Republicans who control the House have been particularly hostile to Biden’s efforts to increase spending in several areas , including the Title I program that supports high-poverty schools.

Overall the budget proposal calls for more than $82 billion in discretionary spending for the education department, a 4% increase from this year.

Officials emphasized that this budget proposal complies with spending caps agreed to in last year’s bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act, while still investing in initiatives they hope will improve student success.

“When it comes to education, this budget is about raising the bar,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “There are historic investments promised on top of historic investments delivered.”

Budget offers way to continue tutoring, attendance outreach

American schools received a combined $190 billion in assistance across three pandemic aid packages and have until September to spend any remaining money. Many schools have come to rely on their tutoring programs and want to keep them going after the pandemic aid expires.

But how they’ll fund them has been a big question. Some states have pledged added tutoring funds, but many districts would likely struggle to keep providing intensive help to students without making cuts elsewhere in their budget.

Similarly, the rate at which students are missing lots of school remains well above pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the country. Many schools launched home visit programs or hired staff specifically to work with kids who aren’t attending regularly, but school leaders say it will take additional time and investment to re-engage students and continue to boost attendance rates.

Expanded summer school programs were a popular investment during the pandemic, though they’ve been only moderately successful in helping students catch up. They’ve also been a common place school leaders have scaled back as COVID relief funding has wound down.

The proposed $8 billion in new money isn’t intended to replace pandemic assistance but would supplement current efforts. Officials envision a competitive grant program that would prioritize high-poverty schools, schools in communities especially hard-hit by COVID, and schools identified as needing academic improvement under federal accountability rules.

More money for English learners, civil rights investigations

Biden’s budget proposal calls for a 1.1% increase, or $200 million, to local grants in the Title I program, which provides money to low-income schools. Earlier in his administration, Biden called on Congress to double spending on Title I, but that hasn’t come to fruition. Congressional Republicans have questioned whether schools need more money after the pandemic stimulus, and last year, they sought to significantly cut Title I spending.

Cardona characterized this budget as defending public education from a “slash-and-burn” approach that would endanger the futures of American students.

Similarly, the White House is proposing a 1.4% increase in spending to support K-12 special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as additional money for infants, toddlers, and preschool students with disabilities and grants to recruit special education teachers. Advocates have long called for the federal government to increase special education funding. Federal law lays out disabled students’ educational rights but leaves most of the costs to states and school districts.

The budget proposal calls for a roughly 5% increase or $50 million in new spending for Title III, which supports English learners.

Biden’s budget proposal also includes an extra $22 million, a 16% increase, for the Office for Civil Rights, which conducts investigations into allegations of discrimination in schools. Recently, the department announced it is looking into several incidents involving antisemitism or anti-Muslim discrimination at colleges and K-12 schools since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October.

The budget also calls for increased funding for preschool, student mental health, and community schools, which provide a wide range of services to support students and their families, as well as programs to encourage diverse candidates to enter the teaching profession.

The budget proposal includes a few cuts as well, including a 9% or $40 million reduction in a program that supports new charter schools and the replication of high-quality charter models.

Budget seeks to mitigate college costs

Biden’s budget blueprint would also increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $8,145, a 10% increase from current levels. Pell grants are available to college students from low-income families, and unlike loans, do not need to be repaid.

Budget analysts have warned of a looming shortfall in the Pell program after Congress expanded eligibility at the same time more students are heading back to college. The most recent continuing resolution to keep the federal government open walks back some of that recent expansion.

Advocates have argued that the maximum Pell award should be closer to $13,000 to keep pace with tuition increases and keep the door open to college for students of modest means.

The budget would increase funding for programs that allow high school students to earn college credit before graduating and for grants that help colleges support first-generation students and increase graduation rates.

The budget also calls for partnerships with states and tribes to make two years of community college free for students going to college for the first time and workers looking to change careers. Free community college was one of several education proposals that Biden ran on in 2020 that hasn’t gotten traction.

And the budget calls for more investment in the Office of Federal Student Aid amid a rocky rollout of a new federal financial aid form.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

A glitch blocks thousands of immigrant families from a new, simpler FAFSA. The fix is TBD.

2024-01-25T22:20:06+00:00

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Update as of Feb. 21: There are now two workarounds for the Social Security number problem, one a paper form and the other online. Federal officials promise a permanent fix is coming in March.

Like many high school seniors, 18-year-old Jocelyn is trying to get through her college application to-do list.

She’s applied to 10 colleges so far. Northeastern University in Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago are her top picks. She’d like to study veterinary medicine and work with animals like her two cats, Strawberry and Copito.

With the help of her sibling, Jocelyn completed her portion of the federal application for financial aid in around an hour. But now she’s stuck. That’s because her mom doesn’t have a Social Security number, so she hasn’t been able to add her financial information.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid that debuted last month was supposed to be easier for students and families to complete. And in many ways it is: It’s shorter, and it pulls tax information directly from the IRS instead of asking families to enter it themselves. The goal is to get more students to apply for aid and attend college.

But the form was released months later than usual, leaving students much less time to complete it and schools scrambling to offer help. On top of that, many families have experienced glitches. One of the biggest issues is that parents who don’t have a Social Security number can’t enter their information right now, and workarounds from prior years are gone. Potentially tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others with legal status — who are eligible for federal financial aid regardless of their parents’ immigration status — could be affected.

Federal officials say a fix is on the way, but can’t say when. Education advocates say there needs to be a stronger sense of urgency to resolve the issue, as some colleges award aid on a first-come, first-served basis.

Eighteen-year-old Jocelyn shows the Instagram video she watched to make sure she filled out her portion of the FAFSA correctly.

“We need to be working around the clock,” said Amalia Chamorro, who directs the education policy project for UnidosUS, a civil rights group that advocates to improve educational opportunities for Latino students. “We do worry that this is just another hurdle, another barrier, another way that they’re getting the message that they don’t matter, that they’re not as deserving of pursuing post-secondary education. That’s not the message that we want them to get.”

Jocelyn, whose last name Chalkbeat is withholding so as not to jeopardize her mother’s immigration status, is feeling stressed. But she’s trying to stay optimistic that she’ll be able to check this off her list soon, too.

“I didn’t want to turn in the FAFSA form late, and now I’m going to have to wait,” she said. “I know that my other friends have turned it in already, and I feel like I’m a little behind.”

Why some students are getting stuck on new FAFSA

Jocelyn isn’t the only one of her classmates having trouble.

On a visit in mid-January to Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago, just two of the 15 students in her class that helps students prepare for and apply to college had managed to complete the FAFSA. The high school serves predominantly Latino students from low-income families, many of whom will be the first in their family to attend college.

Some students got tripped up trying to add their parents as “contributors” to the FAFSA, a new step that requires them to sign up for an account and verify their identity. In the past, students could more easily fill out their parent’s portion for them.

That has presented challenges especially for families who are unfamiliar with the financial aid process, who have language barriers, or who worry about sharing personal information with the federal government.

When students are the first in their family to attend college, or there are immigration concerns, “You’re going to have a lot of paranoia, you’re going to have a lot of anxieties around it,” said Josh Kumm, who teaches Jocelyn’s class in partnership with OneGoal, a nonprofit college access organization that works in over 30 high schools in Chicago.

Eighteen-year-old Breann Sanford was one of the lucky ones who got through.

It helped that her mom was familiar with the FAFSA — she filled one out when she took a few college classes — and Sanford’s college and career coach knew just what to do when Sanford accidentally entered her email instead of her mom’s in one instance.

“It was a big help,” she said. “I knew I had a lot of different support options that I could go to if I needed help.”

Breann Sanford, 18, was able to submit her FAFSA successfully by mid-January. In her class at Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago that helps students apply to college, only a few completed the form without challenges.

Others are struggling for other reasons. During the recent visit, 18-year-old Ángel Serrano said he was still trying to tell his mom that he’s applying to college and needs her help with the financial aid form. His window to do that is on Wednesdays — the only day she’s not exhausted or working, Serrano said.

Another student in the class needs financial information from his mom, but they’re no longer living together or on speaking terms.

“You’ve got all these other things going on,” Kumm said. “It’s not just socioeconomic, it’s also the social-emotional parts of the family dynamics … That’s complicated.”

One-on-one help is key, but some FAFSA issues need federal fix

One-on-one support has been crucial for students to navigate FAFSA hiccups, though school counselors and college coaches have been swamped with requests for help. Sometimes the fix is to sit on hold with the U.S. Department of Education for hours — a step that’s impossible for many working parents.

Elve Mitchell, the senior director of program operations for College Possible in Chicago, a college access organization that works with a half-dozen high schools in the city, said one big thing his organization’s coaches are working on is making sure students and parents know the right questions to ask when they finally do get through to a live person on the department’s helpline.

Another way school staff and coaches are trying to help is by finding other ways students can work on their applications, such as fine-tuning a personal essay or using a federal student aid estimator to do some rough comparisons of college costs.

But for students whose parents do not have Social Security numbers, there isn’t much a school counselor can do right now.

When Jocelyn met with her school’s college and career coach this week, the advice was to sit tight, keep checking the federal government’s website, and wait for “the green light on what to do.”

Schools like Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago have been stepping in to offer students help when they've struggled to complete the new FAFSA form.

In the past, parents without a Social Security number could enter all zeros and sign a paper form.

The education department set up a new process for these parents to verify their identity through a credit agency, but educators say it’s not working consistently. Parents have had to call the federal helpline, open a case, and then share documents that prove their identity.

“For someone who’s undocumented, it’s very scary to give the federal government any documentation,” said Tony Petraitis, a college and career curriculum specialist for Chicago Public Schools, who’s been assembling how-to guides with screenshots to support school counselors. “For one of our most vulnerable populations, it’s a pretty big deal.”

Even if the credit agency produces a correct match, these parents still can’t share additional information on the FAFSA until the federal government comes up with a fix.

Chamorro, of UnidosUS, hopes the added delays and frustrations don’t deter students from applying to college.

“We don’t want them to give up,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

COVID-era laptops made a dent in the digital divide. Now the real work begins.

2024-01-25T22:08:07+00:00

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When pests started attacking plants in the community garden across the street from M. Agnes Jones Elementary School in Atlanta, the students hatched a plan.

They didn’t want to use pesticides in the garden, and they had learned in their science lessons that bats eat insects. They researched how to attract bats to the garden, made paper sketches of bat house designs, then moved to digital design tools. The students could see 3-D versions of their houses, test modifications, and refine their designs — making the entrance narrower so bats would feel safe and adding rafters to create better spaces for brooding.

A new National Education Technology Plan released this week urges educators to use technology to enable this kind of engaged, hands-on learning and urges states and districts to provide the training, planning time, and technical support to make it happen.

First issued by the U.S. Department of Education in 1996 and last updated in 2017, the National Education Technology Plan provides guidance to help school systems use technology to improve learning and close achievement gaps. The latest iteration comes as virtual learning and federal pandemic relief “expedited the proliferation of technologies and connectivity on a scale and speed for which many districts and schools were unprepared.” Innovation actually slowed even as more students got laptops, and too much technology use today is essentially passive, the plan argues.

Surveys suggest more than 90% of secondary students and more than 80% of elementary students have access to a personal laptop or tablet — before the pandemic, fewer than half of students had such access. Schools are awash in digital tools and grappling with the implications of artificial intelligence. Yet a recent survey of more than 41,000 students found the main way students used technology in school was to take online tests and quizzes.

Wide gaps persist between digital haves and have-nots

The plan identifies three types of digital divides. There’s still an access divide — not all students have laptops or reliable internet. There’s also a use divide — some students log into Google Classroom to catch up on assignments while others produce podcasts and design top-notch bat houses. And finally there’s a design divide — only some teachers have the training, support, and planning time to learn how to use new technology in exciting ways.

School systems need to address all three divides to make full use of technological opportunities, the plan said. They also need to balance student privacy with responsible oversight, imbue students with digital literacy, battle the ills of social media, adapt to AI, and make smart decisions about which technology to invest in, according to the report.

Technology has the potential to help students take more control of their learning, make connections they couldn’t make before, and showcase their skills in new ways, the plan says. English learners and students with disabilities, in particular, could benefit from more ways to access material and show what they’ve learned, but if schools don’t plan carefully, these students are also at more risk of being excluded, the plan says.

The plan includes dozens of examples of educators already doing this work, including from rural and high-poverty schools, along with guidelines for decision-making and missteps to avoid.

Districts where internet access is spotty shouldn’t rely on online surveys to reach parents, for example. Consider hosting monthly in-person technology nights instead and send communication in a variety of languages. Special education directors buying screen-reading programs should make sure they also work offline and that they’re compatible with the operating system installed on district laptops.

The plan includes rubrics for assessing whether ed tech programs have evidence to back their claims and suggests regular audits of which programs teachers are actually using. An Associated Press investigation last year found school districts spent tens of millions of pandemic relief dollars on ed tech with little evidence it worked.

David Miyashiro, superintendent of the Cajon Valley Union School District in California, served on the technical working group that helped develop the report. He was an early proponent of embracing technology in education, and he’s led an expansion in Cajon Valley, where two-thirds of students come from low-income households and one-third are learning English.

Students get their first laptops in kindergarten and use them to deliver 30-second TED talks about what they’re afraid of and what they’re excited about, illustrated by generative AI. They’re learning presentation and communication skills while building community and connection with their classmates, Miyashiro said.

Students trade up in third grade, when they go to middle school, and again for high school. An ed tech bond helped pay for devices, IT infrastructure, and a replacement fund.

Miyashiro hopes the new federal plan helps districts incorporate technology thoughtfully. And he said it feels timely, now that many more students have devices.

“A lot of districts bought computers so teachers could Zoom synchronously with their kids,” he said. “Now what are they going to do? This plan helps them course correct.”

But for John Fredericks, an English teacher at West Tallahatchie High School in the Mississippi Delta, digital access has actually gotten worse since 2021. Pandemic relief money meant students had laptops and hotspots for the first time ever — though the connections could be spotty.

“The best thing, when the students had access to the internet and a computer at home, was the ability to differentiate, the ability to challenge the kids who want more work,” Fredericks said. “And for students who have trouble completing work, I could give them more time and grace.”

Now the hotspots are gone, laptops have to stay at school, and when a student is out sick, Fredericks is back to sending home paper packets. Students who take virtual dual-enrollment classes in the school’s computer lab try to get their college coursework done during other classes.

Fredericks said it’s hard to even imagine what learning opportunities his students are missing. He just hopes policymakers don’t forget that pandemic-era laptops are already breaking down and some communities still don’t have internet, at least not at a price families can afford.

“Throwing money at the problem kind of actually worked,” he said. “That’s not always true in government policy or education policy, but if you want to solve the technology divide, keep giving schools money for technology. Let them buy computers and buy hotspots and advocate for high-speed internet in rural areas.”

Blending tech with learning takes time, vision

When Margul Retha Woolfolk started as principal at M. Agnes Jones Elementary in Atlanta, she found a state-of-the-art building where the science lab was “really a storage unit.” The school serves a high-poverty neighborhood, and students spent a lot of time drilling basic skills.

Retha Woolfolk, now an associate superintendent with Atlanta Public Schools, knew her own students had done better when lessons in core skills were coupled with hands-on projects. And she loved science. She started going to conferences, learning everything she could, and seeking out partners at local universities and in the private sector.

Jarvis Blackshear, a paraprofessional with a background in music production, would come to play a critical role providing instructional support in science and technology. He had learned how to teach himself new programs as a music engineer, and he had a knack for bringing students and parents along with him.

Retha Woolfolk wanted to buy the school a programmable robot, but it cost more than $7,000. She could get it for $3,000 if she got it disassembled. Blackshear invited fourth and fifth graders to help him build it. He’d assemble each section ahead of time, sand down sharp edges, then disassemble it and have it waiting for students.

He took the same approach as students designed the bat houses, teaching himself design programs so he could support the students’ learning. When the 3D-printed bat houses weren’t up to snuff, he reached out to a grandparent with carpentry skills to help students make their blueprints reality.

Seven years later, Principal Robert Williams said he’s proud to continue the work. MAJ offers coding alongside art, music, and physical education. Students build electric cars and learn about force and motion, circuitry, teamwork, and the engineering design process along the way. The MAJ Rapid Racers team competes in Greenpower USA regional events, “the NASCAR of elementary school.”

Aleigha Henderson-Rosser, the district’s assistant superintendent for instructional technology, said leadership at the building level makes a big difference, but educators shouldn’t feel like they have to know everything to get started.

“Don’t be scared to take risks, and the kids will guide you,” she said. “Our kids deserve to learn like this.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

White House calls for focus on tutoring, summer school, absenteeism as pandemic aid winds down

2024-01-18T00:26:36+00:00

Top White House officials are urging schools to double down on tutoring, extra learning time, and efforts to boost attendance as the spending deadline for pandemic aid nears.

To help, federal officials say states can now seek permission for schools to spend the last and largest pot of COVID relief money on these kinds of efforts over the next two school years. Previously, schools had to spend down their money by January 2025.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced what the Biden administration is calling its Improving Student Achievement Agenda at a White House event Wednesday with governors and state education commissioners. The new push comes at a time when many states have yet to see math and reading scores rebound to pre-pandemic levels and many students are struggling to fill in gaps in their learning.

Federal officials said they had chosen to focus on these strategies because they are proven ways to raise student achievement.

“These three strategies have one central goal: Giving students more time and more support to succeed,” Cardona said. “We must get back to pre-pandemic levels quickly. But also let’s be clear: The bare minimum that we aspire to is to get back to what it was in 2019. 2019 data wasn’t anything to write home about.”

Though the federal government doesn’t have many tools at its disposal to encourage schools to adopt certain attendance or academic strategies, Cardona said the education department would do what it could.

That includes monitoring states to make sure they are spending federal money on evidence-based approaches to improve school performance, a job they have under federal education law. For example, federal officials could look at how states are running their tutoring programs and step in to provide guidance if the model they’re using isn’t as effective as others.

Education officials also plan to prioritize these strategies for competitive grant funding.

Why the White House wants schools to focus on tutoring and chronic absenteeism

As they did throughout the pandemic, federal officials pointed to high-dosage tutoring as a worthy investment for schools. To do that, programs should tutor students one-on-one or in groups of no more than four, for 30 minutes at least three times a week. Sessions should be scheduled during the school day and take place with a trained tutor, White House officials wrote.

Last year, some states and school districts said they had abandoned efforts to tutor kids after school, finding students often missed sessions because they lacked transportation or had schedule conflicts.

The Biden administration lifted up examples of states and districts that have invested heavily in tutoring, including Maryland, which launched a tutoring corps to focus on middle and high school math this past fall, and Washington, D.C, which is tutoring students in math and English language arts.

During the White House event, Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent of education, said a key part of that investment is staffing tutoring managers in the district’s highest-need schools — a finding that’s been echoed by other tutoring programs. Those managers work like an assistant principal who can set up schedules, examine student data, and group students by ability.

“They are the ones saying, ‘No, no, you can’t go to lunch, you have to come sit here,’” Grant said. “We’re making sure that we didn’t just tell teachers and principals: ‘Hey, do this extra thing.”

Absenteeism soared during the pandemic and remains well above 2018-19 levels in most communities. When children miss school, they fall behind academically and are at greater risk of dropping out. When many students in a school frequently miss class, teachers have to decide whether to repeat material for those who missed, boring their classmates, or leave some students behind.

“We simply cannot accept chronic absenteeism as the new normal,” White House Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden said. “Fortunately, we know what works: engaging parents and families as partners in their children’s education.”

She cited the example of Gompers Elementary-Middle School in northwest Detroit. Chalkbeat chronicled the school’s efforts to keep students in school, including pairing students who were starting to miss too many days with adult mentors and working closely with families.

Family and work obligations, mental health challenges, lack of transportation, and many other factors contribute to children missing too much school.

Federal officials urged schools to make specific commitments to reduce absenteeism, such as increasing calls and texts to parents, doing more home visits, and developing early warning systems. Schools should make sure communication is available in multiple languages.

States also should adopt consistent definitions of chronic absenteeism and incorporate it as a measure in their school accountability system if they haven’t done so already, officials said.

Connecticut Education Commissioner Charlene Tucker-Russell described how the state used data to identify students struggling the most — homeless students, English learners, students with disabilities — and target support. The program trained teachers and community members to do outreach and connect families with shelter, transportation, and mental health resources. An evaluation of the program found a 16% increase in attendance after home visits, Tucker-Russell said.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisholm said she was “embarrassed” about her state’s sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism, including among elementary students. Working with parents is part of the solution, but schools also have to make sure students feel supported and successful so they want to be in school, she said.

“If you aren’t reading at grade level, and you can’t do math at grade level, [school] is not a place you want to be,” she said.

Federal and state officials also emphasized the importance of giving students “more time on task” — both by making sure they are attending school regularly and adding learning time.

That could mean adding time to the school day or year — a strategy many districts have struggled to pull off — or running substantial summer school programs that offer multiple hours of academic instruction per day.

Nearly half of school districts used the largest bucket of COVID relief funds to expand summer school, federal officials said, though already some have made cuts or made plans to do so.

Alabama’s state superintendent, Eric Mackey, said education officials in his state are working with lawmakers and the governor’s office to keep funding summer math and reading camps that have run for the last three years with pandemic aid. The state has provided meals, transportation, and connections to afternoon youth programming to help make it work.

“We’ve built enough momentum that our legislature said: ‘We know we can’t drop this,’” Mackey said. “We have to find a way to continue to fund it and sustain it going forward.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Nearly 10 million children won’t get summer food benefits as states opt out of new federal program

2024-01-10T21:02:51+00:00

Across rural North Dakota, many school districts struggle to staff summer meal programs, and families might live 20 miles from the nearest meal site.

So state officials eagerly got on board when they learned the federal government was launching a permanent summer program that gives low-income families $120 for each of their school-aged children. Families can use the money, which comes loaded on a prepaid card, to buy their own food and cook at home.

“In North Dakota, the summer food service program doesn’t meet the needs of a lot of the students,” said Linda Schloer, who directs child nutrition for the state’s Department of Public Instruction. “For a modest effort both financially and personnel-wise, it just makes sense that we would do whatever we can to try to get the program going as soon as possible.”

States had to tell the federal government by Jan. 1 if they planned to run a Summer EBT program in 2024. As of Wednesday, 35 states said they would. Together they are expected to reach more than 20 million school-aged children — a rare example of a pandemic-era assistance program sticking around after the end of the public health emergency.

But another 9.5 million students who would have been eligible will likely go without after their states declined to participate this year. Some states cited cost and administrative burden, while in others governors balked at accepting federal money.

South Dakota, which serves a similar student population as its neighbor to the north, is among those opting out.

“Federal money often comes with strings attached, and more of it is often not a good thing,” Ian Fury, the chief of communications for Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, wrote in an email. He cited low unemployment, the administrative burden of running the program, and South Dakota’s “robust existing food programs.”

That news came as a disappointment to school leaders like Louie Krogman, the superintendent of the White River School District in South Dakota.

The district serves around 400 students, most of whom are Native American and come from low-income families. The district runs a summer meal program in June, but families are on their own until school starts seven weeks later.

“We do have some families that would have definitely benefited from that additional EBT money,” Krogman said.

Timeline and cost keeps some states from offering Summer EBT this year

Summer EBT will work a little differently depending on the state, but generally states will identify which families qualify for the $120 or more in benefits and either mail out EBT cards for the summer, or load the value onto existing benefit cards. Then families can use that money to buy food at their local grocery store.

The newly permanent program will run similarly to the Pandemic Summer EBT program that operated for the previous three summers, as well as a federal pilot program that tested the concept over the last decade. A 2016 review of that program found that offering these summer benefits reduced child food insecurity and helped kids eat more fresh fruits and vegetables.

The extra money is coming at a much-needed time, said Kelsey Boone of the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit that advocates for anti-hunger policies, including Summer EBT.

“In the last year, a lot of the boosts to SNAP benefits ended,” Boone said, referring to the temporary pandemic-era increases to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which ended last spring. Summer EBT “can help offset those cuts,” she said, “especially at a time when food prices are so high.”

In declining to participate, Georgia and Nebraska pointed to their states’ existing summer food programs, while Mississippi said it did not have the funding or staff capacity to run the program. During the pandemic, the federal government covered the full cost of the benefits and running the Summer EBT program, but now states have to split the administrative costs.

Texas said it wasn’t feasible to participate because the final rules and guidance for the program came just days before states had to tell the federal government if they’d be opting in. The state also needs additional funding from the state legislature to run the program, a spokesperson for the state’s health and human services department wrote in an email.

Vermont, too, said the state is working to secure funding and put the necessary IT systems in place. “The goal is to be able to offer this important summer nutrition benefit for eligible children starting in the summer of 2025,” a spokesperson for Vermont’s Department for Children and Families wrote in an email.

Still, in several Republican-led states, the program seemed to get caught in a longstanding political debate over whether the government should provide more publicly funded benefits to families — a debate that’s also raged over whether states should provide free school meals to all students.

Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, for example, issued a statement saying her state opposed participating in Summer EBT because the program didn’t have tight enough restrictions on what foods families could buy and it would cost the state $2.2 million to run — though Iowa students were in line to receive around $29 million in food benefits and the program follows the same nutrition requirements as SNAP.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families,” Reynolds said. “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”

In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt cited concerns about the program not being “fully vetted.” He also said that it would help relatively few children — though an estimated 403,000 school-aged children would qualify for food benefits in his state.

Three of Oklahoma’s largest Native American tribes are stepping in to run Summer EBT programs on their reservations, an effort that could reach at least 50,000 children.

Florida said it opted out of participating because it already had summer food programs and didn’t want to follow additional federal rules.

“We anticipate that our state’s full approach to serving children will continue to be successful this year without any additional federal programs that inherently always come with some federal strings attached,” Miguel Nevarez, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Children and Families wrote in an email.

But Sky Beard, the Florida director for No Kid Hungry, an initiative of the nonprofit Share Our Strength that advocated for Summer EBT, sees a big need for the additional summer benefits.

Her organization conducted a poll last year that found around a quarter of parents of school-aged children worried their households wouldn’t have enough to eat.

“There are summer meal sites available throughout the state, but there are real challenges with families accessing those,” she said. Existing programs “just don’t reach all children that participate in school meal programs over the school year.”

Some Republican-led states are embracing the program. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for example, issued an enthusiastic statement about her state’s participation in the anti-hunger program.

“We are leveraging every resource at our disposal to fight this crisis, and Summer EBT promises to be an important new tool to give Arkansas children the food and nutrition they need,” she said.

For now, many states are already working to get Summer EBT up and running by the time school lets out in a few months.

In North Dakota, Schloer is focused on making sure the state has up-to-date addresses for eligible students so families can get their EBT cards in the mail.

The state is preparing to send out lots of emails and texts to families, too, to make sure they know about the new program, and whether they might need to fill out some paperwork to get their benefits.

“If we can get a message on that smartphone and from a reliable source, we’re hoping that they will read it,” Schloer said. Schools, too, can play a part by making sure families know: “It’s legitimate, please pay attention!”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago gets $20 million federal grant to buy 50 electric school buses

2024-01-09T22:05:09+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools is planning to purchase up to 50 electric school buses to operate its own fleet with a $20 million federal grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The additional money comes as the district continues to struggle to provide students with transportation. The district has not operated its own bus fleet for more than a decade. It contracts with outside vendors to provide bus service and has been grappling with a driver shortage since the pandemic hit.

CPS announced just before winter break that it would not be adding bus service for general education students, many who attend selective or magnet schools, for the remainder of the year. They cut service to those students at the start of the school year in order to ensure students with disabilities, who are legally entitled to transportation, were being routed and weren’t riding the bus more than an hour.

But the federal grant and new buses will not immediately fix those issues. For one, 50 buses “will not be enough to provide service to the entire district,” a district spokesperson said. The process for buying and deploying the electric buses will start on April 1, 2024 and happen over a three-year period, the spokesperson said.

The Chicago Teachers Union applauded the grant and said the news was a sign of better collaboration between the union, the district, and the mayor, who is a former CTU organizer. The statement issued by the union said the award would “allow CPS to hold private bus vendors accountable for another 140 electric buses that will replace their current diesel-powered fleets.”

About $81 million is being awarded to private bus vendors that serve Illinois and other states, according to the EPA. First Student Inc. – which operates yellow buses in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin – is getting $39.4 million to purchase 100 electric buses; Student Transportation of America Inc is also in line to receive $12.2 million to purchase 32 buses in Illinois and Wisconsin; and Highland CSB 1 is expected to get $29.4 million to purchase 98 buses in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

A news release from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office said the goal will be to deploy the new buses in communities “most impacted by poor environmental policies and practices, and historic disinvestment.” Johnson ran on a promise to update school facilities to be more environmentally friendly and energy efficient.

In all, the federal government is doling out more than $1 billion to fund electric buses across 280 school districts.

In Philadelphia, the school district is in line for $8 million to add 20 electric buses to its fleet, doubling the current 20 it operates. Detroit Public Schools is expected to get nearly $6 million to buy 15 electric buses.

The move comes as districts nationwide are looking to shift to clean energy buses. Colorado also announced plans last August to expand electric buses in more than a dozen school districts using state and federal funding. New York state announced in 2022 it wants all new school buses to be zero-emissions by 2027.

The federal Clean School Bus Program also provides rebates to districts that use electric buses. Thirteen school districts in Illinois, most of them downstate, got more than $46 million in those rebates last school year to operate electric buses, according to data from the EPA.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee senators’ report highlights risks of rejecting federal education funding

2024-01-09T21:28:53+00:00

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Senate members of a joint legislative panel that looked into whether Tennessee should reject more than $1 billion in federal education funding released their own report Tuesday, citing disagreements with House colleagues.

The 12-page report said Tennessee could not make new investments toward other needs if it opts out of federal education funding and tries to fill the gap with state revenues.

The report also noted numerous other avenues for Tennessee to pursue to resolve conflicts between federal and state interests, and it brought up uncertainties created by taking the unprecedented step of saying no to U.S. money.

“Many federal requirements could still apply to Tennessee schools even if the state rejected federal K-12 dollars, creating questions that would likely be resolved in court,” the report said.

In essence, the senators’ report laid out why no state has ever taken the step of rejecting federal funding for its students and schools, even though several such as Oklahoma and Utah have considered it.

The U.S. contribution, for which Tennessee citizens pay taxes, makes up about a tenth of the state’s budget for education — about the same as with other states. Most federal money supports low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities.

Sen. Jon Lundberg, the Bristol Republican who co-chaired the 10-member panel, called the report “preliminary” as he and four other senators submitted the document to Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton.

“At this time, the House and Senate have not agreed to mutual recommendations,” they wrote in an accompanying letter.

Rep. Debra Moody, the Covington Republican who co-chaired the panel with Lundberg, did not immediately respond when asked whether the House members would submit their own report or comment on any disagreements.

Rep. Debra Moody and Sen. Jon Lundberg, both Republicans, co-chaired the joint legislative panel that conducted hearings in November.

But Sexton, who floated the idea nearly a year ago for Tennessee to look into the possibilities, said through an aide that a separate House report is coming.

“The House agreed with [the] Senate’s options for consideration. However, the Senate would not agree with the House’s actionable recommendations moving forward,” said a statement from Sexton’s office.

The Crossville Republican, who is a likely candidate for governor in 2026, had complained about testing requirements and other federal strings attached to acceptance of federal dollars, but has yet to provide a list of the other strings he finds objectionable.

Education advocates have suggested that objections from Sexton and the legislature’s GOP supermajority are related to current “culture wars” about curriculum and the rights of transgender students to use school bathrooms or join sports teams consistent with their gender identity, which may not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

A year ago, Sexton said Tennessee could tap into $3.2 billion in new recurring state revenues, which would more than cover any lost federal funds for education. But those numbers were based on budget information at that time. State revenues have since flattened.

“Tennessee likely has room in the budget to reject and replace recurring federal funding in K-12 education, but at the expense of other potential investments,” the report said.

The senators also noted that the amount of federal money that Tennessee receives totals more than any of the recurring increases for education over the last decade. It’s also larger than the budgets of all but just a few state agencies, such as TennCare, transportation, education, and corrections.

Lundberg released the report just as the General Assembly reconvened its 2024 session, meeting a Jan. 9 deadline set by Sexton and McNally when they appointed the joint panel in September.

RELATED: Key education issues to watch as Tennessee lawmakers return

He told Chalkbeat later Tuesday that he stands by the report and refused to make changes requested by Sexton’s office.

“We determined it was best to release a Senate report that was solid, based on the testimony we heard and the information we were given,” said Lundberg, who declined to detail the points of contention.

Lundberg, who also chairs the Senate Education Committee, praised the work of the joint legislative panel for clearly identifying the state’s funding sources for education and their related mandates.

“Frankly there are fewer federal strings than I anticipated,” he said.

During four days of testimony in November, the panel heard mostly fact-finding presentations from established nonpartisan researchers, school district leaders, and state officials.

On the fifth day, at the request of House members, the group also heard from representatives of two conservative groups who urged the state to pursue forgoing federal funding. None of the Senate members were present for that final testimony. They said scheduling conflicts prevented them from attending.

The legislative panel declined to hear from Tennessee parents or advocacy groups about how federally funded education programs are run or affect their children.

Last week, several legislative leaders told Chalkbeat they did not expect any new legislation this year out of last year’s hearings.

Below, you can read the full Senate report, with the accompanying letter.

This story has been updated from a previous version.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org

U.S. math scores dropped, but reading and science results held steady on key international test

2023-12-05T10:00:00+00:00

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It’s a familiar story, with a few interesting plot twists.

That’s how one top federal official described the 2022 test results for American students on a high-profile international exam that allows for comparisons of what 15-year-olds around the world know and can do in math, reading, and science.

The results released Tuesday from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, showed that math scores dropped significantly last year for 15-year-olds in the U.S. compared with 2018, the last time this test was given. But there was also encouraging news: Reading and science scores held steady over that time. And the nation’s PISA rankings actually rose because other countries’ performance dipped.

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the PISA in the U.S. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

The decline in math scores following the pandemic has become a topic of national concern, as scores for fourth and eighth graders dropped significantly on a key national test last year. Students in several states also saw big math declines in COVID’s wake, though there’s been some recent recovery.

Some educators say that’s because math skills build on one another, so students who missed critical lessons earlier in the pandemic may have a hard time filling in those blanks and catching up to their current grade level.

The scores come as officials and educators in several states are weighing the best way to teach students math — and how much classes should focus on real-world uses of math versus more theoretical applications. Others are trying to expand access to higher-level math courses like algebra and calculus. Historically, Black and Latino students have had much less access to these classes than their peers.

“There are a lot of hypotheses about what we need to do differently to move ourselves forward in mathematics,” Carr said. “But clearly we haven’t figured it out.”

Even though American students’ average scores dropped or didn’t change much, the U.S. climbed in the international rankings in all three subjects, as scores declined in other countries that tend to outperform the U.S.

The U.S. improved its rankings even as its students reported that their schools were closed on average for longer periods of time during the pandemic than their peers in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

The relationship between academic performance and the length of school closures was small, Carr said, meaning that the variance in scores was mostly due to other factors. Some OECD countries that reopened for in-person learning more quickly than the U.S. saw steeper drops on the test, she said.

That finding echoes the analysis of a research team released last year that found remote learning was a contributor to score declines, but it wasn’t the primary driver of those academic losses.

Among the 81 international school systems that participated in the PISA last year, the U.S. ranked 26th in math achievement, up from 29th among the same group of school systems in 2018.

Among the 37 members of the OECD that gave the test, most of which are higher-income countries, the U.S. ranked 22nd in math achievement.

Norway, France, Iceland, and Portugal, for example, all scored better than the U.S. in math in 2018, but are now scoring at the same level statistically.

The U.S. ranked sixth in reading and 10th in science among the 81 school systems that gave the PISA last year. In 2018, the U.S. ranked eighth in reading and 11th in science.

The steady reading results among U.S. high schoolers run counter to the significant reading declines observed last year for younger students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Academic recovery in reading has also been uneven. Carr said that could indicate that the NAEP has a higher difficulty level than the PISA.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona pointed to the results as an indicator of the impact of the federal investments made in schools during the pandemic, much of which was spent on academic recovery initiatives, such as tutoring and mental health support for students.

That spending “kept the United States in the game,” Cardona said. Without it, he said, the U.S. would be “in the same boat” as other countries that didn’t spend as much and saw steeper declines.

The PISA was given to around 4,600 students across the U.S. and some 620,000 students around the world.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Suspensions and bullying plunged as many students learned remotely, national data shows

2023-11-15T21:52:14+00:00

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The number of students who were suspended or arrested at school fell dramatically during the first full school year of the pandemic, new federal data released Wednesday show.

And though disparities in who got suspended or arrested at school persisted along lines of race and disability, in some cases, those gaps narrowed considerably, especially for Black students.

The data for the 2020-21 school year, released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, echoes earlier reports from some school districts and states. But it’s the first to fully capture what discipline looked like across America’s schools early in the pandemic, when large shares of students were learning remotely.

“Some of these data are not easy to look at,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told reporters Wednesday. “These data are a reminder that we have a lot of work to do.”

The data come as many schools wrestle with how discipline should look in the wake of a pandemic that left many students with greater social and emotional needs. Some states have considered laws that would give schools broader latitude to suspend students, and some districts have brought back school police following concerns over student behavior and safety.

The report reflects a time when 88% of schools provided a combination of in-person and remote instruction, federal data show, while another 5% offered only remote instruction. The following year, when most students returned to fully in-person learning, many schools reported an uptick in behavioral issues, and some districts suspended a larger-than-usual share of students.

Suspensions and expulsions had been falling for years even before COVID hit, as many schools took steps to curb disciplinary practices that removed students from the classroom. But the declines during the 2020-21 school year were much steeper.

The drops likely reflect a combination of fewer students learning in person and a reticence among educators to remove students from the classroom at a time when many kids craved in-person contact with their teachers and peers. But the data does not capture some of the new or informal disciplinary practices that cropped up during the pandemic, such as removals from a Zoom classroom or requiring a student to learn remotely as a form of punishment.

Around 639,000 K-12 students were suspended from school at least once during the first full year of the pandemic, down from 2.5 million students during the 2017-18 school year, the last period with comparable data.

That represents a staggering 75% decline. (For comparison, suspensions dropped around 11% from the 2013-14 school year to 2017-18 school year.)

Similarly, the number of students who experienced an in-school suspension fell by 70%. The number of students who were referred to law enforcement dropped by 73%. And the number of students who were arrested at school plummeted 84% to around 8,900.

Education department officials cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from an anomalous school year filled with disruptions for both students and the staff who collect this data.

Public school enrollment dropped by 1.7 million students, or 3%, between the 2017-18 and 2020-21 school years. And schools were not required to report whether students who were disciplined were learning in person or remotely. To address that, federal officials are collecting the same data for the 2021-22 school year — the first-ever back-to-back effort.

Still, it’s notable that Black boys and students with disabilities continued to receive a disproportionate share of suspensions from school. Black boys made up 8% of the nation’s K-12 enrollment during the 2020-21 school year, but they received 18% of suspensions from school. Similarly, students with disabilities made up 17% of the nation’s enrollment, but they received 29% of suspensions.

That disparity for Black boys shrank 7 percentage points from the last time this data was collected, but the gap for students with disabilities didn’t budge.

A new disparity, meanwhile, arose regarding white boys. During the 2017-18 school year, white boys were suspended from school at a rate nearly equal to their share of enrollment. But in the first full year of the pandemic, they made up 24% of the nation’s enrollment, and received 36% of suspensions from school — a gap larger than the one for Black boys.

A top education department official said while the cause of that trend is unclear, it represents a notable departure from past data collections that merits investigation.

Black, Hispanic, and Asian students were much more likely to learn remotely during the 2020-21 school year, while white students were more likely to learn in person.

Black students and students with disabilities, meanwhile, continued to be arrested at school at higher rates than their peers, though those disparities did narrow. The gap shrank notably for Black students, who made up 15% of K-12 enrollment, but received 22% of arrests at school.

Three years ago, they made up the same share of enrollment, and experienced 32% of arrests at school.

Still, a top department official said the frequency with which students were arrested at school was deeply concerning.

Reports of bullying and harassment related to a student’s race, sex, or disability also fell notably by 64% — echoing other research that found a drop in online searches related to school bullying during that time. However, Black students were still more than twice as likely as their peers to experience race-based bullying or harassment.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee should boost education funding, not reject federal money, school leaders say

2023-11-08T01:01:44+00:00

A state committee studying whether Tennessee should reject federal education dollars heard a unified plea from public school leaders not to do that — and to instead invest the state’s excess revenues in K-12 students, teachers, and schools.

“The needs are so great,” said Toni Williams, interim superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Tennessee’s largest district, during remarks Tuesday before the panel.

She described dozens of school buildings that are over a century old, outdated HVAC systems, and the need to mitigate everything from mold to rats. Last year, a library ceiling collapsed at Cummings K-12 Optional School, injuring the school librarian and two other staff members.

Toni Williams, interim superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, speaks to state lawmakers on Nov. 7, 2023.

“This year has been incredibly difficult,” Williams said of her district’s work to address its ailing infrastructure while also providing teachers and staff with competitive pay and preparing for an end to federal COVID relief funding.

The plea from Williams and three other district leaders ran counter to the panel’s charge to develop a strategy on “how to reject certain federal funding or how to eliminate unwanted restrictions.”

Tennessee receives about $1.8 billion in federal funds for education. The U.S. government generally covers about a tenth of a state’s spending for public schools. No state has ever said no to federal funding for its students.

But leaders of Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature say they’re frustrated by the federal oversight that’s attached to receiving the money. Many of them believe the state can afford to forgo federal funding and fill the gap with state money.

The committee, appointed by the speakers of the House and Senate, kicked off hearings into the matter this week and is to report its findings and recommendations to the General Assembly by Jan. 9.

Federal funding cutoff could force tax increases later

On Monday, officials with the state comptroller’s office reported that districts in low-income and rural areas depend the most on federal funding. That money is directed to schools that serve disadvantaged students and programs that target certain needs ranging from rural education and English language learners to technology and charter schools.

On Tuesday, researchers with the Sycamore Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said “much is unknown” if the state opts to pull out of the federal funding stream.

“There’s no precedent upon which to make projections,” said Mandy Spears, the institute’s deputy director.

Even with lower-than-projected revenues and experts predicting stagnant revenues ahead, Spears told the panel that Tennessee likely has room in its budget to replace federal dollars with state money. However, possible ramifications could include budget cuts or tax increases during a future shortfall or recession; protracted court battles over federal requirements that may still exist for schools even if funding is refused; and Tennesseans having to pay federal income taxes for education support that would go to other states.

Spears said federal requirements tied to federal funding provide an extra layer of accountability that’s important to many students and their families because of Tennessee’s history of racial discrimination, school segregation, and exclusion of students with disabilities from public schools.

“Students and families in these protected classes may worry that such practices could return in the absence of federal oversight,” Spears said.

Later Tuesday, the panel asked school district leaders numerous questions about staffing costs related to federal compliance and whether replacing federal funds with state money would give them more flexibility. They also questioned the superintendents about whether their districts measure how much federally funded food is wasted in school cafeterias.

They don’t.

“We just report the number of meals served every day,” said Williams of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, where food and nutrition is the second largest federally funded program at a cost of $89 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Williams said 60% of the district’s 100,000-plus students are considered economically disadvantaged.

“Some of these students wouldn’t have an opportunity (to eat), if not for our food and nutrition program,” she said.

District leaders say extra funding is needed

Asked for a list of burdensome requirements associated with federal education funding, none of the school leaders spoke up. But they spoke at length about the need for more funding for public schools and their students.

Marlon King noted that Madison-Jackson County Schools, where he is superintendent, is among several districts in West Tennessee making investments to develop the future workforce for Ford Motor Co.’s new electric pickup truck plant in nearby Haywood County.

Hank Clay, chief of staff for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, worried that any move toward eliminating federal funding or oversight could tempt districts to shift money that helps their most vulnerable students, especially when school leaders are dealing with other challenges around teacher pay and school facilities.

“If there’s funding on the table to replace these federal dollars, we would welcome that, but ask that it be in addition to — because our students deserve it,” Clay said.

Matt Hixson, who leads schools in Hawkins County, called infrastructure a “huge concern” and noted that his rural district is staring at a $15 million price tag for roof replacement at two high schools. That cost is borne by local taxpayers.

“The only way we have to fund some of those projects is to stand in front of my peers in the county and say we need more tax money,” he said. “I’m a taxpayer too. I’m not a fan of big taxes.”

Earlier this year, the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations reported that the state needs to invest more than $9 billion in its K-12 education infrastructure over five years, an increase of nearly 9% from an assessment done a year earlier.

Of that amount, about $5.4 billion is needed for renovations and technology improvements, while nearly $3.6 billion is needed to build additions and new schools.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Feds urge schools to protect rights of Jewish, Muslim students following ‘alarming’ rise in incidents

2023-11-08T00:26:26+00:00

Federal officials are urging school leaders to protect Jewish and Muslim students from discrimination following an “alarming rise” in reports of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other incidents of bias at colleges and K-12 schools over the last month.

The letter, shared with U.S. schools and colleges on Tuesday, comes one month after the militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel, killing more than 1,400 people. Israel has responded with airstrikes in Gaza that have killed at least 10,000 people and displaced more than a million others.

The news has shaken many school leaders, educators, and students with ties to Israel and the Gaza Strip, and prompted protests on college campuses nationwide.

Since the start of the conflict on Oct. 7, the Education Department has received at least seven discrimination complaints involving antisemitism and two involving Islamophobia, a department spokesperson told Chalkbeat in an email. Most stemmed from incidents at colleges, but at least one incident happened at a K-12 school.

“The rise of reports of hate incidents on our college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict is deeply traumatic for students,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement on Tuesday. “College and university leaders must be unequivocal about condemning hatred and violence and work harder than ever to ensure all students have the freedom to learn in safe and inclusive campus communities.”

Several incidents have been documented in news reports over the last month. At Cornell University, police were called after online posts threatened Jewish students. The University of Pennsylvania alerted the FBI about antisemitic emails that threatened the campus’ umbrella organization serving Jewish students. A hit-and-run that injured a Muslim student at Stanford University is being investigated as a hate crime. In suburban Denver, students of Palestinian descent reported racist bullying at their high school, while in New Jersey a high schooler had her hijab ripped off.

In the letter, the assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine Lhamon, noted that schools that receive federal funds are legally required to protect Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students from discrimination. That could include racial or ethnic slurs, stereotypes based on a student’s religious style of dress, or discrimination related to a student’s accent, ancestry, name, or language.

A few days before the Education Department issued its letter, a coalition of three organizations that advocate for the civil rights of Arab Americans and Palestinian people had asked the department to “take urgent special measures to ensure that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, or students perceived as such” were protected from discrimination at school. They cited examples of students who’d been doxxed and the recent murder of a 6-year-old in suburban Chicago in what police have described as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia were on the rise even before the war between Israel and Hamas, according to organizations that track such incidents.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization, noted that the education discrimination complaints it received last year had jumped by a “disturbing” 63% to 177 cases. That included instances of Islamophobic school curriculum and failure to accommodate Muslim students’ religious requests. (Bullying at K-12 schools, such as an incident in which a Delaware middle schooler who was told by her teacher she was too skinny to fast during Ramadan, were tracked in a separate category.)

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights and advocacy organization, documented 494 incidents of antisemitism at non-Jewish, K-12 schools last year, a 49% increase over the prior year. Most were incidents of harassment, such as a student taunting a Jewish classmate with a Holocaust joke, or vandalism, such as a swastika drawn on a school wall.

Meanwhile, when Education Week and ProPublica reviewed nearly 500 incidents of hate in schools between January 2015 and December 2017, the news organizations found that incidents targeting Jewish and Muslim students were among the most common.

Kira Simon, the director of curriculum and training for the Anti-Defamation League’s education program, which offers anti-bias training to schools, said that teachers can help combat the kind of harmful rhetoric that can lead to bullying and harassment at school by taking a few key steps.

If teachers regularly lead discussions about current events in their classrooms, she said, they should stop to think about how those conversations could “impact my students who are Jewish, or how might it impact my students who are Muslim or my students who are Palestinian or Arab?” she said. “And not to assume how it would impact them, but to be thoughtful.”

That could mean putting ground rules in place for having a respectful discussion, letting students opt out of the conversation, or giving them an alternative assignment if they’re having a strong emotional reaction. It can also be a good idea to give students advance notice about these conversations, instead of springing it on them.

And if teachers know they have students in the same class with opposing viewpoints on the conflict, they can focus on making sure students feel safe to share when they feel scared or stressed, and know who at the school they can turn to for support.

And while these conversations and questions may feel urgent, it’s OK for teachers to take the time they need to plan a conversation and do their own research, Simon said. That might mean giving students time to write about how they’re feeling while planning for a discussion down the line.

“Something that adults can do that, I think, will help young people to feel a little bit safer and be able to regulate their emotions better, is to tone down the urgency,” Simon said. “If a question comes up, the teacher doesn’t have to have the answer right in the moment.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee rushes to revamp its A-F letter grades for schools. Educators cry foul.

2023-10-26T10:00:00+00:00

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It was supposed to make things simpler.

A 2016 Tennessee law required the state to assign each public school a letter grade, A to F, based mostly on student test results. The intent was to give parents and communities an easy way to assess the quality of education at each school.

Nothing about it has been simple, though. Since the law took effect, the state hasn’t issued any grades, mostly because of testing glitches and the pandemic.

And now there’s a new complication: As the state prepares to finally issue its first grades in November, the education department and its new leader are revamping the grading formula. The changes likely will mean fewer A’s and generally worse grades than expected for many schools, especially those serving students from lower-income families in rural and urban communities.

The rollout will be a jolt to many Tennessee public school leaders, who have been waiting and planning for these grades for five years, thinking they understood what the criteria would be. And beyond the stigma, the grades could have real consequences: Officials representing schools that get D’s or F’s eventually may face hearings or audits of their spending and academic programming.

“It almost seems like we’re trying to change rules after the game’s already been played,” said Brian Curry, a school board member in Germantown, during an August town hall in Memphis to discuss potential changes with state officials.

Why the letter grades for schools matter

Tennessee’s 2016 school report card law didn’t include consequences for schools that get low grades.

That changed last year, when Tennessee passed a new system for funding K-12 education.

Under the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act, or TISA, school districts or charter authorizers can face hearings before the state Board of Education if their schools get D’s or F’s on the state report card, beginning with the 2024-25 school year.

Ultimately, administrators could have to submit a corrective action plan or undergo a state audit of spending and academic programming at the school in question.

State board member Darrell Cobbins, whose district includes Memphis schools, acknowledges that the increased funding that came with TISA warrants additional accountability. But he wonders about the feasibility of what the law asks of the all-volunteer board. Holding hearings for potentially hundreds of schools will be a “major undertaking,” he said.

The board is working with a consultant, Bellwether Education Partners, to develop a review process that Cobbins hopes will be logical, consistent, and explainable.

At the crux of the state’s late change is a long-running debate over proficiency vs. growth — whether students should be judged based more on whether they meet certain academic standards, or on how much progress they make toward those standards. Where the state lands in that debate is especially important for schools where students face extra challenges even before they walk into a classroom.

But many public school leaders believe there’s a larger political motive behind the sudden drive by Gov. Bill Lee’s administration to change the rules: advancing his school choice agenda.

Under a 2019 voucher law pushed by Lee, Tennessee now provides taxpayer money to help some families send their children to private schools. But the program has fewer than 2,000 students enrolled in the three counties where it operates, significantly below this year’s 5,000-seat cap. Lee wants to expand enrollment and eventually take the option statewide.

“School choice has got to be part of what’s driving all this,” said Mike Winstead, director of Maryville City Schools and a former Tennessee Superintendent of the Year.

“Think about it,” he continued. “If you have an A or B school in your community, that may not motivate parents to want to pull their kids out of public schools to use a voucher.”

Several other district leaders brought up the same concern to state officials at town halls hosted by the department in August and September to get public feedback about revising the grading formula. But state officials flatly deny there’s a connection between the voucher law and changes to the grading formula.

The grading law “was passed to promote transparency, and families should be able to know and to understand how their students’ schools are performing,” a department spokesman said in a statement to Chalkbeat.

Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds said the goal of the new formula is to generate grades that signify meaningful differences in school performance in a way that make sense to Tennesseans, whether they reflect proficiency, growth, or other criteria that are ultimately chosen.

“Whether you are a student, parent, teacher, policymaker, or an interested community member, school letter grades will empower all Tennesseans with the information they need to support K-12 public education and our local schools,” she said.

Tennessee initially adopted growth-focused model

State law requires that Tennessee’s model for grading schools take into account student performance and improvement, as demonstrated on annual state tests, and it allows inclusion of other reliable indicators of student achievement. The statute directed the education department to come up with a formula to turn those results into a single letter grade for each school, to be published online on the State Report Card.

When developing the calculation under former Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration, the department stressed achievement and growth in math and English language arts. And it created two pathways for schools to demonstrate achievement.

One way was based on what the state calls “pure achievement,” meaning that a certain percentage of a school’s students demonstrated a required level of proficiency, skill, or knowledge. By this metric, a school that started the school year with a high proficiency rate was likely to receive an A even if it had not improved student learning during the school year.

The other way rewarded schools that met certain goals to move their students toward proficiency from one year to the next. The idea was that all schools, especially those serving low-income students or that have historically performed poorly, should have an opportunity to get an A as long as they make strong progress toward the state’s achievement goals.

So even the achievement part of the grading formula could be fulfilled with strong growth. In this way, Tennessee was an early adopter of a growth-heavy model when developing its accountability system.

“All means all!” became the mantra of then-Education Commissioner Candice McQueen as she worked with education stakeholders for nearly a year to design a system to incentivize improvement for all students — whether they are considered low, average, or high achievers — as well as for all schools, regardless of their demographic makeup.

Tennessee had modest success with that approach, even though the actual letter grades were never issued. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, students were showing incremental growth in math and reading based on some of the nation’s highest proficiency standards.

But state lawmakers have become increasingly impatient with the pace of improvement, especially in reading. About a third of the state’s students meet grade-level standards on the English language arts test, which requires students to demonstrate the ability to read closely.

“School choice has got to be part of what’s driving all this. Think about it. If you have an A or B school in your community, that may not motivate parents to want to pull their kids out of public schools to use a voucher.” — Mike Winstead, Maryville City Schools director

“At the end of the day, I want to know: Can you add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and can you read, regardless of how much you have grown from one year to the other?” said Rep. Mark Cochran, an Englewood Republican, during one legislative hearing about the state’s emphasis on growth.

Meanwhile, the legislature has sought to provide more options for families dissatisfied with the performance of traditional public schools by introducing private school vouchers and allowing charter schools to open statewide.

Now as Tennessee revamps its school grading system, Lee’s administration is poised to shift weight in the equation from growth to pure achievement. Reynolds wants the state to do that by eliminating the growth pathway for demonstrating achievement. Growth would still be a component of the overall grade, as dictated by state law, but a much smaller part.

“I want to be very clear that when we’re talking about academic achievement, we’re talking about academic achievement,” Reynolds, the new education commissioner, said at an Oct. 12 meeting of education stakeholders.

State hears strong calls for retaining growth focus

Reynolds, who was sworn in to her post in July, launched the reevaluation of the grading system about a month later as her first major initiative. She invited Tennesseans to weigh in on how the state should measure a school’s academic success. At the time, state officials said all options were on the table.

At town halls, meetings with stakeholders, and in nearly 300 public comments from Tennesseans, state officials heard a common theme: Keep some kind of growth option as part of the achievement calculation. Measuring student performance with a single letter grade requires nuance, many educators said, and the growth-based model allows that.

“Is having a campus that has only 15% reading proficiency really a B school, if those kids cannot read?” — Lizzette Reynolds, Tennessee education commissioner

A formula that’s weighted too heavily toward pure achievement, they warned, would produce grades that essentially mirror the economic profiles of the schools — with high-income communities getting the A’s and B’s — and families wouldn’t be able to use the grades to differentiate the performance of one high-poverty school from another.

“Given the strong correlation between achievement and poverty, I think it’s really difficult to talk about just achievement in isolation. We really need to balance this with growth,” said Madeline Price, policy director for the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, at an Oct. 5 meeting of the stakeholders group.

“All schools, especially low-income and traditionally low performing schools, should have a very real opportunity to receive an A” if they significantly improve student performance, the leaders of Tennessee’s school superintendent organization wrote in a letter to Reynolds.

Meaghan Turnbow, who coordinates programs for English language learners in fast-growing Rutherford County Schools, south of Nashville, noted pitfalls in a model that emphasizes proficiency over growth.

“We have students come to our district from all over the world with various education levels and English levels,” she wrote in a public comment. “Year to year they grow, but it may be several years before they are considered meeting or exceeding expectations.”

Tennessee Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds speaks to a gathering of school superintendents in September. Reynolds has signaled that she wants to narrow the way the state judges student performance.

But soon after asking for public feedback, Tennessee’s new education chief signaled that she wanted to narrow the way the state judges student performance.

During an Aug. 29 town hall in Chattanooga, Reynolds acknowledged that the education department, before scuttling plans to issue grades in the fall of 2022 under former Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, had run the numbers but didn’t like what it saw. For instance, she said, a school with 80% of its students reading on grade level might have received a B, but so might a school that had only 15% of students reading on grade level, while also demonstrating high growth.

“Is having a campus that has only 15% reading proficiency really a B school, if those kids cannot read?” Reynolds asked.

“We should celebrate growth,” she continued. “We should also celebrate achievement, because at the end of the day, kids can grow. But if they never get on grade level, they don’t have much of a future, particularly when it comes to reading and math.”

How a single school could get conflicting evaluations

The A-F grading system, as required by the state, was billed as a simple, common-sense tool to help parents understand how their child’s school is doing and compare schools.

But changes the department is making could add a new layer of complexity for school communities.

When Tennessee developed its accountability plan in 2017, it opted for a single system to satisfy both the state law and a 2015 federal accountability law called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. That way, “we’re not sending different messages to parents and the general public,” said Winstead, the Maryville schools director who served on the state task force that developed the plan.

ESSA doesn’t require A-F grades, but it directs the state to use its own criteria to identify schools that are academically in the bottom 5%, plus other schools showing low performance or significant disparities across groups of students who are Black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, or English learners, or have learning disabilities. Such schools become eligible for additional federal funding.

Because of the link between the two laws, the schools that would earn the lowest grades under Tennessee’s current formula are the same ones that would get federal support to help them improve. And educators would work with a common set of goals, priorities, and incentives.

Changes that the Tennessee Department of Education is making could create two separate accountability systems, producing conflicting assessments of how a school is doing.

Under Reynolds, the Tennessee education department appears ready to decouple the state’s A-F system from its federal compliance plan. The change would result in Tennessee having two accountability systems, potentially producing conflicting assessments of how a school is doing.

For example, if the new state formula places less emphasis on certain student groups than the federal system does, a school that has big racial or economic disparities in student performance could still earn high grades from Tennessee based on overall proficiency rates. Meanwhile, a school with low proficiency rates would get a D or an F, even though it may serve certain groups of students better than an A or B school.

Mary Batiwalla, former assistant commissioner of assessment and accountability in Tennessee, says what’s going on here has parallels in Texas, where Reynolds used to be chief deputy commissioner. Officials there changed their grading criteria this year to apply to schools retroactively. However, after some school districts sued that state over the changes, Texas delayed the release of its grades.

Texas lawmakers are also in the midst of a special session on vouchers to debate whether students should be able to use public dollars to attend private schools. Batiwalla worries that officials in both states are hijacking the grading systems for political aims, not to incentivize school communities to improve.

“If you want to do vouchers, do vouchers,” said Batiwalla, an outspoken critic of Reynolds’ efforts. “Don’t take away this policy tool that has the potential to drive improvement from the rest of the public schools.”

Proficiency focus could shortchange some students

Other tweaks are likely when Tennessee releases its new equation in the days or weeks ahead, just before giving schools their first set of grades.

“If you want to do vouchers, do vouchers. Don’t take away this policy tool that has the potential to drive improvement from the rest of the public schools.” — Mary Batiwalla, former assistant commissioner, Tennessee Department of Education

The department has heard calls to include social studies and science scores in the calculation, as well as data related to third-grade reading, participation in tutoring programs, and postsecondary indicators like dual enrollment and career and technical education offerings, just to name a few. There’s also a growing consensus around ditching student absenteeism data, which is a factor in the current equation.

But most educators have their eye on the growth vs. proficiency debate. They worry that greater emphasis on proficiency will motivate schools to focus on improving “bubble kids” — those scoring just under proficiency — instead of working to improve students at all levels of achievement.

“You’re incentivizing bad choices that serve just a few kids instead of all kids,” Winstead said.

Winstead’s suburban school system should be fine. Maryville City Schools, near Knoxville, is one of the state’s highest-achieving districts and stands to benefit if Tennessee’s revamped grading formula puts more weight on proficiency. But Winstead philosophically disagrees with the approach that the state appears to be taking.

“This is going to demoralize a lot of school communities,” he said, “teachers, kids, and parents — folks who have done incredible things to move kids forward.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org. Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

New federal program puts $12 million toward school integration in a dozen states

2023-10-23T16:13:00+00:00

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School desegregation efforts in a dozen states are getting a $12.5 million infusion from the federal government as part of a new grant program meant to create more diverse schools.

Among the winners are some of the largest districts in the country, including New York City and Chicago, where debates have long raged over how to address the inequities wrought by school segregation. Other winners include a cohort of Maryland districts and the East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana, both of which have been home to intense battles over school segregation in recent years.

The grants come as many school communities continue fraught discussions about racial inequities in schools — conversations that ramped up after the murder of George Floyd, but are facing pushback in many states as conservative lawmakers, activists, and some parents fight to end diversity and equity initiatives and curtail teaching about race and racism.

The funding is a small fraction of what the Biden administration initially sought. And there is only so much schools and federal officials can do in the wake of Supreme Court decisions that severely limited desegregation across district lines, and quashed efforts to explicitly take student race into account as part of integration plans.

Still, the grants are the culmination of a years-long effort led by school integration advocates and officials within the Obama and Biden administrations to steer more federal funding to school desegregation. The money is sorely needed, as America’s schools remain highly segregated by race and income but initiatives to fix that often fizzle out.

The result of that isolation, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement on Thursday, is that students of color and students from low-income families disproportionately experience “inadequate resources, lesser access to advanced courses, fewer extracurricular offerings, and other tangible inequities.”

The grants are relatively small: The $12.5 million is being divided among 14 initiatives, ranging from $250,000 to $2.8 million. But integration advocates say start-up money like this is essential because it gives schools funding and political cover to launch complicated planning efforts and community conversations that are necessary for initiatives to stick.

“It’s not going to fully solve it,” said Mohammed Choudhury, the former Maryland schools superintendent who oversaw the state’s application that netted $500,000 for its first year of work. But if the money helps shift some policies, “then it’s a big damn deal.”

Maryland will use its money to work on initiatives in the districts of Anne Arundel, Charles, Frederick, Howard, and Montgomery counties. Howard County, notably, faced parent backlash a few years ago when leaders there tried to deconcentrate the share of students from low-income families who attended certain schools.

Each of the Maryland districts has committed to try at least one of three strategies to create more integrated schools. Those include revamping admissions processes to make selective schools more diverse; ensuring dual language schools are accessible to low-income families whose children are learning English; or finding ways to integrate young children across public and private preschools. Much of the money will be spent on family engagement, Choudhury said.

Expanding access to particular programs may not be as controversial or have as sweeping of an effect as other school desegregation strategies, such as changing school boundaries. But Choudhury, who is now a senior advisor to Maryland’s board of education, expects it won’t be drama-free.

“From opportunity-hoarding type tensions and challenges, to people feeling like they are losing something, to people feeling like they could potentially be pitted against each other — all of those things have to be navigated,” he said. “You’ve still got to win hearts and minds.”

New York City, meanwhile, won $3 million for initiatives in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn that have previously worked to create more integrated middle schools. In Manhattan, officials will work to create a more diverse group of schools serving some 12,000 students, starting with preschool. In Brooklyn, the money will help put middle school integration plans into place, and fund efforts to recruit elementary school families to attend the area’s middle schools.

Recently, some New York City schools have returned to academically screening incoming middle schoolers — a practice integration advocates say fuels segregation. The current mayor and chancellor have shown less interest in school integration than past administrations.

Chicago Public Schools plans to use its $500,000 to hire staff and host community meetings, a spokesperson said. The work is part of several ongoing planning initiatives related to school quality and student admissions, according to a project description.

Fayette County Public Schools in Kentucky plans to use its funding to improve schools in Lexington’s East End, a historically Black community that’s experiencing some gentrification.

“Our aim is to reconnect our East End students with the cultural identity and heritage of their historical neighborhood,” a project description states. “All the while, changing the reputation and perception of East End schools so that they are a source of pride for residents as well as an attractive school choice for more diverse, affluent parents.”

Other winning districts include:

Anchorage School District in Alaska, which plans to use its funding to create more socioeconomically diverse high school programs by expanding access to career and technical education.
Hamilton County Schools in Tennessee, which plans to use its money for community engagement as it seeks to “reimagine” student transportation and school access.
Oakland Unified in California, which will develop an integration plan focused on improving outcomes for students who attend some of the district’s highest-poverty schools.
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, which will analyze enrollment patterns and student assignment policies and potentially change attendance boundaries. The money will help fund sessions for students, families, and staff to provide feedback.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Millions of kids are newly eligible for free school meals — but many will likely miss out

2023-10-11T17:37:22+00:00

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Dylan Beitz’s ears perked up when federal officials announced last month that a new rule would allow more schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students.

That rule would cover Jefferson County schools, the district in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle where Beitz oversees child nutrition. Before the change, the district fell just below the federal cutoff for offering free meals to all 8,400 of its students as part of a national program meant to help high-poverty schools.

Under the new rule, which takes effect later this month, Jefferson County could go from offering free meals in seven schools to all 16. Beitz knew that could save the district time and labor — no more mailing bills for unpaid meal debt — and give families extra money to spend on other expenses.

“I think it’s something that we want to go to,” Beitz said. But first, the district has to see if it can afford to “bite that bullet” if there are out-of-pocket costs: “We’ve really got to look and see what the financial repercussions are.”

Beitz isn’t the only one crunching the numbers. Recent headlines proclaimed the new rule would grant millions of students access to free school meals. And there’s research indicating that universal free meals may provide academic and other advantages for students. Yet federal officials and school nutrition experts say many kids who could benefit will actually miss out.

That’s because without additional funding from Congress that’s probably not on the horizon, districts that want to participate must weigh the costs and benefits of providing more free meals against other priorities.

“Unless they have additional resources, or the state is able to provide additional resources, a lot of the newly eligible schools will find it difficult financially to implement that,” said Crystal FitzSimons, who oversees school nutrition work for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, which advocated for the new cutoff.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school meal programs, said it’s up to districts to opt in and the agency knows not all newly eligible districts will do so.

What is the community eligibility provision?

This federal program allows schools or districts that meet certain criteria to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of family income. Elsewhere, schools have to collect paperwork from families to determine if they qualify for free or reduced-priced meals. Other students pay full price.

What is changing?

Under a new rule, individual schools or entire districts can participate in the community eligibility provision if at least 25% of students meet certain criteria. These could include participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly known as SNAP — or Medicaid, lacking stable housing, or living in foster care. Under the previous rule, schools or districts had to enroll at least 40% of students who met those criteria.

The change affects a federal program known as the community eligibility provision that allows schools to provide free meals to all students regardless of family income. It has shot up in popularity in recent years, as schools got used to providing free meals to all kids under a temporary pandemic-era policy, and didn’t want to go back to charging them when that expired.

Under a previous rule for that program, individual schools or entire districts could offer free meals to all kids if at least 40% of students met certain criteria that showed they were from low-income backgrounds. The new rule lowers that to 25% of students. Around 3,000 school districts serving some 5 million students are newly eligible, federal officials said. That represents around 10% of all public school students in the U.S.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack touted the change as an important step toward fulfilling the Biden administration’s pledge that it would expand access to free school meals to millions more children in the coming years.

In feedback collected by federal officials, some school staff said the lower threshold would help their districts that didn’t qualify under the old cutoff, “but they know students in their communities experience widespread food insecurity.”

Still, many districts that are newly eligible may choose not to participate because they’d rather spend money on things like classroom activities or staff salaries.

Before the rule change, schools and districts that were just above the old 40% threshold often didn’t participate because it was hard to break even under the formula the federal government uses to reimburse schools for the free meals they serve.

Last school year, two-thirds of schools that served 40% to 50% of students who met the low-income criteria used the community eligibility provision, a 50-state survey conducted by FitzSimons’ organization found. The take-up rate rose as more students were identified as being from low-income families.

That financial calculus is unlikely to change anytime soon. In its most recent budget, the Biden administration proposed raising the federal reimbursement for school meals in a way that would help districts that serve lower shares of students from low-income families provide free meals to all. But Congress would have to agree — and Republican leaders have previously opposed additional spending to make meals free for kids who don’t already qualify.

To decide if the free-meals-for-all route makes financial sense, newly eligible districts should look at whether they’d save money by reducing administrative work, and if there would be “any financial improvements because of economies of scale and increases in breakfast and lunch participation,” FitzSimons said.

Eliminating meal debt, and the need to collect it, could also be a reason to opt in, she said.

School officials want more aid from federal government

The community eligibility provision is different from the temporary universal free school meal programs that all schools were permitted to run during the pandemic, and the permanent state-run programs that eight states adopted after Congress failed to pass a national universal meals program.

Those programs generally offer free meals to all public school students in the state regardless of income, and require additional state spending.

Federal officials and school nutrition experts expect many districts in those eight states will take advantage of the rule change because it will cut down on paperwork and allow for more federal funding. More districts in states that help pay for the cost of participating in the federal program, such as New York and Oregon, may opt in, too.

Districts that want to make this change mid-year will have to work with state education officials to seek a waiver from the federal government. Some, like New York, have already opened an application process.

Kate Dorr, who oversees food services for 16 districts in central New York, is planning to apply to bring on the last three schools in her area that do not yet serve free meals to all students.

She knows it will help many families. Last year, meal debt in her districts spiked from zero to $150,000. Dorr had many painful conversations with families who struggled to afford food, but no longer qualified for free meals.

But without the New York state subsidy, providing free meals to all students would be hard to afford, she said. That’s why she wants federal officials and lawmakers to do more to support school nutrition programs like hers.

“I really feel for states that don’t have this kind of supplemental funding,” Dorr said. “This change from 40% to 25% just feels like way too little, when so much more is needed.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.