Chalkbeat

Judge dismisses conservative-leaning Colorado school districts’ lawsuit over transgender athlete policies

2026-08-27T22:37:53+00:00

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A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by several Colorado school districts and charter schools over policies related to transgender student athletes.

Senior U.S. District Court Judge John Kane ruled Wednesday that the districts and schools don’t have standing to sue the state, in part because they aren’t facing clear harm. The ruling is a win for the state and a loss for the conservative-leaning districts and schools that had challenged the state’s non-discrimination law, specifically its gender identity protections.

Kane’s decision affirmed a January recommendation by a magistrate judge, a type of judge whose decisions can be reviewed by a full judge if one party objects.

The eight plaintiffs in the case — School District 49, Colorado Springs District 11, Academy District 20, Montezuma-Cortez School District, James Irwin Charter Schools, Monument Academy, the Classical Academy, and Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Education Services — objected to the January decision by Magistrate Judge Maritza Dominguez Braswell.

It’s not clear what impact the ruling will have. The districts and charter schools that sued wanted the court to prevent Colorado officials from investigating, penalizing, or fining them for policies banning transgender athletes from joining school sports teams that match their gender identity. State officials so far have not penalized public schools that have such policies.

A second defendant in the lawsuit, the Colorado High School Activities Association, agreed not to penalize schools and districts that have such policies as part of a December 2025 settlement.

The association’s bylaws for years recognized the right of transgender athletes to participate on sports teams that match their gender identity and said the group can review district decisions on such matters. But a spokesperson for the group, which governs high school sports in Colorado and is often called CHSAA, said at the time it had never penalized a school or district for policies on transgender athletes.

Some Colorado districts allow transgender students to play on teams that match their gender identity, some prohibit it, and some decide on a case-by-case basis.

Peter Hilts, the superintendent of District 49, which spearheaded the lawsuit, said of Wednesday’s decision in an emailed statement, “We respectfully disagree with the judge’s ruling, but given that we have already secured protections for our students and coaches via a settlement with CHSAA, we are considering how to proceed.”

The Colorado Attorney General’s office declined to comment on the ruling.

District 49 sued the state and CHSAA in May 2025, after its school board narrowly passed a controversial policy banning transgender middle and high school students from joining school teams that align with their gender identity. The policy, which applies to both transgender boys and transgender girls, was developed after President Trump’s executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that allows athletes assigned male at birth to participate in girls’ or women’s sports.

When District 49’s school board considered the new policy, the district’s lawyer speculated that it could lead to the district being sued. But instead of playing defense, the district filed its own lawsuit. The other seven districts and schools joined as plaintiffs a couple months later.

Kane’s 23-page ruling affirmed Dominguez Braswell’s January argument that the eight districts and schools didn’t have standing to sue the state on their own behalf or to sue on behalf of their students.

If a party has standing, that means they have a right to have their lawsuit heard in court. One criteria for standing is that the plaintiff is facing harm.

Kane found no proof of current or future harm. He said the districts and schools didn’t show evidence of a transgender student athlete who might take action because they believe they have faced discrimination as a result of the plaintiffs’ student athlete policies.

“I cannot infer a speculated lawsuit or enforcement action would arise, if no transgender student, who would be subjected to discrimination, exists,” wrote Kane.

Kane and Dominguez Braswell said the districts and schools don’t have standing to sue on behalf of all students because their students may have different opinions on whether transgender students should be allowed to play on teams that match their gender identity.

Kane noted that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed states to bar transgender athletes from playing on school teams that match their gender identity isn’t relevant to his ruling.

“The Supreme Court’s opinion does not alter the requirements for standing, and as such, does not impact the analysis here,” he said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Virtual school enrollment has doubled in recent years, following pandemic-era surge

2026-08-27T20:29:44+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.

Data analysis by Kae Petrin.

Remote learning during the pandemic was a nightmare for some students, but others have stuck with it, new data shows.

Just over 600,000 public school students attended fully virtual schools in the 2024-25 school year, the most recent data available. That’s about 1 in 80 public school children — a twofold increase since before the pandemic.

This reflects the growth of school choice: In more places, families who want to opt their children out of traditional schooling can and are doing so with public funding. Many families seek out online education because traditional schooling isn’t working for a variety of reasons. Yet prior research has raised pointed questions about the quality of virtual schooling. These concerns once drew significant attention, but ironically they have faded from the national discourse even as digital schooling has rapidly grown.

Virtual school enrollment spiked in the 2020-21 school year in the midst of the pandemic. Some families may have believed that a stand-alone virtual school would be better than the makeshift online programs that many school districts were standing up. This was not just a one-year blip, however, as the new data shows.

A majority of fully virtual students are in charter schools. Two companies that run online schools, Stride and Pearson, account for a large chunk of virtual enrollment. A recent earnings report from Stride said its virtual schools, known as K12, now enroll over 240,000 students in public and private schools. “Demand for educational choices remains strong,” the report said. In recent years, more school districts have also launched their own online options.

Among high school students, 1.6% were in fully virtual public schools, compared to 0.8% of students in grades 1-8.

The Education Department used to regularly report on the number of virtual school students, but like many other statistics, it has not updated these figures recently. Chalkbeat calculated up-to-date numbers, which had not been previously reported.

An additional 195,000 students were enrolled in schools that are categorized as primarily online with some in-person opportunities.

The federal numbers may undercount online school enrollment. For example, according to that data, 1% of Indiana students were in fully virtual schools in the fall of 2024. A Chalkbeat analysis using more detailed state data pegged enrollment at virtual schools at about 3% that year. States vary in the share of students in virtual schools, though differences in response rates and program structures mean cross-state comparisons should be interpreted with caution.

Several studies, based on data from before the pandemic, have found that students tend to make much less academic progress and graduate at lower rates in virtual charters. In 2016, prompted by concerns about quality, a trio of pro-charter school groups issued a high-profile call to close low-performing online charters. Reporting in states including Indiana and Colorado has raised concerns about misspending and inflated student enrollment in certain virtual charters.

Patrick Wolf, a University of Arkansas professor, noted that existing research may not be able to adequately account for the type of students who opt into virtual schools when assessing the quality of the education in these settings.

“Students who learn remotely may also perform somewhat lower than expected on in-person state assessments, not because of instruction quality, but because the testing environment itself is unfamiliar,” said Brooke Gabbert, a spokesperson for K12 virtual schools. “These students typically learn and test at home.”

A teacher at New York City’s district-run online school previously told Chalkbeat that students go virtual for a variety of reasons, such as disabilities that make attending a regular school challenging; flexibility for students who are caregivers; and difficulties in a prior school.

“Many of our students face social and personal challenges, so our work extends beyond delivering content,” said the teacher, Jude Julien.

Wolf says if test scores are a priority, online schooling is probably not a good option for most. “Parents should be informed about that reality and factor it into their decision making,” he says. The growth of virtual schooling is a sign of the times, though: The priority in education policy in recent years has been responding to parent demand rather than raising test scores.

Since online schools have grown rapidly, up-to-date and better research about the quality of education they’re providing seems like an urgent priority.

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

Open or closed? Some Colorado programs for homeschoolers remain in limbo after turbulent summer

2026-08-26T21:33:36+00:00

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As the school year begins, leaders at Denver’s Bluff Lake Nature Center are searching for a way to keep offering publicly funded enrichment classes that teach homeschooled students about water quality, wildlife tracking, shelter building, and foraging.

Space Academy, a Colorado Springs program that teaches homeschoolers about rocketry, is pausing its once-a-week classes this school year.

The contrasting decisions show how different homeschool enrichment providers are reacting to the sudden demise of the controversial group that had authorized their programs. That group — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES — is dissolving after a recent crackdown by the state.

The dissolution affects 44 state-funded homeschool enrichment programs and comes after a roller coaster year that brought intense scrutiny and strict rules to public homeschool enrichment offerings. If all 44 programs retained an authorizer and received approval, they could have served more than 6,000 Colorado homeschoolers this year at a cost of more than $35 million in state dollars.

But in all likelihood, the numbers will be much lower. That’s because some homeschool programs authorized by ERBOCES have already closed, and others, including Space Academy, are pausing in the hopes of relaunching under a new authorizer in fall 2027.

Authorizers handle certain administrative tasks and serve as a conduit for state funding.

Controversial group that opened ‘Colorado’s first public Christian school’ will close after 13 years

Some homeschool enrichment programs previously authorized by ERBOCES are scrambling to find a school district or charter school willing to authorize them so they can continue providing tuition-free classes this year.

It’s unclear how many of the 44 programs are seeking new authorizers and how many have closed their doors temporarily or permanently. Programs have until Sept. 4 to find new authorizers and inform the state.

“We are in conversations with numerous people about alternate paths to authorization for this school year prior to (the Colorado Department of Education’s) deadline in September,” Rachel Hutchens, executive director of Bluff Lake Nature Center, said in an email.

Last year, Bluff Lake’s program served about 35 homeschoolers.

Verónica Corral Flores, Space Academy’s program director, said in an email that her program won’t hold its usual weekly classes this year but will offer free monthly sessions where homeschooling families can build and launch their own rockets. Grant money will cover the cost of the rocket kits, she said.

New rules, more oversight for homeschool enrichment

A state law passed last spring put new guardrails on public education co-ops like ERBOCES, which had long been lightly regulated.

Since the pandemic, the Monument-based group had authorized a flood of homeschool enrichment programs across the state. Lawmakers grew alarmed over mounting state spending on homeschool enrichment and news that some programs subsidized private schools while others offered activities that public school families had to pay for, including horseback riding, skiing, and jiu-jitsu lessons.

The new guardrails include strict criteria for receiving state funding and a new layer of review for homeschool enrichment programs that operate outside the boundaries of the school district or BOCES that authorizes them.

ERBOCES authorized more than 50 homeschool enrichment programs last school year. Earlier this summer, it submitted applications on behalf of 44 of them to state reviewers. A few other authorizers — Aurora Public Schools and some charter schools — also submitted applications to the state for a handful of out-of-boundary homeschool programs.

By August, ERBOCES was on the brink of collapse because of defections by member institutions and a state crackdown over an improperly constituted board and misspent state money. Then, on Aug 17, its most critical member, School District 49, voted to dissolve the co-op.

That left the 44 homeschool enrichment programs in limbo. Complicating matters, the state had reviewed only half the applications submitted by ERBOCES, approving three, including Space Academy and Bluff Lake.

The state denied 18, several because homeschool enrichment funding would subsidize students attending private schools, reviewers said. A state spokesperson said denied programs could submit clarifying information and ask for a second review. Only a few have done that so far, they said.

A waiting game for families

Gran Via, a bilingual outdoor education program in metro Denver, is one former ERBOCES program that found a home with a new authorizer: an Aurora charter school called Wildflower Montessori. Bill Knous, executive director of Gran Via, said his group switched authorizers before ERBOCES was dissolved. Gran Via had long been in talks with Wildflower because both take a Montessori approach and have similar missions, Knous said.

But finding a new authorizer is only half the battle. Gran Via is still waiting for the state to decide on its application to operate at a park and library outside Aurora one day a week. Without state approval, Knous can’t officially enroll homeschool students or get state funding.

With the school year underway, that puts Gran Via families, including some with neurodivergent children who’ve struggled at traditional schools, in a bind, Knous said.

“They’re not focused on all the politics,” he said. ”They’re simply thinking about, ‘Is my kid going to be seen, valued, and known at school?’”

For now, Knous said Gran Via is visiting with families one on one to keep them connected to the program while it awaits a decision. He choked up as he shared some of the worries parents have about losing the program.

“It’s very hard for them, right?” Knous said. “Because they’re like, ‘What if this doesn’t happen? What do we do?’”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Arizona court kills voucher ballot measure, leaving a national school choice debate unresolved

2026-08-18T23:19:16+00:00

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The Arizona Supreme Court effectively killed a ballot measure that would have brought significant oversight and an income cap to the state’s school voucher-like program in a ruling Tuesday.

The battle over the measure brought high drama to the desert — and exposed cracks forming between conservatives over oversight of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, which families can use like vouchers on homeschooling, private school, and other expenses.

Those divisions are still in play: In the state superintendent’s race, Arizona voters will choose between two candidates who disagree sharply about whether the ESAs need more regulations. Yet the ballot measure’s failure demonstrates that enacting new rules for longstanding universal school choice programs can be a difficult task in the current climate — even if some voucher supporters express qualified support for those limits.

Arizona has long been a proving ground for the school choice movement. ESAs became open to all families four years ago. Some say the program represents a huge victory for families and triggered a much-needed explosion in new education models. To others, the accounts have become a boondoggle ripe for abuse.

Voucher opponents had hoped to tap those concerns about misspending and ask voters directly whether to impose new regulations. Conservative school choice supporters treated the proposal like an existential threat to educational freedom, and used every tool from competing ballot measures to signature petition challenges to thwart the effort.

The signature challenge ultimately carried the day. The state Supreme Court invalidated enough signatures that it appears impossible for the measure, known as the Protect Education Act, to make the ballot. The state teachers union, one of the measure’s key supporters, conceded defeat Tuesday.

While a large contingent of notable Republicans, including former Gov. Doug Ducey, cheered the demise of the Protect Education Act, officials behind it wrote that the court’s ruling “does not reflect what Arizona voters want” in a statement to The Arizona Republic.

Polling from late last year indicated that voters had an appetite for better management of the ESA program. What to do with that public sentiment divided school choice supporters.

The American Federation for Children — a staunchly conservative organization once chaired by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — backed a compromise measure intended to defang the Protect Education Act. It accused other pro-voucher groups of “playing Russian roulette” with Arizona children’s futures. Critics of the federation shot back that the group “burned a lot of bridges locally and nationally” through its efforts in Arizona.

Brian Jodice, a spokesperson for the organization, said in a statement after the state Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling that the American Federation for Children would “continue working for real solutions.”

“It is wrong and reckless to risk 100,000 scholarships, every year, to keep this program unchanged and out of step with all other similar programs across the country,” he wrote.

But with the Supreme Court ruling, that gamble appears to have paid off, at least for now.

Robert Enlow, the president and CEO of EdChoice, said Arizona has led the way in “true parental autonomy.” Imposing any guardrails risks reversing that progress for the school choice movement, he said.

“Arizona is way out in front of everyone else,” he said. “That’s where it has the real national impact.”

The court’s ruling comes just weeks after the question of whether and how much to regulate ESAs emerged as a key issue in the election for the top education job in the state.

Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne, a strong school choice supporter, lost his reelection bid in the July Republican primary to state Treasurer Kimberly Yee.

Yee accused Horne of overstepping his authority because his office rejected some Empowerment Scholarship Account purchases by parents because it deemed them not educational expenses. Such decisions should be up to state lawmakers, she said. Horne shot back that Yee’s logic would allow people to use the accounts for suspect items, like Rolex watches.

Republican primary voters favored Yee in a race that became the most expensive election to date for state superintendent, according to The Beam, an investigative news outlet.

In an email to Chalkbeat, Yee wrote that she’d protect taxpayer dollars “with transparency and accountability.” She did not answer questions about whether she feels the program needs more oversight or specific new guardrails.

Yee will now face Democrat Teresa Ruiz — a former community college president — in November.

Ruiz, who wants to build up oversight of the program if elected, told Chalkbeat that management of the ESA program is the “number one” topic that’s come up when talking to prospective constituents.

“While there are, I’m sure, some appropriate educational expenses, we also know that the un-educational things have gone through,” she said.

With the ballot measure essentially dead, the superintendents’ race could become the next test for how voters feel about regulating school choice.

Passing such regulations through Republican-dominated legislatures has proved challenging. And at least one recent election suggests GOP politicians could pay a price for indicating interest in them.

In 2025, Florida Republicans considered legislation that would address financial mismanagement of the state’s voucher program, after an audit flagged millions of dollars that weren’t accounted for. They ultimately abandoned the effort. This year, lawmakers in West Virginia considered but did not advance legislation to try to contain the costs of vouchers.

In this year’s Iowa GOP gubernatorial race, U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra expressed concerns about private schools not accepting all students using the state’s education savings accounts — only for fellow Republicans to accuse him of betrayal. He lost his June primary election, despite getting President Donald Trump’s endorsement.

Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee in that election, Rob Sand, believes that calling for more regulations for vouchers is a winning issue.

He has conceded, however, that there’s “no chance” Iowa will repeal the program, since Republicans have firm control of the legislature.

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

Controversial group that opened ‘Colorado’s first public Christian school’ will close after 13 years

2026-08-18T22:47:51+00:00

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An education group that last year authorized “Colorado’s first public Christian school” soon will dissolve, following a Monday night vote by a key member institution.

The school board in School District 49 unanimously approved the dissolution of Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES.

Monday’s vote represents a major turnabout from two months ago, when the District 49 board briefly considered dropping out of the co-op but opted to stay another year. After 13 years of existence, ERBOCES leaves a legacy of school choice advocacy and a long string of controversies.

The change of fortune for ERBOCES comes after growing scrutiny by state education officials, who this month cracked down on the co-op over what they said was an improperly constituted board, invalid contracts, and misspent state money.

In addition to launching the “public Christian school,” called Riverstone Academy, ERBOCES has created dozens of publicly funded homeschool enrichment programs in the last few years. The flood of programs, including some that paid for ski passes and sports camps and others that subsidized private schools, drew the ire of state lawmakers last spring.

ERBOCES is one of 21 such public education co-ops in Colorado. Most are composed of several school districts that band together to provide services such as special education. ERBOCES has operated differently, opening schools and programs that serve students across the state.

About a dozen parents, students, and homeschool program providers spoke at Monday’s meeting, with several urging the board to help homeschool enrichment programs that are now in limbo and prevent students from being “collateral damage.” Others said dissolving ERBOCES will help the district avoid reputational damage, legal fees, and fines that might come with staying in the co-op.

ERBOCES’ dissolution, which will take place over the coming school year, means the group can no longer authorize any schools or programs. During the wind-down process, the five-member District 49 board will take over as the co-op’s governing body and the district’s business office will assume financial oversight.

ERBOCES will no longer be led by an executive director as of Sept. 15, according to the resolution approved Monday.

In addition, District 49 will become the authorizer during the 2026-27 school year of six online schools previously authorized by ERBOCES: Williamsburg Academy, Pikes Peak Online School, Summit Connections Academy, and an elementary, middle, and high school all under the Colorado Preparatory Academy brand.

Less clear is the fate of ERBOCES’ homeschool enrichment programs, which last year enrolled more than 8,000 students, most in one-day-a-week classes. Some closed this summer but more than 40 are up for approval by the state.

According to Monday’s resolution, District 49 will not take on those programs. State officials are expected to release more information this week.

Different perspectives on ERBOCES

While District 49 board members all voted for the resolution Monday, they had different perspectives on what brought the problem to a head this summer.

Board member Mike Heil urged the audience to remember that ERBOCES officials were the decision-makers who were “testing the law and finally got caught at it.”

“We know for fact now, as more evidence has come forward, that some of these homeschool enrichment programs were essentially subsidizing private religious schools, and you can’t do that with public money,” he said.

Board President Marie LaVere-Wright said publicly funded homeschool enrichment has been “highly, highly, highly unregulated” in Colorado because the original law that allowed it was broad and vague.

“That doesn’t mean anybody … did something illegal necessarily because they operated in an unregulated environment,” she said.

LaVere-Wright, who helped start ERBOCES and previously served on its board, described the group’s dissolution as an awful situation, but said it’s the right thing to do.

Board member Lori Thompson, who recently joined the ERBOCES board, said the group has done incredible things.

“Was every step correct?” she said. “Anyone can be a Monday morning quarterback, but I am proud of ERBOCES.”

Constant controversies prompted state concerns

The demise of ERBOCES comes after a stream of controversies last school year. Those include revelations that the co-op launched Riverstone Academy at the behest of a conservative law firm to spark a lawsuit over the question of public funding for religious schools. ERBOCES filed a religious liberty lawsuit against the state in February, but the case fizzled when Riverstone closed permanently in June.

ERBOCES has also drawn criticism because, for years, some of its board members have been ineligible under state law. Also, the co-op has often used contractors and subcontractors that effectively shield its programs from state oversight and public scrutiny.

State lawmakers addressed some concerns about ERBOCES last spring by putting strict new limits on how and where such co-ops can authorize schools and programs. But the ongoing tumult seemed to be wearing on the group’s three members and it appeared member defections might tank ERBOCES this summer.

State law requires such co-ops to have at least two member institutions, and one must be a school district.

The Elizabeth School District dropped out of ERBOCES in June. District 49 considered it but opted not to. The third member, Pikes Peak State College, announced that it would leave the group in mid-August.

As that deadline neared, Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova urged ERBOCES to dissolve. She also chastised the group over another emerging controversy: The co-op’s plan to lend a Woodland Park charter school $3 million.

But a week before Pikes Peak was set to withdraw, ERBOCES officials unearthed an old agreement that required more notice and the college agreed to stay till next summer.

For a few days it seemed that ERBOCES would be able to stay open. But on Aug. 13., Córdova threw the book at ERBOCES. In a second letter urging the co-op to dissolve, she suggested that Pikes Peak State College never legally joined and that many of the group’s contracts are void because its board has been improperly constituted for years.

She also ordered ERBOCES to immediately repay the state for funding provided to Riverstone Academy, citing a recent court decision.

That night, District 49 Superintendent Peter Hilts recommended to his school board that ERBOCES be dissolved and Monday’s vote was quickly scheduled.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

The most advantaged students attend the best-funded colleges. Does it have to be this way?

2026-08-18T14:28:17+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.

The prevailing philosophy of American higher education is simple enough: The best-funded universities ought to be reserved for the best-qualified students, who are largely from advantaged backgrounds.

Such is the reality described in a new study set to be released through the National Bureau of Economic Research in the coming weeks. The paper documents the all-encompassing stratification of American higher education. It is not simply that top students go to more selective colleges; it’s that those colleges spend far more on their students’ education. This is not just true of elite private universities; it applies to public colleges as well.

In practice, higher education’s pyramid-like structure means that the rich — both academically and financially — get richer through a well-funded college education. At the moment, higher education is under fire for what critics describe as equity and DEI efforts run amok. Yet its intensely unequal structure remains solidly in place.

The basic facts described in this new study — by Princeton’s Zachary Bleemer and UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein — are not terribly surprising, but they are rarely laid out so starkly from top to bottom.

At hyper-elite private colleges, there are more students from the top 1% of family income than from the bottom 40%. At public flagship universities, students from the top 20% outnumber those from the bottom 80%. “The more selective the college, the higher-income are its students,” the study says. Those schools also, of course, enroll students with much higher test scores.

Young adults who don’t enroll in college at all tend to come from the least-advantaged families.

This income and academic stratification correlates neatly with the money spent on students’ education, Bleemer and Rothstein show. Elite private schools spend by far the most — often well over $50,000 per student on instruction — but the public system is also highly unequal. Selective public four-year colleges spend more than twice as much per student as community colleges.

This resource gap was not always so extreme; it grew substantially between 1980 and 2010.

The study relies on detailed data to connect students’ family income to their college about a decade and a half ago; there is little evidence this relationship has weakened in the intervening years.

Bleemer and Rothstein say this current arrangement reflects a “meritocratic consensus” — the belief that the quality of students’ college education should depend on their success in high school. This is strangely uncontroversial. In K-12 schools, educators and policymakers often make efforts to drive more support and resources to struggling students. In higher education, the prevailing, albeit usually unstated, belief is that such students deserve less support.

The result is that American higher education widens the inequality of opportunity that begins in childhood. This system is not simply the result of free choices in a free market; it is supported, subsidized, and, in the case of public universities, created by the government.

The study is descriptive in nature, but Bleemer and Rothstein eventually acknowledge their own thinking. “There is little economic evidence justifying the status quo on efficiency grounds, and substantial room for skepticism,” they conclude.

Rothstein tells me that he would like to see more funding for community colleges. Bleemer notes that selective schools can exist without such massive resource differences.

Some adherents to higher ed’s “meritocratic consensus” have insisted that less academically prepared students do not benefit from the better-funded education that more selective colleges have to offer. Yet research suggests this is simply not the case, and it would be rather strange if it were.

When choosing a school, “the one number that you want to look up is what is being spent on a student in the college or university,” Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby recently advised. This is a key reason why equity advocates in higher education have been desperate to get more low-income students into elite schools, albeit with limited success.

The result of the current system is not simply that some students don’t get to attend their dream colleges. It’s that their fallback options often provide a worse-quality education.

Yet efforts to break the “meritocratic consensus” have drawn fierce pushback. At the University of California system, faculty have complained about underprepared students slipping through the admissions sieve since standardized tests were dropped from consideration. The response, faculty and others insist, should be to keep such students out. Little attention is paid to where they would go instead.

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

The end could be near for the Colorado education group that opened ‘public Christian school’

2026-08-14T21:40:55+00:00

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A controversial Colorado education group that launched a now-defunct “public Christian school” last year could soon dissolve after the state’s top education official urged the move this week and the group’s most crucial member considers leaving.

The 13-year-old group — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES — authorizes six online schools and a host of publicly funded programs for homeschool students. If the Monument-based co-op closes, some schools and programs might move to other authorizers, and some might permanently close.

In a Thursday letter to ERBOCES, Education Commissioner Susana Córdova pushed the group to dissolve, citing legal violations and questionable conduct. She suggested one of the group’s two member institutions never legally joined; that many of the group’s contracts are void because its board has been improperly constituted for years; and that it has misspent state money, including by funding private schools.

The 5-page letter represents the state’s most aggressive effort yet to hold ERBOCES accountable and reflects the extent to which the group has been a thorn in the education department’s side.

ERBOCES officials have long said their goal is to provide innovative education options to Colorado families, but critics argue that the co-op pushes the boundaries of — and in some cases breaks — state law.

Ken Witt, the executive director of ERBOCES, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

In her letter, Córdova ordered ERBOCES to repay the state by Tuesday for around $300,000 given to the “public Christian school,” Riverstone Academy, and provide the department with a host of documents. The demand for repayment is surprising because the state previously backpedaled on a suggestion that it could claw back the money given to Riverstone.

The rationale presented in the letter was a court ruling this week that invalidated a 2025 school board agreement that allowed Riverstone to open last summer.

Because the agreement “was null and void, ERBOCES was never authorized to submit” Riverstone students for state funding, Córdova wrote.

Riverstone received the state funding before it closed permanently in May.

Co-op has recently faced member defections

ERBOCES has spent much of the summer with its future in jeopardy — losing members and struggling to find new ones. State law requires such co-ops to have at least two member institutions, and one must be a school district.

Currently, ERBOCES’ two members are School District 49 in El Paso County and Pikes Peak State College. In June, the Elizabeth school district left the group. Pikes Peak announced around the same time that it would leave the group in mid-August, but as the exit date neared, college officials agreed to stay till next June.

The school board in District 49, which has been ERBOCES’ most stalwart member and its fiscal agent, also considered leaving ERBOCES this summer but opted to stay for another year.

That could change next week.

Superintendent Peter Hilts recommended the dissolution of ERBOCES to the school board Thursday evening, saying there’s no longer a legitimate, responsible path forward for the co-op.

He praised ERBOCES’ efforts to launch new schools and programs, then said, “but Icarus is coming back to Earth” — referring to a Greek myth in which a character flies too close to the sun and falls.

The board will hold a special meeting Monday to discuss the matter.

Board member Mike Heil, who led the charge to exit ERBOCES earlier this summer, said by email Friday that being part of ERBOCES is damaging the district’s reputation. He said the co-op has created some excellent programs, but that officials there have shown poor judgement.

He also noted ERBOCES’s inability to attract a new member this summer.

“I interpret the lack of suitors to be a collective, statewide referendum on ERBOCES, and their dissolution is therefore correct,” Heil said.

Board member Holly Withers said by phone she was stunned when Hilts suggested that ERBOCES should dissolve because he’s been a supporter of the group and because in June the board discussed the issue and decided to stay.

“I was willing to stay involved in ERBOCES on a probationary type level while they get their affairs in order,” she said.

Withers said she trusts Hilts’ recommendation that ERBOCES should dissolve, but she worries about the families that will be affected and hopes the co-op has a plan to help them.

Last year, ERBOCES online schools enrolled about 4,700 students and its homeschool enrichment programs enrolled more than 8,000 students. The future of many of those programs is up in the air due to state law changes.

Education chief’s letter cites numerous concerns

Córdova’s letter to ERBOCES cited numerous problems, some dating back years and some surfacing in the last month.

Among the concerns she cited are:

That Pikes Peak State College was never a legitimate member of ERBOCES because there’s no documentation showing its governing board approved its membership as required by law.
That ERBOCES’ board has not been properly constituted “for several years, possibly over a decade,” which means board decisions during that time are void.
ERBOCES’ plan to loan $3 million to a charter school in Woodland Park. She said there’s “no legal reason a loan for the benefit of another district’s constituents can plausibly be considered a reasonable and necessary expense,” and therefore is invalid.
ERBOCES’ payment of nearly $800,000 to a private Christian school last school year, which the department suspects is directly funding tuition for private school students.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

New York loses millions in sex ed money after uptick in teen pregnancies

2026-08-14T20:30:20+00:00

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Over the past two and a half years, 17-year-old Ana Ortega has visited dozens of high school classrooms across the South Bronx and Harlem, leading conversations about consent, healthy dating behaviors, and safe sex with students her own age.

“A lot of teenagers don’t want to talk to adults because they don’t want to be judged,” she said.

Ortega is a peer mentor with the teen pregnancy prevention initiative at Children’s Aid, which provides sexual health education to New York City youth in schools, community centers, and foster care facilities. But parts of the initiative will soon come to an end. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration launched an effort to gut and reshape an Obama-era federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy, which Children’s Aid had relied on for over 10 years to provide sexual education in vulnerable communities.

As part of that overhaul, the federal Department of Health and Human Services notified the nonprofit that it was terminating its grant effective immediately, two years before it was set to expire. “The reason provided was that the initiative no longer aligned with HHS’s priorities,” said Rhonda Braxton, a vice president at Children’s Aid.

The organization is among three New York grantees that are losing over $4.3 million in annual federal funding to support evidence-based sexual health education for over 19,000 young people each year.

The funding cuts come at what reproductive health advocates describe as a critical time. Although the national teen birth rate remains near a historic low, teen pregnancy rates in New York state and New York City rose between 2021 and 2023 — the first increase in two decades, according to the latest available state and city data. (A vast body of research has linked teen pregnancy and birth to difficulty completing high school, pursuing higher education, and getting well-paying jobs.)

Of 67 federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants nationwide, all but 14 have been terminated as HHS shifts its focus to abstinence-based initiatives.

Last week, members of New York’s congressional delegation sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. urging him to reinstate funding to the three programs that lost it.

Braxton said Children’s Aid’s initiative relies on building trust with youth, and goes beyond pregnancy prevention to address positive body image, sexually transmitted infections, and healthy decision-making.

Now, Braxton said, “young people are losing those trusted relationships in an era of misinformation and mistrust.”

Children’s Aid is looking for more funding to make up for the loss of the $936,700 annual grant. If it can’t find it, the nonprofit will have to eliminate most of its programming, including many of its peer mentors and sex ed at the city’s Children’s Center, a temporary intake facility for children awaiting placement in foster care. (Youth in foster care experience higher rates of teen pregnancy and childbirth than their peers, research shows.)

In their letter to HHS, lawmakers wrote that Children’s Aid was the only organization providing sexual health education “to a highly vulnerable population that may be at increased risk of trafficking, sexual abuse, and unplanned teen pregnancy.”

HHS also canceled funding for NYC Teens Connection, a city program that partners with schools, foster care agencies, and juvenile justice programs to improve teens’ decision-making skills and connect them with local health clinics. Since 2010, the initiative has worked with over 400 organizations and served nearly 130,000 teenagers across the five boroughs.

It’s now set to lose $3.9 million in funding over the next two years, putting 15 staff members at risk of losing their jobs. New York City Health Department spokesperson Rachel Vick said in a statement that the initiative and others like it have helped contribute to a 79% decrease in teen pregnancies in New York City over the last three decades.

“Teenagers want truth and honesty from the adults in their lives, and programs that center the real-world experience of the young people they serve,” Vick said.

There were over 20,000 fewer teen pregnancies in New York City in 2023 than in 2000. But lawmakers and advocates say that post-pandemic increases in the city’s teen pregnancy rate underscore the need for comprehensive sex ed: Between 2022 and 2023, teen pregnancy rates increased across all boroughs other than Brooklyn. It’s unclear what exactly drove the trend, but the city’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior survey reflected an increase in the number of sexually active students not using contraception since 2021.

The cuts also eliminate $1.4 million annually for the HOPE Buffalo program, run by health care nonprofit Cicatelli Associates. The program helped drive a 36 percent decline in teen pregnancy rates across high-poverty Buffalo neighborhoods from 2015 to 2020, according to the group.

Cicatelli Associates did not respond to a request for comment.

Meredith Ouderkirk, director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York, which partnered with Cicatelli to offer the program, said that because New York is run by Democrats, people may assume that everyone has access to comprehensive sex ed. But the state’s sex ed mandate is limited and gives school districts significant discretion, she said, making a child’s access to evidence-based sex education dependent on where they live.

The state Department of Health, which does not currently receive funding through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said it may be able to fill gaps left by the federal cuts through its own initiatives that fund community-based projects.

Reproductive health organizations are less optimistic.

“If this changes the ability to reach even one young person and that results in an unintended pregnancy, that can be life-changing and devastating,” Ouderkirk said.

Colorado school board involved in ‘public Christian school’ drama violated open meetings law, judge rules

2026-08-12T21:04:41+00:00

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A Colorado school board violated the state’s open meetings law by concealing the true nature of a “public Christian school” the board allowed to open last year, a state judge ruled Tuesday.

In addition, the decision by Pueblo District Court Judge Michelle Chostner found an open meetings violation related to an appointment the school board made last winter.

Together, these findings represent a major — and potentially expensive — defeat for the Pueblo County School District 70 school board, the defendant in the lawsuit.

Chostner’s ruling invalidates the February appointment of Susie Carnes to a vacant seat on the Pueblo 70 school board, and requires a new meeting so the four other board members can vote to fill the seat. Tuesday’s ruling also invalidates a June 2025 agreement approved by the Pueblo 70 school board that allowed the launch of the “public Christian school.”

That school, Riverstone Academy, closed permanently in May, but the court ruling could open the way for the state to claw back around $300,000 in public funding given to the school

The Pueblo 70 school board must also pay the plaintiffs’ attorney fees, the judge said.

The ruling is a win for Jonathan Lewis, Tara Stroesenreuther, and Adolph Vigil, the three school board candidates who brought the lawsuit in March after they were passed over for the vacant board seat.

The Pueblo 70 school board voted earlier this summer to authorize an immediate appeal if the ruling ordered the removal of a board member or a meeting to fill a board vacancy. As of mid–day Wednesday, no appeal paperwork had been filed with the court.

A Pueblo 70 spokesperson said by email Wednesday the district doesn’t comment on active litigation.

Although in their lawsuit the plaintiffs sought a vote to fill the vacant seat that Carnes filled, they wanted it to happen under slightly different conditions than what the ruling prescribed. That is, with voting only by the three board members who remained at a Feb. 10 meeting after one member had a seizure and departed. That scenario, which the judge did not require, would potentially yield a vote for one of the plaintiffs, not Carnes.

Asked about whether the state would seek to recover public dollars it previously gave to Riverstone Academy, a Colorado Department of Education spokesman said by email Wednesday that, “We are reviewing the decision to determine whether it will impact funding.”

Last fall, department officials suggested they could claw back Riverstone’s funding following an audit, but subsequently backpedaled on that.

The 30-student school, which used Christian curriculum and offered students a “Christian foundation,” was intended to spark a lawsuit over the question of public funding for religious schools that would go to the U.S. Supreme Court. That lawsuit was filed last winter, but fizzled when the school closed.

Chostner invalidated the Riverstone agreement approved by the Pueblo 70 board because the board did not reveal Riverstone’s religious character or its purpose in two meeting agendas or meetings. The district’s lawyer, who helped launch Riverstone, had shared that information in a private letter to the board.

“Riverstone’s true nature should have been made clear both to the public, and to the voting board members, by way of the agendas,” Chostner wrote.

Chostner noted that some board members seemed to be in the dark about Riverstone, even as they voted to approve the agreement in June 2025. Two board members testified in court that they hadn’t read the email from the lawyer, Brad Miller, prior to either meeting where the board considered the Riverstone agreement.

Two others “did read the email but nonetheless during their testimony questioned whether they fully understood the import of the email,” she wrote.

A.J. Wilson, the board’s vice president, said during the June trial that he’d read the email and thought the idea of pursuing a test case was “kind of stupid” because “you should never go looking for a lawsuit.”

But that belief didn’t play into his vote to approve the Riverstone agreement, he said, “because that was kind of their prerogative, and if they wanted to pursue that, then it shouldn’t have affected the district at all.”

Riverstone’s opening led to a tumultuous year in the 12,000-student district, contributing to the sudden resignation of a board member, numerous tense public meetings, and the lawsuit against the school board.

Board president’s secret appointment violated Colorado law

Tuesday’s ruling said Susie Carnes’ selection to the Pueblo 70 board was a violation of Colorado’s open meetings law because the school board president, Ann Bennett, made the appointment over email without providing public notice.

“The appointment was done in secret: precisely the type of formal action the (Colorado Open Meetings Law) prohibits,” Chostner wrote.

Although the plaintiffs had argued that two February school board meetings around the time of Carnes’ appointment violated the open meetings law, the judge didn’t agree. She said both meetings were properly noticed.

Even so, Chostner found fault with Bennett’s decision at one meeting to break quorum and leave unannounced. That happened on Feb. 10, when the board deadlocked on picking a board member with repeated 2-2 ties. Then Wilson had a seizure and left the meeting. Bennett, who had sided with Wilson in the vacancy votes, never returned from the 10-minute recess she’d called or adjourned the meeting.

Chostner said there’s no evidence Bennett needed to end the meeting, because “the other board members were present and were ready to continue voting,” she wrote.

Six days after the unadjourned meeting, Bennett announced that she’d appointed Carnes to the vacant seat. Under Colorado law, school board presidents can appoint a new member if the board can’t agree on a candidate after 60 days.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

A controversial Colorado education group was in danger of dissolving. A 2013 agreement just saved it.

2026-08-12T00:36:56+00:00

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A controversial Colorado education group will continue to exist for at least 10 more months after a clause in a 13-year-old agreement prevented one member from exiting.

Until late last week, the group, Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES, appeared to be on the brink of collapse because Pikes Peak State College was set to withdraw Aug. 15.

Colorado Education Commissioner Susana Córdova sent ERBOCES a letter on Friday suggesting the co-op should start dissolving, since it would soon have a single member, School District 49 in El Paso County. State law requires two.

But a lawyer for ERBOCES responded, saying a 2013 agreement required Pikes Peak to give a year’s notice before withdrawing. The college isn’t fighting the requirement.

“There was an agreement signed in 2013 that I feel compelled to honor,” said Lance Bolton, the president of Pikes Peak. “I think it’s just a matter of integrity.”

The decision represents a win for supporters of ERBOCES, which authorizes several online schools and dozens of publicly funded programs for homeschoolers. It’s a setback for opponents who argue that ERBOCES often operates in the gray areas of state law.

Ken Witt, ERBOCES executive director, said by email Monday, “We are grateful that Pikes Peak State College committed in their membership MOU to one year’s notice before withdrawal.”

ERBOCES has recently been at the center of two major controversies: the creation of a now defunct “public Christian school” and the launch of homeschool programs that used state money to pay for sports camps, horseback riding, and skiing.

Colorado lawmakers cracked down last spring, limiting the group’s ability to authorize public schools and homeschool programs. The Colorado Department of Education has also recently taken a harder line on ERBOCES.

Bolton said the Pikes Peak State College announced it would withdraw from ERBOCES in June not because it had an opinion on the “Christian public school” or homeschool enrichment programs.

“We’re not against them. We’re not for them.” he said. “They’re just not what we’re here for.”

He said the college originally joined in hopes of collaborating on concurrent enrollment efforts, which has been a small part of ERBOCES’ work. As a member of ERBOCES, Pikes Peak gets to have a representative on the co-op’s board. Bolton said the college’s previous board representative has too much on her plate, and a new one will be selected.

In June, when Pikes Peak announced it would withdraw from ERBOCES on Aug. 15, Witt put out a cordial statement saying members occasionally choose to leave and expressing appreciation for members past and present. The effort to enforce the 2013 agreement just days before Pikes Peak was set to depart suggests ERBOCES is having trouble recruiting new members.

Córdova, in her letter to Witt on Friday, wrote, “in the absence of an eligible partner, by August 16, ERBOCES will no longer be eligible to exist as a BOCES, operate schools and programs, or receive state funding.”

She also wrote, “Recent actions from the ERBOCES board have not demonstrated the reasonable and necessary use of public funds.”

She warned the co-op not to go through with a planned $3 million loan to a Woodland Park charter school, indicating that ERBOCES does not have the legal authority to make the loan.

“We are unaware of any statutory authority for such an intergovernmental loan and see no basis for concluding that a loan for the benefit of another district’s constituents can plausibly be considered a reasonable and necessary expense of the BOCES,” Córdova wrote.

At the ERBOCES board meeting in late July, Witt sounded optimistic about recruiting new members.

He acknowledged Pikes Peak’s plan to withdraw and talked of a “live conversation” with a potential new member he didn’t name. He also talked about starting a program to pay institutions that agree to join ERBOCES.

“Because we are actively recruiting new members, and we really need some incentive beyond just participate for the dialogue, we want to offer … a stipend for member districts that choose to join,” he said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@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.

Q&A: The case against blanket screen-time limits in schools

2026-08-06T14:20:59+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’s a tough time to be an education technology enthusiast.

Ed-tech was once widely touted as key to improving learning, but these days many state officials, school leaders, teachers, and parents want to get students off screens in class.

Richard Culatta, the CEO of ISTE, a nonprofit that convenes and trains educators on using tech, has watched this furor grow with a combination of sympathy and alarm. In his telling, the tech backlash is understandable, but the solutions — blanket restrictions in some cases — are not. Echoing many advocates and companies, Culatta insists that schools not throw the ed-tech baby out with the bathwater. Yet he readily concedes there’s a lot of bathwater.

Incidentally, ISTE recently rebranded from the International Society for Technology in Education to the International Society for Transforming Education. Culatta, who’s led the organization for nearly a decade, says the name shift has been in the works for some time and is not a response to ed-tech’s brand crisis.

I’ve heard a lot recently from skeptics of ed-tech, which is why I wanted to talk to Culatta, who has emerged as a leading defender of the value of tech in schools. I was interested in Culatta’s take on why this backlash happened, how to tell good ed-tech from bad, and what role screens should play in early grades.

Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Photo of Richard Culatta

Why do you think there has been such an intense backlash to ed-tech in recent months?

You know, in some ways I’m surprised it’s taken this long. I was watching how we were managing technology in the wake of COVID, and we were not doing it very thoughtfully. When you start handing out devices very quickly without preparing teachers, without carefully selecting the tools, without monitoring them for quality, stuff starts to go off the rails.

The implication is that there has been a lot of bad ed-tech use, right? What does that look like?

People very quickly want to focus on the tools, on the screens, and it just doesn’t line up with what we see. It’s almost entirely about how the technology is used. In some cases, we have kids just clicking next through PowerPoint, and that’s terrible learning. That’s just the equivalent of a worksheet on a screen.

So I think we just need to have a moment where we go back and say ‘we did things wrong.’ Unfortunately, what we’re hearing are far less effective strategies. I mean, our friends in L.A. are doing the worst possible approach to trying to course correct.

[The Los Angeles school board recently approved limits on screen time, set by grade level. For instance, in fourth and fifth grades, students will be limited to 30 minutes per day. Before second grade, devices will generally not be used. School board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin recently explained the rationale behind this shift to me.]

What do you object to about what Los Angeles is doing?

If you have a technology that is not supporting learning, zero minutes should be used. And if you have cases where technology is being used in thoughtful ways, it should have more flexibility. It’s going to mean that all of the energy is spent on clocking and timing as opposed to actually training teachers.

Do you think first graders and kindergartners should be spending any amount of time on screens?

It depends. All technology use should be aligned to student needs and learning goals. The use cases where that makes sense for young students are fewer and far between. Banning rarely is a good strategy.

I saw, ironically, in L.A. a number of years ago, a great example of kindergartners practicing reading. Instead of doing these traditional book reports — that were just painful and boring — they were making videos explaining the words they were using. So lots of vocabulary repetition, lots of good use of words in context. Should it have been done for a very long time? No, but in this case it wasn’t.

I’m old enough to remember when there was incredible hype about the possibility of ed-tech driving substantial learning gains. Was ed-tech oversold?

I don’t think it was oversold. It was oversimplified, and so this idea that you could just put some software in front of a kid with no need for a teacher anymore — I mean, we’d hear stuff like that. What happens is when there are big sweeping statements like ‘oh technology will solve everything’ and then it doesn’t — of course it doesn’t — then people think technology is garbage, and we should ban it.

My colleague did a story recently about the sheer number of sales pitches from tech companies that a school district leader gets. And I’m sure every sales pitch came with, ‘oh we’re curriculum-aligned, we’re evidence-based.’

Why would we ever trust the company selling you the thing to tell you that?

Well, right, but then who do you trust? How do you know?

That is the job of education leaders. That is the job of teachers to know when it’s effective. In fairness, we do need to make it easier for schools to make those decisions. We have something that we’re piloting right now, which is called the EdTech Index. It is a database where we are collecting trusted third-party validations of tools and apps.

Do you think the growth of technology in schools over, say, the last decade has had a net positive effect on students?

In the cases where it’s been used in appropriate ways, the answer is yes. The challenge is that for every two schools that are doing this thoughtfully, there are two schools that are doing it in all the wrong ways. What you end up getting is results that are like, eh, doesn’t really make much of a difference. If you aren’t using it in a way that makes a significant difference, you’re guaranteed that it’s going to be distracting and limiting effective learning.

We have well-intentioned schools and educators, and if your theory is true, so many of them are using tech for ill rather than good — that’s a profound challenge.

Totally. I mean, you’re spot on. A follow-up question that you might ask is, well, even if it does make a difference in some places, just to avoid the risk, let’s just not use technology. And that would be reasonable if we didn’t care about our kids being able to get a job in the global economy.

But is it necessary to introduce those tools in, say, elementary school to prepare kids for a global economy?

100%. It’s not about the tools; it’s about behaviors. The behaviors need to happen over a long time. Being a healthy, contributing member of a digital world — that is a complex skill, just like learning to read and write, play an instrument, or play sports.

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

Who should go to college? More students may benefit than we think

2026-08-04T20:40:26+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.

It’s well known that college-educated workers earn more money, on average, than those with just a high school diploma. And there are few middle-class jobs available for workers without a degree, as I found in a recent data analysis.

So does that mean more people should go to college?

The Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli is skeptical. Many people who don’t attend college “were nowhere near college ready at the end of high school,” he wrote in response to my piece. Sending academically underprepared students to college does them no favors, Petrilli continues. Only 40% or so of high school students have demonstrated college readiness, he says. Pushing the other 60% to college could just lead them to debt without a degree.

I was curious about this myself. Should college be limited to those who do relatively well in high school? To get a better sense, I dug into the research. The findings surprised me.

It is genuinely complicated to determine the value of college and who should attend. While degreed workers make more money, we don’t know if that’s because they went to college.

Fortunately, researchers have developed a clever strategy to see whether four-year college makes a difference: tracking students who just managed to get into college and comparing them to similar peers who didn’t get that opportunity.

An influential 2014 study by Yale University economist Seth Zimmerman focused on Florida International University, a large four-year public college that provided a sharp admissions advantage to students whose GPAs were above 3.0. Zimmerman compared students right above and right below that threshold. The intuition is that someone with a 3.01 GPA is essentially identical to someone with a 2.99 average, except one person receives an admissions edge and the other doesn’t. This creates a natural experiment.

The students who just managed to get into FIU were not academic standouts — far from it. Their SAT scores, just over 800 out of 1600, were at the 21st percentile of high school seniors planning to attend college. For many, if they didn’t get into FIU, they wouldn’t have gone to a four-year college at all.

Zimmerman found a clear advantage for students who got the opportunity to attend FIU. Roughly a decade later, those students earned 22% more than similar students who didn’t get in. These earnings gains were well worth the cost of tuition.

Only about half of these marginal FIU students went on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. By comparison, the national graduation rate for four-year nonprofit colleges is roughly two-thirds. The study isn’t able to distinguish the effects on graduates versus non-graduates. It can only speak to the average effect. It’s possible that many non-graduates did not benefit or were even harmed. But they may have developed skills in college that helped them in the future, even though they didn’t earn a degree.

This was one paper in one particular setting, but the findings have shown up in other contexts too.

A Georgia study found students who just got into the state’s four-year public university system eventually earned 17% more annually by age 30 than similar non-admitted students. These were students at about the 30th percentile of SAT performance.
Research in Massachusetts found that low-income students who just got into state colleges there received large economic benefits years later. In high school, these students’ test scores were slightly below the average for high school graduates.
A Texas paper, using test-score admissions cutoffs across 35 public colleges, found a clear economic edge for students who won admission to a four-year school.

These studies generally look at students who otherwise would have attended a two-year college rather than no college at all. A different Texas study showed a clear hierarchy: Students fared better in four-year colleges than two-year schools, but a two-year program was better than no college at all. The two-year college advantage was for students at roughly the 30th percentile of high school test performance in the state. (One wrinkle: Another recent study in the state found marginal students didn’t seem to benefit from transferring to a four-year college from a two-year school.)

This body of research should be interpreted with some degree of caution. It looks at specific places and specific groups of students, who typically entered college decades ago. The papers find positive effects on average, but they don’t imply that everyone benefited. The studies can’t speak to whether AI will change the value of a degree, as some predict. The research also doesn’t show whether students are developing skills in college that help them succeed or whether they are getting hired because employers use a college education as a signal of skill.

Still, these papers find that even students who don’t excel in high school often stand to gain from attending college. Many, perhaps most, of these students would not have been categorized as “college ready” by traditional benchmarks. If anything, the research suggests that some states have set college admissions cutoffs that are too high, not too low.

“Given the population of people who want to go, we would benefit from helping more of them go, at least somewhat,” says Zimmerman, the Yale professor.

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

NYC revamps how schools handle school avoidance under legal agreement

2026-08-03T12:00:00+00:00

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New York City’s Education Department is changing how it responds to students who are chronically absent due to school avoidance, according to an agreement officials signed last week with the legal team that brought a class action lawsuit over the issue.

School avoidance, or school refusal as it’s sometimes called, is when students miss large stretches of school because of social or emotional disabilities, such as severe anxiety or depression.

The lawsuit, filed in October 2024 on behalf of four students with disabilities who stopped regularly attending school, claimed the nation’s largest school system had no policy or procedures to ensure students received the “free appropriate public education” they were entitled to under federal law.

The city spent more than a year hashing out an agreement with attorneys from the Legal Aid Society and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. The agreement signed Friday creates systemwide guidance and support, including a new mandate that every school across the five boroughs designate a school avoidance liaison.

The shift involves “amending policy, doubling down on training, and creating awareness,” said Flavia Puello-Perdomo, deputy chancellor for family partnership and community support.

“If we’re able to intervene earlier and address the needs of students and really get to the root cause of why students are not coming to school, then we are going to be able to address chronic absenteeism much better,” Puello-Perdomo said. “What is affecting that student from coming in? Is this related to anxiety? Is this related to depression? Is this … simply refusing to come to school because oftentimes not coming to school is, as we know, signs that kids are struggling.”

The Education Department began working on the agreement with the lawyers before a judge ultimately dismissed the lawsuit, believing the claims for each plaintiff could be handled through individual due process hearings. The lawyers, however, planned to appeal because they were challenging a lack of a systemic policy. But they continued working with the department instead, seeing the city was approaching it in “good faith,” attorneys said.

Building systemwide consistency and intervening earlier

Researchers estimate between 1% and 15% of children exhibit school refusal. Parents and educators believe the problem was exacerbated after the pandemic forced schools to shift to remote learning. Education Department officials said they don’t collect specific data on how many chronically absent students are avoiding school because of social or emotional issues. Overall, roughly 33% of city students were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, and officials hope the shift in approach will help address school-avoidant students before their absences pile up.

“The moment that we see that student attendance is dipping down, or that students are showing any of these types of behaviors, then we can intervene earlier and ensure that students are remaining engaged with school,” Puello-Perdomo said.

When students don’t show up to class, they often fall behind academically, which can make returning to school harder. Without official guidance on how to respond to students struggling with school refusal, the city’s nearly 1,600 schools have responded unevenly, Chalkbeat previously reported. While some schools have developed strong partnerships with families to create plans that gradually bring children back to campus, others have blamed parents for their children’s attendance problems and refused to help students who weren’t in the building, several families told Chalkbeat.

Under the agreement, schools must designate a school avoidance liaison — a teacher, school administrator, or other pedagogue — by Oct. 31 each year and provide that staffer with annual two-hour training on behaviors that lead to school refusal. The liaisons, or other staff at the school, must provide families information about mental health programs and options such as special education evaluations or reevaluations.

The agreement requires the Education Department to create training materials for district and school staff, including liaisons, by Jan. 1, 2027. The materials must include guidance on talking with parents about school avoidance behaviors and resources like sample plans for bringing students back into the building gradually.

Schools should not expect students exhibiting school avoidance behavior to immediately have perfect attendance, Puello-Perdomo said. Schools instead will have to provide individualized plans to reintegrate the student, working closely with their families.

Experts say, for example, a student might first just enter the school lobby, then spend a morning with the guidance counselor before attending a favorite class. The student could gradually build toward a fuller return, with accommodations for easing back into class and catching up on missed work.

The goal, Puello-Perdomo said, is to “make it so that they can also experience a level of success.”

The Education Department also will post resources on its website to help parents address school avoidance behaviors.

Schools shift from blaming parents to addressing root causes

Susan Horwitz, director of the Legal Aid Society’s Education Law Project who worked on the class action suit, said the agreement will help schools look more closely at the reason kids aren’t showing up and shift the conversation from “What’s wrong with this parent? Why can’t they drag their kid into school?” to “Why is this happening?”

Most importantly, she added, “There will be consistency between schools in how they address school avoidance.”

The agreement tackles another major issue: Often, when students refuse to attend class, their schools say they can’t evaluate them for special education support since the child is not on campus. Now, schools will consider accommodating students at an Education Department-approved location closer to their home or approving an independent evaluation.

“So many times we hear from parents that when they say, ‘I can’t get my kid to go to school, she won’t get out of bed,’” Horwitz said. “The school says, ‘Well, we can’t do any evaluations because your kid’s not here.”

Jeffrey Metzler, a litigation partner and co-leader of Pillsbury’s education group, praised the Education Department for an agreement that is not only in the “the best interests of the kids, but that’s something that’s actually implementable.”

“I don’t think it’s realistic to expect even with training for every school liaison officer to become an expert in all of the potentially complicated issues that could result in school avoidance,” Metzler said. “But they know enough, and they’ll have the resources to escalate to people who do have that expertise.”

The Education Department must report to the legal team by July 31 whether each school in the system has designated a liaison and whether each liaison has completed the training.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Trump’s moves to break up Education Department generate new bipartisan resistance in Senate

2026-07-31T22:05:48+00:00

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President Donald Trump doesn’t have the votes to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, though that’s not stopping him from taking it apart.

That came into focus this week when moderate Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and other Democrats to advance legislation that would reverse some of the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department.

Thursday’s bipartisan 13-9 vote in the Senate education committee represents the first formal effort by Congress to stop a series of interagency agreements that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has used to transfer core functions to other departments.

“This bill is straightforward. It keeps the administration of important landmark education programs at the Department of Education, where Congress specifically put them and where they belong,” Collins said during the committee hearing.

McMahon has pitched these agreements, which critics have said are illegal, as “proof of concept” that the federal government can adequately support education without a standalone department. She and her top deputies have repeatedly said they are not trying to go around Congress to abolish the agency, even as they have moved aggressively to outsource its core functions without congressional approval.

That backing has always appeared unlikely. Unless the Senate ditches the filibuster, significant legislation such as abolishing a cabinet-level agency would require 60 votes. And Republicans only hold 53 seats. No Democrats are on record supporting the effort.

Perhaps there was a time when some Democratic votes could have been found in exchange for dramatic increases in education funding, said Rick Hess, a senior fellow at the right-learning American Enterprise Institute. Those days are long gone — and the Trump administration never offered that deal anyway.

The committee vote, meanwhile, shows the administration can’t unite even Republicans behind its goals, something the president’s allies find “enormously frustrating.”

“I don’t see a path forward,” Hess said.

At the same time, if Democrats somehow convinced enough Republicans or won enough seats to pass the bill restricting Trump’s outsourcing effort, he would simply veto it, Hess said.

“Nobody has the votes to do anything,” Hess said.

The legislation advanced by the Senate committee would roll back four of the interagency agreements. These sent K-12 education and postsecondary education to the Labor Department, Indian education to the Interior Department, and most controversially, special education oversight to Health and Human Services.

The bill does not affect agreements moving career and technical education to Labor, or giving the Justice Department a larger role in civil rights enforcement in schools.

The change to special education, widely decried by advocates, appears to have been the move that prompted public resistance on Capitol Hill. Trump’s record low approval ratings also give Republican skeptics more breathing room to act independently.

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the education committee chair who recently lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, echoed the concerns of many special education advocates when he said, “I worry that many states will still struggle to meet IDEA’s requirements and need federal technical assistance, coordination, and oversight,” referring to the main federal special education law.

Though Cassidy ultimately voted against broader limits on reorganizing the Education Department, it’s notable that he allowed the vote to occur. He also introduced his own bill to prevent special education from going to HHS.

In response to the legislation, McMahon sent an open letter to Congress Thursday touting the success of the interagency agreements to date. She noted record numbers of applications for some grant programs and the successful distribution of federal funds.

“Our interagency agreements deliver on both promises by breaking up the failed federal education bureaucracy in Washington and partnering with agencies who are far better equipped to manage essential programs effectively,” she wrote.

Although the administration has promised to “return education to the states,” it has aggressively wielded federal authority in a bid to restrict liberal policies related to race and gender in school. Trump officials have also said they would preserve most existing federal education programs.

A department spokesperson said the legislation represented “an insult to American families — and downright malpractice.”

“It is entirely premature to sabotage this effort before it has the chance to eliminate bureaucratic barriers and fully deliver the results that our students, families, and educators deserve,” press secretary Savannah Newhouse said in an emailed statement.

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

How a years-long rise in teacher turnover reshaped American classrooms

2026-07-30T19:08:33+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.

There was no single reason why Ryan Higgins decided to leave teaching.

It was a job he loved: invigorating, unpredictable, a chance to make the world a bit better. But several years into his career, Higgins, who taught high school social studies in the Fort Worth, Texas area, was increasingly frustrated.

For one, his salary — decent when he was fresh out of college in 2016 — felt stagnant and mediocre. He coached basketball and football, so his days often stretched from early morning to late evening. And “teacher appreciation week” began to feel borderline demeaning: You can wear jeans all week! There’s free pizza in the teachers’ lounge!

Then there was the time a parent complained after he chewed out and benched a member of the basketball team who was slacking off. The school’s assistant principal didn’t back Higgins up. Yes, maybe he had been a bit too tough, but he was also giving up his Saturdays, doing students’ laundry, and even driving the bus.

Ryan Higgins, during his teaching days, with a colleague.

“You’re running around like crazy trying to solve problems, and yet people who aren’t with you are always telling you what you need to do better,” Higgins says.

What finally pushed him out was the aftermath of the pandemic. Trying to effectively teach students over Zoom was all but impossible. Then when students returned to classrooms, they were breathtakingly behind academically and socially. Behavior was out of control. Parents, it seemed, were less trusting of teachers, too. “It felt like the walls were closing in,” he says.

Higgins left teaching in the summer of 2022. A member of the Army Reserve, he soon took an assignment overseas. Today, he’s going into his third year of law school. He sees himself as part of a “lost generation” of teachers.

The year Higgins left, more teachers departed public school classrooms in Texas than at any point since at least 2007, the earliest year with state data. This was not just a blip: From 2020 to 2025, the state lost 35,000 teachers who would have stayed in the classroom if the state had maintained its pre-pandemic turnover figures. That’s equivalent to nearly 10% of the current teacher workforce.

The pattern in Texas has repeated to varying degrees in states across the country, according to an extensive Chalkbeat analysis of data since 2019 spanning 21 states. Most of those states have experienced four to five straight years of elevated teacher turnover, compounding the losses year after year. High-poverty schools in particular were already having a hard time keeping teachers.

Even though turnover finally appears to be trending down, the consequences persist. Research has linked teacher churn to declines in test scores. At a moment when policymakers are seeking to understand America’s sluggish learning recovery, the loss of teachers and instability in schools deserves to be on the list of plausible contributors.

[See our entire analysis of teacher turnover across 21 states including detailed data from each state. You can also watch our online event about teacher turnover.]

A teacher turnover dip, then a sustained rise

There is no comprehensive national data on teacher exit rates. To fill this gap, I conducted an extensive state-by-state review, using a variety of sources.

Across most states, a pattern emerged: Compared with 2019, fewer teachers left the profession in the summer of 2020 when the economy was at a standstill due to the pandemic. But then teacher attrition began to rise sharply. Rates peaked in 2022 but typically remained elevated for the next couple years.

Only a couple of states in this analysis, Connecticut and Maryland, avoided any meaningful rise in turnover.

A spokesperson for the Texas Education Agency said the state has “experienced many of the workforce challenges seen nationwide, which is why teacher recruitment and retention remain a priority.” Texas, for instance, has expanded a merit pay program, which has helped retain effective teachers, according to a recent study.

High-poverty schools, which struggled with teacher churn before the pandemic, likely suffered the most from the turnover spike. In South Carolina, for instance, exit rates rose especially sharply at those schools. A number of states have reported increases in uncertified, emergency-certified, and inexperienced educators. Those teachers are typically concentrated in high-poverty schools.

It hasn’t just been teachers departing. In Alaska, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Texas, and Washington state principal attrition rose too. Turnover often has a cascading effect in schools. When a principal leaves, an assistant principal may take over, a teacher may become an assistant principal — and another classroom vacancy opens up.

Justin Wax became principal of a junior high school in southeast Louisiana in 2021. He was the third leader in three years. That made keeping staff harder since many were looking for stability at that moment. Most of the teachers who were at the school when he started are now gone. “You’re scraping the cream off of the top of all of the most veteran people,” Wax says. “There ends up being a vacuum.”

Turnover appears to be finally coming back down. In the 12 states with figures through last summer, rates were below post-pandemic highs, although some places have not fully returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Wax says he’s had his best year of retention recently and is well staffed going into this coming school year. He’s prioritized making his school a supportive community where teachers are given professional autonomy and backed up on student discipline issues. Today, surveys show that teacher stress has subsided from pandemic-era spikes. Most teachers are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs.

More comprehensive recent data on turnover is not available because many states report figures with a significant lag. Other states don’t report numbers at all. And no state appears to have data yet for the share of teachers who have left this summer.

Teachers face worse behavior, stagnant pay, fewer perks

What drove the sharp increase in teacher exits?

Meghann Seril has been teaching elementary school in Los Angeles for 18 years. These days, she finds students’ behavior more challenging and their attention spans more limited. She’s seen many colleagues who struggled with classroom management leave in recent years.

“It has such a ripple effect because the administrator is focused on supporting those new teachers,” she says. “You’re working on putting out little fires all of the time.” In surveys, teachers often say that student behavior is their top source of stress, and many reported that behavioral issues spiked after school buildings reopened.

Meanwhile, many other professionals have received a valuable new perk since the pandemic: the ability to work from home. “Being a teacher is arguably the least flexible job around,” says Alex Baron, principal of a charter middle school in Washington, D.C. He suspects that’s made it difficult to recruit and retain teachers in his school.

At the same time, teacher salaries, never particularly high, have fallen in real dollars, as inflation soared and school officials used new funds to hire more staff rather than give teachers a raise. The salary gap between teachers and other college-educated professionals has grown in recent years.

Tyra Damm’s decision to leave teaching came down to money. Some of her colleagues with higher-earning spouses saw teaching as a nice-to-have second income. One called it “fun money.” Damm, who lives in the Dallas suburbs, did not have that luxury. She took up teaching in 2013, soon after her husband died of brain cancer. She figured it would provide a stable income with a parent-friendly schedule as she raised two young children.

She loved the job. Damm most recently taught middle school reading and writing to gifted and talented students and was named secondary teacher of the year in her district in 2019. But with only anemic raises and the price of everything rising, “I just couldn’t pay the bills anymore,” she says.

When the American Heart Association, which she had done freelance writing for, offered her a full-time job with remote work and higher pay, Damm felt like she had no choice but to take it. She left teaching in 2024.

“I miss it every day,” she says.

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

Colorado officials knew ‘public Christian school’ was religious before it opened. They didn’t stop it.

2026-07-24T21:21:54+00:00

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When the leaders of a new elementary school applied for a four-digit public school code from the Colorado Department of Education last summer, they didn’t mention a key detail: The school would be religious.

Instead, they said Riverstone Academy would offer traditional academics and trade-themed electives. But education department officials soon learned that the 30-student school in Pueblo County would also be run by a Christian group and use some Christian curriculum.

Several department employees raised red flags internally and escalated the issue to state lawyers, according to emails obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request. Still, Riverstone got its school code, and the department didn’t confront the school’s authorizer until months later, after the group’s director publicly announced that Riverstone was “Colorado’s first public Christian school.”

That’s when the department cited the Colorado constitution’s ban on teaching religious tenets in public schools and warned that Riverstone students might not be eligible for public funding. But that didn’t stop hundreds of thousands of dollars from flowing to the school last year.

A department spokesperson told Chalkbeat that the state legislature hasn’t given the department “any clear authority” to enforce the state constitution’s ban on religious public schools or the Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The clause prohibits the government from endorsing any religion.

“Compliance with the First Amendment has historically been enforced through the courts, not by state agencies,” Colorado Department of Education Chief External Relations Officer Emma Garrett-Nelson said in an email.

Riverstone’s story shows Colorado lacks any clear procedure to keep religious schools out of the public school ecosystem. The school closed permanently in May, but not because it was religious. Instead, state lawmakers imposed strict new limits on the group that authorized it.

Christian law firm’s search for test case led to religious public school in Colorado, emails suggest

As conservative activists around the country chip away at church-state separation in education, that leaves a key question unanswered: Can Colorado stop a religious school from being recognized and funded as a public school?

Steven Green, a law professor at Willamette University who specializes in church-state issues, said that state officials could have and should have stopped Riverstone from opening. He disagreed with the idea that enforcing the state constitution is an issue for the courts and not state agencies.

“As a state official, however far down it is, they’re still bound by the Constitution,” he said. “It’s not that you wait till litigation occurs.”

Department staff raise questions about Riverstone

Chalkbeat reviewed scores of emails exchanged among more than two dozen Colorado Department of Education employees over two weeks last summer as they pondered whether to give Riverstone a public school code, which is required for data-tracking purposes.

Riverstone’s school code application arrived June 27, 2025. It was shared with more than a dozen members of a committee that reviews such requests.

On July 2, Jessica Tribbett, a data specialist for the department, emailed committee members that the Christian contractor that would run Riverstone, Forging Education, “operates a network of private school campuses committed to academic excellence and spiritual formation.”

Janyce Skalla, a senior policy consultant in the department’s schools of choice unit, replied, saying that Riverstone’s website mentioned faith-based science and social studies curriculums, Masterbooks and Berean Builders.

“The school claims to be public but has some private school elements that are worth flagging,” she wrote.

That afternoon Tribbett emailed four higher-level department employees. She wrote that an internet search revealed that Riverstone would offer “a faith-based education” and should be assigned a private school code instead of a public school one.

“Are there guidelines or legislation stating that faith-based curriculum cannot be used if accepting public funding?” Tribbett wrote.

One of the recipients, DJ Loerzel, executive director of data operations, emailed another group of department leaders the next morning.

“This is the first time we encountered a situation like this,” he wrote. “Are there specific statutes/policies noting public funds for schools that potentially have a religious curriculum?”

A lawyer meeting, then a decision

By the time the July 4 holiday weekend started, emails show employees from across the education department had been looped into the Riverstone conversation, including executive directors, managers, policy advisors, and an assistant commissioner.

The next step was a meeting with Joe Peters, an assistant state attorney general.

On July 8, after Tribbett and a few others met with Peters, Tribbett sent a brief email to seven higher-ups indicating a decision had been made.

Two days later, Riverstone got its code: 7294.

Ken Haptonstall, who heads the Colorado BOCES Association, a group for public education co-ops like the one that started Riverstone, said a school code provides a kind of legitimacy.

“To me, once you give a school code, it’s almost like you’re giving permission in a way,” he said.

It’s not clear from the public records what legal advice the assistant attorney general gave the education department. The department withheld some emails from Chalkbeat based on attorney-client privilege.

A spokesperson for the Colorado Attorney General’s office declined to answer questions about whether state law gives the education department the power to prevent a public religious school from opening.

Garrett-Nelson, the education department spokesperson, described the school code review committee’s job as an administrative process and said it wasn’t the place to “litigate this important issue.”

“Based on the current U.S. Supreme Court caselaw, the department likely would have lost a lawsuit challenging the denial of a school code solely based on the religious status” of Forging Education, Riverstone’s contractor, she wrote in an email.

A 2017 U.S. Supreme Court ruling said government benefits can’t be withheld from an organization solely because of its religious status.

But department employees knew more than Forging Education’s religious affiliation. They knew the school planned to teach students using two different Christian curriculums.

Asked why that didn’t allow the department to take action, Garrett-Nelson said, “We were working closely with our legal counsel as more information was coming to light. Due to the high-stakes nature of litigation in this area, we wanted to ensure we were on stable ground before actively questioning the use of public funds on religious instruction.”

Green, the Willamette law professor, likened the approach to an ostrich putting its head in the sand, particularly because conservative legal groups have consistently pushed for publicly funded religious education in recent years.

“For any knowledgeable assistant attorney general to think, oh, if we give them just a little bit, or maybe it won’t manifest itself in the way we think it will … or maybe it will just go away, that’s pie in the sky.”

A delayed confrontation

State education leaders confronted Riverstone’s authorizer — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES — in October, three months after the school code decision and two months after Riverstone opened.

These co-ops are meant to support school districts. This one started Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school.’

They’d already begun getting questions as word of the school spread, emails obtained through a public records request show. In early October, Scott Smith, the chief financial and operating officer for the Cherry Creek School District, sent screenshots of Riverstone’s website to two top department officials and said, “I’m wondering how this school can qualify for public funds?”

The department addressed the issue directly on Oct. 10 — the day after Ken Witt, the executive director of ERBOCES, called Riverstone “Colorado’s first public Christian school.”

Jennifer Okes, district operations special advisor, wrote to Witt, saying the department “recently became aware” of the school’s opening. She said that public schools are generally required to be nonsectarian — meaning non-religious — and that Riverstone students might not be eligible for public funding.

In the weeks following Witt’s headline-making announcement, department officials didn’t acknowledge they’d known that Riverstone would be a religious school from the start and that its school code had sparked a dayslong debate.

When Chalkbeat asked in late October whether a school that was clearly religious would be given a school code, department spokesperson Jeremy Meyer said by email, “If that hypothetical event were to occur, we would consult with our legal counsel on the appropriate course of action.”

A threat, but no action

Department officials never cracked down on Riverstone.

In January, they selected ERBOCES for a state audit, a lengthy process the department’s earlier letter had implied might provide them ammunition for withholding Riverstone’s funding.

But in February — the same day Riverstone and ERBOCES filed a religious liberty lawsuit against the state — department officials sent a letter to Witt saying the department’s audit wouldn’t consider religion.

Garrett-Nelson said the department changed course because religion wasn’t mentioned in its audit guide, which is a set of instructions for school districts. Officials “decided not to rely on this untested approach to claw back funding” because it would have “led straight back into the heart of the litigation risk,” she said.

Today, Riverstone is closed for good, the religious liberty lawsuit is dead, and ERBOCES no longer has the power to hand over school operations to a contractor. But it remains unclear if the education department can or will stop a religious public school, either through bureaucratic steps on the front end or the power of the purse on the back end.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

The fight for control over New York’s charter schools is escalating

2026-07-23T20:28:15+00:00

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York.Sign up for their newsletter here.

This September, a new elementary school is set to open in the South Bronx that will operate year-round, seven days a week, and 12 hours a day to accommodate working parents. But the state teachers union is suing to block it.

Strive Charter School was proposed by Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy, the state’s largest charter school network, and her husband Eric Grannis. The union contends that opening it would violate a state law that limits the number of charter schools statewide; Moskowitz and Grannis argue it would instead be transforming an existing charter school.

The dispute is the latest salvo in a long-running battle in Albany over who should approve and regulate charter schools: the legislature-elected Board of Regents, which is housed under the state education agency, or the governor-appointed State University of New York trustees.

State law allows both bodies to approve new charter schools, but it also gives SUNY the power to overrule objections by the Board of Regents — as it did with Strive.

SUNY approved the Bronx school even though state education officials warned it could violate state law and recommended abandoning the project. A New York Focus analysis of state charter school decisions found that since 2017, the Board of Regents has rejected 58 SUNY-approved charter actions. In at least 51 of those cases, SUNY resubmitted the application without making any modifications, permitting dozens of charter schools to open, expand, relocate, merge, or receive early renewal against the guidance of the state’s top education policymaking body.

To advocates for traditional public schools, including teachers unions, that discrepancy indicates that SUNY simply rubber-stamps charter school proposals, even those that the state education officials find lacking.

Charter school proponents say the system is working as intended. “It’s a feature, not a bug,” wrote Grannis, Strive’s executive director, in an op-ed for the New York Post about the lawsuit.

Funding caps and the core charter debate

Charter schools, funded with tax dollars but run by independent organizations, have been the source of fierce debate since New York enacted its first charter school law in 1998.

New York law requires school districts to pay charter schools for every local student enrolled — on average, about $16,600 per student — which decreases the budget available for traditional schools. Public school districts also pay for charter school transportation, along with health and welfare services. This past school year, for example, Buffalo Public Schools budgeted $195 million for payments to 22 area charter schools educating over 10,000 local students.

State law limits the number of charters to maintain quality control, to manage the financial burden on local school districts, and to allow public school administrators to have some predictability in their budgets.

Proponents see charter schools as a free, high-quality alternative to low-performing schools, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. But opponents say they drain resources from traditional public schools without the same level of oversight and accountability as public schools.

Teachers unions have traditionally opposed charter schools because they are not typically unionized and receive public funding while operating under different rules than traditional public school districts, with greater autonomy over staffing and governance. In New York, the teachers union has opposed efforts to lift the state’s charter cap, while pushing for bills to tighten oversight, increase transparency, require community engagement, and ultimately eliminate SUNY’s charter-authorizing power.

The conflict between SUNY and the Board of Regents is an extension of that debate. Under state law, proposals for charter schools may be submitted to either the Board of Regents or SUNY. The Board of Regents must review charter proposals submitted to SUNY, but SUNY has the final word on whether they are approved. Of the roughly 352 operating charter schools statewide, 220 were authorized by SUNY, while 92 were authorized by the Board of Regents. (The remaining were granted by NYC DOE or the Buffalo Board of Education.)

Under state law, New York City is at its charter school cap, with around 285 currently in operation. To create a new school without exceeding the cap, Success Academy asked SUNY to transfer the charter of one of its existing schools to a newly created entity led by Grannis, Moskowitz’s husband. In the application, Moskowitz wrote that the school would operate independently of Success Academy with a separate board and distinct mission.

Last October, SUNY approved the transfer and forwarded it to the Board of Regents for review. In January, the Board of Regents voted to send the request back to SUNY and urged trustees to withdraw the approval, warning that it could violate state law. They argued that the request amounted to the creation of a new school without going through the proper approval process, circumventing the state’s charter cap.

“It seems like they just ignore what we have to say,” said Shino Tanikawa, a member of the Board of Regents. “We have educators and school leaders on the board, we are the educational management entity for the state, we know what we’re doing and we know when something isn’t right.”

Joseph Belluck, chair of SUNY’s Charter Schools Committee, said the committee always reviews the board’s comment, “but most of the time, it’s completely lacking in merit.”

He and Grannis maintain that Strive does not violate the law because they are not increasing the number of charter schools in the city; they are simply taking over an existing charter school and operating in the same building.

“We are trying to make it easier for people who want a good quality charter school education to get it by being more flexible,” he told New York Focus.

The school will open this fall with grades K–4. Grannis said the school has received about 270 applications and plans eventually to serve 540 students. It will operate on a year-round, flexible schedule from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. seven days a week, with classes from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays from September to June and the extended hours offered as an option for families who want them.

Grannis said the school is already fully staffed with lead teachers, who will work weekdays year-round, and teaching assistants, who are not required to have a bachelor’s degree and will work roughly 50 hours per week to cover the extended schedule. The program is free for students, supported by funds from the city Department of Education for the school day and private philanthropy for the extended hours.

Union lawsuits and heated exchanges

In its lawsuit, filed last month, New York State United Teachers argues that SUNY’s approval of Strive Charter “disregards the plain purpose of the cap” and “wreaks havoc” on the city’s budget for traditional public schools. “We’ve tried to change the law, and now we’re going to the courts,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person.

Belluck, the SUNY Charter Schools Committee chair, said the lawsuit and the union’s push to take away SUNY’s authority over charter schools are an attempt to put “charter schools in New York out of business.”

“I don’t know if charter schools can save the educational system, but what I do know is that it’s grossly unfair to say to families and kids who have a shot at a free education that might be transformative for them and their families that they’re now not going to get that opportunity,” Belluck said.

Last month, a coalition of the state’s most powerful charter school founders and CEOs, including Moskowitz, sent a letter to State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa expressing concern about “the increasingly adversarial posture NYSED and the Board of Regents have taken” toward SUNY’s role as an independent charter school authorizer.

The letter boasted that SUNY-authorized schools consistently outperform both traditional public schools and charter schools authorized by the Board of Regents, and urged the state to recognize its “extraordinary record.”

In a June 29 response, NYSED counsel Daniel Morton-Bentley said the Regents only return applications for reconsideration when they raise concerns about potential legal issues. He also attached an appendix outlining concerns about the charter schools and networks that signed the letter, including high rates of student suspensions, persistent under-enrollment, a lack of certified teachers, and inadequate services for children with disabilities and English language learners.

Local school officials in the Hudson Valley and Long Island have also weighed in.

The Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents, which represents leaders of 78 school districts, has proposed an amendment to the state education law that would give the Board of Regents final authority to approve charter schools. It would also ensure that the fiscal impact on affected school districts is a critical consideration.

“Public schools are the absolute engine of a thriving democracy,” said Louis Wool, president of the organization and superintendent of Westchester County’s Harrison Central School District.

On Long Island, some local officials complain the growth of charters has strained the budget of traditional public schools.

In January, the teacher’s union joined local education and community partners in suing over SUNY’s approval of three new charter schools that the Board of Regents had objected to: The Academy Charter School Brentwood Elementary, The Academy Charter School Brentwood Middle, and the Academy Charter School Central Islip Regional High. The lawsuit, which is pending in Albany County Supreme Court, claims applications failed to address strong community opposition.

At a town hall last June hosted by Brentwood Union Free School District to discuss the new schools, former Hempstead school board president Victor Pratt said the district’s payments to charter schools grew from $9 million in 2009, when the area’s first Academy Charter School opened, to more than $107 million during the 2024–25 school year. The funding loss has left the district unable to address needs like air conditioning upgrades, he said. (Charter school advocates contend that per-pupil funding should follow the student rather than stay with the institution the student is no longer enrolled in.)

“Charter schools do not coexist with public schools, they operate at the expense of public schools” said Pratt.

State Assemblymember Phil Ramos, who represents Brentwood and Central Islip, called SUNY a “backdoor approval system” for charter schools that ignores overwhelming community opposition. He previously sponsored unsuccessful legislation that would have removed SUNY as an authorizer. This year, he introduced a bill that would require hearings and, outside New York City, a local vote before a charter school can be established, expanded, or renewed.

NYSUT supports the bill, which was also sponsored by Senate Education Chair Shelley Mayer but failed to advance out of committee in either chamber. Despite previous challenges passing charter school reform legislation, Mayer said she is optimistic that the state will heed public educators’ calls to strengthen communities’ ability to challenge charter school proposals because “there’s a serious movement of legislators who are very troubled by this process.”

“I think the pressure is on, and we’re moving toward some meaningful change,” she said.

Second public school closes following Colorado law change aimed at controversial education group

2026-07-23T20:25:36+00:00

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A second school has closed permanently because of a law change aimed at a group some Colorado lawmakers believed was exploiting legal loopholes to authorize public schools and programs statewide.

Pueblo Classical Academy, which enrolled 260 K-12 students, won’t reopen in August, school leaders announced on social media in mid-July, after declining for weeks to comment on the school’s fate. Another school, Riverstone Academy, which backers called “Colorado’s first public Christian school,” closed in May.

Both schools were authorized by a Monument-based group called Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES. Such co-ops are allowed to authorize schools, but most don’t.

Colorado officials knew ‘public Christian school’ was religious before it opened. They didn’t stop it.

It’s not often a state law change prompts such swift school closures, but lawmakers felt a sense of urgency in reining in ERBOCES because of controversy surrounding Riverstone and the many publicly funded homeschool enrichment programs the co-op authorized in recent years.

State lawmakers passed strict limits on the authorizing power of such co-ops in the last days of the legislative session. The decision meant Pueblo Classical School, Riverstone, and one other school, Ascend College Prep, had to find new authorizers to stay open.

Only Ascend, a small school for students in grades 10 to 12, was successful, becoming a charter school authorized by the Charter School Institute, a statewide charter authorizer.

Pueblo Classical sought to become a charter school authorized by Pueblo School District 60, but the district’s school board voted it down. The school has a history of switching authorizers, flip-flopping between being a BOCES-authorized school and a charter school.

It opened in 2021 with ERBOCES as its authorizer. In 2022, it became a charter school authorized by District 70. But in 2024, the district revoked its charter because of financial breaches and its failure to report an employee’s arrest, among other concerns. At that point, the school returned to ERBOCES.

Pueblo Classical was part of a three-school network in Pueblo County. The other two schools are charters authorized by the Pueblo 60 district and will remain open. Fulton Heights Charter Academy has about 200 K-8 students, Jones Charter Academy has about 370 K-8 students.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

A new Memphis group is pushing for school reform via state takeover. Who are they?

2026-07-22T14:37:51+00:00

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A new Memphis group has joined a network of local organizations supporting the state takeover of Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Together4Students launched in May, around the same time that Nashville Republicans passed a law establishing a state-appointed oversight board to take control of MSCS. The group’s website advocates for using the state intervention to pursue ambitious achievement goals for MSCS, including doubling the number of students in high-performing schools by 2035.

The group was founded by Henry Jones, former director of organizing for Memphis nonprofit Leadership for Educational Equity, and Mark Sturgis, who leads longtime education advocacy organization Seeding Success.

Together4Students is the latest group jockeying for influence in Memphis’ education advocacy space, which was once flush with federal investment and local heavy hitters but has since dwindled in dollars and voices. The group is backing the state takeover and partnering with the decade-old parents’ rights organization Memphis Lift.

Not all education advocacy groups are backing the takeover. Some have been fighting state intervention for years, including by partnering with MSCS leaders last fall to rally parent support.

Jones said Together4Students is still gathering local organizations to partner with and recruiting fellows ages 16 to 25 to create a “pipeline of organizing” through leadership training. The group is also seeking 2,500 signatures for a petition calling on MSCS to drop its lawsuit challenging the state takeover, with over 300 collected as of Tuesday.

In early July, a federal judge granted MSCS an early win in the case by temporarily blocking the state oversight board from beginning its operations.

Jones said fellows are receiving a stipend for their work through his independent project, the Change the Game Fellowship, which launched in 2022. He pays fellows using money he’s earned from consulting work, but declined to say the exact amount.

Together4Students is not an official nonprofit organization, Jones said, and isn’t currently receiving any local or national funding.

But Jones said the group has a “strategy team” of local organization leaders who meet each month. He declined to name which organizations are involved.

“Like many early-stage nonprofits or grassroots efforts, [Together4Students] has relied on volunteers, in-kind support, and community relationships as we get established,” he wrote in an email to Chalkbeat, with Seeding Success and Memphis Lift being two of those community relationships.

On its website, Together4Students lists two goals for MSCS in the next decade. The group wants 80% of MSCS students to attend schools receiving A or B ratings from the state, up from 38% now. That includes a 2030 goal of having around 23,000 more students attend those highly rated schools.

Group leaders also want 80% of MSCS students “on a clear path to a rewarding career” by 2035, meaning they have a college acceptance or trade credential by the time they graduate.

Though the group backs the new oversight board, Jones said Together4Students isn’t explicitly against MSCS or the local school board. Instead, it’s rooting for district improvement regardless of who is in charge.

“We don’t really see the oversight board being any different from the school board,” he said. “If the oversight board doesn’t serve kids well, we’re going to be on them.”

Education won’t be the group’s only focus, Jones told Chalkbeat. The fellows he recruits for the team will choose its next priority, he said.

“Six months from now, we might be building a campaign around gun violence,” Jones said. “We’re hoping to build a variety of campaigns around accountability, whether it’s for the state-appointed board, whether it’s county commissioners, city council, or the local school board.”

On a call with Chalkbeat, five of Together4Students’ seven fellows said violence is the main issue they want to solve. But Unveyunce Fitch, the mother of an MSCS kindergartner and a Booker T. Washington graduate, said she joined as a group leader to push for education reform.

“As a single mom who graduated at the top of my class, I know how hard it is to get an education in Memphis,” she said. “Students shouldn’t have to fight so hard, and parents shouldn’t have to ask for accountability.”

This story has been updated to include information about the Change the Game Fellowship and clarify that Jones no longer works for Leadership for Educational Equity. He left his position in June 2026.

Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.

2 conservative law firms join defense team in Elizabeth school district’s book ban lawsuit

2026-07-21T23:32:26+00:00

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Two high-profile conservative law firms, including one that has many wins before the U.S. Supreme Court, are helping to defend a Colorado school district in a book banning lawsuit.

Lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation filed paperwork to join the legal team representing the Elizabeth School District, which was sued after removing 18 books from its school libraries. The additional legal firepower comes about five months before a December jury trial is set to begin in federal district court.

It’s not clear why the district brought on lawyers from the Heritage Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom at this point in the case. A statement provided by a district spokesman said that Alliance Defending Freedom has a 20-win record before the U.S. Supreme Court. It also said that the district is the first client of Heritage’s new Legal Action Center, which was created for cases like the library book lawsuit.

“The District has assembled this legal team to mount a vigorous, well-resourced defense of its policies on the merits,” the statement said.

The three lawyers join the book removal case at a tumultuous time for the district. In May, the previous superintendent was forced out and a new superintendent was hired. The district is also facing a financial crisis caused by overspending, leading to staff layoffs and other cuts this summer.

The district has been soliciting donations for its legal defense in the book removal case since last summer. In May, district leaders took steps to create Friends of Elizabeth Schools, a group intended to fundraise for legal costs.

The Elizabeth district spokesperson said he did not have information about how much the district has spent on the library book lawsuit so far or whether Heritage and Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys will charge the district for their work. The additional lawyers will join at least two other firms already representing Elizabeth in the case.

The controversy over the books, which are back on school library shelves while the case is pending, began in the fall of 2024 when the district in conservative-leaning Elbert County decided to pull 19 titles from school libraries because of content school board members deemed not age appropriate, overly graphic, or highly sensitive. One of the books was not actually removed because it had been checked out and was never returned.

The removed books are primarily by or about LGBTQ people, people of color, or both. They include “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved,” both by Toni Morrison; “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini; and “It’s Your World — If You Don’t Like It, Change It” by Mikki Halpin.

In December 2024, two students, a chapter of the NAACP, and an authors group, all represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, sued the Elizabeth district over the book removals. They alleged that the removals violate students’ rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment to access information and ideas and authors’ rights to communicate those ideas to students.

Lawyers for the district rebutted those claims in a 2025 legal filing, saying “a school library’s curation decisions are government speech immune from First Amendment scrutiny.”

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative public policy group that produced Project 2025, a playbook for the second Trump administration. The document’s introduction says,“Children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”

Heritage’s Legal Action Center launched in July and described its goals on social media as defending “free speech, religious liberty, election integrity, parental rights, medical freedom, the right to life, and the constitutional principles that safeguard liberty.”

Alliance Defending Freedom is an Arizona-based conservative law firm and legal advocacy group that describes its mission as “grounded in the historic Christian tradition.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

70 years after Brown, schools remain separate by race and class. One advocate says integration still matters.

2026-07-21T21:33:12+00:00

Ary Amerikaner is on a mission to make America integrate schools again.

A lawyer and education policy advocate who worked in the Obama Education Department, Amerikaner cofounded and leads an organization called Brown’s Promise. The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education prohibited legally mandated segregation.

The group is hoping to influence the national conversation, while also making direct change in a handful of specific states.

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NY families left $62 million in summer food benefits unspent last year. Here’s how to claim your $120 now.

2026-07-17T19:32:07+00:00

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Thousands of New York families might be leaving millions of dollars on the table when it comes to summer food benefits.

To combat hunger while schools are closed, the state’s Summer EBT program sends eligible families $120 per child in food benefits. Last year, the state issued about $237 million in benefits to families, but about $62 million — or 26% — remained unspent during the 122-day window families had to use them, according to records obtained by David Rubel, an education consultant who tracks Summer EBT rates.

That money could have fed about 518,000 children in need, the data showed.

Instead of going to struggling families, Rubel said, the money reverted back to the federal government.

More people across the country are going hungry now than at the height of the COVID pandemic, according to a May survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In New York City, 1 in 4 children experiences food insecurity, food rescue group City Harvest estimates.

Advocates and educators are concerned about an increase in hunger as new federal work requirements to qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, took effect in March. Food pantry lines have lengthened this summer, Gothamist reported Wednesday.

Under federal guidelines, children are eligible for the Summer EBT program if they attend a school that offers free lunch and meet household income requirements for free or reduced-price school meals. The income limits vary by household size. A family of four qualifies with an annual income at or below $61,050, for example.

Families who receive SNAP or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits, or who are enrolled in Medicaid, automatically receive the funds. Other families who qualify based on income must apply. Last year, roughly 99% of Summer EBT recipients were enrolled automatically because they qualified through SNAP, Medicaid, or information provided by the state Education Department, officials said.

Families have until Sept. 8 to apply for the food benefits.

Lost your Summer EBT card? How to claim your benefits

Nearly 1.6 million children from low-income families have received $189 million in summer food assistance through the program, said Darren O’Sullivan, spokesperson for the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, or OTDA, which oversees the program.

“At a time when vital nutrition programs like SNAP face continued attacks in Washington, Summer EBT puts money back in the pockets of New York’s working families, helping them afford to buy healthy food during the summer months when schools are out of session and many children lose access to free school meals,” O’Sullivan wrote in a statement to Chalkbeat.

The benefits for all eligible families are loaded onto a child’s Summer EBT card and can be used wherever SNAP or EBT benefits are accepted. Last year, families were supposed to use cards they were sent in 2024. Rubel said he worries that some families may not have realized that or may have lost their cards.

This year, however, the state is sending new cards to families that did not spend any of their food benefits last year.

Families can also request a replacement card either online or by phone (1-888-328-6399). Cards take about a week to arrive, state officials said.

Rubel is hopeful that less money will be left on the table this year if families understand they can get replacement cards. He praised OTDA for stepping up its outreach efforts.

Besides mailing eligibility letters to families before issuing the benefits, the agency is also texting reminders to use the benefits, sending texts and emails with other important Summer EBT updates, and scaling up a public awareness campaign at Thruway rest stops and Department of Motor Vehicles locations.

Rubel, however, felt that the city’s Education Department missed an opportunity to promote the initiative by not sending home a letter with students before the school year ended.

Education Department officials told Chalkbeat that information about the benefits would be reiterated to families through a flyer included in this week’s “Principal’s Digest” newsletter, which is emailed to all principals. The department also plans to share the information directly with students and on its social media channels.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Council approves $10k perk for public school paraprofessionals

2026-07-16T21:26:51+00:00

This story was originally published on July 16 by The City Reporter. Sign up here to get the latest stories from The City Reporter delivered to you each morning.

The City Council voted unanimously to approve a one-time $10,000 payment to most of the public school paraprofessionals on Thursday, an effort to boost retention and recruitment for the badly-needed – but low-paying – jobs with students.

But Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who could try to stop the bill, said it is in “direct violation” of state labor law.

The bill was sponsored by nearly every member of the Council, and passed 49 to 0, with two members absent.

$244 million price tag

“This is a mandate from the entire city of New York. This is a mandate because we heard the numbers — $32,000 starting salary, in the most expensive city in the world,” Councilmember Carmen de la Rosa, the bill’s lead sponsor, said at a press conference earlier in the day.

“We know that we are in the throes of an affordability crisis, the way we can quell some of the issues of poverty is by putting money directly into people’s pockets,” De La Rosa said. “And this is what this bill does.”

The “Respect” check, as it’s called, would give public school paraprofessionals $10,000 in four installments, starting on Jan. 1, 2027, and going through Aug. 1 of the same year. Substitute paraprofessionals would have their money pro-rated based on how many days they worked.

The cost to the city would be around $244 million for payments to an estimated 26,000 paraprofessionals. The starting pay for paras is around $34,000, and rises to a top rate of more than $56,000 within 15 years, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

Labor law conflict?

Mamdani — who, as a candidate, supported an earlier version of the bill — expressed concerns as mayor over any payment made outside collective bargaining while also praising the work of paraprofessionals.

“I have been clear that questions of compensation are best resolved through the collective bargaining process that respects workers and their unions,” he said in a statement after the vote. “However, the Council’s passage of this legislation is in direct violation of the Taylor Law. Our administration is reviewing the final language carefully and working to determine the appropriate next steps.”

The mayor could veto the bill, but given the strong support in the Council they could then vote to override his veto.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said Thursday that the bill was written in a way to not run afoul of the state labor law. The bill, he said, is a last-ditch effort to help his workers.

“We would prefer to do this through collective bargaining, but you need a willing partner on the other side,” Mulgrew said.

Katie Honan covers New York City Hall for The City Reporter and is co-host of the FAQ NYC podcast.

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.

Can they do that? Council sets vote on $10K perk for paraprofessionals

2026-07-13T20:45:33+00:00

This story was originally published on July 13 by The City Reporter. Sign up here to get the latest stories from The City Reporter delivered to you each morning.

The City Council will vote this week on a bill to boost underpaid paraprofessionals in the city school system with a $10,000 payment that’s separate from their negotiated salary – even though it sparked concerns from the mayor’s office over whether it’s legal.

The bill, which was re-introduced in February by Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa, would approve a “workforce stabilization payment” of $10,000 to thousands of Department of Education paraprofessionals until they reach a contract with a raise that’s greater or equal to that sum. The funds would be doled out over four payments.

The starting pay for paras is around $34,000, and rises to a top rate of more than $56,000 within 15 years, according to the United Federation of Teachers, which represents the workers.

The UFT argues that the low pay makes it hard to recruit the crucial staffers, and that a current paraprofessional vacancy of around 1,600 hurts students with disabilities the most.

But the annual cash infusion could also run afoul of state labor rules, known as the Taylor Law, which says raises and other payments must be negotiated through collective bargaining.

Daniel Pollak, the first deputy commissioner for the Mayor’s Office of Labor Relations, testified during a March hearing that, while the administration supports the bill, they had concerns.

“We have significant legal, practical, and fairness concerns with an approach that would provide a substantial pay increase for these employees through local legislation,” he said.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani supported an earlier version of the bill which proposed the same $10,000 bonus, calling it “critically important.”

“I supported it in the primary and I continue to support it today,” he told The City Reporter before he was elected in the fall. “And the reason I do is that we have an increasing number of vacancies of paraprofessional positions within New York City. Part of it is because we are paying people a wage they cannot afford to live in New York City.”

He dialed back that support as mayor in an interview with The City Reporter in April.

“I think that it’s still something that’s critically important, that those who work for the city can afford to live in the city, I also think we want to look at the process by which we do this to ensure that it’s sustainable and that it’s tenable,” he said. His spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Speaker Julie Menin said the payment is needed to boost recruitment and retention for a critical job, and doesn’t violate current labor rules.

“I pushed to address this during the budget process, but the administration failed to make this workforce a priority both in its budget and at the bargaining table,” she said in a statement.

“We can’t sit idly by as our public schools suffer from a workforce retention crisis of paraprofessionals who earn just $32,000 a year,” she said, noting that the city pays more than $1 billion on settlements over students who haven’t received required services — and more paras could help stop that.

“Investing in the workforce that helps deliver mandated services, strengthens school stability, and improves student outcomes is one of the smartest investments we can make,” she said.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the payment is to help rectify an emergency situation, not skirt labor laws.

“We’re very protective of the Taylor Law, which is why we made this part of a program and not collective bargaining,” he told The City Reporter.

He thanked the City Council for its work but said the mayor hadn’t done enough to rectify the issue.

“The mayor, throughout his entire campaign and since he’s been in office, has said he wants to fix this problem,” Mulgrew said.

Some paraprofessionals, though, feel the payment isn’t enough and doesn’t address longstanding issues that they say have been ignored by the union.

Marie Wausnock is a paraprofessional on Staten Island who also co-founded Fix Para Pay, a union caucus slate that opposes Mulgrew. Some paras leave for other city jobs that require less training and have better pay, she said.

“How do you give respectable pensions and dignity to paras when you want to give them non-pensionable money?” she said. “Paras are so underpaid. We get crumbs every time.”

State scrutinizes homeschool enrichment proposals from controversial education group

2026-07-10T23:22:29+00:00

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Responding to recent changes in state law, Colorado officials are scrutinizing 42 homeschool enrichment program applications submitted by a controversial education group whose past practices spurred the changes.

The Colorado Department of Education on Thursday sent a four-page letter to the group — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES — requesting additional details so a six-member review team can determine if the enrichment programs comply with the new rules.

The department’s letter provides a glimpse into the state’s new harder line on publicly funded programming for home-school students. It also illustrates ERBOCES’ effort to maintain its stable of enrichment programs around Colorado in the face of state efforts to crack down on the group.

Homeschool enrichment programs typically offer six hours of class a week and are meant to give home-schooled students socialization opportunities or access to courses that are hard to offer at home.

The state’s tougher stance on homeschool enrichment comes after lawmakers passed strict limits this spring, aiming to curb rapid growth fueled by ERBOCES, increase transparency, and bar certain kinds of offerings, such as ski passes, karate lessons, and sports camps. Last year, the state spent around $100 million on homeschool enrichment programs.

The law change requires homeschool enrichment authorizers like ERBOCES to get approval from the state or a local school district if they want to continue operating an enrichment program outside their boundaries. As of Thursday, the education department had received 45 applications for out-of-boundary enrichment programs, according to a department spokesperson.

Forty-two of the applications came from ERBOCES for programs operating outside the group’s only member school district, District 49 in northeast Colorado Springs. One application came from the Aurora school district and two came from charter schools: Ascent Classical Academy of Northern Denver and Colorado Military Academy in Colorado Springs.

ERBOCES does not have to get state or school district approval for homeschool enrichment programs operating within District 49.

Ken Witt, executive director of ERBOCES, said by email on Friday that the education department’s review of his group’s 42 applications “encompasses a significant number of our wildly popular programs.”

He said the review will require some back and forth with the department, and he expects it to be completed in the next few weeks.

During the 2025-26 school year, ERBOCES had more than 50 homeschool enrichment programs around the state. Some offered math, reading, and electives like music and physical education. Others had a specific focus: outdoor adventure, career training, aviation, golf, or horsemanship.

Witt has declined to provide Chalkbeat a full list of its homeschool enrichment programs, some of which have dozens of sub-campuses and subcontractors.

In Thursday’s letter, education department officials warned ERBOCES that its 42 applications were incomplete and would need to be resubmitted.

Items missing include:

Information on whether homeschool enrichment applicants are located on private school campuses. Such co-locations are no longer permitted.
Information on whether homeschool enrichment applicants are located at the same place as private fee-based programs. Such co-locations may not be permitted because the new rules bar the state from subsidizing private activities or purchases for home-schoolers.
A full list of sub-campuses or subprograms operated by a single applicant.

In the letter, education department officials cited specific problems with some applications. For example, it noted that Enrich Colorado, a homeschool enrichment program based in Pueblo, had not included information on a contractor operating in 28 locations around the state. That contractor is Forging Education, a group that operated a now defunct “public Christian school” that created a storm of controversy last school year.

The letter also cites discrepancies in application paperwork for a program called Colorado Homeschool Enrichment, with one form saying the group has 68 campuses across Colorado and another form saying the number is 75.

In June, ERBOCES provided a partial list of Colorado Homeschool Enrichment campuses to Chalkbeat. Most of the 30 items on the list simply say “Micro-Campus” with an individual’s name next to the entry. Others have names like St. Stephen Catholic School, Global Ex Academy, and Adventure Learning.

Several homeschool enrichment programs that last year operated under the ERBOCES umbrella have discontinued their offerings in Colorado, according to their websites. They include programs such as Front Range Construction Academy, Alpine International Prep Academy, and Colorado Agribusiness and Equine Sciences Academy.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Just 1 Black student gets into Staten Island Tech as racial gaps at specialized high schools persist

2026-07-10T21:52:19+00:00

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Of Staten Island Technical High School’s nearly 300 offers, just one went to a Black student.

At Stuyvesant, that number was three — the lowest number since at least 2014, which is as far back as the city’s public data goes. And at the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering, there were six Black students who received offers, according to Education Department admissions data released Friday.

The dearth of offers to Black students to the city’s eight schools that require the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT, as the sole basis for admissions is nothing new.

And Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself a specialized high school alum — he attended Bronx Science — plans to look more closely at the results, his spokesperson said.

“The mayor believes we must root out the deep racial and economic inequities that persist in our public school system, and our administration will be reviewing these results carefully,” Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the mayor, said.

About 3.5% of the roughly 4,000 offers in total went to Black students, edging up slightly from last year’s 3%. About 6.5% of offers went to Latino students, down slightly from 6.9% the year before.

Overall, Black students made up 19.3% of students this year; Latino students made up 42.3% of the nation’s largest school system. About 17% of the students who took the SHSAT last year are Black, while 25% are Latino.

The number of offers to Asian American students at specialized high schools ticked up to 56.5% from 54% the year before. Offers to white students fell slightly to 23.5% from about 26%. Asian American students make up 18.7% of students citywide; white students make up 16.1%.

The city’s specialized high schools enroll about 5% of the city’s public high school students, yet they draw an outsized amount of attention because they are often considered among the best in the country. For years, integration advocates have called to change the testing admissions system to these prestigious schools.

Mamdani said on the campaign trail that he would keep the SHSAT in place. (He did, however, say he would like to push back the start of gifted and talented programs from kindergarten.) Earlier in the mayor’s race, he indicated that he would order a study of racial and gender bias in the admissions exam. In a 2022 questionnaire before he ran for mayor, Mamdani said the test should be abolished.

Another 800 students were invited to participate in the Discovery program, which offers disadvantaged students who scored just below the test-score cutoff a chance to enroll in a specialized high school. The program faces ongoing legal challenges from families who say it discriminates against Asian American applicants. Of this year’s 800 Discovery participants, 11% are Black, 16% are Latino, 62% are Asian American, and 7% are white.

Roughly 26,100 students took the SHSAT, which was offered online for the first time. This coming year, the digital test will be computer adaptive, meaning that students’ responses will affect the level of difficulty of their subsequent questions.

Beyond the specialized high schools, about 58% of rising ninth graders got their first choice in high schools, and 82% received one of their top three choices. For middle school, 77% of rising sixth graders got their top choice, and 94% got into their top three schools. Those numbers were on par with the previous year, officials said.

A focus on 3-K expansion shows results

Mamdani, who didn’t make K-12 education a major focus of his campaign or his first six months in office, has devoted significant attention to expanding access to the city’s free childcare programs.

He launched a free program for 2-year-olds for the first time this year in five school districts for roughly 2,000 kids. Families who applied to that program will get their offers Aug. 4.

Despite an energetic effort to publicize the city’s free 3-K and prekindergarten programs, Mamdani’s administration did not see an uptick in those applications, which stayed flat compared to last year.

But officials did succeed in placing more 3-K applicants in programs closer to their homes in response to complaints from some families in previous years about having to make significant commutes with toddlers in tow. City officials added roughly 2,000 new 3-K seats in areas of high demand to address the issue.

This year, 70% of 3-K applicants got their first choice program, up from 65% last year, according to the Education Department data. Of the roughly 5,100 families who didn’t get into any of the 3-K programs they chose and had to be placed in a program by the Education Department, 63% were put in a program within a mile of their home — up from 39% last year.

Looking ahead, here are some key dates to know:

High school admissions will run from Oct. 6 to Dec. 4, with SHSAT registration closing on Oct. 30. Offers will be sent March 4, 2027.
Middle schools admissions will run from Oct. 14 to Dec. 11. Offers will be sent April 7, 2027.
Kindergarten admissions will run from Dec. 9 to Jan. 22, 2027. Offers will be sent March 30, 2027.
3-K and pre-K admissions will run from Jan. 13 to Feb. 26, 2027. Pre-K offers will be sent May 11, 2027, and 3-K offers will be sent May 18, 2027.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael atmelsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

At Hunter College, students tackle garbage — and a new way of shaping policy

2026-07-09T20:42:16+00:00

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

If Hunter College manages to reduce the roughly one ton of trash it produces each day — as required by a state order directing all public entities to cut their waste — it will likely be thanks to a new, highly democratic decision-making body known as a citizens assembly.

Over two months, some three dozen Hunter undergraduates met weekly to research the topic, grill the college’s waste managers and outside experts, tour the campus trash trail, and ultimately come to consensus on seven actions aimed at sending less garbage to recycling and landfills.

The CUNY Climate Assembly Project at Hunter, or CCAP, is one of the first citizens assemblies in New York state. The approach involves selecting participants at random, ensuring their demographics accurately reflect the community, and giving their recommendations real weight in decision-making. Also known as civic assembly, popular assembly, lottocracy, or citizen jury, it has been used in Europe for decades and is gaining traction in the United States and around the world.

Some of the Hunter College climate assembly participants were drawn by the $750 stipend. Others had nothing planned for spring break, when the assembly began. And some seized the opportunity to collaborate with others and achieve a tangible good.

“I’ve been in a phase of climate nihilism,” said Luisa Pellettieri, a senior in sociology. “I’m trying to say yes to more things. I’m hoping to get hope back.”

Over the summer, the group will present its recommendations to Hunter College leadership, which promised to review and respond to them. While college leaders did not commit to more binding language, they have been involved and supportive of the effort.

Assembly organizer Forrest Sparks said the project connects people in new ways. “The group that comes together looks like the larger public of Hunter,” he said, addressing the crowd gathered in the West Building’s eighth-floor conference room on a rainy Friday in February, waiting for participants to be drawn from a lottery spinner. Over 23,000 students received an email invitation to opt in to the lottery; 570 accepted the invitation, and 42 were selected by lottery.

“It really expands who decides and who designs within our democracy,” Sparks said to the group. “In our current political system, unfortunately, we don’t have too many pathways to do that. But y’all are leading the way.”

A custodial supervisor leads delegates on a tour of waste management on the Hunter campus as a custodian walks through carrying bags of trash.

A democratic innovation

Central to any citizens assembly is the selection of participants by lottery. In a given city, an invitation might be mailed to as many as 10,000 to 20,000 people. Of those who respond, several dozen participants are usually chosen with tools that select for both randomness and demographic representativeness.

Running a successful assembly is labor-intensive. Organizers must secure funding, get buy-in from decision-makers who have the power to act on the assembly’s consensus, and recruit a qualified team to plan and lead the process over weeks or months. CCAP was funded by a Mellon Foundation grant to the CUNY Center for the Humanities and led by professional facilitators and trained graduate students.

But the payoffs can be significant. Proponents say citizens assemblies surface genuine public opinion and generate creative solutions that politicians — constrained by loyalties and conflicts — might never reach. They build trust in public policymaking, and participants often report feeling more engaged in democracy, sometimes for the first time.

Former New York City comptroller and council member Brad Lander called for a citizens assembly on housing while campaigning for mayor last year. “At a time of catastrophically low trust in our democracy, I believe citizens assemblies can help to renew it,” Lander, who is now a candidate for Congress, told New York Focus.

The model also forges unusual bonds: Because a citizen assembly’s “mini-public” mirrors the demographics of its community, participants collaborate with people unlike them politically and socioeconomically, and elected officials get policy options with democratic legitimacy already built in.

Local leaders

The Hunter College climate project isn’t the city’s only citizens assembly.

Last month, New York City residents over the age of 11 voted on local projects in a city-sponsored deliberative process called The People’s Money. The five boroughs have $4 million total to spend on priorities selected through borough-level citizens assemblies.

Now in its fourth cycle, The People’s Money unfolds in four phases: open idea submission, a citizens assembly in each borough to choose finalist ideas, a public vote, and then implementation. Projects have included swim lessons for children in NYCHA housing, food-growing and cooking programs, and housing education for older adults.

The program is run by the Civic Engagement Commission, which was created by a 2018 referendum to initiate a citywide participatory budgeting process (in addition to the participatory budgeting programs run by many City Council members in their own districts).

“People themselves do know what is best, and they can arrive at conclusions that work for the community and that are legislatively feasible,” said Benjamin Solotaire, senior adviser at the Civic Engagement Commission, who helped to integrate the assembly component into The People’s Money process. “It is really the lived experience that makes it feasible.”

New York and beyond

The climax of the Hunter College assembly’s campus “garbage tour” was a visit to the trash compactor on East 67th Street, where delegates watched as custodians on a high platform emptied trash from the entire campus into a massive metal container before it was carted away by the Sanitation Department. The goal was to see the problem up close.

Rozen Kapadia, a junior studying psychology, said her role on the assembly was already changing her mindset. “I do feel responsible,” she said. “I feel expected to bring about change.”

A staff custodial supervisor answers assembly members' questions outside the compactor on East 67th Street.

Over the two months that followed, the delegates worked to achieve it. They sought information from outside experts. They met every Friday to learn, deliberate and ideate. A public forum on May 15 included the broader campus community. In early June, the assembly developed and voted on nine recommendations, passing seven with a strong consensus. Those include expanding the compost program, barring on-campus vendors from distributing styrofoam and single-use plastics, and redesigning and relocating trash receptacles to encourage recycling.

The results will be discussed with the administration over the summer. Then nine students will serve as post-assembly fellows, working with campus leadership to implement the proposals.

“This was a great experience,” said Hunter junior Tariq Bradshaw after the vote. “I think I’ll always look back on this time, because I never thought I would do anything like this before. It was great being part of something bigger.”

It’s unclear whether supporting citizens assemblies is a priority for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration; neither the mayor nor his new Office of Mass Engagement answered questions about it. (OME’s first initiative is quite different: a campaign to recruit tenants to testify at upcoming rent stabilization hearings.)

Across the country, meanwhile, citizens assemblies are proliferating. This spring, Los Angeles used one as part of a city charter review, as did Lexington, Kentucky. Akron, Ohio, just conducted a citizens assembly on housing; Raleigh, North Carolina, held one focused on urban planning. Beginning in July, Connecticut will hold a statewide citizens assembly on property taxes.

Abroad, notable examples include the standing assemblies of Paris and East Belgium — whose recommendations have been adopted into law — and the 2016 Irish assembly that led the country to legalize abortion two years later.

Citizens assemblies are not infallible. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, overpromised and underdelivered on implementing the French Citizens Convention on Climate six years ago.

Still, the model may prove well suited to society’s emerging problems. Two western communities have already launched assemblies on artificial intelligence: the Central Oregon Community Solutions Assembly on AI and the Snohomish County, Washington Civic Assembly.

If elected, Lander said, he’d love to do the same in New York. A citizens assembly could “transform an extractive, profit-driven model of artificial intelligence by using a democratic model for amplifying our collective intelligence,” he said.

Tap your cellphone: NYC to pilot digital student OMNY cards for 7 schools

2026-07-07T16:10:38+00:00

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Student OMNY cards are going digital, at least for some New York City students, Chalkbeat has learned.

New York City’s Education Department is launching a pilot program for virtual student OMNY cards at seven schools, officials confirmed on Monday. Officials declined to share which schools will be part of the initiative and said the participating schools were subject to change.

Officials initially said the pilot would launch this fall, but later walked that back, saying they had no start date yet.

Students at those schools might not be allowed to access their cellphones during the school day, but will be able to use their devices to tap for their commutes to and from campus. The move comes after widespread complaints of physical cards breaking and long delays for replacement cards.

The Office of Pupil Transportation selected participating traditional public, charter, and non-public schools after assessing whether they were ready to transition to cellphone-based OMNY cards.

The school system and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority have been discussing the move to virtual cards for more than a year. Students without phones would still be able to obtain physical OMNY cards.

The shift from student MetroCards to OMNY cards during the 2024-25 school year has been a game changer for many students. They now get four free rides a day, 365 days a year, at any time, a significant upgrade from the three daily rides during limited hours on school days.

But many students have run into problems with the flimsy paper cards, which are known to suddenly stop working and can be difficult to replace from school in a timely manner. Some families have told Chalkbeat they’ve waited for months to get replacement student OMNY cards. And while some students are able to pay the fare in the meantime, others can’t afford to and jump turnstiles.

Ishaq Bekoe, a student at the NYC School for Collaborative Studies, told City Council members at a March City Council hearing that his friend’s OMNY card “randomly” stopped working last year.

“We thought it was just a glitch, however, the next day, the same thing happened,” Ishaq said. “So he had to jump the turnstile where an officer approached him and stopped him and asked him where his OMNY card was. He tried to explain to the officer that his OMNY card wasn’t working, to which the officer replied that something like that doesn’t just happen.”

His friend was able to show the officer his OMNY card, but then missed his train and had to wait another 10 minutes.

“When a student’s card stops working without warning, it is not just an inconvenience, it can disrupt their entire day, their attendance, and their sense of stability,” Ishaq said.

August Hoyt, a student at Bard High School Early College Manhattan and a member of the youth activist committee for the Transportation Alternatives transit advocacy nonprofit, told City Council members that his OMNY card had been deactivated at least half a dozen times for reasons that were unclear to him. His peers, too, have been left stranded by malfunctioning or deactivated cards.

“It puts students — and particularly students of color — at risk of confrontations with the law enforcement,” August said.

Several students at that hearing pushed the city to expand eligibility for student OMNY cards to groups that don’t currently receive them, including students who live less than a half-mile from school and students with disabilities who ride yellow buses and are limited to that single mode of transportation.

Without OMNY cards, those students miss out on benefits such as free rides on weekends and during the summer, as well as transportation to and from sports practices, extracurricular activities, and internships.

Education Department officials said the current eligibility requirements will remain in effect for the coming school year.

New York City pays the MTA about $50.5 million annually for the student OMNY cards program, officials said.

This story was updated to reflect new information from the Education Department about the pilot program’s timeline.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s what happened to 3 Colorado schools when state lawmakers reined in a controversial education group

2026-07-02T20:12:17+00:00

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A recent law change aimed at what some Colorado lawmakers saw as a rogue school authorizing group quickly changed the trajectory of three public schools this spring.

One closed, one will stay open, and the fate of the third is a mystery.

The new law put strict limits on the school-authorizing power of Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES. It passed quickly in the last days of this spring’s legislative session, a sign of the urgency lawmakers felt in their bid to rein in one particular BOCES: Education reEnvisioned.

The Monument-based group, often called ERBOCES, started a controversial “public Christian school” last August and fueled explosive growth in homeschool enrichment programs that cost the state tens of millions of dollars.

The law forced ERBOCES’ three brick-and-mortar schools to find a new path forward or shut down.

Riverstone Academy, the public Christian school, closed at the end of the school year. It had about 30 elementary students.

Ascend College Prep became a charter school after winning authorization last month from the Charter School Institute, a statewide charter authorizer. Last year, the Colorado Springs school served 116 students in grades 10 through 12.

After a year of controversy, the leader of a shuttered ‘public Christian school’ is pitching a new venture

It’s not clear what will happen to the third school, the 260-student Pueblo Classical Academy. School leaders were unsuccessful in their recent effort to become a charter school authorized by Pueblo School District 60. They haven’t responded to questions about whether the school will close or obtain a new arrangement that will allow it to stay open.

The new law bars BOCES from authorizing schools outside their member school districts and from having brick-and-mortar schools entirely run by contractors. Since Riverstone, Ascend, and Pueblo Classical were outside ERBOCES’ member school districts and run by contractors, they didn’t meet the new law’s requirements.

Riverstone’s leader, Quin Friberg, didn’t respond to a request for comment about why he didn’t seek a new authorizer for the school.

Riverstone had been forced out of its original building midway through the school year because of safety concerns and hadn’t completed the required improvements to move back in.

After the law change, Ascend officials rushed to convert it to a charter school under the umbrella of the Charter School Institute, a move that also required approval from Academy District 20, where the school is located. Both tasks had to be finished in about six weeks.

Ascend Principal Karin McWhorter said her team was blindsided by the abrupt law change.

“Ascend has done everything right for five years,” she said. “We keep meticulous records, we have a 100% graduation rate, we follow every single law and regulation to the letter, and so … my initial thought was, it felt very unfair.”

McWhorter said becoming a charter school will also bring benefits, including access to certain kinds of capital project funding for schools.

McWhorter opened Ascend in 2021 after teaching at the Air Force Academy and finding that some students arrived unprepared for college-level work. She started the school with high school juniors and seniors, then added sophomores in its third year so there would be enough students to receive a state rating. The school, housed in leased office space, caps classes at 16 students and enrollment at 125.

Pueblo Classical Academy has recently posted school supply lists and enrollment forms for the 2026-27 year, but it’s not clear how the school will open without a new authorizer.

Pueblo Classical has a history of switching authorizers. It opened in 2021 with ERBOCES as its authorizer. In 2022, it became a charter school authorized by District 70. But in 2024, the district revoked its charter because of financial breaches and its failure to report an employee’s arrest, among other concerns. At that point, the school returned to ERBOCES.

Spokespeople for Pueblo County District 70, where the school is located, and the Charter School Institute said Pueblo Classical had not applied to them for authorization. Ken Witt, ERBOCES’ executive director, said by email Wednesday he doesn’t know if Pueblo Classical has found a new authorizer.

Dave Martin, the head of the three-school network that includes Pueblo Classical, didn’t respond to repeated email and phone messages asking about the school’s plans for the coming year.

Martin did speak to Chalkbeat just before the June 23 vote by the Pueblo 60 school board on whether to authorize Pueblo Classical as a charter school.

He expressed frustration over the sudden law change, saying his students were getting caught in the political crossfire.

“Shame on those folks who swing to the right, and shame on those folks who swing to the left, because at the end of the day, not one of those 260 families that we serve had anything to do with either side,” he said.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@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.

Education Department officials deny doing an end run around Congress

2026-06-25T22:59:46+00:00

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Parceling out key Education Department functions to other agencies does not represent an end run around Congress, top officials said Thursday, even as they declined to say what might trigger the need for congressional approval.

In a 20-minute video interview with Chalkbeat, assistant secretaries Kirsten Baesler, Kimberly Richey, and Kelly Rogers pushed back against criticism from education advocacy groups, Democratic lawmakers, and even some Republicans.

They argued these changes will be good for students and families in tangible ways — saying that they will improve services for children with disabilities, strengthen civil rights protections, and boost academic outcomes. In a number of cases, though, they offered only limited specifics on how moving around offices would make a practical difference.

Baesler, the former North Dakota schools chief, oversees K-12 programming, which is now under the Department of Labor. Richey oversees civil rights, which will be working more closely with the Department of Justice. Rogers runs the special education arm, which has been moved to the Department of Health and Human Services.

They reiterated the idea that a series of interagency agreements will provide proof of concept that the federal government can best support education without an actual Education Department.

And they said the changes underway are responsive to parent and educator complaints about the status quo — but they could not name leaders or groups not already in the Republican camp who support specific changes, such as moving special education oversight to Health and Human Services.

Here’s what we heard from Education Department leaders:

Officials deny going around Congress

Baesler responded with an emphatic “absolutely not” when asked if the interagency agreements are a way to dismantle the department without getting congressional approval.

“We know that dismantling or the dissolution of the Department of Education will take an act of Congress,” she said. “Our whole intent is to provide evidence to our congressional members of the House and the Senate that this is actually a more efficient and effective way to yield stronger student academic outcomes. … We’re not going around but working with.”

Kirsten Baesler, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education

Baesler compared the 14 interagency agreements that have farmed out duties the law assigns to the Education Department to six other departments to times she ran a pilot program in North Dakota before asking state lawmakers to change policy or approve new funding.

But the administration has not treated the effort as a small pilot — it has outsourced several of the largest arms of the agency. After months of limited pushback, some lawmakers are speaking out.

Last week, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the Senate education committee who has stepped up his criticism of the administration since losing his primary, promised a committee vote on a measure that would prevent special education from moving to HHS.

And on Thursday, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the House education committee, introduced articles of impeachment that accuse McMahon of “willful intent to unilaterally dismantle and eliminate the Department of Education.”

Schools will get federal money on time this year

Baesler said federal money will go out to states and school districts on July 1, as is typical.

Last summer, the Office of Management and Budget held back some $7 billion that school leaders had been counting on to hire staff and set up programs for the upcoming school year. The money was only restored after outcry from Republican lawmakers and state chiefs.

This year, the Office of Management and Budget has used an obscure procedure to delay placing money in the necessary accounts for some federal grant programs. The affected accounts involve a smaller pot of money than last year’s withholding.

Baesler said school districts will not experience a repeat of last year’s delays.

Officials could not name parents who pushed for special education changes

Rogers laid out the case for the most contentious of recent changes: moving special education oversight to HHS. In listening sessions, Education Department officials heard from parents that their children often need services and support outside of school. She said partnering with HHS will improve services from infancy into adulthood. The ultimate goal, she said, is better long-term outcomes.

While disability advocates have stressed that students with disabilities are students first, Rogers said parents said their children are more than just students. That means Health and Human Services is a better place to meet their needs, she said.

Linda McMahon says she heard parents. Parents say special education changes show she didn’t listen.

But asked to name a disability rights group or individual who wanted special education to move to HHS, Rogers could not do so. “I don’t have that information right now on who said what, but we took in all the feedback and made the ultimate decision,” she said.

Administration touts state flexibility, even though some leaders aren’t feeling it

Similarly, Baesler said she believes the changes to K-12 education will empower states and local districts and ultimately improve student academic outcomes.

But asked to name a Democratic-appointed or aligned education leader who feels empowered by the administration’s changes, Baesler could not do so. She cited Vermont’s education chief, who was appointed by a Republican. Education leaders in Rhode Island and Washington have previously told Chalkbeat that if anything they are experiencing more federal involvement under the Trump administration.

It’s still not clear how exactly civil rights enforcement will change

The Department of Justice will take a “more active and involved role” in school civil rights complaints going forward, Richey said, while the Office for Civil Rights retains ultimate authority over civil rights enforcement.

“We’re going to continue to be laser focused on complaint investigation and resolution,” Richey said.

The Trump administration has laid off civil rights investigators, closed regional offices, and focused enforcement on high-profile cases involving political priorities such as transgender athletes and campus protests.

Many details of the agreement are still being worked out, Richey said, but the goal is “more aggressive enforcement” and bolstering civil rights in schools.

In an interview last week with conservative commentator Glenn Beck, Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, said Justice has “cut out the middle man, which is Department of Education investigators and lawyers.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the work is going to be done here,” she said.

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

Another defection hits group that launched ‘Colorado’s first public Christian school’

2026-06-24T22:55:51+00:00

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A controversial public education co-op that spearheaded a “public Christian school” in southern Colorado last year will lose a member in August, putting its existence in jeopardy for the second time this summer.

Pikes Peak State College will withdraw from the co-op — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services or ERBOCES — effective Aug. 15, Matt Radcliffe, a spokesperson for the college, said by email on Tuesday.

“We do not have anything further to add,” he wrote.

The Elizabeth School District withdrew from ERBOCES in early June. The only other school district member — District 49 in El Paso County — also considered dropping out this month but ultimately opted not to.

Colorado group that started controversial ‘public Christian school’ loses member support

State law requires co-ops like ERBOCES to have at least two members, either two school districts or a school district and a college. Once Pikes Peak State College leaves the co-op, ERBOCES would need another member to keep operating in accordance with the law.

ERBOCES has been at the center of two major controversies over the past year, and both its members and state lawmakers have taken notice. Last summer, the co-op authorized Riverstone Academy, a tiny school in Pueblo County that emails show was created at the behest of a conservative law firm that wanted to spark a religious liberty lawsuit that would go to the U.S. Supreme Court. ERBOCES has also fueled massive growth in publicly funded home-school enrichment programs across the state, using private contractors and subcontractors that keep many details hidden from the public.

In May, Colorado lawmakers sharply curtailed the power of such co-ops to operate schools or programs outside their member districts. The changes prompted the permanent closure of Riverstone and could lead to the closure of other schools and some home-school enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES.

Asked how ERBOCES will continue operating once Pikes Peak drops out, Ken Witt, the group’s executive director, was vague.

“We routinely welcome new members, just as we understand when political and administrative changes lead to affiliation changes,” he said by email Wednesday. “We will continue to do all in our power to ensure parents have access to the programs and schools they want for their children.”

ERBOCES authorizes several schools, most of them online schools. It also has dozens of home-school enrichment programs, which typically provide six hours a week of tuition-free classes or activities.

When the District 49 school board, which is ERBOCES’ fiscal agent, discussed whether to drop out of the co-op in early June, board members were divided. Some, like Mike Heil, who drafted a presentation highlighting his concerns, questioned the “reputational impact” of District 49 being associated with the co-op.

Board member Lori Thompson, who recently joined the ERBOCES board, said Heil’s presentation told an incomplete story.

School Board President Marie LaVere-Wright, who used to be a member of the ERBOCES board, urged the District 49 board to stick with the co-op for another year at a minimum.

“If we leave, because their funding flows through us, too, that creates a structural problem for them,” she said. “And you have a whole set of families that are depending on this who would immediately lose something.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

After a year of controversy, the leader of a shuttered ‘public Christian school’ is pitching a new venture

2026-06-24T20:34:53+00:00

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Just weeks after the permanent closure of a controversial “public Christian school” in southern Colorado, its leader is pitching a new venture that involves public funding for students who opt out of public schools: overseeing homeschool enrichment programs.

On Tuesday, Quin Friberg, former executive director of Riverstone Academy, asked the Pueblo County District 70 school board to consider contracting with a nonprofit he created last month called Keystone Education Services. His new pursuit comes after recent state law changes that will require some publicly funded enrichment programs to seek new authorizers. The changes also forced Riverstone, which was located in District 70, to close last month.

“We created this organization to partner with school districts or charters to help monitor compliance around home school enrichment programs,” Friberg told the school board.

But after months of community pushback and legal problems related to Riverstone, the District 70 school board was divided on Friberg’s latest proposal.

“We have just been through hell on account of Pastor Friberg,” board member Mark Emery said.

“I’m not sure what that’s a reference to, but continue,” Friberg said.

“Your school,” Emery said.

“My school. Oh!” said Friberg, sounding surprised.

Board President Ann Bennett spoke in favor of the Keystone proposal, saying it would create new educational choices for local families.

Bennett said opposition to the proposal “is because there’s a chip on people’s shoulder because of Quin and because of Brad (Miller), and I’m not willing to sacrifice the 70 homeschool students for a vendetta.”

A leaked email written by Miller, a Colorado education lawyer, revealed last fall that Riverstone was started at the behest of a conservative law firm hoping to spark a religious liberty case that would go to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May, the case fizzled when it became clear the school would close for good.

One District 70 board member, Susie Carnes, is also on the board of Keystone Education Services. She said little during Tuesday’s discussion, and it’s unclear if she’d recuse herself from a vote on Keystone, which could take place later this summer.

Contracting with Keystone Education Services could demand a leap of faith for Colorado districts given the history of Friberg’s now-defunct school. During its 10-month existence, Riverstone was involved in lawsuits against the county and the state, was forced to vacate its building because of safety concerns, and its authorizer settled with the family of a Riverstone student for $20,000.

The 10,000-student District 70 district is also coming off a tumultuous year peppered with conflicts over Riverstone. The school board faced infighting over a controversial school board vacancy appointment and accusations that some board members failed to recuse themselves from key votes in which they had conflicts of interest. The board is also embroiled in a lawsuit over open meeting violations stemming from Riverstone’s launch.

Colorado lawmakers this spring put strict new limits on the authorizing power of the state’s 21 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services or BOCES. It was largely a response to Education reEnvisioned BOCES, the Monument-based co-op that authorized Riverstone and scores of homeschool enrichment programs across the state.

The law change bars the co-ops from authorizing schools or enrichment programs outside their member districts and means that dozens of homeschool enrichment programs previously authorized by Education reEnvisioned will no longer get public funding unless they get approval from a local district or charter school.

According to Friberg’s presentation, Keystone would serve as a sort of middleman between school districts and any homeschool enrichment program they authorize. Such publicly funded programs typically offer about six hours a week of tuition-free classes to homeschoolers. Some include math, reading, and electives such as art, music, and physical education. Others fill a specific niche: forest schools, aviation classes, or performing arts programming.

It’s not clear how many students in Pueblo 70 would participate in Keystone-supervised enrichment programs. Superintendent Ronda Rein, who’s retiring this month, estimated there are about 70 homeschoolers currently known to the district. Friberg suggested the number could eventually be hundreds.

Keystone would get a 6.5% cut of the state money that flows to enrichment programs in exchange for vetting new enrichment programs for school districts and providing oversight once they start. Districts would get to keep another 6.5% of the state money, Friberg said.

On average, the state pays about $6,000 per homeschool enrichment student.

Rein said a contract with Keystone would put a new burden on district administrators and expose the district to liability if something went wrong.

Friberg told the District 70 board he’s shopping his Keystone proposal to districts across Colorado, with upcoming meetings in Westcliffe and Grand Junction. He said he’s also reached out to every BOCES in the state.

A handful of community members spoke about the Keystone proposal Tuesday evening.

Jennifer Holderman, who homeschools two of her children, said the district should support homeschool families with enrichment programming because they are part of the district too.

“We live here, we raise our children here, we volunteer here … Choosing a different educational model does not mean choosing to leave the community.”

Another district parent, Hannah McDowell, was sharply critical of Friberg’s proposal.

“Keystone Education Services is literally a brand new, made-up entity dabbling in messy legal technicalities, much like Riverstone Academy was,” she said. “And look how all that turned out: lawsuits, safety violations, damaged reputations, and outrageous amounts of money wasted.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Non-college career pathways have a math problem

2026-06-23T09:56:46+00:00

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For much of the last few decades, some young people have heard a simple mantra: bachelor’s or bust. That is, the best and perhaps only path to economic prosperity is through a four-year college education. Now a wide swath of politicians, educators, and philanthropists are rethinking this. Some even suggest that there are numerous lucrative jobs that don’t require a degree.

A New York Times video explained that “Job demand in fields like construction, along with the allure of potential six-figure salaries, have some high schools investing in hands-on classes that are redefining what success looks like for the Class of 2026.”

At the recent Education Writers Association conference, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore suggested high schools are too focused on getting students into college. If a student chooses a different route “and they find something that’s going to make them have economic mobility for them and their family, then right on,” he said.

Amidst this enthusiasm I wanted to take a look at the data to answer a simple but contested question: How likely is it that students can skip a four-year degree and make a good living or achieve “economic mobility?”

The short answer is it’s certainly possible, but the odds are stacked against workers without degrees. “We all want the $70,000 job that a student can access right outside of high school,” says Dom McKoy, executive director of the University of Chicago’s To&Through Project. But those opportunities are rare. “We have to be really clear-eyed about what is a true pathway at scale for young people.”

Some non-college occupations offer solidly middle-class salaries — but the largest ones typically don’t

To analyze this issue, I used federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data on pay by occupation, organized by the share of workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

On average, jobs where degrees are required or encouraged pay more. Notably, though, a handful of jobs in the blue-collar trades also make slightly above the national median. Those include plumbers, machinists, HVAC installers, and carpenters, among others. Although these jobs typically require some form of postsecondary training, and in some cases students take on debt, they don’t demand four-year degrees.

Still, the most common non-college jobs make far below the median. For instance, there are over 4 million people who work as home health and personal care aides in America, the largest single occupation. That’s more than the number of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, HVAC specialists, welders, car mechanics, roofers, and power-line installers combined. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts more growth in jobs for home health aides than any other occupation. The median salary is about $35,000 a year.

Other large non-college vocations — each encompassing millions of people — include retail sales workers, cashiers, order stockers, waiters and waitresses, fast-food workers, and janitors. All of these pay substantially below the median. One exception is truck driving, a position that pays relatively well and employs millions of people. But many fear the job is at particularly high risk of automation.

All this maps onto other data showing that college-educated workers have a large wage advantage, on average, compared to those without a degree.

Better-paid, non-college occupations employ few women

Most of these relatively well-paid blue-collar jobs are dominated by men. In some cases, fewer than 10% of the positions are filled by women. Many of the large, lower-paid occupations, including home health aides, have a high share of women.

Some of the lower-paid careers where college degrees are required — including teaching and social work — are also largely staffed by women. Their salaries still outstrip the vast majority of non-college options, though. This suggests that forgoing college is particularly risky for girls and women.

Despite the headlines, six-figure salaries are rare in non-college jobs

The vast majority of non-college roles, including blue collar trades, earn below-average wages. This is different from median wages, which captures the typical worker’s experience. The average salary is usually higher than the median because it includes more of the upside for top earners within a profession.

This data indicates that non-college occupations have relatively low pay ceilings. The slew of headlines and viral social media videos about six-figure jobs in the trades appear to be outliers. In many cases, only the top 10%, or fewer, of those workers make such salaries.

Many occupations have a combination of workers with and without four-year degrees.

So far, I’ve been focusing on the distinction between college and non-college pathways, but as the data makes clear, this is not a simple binary.

In many cases, degree-holders likely have an edge within an occupation. But in other cases, the degree may have little, if any, value. A significant minority of lower-paid jobs are held by college graduates; even more are held by those who attended college but didn’t earn a degree. For instance, nearly half of home health aides spent at least some time in college.

Will AI change all of this?

This data cannot answer whether a particular student should attend college. That depends on what profession they want to pursue, their chances of graduating, the debt they may have to take on, and the quality of college they would attend. It also depends on an unknown future. The economy is always changing and may shift rapidly in the coming decades.

A recent Wall Street Journal survey found some economists predicting that AI will reduce demand for white-collar work. But others predicted no change or even said that there would be more demand for knowledge work.

The bottom line: Considering how the economy is currently structured, it’s risky to bet against the value of a bachelor’s degree.

Methodological note: The data we used here extrapolates hourly pay rates into estimated annual salaries for full-time workers. These figures, including the national median and average, do not count overtime pay, certain bonuses, and some other forms of compensation. We categorized the largest 250 occupations — encompassing the vast majority of workers — by the share of workers who have attained at least a bachelor’s degree. Other forms of postsecondary education are not included in this analysis. Keep in mind that there is substantial variation among workers in the same occupation, including by region, educational level, experience, union status, and more.

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.

Click here to continue reading.

Education Department dismantling continues: special ed oversight to HHS, civil rights to Justice

2026-06-16T17:27:13+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Justice is taking over aspects of civil rights enforcement in schools, while oversight of special education is moving to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Trump administration announced Tuesday.

The change will move some of the most essential and integrated functions provided by the federal Education Department to two separate agencies and further accelerates the dismantling of the department without congressional approval.

Senior department officials said the changes would not reduce or affect students’ rights and would instead lead to more effective services for students and families. But many details are still being worked out.

“The Trump Administration has been clear: as we scale back federal micromanagement when it hinders success, we are equally committed to bolstering the efficacy of federal oversight where it is essential,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a press release.

Advocates for students with disabilities have been fighting the move involving special education for more than a year. They had hoped that the overwhelming opposition voiced during listening sessions earlier this spring might sway officials.

They fear that Health and Human Services lacks not only the experience but also the appropriate perspective to support the education of students with disabilities, most of whom are educated alongside their peers in general education classrooms.

Meanwhile, complaints related to children with disabilities make up a significant portion of the work of the Office for Civil Rights. While the Department of Justice has always played a critical role in civil rights enforcement, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights historically has focused specifically on getting school districts to change their practices rather than penalizing violations. Advocates have valued that approach as a way of improving education for a larger group of students.

The law that established the Department of Education says the agency is responsible for overseeing and funding the education of children with disabilities, and for enforcing civil rights in schools. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act also places special education oversight within the Department of Education.

Recent budget laws give control of IDEA funds to the Department of Education and say that money can’t just be transferred to another agency.

Education advocates quickly condemned the move.

“These continued disruptions will create confusion for states and school districts, undermine accountability, and inject uncertainty into services that students and families depend on every day,” The Education Trust, a progressive advocacy group, said in a statement. “Without a clear plan, these shifts risk weakening implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and decades of hard-fought civil rights progress.”

The Education Department is using interagency agreements to move the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services to HHS and the Office for Civil Rights to Justice without a green light from Congress. Historically, such agreements were used to allow departments to contract with other agencies for certain services outside their core mission.

It’s the same mechanism that the department used to move career and technical education and the bulk of K-12 programming to the U.S. Department of Labor.

Members of Congress have raised questions about these moves, with Democrats even calling them illegal, but there has been no meaningful congressional oversight or other steps to block the changes.

Supporters of the changes have said it would better align educational programs with workforce needs.

Moving special education to Health and Human Services is a much bigger change, and one where the policy justifications are less clear.

Linda McMahon says she heard parents. Parents say special education changes show she didn’t listen.

Supporters of IDEA and its critics can both point to many problems with the law, including persistent underfunding and a focus on compliance rather than meeting students’ needs.

But many advocates fear moving special education to Health and Human Services will mark a return to a medical model of dealing with disability. A recent study found that students with disabilities benefit from special education services, suggesting the system is working for at least some students.

A senior department official said partnering with Health and Human Services will improve coordination of services for infants and toddlers, on one end of the spectrum, and services for adults with disabilities on the other end, with the education provided in schools.

The official said the Trump administration also plans to increase funding for special education by roughly $500 million, although it remains to be seen if Congress will agree to that.

The move follows a blueprint laid out in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for moving special education to HHS and converting funding into a small voucher for individual families. Project 2025 also calls for moving civil rights enforcement to Justice.

Lindsey Burke, the lead author of Project 2025’s education chapter, is a top official at the Education Department.

“Downsizing this agency and returning education to the states achieves a long-standing goal to empower families and local communities,” Burke said during a Chalkbeat event earlier this year. She said that the Education Department has proven to be a costly failure.

Under McMahon, the Office for Civil Rights has been cut significantly even as it’s continued to receive thousands of discrimination complaints. The office received more than 9,000 complaints of alleged discrimination between March 2024 and Sept. 2025, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report. The department resolved more than 7,000, though 90% were resolved through dismissal.

The administration previously laid off Office for Civil Rights staff before more recently moving to rehire attorneys. It also closed seven out of 12 regional offices, reassigning caseloads to the five remaining offices.

National reporter Lily Altavena and Ideas Editor Matt Barnum contributed.

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

Indiana wins federal education funding waiver from Trump administration

2026-06-16T15:01:14+00:00

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The Trump administration is giving Indiana new flexibility in how it spends some of its federal education funding.

But the waiver from the U.S. Department of Education is not nearly as expansive as what Indiana requested last year, when it sought a waiver from some provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the main federal law governing K-12 education.

The approved waiver will merge five federal funding streams to the tune of around $50 million over the next four years, according to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who spoke at a news conference with Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner and Indiana Gov. Mike Braun on Tuesday.

This strategy for federal education funding, often referred to as a block grant, is popular among conservatives championing fewer regulations. But others have criticized it, saying it could weaken accountability for the money and ultimately hurt certain students.

Indiana is now the third state after Iowa and Louisiana to receive a “Returning Education to the States” waiver from the Trump administration, which has also sought to close the Education Department. The flexibility the department provided to Iowa was also more modest than what the state originally sought.

McMahon and Jenner said the move will save Indiana an estimated $20 million in compliance costs over four years associated with administering the grants separately.

“As states, we have significant control over education. We set standards, choose our curriculum, and design assessments. When it comes to federal funding, our hands have always been tied, until now,” Jenner said.

The waiver will also allow the state to use its newly approved school accountability model as the sole accountability model for state and federal purposes.

At the state level, the waiver will merge the following funding streams:

Title I, Part B grants, which cover assessment.
Title II, Part A grants, which cover professional development.
Title III, Part A grants, which cover education for English learners.
Title IV, Part A grants, which cover enrichment.
Title IV, Part B grants, which cover 21st Century Learning Centers.

The federal funding for these grants will not change under the waiver.

The waiver does not grant all Indiana districts similar flexibility to spend the money they receive from the state, as the state originally requested in its waiver application. Instead, it allows the state to create a pilot program for up to 15% of local education agencies that will allow them to merge Title II, Part A and Title IV, Part A funds.

The waiver also does not address Indiana’s request to redirect School Improvement Grant funding away from schools identified as low-performing. That request would have potentially diverted $25 million in annual federal funding to other schools, like charter schools and microschools.

Education advocates had expressed concern that this move would have hurt students who have to stay at the schools identified as low-performing.

Similarly, critics have also said that merging dedicated federal funding streams for specific student needs into block grants risks losing the guardrails that ensure the funding reaches those students.

Denise Forte, president and CEO of The Education Trust, an advocacy group that tracks the status of state waiver requests, said in a Tuesday statement that the Trump administration “has abandoned” commitments to supporting students and schools and to publicly reporting important education data.

“Instead, the Department of Education will allow Indiana to rewrite its accountability system in a way that will mask student performance and move millions of dollars in dedicated funding away from students who need it most,” Forte said.

Indiana officials on Tuesday rejected such arguments.

“Our funding formulas … direct a certain number of dollars per student to every school. That money will continue to flow,” Jenner said. “Now the money will be able to be deployed exactly how they need it in a timely manner.”

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Knicks ticker-tape parade is on a school day — and conflicts with Regents exams. Some families are angry.

2026-06-15T00:05:13+00:00

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The New York Knicks’ victory this weekend over the San Antonio Spurs, cementing their first NBA championship since 1973, brought joy to fans across the five boroughs.

Shortly after their win, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the city will host a ticker-tape parade to honor the team. It will start at 10 a.m. at Battery Park and travel north along Broadway through the Canyon of Heroes before concluding at City Hall for a ceremony where the mayor will give the team the keys to the city.

The only problem: Some parents are mad that the parade is being held on the same day as science Regents exams. The biology and living environment exams are being administered in the morning. The “Earth and Space Sciences” and “Physical Setting/ Earth Science” exams are being administered in the afternoon.

One mom has already started a petition asking city and state officials, as well as the team’s owner, to move the day of the parade. (High school students who aren’t taking Regents exams that day don’t attend school.) And one student started a petition to cancel school altogether on Thursday.

“This scheduling conflict creates a profound issue of equity and fairness,” Michelle Weintraub, a mom of an eighth grader scheduled to take a Regents exam that day, wrote in her petition. “The students most affected are those who have worked tirelessly all year to pass these exams. Depriving them of the chance to celebrate their city’s historic milestone—while adults and non-testing students freely attend—is inherently inequitable.”

Sebastian Crosa, the student who started a petition, played up the feelings of unity the Knicks have brought to the city — and suggested the parade could be a teachable moment.

“The parade is an educational experience in itself, rich with lessons about sportsmanship, history, and the power of dreams coming true,” Cosa wrote in his petition. “By supporting this request, we will allow the next generation of Knicks fans to experience this extraordinary moment, creating lifelong memories and sparking inspiration for future accomplishments in their own lives.”

As mayor, Mamdani has embraced a sense of fun for the city’s school kids, “canceling” bed time so they could watch the Knicks in the championship games. And of course, many kids were grateful to him for bringing back traditional snow days. But to do that, he had to get a waiver from the state for the day off since students already were at the minimum required instructional days.

Getting a waiver again would likely be a tall order.

What do you think about the scheduling conflict? Let us know: ny.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Treasury Department preview of tax credit scholarship rules suggests limited role for states

2026-06-11T23:51:45+00:00

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States most likely will not be able to place additional requirements or guardrails on scholarship groups funded through the new federal tax credit, according to a preview of the rules provided by the U.S. Treasury Department this week.

This position contradicts comments Education Secretary Linda McMahon made to Congress last month and at a Michigan school choice event in March in which she said states would be able to shape their own programs.

The U.S. Department of Education has declined to clarify those remarks, but it is ultimately the Treasury Department that will set the rules for the program.

And in remarks made Tuesday at a closed-door meeting and later released by the Treasury Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Kevin Salinger said that states may not impose “substantive” rules on scholarship groups that are more restrictive than federal law.

That’s welcome news for school choice groups who want more flexibility and limited rules for scholarship groups.

It may present a dilemma for Democratic governors who have said they are waiting to see these rules before deciding whether to opt in.

One of the key questions for this group has been whether they’ll be able to shape the program by putting additional rules on scholarship groups, requiring, for example, that they serve low-income families and students with disabilities or meet certain academic standards. Some Democrats have indicated they want the money only to go to public schools.

“I am never going to leave money on the table when it comes to supporting our kids in public schools,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said last week at the Education Writers Association conference in Baltimore when asked about the tax credit. But Moore said he was waiting on the regulations to decide whether to participate. “I do not believe that we should be taking public dollars and putting them towards private education.”

Salinger’s remarks indicate states will not be able to shape the program as they see fit, contradicting the administration’s promise to “return education to the states.”

Set to launch in 2027, the federal tax credit scholarship allows individuals to donate up to $1,700 to eligible nonprofits and get fully reimbursed through a federal income tax credit. The scholarship groups can provide vouchers to families earning up to 300% of the area median income to spend on educational expenses. Those expenses could be private school tuition, tutoring for a public school student, or specialized equipment or therapies.

Governors can decide whether their states participate, and those who do must submit lists of eligible scholarship organizations each year. Federal law imposes only minimal requirements, for example that scholarship groups operate as federally recognized nonprofits and provide money to students who attend more than one school.

The closed-door event at which Salinger spoke included a panel on ways public school students could also benefit.

Speaking at a separate Chalkbeat Ideas event Thursday, Rhode Island Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green said Democratic states should be open to possibilities, such as scholarships funding afterschool tutoring through approved vendors.

“This is not money that we would have,” she said. “This is money that, instead of going to the federal government, could come to our state.”

Another question has been whether homeschool families can benefit. That’s likely to be determined by whether state law considers a home school to be a school in a legal sense.

Sailnger laid out other aspects of the rules that school choice groups have been watching carefully, clarifying that they can operate in multiple states and that caps on administrative costs won’t apply to their entire budgets, only to money they raise for scholarships.

The rules will be finalized by the end of September, Salinger said.

Large national scholarship groups hoped for this flexibility so they can expand and serve more families.

“We have gotten our clearest signs from Treasury yet that this tax credit is going to benefit all students across all sectors,” said Ashling Preston, director of federal affairs for the American Federation for Children. “Every governor has the information they need to opt in right now. There are hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at stake in every state.”

But Augustus Mays, vice president for partnerships and engagement at the progressive advocacy group EdTrust, said the preview of the rules only reinforces his belief that Democratic governors should opt out.

“If you’re a governor and you think you’ll be able to have the authority to shape this program to align to your public school priorities,” he said, “the answer is no, you’re not going to have that authority.”

Ideas Editor Matt Barnum contributed.

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

Tighter rules, more oversight now govern homeschool enrichment in Colorado

2026-06-11T23:05:03+00:00

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No ski passes, soccer club fees, or museum memberships.

These are just a few of the new rules governing state-funded homeschool enrichment the Colorado Department of Education unveiled this week.

Prompted by law changes in late May, the rules aim to close loopholes that in recent years allowed a controversial public education co-op in Monument to authorize a flood of new homeschool enrichment programs. The group’s enrichment programs cost the state tens of millions of dollars and drew intense scrutiny from lawmakers who raised alarms about funding abuses and lack of transparency. The State Board of Education will draft additional rules for homeschool enrichment programs over the next several months.

This summer marks the start of a new stricter era for state-funded programs serving homeschool students. The goal is to ensure that enrichment programs operate under the wings of local school districts or charter schools, not faraway authorizers, and that offerings mirror what’s available to public school students. In other words, not horseback riding, sports camps, or martial arts classes.

Colorado lawmakers seek to limit group fueling growth in publicly funded homeschool enrichment

In addition, private schools can no longer designate a portion of their school day or week as homeschool enrichment time and get state funding for the students who attend. Michelle Berge, first assistant attorney general in the K-12 education unit, said during a State Board of Education meeting Thursday that such practices essentially meant public funding was subsidizing private schools or giving private school families tuition breaks.

To root out that practice, the state will now bar private school programs and homeschool enrichment programs that serve the same students from being co-located at the same site.

While all state-funded homeschool enrichment programs must adhere to the new parameters in Colorado law, some programs will have to take an additional step this summer: applying for approval from the state or their local district. This could affect potentially dozens of the more than 50 enrichment programs authorized by the Monument-based co-op Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES. That’s because such groups are now barred from operating schools and programs outside their member school districts.

ERBOCES, whose only member district is District 49, operated homeschool enrichment programs all over the state during the 2025-26 school year. The exact number is unclear because co-op officials have refused to release a full list and the state hasn’t tracked it.

Out-of-boundary homeschool enrichment programs that existed last school year can apply to the state or their local district for approval starting June 15. State officials say they’ll make a decision within 30 days of receiving applications.

School districts will have to use the same application materials the state requires, but the timeline for decisions isn’t clear, since many local school boards meet less frequently over the summer.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Girls’ test scores have fallen faster than boys’. No one knows exactly why.

2026-06-11T14:36:06+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.

New results from a long-running set of federal exams show a striking, persistent, and unexplained duality: Girls’ scores have fallen more sharply than boys’ and then have been slower to recover. In some cases, they haven’t recovered at all.

In math, among both 9- and 13-year-olds, boys’ advantage over girls is higher than at any point since 1978, which is as far back as the data goes. In reading, 9-year-old boys have reached parity with their female peers for the first time on record, largely because girls’ scores have declined.

This pattern has also emerged on a battery of other assessments. To date, researchers have not reached any consensus on what explains this. The latest results suggest this gender gap in learning is not simply a pandemic-induced blip.

To be clear, we should not see this as a battle of the sexes, but as a warning sign that something is going wrong academically for girls. In other words, America’s “learning recession” has hit girls hardest. Understanding why may be a key part of addressing this national challenge.

Soon after the pandemic upended American schooling and life, researchers began showing that learning rates fell most sharply among children whose school buildings were closed longer. Students from low-income families and those who started at lower levels academically were also particularly affected.

Few experts predicted or even noticed the gender disparities that were beginning to emerge. If anything, in recent years there has been growing attention to boys’ struggles in school. There are good reasons for this: Boys as a group are more likely to be suspended and less likely to finish high school or college.

I first noticed the gender gap in learning loss in late 2024 when it showed up on an international math and science exam. I assumed this was a fluke, but just in case I started looking into it. Sure enough, on virtually every U.S. test, girls’ scores had fallen faster than boys. This has occurred in other countries too, at least on certain exams.

The latest federal NAEP results, which track scores all the way back to the ‘70s, confirm that this gender gap in learning has persisted through at least last year.

(One caveat worth keeping in mind: We’re talking about averages across a massive population here. This doesn’t tell us much of anything about an individual girl or boy.)

Experts I’ve talked to have offered a handful of hypotheses to explain these surprising gender disparities:

Girls have previously performed better in school by some metrics, so removing typical school structures, as occurred during the pandemic, may have harmed them more.
As children spent more time at home during the pandemic, girls might have borne more responsibility including caregiving for younger children. This could have limited their attention to schoolwork.
The growth of social media and screens might have harmed girls more than boys.
Even post-pandemic, girls may have been more likely to quietly internalize their academic struggles, which could have caused teachers to overlook their needs.

None of these strikes me as terribly satisfying, though. The pandemic is in the rearview mirror, and if anything the gender gap has continued to widen. Social media is unlikely to explain trends that are affecting 9-year-olds.

Broader theories meant to elucidate disappointing test scores don’t seem especially helpful here either. Less accountability for schools, for instance, wouldn’t obviously affect girls more than boys.

Officials at the Education Department, who released the latest scores, are loath to speculate about what’s driving trends, including the emergent gender gap. “Researchers, policy leaders can do that digging under the hood,” said Matthew Soldner, head of the department’s research arm. Such digging is indeed necessary here.

For the moment, though, there’s no end in sight for the remarkable and unexplained gender divide in learning loss and recovery.

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

No more scrolling at lunch: Officials from 3 Colorado school districts discuss their cellphone bans

2026-06-10T23:42:52+00:00

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Before a ban on cellphones, Jill Haffley said her classroom “was like Vegas.”

“The cellphones were lighting up all the time,” said Haffley, who was a teacher for 30 years before being elected to the Colorado Springs School District 11 school board.

Weary of the distractions, Haffley ran for office in 2023 on a platform of banning cellphones, and the 23,000-student District 11 did it starting in the fall of 2024. Haffley said that if you ask a group of students what it’s been like to go phone-free, they’ll say they don’t like it.

“But you get them individually and one girl told me, ‘Thank you for this. I can breathe again. I don’t have to continue to look at my phone every time I get a notification and I can blame it on you,’” Haffley said. “Our job is to educate these kids and we can’t educate them when their minds are constantly on their cellphones.”

Haffley was one of four school board members and superintendents who spoke to the Colorado State Board of Education Wednesday about their experience with cellphone bans. Under state law, all 179 Colorado school districts must adopt a cellphone use policy by July 1.

That policy doesn’t have to be a prohibition, but many districts are moving in that direction. The state’s largest district, Denver Public Schools, adopted a bell-to-bell ban this week.

Panelists said adults were as much to blame for cellphone distractions as kids. Parents would send their teenagers cute emojis or “thinking of you” texts during class, Haffley said. That was sweet — but also frustrating if 35 students’ phones were dinging during a lesson, she said.

Brian Hill, the superintendent of Mesa County Valley School District 51 in Grand Junction, said students told him their parents were sending them TikTok videos of cats and their athletic coaches were texting them about practice. Haffley said a mother relayed that her anxiety would go “through the roof” if she couldn’t get ahold of her sophomore whenever she wanted.

Parents were especially worried about contacting their children during a school shooting or other emergencies, the panelists said. The superintendents said they understand that fear but there are safer ways of receiving emergency notifications and less distracting ways of relaying messages.

“Without trying to sound like a jerk, we have landlines in all of our schools,” Hill said. “You can call the front office if it’s an emergency and you can get a message through to your kiddo.”

The districts varied in how they made their decisions to ban cellphones and how they explained the reasoning to families. While District 51 relied heavily on research that shows cellphone and social media use leads to increased anxiety and depression in children, District 11 Superintendent Michael Gaal said his district is “not in the wellness game.”

Instead, Gaal stressed the importance of creating a “neutral learning environment” where the primacy of instruction is protected and students aren’t influenced “by one constituency or another.” In addition to banning cellphones, the district banned all flags except for the American and Colorado flags, with exceptions for geography classes, Gaal said.

Aspen School District Superintendent Tharyn Mulberry said his district gathered feedback from the community. Unsurprisingly, it was mixed. He decided it was important not to belabor the process.

“Spending too much time collecting the data and doing community outreach is probably not as necessary as you think,” he said, noting that districts can always change their policies later.

District 51 is doing just that. The policy that the district adopted in 2024 allowed high school students to use their cellphones when they weren’t in class. But this fall, District 51 will switch to a bell-to-bell ban for all grades. Hill said he’s only gotten one upset email.

“This notion that everyone is going to start bombarding your email inbox when you implement it — I haven’t seen it,” he said.

Not that making a cellphone ban work is easy. All four panelists said students will find creative ways around any ban. At schools that require students to lock their cellphones in pouches, teenagers will lock up dummy burner phones or even phones made out of Legos instead, the panelists said. They’ll hide wireless earbuds under their hair or wear knit caps with earphones built in.

Haffley said her nephew told her he could buy a $3 magnet on Amazon that would unlock the pouch that his school uses. She told him he could spend that $3 if he wanted, but if he got caught, the district’s policy would require his mother to come to the school to pick up his confiscated phone.

Consistent enforcement is key, the superintendents said. And the longer the bans are in place, they said, the more a school’s culture shifts from scrolling at lunch to talking at lunch.

“We went back into the cafeterias, we went back into the hallways, we went back into the gymnasiums, and you know what we heard?” Mulberry said. “Noise.”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Superintendents defend policies about transgender students, parent rights on Capitol Hill

2026-06-10T22:19:04+00:00

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Three progressive superintendents defended their policies for parental involvement and transgender inclusion during a congressional hearing Wednesday in which Republican lawmakers called them “pathetic” and said they should find other jobs.

House Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg convened the hearing with the title “Breaking Trust.” Much of the questioning centered on policies intended to protect the rights of transgender students or create more inclusive school environments. But lawmakers also brought up abortion, the role of teachers in promoting political protest, and eighth grade algebra access.

Called to testify were San Francisco Unified School District Superintendent Maria Su, Loudoun County Superintendent Aaron Spence in Virginia, and Chicago Public Schools CEO Macquline King, who had to be subpoenaed.

Each of these superintendents is a relatively new leader in a district that has been at the center of intense controversy over race, gender, and other topics that are often referred to as part of culture war fights. Chicago and Loudoun County, in particular, have been the targets of repeated investigations by the Trump administration, which has also threatened to withhold funding.

Two days before the hearing, the conservative advocacy group America First Legal, founded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, filed formal complaints accusing all three districts of violating parental rights and federal law with policies that give students a say in whether parents are notified that that child wants to change their gender presentation.

Walberg, a Michigan Republican, said in his opening remarks that Congress has a responsibility to ask questions of school districts, including when “parents are excluded from major decisions involving their children” and “when classrooms become vehicles for political or ideological agendas.”

“Across the country, school districts are losing sight of their core mission: educating students,” Walberg said.

The superintendents, in turn, said they respect parents as partners, develop policies with input from local communities, and want to create school environments where students can show up as themselves.

“We’re in education because we care about students, and part of that means ensuring an environment where all students can reach their full potential,” Spence said.

Lawmakers and superintendents spar over abortion, transgender students

Asked repeatedly if parents can opt out of lessons related to sexual health or LGBTQ topics, superintendents said yes or that they comply with state and “binding” federal law.

Rep. Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, asked King about Chicago Public Schools making information about abortion available to students. He also pressed her about “which form of abortion” she preferred after offering graphic descriptions of the procedure.

“I’m very disturbed by that question,” King said after a pause. “I want to say that Chicago Public Schools’ sexual education curriculum is in compliance with Illinois state law.”

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

Rep. Rick Allen, a Georgia Republican, cited a recent malpractice lawsuit in which a New York jury awarded $2 million to a woman who felt disfigured by a mastectomy she had as a teenager when she identified as male. He compared that to school districts having policies that require addressing students by their preferred names and pronouns.

“You’re going to be held responsible legally for what you’re perpetrating on young people,” Allen said.

Democrats for their part used their time to highlight cuts to the Office for Civil Rights, the value of diversity, and Republican efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. They emphasized that the superintendents were accountable to local elected school boards and that policies reflected community preferences.

“This committee talks all the time about ‘decisions should be made at the local level,’ but I guess that’s only if they like the decisions that you make at the local level,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Connecticut Democrat and former national teacher of the year.

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

And Democratic Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania urged the superintendents not to “change your values or your positions, because you know who you work for, and it is the parents and the students in your community.”

Spence came in for some of the most intense questioning. The Virginia district has been at the epicenter of political battles over COVID restrictions, parental rights and policies related to transgender students and racial equity. Most recently, the district refused to bend to pressure to exclude some immigrant students from federally funded career education.

Virginia sits under the jurisdiction of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in the 2020 Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board decision that students cannot be prevented from using restrooms that align with their gender identity. Loudoun County officials have said they are bound by that ruling until the 4th Circuit or the Supreme Court decides otherwise.

The Trump administration, in contrast, says Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination in education, actually requires that transgender students be excluded from restrooms that align with their gender. It has threatened Loudoun County with the loss of federal funding.

“Yes or no, should biological men be allowed in locker rooms with biological women or girls?” asked Rep. Robert Onder Jr., a Missouri Republican.

“Transgender women should be allowed in women’s spaces,” Spence responded.

“That’s a yes,” Onder said. “So biological men should be able to go into locker rooms and shower rooms with biological girls?”

“Federal law requires it,” Spence said.

“No it doesn’t,” Onder said.

“Yes, it does,” Spence said.

“No,” Onder said. “Title IX is, in fact, quite the opposite. Title IX requires you to protect women and girls.”

Loudoun County has also been investigated over an incident in which a transgender boy was accused of filming other boys in a locker room. The U.S. Department of Education said the school district violated Title IX in its handling of the incident.

Several representatives interrogated Spence over the incident and why the students who complained about being filmed allegedly received longer suspensions than the transgender student.

Spence said he could not discuss specifics due to student privacy laws but said that the incident had not been described accurately in public reports. He also said the district applies discipline “appropriately” and in accordance with its policies, including policies against bullying.

The hearing did have moments of comity. California Rep. Kevin Kiley, who recently switched from Republican to independent, said he’d long been a critic of San Francisco Unified but praised Su, giving her a platform to talk about changes she’s made.

Su said the district has brought back eighth grade algebra, revised its ethnic studies curriculum, and implemented literacy approaches consistent with the science of reading, among other changes.

“When I came on as superintendent 18 months ago, I listened to families, listened to parents and our educators, and we moved quickly,” Su said.

Kiley said he probably disagrees with many things the district is doing.

“But these are really good, important steps, so thank you for your leadership,” he said.

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

An NYC student was ashamed of his antisemitic thoughts. This fellowship helped him resist prejudice.

2026-06-09T22:48:23+00:00

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Can a program for New York City high school students designed to fight hate change hearts and minds?

For Matthew Canzius, a sophomore at Hillcrest High School in Queens, the answer is yes.

During his freshman year, he saw the fallout on social media from Israel’s bombardments of the Gaza strip, following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas. And he grappled with having antisemitic thoughts while attending a school with several Jewish teachers.

Those thoughts “made me feel ashamed in a way,” Matthew told Chalkbeat. Recognizing they came from a place of ignorance, he applied for the fellowship.

As part of a yearlong Combat Hate Fellowship, Matthew joined 26 other students from five New York City high schools designed to help them recognize — and confront — antisemitism, racism, and other forms of hate. They visited cultural institutions, at each stop hearing from speakers who shared personal stories of facing injustice. They participated in facilitated conversations exploring their own identities and experiences. And they later gave workshops in their own schools about hate and how to be an upstander in the face of bullying and harassment.

“This isn’t something that I usually like to share out publicly,” Matthew told the crowd of students and educators gathered at the fellowship’s year-end celebration last month in midtown Manhattan, “but I’d say that I used to think in a way that was more based on prejudice.” After nine months in the program, he believes he gained “a sense of deeper empathy.”

The fellowship is a partnership between the anti-hate organization Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and the New Visions High School District, the city’s largest high school network that serves 37,000 students, including those at Hillcrest. Now in its second year, the fellowship is largely funded by the City Council.

It comes at a time that New York City middle and high school students say they’re seeing and experiencing more bullying related to identity. Roughly 40% of New York City middle and high school students last year reported seeing classmates bullied or harassed based on race, ethnicity, religion, or immigration status, according to annual school survey data. That was up from 30% in 2019.

In terms of documented incidents, the city has started to see a downward trend. Schools reported roughly 700 incidents related to ethnicity or national origin in the 2024-25 school year, down nearly 15% from the year before, according to public data. There were nearly 320 reports related to religion last year, down about 56% from the 2023-24 school year.

In the seven months following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas and subsequent bombing by Israel on Gaza, former schools Chancellor David Banks reported that out of the 281 incidents of religious bias in city schools, 42% involved antisemitism and 30% were directed against Muslim students.

One of the highest profile incidents took place at Hillcrest High School in November 2023 — a year before Matthew enrolled there — when students rioted in the halls after seeing a health teacher’s pro-Israel social media post.

The school has changed principals since then and made other changes. And in the spring, members of the fellowship gave presentations to their peers at the school. They also created a video raising awareness about cyberbullying for their final presentation for the program.

“From day one, I knew that confronting hate in our schools wasn’t optional, it was essential,” said Noah Angeles, the superintendent of New Visions who took over the network in 2024, not long after the clash at Hillcrest.

Creating safe spaces for hard conversations

At the fellows’ first stop in October, the students toured an Anne Frank exhibit at the Center for Jewish History and met with Leo Ullman, a Holocaust survivor who was hidden as a baby from the Nazis by a non-Jewish family in the Netherlands. Their last trip was to the Islamic Cultural Center, where they met Mohammad Ravzi, who became a prominent advocate for Muslim New Yorkers after 9/11.

In between, they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; El Museo del Barrio; the Stonewall National Monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history; and the Museum of Chinese in America.

Jack Simony, Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation director general, left, interviews Holocaust survivor Leo Ullman during the Combat Hate Fellows' trip to an exhibit on Anne Frank at the Center for Jewish History on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.

Meeting speakers who experienced hate and hearing how they were affected but were able to “push through despite that hate,” was eye-opening for Matthew.

He said it helped him “learn and grow as a person, from seeing all these people who experienced such horrific acts, or horrific acts of prejudice still continue to thrive and try and help the society.”

Chayanika Chakravorty, another Hillcrest sophomore, also felt transformed by hearing people’s stories.

“I feel like a new whole world opened up to me, like things that I never even knew existed,” she said.

After the Anne Frank exhibit, she felt a deeper understanding of what happened to Jewish people in Nazi Germany, and said it resonated with her as a Hindu from Bangladesh, where most people are Muslim.

About Ullman, she said, “not a lot of people have that mentality, that strength in their head, and seeing someone like that really inspires me to do the exact same thing.”

Angeles said he wanted to build a program to foster that kind of empathy rooted in experiential learning through the city’s diversity and cultural institutions.

In talking to students across the city, Angeles saw they were hungry to discuss world events but needed the space to do so.

“The adults didn’t always want to talk about it, because it could be controversial, and people are afraid,” he told Chalkbeat in October.

Jack Simony, Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation director general, said that creating a peer-to-peer model felt essential.

“You can’t tell people not to hate. It doesn’t come top down, it comes bottom up,” he said.

Officials across the five boroughs have been trying to find school-based solutions. The Education Department has continued to develop its “hidden voices” history program, featuring stories of figures overlooked by traditional textbooks, including lessons on Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans. The department last school year also launched an anti-hate hotline (718-935-2889) to anonymously report incidents related to hate, harassment, and discrimination.

A City Council task force to combat hate recently issued recommendations, including expanding arts programs that expose students to current events and diverse perspectives, and ensuring that teachers have the resources and training to connect historical context to current events.

The committee also suggested funding peer educator “train-the-trainer” programs for restorative justice interventions in the 15 schools with the highest rates of student-to-student bullying, harassment, and discrimination.

Marcia Cudjoe-Forrest, a Hillcrest special education and global studies teacher who was the adviser for her school’s Combat Hate fellows like Matthew, believes what happened in 2023 at her school exposed the need for students to dive into the stories of other cultures to help them see “we have a lot more similarities than differences.”

She’d like to see more spaces for kids, not just in her school, where they can have these kinds of conversations.

“We can always agree to disagree,” Cudjoe-Forrest said, “but we have to agree to at least learn, listen, and understand.”

Correction: June 9, 2026: Only the New Visions High School District is involved in the fellowship, not its partner organization, New Visions for Public Schools, as the article initially stated.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@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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Trump education department investigates Cherry Creek district over alleged racial discrimination

2026-06-08T23:40:57+00:00

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The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights announced Monday that it is investigating the Cherry Creek district over allegations that the district considers race in a variety of programs in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a press release announcing the investigation, the department alleged that the district sponsors clubs that exclude students based on race and that the district requires teachers to consider race when assigning students to classes or deciding what level of academic support to provide. The release gave no examples of student clubs that exclude members based on race or of incidents where teachers used race in making class assignments or academic support decisions.

The investigation into Cherry Creek, a 52,000-student district in the Denver suburbs, is part of a broader Trump administration effort to root out policies that support students of color or LGBTQ students. Many of these investigations have focused on school districts in blue cities, including New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. Over the past 18 months, the administration also investigated the Denver district for converting a girls restroom into an all-gender restroom and the Jeffco district for policies on sleeping arrangements for transgender students on overnight field trips.

A Cherry Creek district spokesperson said by email Monday, “We strongly disagree with the characterization of District programming. The District has not yet received a copy of the complaint. Without the complaint, we are not in a position to respond further.”

When asked for more information about the complaints that prompted the investigation, U.S. Department of Education officials said they don’t comment on open investigations.

But Kimberly Richey, assistant secretary for education, did comment in the press release.

“Federal law prohibits racial discrimination, which means that race cannot be a factor in how the school educates its students or trains its teachers. Despite this, the District seems to be basing decisions about how to support students, teachers and parents solely on race,” she said.

In addition to alleging race-based discrimination in student clubs and class assignments, the Office of Civil Rights press release said the department is also investigating a district committee and a multi-day training for educators.

The district’s Voices of Color Committee “reportedly grants preferential access and participation based solely on race,” the release said. The district’s website describes the committee’s goal as fostering an “inclusive and safe environment to support the success of students of color.“ It says the committee is composed of parents, district staff, and community members and links to a registration form for people who want to join the committee’s contact list. The form doesn’t ask for the potential participant’s race or ethnicity.

About 56% of Cherry Creek students are students of color.

The press release said the district promotes a training called “Transformational Equity Experience: To Be Seen. To Belong. To Be Whole,” which teaches that the United States was founded on “white supremacy” and categorizes individuals as “oppressors” and “oppressed.”

A webpage from a 2024 Cherry Creek conference with that name features a list of sessions offered over four days, including “School Leadership — Approaching All Systems with Equity,” “All Are Welcome: Creating LGBTQ+ Affirming Spaces in our Schools,” and “What Happened to Denver’s Chinatown & How to Incorporate Local History to Teach ‘Ethnic Studies’ in the Classroom.”

The three emcees of the event were a current Cherry Creek student and two recent graduates.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

NYC school budgets won’t face cuts next year (for now) despite falling enrollment

2026-06-07T20:14:13+00:00

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Despite shrinking enrollment, New York City schools will not see their initial budgets take a hit next school year.

New York City principals are soon expected to receive their budgets for the 2026-27 school year, and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels gave them a heads up that even if they’re projected to have fewer students, their budgets won’t drop.

Though school budgets are typically tied to student head count, the city began its “hold harmless” policy — propping up school budgets despite enrollment losses — during the height of the pandemic. The Education Department’s coffers were flush with billions in one-time federal relief funding, and officials were concerned about catching kids up after prolonged learning disruptions. So they kept budgets steady even as students left the nation’s largest school system.

Over the past six years, the city has spent $1.6 billion to stave off enrollment-related cuts, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group. Meanwhile, K-12 schools have lost nearly 10% of students during that time, dropping below 800,000 students this school year — and declines are expected to continue. The decision from Samuels pushes any eventual financial reckoning further down the road.

“Our hold harmless policy began during the pandemic to provide stability amid a crisis—and while we are no longer in a pandemic, stability and predictability remain critically important for our school communities,” Samuels wrote in a Sunday email to principals.

“To that end,” he continued, “we will be holding schools harmless for their SY26-27 initial budget allocations. This investment will provide stability and predictability for school communities as principals plan staffing, programming, and supports for the upcoming school year.”

Some school funding experts warn against allowing budgets to drift away from schools’ actual enrollment, which disproportionately benefits schools that have lost the most students. But some educators and parent leaders note that many schools have come to rely on the money and abruptly removing it could force them to scale back programs such as music and art and let go of teachers.

Plus, cuts are likely to invite backlash and are politically unpopular, especially as Mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed to prioritize funding for public schools on the campaign trail. When former Mayor Eric Adams initially began winding down the program, the blowback ballooned, with families making T-shirts declaring that Adams defunded their schools. Subsequently, Adams decided to keep propping up budgets.

Samuels’ email made no mention of what the city will do midyear, when it will be faced with another inflection point whether to hold schools harmless if their enrollment is lower than anticipated. Again, before the pandemic, the city would claw back money in the middle of the school year if a school’s roster failed to match projections.

But principals this year did not have to give back money despite nearly two-thirds of the city’s roughly 1,600 schools having fewer students than projected. The policy cost the city more than $250 million.

Samuels is expected to testify Monday before City Council on the budget.

“Going forward,” he told principals, “I am committed to engaging with you and your school communities about our school budgets—to ensure both long-term fiscal sustainability and comprehensive school support.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC proposal would add younger students to school leadership teams — and pay them for it

2026-06-05T21:30:16+00:00

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New York City elementary and middle school students may soon have a greater say in shaping their education by joining their school leadership teams — and earn $300 doing so.

School leadership teams, or SLTs, are committees of educators and parents that collaborate to develop and evaluate school policies aimed at improving student outcomes and ensuring that a school’s goals and budget align. Through a shared decision-making process, these teams create a sort of blueprint for the school year, known as a “comprehensive education plan.” Under state law, all schools are required to have these governing bodies, and when Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged a more democratic model of mayoral control, he said he would tap the existing infrastructure of parent involvement, including SLTs.

The city already requires high school SLTs to include at least two students. An Education Department proposal to update SLT regulations would mandate middle schools include at least two student members and would encourage elementary schools to include students as well. (All SLT members can get a remuneration of $300 for completing 30 hours of SLT work, including training. In the summer, they may receive an additional $10 per hour for up to 10 hours.)

“School Leadership Teams are most effective when they reflect the voices of the communities they serve, including students,” Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said in a statement. “As we continue strengthening family and student engagement, we are focusing on expanding meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in school-level decision-making, so that school policies and priorities are informed by those closest to the student experience.”

But will students sign up to be on these committees?

About 125 high schools — or nearly a quarter — have no student representatives assigned to their SLTs, Education Department officials said. Roughly 370 high schools have at least two student members identified on their SLT rosters, and another 30 have at least one student member listed.

More broadly, SLTs must have at least 10 members, including a school’s principal, its teachers union chapter leader, and parent teacher association president, along with other school staffers and parents in equal numbers. And about 10% of schools across the city do not have the minimum 10 SLT members, as required, officials said.

SLTs were codified in state law in 2004 and haven’t been updated since 2010.

The new regulations propose adding other members to SLTs in addition to students. At schools that receive federal Title 1 funding — generally those with at least 60% of students living in poverty — the proposed regulations would also mandate the Title 1 Parent Advisory Chair serve on SLTs. It encourages schools to make their “best effort” to include staffers from DC37, the union that represents cafeteria workers, crossing guards, and substance abuse specialists as well as parent coordinators. Parent coordinators are not allowed to serve on the committees due to potential conflicts of interest representing parents but reporting to principals.

The updated regulations, which are expected to be voted on June 17 by the Panel for Educational Policy, say they clarify election procedures for SLT members as well as the open meetings law requirements when conducting meetings, among other things. Some education advocates, however, say the updates didn’t go far enough when it comes to open meetings and had been calling for remote access for observers.

The city solicited feedback on the proposed regulations, posted May 1, and as of Tuesday, received just 14 responses, including calls for more transparency in how the meetings are run and promoted. Though these meetings are open to the school community at-large and the public in general, they rarely attract non-members. One commenter pushed back on excluding parent coordinators since they are so involved in daily school operations.

Lisa Donlan, a former parent leader from Manhattan’s District 1, who led training sessions as part of the district leadership team for SLTs, said she focused on empowering these committees to help them “grow” their school’s sense of community rather than making them feel like a “coffee clatch.”

“The work is creating the goals of the school for the following school year and creating actions plans — and then seeing if those goals are met,” Donlan said.

For parents, she added, “you forget that you’re not just serving on the SLT, your job is to represent the parents.”

(People can send comments on the proposal to Panel for Educational Policy on the proposal through June 15. District 1’s Neighborhood School PTA Advocacy meeting, which is open to the public, is hosting an 8:30 a.m. discussion at the school, located at 121 E. 3rd St., on the proposed SLT regulations and co-governance in city schools on June 17, before the panel votes on the proposal.)

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Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

NYC is getting more money for childcare vouchers. Why does the waitlist keep growing?

2026-06-04T20:02:18+00:00

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The waitlist for New York City’s enormously popular childcare voucher program for low-income families has ballooned to 25,000 kids and isn’t likely to shrink, according to officials and experts — even as its budget keeps growing.

Officials from the city’s Administration of Children’s Services, which administers the state and federally funded Child Care Assistance Program, haven’t let any new families in since last May, citing financial limitations.

And city officials haven’t made any commitments to enrolling families on the waitlist this year. Yet, state funding for the city’s childcare vouchers grew from about $1.45 billion last year to $2 billion in the recently passed state budget. This year, $475 million of that state funding is only available if the city contributes a matching amount.

Advocates and experts say the city could be doing more to chip away at the waitlist, pointing out that city officials have left hundreds of millions of dollars in potential state funding for the voucher program on the table. They argue city officials are being overly cautious in their financial planning.

The stakes are high for thousands of city families and scores of childcare providers. For many parents of young kids, the voucher program, which gives families a weekly subsidy they can use at any licensed childcare program, is the most direct and flexible way of defraying the often unaffordable costs of childcare.

And for providers, particularly home-based childcare operators, the subsidies are a key tool for increasing enrollment and ensuring income to pay their staff and cover their bills.

Adding to some advocates’ concern is a curious detail in last week’s state budget. State officials quietly adopted language allowing the city to spend up to $100 million that was previously earmarked for childcare vouchers on any cost “in support of children,” according to budget documents. That could theoretically give the city license to spend that $100 million on any number of programs from after-school programs to K-12 education.

“The big takeaway for me is that the city does have resources available to it to be serving more families than it currently is with the waitlist,” said Pete Nabozny, policy director at The Children’s Agenda, a nonprofit childcare advocacy organization, of the new state budget.

Lauren Melodia, the director of economic and fiscal policy at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs, estimated the city would have to spend about $500 million this coming fiscal year to clear half of the voucher waitlist.

Nicolette Simmonds, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said the governor has invested a “record amount” in childcare vouchers. State officials noted enrollment has tripled in New York City since 2022, but did not respond to a question about the rationale for the $100 million budget carveout.

The city plans to claim the remaining $245 million in state funds for the city’s voucher program by the deadline in September, said Sneha Choudhary, a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Here’s what you need to know about the voucher program, its waitlist, and its budget situation.

What is the voucher program and why is it so popular?

The Child Care Assistance Program has been around for years, but exploded in popularity following the COVID pandemic, when Gov. Kathy Hochul significantly expanded both who was eligible for the program and the value of the voucher.

Families now qualify for a low-income childcare voucher if they make under 85% of the state median income, or about $114,000 a year for a family of four. The vouchers can be used at any licensed childcare facility for kids from birth to age 12, and pay out an average of about $300 a week.

The model differs from the city’s prekindergarten, 3-K, and 2-K programs, which directly contract with childcare providers. That system gives the city more oversight of programs, and can offer parents a fully free option in some cases. Some families, however, prefer the voucher model’s flexibility, because it allows parents to use any provider with open seats. Some of those providers operate outside the standard daytime hours available in the city’s programs.

The program’s model is “what people actually envision of universal child care: I have a kid, I need care for specific hours, and regardless of the kid’s age, I can go to any licensed program and get care,” said Melodia. “There is a real demand for universal child care that is flexible, that meets parent’s demands now.”

Since state officials expanded eligibility and funding, enrollment in the low-income vouchers program has shot up to roughly 70,000 from less than 9,000 in 2022.

Why is the program facing a budget crunch?

To understand the voucher program’s precarious finances, it helps to know that there are actually two separate voucher programs.

The low-income program with the growing waitlist is often referred to as “non-mandated” vouchers.

But there is a separate, “mandated” voucher program only open to families receiving federal cash assistance. City and state officials are obligated under federal rules to offer a childcare voucher to any family receiving cash assistance that requests one.

Enrollment in the city’s mandated voucher program has fluctuated wildly in recent years, making it difficult for the city to make firm financial predictions.

During the pandemic, officials relaxed work requirements for federal cash assistance, keeping more families home and reducing their need for child care. Enrollment in the mandated voucher program cratered. Last year, when officials reinstated work requirements, many expected mandated voucher enrollment to surge back to pre-pandemic levels. But that hasn’t yet happened: Enrollment only ticked up by about 3,000 from February 2025 to a year later, according to the most recent data.

Nabozny said the “big issue” preventing the city from beginning to enroll families from the low-income voucher waitlist is that they want to have enough funding available in case mandated voucher enrollment does surge, although some question whether that’s the best approach.

“It’s a problem, because they could be serving other families who are on a waitlist now,” Nabozny said.

How much money does the city have to give out more vouchers?

Last budget season, as officials were preparing for a boom in mandated voucher enrollment and one-time federal funding from the pandemic dried up, the state offered a stopgap solution to keep the voucher program solvent.

In order to prevent the city from having to kick families out of the program, the state offered an extra $350 million, but with a catch: The state would only pay out as much from that supplemental pot as the city put forward from its own coffers.

A year later, the city has only tapped $105 million of the $350 pot, city officials confirmed. City officials say they plan to claim the remaining $245 million by the September deadline.

But due to the late change to the state budget, the city has the option of using $100 million of those unclaimed state funds for an entirely different purpose. A Mamdani spokesperson said the administration “intends to claim all available funding for child voucher related expenditures,” but did not specify how the city was planning to use the newly available $100 million.

For the coming year, the supplemental pot from the state is even larger. The city can claim up to $475 million for vouchers from the state, provided it matches with its own funds.

But city officials are still being cautious about making any commitments on if and when they will begin enrolling from the waitlist. Officials noted that some families on the waitlist may have enrolled in other city-funded childcare programs like 3-K and Pre-K, but couldn’t provide exact numbers.

Brooklyn Council Member Lincoln Restler urged officials to adopt a stopgap solution of offering a slew of new temporary, one-year vouchers.

“We don’t make an in perpetuity commitment that this child is going to have a voucher until they’re 13,” he said at a budget hearing last week. “But we add child care capacity for the coming fiscal year with the resources we know we have today.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school’ closes permanently

2026-06-02T18:10:24+00:00

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A controversial “public Christian school” in southern Colorado has closed permanently after changes in Colorado law cut off state funding, its executive director wrote in a legal filing.

Backers opened the 30-student Riverstone Academy in Pueblo County nine months ago with hopes of sparking a religious liberty lawsuit that would go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Instead, the school faced setbacks — including safety problems that forced it to move and a $20,000 settlement with the parents of a young student — and the legal effort fizzled.

Citing the new provisions in state law, Riverstone Executive Director Quin Friberg wrote in a legal document that the school’s efforts “will be directed to winding up its operations and shutting down” after the last day of school last week.

The filing signed by Friberg on Thursday is part of a lawsuit brought by three school board candidates against the Pueblo 70 school board alleging open meetings violations related to Riverstone’s launch.

Another lawsuit — the one backers hoped would go to the Supreme Court — came in February when Riverstone and its authorizer sued the state for religious discrimination, citing the possibility that the state could eventually claw back the school’s public funding.

Emails obtained by Chalkbeat show the school was created at the behest of a conservative law firm to spark such a lawsuit after the Supreme Court deadlocked on a similar case out of Oklahoma last spring. The firm, Alliance Defending Freedom, asked an education lawyer named Brad Miller if he could “find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado.”

The case was short-lived. The school and its authorizer, a public education co-op based in Monument, dropped the lawsuit in May.

The death knell for Riverstone was a pair of amendments lawmakers passed in the last few days of this spring’s legislative session. One bars co-ops like the one that authorized Riverstone from starting schools or programs outside their member school districts. The other bars school districts or co-ops from having brick and mortar schools that are entirely run by contractors.

The new limits effectively put Riverstone’s authorizer — Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services or ERBOCES — at odds with state law, making Riverstone ineligible for state funding. That’s because Riverstone is located outside of ERBOCES’ two member school districts and is run by a contractor.

Riverstone opened quietly last summer in a former office in an industrial area in Pueblo County. It described itself as a public elementary school that offered a Christian foundation, but its religious affiliation wasn’t widely known until October. That’s when Ken Witt, the executive director of ERBOCES, announced at a public meeting that Riverstone was Colorado’s first public Christian school, surprising members of the public and some government officials.

The fallout included the abrupt resignation in December of Pueblo 70 school board member Anne Ochs after a district parent criticized her for her role in bringing Riverstone into the district and for failing to disclose a conflict of interest.

Friberg and Witt did not respond to requests for comment about Riverstone’s closure.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

The red-state Democrat upending the politics of school vouchers

2026-06-02T14:11:10+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.

Over the last several years, Republicans have offered a fairly unified message on education. They want to expand school choice, eliminate certain liberal ideas from school curriculum, and close the U.S. Education Department.

Democrats, on the other hand, have been casting about for an educational vision. A vocal contingent within the party has said they need to embrace school choice, perhaps even vouchers for private schools. This perspective has received much ink in major publications.

In Iowa, however, State Auditor Rob Sand is taking a different tack in his run for governor. A Democrat in an increasingly red state, Sand is aggressively campaigning against the state’s education savings account, or ESA, program, which passed in 2023. The state now provides publicly funded vouchers for families to pay for private-school tuition and expenses.

“We’re talking about this everywhere we go,” Sand said at an event in April hosted by the Iowa state teachers union. “This is just basically a siphon of hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools.”

Co-opting the language of conservatives, Sand is fashioning himself as a fiscal hawk — “the taxpayers’ watchdog” — who will rein in wasteful spending, including in the state’s ESA program. Republican candidates for governor are arguing with each other about the program, which suggests Sand has landed on an effective wedge issue.

Sand’s campaign is hardly quixotic: He’s leading in some early polling. Nationally, his strategy is significant because it shows the different ways that various Democrats are approaching K-12 education — and the divide within the party on how to do so.

I spoke with Sand via Zoom. I wanted to hear why he’s putting the ESA program at the center of his campaign. Beyond that, I was interested in what ideas he had for improving public schools in the state.

Heather Doe, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education, declined to make anyone available for an interview but said Sand’s critique of ESAs is partisan and without merit. “It is regrettable that the Auditor has used his official capacity to waste time and taxpayer money in an effort to run for governor by targeting a program that is helping Iowa families exercise their statutory right to school choice,” Doe said in a statement.

My conversation with Sand has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is the ESA program an important part of your campaign?

I believe that the vast majority of Iowans think that oversight is important, and we should want public oversight of public money.

We should have income limits on the program. It shouldn’t be going to the wealthiest Iowans. We shouldn’t be allowing private schools to take 7,500 bucks from the state and then just jack up tuition by $7,500, leaving it equally unaffordable. We ought to be able to audit the program.

[Earlier this year, Sand’s office released an audit of the ESA program that did not identify any significant problems. He said then that the governor’s office failed to provide sufficient time for a thorough audit. Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican and ESA champion, countered that Sand’s comments were “just another manufactured opportunity for the auditor to use his official office to advance his political agenda in his run for governor.” Doe said in her statement that the department provided Sand’s office with extensive information. “The politicization of what’s meant to be the Department’s independent, unbiased annual audit is deeply concerning,” she said.]

What would you say to Iowa parents who are using this program and appreciate it?

Everything that I have proposed is reasonable, and I hear from parents literally every week who say, ‘Yeah, I’m glad we have the program, but geez, I want to make sure this money is spent responsibly.’

Do you ultimately want to repeal the ESA program?

[shrugs] There’s no chance of that happening. I mean, we’re talking about a legislature where it’s near supermajorities of Republicans.

Well, I’m asking what you would want in your ideal world.

I hear you asking me, and I’m answering you. I don’t deal with hypotheticals. If we can work really hard and get it to a better place, we’ll see where we are.

Some will hear the various rules you’re proposing and say that’s a stealth way of making it so private schools won’t participate.

If you’re telling me you don’t want tax dollars unless you can have them without oversight, that’s your problem, not mine.

What is your positive vision for Iowa’s public schools?

When I was growing up in Decorah, way up in Northeast Iowa, we were always in the top for public education. I want our schools to be at the top again, and I’m open-minded about how we get there. I’m not ideological about that.

We’ve got to have competitive teacher pay, not just for beginning teachers but also for teachers who have three, four, or five years’ experience, when studies show they are beginning to get very good at their craft. I think that we could be using AI one-on-one tutors right now to help kids learn to read more effectively. I’m a believer in phonics. Iowa did a requirement for phonics, so I think that that’s a good change. I was never bought into the whole language idea.

But the vast majority of our conversations around education are about how that ESA program works. What’s so interesting to me is the people who are advocates for it, say, ‘Oh, we want school choice.’ Well, I want public oversight of public money, and when you allow private schools to take public money but reject students, then you actually haven’t promoted school choice because the school is the one that gets to make the choice.

There are a number of national Democrats who are pushing your party to embrace school choice, even vouchers, and to distance itself from teachers unions. What do you think of that advice?

I know there are people out there like that. I haven’t been paying much attention to it. Specifics matter. Each program is different. I will continue to talk about the ways in which I think Iowa’s program is an invitation to fraud and doesn’t actually promote school choice. [Doe, the Iowa education spokesperson, said Sand’s office’s audit “identified zero financial discrepancies, once again affirming the Department’s responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds.”]

I’m proud to have the [Iowa teachers union’s] endorsement. But I’d say what I say to every other group: I’m independent-minded. You’re not going to get 100% of what you want from me, because there’s nobody that I agree with 100% of the time.

What do you disagree with teachers unions on?

That’s a better question for a different time. I’d have to go through what their wish list would be here in the state. I’m just making a point in general.

If you were governor, would you participate in the federal tax-credit school scholarship program?

I don’t think I have been following that one.

Do you consider yourself a fiscal conservative?

Yeah, I mean to me the phrase that’s more important is fiscal responsibility. But I’m open-minded to the importance of making investments that are going to pay off. Oh — you asked about what else we want to do for public education. I want universal early childhood education. If you just did income restrictions in the school vouchers program, you could fund early childhood education [for more students]. To me, that’s money that is well invested.

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

These Colorado counties have very different politics. Both now offer tax relief to childcare providers.

2026-05-29T19:01:10+00:00

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Two Colorado counties on opposite sides of the political spectrum are the first to use a recent state law to provide property tax relief to childcare businesses, in an effort to help stabilize the industry.

Adams County commissioners, who are all Democrats, and Douglas County commissioners, who are all Republicans, approved their respective property tax rebate plans this spring. The initiatives, which give extra incentives to childcare providers serving infants and toddlers, will send hundreds of dollars to the smallest providers and thousands to the largest ones starting in the second half of 2026.

Lisa Jansen Thompson, who leads the Early Childhood Partnership of Adams County, likened the rebates to one piece in a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

“Every little piece helps,” she said “And the more that we’re able to put together pieces, the closer we get to making childcare affordable for families as well as for providers, and making sure there’s enough.”

The new property tax rebate programs are the latest example of efforts by local governments around Colorado to offer financial help to childcare providers, and in turn support the families they serve. In the last few years, voters in more than a dozen cities or counties, including Larimer County and several mountain resort communities, have approved sales or lodging taxes that generate funding for childcare.

Such efforts have expanded as childcare providers face increasing financial headwinds: the end of COVID stimulus money, rising costs, and enrollment drops caused by freezes on childcare aid for low-income families.

Divine Klutsey, president and CEO of Purple Moon Early Learning Center in Northglenn, said he and his wife have considered closing their center, which enrolls about 80 children, because of barely-there profit margins. One Friday this spring, he was on the phone with a plumber whose visit to fix a leaking sink was going to cost $300.

“There’s always something that is not working well,” he said.

This year, Purple Moon’s property tax bill is $36,000, Klutsey said. Typically, he takes out a high-interest loan to pay the bill, and then makes weekly payments.

“I am still paying the one from last year,” he said.

Klutsey doesn’t know exactly how big of a rebate he’ll get back through Adams County’s new program, but said if it covered half his county property taxes it would be a relief.

“Then I don’t have to close the business a year or two down the road,” he said.

The rebate programs in Adams and Douglas counties are possible because of a 2024 state law that allowed counties to offer tax credits or rebates to address local challenges such as housing, childcare, job training, or renewable energy.

Only childcare businesses that pay property taxes or who rent from landlords that pay property taxes are eligible for the rebates. Childcare programs in public schools and churches aren’t eligible because those institutions don’t typically pay property taxes.

Diane Smith, executive director of the Douglas County Early Childhood Council, said private providers tell her the rebates will help level the playing field by cutting some of the overhead costs that other childcare programs don’t have.

Adams and Douglas counties will offer 100% rebates on county property taxes for two categories of providers: home-based programs and those that have infant and toddler spots. Providers outside of those two categories will get 50% rebates in Adams County and 75% rebates in Douglas County.

About 167 providers in Douglas County and 176 providers in Adams County will be eligible for the rebates directly, or through their landlords. Both counties will offer the rebates for one year and county commissioners will consider renewing them next year.

Julie Duran Mullica, chair of the Adams County Board of Commissioners, said approving the rebates was an easy decision for the five-member board even though it could mean a loss of $700,000 in property tax dollars.

“You budget what you value,” she said. “We know how much of a struggle [childcare] is in Adams County.”

At the end of the pilot year, Duran Mullica said she’ll want to see data on how many childcare closures the rebates helped and how many seats providers added.

Mark Arbitrio, who owns Ivybrook Academy in Castle Rock and paid about $20,000 in property taxes last year, said he’ll use a portion of the rebate he hopes to receive to subdivide one of his four classrooms, so that a portion of the space can be used for a new toddler classroom. That room will create around 18 new half-day toddler spots.

Some of the rebate could also go toward retention bonuses for teachers.

“They are the glue to everything that we do,” Arbitrio said. “I mean, I love our curriculum, our school’s beautiful and all that, but they are the glue, right?”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Julie Duran Mullica’s title. She is the chair of the Adams County Board of Commissioners.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

The Voting Rights Act reshaped school boards. What will happen after the Supreme Court weakened it?

2026-05-26T12:59:58+00:00

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The Voting Rights Act has for decades given parents and others a pathway to change the institutions that have the most day-to-day control over American schools: their local school boards.

But the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which has kicked off a rush of partisan redistricting that threatens Black representation in Congress, could make it harder to demand changes in how school boards are organized going forward.

The impact of that law has been sweeping. More than 320 Voting Rights Act complaints between 1982 and 2024 dealt with school board elections, according to a database created by Chris Seaman, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.

School boards accounted for more than a fifth of all Section 2 voting rights cases during that time period, Seaman found.

Many of those challenged at-large elections — which allow everyone in a community to vote for every seat on a board. This setup can make it difficult for communities of color to elect their preferred candidates, especially in places where a white majority votes in a bloc.

Some 3.6 million children currently attend school in a district shaped by one of those challenges, a Chalkbeat analysis found. But at-large elections remain the most common school board structure in the United States.

Legal experts agree that it will be more difficult now to claim that a particular electoral system violates the rights of minority voters. In the aftermath of Callais, conservative legal groups are gearing up to challenge state voting rights laws that have provided additional tools to reshape school boards. Some even see an opening to challenge past settlements — especially in cases where school districts voluntarily made changes to improve racial representation.

The Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act will likely lead to “a decrease in minority representation, and school boards will not be exempt,” Seaman said. Most public school students are children of color, while most school board members are white. While the Voting Rights Act does not guarantee the election of candidates of color, it has given minority communities the opportunity to elect candidates responsive to their concerns. Limited research has shown school board members of color make a difference in student discipline, superintendent hiring, and academic outcomes.

But unfair student discipline or low test scores don’t create Voting Rights Act violations, said J. Christian Adams, a conservative election lawyer and former Justice Department official who served on President Donald Trump’s failed 2017 voter-fraud commission.

There’s nothing fundamentally better or worse about single-member or at-large school board districts, said Adams, now president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. But under the Callais ruling, “if a school district says we’re going to single-member districts to elect minority representatives, that would violate the constitution. That’s over. That’s done.”

Callais focused on partisan redistricting in legislative races. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority said party considerations — wanting Republicans or Democrats to win more seats — could justify drawing maps that dilute minority voters’ voice.

That could mean the decision has less impact in nonpartisan school board races. It will take time and more lawsuits to fully understand the effects.

“To the extent that the Voting Rights Act has any vitality left after Callais, I think it’s likely to be in these local races like school boards,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert and professor at Loyola Marymount University.

How racism fueled at-large school board elections

At-large school board elections are a legacy of Progressive-era reforms that sought to reduce the power of machine politics and cronyism over education governance.

In northern cities, these changes reduced the political power of immigrant enclaves. In the Jim Crow South, they prevented Black communities from electing their own school board representatives, when those residents could vote at all.

As Memphis schools takeover looms, city faces further voting power struggle

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965 and repeatedly amended, provided grounds to challenge at-large elections for local government offices that potentially dilute the votes of minority groups.

A handful of attorneys in Texas and Alabama filed dozens of challenges to at-large school board elections in the 1980s and 1990s, accounting for the majority of cases. Often, school districts agreed to settle when faced with just the threat of a lawsuit.

These challenges changed who decided to run for office, who won seats on school boards, and how resources were allocated in districts across the country.

“There are really important decisions that impact students of color that benefit from the perspective of school board members of color,” said Carrie Sampson, an associate professor of educational leadership at Arizona State University who studies school boards.

And these challenges continue in the modern era.

Just last year, Wicomico County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore agreed to replace its hybrid system, which included at-large and single-member districts for both county council and school board, with seven single-member districts, two of which are majority Black. The changes occurred in response to a 2023 lawsuit by Black voters supported by the Maryland branches of the ACLU and the NAACP.

The lawsuit described a long history of discrimination and racially polarized voting that blocked Black candidates from winning at-large seats. When the governor appointed members, the Wicomico school board often had two Black members. After switching to an elected board in 2016, the board has only had one Black member at a time — always elected in the single majority-Black district.

“They kept claiming that we didn’t need to sue them, that they would have done it if we just asked nicely,” said Deborah Jeon, legal director of the Maryland ACLU. “But we had been asking nicely for two decades. It was only once we sued that they came to the table.”

School boards might defend at-large seats creatively

Whether school districts will continue to come to the table or instead fight to maintain at-large elections is an open question.

Even in communities with hard-fought, racially polarized school board elections, those divisions may not fall neatly along party lines. That means advocates can still make arguments about vote dilution and other unfair practices.

But Levitt, who advised the Biden administration on voting issues, said he expects more school districts to find other race-neutral justifications for their electoral systems, for example that at-large elections produce candidates who will look out for the interests of all students.

“I think you’ll see a lot of creativity,” he said.

Callais also requires “a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred” in setting up a particular voting system, and not just a discriminatory effect or outcome.

Colorado lawmakers reject attempt to move away from at-large school board elections

Adams said school boards that might have settled in the past could now open themselves up to counterchallenges that they drew districts designed to advantage one racial group. He reads Callais as allowing such a remedy only when a court finds recent evidence of discrimination in voting.

“A school district would be very foolish to think that a settlement will bring them peace, because the next people they’ll hear from will be suing over an illegal racial gerrymander,” he said.

Even school districts that discuss racial balancing during regular redistricting processes, as Denver did in 2024, could open themselves to a lawsuit, he said. The meeting minutes would be “gold” in proving racial motives.

Challenges to school board elections confront new standard

Two decades ago, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, made national headlines for adopting sweeping anti-immigrant legislation as new arrivals transformed the demographics of the coal country city. Those laws were found to be unconstitutional, but Hispanic residents say they continue to face discrimination, including in school.

In 2024, Aleida Aquino and Brendalis Lopez filed a lawsuit challenging the Hazleton Area School District’s at-large election system with support from the University of California Los Angeles Voting Project.

Hispanic voters account for some 40% of registered voters in the district, according to the lawsuit. Two-thirds of students are Hispanic. At least six Hispanic candidates have run for school board since 2019, yet no Hispanic candidate has won a seat on the nine-member board.

The Supreme Court’s voting rights decision could reshape local government across Texas

Moving to single-member districts could allow the Hispanic community concentrated in the city of Hazleton to elect a representative who might be more responsive to their concerns about unfair discipline practices, limited translation services for parents, and other disparities, the lawsuit says.

But unlike many school districts in this situation, Hazleton hasn’t settled and is fighting to maintain its at-large elections. Now the lawsuit will be heard under the higher standard created by Callais.

Neither Superintendent Brian Uplinger nor the school board president responded to a request for comment from Chalkbeat. In a statement issued when the lawsuit was filed, Uplinger defended the district’s record of serving Latino students.

Bernadette Reyes, senior counsel with the UCLA Voting Project, said Callais runs counter to the history of the Voting Rights Act and congressional action. The ruling has made the road ahead more difficult for lawsuits like the one in Hazleton.

“But it’s important that these challenges continue,” Reyes said. “Those folks challenging it need to adapt to the higher standard.”

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

Tom Kane has tracked years of U.S. test scores. Here’s what he’s learned — and still can’t explain.

2026-05-21T09:46:23+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.

Just about everyone in education is trying to figure out why student achievement has been declining and how to raise it back up.

If anyone would know the answer it might be Tom Kane, a Harvard University professor who has been poring over data on student learning for the last several years. Kane and several colleagues recently released an extensive database of test scores from most states in the country.

The takeaway: Schools have made some progress recovering from steep learning declines in math, but scores in both math and reading are still far below where they were over a decade ago.

“The U.S. has been in a learning recession since at least around 2013 and that’s especially true in reading,” says Kane. “The challenges we face didn’t start or end with the pandemic.” The implications are alarming. In other work, Kane has found that test scores are linked to a variety of economic outcomes.

The research out of Kane’s center has been so comprehensive that many of its interesting findings have flown under the radar. I wanted to highlight a few of them. And I also wanted to unpack theories to explain poor academic results. What’s striking is that even Kane, a leading expert, doesn’t have clear answers or solutions.

Here are some takeaways from the work of Kane and his colleagues.

There are hypotheses, but no decisive evidence, for why learning stalled before the pandemic

Kane offers two theories. “The slowdown in learning coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability and a rise in social media use,” his study says. The evidence for both is circumstantial, Kane acknowledges. Other countries have also seen test scores deteriorate, which could be consistent with a rise in social media everywhere. Federal accountability helped drive learning gains in the past, according to some research, so easing the pressure may explain recent declines.

Yet both theories have holes. Test scores have dropped even in early grades where social media use is not prevalent (although general screen use has accelerated for young kids). And accountability policies seemed most effective in raising math scores, but the most persistent recent declines have been in reading.

“We don’t have a definitive answer,” Kane says.

The highest- and lowest-poverty school systems have recovered faster than those in the middle

Kane calls this a U-shaped recovery. You can see it in the graph below, from his recent study. The dark blue and orange lines show learning trends by district poverty rates between 2022 and 2025. In math, the highest- and lowest-need school systems have seen the most progress. In reading, scores in middle-income districts fell the most.

Kane says policymakers should keep in mind those middle-income districts, which are sometimes overlooked in policy and funding formulas.

Federal COVID relief money helped, but it might have gone further

Part of the explanation for this U-shaped recovery is the $190 billion or so in federal COVID relief funding. In the same graph, the line below the actual recovery shows Kane’s estimate of what scores would have been without the money. Scores in high-poverty districts would have been significantly worse, he finds. Those schools benefited more from the money simply because they got more of it.

Kane rejects the commonly heard argument that the federal relief money was largely wasted. But he thinks the test score effect might have been larger had districts been required to spend more on academic recovery.

One caveat: Kane acknowledges he may be underestimating the effect of each dollar of federal aid because he doesn’t have data on how much extra money schools actually spent, just how much they were supposed to receive.

Absenteeism is limiting recovery, at least a bit

Attendance issues have exploded in recent years. Schools have made some progress in getting students back to class, but absence rates remain elevated. Kane and team estimate that this is dragging down learning. The other gray lines in the graphic — above the blue and orange lines — are Kane’s predictions of what scores would be if students were attending school at the same rate as before the pandemic.

The effects are real but fairly modest, indicating absence rates are not the main drivers of sluggish recovery. In reading, for instance, most districts would still have lost ground even with pre-pandemic attendance.

State test scores paint a more optimistic picture of recovery than the main federal test

Kane and colleagues use a combination of state tests and federal NAEP exams to construct their learning estimates. To produce the main trends they rely on NAEP, except for score changes from 2024 to 2025 since NAEP scores aren’t yet available. This matters because state tests tend to produce more positive trends. For instance, NAEP has shown reading scores declining in recent years, even while many states’ results have inched up. It’s not that one set of scores is right and the other is wrong. But this discrepancy is worth keeping in mind.

It’s not clear whether science-of-reading laws are working

Kane doesn’t find a strong correlation between states’ reading gains since 2022 and the number of science-of-reading elements they’ve incorporated. Yet he notes that the states with very few of these tenets have not made progress. Kane emphasizes that this is not especially rigorous evidence, and should be taken as only “suggestive.” More research is needed on whether these laws are changing school practices and improving outcomes.

Progress has happened before and is happening in some places

Kane marvels at the substantial gains in test scores in the 1990s and early 2000s — which went largely unremarked upon at the time. If anything, the prevailing narrative was that nothing in education was working. But if we made progress before, we can do it again, he suggests. That’s also why his report highlights a number of school systems, like Detroit, that are relative bright spots.

“It’s a reminder that improvement is possible,” Kane says.

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

Council speaker tries new ‘buffer bill’ after Mamdani rebuff

2026-05-21T01:18:18+00:00

This story was originally published on May 20 byTHE CITY. Sign up here to get the latest stories from THE CITY delivered to you each morning.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin is preparing to re-introduce a limited version of a controversial bill that would establish anti-protest “buffer zones” around schools, opting not to try an override of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s veto of an earlier bill.

Menin’s new bill would direct the NYPD to plan protest buffer zones for public and private K-12 schools only. Colleges, universities, museums and libraries, teaching hospitals and other educational facilities will not fall under the bill’s scope, according to a draft obtained by THE CITY. Menin confirmed the changes.

“We’re taking steps that will result in a greater consensus among Council members, as well as the community at large, that will focus the legislation more clearly on the sites that serve the most vulnerable students,” she said at a press conference Wednesday.

Menin did not have information on exactly how many K-12 schools or early childhood education centers have been targeted by protesters to date.

She said the Council was in a position to override the mayor’s April 24 veto – which requires a supermajority of the council, or 34 votes – but instead chose to introduce a new version.

“What our weeks of conversation also revealed was that there was a considerable number of members who wholly support the intent of the legislation, but who had concerns about which educational facilities are included,” she said.

“We not only listened to these members’ concerns, but we heard them and now we’re choosing to address them rather than dismiss them,” Menin added.

The proposal, known as Intro 175, has been the source of enormous controversy since it was first introduced by Councilmember Eric Dinowitz in January. Unions, civil rights groups and community organizations — including some groups representing the city’s Jewish community — decried the measure as a threat to free speech rights.

Organizations representing Jewish and Catholic schools, as well as the city’s mainline Jewish groups, supported the measure.

Menin pushed for the schools buffer zone bill, and a similar bill that establishes anti-protest perimeters around houses of worship, as an answer to the NYPD’s widely-criticized response last year to protests outside the Park East Synagogue, which had hosted an organization that helps Jews move to settlements on the occupied West Bank, as well as to the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses.

The Council ultimately approved watered-down versions of both bills in late March. The bill addressing houses of worship passed the Council by a veto-proof majority. Mamdani eventually vetoed the schools bill — the first such move of his tenure — after intense lobbying from unions and community organizations who opposed it.

Many of those same groups took a victory lap on Wednesday, after news broke that Menin had failed to whip enough lawmakers to secure a veto override.

“The dangerously broad, anti-free speech ‘buffer zone’ bill, Intro 175-B, will not become law,” James Davis, president of the City University’s staff union, said in a statement. “This is a victory for the CUNY community, labor rights, and social justice in New York City.”

“These ‘buffer zone’ bills have never been about keeping New Yorkers safe, but about silencing our voices,” Jews for Racial and Economic Justice executive director Audrey Sasson said in a statement.

It is unclear whether the city Department of Education supports the latest version of the bill, and a spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. The agency also did not testify at a marathon February hearing where the police department testified against it, saying it already has protocols in place to address protests.

Disclosure: Irizarry Aponte is a PSC member in her role as an adjunct instructor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Colorado isn’t cutting the amount it pays for homeschool enrichment students. Here’s why.

2026-05-19T23:19:13+00:00

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This spring, state lawmakers considered cutting funding for homeschool enrichment students as a way to bring down costs in a growing but mostly unregulated corner of Colorado’s publicly funded education system.

But in the last days of the legislative session, they opted instead to rein in funding in a different way: by putting guardrails on the group fueling most of the growth. The move will save the state tens of millions of dollars by eliminating some homeschool enrichment programs authorized by the Monument-based group Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES.

The homeschool enrichment debate flared as lawmakers grappled with a $1.5 billion budget hole and revelations emerged that some homeschool enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES fund activities such as sports camps, martial arts lessons, and even ski passes. While many school districts and charter schools also offer enrichment programs to homeschoolers, their offerings tend to be more similar to public school classes such as art, music, physical education, and sometimes academics.

The state spends more than $100 million a year on part-time students, a group that consists mostly of homeschool enrichment participants. The rest are private school students who take classes at public schools that their schools aren’t able to offer.

For now, the state will continue paying the current part-time per-pupil rate for homeschool enrichment programs — about $6,000 a year on average, typically for one day a week of classes. That rate is half the full-time rate for public K-12 students, who attend classes four or five days a week.

Lawmakers may reconsider cutting that rate in future years.

“I definitely think that that is still going to be an important conversation going forward,” said Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat who is chair of the powerful Joint Budget Committee.

She said with continued budget shortfalls expected in the next couple years, lawmakers will need to look everywhere for savings.

Sirota said the Joint Budget Committee pivoted away from cutting the homeschool enrichment funding rate this year in part because the proposed change didn’t address the root problem: that one authorizer, ERBOCES, was responsible for the explosion of new programs.

The co-op has more than 50 homeschool enrichment programs scattered across the state, most created in the last few years. All are operated by private contractors.

Sirota said stopping the spread of homeschool enrichment programs that provide activities outside the bounds of what is normally considered public education was the first priority.

Simply halving the homeschool enrichment rate would have hurt school district enrichment programs that are operating appropriately, “but wouldn’t have stopped the horseback riding lessons and ski pass programs,” she said. “Those probably would have proliferated even further.”

The legislature curtailed the power of co-ops like ERBOCES to authorize schools and programs outside their member school districts through an amendment to the School Finance Act. ERBOCES has only two member districts: District 49 in El Paso County and the Elizabeth School District in Elbert County.

The amendment would bar homeschool enrichment programs from providing activities not generally available to students attending public schools. It would also ban publicly funded homeschool enrichment programs from enrolling private school students. Some of the homeschool enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES provide one day of free programming a week to students who attend private school the rest of the week.

State estimates indicate the changes will save about $21 million next year and about $30 million the following year, though the amounts could vary based on several factors.

Even with the changes to the School Finance Act, some existing homeschool enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES will be allowed to continue operating even if they are outside its territory. They’ll have to meet certain conditions, including approval by the school district where the program is located, or starting in 2027-28, approval by the State Board of Education. They won’t be allowed to enroll more students next year than they have this year.

The new restrictions mean that some homeschool enrichment programs in the pipeline will not open. ERBOCES, which is overseen by a five-member board, was slated to launch at least two dozen enrichment programs next fall, according to board documents and meeting audio recordings. They included a forest school in Lakewood, an arts program in Pueblo, and classes on Japanese language and culture in the Denver area. Since they are new and outside ERBOCES’ two member districts, they wouldn’t be eligible for public funding next school year.

ERBOCES officials have declined to provide Chalkbeat a list of the group’s current and planned homeschool enrichment programs.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

What happened when Los Angeles parents got better school choice information?

2026-05-19T09:47:00+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.

In the fall of 2019, thousands of parents in Los Angeles received letters in the mail designed to help them choose a high school for their eighth graders. Many of these letters included novel data on how effective different high schools were at helping students learn.

What the families probably didn’t realize is that they were part of an unusual experiment designed by University of Chicago economist Chris Campos, in partnership with the Los Angeles school system. Campos was looking to answer a long-discussed question: Can better information help families make better decisions about where to send their children to school?

At a moment when school choice is expanding, this is a crucial issue across the country.

Campos, who had previously studied school choice in Los Angeles, spent months working on how to communicate information about school performance. Many parents may assume that schools with the highest overall test scores are the ones where students make the most progress — but this often isn’t true.

Campos calculated measures of student learning himself, using a complex statistical model, while also conducting focus groups with parents on how to explain these numbers clearly. Such figures are often unavailable or hard to make sense of. Campos also designed a video, disseminated to families, describing the difference between student growth and the incoming test scores of schools’ student bodies.

The letter-sending experiment was remarkable. Such an undertaking is rare, especially at a large scale in a large school system. Yet it turned out the letters on their own didn’t make much of a difference. Parents and students selected schools as they always did, seemingly unmoved by this new information.

But Campos was also testing out an additional idea. What would happen if large numbers of families at a single school got letters with information on student growth? Campos’ theory was that choosing a school is fundamentally a social process, both for students and their parents.

The data bore this out. When a middle school was saturated with informational letters, more students tended to choose high schools with higher growth scores. That was even the case for families that did not get their own letter. In other words, what mattered more than individual information was a community-level shift in thinking. “There seems to be a tipping point,” Campos says.

He continued to track these students as they moved through high school. Those from middle schools where growth information was widely shared were more likely to enroll in college and to report more supportive high school environments. Campos’ theory for why is simple: They benefitted from choosing better high schools based on better information.

The high school choice system in Los Angeles is not a zero sum game since many schools are not filled to capacity. When one student chooses a school, that doesn’t necessarily mean another is bumped out of it. The letters seemed to have led to a modest migration toward more successful schools.

Campos is hopeful that if families prioritize growth measures, that will pressure struggling schools to improve. “They’re going to have an even stronger incentive to perform better on these metrics,” he says.

The findings offer two important, albeit still-tentative insights. First, families do seem to value data on student growth, but they often don’t have access to it. Second, to change parents’ thinking, information needs to be widely shared across a broad network of connected families, not just a handful of individuals.

Campos’ results are intriguing but limited. They should be taken as provisional until they are replicated by other researchers in different settings. Successful pilot experiments like this sometimes don’t work when brought to a larger scale. The study also comes in a context in which the vast majority of students are lower-income. Moving the preferences of advantaged families may be much harder.

Campos’ paper is currently going through the academic peer review process. He is still working with officials in Los Angeles to study and improve its choice system. Now, though, all parents are sent letters he’s designed providing information on student growth.

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

More than 19,000 Colorado childcare workers benefit from new state tax credit in first year

2026-05-18T22:53:39+00:00

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More than 19,000 Colorado childcare teachers and staff have taken advantage of a new $1,200 state tax credit for workers who support young children, older adults, or people with disabilities.

The Care Worker Tax Credit was created by a 2024 state law and became available for the first time this spring when Coloradans filed returns for the 2025 tax year. It’s available to single filers who earn an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or less and joint filers who earn $100,000 or less.

The income tax credit represents an effort by Colorado lawmakers to help early childhood educators, whose average pay is lower than many fast food and retail workers. It also takes a more expansive view of the workforce than some other initiatives by including people who care for young children outside of state-licensed facilities, often called family, friend, and neighbor caregivers.

About 17,500 childcare workers providing state-licensed care, and 1,800 providing family, friend, and neighbor care sought the new tax credit this year, according to preliminary state data. That’s about $23 million worth of tax relief.

“For too long, early childhood and direct care professionals have been undercompensated, despite the essential role they play in our communities and economy,” Lisa Roy, executive director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, said in a press release.

“The Care Worker Tax Credit represents a meaningful step toward greater financial stability for these professionals who nurture Colorado’s children, support families, and strengthen communities every day,” she said.

State officials said they won’t have numbers showing how many workers caring for older adults and people with disabilities took advantage of the tax credit until the fall.

The care workers tax credit is a refundable tax credit, which means that eligible filers will get money back from the credit even if their tax bill is less than $1,200. For example, if their tax bill is $1,000, the tax credit will cover the bill, and the remaining $200 will be sent to the filer as a refund.

Colorado has another tax credit available to some childcare workers, but it’s expiring after the 2025 tax year. Created by a 2022 state law to encourage early childhood educators to increase their credentials, the Early Childhood Educator Tax Credit provides credits between $872 and $1,743 depending on credential level.

Child care workers who already filed their taxes but did not seek the Care Worker Tax Credit can still do so by amending their tax returns and filing the appropriate paperwork by Oct. 15.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

NYC PTA funding inequities: See how much your school’s PTA raises

2026-05-15T21:10:06+00:00

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New York City’s public school system has long been defined by inequities of concentrated wealth and poverty, and nowhere is that more pronounced than in parent-teacher association fundraising.

Of the money PTAs raised last year, the top 30 schools, or just 2.5%, raised nearly half of the total amount of the 1,240 schools included in the recently released Education Department data for the 2024-25 school year.

Meanwhile, roughly 390 PTAs — about a third of the schools — reported raising no money last year, suggesting their parent-teacher associations are inactive or struggling. Another 330 PTAs appear to have failed to report anything to the Education Department. Though schools are mandated to have PTAs, some may not have the capacity to sustain such groups.

PTA money can fund enrichment, not core classroom teachers, and is often used to bolster things like the arts or pay for teaching assistants. When a school can use PTA money to cover these costs, it could free their school up to pay more for core classroom teachers.

That could, in turn, make a school more desirable, said Carolyn Abott, a Baruch College assistant professor of political science who has been researching PTAs. It could create a snowball effect, she said, attracting families to a particular school zone and potentially even pushing up housing prices.

“And you are pulling those politically and community active families away from schools that are already sort of resource-deprived, which again, exacerbates the situation,” Abott said.

Noah Strote, a parent of a fourth grader at P.S. 199, an affluent school on the Upper West Side in Manhattan’s District 3, said the funding disparities can show up in different ways, from the number of air conditioners or bathroom supplies to the quantity of enrichment programs.

“They can also fund all the little things that add up, such as teacher and staff appreciation events with food and drink and gifts, that help create a culture where those people want to stay year after year,” Strote wrote in an email. “It’s obviously not the only factor contributing to outcomes for children, but it’s definitely not an insignificant one.”

P.S. 199, which is typically a high-rolling PTA, failed to report any data to the Education Department, revealing some of the shortcomings of the public data.

The data, which is self-reported, appeared to have some errors and inaccuracies. (For example, P.S. 60 in Woodhaven, Queens, was among the top 10 for reported income, reportedly bringing in more than $2 million. But looking at the school’s full balance, that appeared to be a decimal error, and the school likely only brought in about $20,000.)

Drilling down on the data

Fourteen schools brought in more than $1 million each, led by P.S. 29, an elementary school in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill; New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math, a K-12 gifted and talented school on the Lower East Side; and P.S. 8, or The Emily Warren Roebling School, an elementary school in Brooklyn Heights. Another 14 schools raised more than $500,000.

Looking at the data on the district level reveals another set of extremes. PTAs in Manhattan’s District 2, which includes such affluent areas as the Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, and TriBeCa, brought in the most money, with nearly $18 million in total income. That was 600 times greater than what PTAs raised in District 23, which spans Brooklyn’s high-poverty neighborhoods of Ocean Hill/Brownsville. PTAs in District 23, which is also one of the city’s smallest districts, brought in about $29,000.

Because school funding formulas send more money to schools with higher-need students, more affluent schools tend to spend less per pupil — an argument that some PTA fundraiser powerhouses point out. P.S. 29, for instance, spent $17,310 per pupil last year, compared to P.S. 150 in District 23, which spent $46,198 per pupil, according to public data. About 4% of the school’s funding, or $154,000, came from federal dollars given to schools with more than 60% student poverty.

Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said the city recognizes that PTA fundraising varied “significantly” across school communities and reiterated that the city’s funding formula aims to allocate additional resources to schools serving kids with the greatest needs.

“We remain committed to ensuring equitable access to resources through the funding streams we directly control,” she said.

With executive boards turning over each year, newly minted PTA members might not know what they’re getting into and lack training and the understanding of the PTA’s role, said Antonia Martinelli, the PTA Link coordinator at Appleseed, which helps fill the “information gap” for PTAs.

Though the rules governing PTAs make it clear they can supplement, rather than supplant, school budgets, PTAs can change their schools’ ability to hire more teachers, Martinelli echoed.

“Now they’re inadvertently impacting the academic outcomes of the students,” she said.

Martinelli also raised concerns about the end balance of the city’s PTAs, which totaled about $46.5 million.

“PTAs are supposed to target their fundraising to a specific goal,” she said. “They are not supposed to be running quasi endowments.”

Efforts to bolster PTA fundraising

PTAs raise money in various ways: direct appeals, bake sales, or carnivals, galas, and other events.

Some schools raise money by organizing after-school programs, like P.S. 20, in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, which raised more than $1.16 million last year, putting the school in the top 10 citywide. About 85% of the PTA’s income came from P.S. 20’s “wildly successful” after-school program serving kids from prekindergarten through fifth grade, said PTA co-president Sarah Durand McGuigan.

At P.S. 20, it covers an art teacher, pays for a gardening and beekeeping program, and helps fund arts residencies, Durand McGuigan said. It helped the school build a library as well as facility upgrades. It pays for full- and part-time school assistants working in the cafeteria, office, and hallways. It also covers the costs of teacher professional development training.

P.S. 20, which had nearly 700 students, sits in District 13, a racially and socioeconomically diverse district that schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels previously oversaw as superintendent. And while it’s not among the most affluent like some of the other elementary schools in the top 10, with just 38% of students from low-income families, the school is still among the top 100 schools in the city with the smallest share of students in poverty. Citywide, about 75% of students come from low-income families.

The school community is aware of the different needs of families, offering scholarships to the after-school program, for instance, and the PTA jumped into action last year when public food assistance was going to be restricted, raising about $10,000 for grocery gift cards to families in need, Durand McGuigan said.

“The haves and the have nots in the New York City public school system are huge,” she said. “We have people living in $3 million brownstones, and we have people in public housing.”

The PTA at Arts & Letters 305 United, also in District 13, was among the top 30 fundraisers, bringing in more than $546,000 last year. It used the money to support tutoring, school trips, stepping-up ceremonies, enrichment teachers, and for many community-building events, said LaMeane Isaac, PTA president at the Bedford-Stuyvesant school where Samuels had led a merger between a popular affluent school and an under-enrolled one serving more low-income families.

The school’s PTA also helped provide about $2,000 in seed money for a districtwide fund bringing together families, local businesses, and community organizations to support 28 under-resourced schools across the district that lacked PTA funding.

“We are willing to help and commit towards supporting other schools who may not be as financially fortunate as we are,” Isaac said.

“If we can be helpful and supportive to other schools, everyone wins, right?”

Correction: May 17, 2026: This article initially said the percentage of top PTAs was based on all 1,540 schools, which included those that failed to report any data. The calculations were based on the 1,240 PTAs that reported data. (The lookup tool excludes schools that raised no money as well as those that did not report their data to the Education Department.)

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Mamdani expected to secure 2-year mayoral control extension and class-size delay in state budget

2026-05-15T02:14:06+00:00

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to win a two-year extension of mayoral control from state lawmakers as well as a delay in implementing the class size mandate as part of Albany’s final budget, according to multiple media reports Thursday.

Mamdani had been lobbying alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul for a four-year extension of the city’s school governance model — despite declaring his opposition to mayoral control on the campaign trail. Just before his inauguration, he walked back his views on mayoral control, though he still pledged to make the system more democratic and responsive to families and educators.

Lawmakers have often made tweaks to mayoral control when they’ve extended it over the past two decades. It’s not clear yet if or how lawmakers might change the governance structure that empowers the mayor to unilaterally appoint the schools chancellor, select a majority of the city’s school board, and generally set the policy direction of the nation’s largest school district.

Mayoral control is set to sunset on June 30.

Hochul suggested last week at a press conference that a two-year extension was on the table. State Sen. John Liu, of Queens, seemed to confirm the likely deal on mayoral control, which was first reported in Politico.

“A two year extension of mayoral control is the right thing to do, to give this new mayor a chance to deliver results for our public schools, and to pass it as part of the state budget given that there will remain less than two weeks of the legislative session once the budget is finally passed,” Liu said in a statement.

Liu, an architect of the class size law, also has said he’s open to changes to the mandate since Mamdani took office.

“The Mamdani administration also deserves an extended timeframe for reducing class sizes given that despite inheriting a difficult circumstance, the mayor steadfastly committed to achieving full compliance and has presented a clear plan towards that end,” Liu said.

While running for mayor, Mamdani vowed to support the state’s law to reduce the city’s class sizes. Though Mamdani voiced his continued commitment to shrinking classes, he supported changing the timeline from requiring all classes meet the caps of 20 to 25 students, depending on the grade, from the 2027-28 school year to the 2030-31 school year.

Though the state’s budget is delayed, with its 12th extension signed on Thursday, Mamdani previewed his executive budget earlier this week and already anticipated the state will approve a delay implementing the class size law.

Mamdani’s executive budget proposal released this week also anticipates changes to state law, that have not yet been made official, to save money that would have otherwise been spent next school year on class size reductions. His latest budget proposal included $122 million to hire 1,000 educators. That was down from the preliminary budget he unveiled in February that called for $543 million. Officials previously said they would need to hire 6,000 educators to comply with the law.

At the same time, his budget added $1.5 billion in capital funding for the School Construction Authority to help the city comply with the class size mandate.

“Make no mistake: We are fully committed to fulfilling the state mandate in a meaningful way on a realistic timeline that New Yorkers can actually trust,” Mamdani said on Tuesday.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

How parent pressure helped push Los Angeles schools to rein in classroom screen time

2026-05-12T22:02:38+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.

Los Angeles, home to the country’s second largest school system, has been at the center of the growth of ed-tech — and its backlash.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who is on leave following an FBI raid of his home, was an enthusiastic promoter of AI in education and i-Ready, a digital assessment and tutoring program. (Carvalho has not been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing.)

But parents in the city have grown wary about the proliferation of tech. They organized a group called Schools Beyond Screens to push the district to scale back tech use. Their message resonated with school board members, many of whom are parents themselves.

Continue reading the full story here.

In late push, Colorado lawmakers seek limits on homeschool enrichment and group fueling its growth

2026-05-12T01:50:07+00:00

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Colorado lawmakers want to dramatically curtail the power of Boards of Cooperative Educational Services to authorize certain kinds of public schools and homeschool enrichment programs located outside of their member school districts.

With just a few days left in the state’s legislative session, the State House on Monday passed two amendments to Colorado’s School Finance Act that create new guardrails on the public education co-ops. There are still a few more steps before the Finance Act will become law, including a third reading of the bill and meetings to hammer out differences between the House and Senate versions, but the amendments face a good chance of survival.

The two amendments represent the culmination of months of frustration by some state lawmakers over a Monument-based co-op they say has exploited loopholes in state law to open public schools and dozens of homeschool enrichment programs all over the state. Together, the enrichment programs cost the state tens of millions of dollars at a time when Colorado is facing a huge budget hole.

The co-op that will be most impacted by the two amendments is called Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES. Last fall, the group quietly opened what its leader called Colorado’s “first public Christian school” and six months later sued the state, alleging religious discrimination. ERBOCES also has more than 50 enrichment programs, most created in the last few years, that offer tuition-free activities to homeschoolers, including martial arts classes and sports camps.

One of the amendments passed Monday, Amendment 42, mirrors provisions of a bill the powerful Joint Budget Committee ordered to be drafted in April, but never introduced. It would limit the geographical reach of co-ops like ERBOCES, allowing them to authorize schools and programs only in their member school districts. The amendment would not impact the ability of public education co-ops to authorize online schools that enroll students from multiple school districts.

ERBOCES has only two member districts: District 49 and the Elizabeth School District. The amendment would allow some existing homeschool enrichment programs to continue operating outside of their authorizers’ territory on a temporary basis if they meet certain conditions.

Amendment 42 would also limit homeschool enrichment programs that can be approved by any kind of authorizer — a school district, charter school, or public education co-op. For example, programs wouldn’t be allowed to provide activities not generally available to students attending public schools.

Finally, the amendment would bar publicly funded homeschool enrichment programs from enrolling private school students. Some of the homeschool enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES provide one day of free programming a week — Lego-building, music and art, for example — to students who attend private school the rest of the week.

When Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, introduced Amendment 42 on Monday, she said audits by the state education department “have shown that public school dollars are paying for home school and private school students to receive all sorts of things like private ski lessons, private horseback riding, private music lessons, club sports … private jiu jitsu classes and more.”

“And these are all things that families who have full time students in public schools have to pay for with their own money,” she said.

The second amendment approved Monday, Amendment 33, clarifies an existing state law that describes how school districts and BOCES can contract out certain educational services.

Under the amendment, that law won’t allow districts or BOCES to authorize schools — with the exception of online schools — that are entirely run by contractors.

The amendment says a public school run by a contractor could be created under other state laws, such as Colorado’s charter school law. That would not apply to ERBOCES though because such co-ops are not allowed to open charter schools.

It’s not clear what would happen to ERBOCES’ bricks and mortar schools, including Riverstone Academy, the public Christian school, if the amendment takes effect. The 30-student school is run by a contractor.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Memphis 2026 school board primary election: live updates

2026-05-06T04:56:39+00:00

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Incumbent Joyce Dorse Coleman is holding on to her District 9 seat on the Memphis-Shelby County school board by a lead of fewer than 30 votes, according to unofficial results from the Shelby County Election Commission posted Tuesday.

It’s the tightest race in the first Democratic primary election for the MSCS board. T.L. Harris, who was convicted of a felony drug conviction 20 years ago while employed as a Memphis cop, is poised to secure the District 6 Democratic nomination by fewer than 200 votes.

The unofficial election results still need to be certified. But both incumbent candidates are in the lead for their seat nominations, with Michelle McKissack holding over 65% of the District 1 votes and Dorse Coleman holding around 32% of the votes.

Longtime lawyer Tanya Frey holds the lead for District 8 with more than 60% of the vote.

The May 5 election pales in significance compared to previous years because of the Republican-led state takeover that will restrict the locally elected board’s power. Top GOP leaders will soon appoint a nine-member oversight board that will have final say on key budget and staffing decisions in MSCS, including hiring and firing the superintendent. The takeover measure still must be signed into law by Governor Bill Lee.

That state-appointed board must be appointed by July 1, before new local school board members assume office on Sept. 1. Harris and Frey each have to face an independent challenger in the Aug. 6 general election to earn their spots on the local board.

All but one candidate, Damon Curry Morris in District 9, said they opposed a takeover in a Chalkbeat survey. The majority of candidates said they would work collaboratively with the oversight board to prioritize student success.

There’s still a chance MSCS will file a lawsuit against the state takeover legislation — the board voted to hire a lawyer in early April and the county commission passed a resolution to fund that legal action Monday. That’s because the governor signed into law a bill that blocks the district from using public funds to pay for the lawsuit.

Republican lawmakers have long said they’re modeling MSCS’ takeover after a 2023 state intervention in Houston, where one of the first decisions made by state education leaders was to replace the superintendent. The new Houston leader overhauled district curriculum, cut 1,500 central office positions, and implemented a teacher pay model based on test scores.

District 1 board election: Here’s what you need to know

McKissack is running against two MSCS teachers, one with decades of experience and the other in her early career.

Dolores Missy Rivers served as a district teacher for 26 years, and spent the last year as the interim director of the Memphis-Shelby County Education Association. Hailey Marie Thomas started teaching in 2021 and now works as a literacy instructor at MSCS charter school Beacon College Preparatory.

McKissack has been on the board since 2018. She was one of three members to vote against firing former Superintendent Marie Feagins in January 2025.

Here are the unofficial election results, as of 11 p.m. Tuesday:

McKissack, 65.4%
Rivers, 17.9%
Thomas, 16.3%

District 6 board election: Here’s what you need to know

Five Democratic candidates are running to fill the MSCS board seat being vacated by former teacher union leader Keith Williams.

Marinda A-Williams is a former private school and Germantown teacher, while Juliette Eskridge taught in MSCS for 20 years. Stacey Kelly works as a college advisor for the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

Harris, the current frontrunner, led a youth violence prevention program for three years. Contessa Humphrey, the final candidate, did not respond to Chalkbeat’s survey.

The primary winner will face independent challenger Frederick Dewayne Tappan in the Aug. 6 general election.

Here are the unofficial election results, as of 11 p.m. Tuesday:

A-Williams, 27.9%
Eskridge, 24.6%
Harris, 29%
Humphrey, 6.3%
Kelly, 11.7%

District 8 board election: Here’s what you need to know

Two Democratic candidates are vying to fill the District 8 seat being vacated by Amber Huett-Garcia. The winner will face MSCS school librarian Leigh Ann Scarbrough, an independent candidate, in the Aug. 6 general election.

Frey, the current frontrunner, worked as a Memphis-based lawyer for over 20 years and now runs Terra Firma Consulting, an organization that advises nonprofits on leadership decisions.

Ayleem Connolly taught high school Spanish in MSCS from 2015 through 2023 and chaired East High’s language department for two years.

Here are the unofficial election results, as of 11 p.m. Tuesday:

Connolly, 38.5%
Frey, 60.9%

District 9 board election: Here’s what you need to know

Dorse Coleman, a longtime MSCS board member, is facing four Democratic candidates for the District 9 seat.

Jonathan Carroll doesn’t have any business ties to MSCS, but he’s led local and state parent-teacher associations. Incumbent Dorse Coleman has been on the board since 2018 and served as the chair last year.

Tamara Jordan taught in local charter school networks for 15 years and served as the dean of Freedom Preparatory Academy. Curry Morris is the only 2026 candidate in favor of the state takeover of MSCS and worked closely with Nashville lawmakers to develop the bill.

Louis Morganfield III is the building engineer at Ida B. Wells Academy, a beloved MSCS school that will close at the end of this year.

Here are the unofficial election results, as of 11 p.m. Tuesday:

Carroll, 21.1%
Dorse Coleman, 32.3%
Jordan, 31.8%
Morganfield, 6.7%
Curry Morris, 7.5%

Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.

Indiana State Senate District 46 primary election: IPS board member Impink wins

2026-05-06T03:22:43+00:00

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Indianapolis Public Schools board member Allissa Impink is the unofficial winner of the Democratic primary for Indiana State Senate District 46, which could likely tee up a vacancy on the school board.

Unofficial election results with 100% of vote centers reporting showed that Impink had 68.46% of the vote, Sam Glynn had 12.02%, and Clif Marsiglio had 19.52% in the Democratic primary. Results are unofficial until May 15, after provisional and military ballots are counted. The Marion County Election Board will certify the results on May 18.

In a victory statement, Impink promised to focus on community voices, including “parents who are juggling their jobs, childcare, and paying their bills.”

“As I’ve said from the very beginning, the challenges we face are not separate issues. They are deeply connected,” she said. “And for far too long, families have been left to navigate systems that don’t work together.”

No Republican candidates ran in the primary election for the seat that includes downtown, the near eastside, and southern parts of Indianapolis. But it is still possible for a challenger to run against Impink in the November general election. If she wins that race, it would create an opening on the IPS school board. Impink’s current school board term ends in 2028. Board members would appoint a new member to finish her term, and the seat would be up for election in 2028.

Board members recently did the same process to fill the District 2 seat after Gayle Cosby announced her resignation in March. The board appointed Hasaan Rashid to fill the vacancy.

Impink, also a former IPS teacher, was elected to the school board in 2024 to represent District 4, the southwest part of the district. She previously told Chalkbeat that if elected in November, she “will be still carrying that baton of valuing public education.”

On her campaign website, Impink said she supports a moratorium on new charter schools and fully funding public schools, as well as supporting educators and making sure “every student has the opportunity to succeed.” She added that she wants to make sure that IPS is “fully reimbursed for transportation, facilities, and special education services provided to innovation schools.”

Transportation and facilities for district and charter schools are within the purview of the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation. The new body appointed by the mayor will provide state lawmakers with an update on plans for both in November before fully taking over management of transportation and buildings in the 2028-29 school year.

State Senate District 46 is currently represented by Andrea Hunley, a former IPS principal, who is running for Indianapolis mayor in 2027.

Four seats on the IPS school board are up for election in November: Hope Duke Star’s District 3 seat, Nicole Carey’s District 5 seat, Angelia Moore’s at-large seat, and the special election for District 2 represented by Rashid.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

She passed high school math with A’s and B’s. In college, she had to start over.

2026-05-05T21:00:14+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.

Cecilia Lopez Alvarado was scrolling through Reddit one evening in her dorm room when she came across a thread about students at the University of California San Diego who struggled with basic math.

A report had warned of an alarming decline in students’ math skills at UCSD, a highly selective university. It drew international headlines because of what it seemed to say about the state of American education. Commentators blamed high school grade inflation, test-free college admissions, and even the students themselves.

Alvarado read these headlines with a growing sense of frustration. People didn’t understand the full story here, she thought. And she would know: Alvarado is a UCSD student who had to take remedial math at the school. She read Reddit comments about how students should have mastered these topics in high school. She wrote back in the comments that some schools — like hers, a high-poverty public high school in San Bernardino, California — don’t even offer calculus.

The consequences of Alvarado’s challenges in math have been significant. After taking the remedial course, she still fell short on a math exam, which covers high school topics like trigonometry and precalculus. Alvarado therefore couldn’t move on to calculus, which was required for her initial major, business economics. Because of this, she recently decided to pursue a degree in communications instead. She aspires to be an accountant and is minoring in accounting.

Students like Alvarado are at the center of a debate in American education. How do high schools ensure students graduate with sufficient math skills? Who should get access to the resources of an elite college education? What role do universities themselves have in helping students who are underprepared?

High school graduation photo of UCSD sophomore Cecilia Lopez Alvarado

The perspectives of these students have gotten strikingly little attention. That’s why I wanted to speak to Alvarado, a 19-year-old sophomore. Her story does not offer entirely simple answers, but it’s worth hearing. She looks back in frustration at her high school education, where she believes teachers were too lenient. But she’s also convinced she’s benefited from the education she’s received and the peers she’s met at UCSD.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your high school math experience like? How did you do in math classes?

I usually passed with A’s and B’s, but I feel like a lot of the information never really stuck with me, just because we were granted so many opportunities to redo exams and homework. It felt like as long as you retake the exam and get 100% it doesn’t matter if you really know what you’re doing or not.

Do you know why you were given so many opportunities?

I’m sure it’s because they wanted us to not have F’s and D’s on our transcripts. It was just wanting us to be able to move on to the next grade. It never really was to hold us accountable. Instead of being like, hey, you only get one retake, it was just, you can retake it as many times as you like, to get a grade that you’re comfortable with.

Did you feel like it would have been better if they held you accountable more?

I think so, because then you have to face the reality of not just your grades, but what you really know and what you’re really learning. You have to discipline yourself more to be like, hey, I need to start studying instead of doing not so well in class and then just retaking it at a later time.

What did you think about the big national backlash and all these articles about UCSD students like yourself?

I’m very involved on the UCSD social media communities like Reddit, Instagram, and when people are sharing the articles, a lot of it was very negative. A lot of people are saying these students shouldn’t be at the school, their spots should have gone to someone more qualified. It was kind of making me feel bad, like, hey, is something wrong with me because I can’t pass the exam?

I don’t think it’s necessarily an issue with the student. I feel like there’s a lot of things that go deeper than that, like the level of math they took in high school. I think there’s just so many factors that people miss.

What do you mean by the factors that so many people miss?

The culture here is that everyone kind of assumes everyone who’s enrolled comes from a very prestigious background — you know, perfect scores, they have easy access to tutoring. I don’t think a lot of people realize that some students here may have come from low-income communities, low-income schools, where they don’t have resources easily accessible.

I wouldn’t say it makes me envious, but I do wish I had that kind of abundance of resources when I was in high school. I was top of my class in high school, but that’s nothing compared to some of the other students here.

Do you think you’ve benefited from going to a school like UCSD?

I think so. It’s definitely exposed me to a lot of different cultures, a lot of different people. I think I’ve learned more soft skills here through a lot of the classes I’ve been taking. I’m more willing to try things and take courses that I would not have been interested in high school.

Do you feel like being surrounded by peers who maybe went to better high schools pushes you to do better at UCSD?

I think so. I’ve kind of noticed they have more independence. They feel more secure in their academics and what they’re doing, and I feel like I always second guess myself. Seeing how they operate, it makes me want to do better, work harder, especially after my first year. I wanted to make my own self-improvements.

One of the recommendations from the report that caused this whole blowup was that UCSD should reduce the number of students from high-poverty high schools. What do you think of that?

I do not think that should be an option. If they don’t go through the trial and error here, they’re just going to go through it somewhere else. College is a place where you learn new things. Sometimes you’ll fail and you just take the L and learn from it.

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.

Colorado lawmakers seek to limit group fueling growth in publicly funded homeschool enrichment

2026-04-23T23:44:31+00:00

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In response to explosive growth in publicly funded homeschool enrichment, including sports camps and martial arts lessons, Colorado lawmakers are seeking not only to apply the brakes, but to reverse the trend.

The powerful six-member Joint Budget Committee unanimously agreed Wednesday to draft a bill to curtail the power of one public education co-op that has authorized scores of home-school enrichment programs in recent years. The Monument-based co-op, Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Education Services, or ERBOCES, has enrichment programs all over Colorado.

The bill would limit the geographical reach of such co-ops, allowing them to authorize programs only in their member school districts. In the case of ERBOCES, which has two member districts, the bill would stem the flow of tens of millions of public dollars that pass through the co-op to homeschool enrichment programs in other places.

Statewide, around 19,000 students participate in part-time public school programming at a cost of more than $100 million a year. Most are homeschooled students who attend one day of enrichment classes a week at traditional public schools, charter schools, or through ERBOCES programs.

ERBOCES authorizes more than 50 homeschool enrichment programs, many outside its two member school districts. Last summer, it also authorized a controversial “public Christian school” outside its member districts. The co-op’s homeschool enrichment programs are run by private contractors and include state-funded offerings critics say are essentially extracurricular activities, such as horsemanship, taekwondo, and golf. One ERBOCES contractor advertises skiing, swim lessons, and canyoneering trips.

Colorado pays generously for homeschool enrichment. Funding cuts and stricter rules may be coming.

The proposed bill wouldn’t address all lawmakers’ concerns about the ballooning footprint and cost of publicly funded homeschool enrichment, but it would take aim at the group they describe as the biggest offender in terms of exploiting loopholes in state law. As lawmakers consider placing guardrails on homeschool enrichment through law, the State Board of Education is also looking to change state rules governing the kinds of enrichment classes and schedules that would be eligible for public funding.

While lawmakers on the Joint Budget Committee agreed Wednesday that their proposed bill should reign in ERBOCES, they didn’t finalize the timetable for the new restrictions. Some members said homeschool enrichment programs that operate outside ERBOCES’ two member districts — District 49 in El Paso County and the Elizabeth district in Elbert County — should be prevented from accessing public funding before the 2026-27 school year.

Others, including Rep. Rick Taggart, a Republican from Grand Junction, pushed for a six-month grace period so families who’ve already signed their kids up for ERBOCES home-school enrichment programs next fall won’t be left in a lurch, at least through December.

“I don’t want to hurt the students,” he said.

Ken Witt, executive director of ERBOCES, expressed similar concerns in an email to Chalkbeat on Thursday.

“If these programs are axed long after most families have already made their enrollment decisions for the upcoming year, these families will have to scramble to try to find the supports they need to confidently educate their children,” he said. “Many will not find the support they need, because no other program exists within their area.”

Witt said thoughtful engagement with stakeholders is critical and hasn’t yet occurred.

Lawmakers and legislative staff noted that allowing ERBOCES to operate all of its current programs just for the first semester next year might not work because of how and when the state tallies enrollment and distributes funding. The Joint Budget Committee opted to start the bill-drafting process and decide timing details in the coming weeks.

It’s unclear how many of ERBOCES’ homeschool enrichment programs are based outside the group’s member districts, but under the proposed bill it’s likely that dozens would either lose public funding or need to ask their local school district or BOCES to be their authorizer to continue receiving it.

ERBOCES’ website contains only a partial list of its enrichment programs, and the co-op’s staff declined to provide Chalkbeat with the full list.

For now, Joint Budget Committee lawmakers have paused an effort to reduce state funding for homeschool enrichment programs. Currently, the state pays half the full-time public school student rate for each homeschool enrichment student — about $6,000 — even though those students typically attend about a quarter of the hours.

Both home-school parents and school districts have pushed back against the potential funding cuts in recent weeks. School districts benefit from the more generous funding for the programs they authorize.

Lawmakers on the Joint Budget Committee indicated they may eventually return to the funding cut proposal and expressed frustration over resistance from school district leaders.

Sen. Jeff Bridges, Democrat of Greenwood Village, asked how district leaders can explain to parents of full-time public school students that they’re paying twice as much per hour for homeschooled students in enrichment programming than for traditional students.

“How do they justify that to their parents?” he said. “Number two, how do they expect us to justify to the people of Colorado that we’re paying for ski tickets?”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

For children in poverty, the biggest resource gaps are outside of school

2026-04-21T19:19:55+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.

Children from low-income families have roughly $80,000 less invested in their development, well-being, and education relative to their peers from high-income households, according to a new study.

The research is significant because it puts a figure on what has long been known: Children do not have the same access to the resources that might help them flourish. While formal schooling is fairly equal, investments outside of school vary substantially, the researchers conclude.

“The findings of this are not surprising,” says David Blazar, the study’s lead author and a professor at the University of Maryland. “What’s most compelling is thinking about investments in kids as a bundle — it’s not just about housing, it’s not just about early childhood. It’s about the investments we make altogether.”

At a moment when there is intense discussion about declines and disparities in student learning, the study is a helpful reminder of the broad array of factors that shapes children’s academic success.

The paper, written by several researchers and published last month, examines “childhood human capital investments” — in other words, the various resources that help children thrive and develop.

This is defined broadly to include formal schooling, as well as informal education, nutrition, health care, and housing, among other things. The researchers rely on a number of recent national surveys and put every item on a common dollar scale, including things that are not paid for, like parental time helping with homework or going to the library.

Under the researchers’ measure, the typical child received about half a million dollars’ worth of investment in their development through childhood. The disparities were significant, though. In addition to gaps by family income, there were also racial gaps. Relative to white kids, Hispanic kids had $73,000, or 14%, less investment. Black children had $55,000, or 10%, less.

There were notable gaps in spending across a variety of domains including housing, nutrition, health care, child care, and college preparation.

The researchers also considered time as a form of investment. They converted parental activities into a standard hourly dollar rate. Here there were also some gaps by income and race, though they were not especially large. Low-income children were slightly less likely to be read to or taken to a museum, but were more likely to get homework help or visit a zoo. This indicates that parents of all types put large amounts of time into their children’s development.

The overall disparities would likely be far larger without government programs designed to equalize opportunity, the researchers say. Investments in formal schooling, largely through public education, were fairly equal. This echoes analyses showing that there are typically not large gaps in spending between high-poverty and affluent schools. If anything, children in poverty had a bit more money spent on their education, the recent study finds.

“We see that the sectors where the disparities are smallest are when government services are the largest,” says Blazar.

His study does not speak to whether particular investments are effective in helping children develop, but in some cases other research does. For instance, low-income children are more likely to be identified for special education; these services lead to large gains in learning, according to a recent study. Research has also found that certain anti-poverty programs can boost test scores.

The latest study likely underestimates gaps in resources between different groups of students, Blazar says. Because of data limitations, the paper does not attempt to parse the quality of school a child attends, the doctor they go to, or the food they eat. The researchers also do not consider the neighborhood a child lives in or whether they’ve been exposed to environmental hazards. Both of these factors have been linked to success in school.

And while the paper includes the striking finding that formal education investments are relatively equal, the study stops at age 18. If the study continued a few more years, though, the findings would almost certainly be different. Children from low-income families are less likely to go to college and if they do, they typically attend less well-resourced schools.

So while K-12 educational investments have been equalized to a meaningful extent, vast disparities emerge after high school.

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

U.S. Supreme Court to take Colorado case about public funding for Catholic preschools that bar LGBTQ families

2026-04-20T17:43:06+00:00

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The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a Colorado case alleging religious discrimination against two Catholic preschools that wanted to participate in the state’s universal preschool program but didn’t want to have to admit LGBTQ children or children from LGBTQ families.

The court announced the decision Monday morning and will likely hold oral arguments in the fall. The Trump administration has weighed in on the side of the Catholic preschools.

The question at the heart of the case asks if private religious schools that accept public education dollars can refuse to enroll students based on religious principles. The state and two lower courts have said no. The Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, could give a different answer.

The Catholic preschools sued the state in 2023 as Colorado launched its new universal preschool program, which provides tuition-free preschool to 4-year-olds statewide. The $349 million program serves more than 40,000 children and allows families to choose from public, private, or religious preschools.

St. Mary Catholic Virtue School in Littleton and Wellspring Catholic Academy in Lakewood wanted to join the program when it started, but didn’t want to admit LGBTQ children or children from LGBTQ families. They said admitting such children would conflict with Catholic beliefs on sex and gender.

The preschools asked for an exemption from state non-discrimination rules, but the Colorado Department of Early Childhood refused. The two preschools never joined the program, and the case went to court.

In September, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a key part of a lower court decision, handing Colorado a major win and the two Catholic preschools a defeat. In its ruling, the court wrote that it found no proof that the Colorado Department of Early Childhood took actions that “evidence religious hostility,” as the two Catholic preschools claimed.

The state’s universal preschool program “went to great effort to be welcoming and inclusive of faith-based preschools’ participation,” the decision said.

Of more than 2,000 preschools participating in Colorado’s universal preschool program this year, about 40 are religious.

Attorneys from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing the Catholic preschools in the case, argue that Colorado’s universal preschool program excludes the preschools based on their religious beliefs.

It cites a major 2022 Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin, that said states can’t prevent religious schools from accessing public dollars because they are religious. Becket argues that courts have circumvented that decision, including in the Catholic preschool case, by applying it only when governments specifically target religious groups with their rules.

The Carson decision should also apply when government rules affect free exercise of religion, the suit says. It says courts have worked around the Carson decision by citing a 1990 Supreme Court decision over whether Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to someone who used peyote in a religious ceremony.

That decision held that the Constitution’s Free Exercise clause doesn’t exempt people from obeying neutral, generally applicable laws even if those laws burden religious practices.

The preschool program’s non-discrimination rules apply to all preschools, not just the Catholic ones. The rules bar discrimination based on various characteristics, including sexual orientation and gender identity.

Wellspring, one of two parish preschools involved in the case, closed last year along with Wellspring’s K-8 school because of low enrollment and financial problems.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado pays generously for homeschool enrichment. Funding cuts and stricter rules may be coming.

2026-04-14T23:55:35+00:00

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For years, thousands of Colorado homeschoolers have taken publicly funded enrichment classes, often at public schools, meant to round out their learning. Younger students might take art, music, and physical education; older students might take calculus or band.

But a new strain of homeschool enrichment programs funded with state dollars has exploded in recent years, raising red flags for state lawmakers about the cost, content, and structure of these classes. The new programs rely on private contractors and operate with little state oversight. They include offerings that public school parents would have to pay for, such as horseback riding, soccer camp, and jiu-jitsu classes.

Many programs run six hours a week but the state pays as if the programs are providing double that amount. Calling the practice “staggering” and “totally unacceptable,” state lawmakers are considering cutting that rate in half.

Colorado officials are also directing more scrutiny toward the public cooperative that’s fueling most of the growth in homeschool enrichment programs. That same co-op recently authorized a controversial “public Christian school” and sued the state for threatening to withhold funding.

The debate over homeschool enrichment comes as public schools face twin financial threats: enrollment declines fueled by decreasing birth rates and a $1.2 billion state budget hole that’s forcing deep spending cuts. Publicly funded homeschool enrichment costs around $100 million a year.

Colorado State Board of Education member Steve Durham, a Republican from Colorado Springs, said at a January meeting the state should limit the kinds of homeschool enrichment programs that are eligible for public funding. That could take place through the board’s rule-making process over the coming year.

“I, for one, don’t believe that we ought to be paying for sports,” he said. “We really should take a very hard look at focusing on academics.”

But some enrichment providers worry that funding reductions and new guardrails could hobble their programs and eliminate unique offerings families want.

Jay D. Muller, who runs a one-day-a-week horsemanship program for homeschoolers in the Fruita area, said he believes in hands-on experiential learning and is “disappointed that the state is constantly trying to attack it.”

Students in the program learn English- and western-style horseback riding, and about veterinarians, farriers, and horse biology. They also write and illustrate a book about a fictional horse.

“Not every kid’s going to learn in the same box,” he said.

Jessica Capsel, co-chair of the left-leaning nonprofit Pro-Colorado Education Project, said she appreciates what Muller provides, but thinks parents should pay for it.

“My kid goes to public school, and I pay $100 a week for her to go do horseback riding lessons,” she said. “But if I homeschooled, the state would pay for it. Something is backwards about that.”

Homeschool enrichment isn’t new

Some Colorado school districts and charter schools have operated in-house homeschool enrichment programs for decades. They are paid the part-time rate by the state — half the rate for a full-time public school student — but are only required to provide a quarter of the full-time student hours.

Originally, homeschool enrichment programs were a way to give homeschooled students socialization opportunities and provide older students with courses, such as science lab or orchestra, that were hard to offer at home.

About 30 of Colorado’s 179 school districts offer homeschool enrichment programs. Several have large programs, including Aurora with nearly 800 students, St. Vrain Valley with over 700, and Cherry Creek with more than 500.

But a group called Education reEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or ERBOCES, runs the largest collection of programs by far. The cooperative oversees more than 50 homeschool enrichment programs this year that together serve nearly 8,400 students — more than 10 times as many homeschool enrichment students as ERBOCES had in 2022-23. ERBOCES, the authorizer of the state’s first “public Christian school,” will receive around $45 million in state money for its homeschool enrichment students this year.

Ken Witt, the executive director of ERBOCES, declined to comment for this story.

ERBOCES, which is based in Monument, began authorizing homeschool enrichment programs rapidly after the pandemic. Unlike most school districts and charter schools with such programs, the cooperative doesn’t operate the enrichment programs it authorizes. Instead, it contracts with private groups, including private schools and companies that run classes all over the state. Sometimes those groups subcontract the classes to other private groups.

Today, homeschool enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES include forest schools, art programs, sports lessons, career training, aviation, and canyoneering. The co-op doesn’t list all the programs on its website and declined to provide a full list to Chalkbeat.

In response to a public records request from Chalkbeat asking for copies of ERBOCES’ homeschool enrichment contracts, a staff member said it would take 15 hours to compile at a cost of nearly $600.

The state doesn’t have that information either because it doesn’t track the number, type, or quality of homeschool enrichment contractors and subcontractors.

One program that contracts with ERBOCES is Colorado Homeschool Enrichment, which, in turn, subcontracts with 71 “campuses” around the state, according to its most recent annual report. The group’s website says a campus can consist of just two homeschooling families “wanting to amplify their homeschooling.”

One campus was launched last fall by the private Trinity Lutheran School in Greeley. It offers activities like physical education, Lego building, and woodworking. Principal and Pastor Joshua Vanderhyde said by email that Trinity’s private school runs Monday through Thursday and the private school students attend the Friday enrichment program along with some homeschool students.

Private school students are allowed to be enrolled as part-time public school students under state rules. But the scenario often cited by state education officials is a private school student who takes courses, such as advanced biology or French, at a public school because those courses aren’t offered at their private school. That’s different from what Trinity is doing.

Renee Miller, CEO of Colorado Homeschool Enrichment, did not respond to requests for comment about her program.

Programs help teens prepare for the future

Barb Bulthuis runs Crossroads Workforce Readiness Program, a publicly funded homeschool enrichment program authorized by ERBOCES that serves about 30 high school students in Longmont. On Wednesday and Friday mornings, students take classes like future planning 101, basic automotive, basic carpentry, Spanish, and physical education.

On a recent morning, the automotive teacher and one other student looked on as ninth grader Jony Cano checked the air pressure of the tires on a silver Honda Odyssey parked inside a garage on the campus of FaithPoint Church. That’s where both the homeschool enrichment program and Crossroads School, a Christian school also led by Bulthuis, operate.

Cano, who hopes to become a diesel mechanic, said he used to get “straight Fs” at public school, but in seventh grade switched to Crossroads School where he is now earning As and Bs. This year, he joined the homeschool enrichment program.

Ninth grader Jony Cano checks the air pressure of a Honda Odyssey minivan during his automotive class at Crossroads Workforce Readiness Program, which is held at FaithPoint Church in Longmont.

Bulthuis said the enrichment program, which has a $144,000 budget, is not religious, is set up as a separate nonprofit from the school, and has a separate governing board. Some, but not all, students in the Crossroads Workforce Readiness Program attend Crossroads School.

Angie Jacklin’s 19-year-old son, a senior, only attends the workforce readiness program. Homeschooled until ninth grade, he joined the program last year as a junior after severe anxiety thwarted attempts to attend private schools in Loveland and Boulder. Before joining Crossroads, he took online classes.

“Our child was very excited that they could go one or two days a week and take a couple of classes and get used to being out among other people,” she said. “It helped us get from home to … a public place to learn, because they’re going to need that for college.”

ERBOCES has fueled growth

ERBOCES is expected to authorize 30 to 40 new homeschool enrichment programs by the end of this school year, according to a presentation Witt, the head of ERBOCES, gave last fall.

A dozen new programs were up for approval at just one ERBOCES board meeting in March. Nine more are up for approval Tuesday.

These co-ops are meant to support school districts. This one started Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school.’

In addition to newly authorized enrichment programs, some of ERBOCES’ existing programs are expanding their footprints, either by enrolling more students or adding subcontractors. Altitude Performance Academy, a sports-focused program, is one of the programs that’s expanding, launching a six-hour-a-week gymnastics program next fall and an adventure program that includes ski lessons in 2027.

Eric Dinnel, the CEO of Altitude, is executive director of four other homeschool enrichment programs authorized by ERBOCES: Front Range Construction Academy, Renaissance Innovation Academy, Alpine International Prep Academy, and Colorado Agribusiness and Equine Sciences Academy.

Together, Dinnel’s five programs subcontract with more than two dozen groups around Colorado, according to their websites. Homeschooled students in the five programs also have access to tuition-free online classes through Shoreline Preparatory Academy, a school headed by Dinnel. It’s not clear where the funding for the online classes is coming from.

Dinnel did not respond to requests for comment.

Recent discussions among state lawmakers and education officials show that the state has little insight into or oversight of homeschool enrichment programs.

“There’s been an evolution of these models where just based on the number of times money is changing hands, it’s like people are trying to get into the business of providing homeschool enrollment,” Andrea Uhl, a legislative analyst, told the powerful Joint Budget Committee in March.

Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat, said at the meeting, “I was just shocked to see that there were all these private companies that were engaged in this work.”

Uhl said state audits of publicly funded homeschool enrichment programs have turned up concerning details, such as schedules that consist of one-time classes, sports on evenings and weekends, and private schools that merge homeschool enrichment time into their regular school days.

Funding cuts and new guardrails possible

Colorado officials are considering legislation and state rules that could cut homeschool enrichment funding and limit growth.

In March, the Joint Budget Committee ordered the drafting of a bill that would give a quarter of full-time funding to enrichment programs that operate the equivalent of one day a week. That means the state would pay about $3,000 on average per homeschool enrichment student instead of about $6,000.

That bill has not yet been introduced, and homeschool enrichment programs are lobbying for changes.

In addition, the State Board of Education last week approved a motion to push for a bill that would limit Boards of Cooperative Educational Services’ authorizing power so they could only approve schools and programs that would benefit students in their member school districts. The change would drastically curtail the reach of a co-op like ERBOCES, which has just two member districts.

Bulthuis, who runs Crossroad Workforce Readiness Program, is worried about funding cuts. Her homeschool enrichment program provides 90 to 100 hours of class time per semester.

“I have to do all of those same things for my program that a school does for a full-time program,” she said. “It’s not as much work as a full-time school, but it’s also not a quarter of the work.”

Bulthuis also said the estimated savings of up to $40 million from homeschool enrichment cuts is a drop in the bucket compared to Colorado’s public education budget, which is about $10 billion for K-12 schools this year.

But some lawmakers and public school advocates argue that even relatively small amounts of money matter at a time when public schools are laying off teachers and cutting programs.

Rep. Emily Sirota, the Democratic chair of the Joint Budget Committee, said state-funded homeschool enrichment programming “sounds very nice for the kids who are receiving it, but it seems very unfair to me ... that we would continue to direct this vast sum of money to a program that is clearly being abused.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@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.

Trump termination of civil rights agreements could chill student complaints and confuse schools

2026-04-14T10:52:00+00:00

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When the Delaware Valley School District board voted unanimously last month to reverse policies protecting transgender students that they’d adopted a decade ago, some in the audience cried, “Shame!” Others said the board didn’t go far enough.

The district had adopted those policies in the first place under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in response to a complaint from a transgender student. An agreement between the district and the federal government during the Obama administration called for more training for staff and more support for students changing their gender presentation.

Now that same agency had told the district the agreement was terminated. Officials had 30 days to remove gender from the district’s anti-discrimination policies or face consequences.

The board voted at its March meeting to require transgender students to use locker rooms and bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth. The superintendent said social workers would meet with the affected students to go over the changes.

This whiplash is one potential outcome of the Trump administration’s decision to terminate civil rights agreements drawn up under previous Democratic administrations. The Education Department announced in early April that it was ending such agreements related to violations of Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education — in five school districts in four states, as well as for a California community college.

In other communities, little may change because local officials are more supportive of transgender rights. Nevertheless, multiple legal experts and former employees of the Office for Civil Rights told Chalkbeat that tearing up agreements reached after lengthy investigations and negotiations sends a dangerous message to all students: If you file a complaint, the resolution might last only as long as the next presidential election cycle.

“How far will it go?” asked Beth Gellman-Beer, an attorney who spent 18 years with OCR under Republican and Democratic administrations. “Once you open that door to something that is unprecedented, where does it end? If we have another administration that is Democratic, what will they do? What will be the point for anyone to bring a case to OCR, if they can’t trust whatever decision that comes out of that complaint will remain the decision?”

Revoking civil rights agreements is just one piece of a much larger transformation of the Office for Civil Rights, where a reduced staff focuses on cases that align with the president’s political priorities. And federal officials are blunt about how much the government’s approach has changed between the Obama and Biden administrations and Trump’s second term.

“Prior Administrations regularly misinterpreted Title IX to pander to political ideology and police ‘misgendering’ despite not having sound legal grounds,” Education Department spokeswoman Amelia Joy wrote in an email. By terminating past agreements, Joy wrote, “the Trump Administration is upholding the law and righting years of wrongs.”

Given what’s happened over the last few presidential administrations, canceling civil rights agreements was perhaps inevitable, said R. Shep Melnick, a Boston College political scientist who has studied civil rights enforcement extensively.

“The combination of presidential influence and partisan polarization means you have administrations that have very different understandings of how to interpret civil rights law,” Melnick said. “It’s not surprising, once the regulations flip back and forth, that agreements based on previous understanding of statute would be subject to change.”

Ending OCR agreements part of new enforcement approach

The Office for Civil Rights under Trump has made keeping transgender students out of bathrooms and off sports teams that match their gender identity one of its top priorities. Ending the six agreements, which treated discrimination based on gender identity and sex stereotypes as Title IX violations, fits into that broader enforcement approach.

Conservatives hailed the decision as reversing a misinterpretation of Title IX.

“These particular agreements were changing the definitions of sex such that boys could self-identify into locker rooms, bathrooms, and showers,” said Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the conservative Independent’s Women’s Forum. “The Trump administration is sending a strong message that Title IX is about protecting women and girls.”

In Delaware Valley, a 4,200-student district in northeast Pennsylvania, most transgender students weren’t using shared restrooms even under the OCR agreement, said Taylor James, executive director of TriVersity Pride Center, an LGBTQ community group and resource center based in Milford.

Fearful of backlash, he said, most students either used the restroom in the nurse’s office or just waited until they got home. But telling students they can’t use a restroom they feel comfortable in sends a message that there’s something wrong with them, James said.

Without the OCR agreement in place, James fears there won’t be any repercussions when teachers deliberately misgender students or when students face bullying because they don’t conform.

He’s working with legal aid groups on potential next steps, but his top priority is making sure students feel valued and cared for.

James said his biggest piece of advice to those students is to “just make it to adulthood, because you will be celebrated for the things you’ve been taught to hate about yourself.”

Many states still have laws protecting transgender students

Not all of the documents related to the affected districts are available in OCR’s public case search. The Education Department declined to make all the previous settlement agreements available or answer questions about which provisions would no longer be enforced.

But in the La Mesa-Spring Valley school district near San Diego, the revoked agreement involved allegations that a nonbinary student was bullied for continuing to use the restroom that matched their sex at birth — the very practice that the Trump administration wants to require.

And in the Sacramento Unified School District, the complaint didn’t relate to restrooms at all, according to local news reports. Federal investigators found that district officials responded promptly in 2022 after teachers didn’t use a transgender student’s preferred name and pronouns but failed to inform the student of their right to file a complaint.

Kayleigh Baker, a consultant with TNG Consulting and a member of advisory board of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said she’d recommend that institutions “wait just a second” if they’re considering policy changes based on the fact that the agreements have been rescinded.

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

Many states, including California, Delaware, and Washington, where the Education Department rescinded agreements, have state laws protecting transgender students’ rights. Some school districts have had early court wins after pushing back against funding cuts related to Title IX.

“We shouldn’t rush to anticipatory complying with what we think the administration may do, because we have state law, we have all of these open questions,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we have very real students and employees who are trying to access their education, access their work environments, free from discrimination, and we don’t want to rush to take away rights that they have.”

Kristina Moon, senior attorney with Education Law Center-Pennsylvania, stressed that federal laws and legal rulings, not OCR agreements, ultimately spell out what districts’ obligations are to LGBTQ students.

Some affected school districts, for example, are also under the jurisdiction of federal appeals courts that require schools to protect transgender students’ bathroom access.

“A fundamental concern is that our school boards and our school leaders are not understanding this distinction and feeling significant threats from the federal government, by design,” Moon said.

Parlato acknowledged that rescinding agreements is unusual and that courts haven’t yet consistently interpreted Title IX the way the Trump administration does. But she’s optimistic that will change in the next few years.

“Sex is an immutable characteristic, it can’t be changed, and once we can get that codified in law, we won’t have this issue,” she said.

Terminating agreements could undermine OCR’s credibility

The Education Department has also rescinded agreements that have nothing to do with transgender students.

Last year the Education Department withdrew a 2023 settlement in Forsyth, Georgia, in which the Office for Civil Rights had determined that book-ban discussions created a hostile environment for some students. The department also ended an agreement in Rapid City, South Dakota, that addressed mistreatment of Native American students.

Rescinding agreements tells students not to bother filing complaints, said Gellman-Beer, who led the OCR’s now-closed Philadelphia office before resigning last year. She also fears it will give school districts few incentives to work cooperatively with OCR or comply with ongoing monitoring.

“It’s going to make it a thousand times more difficult to negotiate with a school district when they think they can just renegotiate with the next administration,” she said.

Throwing out agreements is “clearly going to reduce the credibility and authority of OCR,” Melnick said. At the same time, the more overtly politicized enforcement becomes, the more questions it raises about the validity of agreements. Melnick highlighted how the Trump administration threatened to withhold billions in federal research dollars to pressure universities to sign sweeping settlements of antisemitism claims.

“One administration should not be able to lock in a policy for the indefinite future regardless,” Melnick said.

Students bring complaints because they want their negative experience to lead to a meaningful change in their community, Baker said. Even students who agree with the current administration’s policies might wonder, “who’s to stop that meaningful change from being undone the second there’s a change in power?”

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

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

Why Sal Khan’s AI revolution hasn’t happened yet, according to Sal Khan

2026-04-09T21:11:13+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.

Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.

So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges.

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.

Khan’s comments are an acknowledgement that AI has not quickly allowed for the creation of an effective super-tutor, as some initially hoped. It’s an early indication of the limits of AI to drive massive learning gains, long an unrealized goal of various technologies. While Khan remains optimistic about various uses of AI in education, he’s also come to see its limits.

“I just view it as part of the solution; I don’t view it as the end-all and be-all,” Khan said in our interview.

In the summer of 2022, OpenAI leaders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman reached out to Sal Khan. They were months away from releasing ChatGPT, and were hoping Khan Academy — a large nonprofit that works with schools across the country — could showcase the technology’s potential benefits. “I didn’t realize it yet, but the world was about to be turned upside down,” Khan wrote in his 2024 book “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing).”

OpenAI provided Khan Academy with early access to a more advanced AI model, GPT-4. With that the Khan Academy team then built a specialized chatbot, Khanmigo, designed to help students learn and restricted from simply giving them the answer. Khan himself quickly became an evangelist for the technology’s uses in schools.

“We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Khan said in a widely viewed TED Talk in 2023. “The way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

He suggested that eventually AI could turn the average student into an academic standout, citing a seminal but controversial 1984 study on the value of individualized tutoring.

Khan also appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment that featured northwest Indiana’s Hobart High School, which was an early adopter of Khanmigo.

Kristen Musall, a geometry teacher at Hobart High, gave Khanmigo a try when it first rolled out. Musall appreciated its encouraging, teacher-like tone, but she found that students didn’t really care for the bot. They found it frustrating — Khanmigo sometimes made mistakes, but also wouldn’t give away the answer. “If students don’t engage with the material enough to know what they’re looking for, then an AI like Khanmigo doesn’t necessarily help,” she recently told me.

Musall no longer uses Khanmigo in her class. She says there’s been more enthusiasm for the product among administrators than teachers in her school.

A few of Musall’s most advanced students have taken advantage of AI to learn new topics. But, as far as she can tell, more students are using it to just find answers, which has created a massive headache for teachers. Nationally, a majority of teenagers say AI-powered cheating is at least somewhat prevalent in their schools, according to a recent Pew survey.

Peggy Buffington, Hobart’s superintendent, said there’s been a range of reactions from teachers and students to AI. There was initially a learning curve for students to ask Khanmigo questions, but that they’ve gotten a lot better, she said: “It’s like anything in education. You have to learn how to use the tool and use it appropriately.”

Buffington says that schools need to prepare students to use AI responsibly and Khanmigo is preferable to commercial products they would use on their own. Overall, she’s found the tool beneficial. “Our kids can log in at home and they can get help with their homework and it won’t give them the answer,” she said.

But Khan Academy officials have seen that many students won’t take advantage of that option or don’t know how to. Kristen DiCerbo, the organization’s chief learning officer, said AI can only respond to students based on what they ask. And it turns out, she said, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well.”

DiCerbo was initially hopeful that AI would be able to personalize instruction to students’ needs and interests. That hasn’t happened. “So far I am not seeing the revolution in education,” she said.

AI is still poised to shake up American education in many ways — by making cheating easier, reshaping how teachers approach their work, and changing the broader economy in ways that affect schools. So far the evidence base for AI in education remains “extremely limited,” according to an overview paper released last month.

Khan Academy officials say they’re learning from their experience with Khanmigo and pairing it with other offerings.

A recent study found that when teachers used Khan Academy to help students practice academic content, their classes made slightly faster learning gains. (Lower-performing students, though, saw few if any improvements from Khan Academy.) This was before Khanmigo.

Khan Academy recently announced an overhaul of its product that provides students additional academic practice. Now Khanmigo is incorporated directly as a way students can get advice as they’re working through specific problems. A spokesperson said the organization made this change because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.”

“AI is going to help,” said Khan of this reimagined Khan Academy. “But I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.”

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

When a teacher ditched screens, class got harder. That may be why it worked.

2026-04-07T14:43:04+00:00

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Seventh-grade math teacher Dylan Kane decided to conduct an experiment in his classes by going cold turkey on ed-tech.

Kane, like just about every other teacher in the country, has seen the use of screens proliferate in his classroom — its own sort of accidental experiment. Then, last December, Kane read “The Digital Delusion,” a harsh critique of ed-tech. Although he was not entirely convinced by its arguments, the book made him pause.

“I had kept some of my technology routines the same for a bunch of years without really thinking twice,” says Kane, who teaches in Leadville, a rural mountain town in Colorado. “So I said, ‘Hey, why don’t I just throw it all out?’”

Kane, who writes a popular Substack about teaching and learning, decided to drop screens from his class for the month of January to see what would happen.

More educators and policymakers are also having second thoughts about the growth of ed-tech — sold as a way of personalizing learning but increasingly criticized for doing the opposite. Some school systems are scaling back the use of screens, and some state lawmakers are adding restrictions to how they can be used in class.

I wanted to talk to Kane to understand the classroom-level pros and cons of winding back the clock on ed-tech. So far his experiment has been a success, he says — so much so that he has not brought screens back. Dropping ed-tech has turned out to be a lot more work for him and his students. That might be why it’s succeeding.

Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

More than three months since he began, Dylan Kane's classroom is still tech free.

How were you using tech previously?

All of my assessments were online. That was a shift I made during the pandemic, which most teachers made. And I just kept doing that. They were easier to grade. It was kind of on autopilot.

Number two, I used a math practice website called DeltaMath, which I liked a lot. I would have students at the end of pretty much every class spend five to 10 minutes working through a short online practice assignment.

And third, I would about once a week use part of a Desmos activity. These are free online activities that are interactive, that students do on their Chromebooks. They often give an interesting insight into some mathematical idea, or let students manipulate math in a different way than we often do on pencil and paper.

So how’d your experiment of dropping tech go?

I’m still tech free. I don’t find myself saying, ‘Wow, these things I used to do with technology are totally irreplaceable.’

A couple things I’ve liked. The biggest is just so many fewer little logistical challenges. No more ‘I forgot my charger, my Chromebook’s dead. My screen’s cracked. The internet’s not working.’ All those things are just out the window. We have pencil, we have paper, we have whiteboards, we have markers.

A lot of stuff that I had students doing on their own, I’m now doing interactively in front of the class, like asking questions, having them answer on mini-whiteboards. That has been better than I expected. I feel much more nimble, like I don’t have to get them to put their screens away — we can just talk about it.

I’m seeing a slight increase in effort across the board. Some students, especially students who are less confident in math, can sometimes hide behind their screens. Screens can just separate us into our own little worlds and be really easy to appear like you’re busy behind a screen.

The last thing is I feel more in touch with student thinking. Part of the premise of education technology is that we can see all this stuff about what students are doing, what they know, what they don’t know. My experience is the data is often overwhelming. And with pencil and paper, I just feel much more connected to what students are confused about, what I need to respond to, where I need to adjust.

What do students think of this?

I surveyed them, and they were mixed. The averages were honestly right down the middle. I have some students say they love it. They either just don’t like a lot of the stuff we do on Chromebooks, or they feel fatigued by the amount of screen time across their classes, or they feel frustrated with all the little logistical issues.

One interesting thing is some students say the work is easier on a Chromebook. One reason is handwriting involves more effort. The effort that goes into handwriting might lead to more durable learning — that might be a good type of effort. Another is working on screens often gives instant feedback, and so not having that feedback can feel a little more frustrating for students.

The loss of feedback feels like it could be a downside.

There’s good and bad here. Instant feedback can be really helpful, but students can also become reliant on it, or it can lead to guessing and checking that’s unproductive. In a lot of situations, delayed feedback works better than immediate feedback.

Is there any part of tech that you miss?

All of this is more work. It’s way easier to click a few buttons and assign a couple math problems for students to do online than it is to prepare a piece of paper, and have all that ready for students in class.

I also find that students are a little bit more self-reliant when they’re on technology. I think again, this is good and bad. They need less teacher interaction, because they’re getting that immediate feedback. But also the way that screens kind of divide people into their own world. Sometimes a student is really confused, but doesn’t quite know how to ask for help. There’s definitely higher energy in my class without screens, and I think that’s a good thing, but it can be exhausting as a teacher.

I’m giving quizzes and tests with pencil and paper now, and it’s a lot more work to grade. I’ve loved that because it’s helped me get students to engage more with their mistakes, but again, it’s more work.

Did you run into any sort of difficulties with school policies that made it hard to unwind tech, because it’s just so integrated in so many schools?

I had my formal observation a few weeks ago, and there are a number of items on the state rubric around using technology that were left blank. I am personally not very worried about my score on one very small subset of the state rubric. But that’s built into Colorado law that teachers should integrate technology in their classroom.

So is your plan for the foreseeable future to continue to be no-tech?

Yeah. I don’t want to be someone who just says, ‘Hey, no technology ever again.’ I plan on being a paper-and-pencil first teacher as much as possible. But if some new tools do come along that I think are doing a much better job than what I had access to before, I’m open to it.

Anything else you want to add?

A big belief of mine is that teachers can do their best work when we set clear expectations for what we think great teaching and learning look like, and within reasonable constraints give teachers some freedom. And I think in some cases, technological tools can be a crutch to take away some teacher autonomy. I don’t think it’s a path to a profession where teachers want to stay in the classroom and where teachers can be responsive to student needs.

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

Why the Classic Learning Test, which embraces Aristotle but spurns calculators, has caught Indiana’s eye

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

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A test that relies on classic Western texts and bans calculators for math will soon play a role in assessing how well Indiana students and schools are doing.

Since February, Indiana has expanded the use of the Classic Learning Test in two key ways. First, a new law requires state colleges and universities to consider CLT scores to the same extent that they would consider SAT or ACT scores for admission.

Second, under a new state accountability model that gives schools an A-F grade based on points students earn for proficiency, the Classic Learning Test is one way high school students can earn bonus points for their schools’ grades. The Indiana State Board of Education approved the use of the test at the last minute when adopting the new A-F model in March. It was not part of previous drafts of the model.

The Classic Learning Test’s expansion is part of a multi-pronged push in Indiana and nationwide by conservatives to counter what they see as an education system that leans too progressive by providing alternatives they believe are more rigorous and in line with Western tradition.

The elevation of the CLT follows state leaders’ decision in 2024 to mandate “intellectual diversity” in Indiana higher education, a move seen by many as a boon to conservatives on campuses, as well as previous years’ efforts to change history instruction that could make students feel guilt or blame for the past. This year, lawmakers also required higher education leaders to explore alternative university accrediting options — in line with other conservative states.

Supporters of the CLT say they like the test because it assesses students’ reading skills with texts that are foundational to the country’s history. That also aligns with a U.S. Department of Education campaign to foster “a shared understanding of America’s founding principles” on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

But there’s also practical reason to welcome the CLT, supporters say: It shakes up a long-standing testing establishment that gave students just two options for college readiness testing — the SAT or the ACT. That reflects the school choice environment that includes a growing number of classical schools.

“The CLT is the first newcomer since Eisenhower was president,” said Michael Torres, director of legislative strategy for the CLT. “We offer an opportunity for our students to prove they’re ready for college based on the curriculum they use.”

But critics counter that there is not enough evidence to say a CLT score is on par with a score on the SAT or the ACT — especially when the scores are used for high-stakes decisions about school accountability and college admissions.

“It especially matters to make sure that kind of mathematical relationship between the scores is stable and well-founded when there are any consequences in how these tests are used,” said Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president for College Readiness Assessments at the College Board, which administers the SAT.

Indiana could eventually decide to let students using vouchers to attend private schools take the CLT instead of the ILEARN state exam that voucher students must now take. A private school leader raised that idea during the legislative session, and CLT officials would support it, Torres said.

But that could make it harder to compare how private school students are performing compared with their peers in public schools. Indiana officials have not discussed this idea publicly.

As Indiana expands the use of the CLT, the state should want to ensure the test it’s well-suited to its academic content standards, measures for school quality, and its goals for students, said Chris Domaleski, executive director of the Center for Assessment. The state advisory committee that focuses on required assessments did not weigh in on including the CLT for school accountability because it’s an optional test, Indiana Department of Education officials said.

“The more it’s used, the more we need to seek evidence that it’s useful, that it has reliability, validity, and fairness, for all student groups, including students with disabilities and multilingual learners,” Domaleski said. “All those kinds of questions we’d ask for any assessment used in a consequential way.”

How do Classic Learning Test scores stack up?

The CLT for juniors and seniors is a two-hour, 120-question test developed in 2015 by founder Jeremy Tate, who “saw there might be interest in a third option that proved students are ready to go to college but didn’t force schools to embrace the Common Core,” Torres said, referring to the state standards that some conservatives came to distrust. Classic Learning Initiatives, the company behind the test, also offers a CLT for grades 3-8 and a 10th grade test.

The CLT uses passages by a bank of Western writers from the ancient to the late modern times — the most recent listed is author Toni Morrison — as well as contemporary nonfiction texts.

Sample questions on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” for example, ask students to determine based on the passage the reason that caused the gods to flood the land, and determine which lines in the poem support the argument.

Critics say this focus promotes a narrow vision of culture and society — and that the test offers an advantage to students familiar with the pieces. Still, classical schools and educators say these works are fundamental to all students’ understanding of history.

“When we talk about college readiness, what are we talking about? Is it the use of AI? Is it being able to critically think, look at passages, look at historical text?” said Kylene Varner of the Indiana Association of Home Educators, who supported the bill to require colleges to consider CLT results like SAT and ACT results. “If we can’t understand the culture and history ... and the writing of our Constitution, how do we learn?”

There are also differences on the math portion of the test, where the CLT does not allow calculators; Torres said that means students must show they are “independently numerate.”

And around 15% to 20% of test-takers utilize a remote option not available on the SAT or ACT, Torres said. This option is important to home-schoolers who may not have access to other tests, Varner said.

But what makes the CLT stand out has in turn raised questions about whether comparing scores from the test to results from other exams can be misleading.

The CLT has published a table showing the equivalency between CLT scores and SAT and ACT scores. Torres said the study behind that table relied on a sample of about 4,500 students and produced reliable results. He noted that in addition to self-reported scores, the company received some scores from the colleges that accept CLT, SAT, and ACT scores.

But representatives from the ACT and SAT cast doubt on the validity of such a comparison. To establish that one score on the SAT reliably correlated to a score on the ACT, the College Board and the ACT jointly examined the scores of more than 500,000 students who had taken both exams, said Colin Dingler, ACT’s chief policy analyst.

In addition to a smaller, less-representative sample size, there are two other key issues with CLT’s score comparison, Rodriguez said: The students’ SAT scores were self-reported, and that sometimes years had passed between the two tests.

Ultimately, it would be unfair if two tests had different passing scores, and one was easier to pass than the other, but some students only had access to the harder test, Dingler said.

“It’s very important from an equity standpoint to have some scientifically established tool to go from the scores of one assessment to another assessment,” he said.

How the CLT factors into school quality, college readiness

One of the primary uses of test scores is to indicate that a student is ready for college.

A handful of private colleges in Indiana — along with around 300 nationwide — already accept the CLT scores, and the U.S. military academies soon will too.

But few K-12 schools offer the test right now, state education officials said, and most public universities in Indiana don’t require any test scores for admission, although Purdue University is a notable exception.

Supporters of the CLT, including leaders of private classical K-12 schools in Indiana who testified in support of it earlier this year, said the test is just as good as traditional standardized tests for measuring students’ college readiness — or even better.

Not everyone agrees. Iowa in 2024 recommended against the use of the CLT for admission to its public universities, citing insufficient data about the academic performance of the students who took it.

A key question for assessing college readiness is whether a test based on a prescribed curriculum is gauging students’ knowledge of that curriculum, rather than their general readiness for college-level classes. Even in subjects like science, the ACT is written so that students without a familiarity with a specific scientific concept can figure out the question, Dingler said.

“I don’t think that philosophically, there’s something wrong with assessments that are anchored in content or a specific reading list,” Dingler said. “But I do think that using the results of that test to generalize that any student is ready to succeed or to do well … that’s a really different matter.”

Torres said that while classical schools have embraced the test, familiarity with the texts is not a prerequisite for success on the CLT.

“It merely uses those texts to test reading comprehension and grammar,” Torres said. “We find that to be a rigorous measure of college readiness.”

Test scores also play a role in assessing Indiana school quality.

Students’ SAT proficiency will make up 10% of a high school’s letter grade on the state’s new A-F accountability model. But the state’s decision to let schools earn accountability bonus points through student scores on the ACT or CLT might lead schools to push students to take the CLT, “where it may be easy to get a score that looks high compared to the ACT or the SAT but maybe actually isn’t,” Rodriguez said.

In a statement, the state education department said the school accountability system approach to the CLT balances “personalized pathways” with elevating “real opportunities for students.”

The test’s supporters like that flexible approach, which could play a role if Indiana considers letting students using private school vouchers take the CLT instead of the state’s standardized test.

“Allowing schools to use nationally normed assessments like the CLT that are also rigorous … objective, and publicly reportable, this respects both accountability and also educational diversity,” said Rachel Oren, head of school at the Classic Academy in Indianapolis.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

In wake of ‘public Christian school’ controversy, Pueblo 70 school board sued over open meetings violations

2026-03-31T22:58:31+00:00

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Three school board candidates who were passed over for a vacant seat on the Pueblo District 70 school board sued the board Monday, asking the court to order a new vote to fill the seat.

They also asked the court to declare that the Pueblo 70 school board violated Colorado’s open meetings law several times over the last seven months, including by not clearly describing agenda items related to Riverstone Academy, an elementary school that backers have called Colorado’s “first public Christian school.”

The lawsuit is the third one this year related to Riverstone. The lawsuit alleges a pattern of violations that started last summer when the school board voted to allow Riverstone to open within district boundaries and continued with the controversial appointment of a fourth candidate to the school board in February.

Monday’s lawsuit was filed in Pueblo County District Court by attorney Eric Maxfield on behalf of Jonathan Lewis, Tara Stroesenreuther, and Adolph Vigil, three of four candidates who vied for an open seat on the school board over the winter. The school board president appointed the fourth candidate, Susie Carnes, to fill the seat in February. At the heart of the latest lawsuit is the idea that the public’s business must be conducted in public.

Emails obtained by Chalkbeat show that Riverstone was created at the behest of a conservative law firm seeking a test case on the question of public funding for religious schools. Attorney Brad Miller, whose law firm represents Pueblo 70, outlined that goal in an email to the five-member board and superintendent last June. The school board president at the time, Anne Ochs, wrote back within minutes, and the topic was added to the next meeting agenda.

Monday’s lawsuit alleges that the school board hid Miller’s plan from the public at two June meetings by using generic, jargon-laden language to describe the Riverstone matter. This failed “to provide full notice regarding the proposed Board approval of a publicly-funded Christian school within D70, created for the purpose of manufacturing a Supreme Court test case in hopes of striking down Colorado’s ban against using public funds for religious education,” the lawsuit says.

Reached by email on Tuesday, Miller did not comment about the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleges that placing the Riverstone vote on the board’s consent agenda on June 24 was a violation of open meetings law. Consent agendas allow public bodies like school boards to group routine, uncontroversial issues together for a vote with no debate. Board members can request that items be removed from the consent agenda and voted on separately. That didn’t happen with Riverstone.

Voting on Riverstone as part of the larger consent agenda constituted an “unlawful rubberstamp of a prior, non-public decision,” the lawsuit says.

Riverstone Academy originally operated in this building, but moved temporarily to Christ Church Pueblo West in February.

The lawsuit says that the Pueblo 70 school board continued to violate open meetings law over the winter. That was after three new members were elected in November and after Ochs resigned in December, when a district parent criticized her for hiding key facts about Riverstone’s creation and failing to disclose a conflict of interest.

According to the lawsuit, School Board President Ann Bennett, one of the board members elected in November, violated the law by abruptly leaving a meeting on Feb. 10, the date the board was supposed to select a new member to replace Ochs.

Before Bennett left, the board had deadlocked on picking a new member with repeated 2-2 ties. Then board Vice President AJ Wilson fell ill and was helped out of the room. That left three board members and the possibility that a candidate Bennett didn’t support — Lewis, Stroesenreuther, or Vigil — could be appointed in a 2-1 vote.

“Faced with losing the vote, in a ‘personal power move’ that broke her pledges to follow state law and to respect the Board, Bennett illegally fled the un-adjourned meeting to break quorum and prevent a vote,” a motion accompanying the lawsuit states.

Quorum refers to the minimum number of members needed for a public body to take votes on public business.

This education co-op quietly opened a Christian public school. Does Colorado need more guardrails?

Several days after the Feb. 10 meeting, Bennett announced in a letter to the community that she’d appointed Carnes the vacant seat. Under Colorado law, school board presidents can appoint a new member if the board can’t agree on a candidate after 60 days.

The lawsuit alleges that the “non-public and unilateral appointment of Carnes” and her swearing in during an “un-noticed” meeting on Feb. 25 violated the open meetings law.

In a motion for a preliminary injunction filed along with the lawsuit, the plaintiffs ask the court to order the three Pueblo 70 school board members who were present when Wilson became ill to resume the Feb. 10 meeting that was never adjourned and vote in a candidate to fill the vacancy. That motion also asks that Carnes be ordered to cease serving as a board member while that process plays out.

The lawsuit also wants the Pueblo 70 board to pay the three plaintiffs’ legal fees.

District Superintendent Ronda Rein said by email that the lawsuit could divert funds from student programming

“The board acts on the guidance of their attorney, and any legal proceedings would require the district to cover attorney fees,” she said. “There are more constructive ways to hold the board accountable than through a lawsuit.”

While Miller’s law firm continues to represent Pueblo 70 school board, the district could soon be represented by a different firm. Rein, who will retire at the end of June, recently put out a request for proposals for attorneys to represent the district. Rein said four firms responded, including Miller’s.

Riverstone is still in the midst of another lawsuit. In February, the school and its authorizer filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against the state over the possibility that the school’s public funding could eventually be clawed back.

Forging Education, the Christian nonprofit group that operates Riverstone, also filed a lawsuit against Pueblo County in January, after county officials ordered the school to close its building over safety concerns. School officials voluntarily closed the building and moved the school to a temporary location shortly after.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

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.

America is turning against higher education. Students are still signing up.

2026-03-24T13:44:25+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.

The narrative is by now familiar.

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen precipitously. More commentators are wondering aloud whether a degree is worth the cost. High school graduates and their families fret about taking on student debt. The Trump administration has aggressively attacked — rhetorically and legally — higher education. Artificial intelligence could threaten the university business model.

And yet, hard data show seemingly positive trends for higher education.

After a dip during the pandemic, enrollment has risen for three straight years. Elite universities continue to have vastly more applicants than seats. College-educated workers still far out-earn those without a degree, on average. College has actually become somewhat more affordable in recent years.

At Chalkbeat Ideas, we recently held an event trying to understand and untangle these confusing facts. The recording is here; the slides featuring my presentation of data are here.

“A lot of discouragement of students around higher education has very little to do with education or economic outcomes,” Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University, said during the event.

The discussion helped clarify my own thinking about the paradoxical state of American higher education — and what the prevailing discourse gets wrong. Here are some key takeaways.

The higher education backlash hasn’t stopped enrollment from growing.

In 2023 and 2024, headlines about Americans giving up on the value of college dominated. Ivy League presidents were filleted before Congress over antisemitism on campus. Trump campaigned on reining in elite schools. Support in polls dropped to record lows.

But a funny thing also happened during this time, although it was less noticed: Actual student enrollment started to trend upward again. Now, overall college and university enrollment is above pre-pandemic levels. The negative sentiment around higher education may have deterred at least some students from pursuing a degree, but in recent years there have apparently been other factors pulling them in.

The backlash has been strongest against elite schools — but they’re still thriving.

It’s hard to know for sure why confidence in American education has fallen so sharply. But I suspect that a lot of it has to do with attention to the country’s most elite schools, the Ivy League and a handful of others. Those universities, which educate a tiny share of American students, have drawn incredible amounts of attention, largely negative: about their purportedly close-minded liberal culture, their remarkably high tuition rates, and their exclusive admissions practices.

Yet demand to attend these colleges remains strikingly high — they still reject the vast majority of students who apply. In recent years, enrollment has only grown at selective colleges, which remain dominated by students from high-income neighborhoods.

Shavar Jeffries, CEO of the KIPP Foundation, noted archly during the Chalkbeat event that there is little indication of declining interest in college among affluent families, despite suggestions that young people are pivoting to blue-collar work.

“When you look at the wealthiest people in this country … they’re not having conversations about construction trades. They’re not having conversations about HVAC [work] when it comes to their kids,” said Jeffries. KIPP, the country’s largest nonprofit charter network, serving mostly students from low-income families, continues to prioritize access to college, he said.

The fundamental economics of higher education have not changed much — and are fairly strong.

What drives many people to pursue a degree is economic opportunity. In recent years, a narrative has emerged that pursuing a bachelor’s degree is no longer worth it, due to some combination of higher costs and lower returns. Neither claim is well supported by the data.

Real college tuition — what people actually pay, rather than the sticker price — has been flat or even falling for nearly two decades, according to tracking from the College Board. Meanwhile, the wage advantage for college graduates has remained at very high levels.

Rigorous research has typically found that students on the margin of attending college benefit economically from doing so. “Unambiguously, you see large returns to college-going,” said Bleemer. He pointed to studies in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Texas. That doesn’t mean everyone benefits, just that the typical student considering college does, at least where it’s been studied.

The persistent economic value of college may help explain why enrollment at four-year colleges has not responded strongly to the backlash.

Two-year colleges have also seen enrollment rise recently, though this followed years of declines. Between 2010 and 2023, student counts dropped precipitously at places like Wayne County Community College and Central New Mexico Community College, to name a couple. There were also steep declines at for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix Online Campus.

These were hardly the schools at the center of the recent higher education backlash, but they bore the brunt of enrollment declines.

This again may reflect economic fundamentals in which students see less value from certain schools. Rising unemployment rates, which typically make additional education more appealing, have corresponded with the recent uptick in enrollment.

Politics, shrinking student pools, and AI mean a new era of uncertainty for higher ed.

So if enrollment is growing and the economic case for a degree remains strong, are colleges in a secure spot? Well, no. They face many pressures at the moment. The first is the shrinking pool of potential students. For the foreseeable future, just about every graduating high school class will be smaller than the last, according to projections. Higher education still faces intense political opposition, which could result in less public funding for colleges and universities. Wealthy elite colleges are in many ways best positioned to weather this storm, while lesser-known schools may again be the hardest hit.

The other variable is artificial intelligence. For multiple generations, universities have benefitted from the fact that more-educated workers can often better take advantage of new innovations. This is sometimes called the race between education and technology — in other words, the country has long been racing to get more educated to keep up with evolving tech.

What’s not clear yet is whether this race will continue. It’s possible that AI could lead to even more demand for higher education, but it could also reduce interest by replacing white-collar work. At the moment, it’s too soon to say how this will play out.

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

Goodbye, Regents exams. NYC educators: Tell us how Portrait of a Graduate will change your classroom.

2026-03-20T19:35:18+00:00

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Next school year will be the last requiring students to pass their Regents exams to earn a high school diploma under the state’s current timeline.

Starting in the 2027-28 school year, students will be evaluated based on a new framework from the state called the Portrait of a Graduate, which includes six key qualities high schoolers should master to earn a diploma. They should be able to demonstrate they are academically prepared, creative innovators, critical thinkers, effective communicators, global citizens, and “reflective and future focused.”

State officials have offered few specifics about how students will be expected to meet those criteria, though they have sketched some broad possibilities such as research projects and internships.

Chalkbeat wants to hear from school leaders and teachers: How will these changes affect what’s happening in your classrooms? What will moving away from the Regents exams mean for you and your students? What questions do you have?

New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels has signaled the Education Department plans to “ramp up” its work filling in the lines for the Portrait of a Graduate. He recently revamped his cabinet to include a new position for a high level official supervising high school leadership. It’s headed by Alan Cheng, who most recently oversaw Outward Bound schools, the Internationals Network serving newcomer immigrants, and New York Performance Standards Consortium schools, which require students to do performance-based assessments such as capstone projects or other presentations rather than Regents exit exams. Consortium schools could potentially serve as a model as the state overhauls graduation requirements.

“As Portrait of a Graduate starts to take shape, a New York City diploma needs to mean rigorous learning and genuine preparation for what is to come next,” Cheng said when his new role was announced.

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AI is already in classrooms. Tell us how you’re using it as we await NYC’s school playbook.

2026-03-17T20:09:38+00:00

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New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels has promised that a city policy on the use of artificial intelligence in schools will be coming shortly.

In the meantime, many educators have already been using a host of AI tools in their classrooms, and many students have come to rely on the technology to help them with their work.

Chalkbeat wants to know how AI is being used in your school and what you want the chancellor to know about it, the good and bad. Parents have raised concerns about safeguards, worried that the technology could lead to upticks in bullying, that it could erode critical thinking skills, and that it could compromise student privacy.

According to a RAND survey released Tuesday on using AI for homework, 67% of participating students (more than 1,200 young people between ages 12-29) said that using AI for schoolwork harmed critical thinking, up from 54% earlier in the year. Roughly 71% reported using at least one AI tool for school-related activities (including writing help, brainstorming, and fact-finding), and most students indicated their schools did not have rules for using AI for homework.

“Some of us as educators recognize that there’s some potential in AI to accelerate some learning,” Samuels said at a recent town hall meeting in Manhattan’s District 2. But he also said that the city’s guidance must be done in a “responsible” manner, with input from communities.

Miatheresa Pate, the city’s chief academic officer, described the forthcoming AI guidance as a “traffic-light approach for clarity around what we allow, what we absolutely will not allow,” as well as opportunities to “engage in case use studies around some of the positive things that are happening to support learners who need it most.”

Once the city releases its guidance, it plans to open a 45-day window for feedback from families, educators, and school leaders.

Help us understand what’s already happening with AI in schools — and what you’d like the city do — by taking our survey.

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A viral case against screens in schools is winning converts. Does the evidence hold up?

2026-03-17T14:39:42+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.

Schools have been struggling for nearly a decade with stagnant or declining test scores. Some have blamed external factors like the pandemic or children’s screen use outside of school. But what if, in a sort of educational horror movie, the call is coming from inside the house?

Such is the provocative theory advanced by Jared Cooney Horvath, a Ph.D-holding neuroscientist who runs an education consulting company. Students’ learning and attention have been derailed by the proliferation of screens in schools. “When tech enters education, learning goes down,” he told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year.

Horvath has offered a synthesis of two anxieties of the moment: poor test scores and rising screen time among children, including in school. It’s a message that is resonating with some parents, educators, and lawmakers.

His Senate testimony has been viewed well over 2 million times on C-Span’s YouTube page. Clipped versions have ricocheted across Instagram. Prominent psychologist and tech critic Jonathan Haidt has promoted Horvath’s work. At least one tech-skeptical parent is attending school board meetings armed with copies of Horvath’s self-published book, “The Digital Delusion,” which is set to be re-released this summer by a major publisher. Meanwhile, some states are considering new restrictions on school-issued devices.

I wanted to figure out how strong the case against ed-tech really is, so I took a careful look at Horvath’s evidence. My takeaway: There’s no smoking-gun data showing that ed-tech is at the root of, or even contributing to, recent learning declines. But Horvath’s case should still give schools and educators some pause. Could the tech tools they’ve adopted be doing more harm than good?

In his book and Senate testimony, Horvath offers a three-pronged case against tech in schools.

First, he notes a basic correlation. On a number of international tests, students who spend more time on school computers tend to do worse, he finds. Both U.S. and international scores also started to drop once schools began giving students laptops, Horvath says.

Second, Horvath summarizes academic research — over 20,000 studies — on ed-tech tools, which he defines broadly. Startlingly, in his telling, they appear to harm learning. “Most general-use educational technologies perform below the effectiveness of ordinary classroom instruction,” Horvath said in his written Senate testimony.

Third, screens are not consistent with learning best practices, says Horvath, drawing from his neuroscience background. Human relationships are an important part of learning, which digital tools can’t match. Screens are also just distracting for students.

Plus, tech can make learning frictionless, which seems like a good thing but isn’t, Horvath contends. For instance, it’s easy to take notes on a computer. Yet the process of hand writing notes requires more consideration of what is being written, and that can help commit it to memory.

Across different strands of evidence, “the same exact pattern pops up again and again,” Horvath tells me — that ed-tech is actively harmful.

Yet this case has a number of significant holes.

His first point about correlation is just that: correlational. It does not show tech has caused lower achievement. Such declines in the U.S. and around the world have coincided with a number of other factors, including the pandemic and the growth of screens outside of school. Researchers are still struggling to pin down the key causal factors here. Horvath readily acknowledges this limitation.

His summary of research is also questionable. The overall impact of ed-tech in the studies he cites is actually positive. Horvath says the effect is too small to justify the use of tech because it’s smaller than the effect of “typical classroom instruction.” Taking that into account turns the ed-tech results negative, he says. This is a key methodological decision on which Horvath’s conclusion rests.

But it’s simply not the right approach, says Elizabeth Tipton, a Northwestern University statistician, who counts herself as an ed-tech skeptic. Horvath’s benchmark is wildly unrealistic, she says. In carefully designed studies, in which two groups are both receiving some sort of instruction, most effects are quite small. In that context, an effect above zero would be encouraging.

Perhaps more importantly, says Tipton, it’s not clear the vast array of research that Horvath is citing should be relied on at all. There are many poorly done studies in education. To do a good summary, low-quality papers need to be ruthlessly weeded out. Another challenge is that tech is constantly changing, making old studies quickly obsolete. She’s worried that there’s a “garbage in, garbage out” problem in Horvath’s summary, which is really an overview of multiple overview papers.

“We are so far from the original data, we have no idea what we’re studying at this point,” says Tipton. She’s not aware of a high-quality summary of research on ed-tech broadly. This would be hard to do because the uses of tech are so diverse.

Horvath acknowledges limits in his cause and effect evidence, but he says that’s inevitable in social science. We should look at the weight of the data and the overall coherence of the case, he argues.

Horvath is perhaps on the strongest ground in his summary of cognitive science research. Although it’s debated among researchers, there is some evidence that students learn less from reading and from taking notes on screens. Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, says he’s particularly concerned that tech opens up new avenues for distraction. “If kids have a Chromebook and they can find a way out of whatever they’re doing so they can do something more fun with the Chromebook, they will,” he says.

For his part, Horvath argues the burden of proof should not be on him but on the purveyors of ed-tech. “We are much closer to proving that it’s harmful than we are to proving it’s helping,” he says.

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

Did federal COVID aid allow states to cut back on school spending?

2026-03-12T21:17:52+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.

Nearly $200 billion in federal COVID relief money left schools in a relatively strong financial position in recent years. But new data highlights a potential unintended consequence of all the federal aid: states cutting back on their own efforts to fund education.

A report, released by the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, tracks the share of each state’s economy devoted to public schools. Researchers call this “fiscal effort.” I like to think about it as the tax rate applied to the states’ economy to fund education (though it’s really multiple taxes). Crucially, this does not count federal dollars, just state and local money.

By this measure, funding effort dropped sharply between 2020 and 2023, as the figure below from the report shows. This doesn’t mean that states are spendinglessin real dollars on schools because the economy has also been growing during this time. They’re spending less as a percentage of the economy.

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Lawyer warns of possible lawsuit over alleged open meetings violations in Pueblo 70 school district

2026-03-12T01:09:39+00:00

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Four school board candidates, one vacant seat, and a school board president who made the pick on her own.

These are the main ingredients of a legal conflict brewing in the Pueblo 70 school district, where a divided board has faced months of simmering tension over the district’s role in the opening of a “public Christian school” called Riverstone Academy.

There’s no lawsuit yet. But a lawyer representing the three school board candidates who were passed over for the vacant seat has suggested it’s possible. Board President Ann Bennett appointed Susie Carnes, who has links to the group that operates Riverstone, to the open seat in February.

In a Tuesday email, attorney Eric Maxfield told Pueblo 70’s lawyer that his clients’ next steps could include “litigation in state district court” over violations of Colorado’s open meetings law. His clients are Jonathan Lewis, Adolph Vigil, and Tara Stroesenreuther.

With district superintendent Ronda Rein preparing to retire, the legal outcome of the board seat dispute could mean a shift to a less conservative school board majority and change the direction of the 12,000-student district. In addition to hiring a new superintendent this summer, the board could decide whether to keep or replace the school district’s law firm, which is headed by attorney Brad Miller.

Miller has been at the center of controversy in recent months. He helped create Riverstone last summer at the behest of a conservative Arizona-based law firm seeking a test case on the question of public funding for religious schools, emails obtained by Chalkbeat indicate. The Pueblo 70 school board voted to allow Riverstone, which is authorized by a public education co-op, to locate within the district’s boundaries.

In an email exchange with Maxfield on Tuesday, Miller pushed back against Maxfield’s assertion that Bennett broke state law by appointing Carnes to the vacant seat.

“I am disappointed that you would feign to believe that her appointment was in error,” Miller wrote, according to a copy of the email provided by Maxfield to Chalkbeat.

The board seat came open after a former board member, Anne Ochs, resigned in December after a district parent criticized her for hiding key facts about Riverstone’s creation and failing to disclose a conflict of interest.

Four candidates applied to fill the vacancy, but the board deadlocked with repeated 2-2 ties at its Feb. 10 meeting. Then Board Vice President AJ Wilson fell ill and was helped out of the room. That left three board members and the possibility that one of the candidates could be appointed in a 2-1 vote.

But Bennett, who had sided with Wilson in the vacancy votes, never returned from the 10-minute recess she’d called or adjourned the meeting. Six days later, she announced that she’d appointed Carnes to the vacant seat.

Under Colorado law, school board presidents can appoint a new member if the board can’t agree on a candidate after 60 days.

Carnes was sworn in by Bennett on Feb. 25, in what Maxfield characterized in his letter as an “unannounced non-public ceremony.”

As of last month, Carnes was listed as an elementary teacher at a school run by Forging Education, a Christian group that also runs Riverstone. Her appointment means that three of the five Pueblo 70 school board members — a majority — have had connections to Forging Education.

In a 10-page letter sent to the Pueblo 70 school board on March 4, Maxfield alleged that Bennett circumvented Colorado’s open meetings law when she abruptly “fled” that February school board meeting and later made the vacancy appointment “unilaterally.”

He argued that Bennett’s sudden departure on Feb. 10 was meant to prevent the public from witnessing the selection of a new board member in an open public meeting that had been noticed in advance.

“Notwithstanding the tragic hardship to Vice President Wilson, after his departure the Board maintained quorum, the business was not concluded, and such business was urgent, under a statutory deadline,” Maxfield said.

Quorum refers to the minimum number of members needed for a public body to take votes on public business. For a five-member board, quorum requires three board members to be present.

Maxfield asked for 11 remedies in his letter, including that the appointment of Carnes be invalidated and that the board re-do the selection process. (Maxfield referred to Carnes as the “Director-in-Error.”) He also asked that an outside lawyer conduct a “comprehensive governance and conflict-of-interest review.”

Miller rebuffed those requests in his Tuesday email to Maxfield and said Carnes’ appointment was “properly completed.”.

“The political interplay was anything but smooth and I can agree that it always would be optimal if a majority of the remaining directors could agree on an appointee,” Miller wrote. “However, the tie breaking mechanism is clearly set forth in Colorado statute.”

Bennett did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request for comment about the alleged violation.

It’s not clear when Maxfield’s three clients will decide whether to file a lawsuit over the alleged open meetings violations. Miller indicated in his Tuesday response to Maxfield that he will discuss the matter with the Pueblo 70 school board on March 17 and will follow up with Maxfield afterwards.

Maxfield and Miller’s firm have faced off in recent years in other cases about transparency.

In February, a Woodland Park mother who is a client of Maxfield emerged victorious after a district court judge ordered the Woodland Park school district to pay her more than $144,000 in legal costs after she successfully showed the district violated the Colorado Open Meetings Law. Miller’s firm represented the school district in that case.

Maxfield told Miller in their Tuesday email exchange that if his three clients decide to sue, they’ll “seek payment by the Board of their reasonable attorney fees and costs.”

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat covering early childhood issues and early literacy. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

Mayoral control fight? Mamdani’s former Albany colleagues set stage for showdown on who runs NYC schools

2026-03-10T20:40:39+00:00

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s old colleagues in Albany aren’t going to let him maintain control of New York City schools without a fight.

Though the former state assemblyman campaigned on ending mayoral control as a way to give families and educators more of a say over the nation’s largest education system, Mamdani recently reversed course. Now, he faces an uphill battle with lawmakers in Albany to let him hold onto that power. Neither the Senate nor the Assembly proposed extending Mamdani’s control of city schools in separate budget proposals they released this week despite Gov. Kathy Hochul pitching a four-year extension of it in her budget proposal.

The state’s final budget is due April 1.

Albany gave New York City’s mayor control of the education system more than 20 years ago and has extended it ever since. The governance model — which is set to sunset on June 30 — allows the mayor to unilaterally appoint the schools chancellor, select a majority of the city’s school board, and generally set the district’s policy direction.

As Mamdani has moved full steam ahead on his plan to bring free child care to the city’s 2-year-olds and bolster the free program for 3-year-olds, he has come to appreciate having centralized control over the vast system.

“We would not have been able to launch 2-K or begin to fix the issues plaguing 3-K without mayoral control,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Mayoral control is key to delivering our affordability agenda, and I look forward to continuing to work with leaders in Albany to secure its extension.”

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who built the city’s massive prekindergarten program for 4-year-olds in 2014, said he would not have been able to launch that initiative without mayoral control.

“This is something that would really lead the nation” de Blasio told Chalkbeat about Mamdani’s child care push. “He’s not going to be able to do it, especially not quickly, if he doesn’t have sufficient capacity to run the system.”

Hochul had asked for a four-year extension in 2024 as well. Ultimately, state legislators approved a two-year extension with some changes to the school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy. (The board grew to 24 appointees, with the addition of a chair nominated by Albany officials and selected by the mayor.)

Because the mayor appoints a majority of the members, the board has long been considered a rubber stamp for the chief executive. But the panel has increasingly displayed an independent streak, repeatedly bucking City Hall under former Mayor Eric Adams.

Another tweak from Albany lawmakers: Panel members serve one-year terms that run through June. That resulted in Mamdani inheriting Adams’ appointees, putting the new mayor in an awkward position of not fully controlling the school board for his first six months in office.

Adams, at the end of his term, ceded some of his control of the Panel for Educational Policy and left office with two mayoral vacancies. Mamdani has yet to fill those openings.

Still, there have been some new additions to the panel, including Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor of political science and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He was appointed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.

“It’s an honor to be able to serve the kids of our city,” Collins wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday, “and in this particular moment, I welcome the opportunity to model what true democratic school governance can look like.”

Advocates have continued to press the mayor to follow through on his promise to make the system more responsive to students, parents, and teachers.

State Sen. John Liu, who chairs the New York City Education Committee, said extending mayoral control would hinge on the city coming up with a plan to shrink class sizes to comply with state law. He also said he is speaking with Mamdani about possible changes to make the system more democratic.

“I’m in discussion with the mayor about what the plan is for class size reduction and what he envisions as a way to increase stakeholder input into how our schools are run,” said Liu, who did not offer more details.

When previously revealing his reversal on mayoral control, Mamdani pledged to incorporate community involvement, restructure parent meetings for community education councils to increase participation and awareness of these elected bodies, and improve the role of parent coordinators to be “meaningful” parent organizers instead of principals’ administrative coordinators.

Hundreds of parent coordinators wrote to Chalkbeat with their ideas for the mayor. They want better pay, more respect, a clearer job description — and they want to be included in decisions made about their jobs.

Albany signals support for Foundation Aid increase

Though lawmakers might not be on board for Mamdani’s plea for extending mayoral control, they do seem aligned with him on changing the formula that makes up the bulk of school budgets, funnelling more money to high-need schools.

The two-decades-old Foundation Aid formula was tweaked last year, but many advocates and politicians said the changes weren’t significant enough. Both houses called to add additional weights to the formula for homeless students,those in foster care, and children learning English as a new language.

High-need districts like New York City — which had about 154,000 students in temporary housing last year — stand to benefit if those weights are added. City schools last year received $314 million less than they would have under the original formula.

Compared to Hochul’s proposal to increase Foundation Aid across the state to $27.1 billion next fiscal year, the Assembly called for $27.8 billion, Speaker Carl Heastie said, while the Senate called for $27.4 billion.

Correction: March 10, 2026: This story initially said that Jonathan Collins was appointed to the Panel for Educational Policy by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In fact, he was appointed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Families turn to states for civil rights support as Trump dismantles the Education Department

2026-03-10T16:57:58+00:00

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WASHINGTON (AP) — In their mostly white school district, Black students routinely heard racial slurs. White classmates hurled insults like “slave,” “monkey,” or worse. It often went unpunished.

Parents made those claims in a 2024 complaint asking the U.S. Department of Education to investigate racial bullying at the Pennridge School District in Pennsylvania. They thought their complaint had the power to make things better. Instead, it became one of thousands sitting in a federal office with little hope of gaining attention after layoffs by the Trump administration.

Families say they’ve had nowhere else to turn.

“There was an expectation that something was going to happen,” said Adrienne King, who has two daughters in the district and is president of the NAACP Bucks County chapter. When nothing did, “it’s a very hollow, empty feeling.”

One of the Education Department’s biggest jobs is to police discrimination in America’s schools. But amid mass firings and shifting priorities, that role has waned. In its place, there’s an emerging push for states to step up.

In Pennsylvania, a lawmaker is proposing a new state agency that would investigate schools and uphold students’ civil rights — traditionally the role of the federal government. At the same time, advocates there and in other Democrat-led states are pressing existing state agencies to intervene when students face discrimination based on race, disability, or sex.

The idea carries risk. Pushing the work to the states could create a patchwork of systems with uneven protections. Some worry it will embolden the Trump administration to retreat further on civil rights.

Lawmakers propose more muscular state agencies

Pennsylvania state Sen. Lindsey Williams offered a blunt message last fall when she proposed a new state civil rights office to be modeled after its federal counterpart. “If the federal government won’t stand up for our most vulnerable students, I will,” said Williams, a Democrat.

Her bill, to be introduced this spring, faces long odds in the state’s Republican-controlled Senate. Yet even if it fails there, Williams believes it has potential to become a national model. She’s already heard interest from lawmakers in other states, and similar proposals have been put forward in Maryland and Illinois.

Colorado lawmakers want to help parents who feel ‘ghosted’ by the federal Office for Civil Rights

More immediately, advocates in Pennsylvania are calling for heavier investment in an existing but often overlooked agency. The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission already has the power to investigate schools and enforce students’ rights, but it’s rarely used for that end. It’s better known for handling employment disputes, with just 5% of its recent cases involving education.

Kristina Moon, a lawyer at the Education Law Center in Pennsylvania, has started encouraging families to take discrimination complaints to the commission instead of the federal government. She sees it as the next best option for families left in limbo amid federal turmoil.

“It’s incredibly important for students and families to be aware of any other option available to them,” said Moon, who represents families in the Pennridge complaint.

The commission is welcoming complaints that have stalled at the federal level. Yet officials are also realistic about their limitations. The agency has about 100 staff — down from more than 200 in the past — and some question its ability to handle a sharp increase in complaints.

New banners of Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Anne Sullivan hang from the U.S. Department of Education building on March 1, 2026. The department has brought back some laid-off civil rights staff but still faces a backlog of complaints.

The federal Education Department had more than 300 open investigations in Pennsylvania as of January 2025, according to the most recent federal data. Each is a possible candidate to be shifted to the state.

“It would be tough, I’ll be totally honest,” said Desireé Chang, the commission’s education director. “A stark influx would definitely put some weight on our agency. But we would do it because that is what we are charged with doing.”

Civil rights work has slowed under Trump administration

Before President Donald Trump took office last year, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights was already struggling under a heavy caseload. Work has slowed further after sweeping layoffs, which closed entire offices in Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and elsewhere. Some remaining staff say time-consuming investigations have become rare as they focus on the quickest complaints.

At the same time, Trump officials have used the office to go after schools that make accommodations for transgender students and athletes, arguing that it discriminates against girls and women.

Trump officials blame the previous administration for leaving a backlog of complaints. Trump officials have brought back some fired employees to help clear cases.

The fallout is being felt across the country. In Maryland, a recently proposed bill would give the state’s Commission on Civil Rights new power to investigate discrimination in schools. The office has long handled discrimination cases in areas like housing and employment, but students don’t have a comparable option to file complaints.

At a hearing last week, officials at the commission supported the bill and said they can no longer rely on the federal government to defend students’ rights.

“Offices have been closed, people have been fired, cases are piling up or not even moving — that’s why we sought to step in that gap and provide Maryland students an option,” said Glendora Hughes, general counsel for the commission.

In Massachusetts, advocates are turning attention to an existing office in the state’s education department. State officials say anyone can file a complaint with the Problem Resolution System to address violations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or other laws protecting students from discrimination.

“It is imperative that the Office for Civil Rights perform its congressionally mandated duties, rather than leaving states on their own to protect the rights of their students to learn in environments free from discrimination,” the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education said in a statement.

Some legal aid groups are also filling in gaps. The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing a Louisiana school district on behalf of a 10-year-old boy with autism. The suit says the St. Tammany Parish School District illegally cut the boy’s classroom time to just two hours a day starting in 2024, down from a full day. The nonprofit said it’s the kind of case that would have been handled by the federal government in the past.

One of the U.S. Education Department’s most powerful tools is the ability to pull federal funding from schools that violate civil rights laws. Facing that threat, schools usually have agreed to make changes when pressed by the agency.

Proposals at the state level have varying enforcement powers. Some would allow states to mediate disputes between families and schools and to issue legal orders. By contrast, a newly created Office of Civil Rights in California primarily aims to provide anti-discrimination guidance and training to local schools.

In Pennridge, families are weighing their next steps. King said she has little hope in the federal complaint, and the bullying hasn’t stopped. Her daughters still hear racial slurs at school, and students make insensitive comments about their hair. She wonders how it will all shape her daughters’ lives.

“I feel as though my girls have normalized a lot of this, but for the sake of survival — middle school is hard,” she said. “You just want to be like everybody else.”

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Holding kids back in 3rd grade can raise test scores — but a new study shows a long-run cost

2026-03-10T14:31:01+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. Next week we have an online event on whether college is still worth it. Join us!

It’s an age-old debate with an emerging conventional wisdom: Third graders should not move on to the next grade if they are still struggling to read.

There’s both logic and evidence behind this policy. Studies have found that students have higher test scores after they’re held back. This practice may also have played a role in helping Mississippi make remarkable improvements in recent years. A chorus of policymakers and journalists have insisted with growing confidence that others should replicate the state’s model.

But a new study offers a warning about the downside risks of retention. Third graders who had to repeat a grade in Texas were far less likely to graduate from high school or earn a good living as young adults, nearly two decades later. The harmful effects were quite large and came despite initial improvements in test scores.

“Retaining low-achieving students in third grade further deepens educational and income inequalities,” writes Jiee Zhong, an economics professor at Miami University.

The findings are hardly the last word on this topic. But they complicate the evidence base for retention at a time when more states — like Arkansas, Indiana, and West Virginia — are adopting this policy.

The paper, set to be published in an economics journal, examines an early 2000s Texas policy to hold back struggling readers. Students had three chances to pass the state exam.

Zhong, the researcher, looked at those who just barely missed the passing score versus those who just reached it. These students were essentially identical — the only difference was a few questions right or wrong on the test. Yet those handful of questions changed the trajectory of many students’ lives by determining whether they would be held back. This also created a natural experiment that allowed Zhong to compare the two groups of students, thus isolating the effect of retention.

Failing the exam wasn’t a guarantee that students would repeat the grade — parents could seek exemptions — but it dramatically increased their chances. Relative to the overall student population, the retained students were more likely to be low-income, Black or Hispanic, and still learning English.

In the short term, the results were promising. By the time retained students finished fourth grade, their test scores were much higher. But there were warning signs. Students missed more school after they were held back. As the years went on, the test score gains, relative to non-retained students, started to fade. In middle school, the students who had been held back were more likely to exhibit violent behavior (although this remained rare).

By the end of high school, retained students were 9 percentage points less likely to graduate, compared to similar students who weren’t forced to repeat third grade. This is a very large effect. Even those students who graduated typically did so a year later, reflecting the extra year from being held back.

At the age of 26, the previously retained students, now young adults, earned less money than if they hadn’t been held back. Again, the effect was substantial: nearly $3,500, a decline of 19%.

So what happened?

Holding back a student essentially adds a year to the time in school required to graduate. Those students then reach minimum drop-out ages at earlier grades. Zhong notes that retention could have led to “stigma and school disengagement.” Even those who do graduate may be delayed in entering the workforce, which could reduce their earnings.

Prior research has been mixed on the long-run consequences of early-grade retention, with some negative effects found in studies in New York City and Louisiana but not Florida. In Texas, retention did not necessarily come with additional remediation, the paper notes.

That’s a key difference from the Mississippi policy, says Carey Wright, who was state superintendent there. Students who were held back received extra small group instruction. Her focus was never on retention, she adds. “Let’s talk about prevention and intervention,” Wright instructed her staff.

Wright says she’s not sure if there have been efforts to track retained students in Mississippi through high school. She notes that one study found that through sixth grade those students had higher reading scores and comparable attendance to similar non-retained students.

The Texas study should not be taken as decisive against retention. That’s because it doesn’t consider a key part of the policy: motivating teachers, parents, and students to improve reading scores to avoid retention.

“In theory you wouldn’t have to have retention,” says Brian Jacob, a University of Michigan education professor. “In practice, the stick in the background may make everyone in the system more focused.” This seems very possible, but we should understand that retention may very well be a stick, not a carrot.

Many parents resist having their children held back, and this study suggests there may be good reasons for that. Students from more advantaged families are more likely to receive exemptions from retention, according to some previous research.

For her part, Wright is not sure whether Mississippi would have seen the same gains without the retention law, though some research suggests it did play a role. In Maryland, where she’s now superintendent of schools, students can only be held back if parents agree.

“It’s a different climate here,” Wright says.

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

In states where voucher programs have exploded, opponents make their case for limits

2026-03-10T13:40:03+00:00

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Capitalizing on headlines about misspending and concern about ballooning costs, some Arizona public school advocates want voters to do something lawmakers haven’t: add certain guardrails to the state’s education savings account program.

A proposed ballot measure in Arizona is one of several recent efforts nationwide to scale back or add oversight to state voucher programs, which direct public funding to private education expenses.

Together, Democratic and Republican Ohio lawmakers proposed a bill in January that would place a $500,000 income limit for families receiving a type of state voucher. West Virginia lawmakers tried and failed to curb voucher spending by limiting how families could spend the money.

These efforts might signal that opponents are taking a measured approach to battling this form of school choice, rather than coordinating all-or-nothing campaigns to kill vouchers. This may reflect an admission by school choice opponents that these programs are here to stay.

Voucher programs started out as targeted programs to give students in poverty or students with disabilities more options. But after decades of lobbying from some conservatives, at least 18 now states have universal choice programs.

And some programs have grown to cost state taxpayers billions of dollars. Florida’s cost the state an estimated $3.9 billion in the 2024-2025 school year, and Arizona’s had a price tag of over $1 billion last year.

Choice advocates say the spending means there’s an appetite for voucher programs, and families should take full advantage of money the state would be spending anyway if the students were in public school. Critics see the spending as raiding public school budgets — and maybe an opening to argue for more guardrails and limits for these programs.

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program, known as the ESA program, allows families to draw funds from the state for educational expenses such as homeschooling, private school or tutoring.

But families have reportedly used taxpayer money to buy items like diamond rings, lingerie and gaming laptops. That news has become an argument for critics of the ESA program in proposing limits on the program.

Save our Schools Arizona and the Arizona Education Association in February proposed a ballot initiative that would attach an annual income limit of $150,000 on families seeking an ESA. It would also require that private schools and other ESA providers get a basic background check from the state, and subject ESA students to academic oversight. That could mean requiring that private school students receiving ESA money take an assessment or requiring that the private schools themselves receive independent accreditation.

“We have data that shows that this billion dollar program is fraught,” said Marisol Garcia, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s labor union for public educators. “This is something that every taxpayer should care about.”

To appear on the ballot, the measure needs almost 256,000 signatures and state officials must approve language the group filed with the Arizona Secretary of State.

Opponents of vouchers have had some success at the ballot in Arizona and other states before. In 2024, voters in Kentucky and Nebraska rejected state voucher programs. Arizona voters rejected an expansion of the ESA program in November 2018, after a campaign from Save Our Schools, with 65% voting against the creation of universal ESAs.

However, the state legislature in 2022 passed a major ESA expansion anyway. Save Our Schools tried and failed to get enough signatures for a referendum on the expansion in 2022. This time, the group is focused on placing more rules on the program, a step that Garcia says polling shows voters support.

Garcia said the $1 billion it costs to fund the ESA program from the state budget comes out of the same pot of money that funds the state’s public schools. Another provision of the ballot measure would rollover any unused ESA funds every year to public schools.

With ESAs, she said the state “turned on the water faucet and just let it go.”

But it may be too late to completely erase the program or go back on universal expansion, if proposals to cull spending are any indication.

The ESA program in Arizona has grown massively since 2022, giving rise to a slate of new educational models and empowered homeschoolers.

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, a school choice advocacy network, said opponents are “trying to kill programs through a death of 1,000 cuts” with oversight measures that are ultimately not needed.

“These programs are very transparent, and the data that’s coming out is showing how transparent,” he said. “We welcome that data to show how transparent they are, because we would rather have it cleaned up faster than not if there are any problems.”

But others aren’t convinced voucher programs are bastions of transparency. Jessica Levin, an attorney with the Education Law Center, said voucher programs can sound good to some before they pass, but harm state budgets, with transparency issues surfacing after people begin spending taxpayer funding.

While Levin believes such programs should be eliminated entirely, proposals such as the one in Arizona “would still have a big impact on curbing some of that waste, getting some money back in the public schools, getting some basic safety standards for kids that are taking vouchers, some basic academic accountability” and other effects, she said.

Some Republicans appear open to limits. In Ohio, one of the sponsors of the bill to set an income limit on which families can receive vouchers, Republican state Rep. Justin Pizzulli, told a TV news station that the proposal would help sustain the program and ward off concerns about misspending.

“By setting a reasonable income cap, we protect taxpayers, keep the program sustainable, and restore confidence that education dollars are being used fairly,” Pizzulli said. The Ohio bill has been referred to the state’s House Education Committee.

Democratic Lawmakers in West Virginia in February also tried to add guardrails to the state’s Hope Scholarship program after a recommendation to cap spending on the program from policy analysts lawmakers hired to study the program.

State Rep. Sean Hornbuckle, a Democrat, said it would be irresponsible not to put limits on the program, which opened to all West Virginia residents this month. Lawmakers had proposed a ban on using the money for out-of-state schools and tutoring services.

“We are hemorrhaging money and the public education system is failing because of it,” Hornbuckle told the West Virginia Watch.

Instead, West Virginia lawmakers did not cap spending and the effort ultimately failed.

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

Teachers, parents, and students: What’s your take on homework? Is it worth it?

2026-03-09T15:56:01+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.

Homework is one of the most foundational aspects of American schooling. It’s also intensely debated and in flux. Some teachers swear by homework; others say it simply doesn’t work. Parents, too, have differing views on the value and role of homework. Researchers examine its effect on learning, with varying and disputed results.

Some educators have changed their approach in recent years to give less homework or to stop grading what they do give. Artificial intelligence is creating new complications, making it harder for teachers to ensure work done at home is students’ own.

We want to understand what’s going on here: how teachers are using homework, how that’s changed in recent years, and what the benefits and downsides of homework are. We also want to hear thoughts about making homework more beneficial when it is assigned.

If you’re a teacher, parent, or student, we want to hear from you about homework. Now’s your chance to sound off on this hotly debated topic.

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

Supreme Court ruling on gender identity favors parents but leaves unanswered questions for schools

2026-03-07T00:27:11+00:00

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s Mirabelli v. Bonta ruling casts doubt on the legality of school district policies that aim to protect transgender students’ privacy.

But even though the majority of justices sided with California parents who said those policies led schools to withhold important information about their children’s gender identity, the practical impact of their ruling is less straightforward amid a shifting legal landscape for trans rights.

In Mirabelli v. Bonta, teachers and parents challenged a California law that required schools to use students’ preferred names and pronouns and to not disclose students’ transgender identity — including to parents — without the student’s consent.

A U.S. District Court judge sided with the parents and teachers and ordered California to revise its guidance to school districts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit put that decision on hold, leaving California’s law in place while the lawsuit played out. The Supreme Court intervened before the appeals court could more closely consider the case, with the conservative majority finding that the parents were likely to succeed on the merits.

As an emergency ruling on the so-called shadow docket, Mirabelli doesn’t create binding precedent but gives a strong indication of how judges view the issue.

Conservatives hailed the 6-3 decision as a victory for parental rights that puts school districts on notice. A database maintained by the conservative parent group Defending Education identified more than 1,000 school districts nationwide with policies that limit parental notification about children and their gender identity.

“If you have been socially transitioning children at school without their parents’ knowledge, the Supreme Court of the United States has now told you in no uncertain terms: that is unconstitutional,” Paul Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, a conservative religious public interest law firm representing the California parents and teachers, said in a statement. “Get your policies into compliance immediately.”

But while the decision seems to say clearly that schools can’t withhold information from parents, the ruling doesn’t clarify under what exact circumstances they have to reach out, said University of South Carolina law professor Derek Black.

A narrow reading of the ruling could be that schools need to respond honestly to parent questions, but don’t have an obligation “to get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, did you know that Jane is going by John now?’” Black said. “That would be kind of absurd actually because the parents may very well know.”

Advocates for transgender youth, meanwhile, worry that some students will lose their only safe haven.

President Donald Trump has asserted through executive orders that there are only two sexes and that people cannot change their gender. His administration has investigated school districts over inclusive policies and threatened to withhold funds from hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to minors.

Mo Turner, director of policy and advocacy for Glisten, a group that focuses on making education safe for LGBTQ youth, sees “a steady march towards trying to create a U.S. where trans folk don’t exist.”

“We are creating a harmful environment when we see school districts asked to forcibly out students, when we ask folks to chip away at the little pieces of independence that our youth are getting, as they try to figure out who they are,” Turner said.

When must schools notify parents about gender identity changes?

Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor gave parents the right to opt their children out of lessons that violate their religious beliefs. But even before that, legal precedent going back to Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Wisconsin v. Yoder generally supported parents’ rights, Black said.

Those constitutional issues are distinct from political questions or policy preferences, he said, even if the outcome presents a “tough pill to swallow” for some.

“Parents have a fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children,” he said. “I’m not saying every parent is going to get it right, but if you have to choose between the state, the school, and the parent, it’s going to be the parent every time.”

One exception, Black noted, was the 2024 U.S. v. Skrmetti decision, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors and disregarded the rights of parents who supported their children’s transitions.

Indiana, Tennessee, and four other states have laws that require schools to notify parents when a student wants to go by a different name or change their gender presentation at school, according to the Movement Advancement Project.

But on the ground, school district policies can be inconsistent, Chalkbeat reporting found.

And the Supreme Court did not address what actions should prompt schools to proactively inform parents. Does that obligation kick in when a student informs adults at school about a new name or pronouns? Or if teachers notice that a student’s friends address them differently?

“The implications for enforcement are so complex and almost impossible to comprehend in terms of how it will be operationalized on a day-to-day basis,” said Shelby Chestnut, executive director of the Transgender Law Center.

Asked if the state would be issuing new guidance for school districts, the California Department of Education said only that it does not comment on pending litigation.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for California Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office is “disappointed” in the ruling but declined to say whether they would continue to defend California’s law in court.

“We remain committed to ensuring a safe, welcoming school environment for all students while respecting the crucial role parents play in students’ lives,” the statement said.

Where do parental rights begin and end?

Social conservatives and the Trump administration have accused schools for years of facilitating children’s gender transitions. Most often, this refers to schools using children’s preferred names and pronouns as part of a process of social transition.

Such accusations touch on highly sensitive and disputed questions of parental rights and the role of schools and educators in children’s lives. Sometimes children or teens ask to go by a different name or gender identity at school and ask trusted teachers not to tell their parents because they fear their parents will respond negatively. Schools might continue to use a student’s legal name and gender in communications with parents.

These decisions can have high stakes for everyone involved. One set of parents in Mirabelli said they did not know their child identified as a different gender until they were hospitalized for a suicide attempt. At the same time, between 20% and 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, with many reporting that parental rejection and abuse contributed to them leaving home.

Black said policies that treat parental involvement as the default and carve out clearly defined safety exemptions might withstand legal scrutiny better than those that tightly limit disclosure.

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a blog post that the decision was “a quiet victory for public schools and teachers.”

“Teachers do their best work when aligned with families, not forced to participate in secrecy regimes that invite suspicion,” he wrote.

Absent from Mirabelli was any consideration of students’ rights or agency. In an unrelated Colorado case, a U.S. District Court judge rejected the parents’ claim that district policies limiting disclosure had harmed them. “The District is not the decision maker at issue: the student is,” the judge wrote.

These and other legal questions could get more consideration if the Supreme Court takes up any of the several dozen cases working their way up through the lower courts.

Like Mahmoud before it, Mirabelli raises other questions about where parental rights begin and end, and whether it matters if parents’ claims are grounded in religious belief. Many states allow teenagers younger than 18 to consent to mental health treatment, medical care, working during school hours, sex, and even marriage without parental permission.

Writing in Vox, Ian Millhiser said the decision’s description of parental rights was so broad that it could require schools to report students to their parents if they dated a classmate, ate non-kosher food, or removed their hijab after arriving on school grounds.

The Education Department, meanwhile, has ongoing investigations into California and Maine based on accusations they violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which lays out students’ privacy rights in school and also gives parents access to students’ educational records, by withholding information. Conservative advocacy groups have filed civil rights complaints that make similar claims.

FERPA requires schools to share written records, such as a formal gender support plan, with parents, but experts question whether it requires proactive disclosure. The administration could draw on Mirabelli to bolster its pursuit of these claims, but on its own, the decision doesn’t change the law.

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

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.

Red states are taking control of school districts as Republicans decry poor test scores, student protests

2026-03-03T17:54:03+00:00

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Roxanne Martinez moved back to her neighborhood in Fort Worth so her kids could attend the same schools she did.

The mother of two was on the booster club. And on a walk one day with students to a polling location — she’s always encouraged civic involvement — one asked her why she hadn’t run for school board. That question sparked a campaign, and she was elected in 2021.

But the board seat Martinez won in the Fort Worth Independent School District may not come with any power for very much longer. Texas education officials announced in October that they would take control of the district and replace locally elected board members with a board hand-picked by the state, a move triggered by the academic failures at a school that has since closed.

“I take parent calls almost every night, almost every day, and so to lose that local voice, removing the voice of my constituents, of our voters, is just deeply concerning to me,” she said.

State takeovers are having a moment. For decades, state officials have taken over school districts, citing academic and financial calamity. In some cases, the calamity was real: School districts were bankrupt. Very small fractions of students read at grade level. But while those reasons are still the most commonly cited, officials’ rhetoric to justify the tactic has become more overtly political as the country’s political divides have deepened, according to those who study the phenomenon.

In Texas, the state has seized control over seven school districts since 2023, four of those announced in the past six months. Nationwide, Chalkbeat tracked at least 21 new school district takeovers in the past three years, with additional takeovers threatened. These come after what some experts said was a lull in the practice. This year already, Texas’ schools chief threatened districts with takeovers over anti-ICE protests, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took a swipe at unions while suggesting a state receiver should be in control of Broward County Public Schools.

“At this point, states don’t really care about having to justify this action,” said Domingo Morel, a professor at New York University. “Back in the 1980s, 1990s, early 2000s, states really went out of their way to make it look like they really wanted to come in to improve the district.”

Conservative governors and education commissioners have said they’re taking a hard line on academics, targeting entire districts over a few schools, or progress they say is not fast enough.

Some argue that outside intervention is the only way to break up entrenched political interests that stagnate learning. Researchers also say the revival of takeovers in some states may reflect alarm over flagging academic achievement and financial distress in COVID’s wake.

“People are really concerned, especially post-pandemic, about student achievement,” said Josh Bleiberg, an education professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “I do think there’s an emergency mindset aspect of here like, ‘well, we’ve got to do something.’”

There are examples of takeovers that produced sustained improvements in student outcomes, but they are the minority, according to research. More often, research shows the loss of control disproportionately affects communities of color in exchange for meager and short-term gains in academic achievement.

Some welcome change in the Fort Worth district, where students lag behind their peers on national assessments. For others, like Martinez, the takeover is a flex of Republican political power over a district in a politically mixed county, and in a school district that primarily serves Hispanic and Black students. To them, the entity that will come out ahead could be the state’s new private school choice program, not public schools.

And for a third set — people like Ale Checka, a longtime teacher in Fort Worth — two things can be true.

Yes, Fort Worth’s schools deserved to be taken over, Checka said. But that doesn’t mean she likes it: “God, I wish we could get taken over by literally anybody else.”

State takeovers gaining momentum in Republican-led states

States run by Democrats have also initiated takeovers in the past three years, in several instances for financial reasons. But Republican-led states are leading the charge on recent takeovers, although the strategy looks different from state to state.

In Tennessee, Republican lawmakers want to install a state-appointed oversight board in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the largest school district in the state, to assume authority of schools in a majority Democratic county.

A Memphis-Shelby County Schools school board meeting.

Tennessee Republicans argue a state-appointed oversight board could better turn around lagging academic achievement than the current school board. Opponents of the GOP plan say Memphis schools are not only improving, they’re exceeding state expectations for growth in reading and math on state assessments.

Mississippi has taken over two school districts in the past year, after a lull since 2021. The state has had broader authority since 2024, when lawmakers removed a requirement for the governor to first declare a state of emergency in a school district to initiate a takeover.

GOP leaders in Nevada and New Hampshire are pushing takeovers for more state control over local districts.

Not all recent state interventions in local school districts amount to a direct takeover. Indiana GOP lawmakers have mandated a new oversight board for Indianapolis Public Schools, but the board’s members would be picked by the mayor, who’s currently a Democrat.

Committee and community members gather after the Indianapolis Public Schools board meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025.

But the state that’s arguably become the clearest blueprint for the current crop of takeovers is Texas.

In Texas, just one school in a district can trigger state intervention for that district. In Houston, the trigger was Wheatley High School where more than 90% of Wheatley’s students are Latino or Black and many are from low-income backgrounds.

Wheatley was deemed unacceptable in the state’s rating system for seven straight school years, which state schools chief Mike Morath cited in 2023 as one reason the state was taking over, along with languishing achievement in other Houston schools, which educate about 180,000 students and constitute the state’s largest district.

In 2023, Morath told the Houston Landing that state intervention was necessary in part because the district had allowed chronic low achievement in multiple schools for far too long.

“Parents, teachers have high expectations for kids,” Morath said at the time. “It’s important for me to maintain high expectations for school boards. So this is ultimately about an intervention action for the school board.” (The Texas Education Agency did not respond to requests for an interview with Morath for this story.)

State officials put Mike Miles — a longtime lightning rod in education — in charge of Houston as superintendent and replaced the elected board with an appointed one. Miles, the former Dallas superintendent who also founded a charter school network, made school hours longer, cut jobs in the district’s central office, implemented new curriculum in struggling schools, and put more pressure on school principals to deliver results.

The results have been a mixed bag. Houston now has fewer struggling schools, under Texas’ school rating system. But the number of students enrolled has declined by 13,000 since the takeover, an acceleration of earlier enrollment decline. And the share of teachers remaining on their campuses between school years fell from 70% before the takeover to 58.6% from the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years, according to research from the University of Houston.

Still, Houston has produced enticing results. “People from all over the country, including Alaska, are calling us to ask how we’re doing this,” Miles told The 74 last year, touting the district’s academic gains. “Boldness is what’s called for, and people are starting to have some hope that big turnarounds can be done.”

Republicans in Tennessee have pointed to Houston as a model for a state takeover of Memphis’ district, critical of flagging academics and school board dysfunction.

Parents and teachers in Fort Worth, a district of roughly 70,000 students and the 10th-largest in the state, have eyed the changes in Houston closely.

Two in 3 students in Fort Worth can’t read on grade level, according to the Fort Worth Report. Two middle schools have failed in the state rating system for four consecutive years, just shy of the state intervention threshold.

Trenace Dorsey-Hollins is a Fort Worth mother of two and founder of Parent Shield, a grassroots group pushing the message that Fort Worth’s kids deserve a high-quality education.

Despite the political undertones of the takeover in Houston, the new management is “changing the trajectory for a lot of kids” there, she said, and Fort Worth is in need of some “true momentum.”

The truth is, many schools across Texas are failing, and they’ve been failing kids for a long time, she said.

Checka acknowledged that Fort Worth is in a literacy crisis that warrants outside intervention, she said. But she’s watched Houston eliminate school librarian positions with horror.

“The moves that the state is making are not moves that are for literacy,” Checka said. While Houston has improved reading scores, educators have been critical of district-prescribed instruction that doesn’t emphasize reading books cover-to-cover.

Martinez, the board member, notes that the district already adopted higher-quality instructional materials and added teacher training. Just this month, the district shared data showing growth on reading assessments.

“If the state had some magic bullet that was going to just come in and significantly improve schools, one: why haven’t they already shared it?” she asked. “Two: why are they not partnering with us?”

Political rhetoric around school district takeovers has changed

As students walked out earlier this year to protest federal immigration policy, Texas Education Agency officials warned that schools could face state control if student protests continued.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called for investigations into multiple districts, implying that protests were taking kids away from academics.

Texas hasn’t initiated any takeovers since Abbott’s comments. But the state did place the Austin district under investigation. Austin was already under financial stress, and several middle schools are one failing grade away from triggering intervention.

Morel, who studies state takeovers, said he believed the country would witness a decline in the practice nearly a decade ago.

Yet Houston marked an “outright political power play on the part of the state,” given that the state used a single school’s shortcomings as the reason for intervention, even when the district itself was not failing in the state’s rating system.

“You can anticipate that if this type of trajectory continues, that it’s really not about improving schools, that it’s about undermining the political power of these communities,” he said.

There’s inherent political friction in a takeover, said Johnny Key, a former Republican Arkansas schools chief who oversaw the state intervention in the Little Rock School District from 2015 to 2021. Key acknowledges the takeover wasn’t a “smashing success” but said it stabilized leadership and helped the district plan for the end of desegregation aid, a major funding source.

Key said any takeover is inherently political, because the state is claiming responsibility for something typically controlled locally. But that doesn’t mean takeovers aren’t necessary, or that state officials are simply dismissing communities.

“To paint state takeover with any type of broad brush ignores the nuance and the differences in the communities that are affected,” he said.

But ultimately state takeovers must be sensitive to politics and get support from key groups, including teachers, to ensure changes can endure, said Ashley Jochim, a political scientist with the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

“You go in and do a bunch of stuff that’s super controversial, even if it benefits kids, if it doesn’t have political support, it’s not going to be sustained over time,” she said.

Recent controversy over Texas education policy isn’t confined to state takeovers. In conversations about the pending Fort Worth takeover, Martinez and others raised Texas’ school voucher program that Abbott signed into law in 2025.

There’s no evidence to suggest Texas is somehow using state intervention as a way to promote vouchers. But critics like Martinez are skeptical of a government touting a voucher program that comes with little accountability for achievement, while also claiming it’s trying to raise achievement for already-stretched public schools.

“The reasoning behind the strong interventions has less to do about student outcomes and more about shifting of power,” Martinez said.

For Checka, the state’s motivation for taking over Fort Worth Schools matters. The idea that students will learn more every day is what gets her up in the morning. She wishes she felt confident Texas officials had the same motivations.

“The things that are important to me are my students being able to read and write … my students being able to access opportunities after high school and go to college,” she said. “It is just not important to them.”

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

NYC to launch ‘2-K’: Here are the neighborhoods getting free child care for 2-year-olds this fall

2026-03-03T16:30:00+00:00

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Neighborhoods in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens will be the first to get free seats for 2-year-olds this fall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Tuesday.

Hochul committed $73 million to fund about 2,000 seats for the program’s first year. The following year, the state is planning to contribute $425 million to grow the program to 12,000 seats across all five boroughs by fall of 2027, officials said.

The program — which the city is calling 2-K — is eventually expected to provide free child care for 2-year-olds to any New York City family who needs it, regardless of ZIP code, income, or immigration status.

“Raising a child takes a village – and it takes a city government willing to step up and tackle the child care crisis head-on,” Mamdani said in a statement.

The initial round of programs aims to serve families in high-need neighborhoods, with an eye toward inclusive access for children with disabilities and families in temporary housing, officials said.

Here’s what you need to know about the program’s first year.

What communities are expected to get seats in September 2026?

• School District 6: Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, and Inwood

• School District 10: Fordham, Belmont, Norwood, Morris Heights, Van Cortlandt Village, and Kingsbridge

• School Districts 18 and 23: Canarsie, Remsen Village, Brownsville, and Ocean Hill

• School District 27: Ozone Park, South Ozone Park, Richmond Hill, Howard Beach, Woodhaven, and Rockaways

City officials said they will release further information on the specific providers in the weeks ahead.

The city used a host of criteria to select these first four communities areas, officials said, including economic need, projected child care demand, existing access gaps, provider capacity, and readiness to scale up seats.

The programs will rely heavily on the existing child care infrastructure, particularly with home-based providers. The city has no plans at this time to open programs in schools, officials said during an unrelated City Council oversight hearing on Monday focused on a series of bills related to early childhood education.

“As we think about the spaces that are most developmentally appropriate, healthy, safe for our youngest children, we know that that is most often our child care centers and our family child care providers,” Emmy Liss, head of the Office of Child Care at the New York City Mayor’s Office, told council members.

Will all children who turn 2 in the calendar year be eligible?

Yes, but with a caveat, Liss explained.

Children may need to be 2-years-old at the time they start the program, depending on the setting, because of health codes. That means those children with fall birthdays may not be able to start right away.

So while seats will open in September 2026, the city expects to have rolling admissions throughout the fall to accommodate toddlers turning 2 from Sept. 10 (which is the anticipated first day of school) through Dec. 31. (The city’s preschool programs enroll children who turn 3 or 4 in a given calendar year.)

Will it be a “full day?”

It’s not yet clear whether all programs will offer a “full day” similar to public schools, which is 6 hours and 20 minutes. It may depend on feedback from providers and parents.

“We want to understand the capacity that our providers have. We also want to understand family interests, which we know varies by community, from community to community,” Liss said. “We do anticipate many providers and families will want a full day, but we have left open the option.”

What will the child/teacher ratio look like?

The answer isn’t straightforward, officials said.

Like the city’s programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, all programs will have at least two teachers in the room. But the number of children depends on the settings since some home-based providers serve mixed ages, from infants to older kids. For a group that’s exclusively for 2-year-olds, there would be two teachers for every 12 students. (For infants, the capacity is around eight. For 3-year-olds, there’s a maximum of 15 children, for 4-year-olds, it’s 18.)

What about children with disabilities or who might need extra support?

City officials pledged to take into account toddlers who might have particular needs, and said they plan to have coaches as well as “inclusion specialists” to help train staff.

The 2-K programs will also work closely with the Education Department’s Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning as well as the bureau of early intervention at the Health Department to “further tailor their coaching for staff,” Simone Hawkins, deputy chancellor of the Division of Early Childhood Education, told council members on Monday.

How will the city address child care workers’ low salaries?

As New York City grapples with salary disparities between prekindergarten teachers at its city-run programs versus those that operate in community based organizations with city funding, the issue of salaries for child care workers in the 2-K program remains a big concern.

Kellan Calder, an organizer with New Yorkers United for Child Care, praised the city’s approach in focusing on high-need neighborhoods, but told council members, “we want to make sure it’s done right, and that starts with paying providers fairly.”

Liss said the city is aware of the issue, noting that workers across the sector earn a wide range of salaries, but doesn’t yet have the answer.

“Broadly, child care workers in the city earn less than 96% of other professions, and that’s something we need to address,” Liss said.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Supreme Court finds parents have a right to know about gender transitions at school

2026-03-03T15:44:03+00:00

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Parents have the right to know about their child’s gender identity at school, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an emergency decision Monday.

The 6-3 decision by the conservative majority found parents were likely to prevail in a lawsuit seeking to overturn a California law that required teachers to use students’ preferred names and pronouns at school and that barred them from disclosing students’ gender identity to parents without the students’ consent.

The decision was notable because the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to take up similar cases that had worked their way through the courts. The case touches on hotly contested issues about the role of schools in children’s lives and how the law distinguishes between parents’ rights and children’s rights.

The majority invoked Mahmoud v. Taylor, a decision last year that found parents have the right to opt their children out of lessons that violate their religious beliefs. California’s law is unlikely to survive the strict scrutiny requirements imposed by Mahmoud, the court wrote.

“Indeed, the intrusion on parents’ free exercise rights here — unconsented facilitation of a child’s gender transition — is greater than the introduction of LGBTQ storybooks we considered sufficient to trigger strict scrutiny in Mahmoud,” the court wrote.

Going beyond just the question of religious rights, the court also found that California’s law likely violates parents’ due process rights to direct their children’s upbringing.

“Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, but when a child exhibits symptoms of gender dysphoria at school, California’s policies conceal that information from parents and facilitate a degree of gender transitioning during school hours,” the decision stated. “These policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Writing in dissent, Justice Elana Kagan said the court should have allowed the case to get a more thorough airing in the lower courts — or taken up one of the numerous cases that has been argued more extensively, including a similar one out of Massachusetts.

The case, Kagan wrote, “raises tricky questions, and so cries out for reflection and explanation. The Court is impatient: It already knows what it thinks, and insists on getting everything over quickly.”

Kagan also noted that the court last year refused to even consider the due process rights of parents who supported their children’s gender transition in its 2024 U.S. v. Skrmetti decision, which upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors.

The lawsuit in California originally was brought by Catholic teachers who said the law impinged on their free speech and religious liberty rights. Later, parents who said the law blocked them from making important decisions about their children’s health and upbringing joined the lawsuit.

A U.S. District Court judge sided with the teachers and parents, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit put that decision on hold, leaving California’s law in place while the lawsuit played out.

The teachers and parents asked the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis. They said allowing the law to remain in place, potentially for years, while the case worked its way through the system, could do irreparable harm.

The Supreme Court did not weigh in the teachers’ rights issues raised by the case, only on the parental rights.

The Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm focused on religious liberty that represented the parents in the case, predicted that the decision will “dismantle secret gender transition policies across the country.”

“This is a watershed moment for parental rights in America,” said Paul Jonna, special counsel at the law firm. “The Supreme Court has told California and every state in the nation in no uncertain terms: you cannot secretly transition a child behind a parent’s back.”

Attorneys for the state of California had argued their law supports the creation of safe and inclusive environments at school and allows parents to be notified, even against a student’s wishes, when there are immediate safety issues.

LGBTQ advocacy groups have said they generally encourage schools to help students find a way to involve their parents in these decisions, but not all parents are safe. Between 20% and 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ, with many reporting that parental rejection and abuse contributed to them leaving home.

The court majority wrote that California could inform parents about children’s gender transitions and still ensure child safety by enforcing child abuse laws.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

These co-ops are meant to support school districts. This one started Colorado’s ‘first public Christian school.’

2026-02-28T00:21:07+00:00

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Six decades ago, Colorado lawmakers made it easier for school districts to band together and offer services that they couldn’t afford to provide on their own.

The creation of Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, allowed districts to pool resources for things like special education services, career and technical education, early intervention services, gifted and talented programming, and teacher training.

Last fall, one of these co-ops proved to be a useful vehicle for a different aim — opening a school intended to test the legality of spending public money on religious education.

Education reEnvisioned, or ERBOCES, launched Riverstone Academy in Pueblo County with 30 elementary students in August. Billed as Colorado’s “first public Christian school,” it is the most prominent example of how its authorizer is using its BOCES status to further school choice.

The school — and ERBOCES’ recent role steering state dollars to home-schooling — is raising questions about whether these co-ops created in a different era for different purposes have too much latitude and too few guardrails.

The Colorado Department of Education’s enforcement powers are limited to certain areas, such as special education, a department spokesperson said. Most oversight falls to BOCES’ boards of directors, which can vary in how much or little they hold school operators accountable.

“Nobody in the state actually regulates how BOCES operate or what they can do,” said Ken Haptonstall, co-executive director of the Colorado BOCES Association, a membership group for BOCES.

“There’s no statutory way for the department to be able to say, ‘Oh, you’re being bad as a BOCES or you need to do this as a BOCES,’” he said.

Some lawmakers and education officials contacted by Chalkbeat said Riverstone’s creation shows school-authorizing safeguards failed — and creates a dangerous precedent.

George Welsh, executive director of the San Luis Valley BOCES, doesn’t agree with public funding for religious schools and said Riverstone’s launch by a BOCES creates a slippery slope.

“Obviously, if one can do it, why couldn’t all?” he said.

Riverstone is currently receiving state funding. But if a state audit underway now finds the school is ineligible because of Colorado’s ban on religious public school, the state could claw back the money. Riverstone and ERBOCES cited that possibility in a lawsuit filed against the state this month for religious discrimination.

BOCES exist to pool district resources

A 1965 Colorado law allowed the creation of BOCES. A year later, 14 school districts in the San Luis Valley banded together to form the state’s first one. Most states have a version of the public education co-ops, though names and formats vary.

In Colorado, BOCES are typically made up of a group of school districts from a single region. About half include a college or university. The cooperatives are governed by a board of at least five people, usually school board members from districts that belong to the BOCES. In some cases, school district superintendents can serve on the BOCES board.

Five Colorado BOCES authorize schools. ERBOCES, unlike the other four, doesn’t hire school staff or oversee day-to-day operations at its schools. Instead, it contracts with outside groups to operate them.

Some BOCES focus on offering a single service or program. One in Adams County provides insurance services to its three member districts. The only job of the Denver-based Expeditionary BOCES is to run a single school, the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning.

“The purpose of the BOCES is it’s a collaborative,” said Welsh, who heads the 14-member San Luis Valley BOCES.

He offered an example: “We have six and a half school psychologists in our stable … and so they serve all the school districts in the San Luis Valley in terms of the identification process for special education students.”

Welsh said his BOCES also runs a program for several young adults in the valley who have significant emotional disabilities. This semester, his team launched a pilot internship program that matches high schoolers in member districts with local businesses so they can get on-the-job experience.

Like many BOCES serving small, rural districts, Welsh’s BOCES is considered a “special education administrative unit.” It’s a label that can apply to a school district or a BOCES and means that the entity must ensure special education laws are followed for students with disabilities.

Royce Tranum, the executive director of San Juan Boces, which has eight member school districts in southwestern Colorado, said one of the “curious” things about BOCES is that there are strict state rules governing some areas but not others. For example, the state carefully monitors BOCES for the job they do as special education administrative units.

“They oversee parts of what we do, but not the organization as a whole,” she said.

Education reEnvisioned is different from other BOCES

ERBOCES was founded in 2013 as Colorado Digital BOCES.

Brad Miller, an attorney who helped start the co-op, said by email that its founders “recognized that school districts are reticent to offer student-focused special schools and programs … and that a BOCES was statutorily intended for such innovations and opportunities.”

State law says the cooperatives were enacted for the “expansion of education services of the public schools” in Colorado and, where possible, to enable “two or more school districts to cooperate in furnishing services.”

But mostly, ERBOCES isn’t helping member districts achieve economies of scale.

Education reEnvisioned has three member school districts with no shared boundaries, including District 49 in El Paso County and the Montezuma-Cortez district, which is almost 400 miles away in southwest Colorado. Pikes Peak State College is a member, and the Elizabeth school district in Elbert County joined Feb 10.

Ken Witt, the head of ERBOCES, has long been a familiar face in Colorado’s conservative education circles. As school board president in Jeffco more than a decade ago, he was part of a three-member conservative board majority that was recalled. Later, during his tenure as superintendent in Woodland Park, there was a staff exodus and accusations of transparency lapses.

Since Witt took the reins of ERBOCES in 2017, the cooperative has grown from two schools to 10, and enrollment in those schools has grown from 2,200 to 13,500 students, a 600% increase. Many of those students come from outside ERBOCES’ member districts.

Ken Witt has been the executive director of Education ReEnvisioned Board of Cooperative Educational Services since 2017.

Of Colorado’s 186 school districts and co-ops, ERBOCES is the 22nd largest, serving more students than some Denver metro school districts.

In 2022, ERBOCES began authorizing state-funded home-school enrichment programs, something no other BOCES does. Such programs typically offer one day of classes or activities each week, and the state pays half the normal per-pupil rate. Today, the cooperative authorizes more than 50 such programs, with more than 8,000 students.

Witt said in a presentation last fall that 30-40 more home-school enrichment programs are in the works.

Witt sent ERBOCES’ mission and vision statements to Chalkbeat and answered a couple questions by email, but he didn’t respond to follow-up questions or agree to an interview for this story.

Some district officials have objected to ERBOCES placing schools or programs outside member districts.

The Colorado Springs School District 11 sued ERBOCES over the issue in 2020 after ERBOCES placed a new school in the district without permission. The district argued that allowing the cooperative to open schools in non-member districts without permission violated the principle of local control. In 2024, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in District 11’s favor, saying state law doesn’t say or suggest that BOCES were meant to open schools in any district they wished.

Haptonstall, of the Colorado BOCES association, said he gets calls from people asking about ERBOCES: “Why are they opening this up in my region?”

“We always encourage them to call the Department of Education and just clarify whether or not that’s legal,” he said.

Cayce Hamerschlag, a mother from the 2,200-student Montezuma-Cortez district, said BOCES were created to provide benefits to member districts, but she doesn’t see that occurring with ERBOCES. Instead, she said it’s acting primarily as a school authorizer, drawing away students from school districts around the state.

ERBOCES’ six online schools enroll about 80 students from Montezuma-Cortez and several hundred from nearby districts, according to data shared at a recent school board meeting. Hamerschlag said when districts lose students, it creates a downward spiral. Declining enrollment leads to fewer offerings for students, the loss of good teachers, decreasing interest in neighborhood schools, and eventually a hit to the local economy, she said.

“I’m disgusted because I’m seeing the dismantling of public education here in Cortez,” said Hamerschlag, who works for San Juan BOCES in southwest Colorado but didn’t speak to Chalkbeat on behalf of the group. “I hear of it happening across the state, and my heart breaks for the students and communities that it’s affecting.”

Sen. Cathy Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat, said by email that if Riverstone is found eligible for public funding it could set a precedent, encouraging every religious school “to seek ‘public school’ status so they can receive public dollars.”

But one lawmaker believes Colorado’s current system “too often protects institutions over students and families.”

Sen. Scott Bright, a Republican from Weld County, said by email, “BOCES and the Department of Education should not be locked in a tug-of-war; instead, the legislature ought to reinstill clear guidance so that local partners are not forced to ‘push the edge’ of the law just to expand options for families,” he said.

How Education reEnvisioned created Riverstone

Miller, the lawyer for ERBOCES, said that BOCES “operate schools or programs at the direction of their members.”

But there’s no evidence that District 49 or Montezuma-Cortez officials requested or directed the launch of Riverstone. The school is nowhere near either district.

An email written by Miller indicates that Riverstone arose because Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm based in Arizona, sought a test case on religious public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked in a similar case out of Oklahoma last spring.

“ADF asked me if I could find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado,” Miller wrote in the June 4 email labeled “privileged and confidential.”

Riverstone opened two months later. Key start-up documents didn’t mention Riverstone’s religious affiliation or that it was intended to spark a lawsuit. There were no public deliberations about the idea of creating a religious public school.

The school board in the Pueblo 70 district, where Riverstone is located, did give permission for the school to locate there as required by the 2024 court decision, but the school’s real purpose went unmentioned at both meetings where it was on the agenda.

It’s not clear whether the ERBOCES board, which unanimously approves the vast majority of motions before it, discussed the school’s true purpose either. The cooperative doesn’t livestream its board meetings, and an ERBOCES employee told Chalkbeat the audio recording of the August 12 meeting where Riverstone’s contract was approved no longer exists.

Last summer, as Riverstone was taking shape, four of ERBOCES’ five board members may not have been eligible to serve on the board, based on Chalkbeat’s review of the state law on BOCES board makeup.

Jeremy Dys, a lawyer for the cooperative from the First Liberty Institute, said by email that ERBOCES Board President Lis Richard is an appointee of Montezuma-Cortez and John Graham, who recently left the board, was an appointee of District 49. Dys didn’t explain how this aligns with state law since neither had been a school board member or administrator in their respective districts for one to three years.

Dys described two other board members — Bethany Drosendahl and James Salazar — as “at large” members, which is allowed under state law provided they live in member districts. Asked why the two members live in non-member districts, Dys didn’t respond.

Salazar participated in the June vote on Riverstone but abstained from the August vote, possibly because of a conflict of interest. He was appointed president of the Riverstone Academy board in July.

None of the five ERBOCES board members when Riverstone was approved responded to Chalkbeat’s request for comment. (District 49 recently appointed a school board member to the ERBOCES board.)

Riverstone is run by a Pueblo nonprofit called Forging Education that runs Christian private schools and home-school programs.

Witt told Chalkbeat last fall that Riverstone is a public school because it was authorized by ERBOCES, and in January, the school received a $55,000 installment of state funding. But Forging Education officials have classified the school as private on their lease, insurance policy, and other documents. The school also acts like a private school by limiting public transparency.

Quin Friberg, the local pastor who heads Forging Education and Riverstone Academy, recently told an attorney working on behalf of Chalkbeat that Forging Education is not a public entity and therefore not subject to a state law that allows news organizations and others access to public records.

In early October, when Witt publicly announced Riverstone was the state’s “first public Christian school,” Pueblo County officials were surprised. They’d known that Friberg was interested in starting a school, but not that he’d opened it to students without ensuring the building was up to code. They quickly issued more than a dozen health and safety violations.

In late January, Riverstone leaders agreed to close the school building after orders from county officials. School leaders have since refused to disclose the school’s temporary location, and ERBOCES officials say they have no records showing the school’s current address.

Correction: April 15, 2026: Due to incorrect information provided by the Montezuma-Cortez school district, a previous version of this story contained incorrect information about the benefits the district received from belonging to Education ReEnvisioned BOCES.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

U.S. Department of Education releases vision for reshaping federal research after DOGE cuts

2026-02-27T23:20:56+00:00

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A much-anticipated report on the future of federal education research makes a strong case for the value of the Institute of Education Sciences and calls for significant changes to make research more useful for educators and policymakers.

The report released Friday by the U.S. Department of Education praises IES for significantly improving the rigor of education research and contributing to a strong body of evidence about what works in schools. But it also says too much previous work by IES hasn’t been put to practical use, has failed to address high-priority issues, or is redundant.

Although the department shared the recommendations, the Trump administration has not committed to adopting them. The administration wants to dismantle the Department of Education and has been parceling out key functions to other agencies in pursuit of that goal. The Institute of Education Sciences was devastated during the early months of the Trump administration, when the U.S. DOGE Service cost-cutting initiative abruptly canceled contracts and eliminated more than 100 positions.

Education research is one of the Education Department functions required by law and is widely considered one of the most important roles played by the federal government. Many researchers and advocates fear states would not make their own investments in education research and that research would not be as widely disseminated without federal involvement. IES directors are appointed for six-year terms that, like those of Federal Reserve chairs, are intended to straddle administrations and insulate the agency from partisan pressures.

The Department of Education hired Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the center-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to look at the work IES had been doing and talk to researchers, state schools chiefs, and others about the best path forward.

“These are not nips and tucks, as IES is struggling in multiple ways to remain relevant and responsive,” Northern wrote in “Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences.”

But the report also offers a vigorous defense of the value of a strong federal role in education research, and argues that research must remain independent from political influence.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that IES’s dogged commitment to high-quality empirical studies has transformed the field of education research, shifting it away from less to more rigorous methods and practices,” the report says.

As the administration seeks to dismantle the Department of Education, the report argues that a reinvigorated IES would support larger goals of giving states and parents the tools to improve how schools serve students.

IES is an “entity worth redemption and revitalization, precisely because its work has the potential to empower those who deliver education to the American people, meaning state and local leaders, school leaders, teachers, and the broader public, including parents,” the report says.

The report lists out research projects that have helped educators support struggling readers, improve students’ math skills, and steer high school students to higher education. Practice guides related to literacy and math instruction are downloaded tens of thousands of times each year. The basic data sets that the National Center for Education Statistics, or NCES, maintains on student demographics, school finance, and more provide a foundation for public and private research.

And the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as NAEP or the nation’s report card, provides essential information about student learning across states and over time.

But too often, research doesn’t make it into the classroom or answer the most urgent questions in education, the report said. And some data collection projects are duplicative or unwieldy and cost too much for the value of data produced.

The report includes numerous recommendations focused on making research easier for schools to use. For example, it says researchers should produce one-page summaries, infographics, and short videos as a condition for funding.

The report also emphasizes funding research that can quickly drive change at the classroom level. There is often tension, however, between speed and determining whether an intervention makes a difference for students years later.

The report’s recommendations include:

Focusing on fewer problems in education and addressing those problems from multiple angles and across the offices within IES.
Streamlining data collection and focusing on core functions.
Prioritizing multi-state projects over requests from individual states and jurisdictions.
Directing research toward “practicality, innovation, and relevance.”
Narrowing the scope of the What Works Clearinghouse to practice guides and other tools educators are likely to use.

In its press release, the Education Department thanked Northern for her work and noted the IES “too often delivered research that is slow, siloed, and disconnected from classroom realities.” It did not commit to adopting the recommendations.

In a blog post, acting IES Director Matthew Soldner wrote: “The challenge that lies ahead is operationalizing elements of Reimagining while ensuring that IES’s unique role in the education sciences isn’t just continued, but elevated."

Report on reshaping IES gets outside support

In an interview, Northern said one of her first questions when the department approached her about the job was how serious officials were about reinvigorating IES. She said she was impressed with how many people inside and outside the administration wanted to engage on the future of IES.

“Too much research was suited to what researchers wanted to know rather than what the field needs to know,” said Northern, who is continuing in an advisory role through June. “We had no real strategy.”

Mark Schneider, who served as director of IES from 2018 to 2024, said the cuts made by DOGE have opened up an “amazing opportunity” to rebuild the agency. Schneider has described being frustrated in making big changes during his tenure by entrenched interests.

Schneider said he supports the report’s focus on addressing urgent education problems and changing how NCES collects long-term data.

“The statistical data collections were old, creaky,” he said. “They weren’t using modern techniques. They didn’t care enough about timeliness.”

Rachel Dinkes, president of the Knowledge Alliance, a national education research coalition, said the report represents a “positive step forward” overall because it promotes the idea that IES is important to federal infrastructure.

“There is a real critical mass of people that feel that IES is a really important agency,” she said.

The report includes valuable recommendations on connecting research and practice, said Cara Jackson, research manager at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting and past president of the Association of Education Finance and Policy. But Jackson worries that too much focus on speed could lead to more correlational studies and less rigor around causality.

Jackson, who participated in one of the working groups that contributed to the report, said she doesn’t want to open the door to vendors making misleading claims about their products.

She also wonders who will turn the recommendations into policy change.

“They’ve let so many people go,” she said. “I’m worried we’ve done tremendous damage to our ability to recruit people into government work.”

Read the full report here.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor covering education policy and politics. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

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

NYC students clock about 130 fewer hours in class than national peers. It likely hurts learning.

2026-02-27T21:24:32+00:00

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Though New York City public schools spend well above average per student each year, kids in the five boroughs are on track this year to spend significantly less time in class than the national average — and that has potential consequences for learning.

Students are in school about a week less this year than the state’s required minimum of 180 days of instruction. That’s because of this week’s snow day (for which the city got a waiver from the state), four professional days where teachers are working while students are off, and as usual, two half days for spring and fall parent-teacher conferences.

While those days add up, the main driver in the disparity is the length of the city’s school day, lasting 6 hours and 20 minutes. Nationally, students are in school on average about 7 hours a day 179 days per year, according to a 2025 study that looked at federal school time data and analyzed more than 74 studies about the importance of total school time.

Making sure kids are in school is a top priority for the city’s new chancellor, Kamar Samuels, who pledged to focus on addressing chronic absenteeism. About 1 in 3 New York City children were chronically absent last year, which is defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. The chronic absenteeism rate is seen as a major predictor of performance since missing class means missing instruction.

“Folks need to understand that if we’re not in school your child is going to miss work,” Samuels previously told Chalkbeat.

New York City K-12 students with perfect attendance are on track this year to be in school for 1,102 hours. That’s about 20 fewer days than the national average, per the study, of about 1,231 hours in school each year.

And this doesn’t take into account all of the other times New York City students miss out on instruction due to testing and test prep for the math and reading assessments students take three times a year, the state tests for grades 3-8, and Regents exam days in the winter and spring when many high school students don’t attend school.

The quality and quantity of time spent in school both matter, said Matthew Kraft, one of the study’s authors and a professor of education and economics at Brown University.

“Overall the evidence strongly points to additional instructional time increasing student success in school,” Kraft said. “Of course, how much time you add, when you add it, and how it’s used also matter tremendously. But it is one of those necessary but not sufficient inputs into supporting a successful education.”

There’s wide variation in terms of the school day length between states and even within states, Kraft said, urging leaders to examine those disparities.

“I think that’s a really underappreciated element of inequity in our learning system that we don’t talk enough about,” he said. “Of course there are collective bargaining constraints and budgetary constraints, no doubt, and we can’t trivialize those, but it’s at least worth having a conversation about what we think would be best for kids.”

The state laws that set minimum learning time thresholds, he said, are just that: minimums.

“They are not what we should be targeting or aspiring to,” he suggested. “They set a floor that we should be moving beyond.”

Education Department officials reiterated that this year’s calendar met the state’s guidelines for calculating instructional time, which includes allowances for professional development, parent-teacher conferences, and Regents days.

“We also know that instructional time only matters if students are present,” Chyann Tull, an Education Department spokesperson, said in a statement. “That’s why NYC Public Schools continues to provide targeted support to schools and families and helping remove barriers to regular attendance.”

David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Grad Center, emphasized the importance of thinking about “the problems of continuity and opacity” in the school calendar, where interruptions are frequent. Out of 45 school weeks, he said, less than half — about 20 — have complete five-day weeks.

“What seems like 180 days isn’t really,” he said, adding, “A child’s individual calendar may differ from grade to grade, program to program because of testing and other non-instructional obligations.”

Bloomfield staunchly advocated for snow days, but he also believes the city should consider rethinking the calendar to add days at the start of the school year, before Labor Day.

Students return to school the Thursday after Labor Day. Given this year’s late holiday, schools aren’t expected to start until Sept. 10 for 2026-27.

“Since summer camps have already closed, most families would not be unnecessarily inconvenienced by the change,” Bloomfield recently wrote in an op-ed. “The main impediment would be union agreement, a difficult but not impossible challenge for the new administration to overcome.”

Neither the union nor the Education Department responded to questions about next year’s calendar.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Can the politics of schools be fixed?

2026-02-26T12:02:43+00:00

America’s schools exist to educate students — right?

Not exactly, says Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at the Ohio State University. In his recently published book, “No Adult Left Behind,” Kogan lays out a provocative thesis: public education is not set out to maximize student learning. Instead, it prioritizes the various demands of adults.

Employee groups protect their members’ jobs, voters without children reject additional funding for schools, and activists derail a focus on academics by complaining about school mascots or the types of books in the library, he says.

“Kids can’t vote,” writes Kogan. “Most people who can (and do) aren’t particularly concerned about their learning.”

Click here to continue reading.

Unions, NYCLU slam bills that would grant police more power over protests at schools

2026-02-25T21:10:36+00:00

This story was originally published on Feb. 25 by THE CITY. Sign up here to get the latest stories from THE CITY delivered to you each morning.

College faculty unions and the New York Civil Liberties Union are turning up the heat in their opposition to a bill they say would greatly restrict the ability to protest or rally at schools and college campuses. Council Speaker Julie Menin says the bill is necessary to help combat hate and antisemitism.

The bill, introduced by Bronx Councilmember Eric Dinowitz last month, would order the police commissioner to establish a “buffer zone” at every entrance and exit of public and private schools, college campuses, and educational facilities and to come up with a plan to address protests in those spaces. Menin, Dinowitz, and the Council’s new Committee to Combat Hate, where the bill was introduced, claim the proposals promote greater transparency for the NYPD around protests and protect free speech.

Though the bill does not explicitly bar protests by unions or any group, organized labor and the NYCLU remain concerned that it gives police greater control to determine who can protest on schools and campuses.

Professional Staff Congress-CUNY president James Davis noted that the police department already has the power to determine if a protest is unsafe and to set up barricades, dole out permits for large gatherings and amplified sound and protect access to sidewalks, entrances and exits.

“The NYPD already has broad discretion to determine if there’s a threat to public safety,” he said in an interview Wednesday morning. “In fact, the NYPD has exceeded their authority,” as evidenced by recent lawsuits and settlements in which the NYPD has been found to have violated the First Amendment rights of demonstrators, added Davis.

“We feel that [the Council] should just go back to the drawing board entirely,” he said.

Dinowitz’s bill was the subject of a packed hearing on Wednesday of the Council’s Committee to Combat Hate, which considered a number of bills including one that would establish similar “buffer zones” at houses of worship.

The NYPD expressed skepticism over both “buffer zone” bills. The agency’s head of legal matters, Michael Gerber, testified that while the NYPD condemns antisemitism, it is “obligated to ensure the rights of protesters without regard to the content of protected speech.” He also voiced concern that some language in Dinowitz’s bill, which would order the agency to come up with a “buffer zone” plan even for private schools and universities, may be legally dubious.

Gerber later clarified that the NYPD has no objections to the amended bills.

Dinowitz and Menin defended their efforts to ensure police transparency at educational facilities and elsewhere — and denied that any of the bills up for a hearing on Wednesday threatened free speech.

“We are instructing the NYPD to come up with a plan, and to make transparent that plan, so that everyone no matter where you are on this issue, whether you’re outside or inside of school, can have transparency and can know what you’re getting from the city government – this is what people deserve,” said Dinowitz.

“In creating these buffer zones and making that plan public, we are preserving everyone’s civil liberties and enforcing and protecting people’s right to feel safe,” added Dinowitz, invoking the image of children being afraid to wear hijabs or yarmulkes in their schools.

An amended version of his bill posted late Monday eliminated language determining that the “buffer zone” would measure 100 feet from every entrance and exit of any educational facility, which UAW Region 9A president Brandon Mancilla said was too extreme and would essentially bar protests anywhere in a city as densely populated as New York.

It also more explicitly asserts unions’ federal right to picket their employers. Those changes are a result of feedback from several unions at a meeting convened by the NYC Central Labor Council last week, including PSC-CUNY and the UAW, with representatives from Menin and Dinowitz’s offices.

But PSC-CUNY and NYCLU still strongly oppose the bill and are expected to testify against it at the hearing on Wednesday. United Auto Workers Region 9A, which represents teaching staff at several private universities including Columbia, also opposes the bill.

Justin Harrison, senior policy counsel at the NYCLU, said the group opposes the committee’s entire slate of bills, including the proposal that would restrict protests at houses of worship.

“It’s also troubling that the Council amended these bills barely 36 hours before the Council hearing, leaving the public with little time to review and prepare a response,” Harrison said in a statement to THE CITY. “At a time when the Trump administration is actively targeting, arresting, and even killing dissenters, lawmakers must reject these rushed, ill-advised proposals that will criminalize and punish protest.”

Menin created the committee in January, one week into her tenure as Speaker, and soon after introduced a five-point plan to help “combat antisemitism, strengthen protections for schools and all houses of worship, and expand Holocaust education citywide.” She cited data from the NYPD showing antisemitic incidents accounted for 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025, though only 10% of city residents are Jewish.

Her proposals came on the heels of the police’s widely-criticized response to protesters who picketed the Park East Synagogue, which had rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel and to settlements on the occupied West Bank. Jewish leaders, including Menin, condemned the demonstrations by pro-Palestinian protesters as antisemitic.

Intro 175, the bill creating the so-called “buffer zone” on schools and college campuses, currently has 23 co-sponsors in the City Council, below the threshold for approval. Council majority leader Shaun Abreu, whose district includes Columbia University and City College, has not signed onto the bill. He declined to comment on Tuesday.

(Disclosure: Irizarry Aponte is a PSC member in her role as an adjunct instructor at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.)