Minneapolis Public Schools is taking the first steps toward closing as many as 16 schools after years of declining enrollment has left it with an expansive real estate portfolio that includes more than 12,000 empty desks.

District leaders unveiled on Tuesday three options for school closures, which they say will allow them to provide more consistent educational offerings, like art and music. School leaders didn’t mention the budget concerns looming over the district — a $39.7 million deficit this year — or even how much the proposals might save.

“We’ve been talking for a long time about the challenges facing our district,” Superintendent Lisa Sayles-Adams told the board Tuesday. “Tonight, after years of analysis, listening and planning, we will be looking at what we might actually do about it.”

At the earliest, the board will vote to select a plan in November, after school board elections, but before families begin the enrollment process for next school year. The board could also choose to make no changes. The district has been discussing the potential for school closures, calling the process “transformation,” since 2023.

School closures face fierce opposition from many parents, who don’t want to see their neighborhood school shutter, as well as the powerful teachers’ union, which fears consolidation will lead to further enrollment declines.

In a press release, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators called the proposals “three different worst-case scenarios for the future of MPS.” The district did not include any information on which jobs, if any, would be eliminated as part of their proposals.

Across all presented Tuesday, the district proposes closing seven elementary schools — Bethune, Pratt, Lake Harriet Lower Campus, Lake Nokomis Wenonah, Loring, Kenny and Hmong International Academy — and a single middle school, Anwatin. Five additional elementary schools would be closed in one or two of the options presented — Field, Hiawatha, Howe, Webster and Cityview.

None of the proposals include closing any of the district’s seven community high schools. But under all options, the district would relocate four of its specialized high school programs, currently located in their own separate buildings, within existing community high schools.

Heritage High School, which focuses on Somali language and culture, would relocate to Edison High School. Longfellow High School, which serves pregnant and parenting students, would relocate to North High School, which also serves these students. FAIR, an arts magnet high school, would relocate to North. Wellstone, which provides legally mandated services for immigrant students ages 18-22, would relocate from leased space at Minneapolis College into South High School.

The district’s estimates 12-14% of students would be impacted by the proposals.

The proposed closures would happen across the city, but be particularly pronounced in the north and southwest parts of the city. Both areas would lose two elementary schools under all three options. Schools that feed students to Washburn High School would be the least impacted under the three options, while also retaining the highest enrollment compared to any other area of the city.

The plan expands the Montessori program at Seward from K-6 to K-8. In two scenarios, Kenwood Elementary School would be moved back to the Southwest High School from North, reversing an unpopular attempt five years ago to integrate what was a predominantly white elementary school into a predominantly Black high school.

Principals at the schools proposed for closure were notified shortly before the board meeting Tuesday night.

In January, the district laid out what it considers the minimum level of enrollment necessary to support the minimum level of services schools should provide. For elementary schools, the minimum size ranges from 360 to 477, depending on the number of low-income students enrolled at the school. At the middle school level, the range is 594 to 756, and at the high school level the range is 888 to 1064.

Community engagement sessions are scheduled in September and October , and there is also an online survey. The board will hear a summary of feedback on Oct. 20.

The district promised Tuesday that if one of the three options were enacted, it would be able to guarantee sufficient funding going forward to provide a consistent set of services across all schools. The only specific staffing the district promised, however, was at least two academic intervention teachers per building, and full-time art, music and gym teachers at all elementary schools.

The district has struggled for many years to provide some basic services, like elementary art, music and gym, at its lowest-enrolled schools.

The district presented only limited information on the financial impact of closing schools. Deputy Superintendent Ty Thompson said that addressing the district’s long-term financial challenges was not part of the board’s directive on “transformation” to the superintendent.

The district’s finances have been deteriorating since 2018, according to its annual financial projections. The district was able to delay budget cuts when it received over in federal pandemic aid. It used much of the money to prop up its sprawling portfolio of schools which have capacity for around 42,000 students, while the district’s enrollment is below 30,000.

A combination of reasons have left the district in an ongoing cycle of cuts in recent years. Some factors outside the district’s control include education funding that hasn’t kept up with inflation,  state funding that doesn’t cover the full cost of mandated English learner and special education services, and new unfunded state mandates like paid medical and family leave and summer unemployment benefits for some school workers.

But the district has also failed to manage many of the financial levers within its control. It made a series of blunders that led to steep enrollment losses and the associated funding, including keeping schools closed during the pandemic longer than any other in the state.

The district also implemented an unpopular plan that redrew boundaries to reduce segregation while closing popular magnet schools in the district’s wealthy Southwest corner.

The district has failed to control its labor costs, agreeing to significant pay raises and mandated staffing levels that have raised its costs faster than its funding has increased.

And, the district has made which the Reformer has this year.

Minneapolis is not the only district closing schools in the state. St. Paul Public Schools voted to close six public schools in 2021, and Robbinsdale Public Schools started this school year with three fewer school buildings.

The same factors at play in Minnesota are also impacting districts across the country. In recent years, , , , , , , , , , , , and thousands of other districts have faced enrollment decreases and cost increases that have led to discussion of school closures, and in some cases action to close schools.

This story was originally published by the Minnesota Reformer.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

This story about was produced by a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

SEWARD, Alaska — It was 2018 when Casie Warner first realized there was a major problem in this popular cruise port, nestled on an inlet about a two-hour drive south of Anchorage. At the time, Warner worked as a home visitor, providing advice, support and resources to low-income parents with young children.

Time and time again, Warner would hear the same story from parents: “‘I wasn’t able to make my medical appointments. I didn’t have child care,’” said Warner. “‘I couldn’t pick up an extra shift at work because of child care.’”

Warner set out to find a solution. But Seward, like many rural communities across the country, is considered a child care desert, where options are scarce and there are no quick fixes.

Then, some unexpected help arrived. In 2021, Norwegian Cruise Lines donated $1 million to Seward to help with post-pandemic economic recovery. The city council voted to spend the money on the two issues deemed to be the most relevant for residents of the town of 2,800: housing and child care.

Five years later, licensed child care slots are up by 150 percent.

In rural communities, the availability of affordable child care is a key component of economic success. At a time when child care shortages are pronounced, especially in rural areas, Seward’s approach of prioritizing child care and investing in new programs and providers offers a potential road map for other communities looking to strengthen their child care industry, support the local economy and eventually retain or attract new residents.

“The hope is that if we can address child care, that perhaps it will have a bigger ripple effect,” said Courtney Bringhurst, a Seward city planner. “We’re hoping that it will help more families be willing to relocate to Seward and stay,” she added. “If we can get more families to stay, that will help strengthen our schools, which will give more opportunities and interest for other businesses to come to Seward.”

Although Seward’s success so far in expanding child care slots shows what’s possible with more money, experts caution that in most places, public dollars, not private donations alone, will need to fill the gap.

“It’s impossible math otherwise for these programs to continue operating, particularly in rural communities,” said Hailey Gibbs, associate director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

About in the U.S. live in a rural community, and though they need and use child care as much as their urban counterparts, they face many more problems getting it. In sparsely populated areas, families are likely to live far from the few providers that exist. The most used child care option for rural families is a provider that operates from their home, but those small businesses are squeezed by low profit margins and high costs.

According to the Center for American Progress, almost all — — of Alaska’s children live in a child care desert, defined by the think tank as an area where there are three or more children for every licensed child care slot. The problem is even more acute in rural areas that are also low income: In those parts of the country, there are nine babies for every one licensed child care slot, CAP says.

Alaska’s economy pays a penalty for the lack of child care — according to a from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the state lost $165 million because parents couldn’t access child care to go to work or school.

But the economic effects are only part of the story. Rural families are more likely to experience food insecurity and to be on public assistance, and rural children under 5 have one of the nation’s . Poverty and food insecurity are linked to poor school performance, which high quality child care could alleviate — but that care is not an option for many.

“We know that fewer than half of children from low-income families are ready for school at age 5, and the gaps are just so much larger in rural communities,” said Karen Harrison, lead adviser for workforce development at the global nonprofit Save the Children, which runs several rural child care initiatives in the United States. “Many families in rural communities are left without options.”

In Seward, Ella Wright said she and her husband spent the first five years of their daughter’s life working part time in nursing and mental health jobs respectively, due to the lack of child care. Until her daughter got a spot at a part-time preschool at age 3, “we had no breaks,” Wright said.

In 2023, about half of Alaskan parents who were surveyed said that, like Wright, they could not fully participate in the labor force because of child care access and affordability.

The picturesque town of Seward, framed by snow-capped peaks on the Kenai Peninsula, cannot afford to lose workers due to a lack of child care. Summers in Seward are lively. On days when cruise ships are in port, tourists meander up and down the main street, stocking up on souvenirs and taking pictures in front of Resurrection Bay’s ice-blue water. During these months, seasonal workers flood the town to work at restaurants and shops.

But the town’s year-round employers, including a state maximum-security prison and a medical facility, face . The shortages have been so pronounced that in 2023 the town had to temporarily close its small local jail, diverting people in custody to state-run facilities, until it could hire more employees.

“It’s very difficult to maintain a strong, year-round economy, because we can’t maintain families year-round in Seward,” said Bringhurst, the city planner. “People just can’t maintain a job if they don’t have reliable child care.”

The donation from Norwegian couldn’t have come at a better time for the town. In 2019, a child care program closed unexpectedly just three years after it opened, eliminating 20 child care spots from the community. (Qutekcak Native Tribe, a Seward-based social services agency that ran the program, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Then in , a preschool program funded by federal Title I money closed after the local elementary school no longer enrolled enough children from low-income families to qualify for the funding. That left two licensed programs and 20 slots for more than 80 children who needed care.

Norwegian’s donation was part of to Alaska port communities that were affected by Covid-related tourism drops. Warner had transitioned from her role as a home visitor to running a child-focused nonprofit, Happy Youth Programs and Educational Resources, or HYPER, which was chosen to lead the town’s new child care strategy.

Using half of the $1 million donation, HYPER trained providers so they could meet requirements for state licensing and offered start-up funds to help cover the high costs associated with launching or expanding home-based child care businesses. The organization also developed a retention bonus program to boost salaries for providers, paid for early educators to attend trainings and established a year-long subsidy program to help families pay for child care.

Seven miles north of downtown Seward, off the only road into town, Josie McClain’s home-based child care program is tucked away in a clearing down a long gravel driveway. The town’s investment has made an immense difference for McClain, who has a degree in elementary education and launched her program in late 2019 after years of running the local teen and youth center for the city.

On a recent morning, a dozen children roamed around a playground fenced off in front of McClain’s house. McClain and her assistant watched, sometimes stepping in to comfort crying toddlers, fix broken sandals and navigate arguments over the swings.

A little girl shuffled over to McClain, her rainbow-colored sandals on the wrong feet, and pointed through the playground fence, across the yard, to a sea of yellow dandelions.

“I see a lot of flowers!” exclaimed the little girl.

“Should we make dandelion jelly this week?” McClain asked. The little girl nodded eagerly.

“I’ll look up a recipe,” McClain promised. She kissed the girl on her head and sent her off to play.

The weight of her role in the community isn’t lost on McClain. The children in McClain’s care have a deep attachment to her. Several call her “grandma” and, during the day, wander over to cuddle on her lap or give her a hug.

Many of the parents McClain serves wouldn’t be able to work if it weren’t for her. Several work in critical industries, like the local bank, the school system and the hospital. As McClain looked around the playground, she pointed out children whose parents would have left Seward if she hadn’t had room for them. Hers is one of two 24-hour programs in Seward, offering reliable care for parents who work nights, as well as backup and emergency care when parents have unforeseen needs.

“There isn’t any place for them to go,” McClain said. “There isn’t an alternative.”

Running her program has involved sacrifice. On weeks when she can’t make the more than two-hour drive to Anchorage to load up on more affordable food and supplies, she must pay more at the stores in Seward. Recently, a federal food program for child care lowered their reimbursement rates, meaning she gets less money for the healthy food she serves children five times a day. To save money, she’s teaching herself how to can food for the winter. She hasn’t taken a vacation in years.

HYPER’s support and recent efforts from the state have helped ease the load a bit. In 2023, McClain was able to expand her child care program thanks to money from the organization. She used $10,000 from the nonprofit to help pay for a new screened-in porch to give children more room to play, including outside in cold and rainy weather.

“It made my small house one thousand times better,” McClain said. She also got licensed as a group child care program, allowing her to take in four more children for a total of 12.

For the first time in years, McClain has been able to stop living paycheck to paycheck and save money. She receives an annual bonus of several thousand dollars from HYPER each year. For the year that HYPER subsidized parent tuition, McClain could count on a reliable payment each month instead of having to “hunt down money” from families.

Recently, Alaska invested more in child care, from which McClain has also benefited. In 2025, the state allocated about $6 million more to expand eligibility for child care assistance, and this year, added close to another $6 million for annual grants to help child care programs operate. More is needed though, experts say. Earlier this year, lawmakers approved $6.4 million to help retain early educators, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy later those funds, along with that would have gone to Head Start, the federal and state-funded preschool program for low-income children.

While the cruise company’s donation funding boosted child care in Seward, and state initiatives have provided additional support, the town’s child care crisis is far from solved. Early childhood jobs, with their low pay and lack of benefits, are hard to fill, Warner said. McClain fears she will have to drop four children from her program if she can’t find someone to replace her assistant, who is leaving soon.

And although two new providers have opened with HYPER’s support in the last year, there is still a shortage of infant and toddler spots.

“I don’t think that the people who want more child care know how many hoops there are to jump through,” said Katie Shepard, who co-runs the newest program in town, Timberline Learning Center. “Anybody else who is not just dying to work with the kids is not going to go through all that.”

When Shepard wanted to open a part-time preschool program, the cost seemed insurmountable. HYPER provided a $30,000 grant to cover start-up costs, program supplies and business licenses. “Unless we had that kind of money to put into something like this, I don’t think it would have been possible,” Shepard said.

On one summer morning, 10 children scampered around the community room of a Methodist church downtown.

“Who wants to play the bug game?” asked one boy, who was sitting in the middle of the room with bug-themed bingo boards. Several children crowded around him.

At the back of the room, Shepard sat by a large poster where students could write their names and stick them by a picture of their favorite bug.

“I LOVE butterflies!” exclaimed a little girl as she ran up to Shepard. With her teacher’s encouragement, she carefully glued her name on the paper. “Glue is so sticky,” she said.

Nearby, Wright’s daughter sat at a table carefully placing pictures of bugs onto a clear piece of sticky paper. Wright has seen how her daughter, now 4, has thrived at preschool.

“Language-wise she’s grown, she’s task-oriented. She’s an only child, so that socialization is key for her,” Wright said. Last year, the family received a subsidy from HYPER to help pay tuition. “That was huge,” she said, adding that the family was able to save more money. She will be able to take on more hours at work once her daughter enters kindergarten full time in the fall.

Looking forward, Warner is trying to find a permanent source of funding for child care to help more families. Ideally, she says, that funding will come from a tourism tax. Recently, a new cruise ship dock opened, which will allow larger ships — and more people — to dock in Seward. If key infrastructure needs like child care aren’t addressed, Warner fears people won’t be able to live there.

“We have to support our year-round economy,” because, unlike the tourists, “We also love to live here when it’s quiet and cold.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program. 

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Claire Stremple for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com.

The body regulating Florida public schools and state colleges Wednesday approved what the Florida Department of Education calls “one of the most comprehensive, parent-centered AI frameworks in the country.”

The State Board of Education  require public school districts and charter school governing boards to amend their internet safety policies to include specific guardrails and directives related to AI by July 1. 

“We are neither going to one extreme, i.e. banning AI, nor are we going to the other extreme, which is just unfettered access,” Education Commissioner Henry Mack said during the board’s meeting in Winter Haven.

Districts and charter schools, at a minimum, must make policies to “protect students, parents, and instructional personnel from unlawful, deceptive, unsafe, or unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence systems, services, applications, and tools used in connection with educational programs and operations in Florida public schools,” according to the public school rule. 

The idea, the rule states, is to “ensure that any approved use of artificial intelligence protects education records and student information, while supporting student achievement, civic literacy, academic excellence, and workforce preparedness.”

More specifically, schools will have to notify parents when teachers approve an AI instructional tool for use, including the name of the platform and classes in which it would be used and the nature of student interaction.

The policy must include a process for parents to object to AI use and provide alternatives to the tool.

“Florida will not outsource childhood to a chatbot,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news release following the meeting. “We welcome tools that help teachers teach and students learn. We will not accept tools that hide from parents, harvest student data, grade kids in secret, or pretend to be a friend. In this state, a teacher stands in front of the class, a parent has the last word, and a student still has to think.”

Schools will be required to conduct additional reviews for AI tools used in PreK-5 to ensure they are age-appropriate. 

The rule looks to protect the teaching profession from being replaced by computers. It calls to “ensure that the use of AI instructional tools is limited to supplementing, and not replacing, the professional judgment of teachers and the primary right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Further, the policy must ensure AI is “accurate, transparent, viewpoint neutral, accessible to students and educators with disabilities.”

State colleges

The board approved a similar for the state college system, directing the 28 boards of trustees to create policies “that provide for the use and limitations of use of artificial intelligence tools in order to ensure quality of education for students, efficiency of operations, and a safe learning environment for the whole college community.”

“The rule that you accepted is not a prohibition, it empowers faculty to decide what to do, it allows the instructor to explicitly permit it or prohibit it with respect to their assignments,” Mack said of the college-level policy.

“I just think it’s a great thing that we put the guardrails, but the guardrails are so nuanced that it allows for flexibility and innovation and faculty ownership in a way that does not compromise or usurp the faculty’s ability to teach what they want.”

This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.

A month into the school year, teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District are still adapting to the district’s new policy that bans screen time for its youngest kids and will soon place significant restrictions on older students.Ìę

One first grade teacher has switched to jigsaw puzzles instead of having her students complete activities on a learning app. A middle school science teacher is considering how to teach Newton’s Third Law of physics with toy cars instead of a video simulation. Some teachers say they are struggling to adjust after years of technology woven into their curriculum.

“Our goals haven’t changed whether we’re on screens or not,” said Armaghan Khan, an eighth grade teacher at Johnnie Cochran Jr. Middle School. “The idea is still to provide quality standards of mind instruction. And so, what does that look like when you’re not on a screen? And for a lot of the newer teachers, myself included, we’ve never really taught that way.”Ìę

Passed in June, LAUSD’s generally prohibits use of district-issued devices for students in early education through first grade. It places caps on every other grade level — the higher the grade, the more screen time is allowed. And by the time students reach high school, they are allowed up to 90 minutes per week in each subject area.Ìę

The new policy followed months of organizing by parents who argued that students — and teachers — had become too dependent on digital devices in classrooms. They argued that schools should prioritize teacher-led instruction, hands-on activities and interaction with peers. Some also said their children’s struggles to regulate their emotions were a direct result of using screens in the classroom.Ìę

But the new restrictions on screen time have also meant that teachers have to rethink lessons built around laptops, tablets and digital instructional programs. Many are concerned about students with disabilities and English language learners who may disproportionately rely on technology, even though accommodations are possible.Ìę

Corinne Hyde, a professor of education at USC, said she worries that the policy could unnecessarily restrict teachers’ ability to use technology when they believe it would benefit students.Ìę

“We should trust teachers to make good instructional decisions, and that as long as we equip them with appropriate professional development and support, that they are fully capable of making the appropriate decisions about how to use technology in their classrooms, or if they should use technology in their classrooms,” said Hyde.Ìę

No screen time for LAUSD’s youngest learnersÌę

Last year, the youngest daughter of Julie Edwards, a parent and member of the group Schools Beyond Screens, would come home obsessed with JiJi, a penguin cartoon that appears on a gamified learning platform. Now, Edwards’ first grader comes home eager to talk about her friends and her school’s ticket-based rewards system, she says.Ìę

“There’s still more work to do,” said Edwards. “But I think everything is like moving in such a great direction, and I’m just really hoping that because this is happening on an institutional level, it really starts to filter down into families’ personal lives.”

Edwards’ daughter’s teacher has made a number of changes to go screenless. So has Martha Medina, a first grade teacher at Logan Academy of Global Ecology, who also lost other classroom support. This year, she no longer has instructional coaches, who help with targeted learning interventions, or teachers’ aides.Ìę

Medina had planned to have students rotate among three 15-minute stations so she could provide individualized attention. One station would be with her, another in the library and a third would use a learning app on an iPad.Ìę

Under the new policy, Medina can no longer use the app as planned. Instead, students at the third station work on jigsaw puzzles or art-related activities designed to reinforce uppercase and lowercase letters.

She said the changes have made it much more difficult to run the three groups, limit constant disruptions and keep children on task.Ìę

“Parents are worried that the kids are going to be on the iPad all day,” she said. “That’s just not the case in primary. There’s no way we can have the kids on iPads all day. There’s too much to teach.”Ìę

Teachers prepare for changes ahead

Khan is among the upper-grade teachers who are adjusting their lesson plans to comply with limits that will go into effect in January.Ìę

Under the policy, middle school students will be limited to one hour of screen time each week in each subject area.Ìę

“I feel a lot of times the district leadership comes up with these ideas, and however well intentioned they are, they leave it to the rest of us to kind of figure out how to implement them, or just what the best case looks like,” Khan said.ÌęÌę

He added that he has spent the past eight years building his curriculum around electronic devices. Like many schools nationwide, his school had been a “one-to-one,” meaning each student has access to a device. Those devices had largely replaced textbooks, and, to some extent, paper and pencil.ÌęÌę

“We were using a lot of digital resources, and some of them have been really amazing,” he said.Ìę

One of Khan’s favorite tools is Gizmos, a program that allows him to show students simulations to explore science concepts that can be difficult to demonstrate in a classroom. For example, students visualize the heart pumping blood through veins and arteries throughout the body. Or, they can explore Newton’s Third Law — the concept that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction —Ìęthrough a simulated car crash.Ìę

“I can always get two toy cars and have them crash together so they can see the law and effect,” Khan said. “But with the simulation, it lets me just get much more granular and just deeper into just how it applies to their everyday lives.”

He also said technology has been particularly important for students with disabilities and English language learners, who may rely on digital tools for accommodations and language support.ÌęÌę

The district told EdSource that it has made professional learning opportunities available to school administrators and teachers, both in-person and virtually, to help with the transition.ÌęÌę

“Our goal is to ensure that all school sites are well-prepared with the tools, understanding, and support needed to effectively implement these guidelines in a way that supports student learning and well-being,” LAUSD said in a statement.ÌęÌę

Khan said he has not had access to that support yet. Still, despite what he described as “growing pains,” he remains optimistic about the changes.Ìę

“I do think there is merit in the idea. I don’t just want to be doom and gloom about having to switch,” Khan said. “I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

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When Aaliyah Duah was 17, she realized one of the major differences between an underserved community like Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she grew up, and more affluent ones was early access to information on how to manage money.

In her public schools, she never learned about financial literacy — and had not heard the term — until she started going down a “rabbit hole” to educate herself on investing. She began to believe: To address the wealth gap in a systemic way, she needed to address the information gap. While a sophomore at Virginia State University during the pandemic, she started , creating workshops that teach personal finance to young people in straightforward, relatable, and fun ways.

Now 23, Duah continues to grow her organization, reaching students at more than 30 schools across Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. She uses examples like Roblox, sneakers, bacon-egg-and-cheeses, and Apple iPhones to teach about credit cards, interest, and retirement accounts. She’s soon releasing a coloring and activity book called My Financial ABC’s, designed to help kids ages 3–8 learn basic financial terms.

(The extra “n” in Revolutionn stands for “network,” because as Duah said, “I learned early on that building wealth requires knowing the right people and making sure the right people know you.”)

On Tuesday, Duah is being recognized for her efforts as a changemaker. She was named , which is essentially . Launched in 2020 by the Walentas Family Foundation, the prize awards $200,000, no-strings attached, to visionaries working to make a difference in the five boroughs.

Duah’s push comes as school districts across the country are embracing financial literacy. , New York state is . Next year, students in grades K-4 must also learn personal finance.

“Everything in our communities teaches us to spend our money poorly and to chase after quick success/financial gains meanwhile wealth builds over time,” Duah said. “I realized that I couldn’t just share this information with my closest friends, I needed to share this message with the world.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell us more about your own experience with school and/or financial literacy and how that affects your work today.

Growing up and even to this day I’ve watched many of my loved ones and peers make poor financial decisions due to a lack of financial education taught to them at a young age. This showed me the importance of learning early so that you don’t grow up developing poor financial habits.

As I learned more about financial literacy, there were accounts and information that I had access to that changed my life. This made me understand that the gap is truly in the access to information. After investing my money and seeing my account grow or building my credit and using it to buy my own car and apartment in my 20s without a cosigner or getting ripped off just because I knew how to manage my money at 17 shows how making smart financial decisions pay off. This drives me to continue to educate myself so I can provide the information to my family and the world.

The David Prize is all about the “power of people with the conviction to change the future of our city.” Tell us a bit about your vision for what’s possible with financial literacy in NYC and how it can help break the cycle of generational poverty.

Financial literacy can change the entire NYC landscape. I truly believe this because that is why some people fight so hard to keep it out of schools, because they know when you put financial education in the hands of all people it will level the playing field. If we provide financial education to people at a young age, they grow up avoiding years worth of making poor financial decisions, they can open accounts at a young age that gives them money to have options when they are older.

Additionally, when they become parents they know how to manage their money so they aren’t passing down financial trauma to their children and helping them establish smart financial habits at a young age.

Financial education helps build better communities and solve systemic issues. When we think of a community, a community is made up of individuals, so if each individual becomes financially savvy the whole neighborhood becomes wealthy. That changes the quality of life for all people who live there. That changes family dynamics, closes the wealth gap, fixes crime, and all the very systems that are hurting families.

What does your work look like with schools?

Every school gets the same Financial Revolutionn experience, but the way they receive it depends on the needs of the school. Some schools’ budgets allow for a six-session program while others can be a semester long. All programs end in a culminating activity which can vary from a stock analysis competition, business pitch competition, or students designing their financial future. The purpose of the program is for the students to come in with any understanding of finances and leave with a transformational experience.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

My favorite lesson to teach is types of accounts and stock investing. Types of accounts is fun because I watch the students go through this aha moment where they are learning about new accounts they didn’t even know existed. For example teaching them about a 401K, which is a term they probably hear often but nobody has ever taken the time to educate them on what that is. I remember teaching a group of college students the difference between a high yield savings account and a regular savings account, and one of them asked me: If this is free and grows your money at a higher rate, how come everyone doesn’t have this account? I had to tell them the truth: It’s simply because people just don’t know these exist.

The stock investing class is always cool because I see students’ mindsets shift from thinking like a consumer to an investor/owning. They start to understand the power of compound interest and investing at a young age gives them more time for their assets to grow.

Many students have told us they think schools should be teaching financial literacy. What sort of feedback have you gotten from students?

I have students say my classes were the best classes they’ve ever had or they only come to school to come to my class, which is sad but the truth.

This is a big moment for financial literacy. New York is now requiring public schools to begin providing personal finance instruction. What are your thoughts on the requirement?

I love that the DOE is starting to be more serious about the financial literacy conversation and really implementing it into more schools. I just hope that they are intentional about how they implement it into the school system.

Financial literacy is very important and if it isn’t received well in the classroom, it would almost become like an English class where students need to know how to read and write but because they made the topic so boring, students don’t take it seriously.

What do you plan to do with the prize money?

I plan to utilize the prize money to invest into an online program that helps families learn about personal finances in an engaging and interactive way.

I also plan to use it to invest in a team to help expand my program into more schools so that we can impact thousands of families all over NYC.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at

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

It is a fair question, and often the right one. But before we look at home, I have learned to look at the ride. 

Transportation is usually treated as logistics. A bus shows up, a student gets on, and then the day begins. For most students, that is close enough to true. For students with special needs, experiencing homelessness, in foster care or needing a vehicle outside the standard bus route, the ride means much more than that. It is the first structured interaction of their day, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. 

Recent backs up what I see in my district every morning. Sixty-nine percent of caregivers say a reliable ride leaves their child noticeably calmer. Students who arrive after a smooth transportation morning are far more likely to be calm and ready to learn than students who arrive after a difficult one. 

Behind those numbers are real students who often are unable to manage anxiety about how they get to school. Inconsistent transportation can have a huge impact on academic and social-emotional well-being for these students every day. 

In our Illinois district, we schedule alternative transportation — typically vans and cars sent out on regular routes — to arrive at least 20 minutes ahead of the bell, because we do not know whether a student had breakfast at home. Maybe they did not have time, or the food was not available for them. That 20-minute cushion is one less barrier for a student who already has enough to manage, and it means they get a warm meal and a few minutes to settle before class starts. 

The other piece is the driver. Students on alternative transportation do not always have consistency anywhere else in their day. We cannot always know what happens before they get into the vehicle or after it drops them off. What we can control is whether the same driver shows up at the same time in the same vehicle. That predictability becomes something a student and a family can count on. What’s more, consistency gives the driver a chance to notice when something is off and pass it along before it becomes a bigger problem. 

Transportation can also quickly become a compliance issue for districts that serve certain vulnerable student populations. The federal McKinney-Vento law requires districts to provide a ride to school to students experiencing homelessness, and other federal laws require that foster children and students with individualized education programs or 504 plans receive transportation help as needed.  Two thirds of administrators nationally have seen transportation issues affect their McKinney-Vento or foster care obligations, and 54% report falling short of services they are legally required to provide. 

In my experience, the biggest gap is under-identification. If a student is not flagged as experiencing homelessness under McKinney-Vento’s definitions, transportation never gets triggered, and the compliance clock starts working against the district before anyone even realizes it. That is why our McKinney-Vento parent liaisons build relationships early, so families understand what they qualify for and what the timeline looks like, rather than discovering it weeks into the school year. 

I also want to push back on one instinct I see in districts who are watching every dollar, which is pretty much everyone these days. When a neighboring district asked me what our alternative transportation partnership costs, my honest answer was that it is not the cheapest option available. It is also not the same value as the cheapest option available. 

A day-and-night taxi will get a student from one address to another, but that is a ride, not a service. A service means cameras and GPS tracking on every vehicle, background-checked drivers, and a partner who tells you within 24 hours whether they can meet a student’s needs and holds to it. These are still our students. I would not put anything less in a vehicle with my own children, and I am not willing to put anything less in a vehicle with someone else’s. 

None of this is complicated, and none of it requires a bigger budget than most districts already have. It requires treating the ride to school as part of the school day rather than a separate problem to be solved. When we do that, attendance — and the attendance-based funding many districts rely on — follows. So does trust, from families who have too often been told to wait five days for a solution that should take one conversation. Consistency is the structural piece that makes every other investment in a student’s education stick.

About 63 percent of Ohio third graders — the grade educators have long considered the most crucial for mastering reading — scored as proficient on spring 2026 state tests, up two percentage points from 61 percent in 2025.

Statewide reading proficiency also rose for all grades combined, as did proficiency for groups of students who often struggle.

That increase is cause for optimism for science of reading supporters, who cheered the progress as the state released spring 2026 test results this week. But the evidence isn’t clear yet that Ohio’s adoption of the science of reading in 2023 has students on a consistent path upward.

Third grade proficiency is still below pre-pandemic levels. It’s also below the 65 percent proficiency third graders had just two years ago in 2024 when the science of reading was being phased in. This year’s 63 percent proficiency is right in the middle of the 2024 and 2025 results.

Large changes in test scores could take a few years to show up, reading experts nationally have told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· since the science of reading has caught on in most states, particularly with schools needing to replace books, help teachers learn new ways to teach and then have the lessons start helping students.

Other factors could be holding scores back, including teachers not embracing the science of reading fully and still using old methods as well as Ohio’s decision to drop its hotly-contested requirement that students score well in reading to advance to fourth grade.

“It’s too early to tell in my view,” said Aaron Churchhill, Ohio research director of the Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education advocacy group that backs the science of reading. “We need to keep at it and give it a few years.”

Ohio Excels, a partnership of Ohio’s chambers of commerce, called the reading gains “encouraging” and said they suggest the science of reading is starting to take hold.

“At the same time, proficiency rates remain much too low, with nearly four in 10 students not proficient in reading,” said Ohio Excels President Lisa Gray. “We cannot be satisfied when so many students are still falling short of the skills they need to succeed.” 

Ohio’s adoption of the science of reading in 2023 is a source of pride for two-term Gov. Mike DeWine, who leaves office at the end of this year. That year, Ohio became one of the earliest states to ban “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in favor of more direct, phonics-based instruction.

The state also required all teachers to take online training in the science of reading; and for all schools to use only state-approved science of reading textbooks, workbooks and online lessons.

Though many schools had already started using science of reading methods before the law and many made the shift quickly, others moved more slowly. The 2025-26 year was the first all schools had to use it.

After third grade reading scores dropped in 2024-25, state officials and science of reading backers said last fall that spring 2026 test scores would be “pivotal.” 

Backers of the change to the science of reading had several points to crow about in test results released this week. In addition to the third grade proficiency increase, the reading proficiency rate for all grades combined rose nearly two percentage points as well, to 62 percent.

And every demographic group the state measures — such as racial groups, disabled students and low-income students — also had improved reading proficiency from last year. Leading the way were Hispanic and Black students with gains of 3.5 and 3.4 percentage points and economically-disadvantaged students with a 2.7 percent gain.

“When you look at this year’s state report cards and see what has been done in a relatively short amount of time, it is a tremendous accomplishment,” DeWine said in a press release announcing the scores.

Schools that were early adopters of the science of reading also suggest that persistence in using the science of reading, and other training and ongoing coaching of teachers, can bring results.

The Elyria school district 30 miles west of Cleveland had stagnant reading results and even a decline in 2025 scores, despite receiving an award from DeWine for its science of reading efforts. But district leaders and teachers told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· last fallÌęthey were poised for gains in 2026.

They were right: Third grade reading proficiency in that district’s five elementary schools jumped from about 45% in 2025 to about 52% in 2026.

 The district was delighted with the gains, but also cautioned keeping them going will take constant work.

“We have talked about things taking time and just what a long term process it is to implement anything, and lots of different factors we have, whether it’s staff turnover or different knowledge levels of our teachers and things like that,” said Courtney Griffiths, associate superintendent of academic services. “Yes, it’s very nice to see those results. It doesn’t mean that we back off on anything that we’re doing or we feel like it’s mission accomplished.”

Literacy specialist Andrea McKenzie said early diagnostic tests of those third graders as they started as fourth graders this school year show the improvements are persisting.

“I think it’s real,” McKenzie said. “We’re not seeing a setback
 It’s really sticking in fourth grade right now too.”

There are still reasons to be unsure if the science of reading shift is bringing sustainable results, along with the third grade proficiency rate still lagging behind 2024. Multiple reasons could account for gains, including drops in chronic absenteeism over time and students having had more time to catch up from missing school because of the pandemic.

And the science of reading isn’t achieving one of its most important goals — helping the worst students read better by giving them more explicit directions on the sounds letters make and how to decode words into something they can understand.

More third graders are scoring as “limited,” the state’s lowest rating, an equivalent to an F, than before the state passed the science of reading — 21% this year, compared to 20.9% in 2025 and 19.1% in 2023. 

The inability to help the students that read the worst bothers Fordham, which wants Ohio to bring back the “Third Grade Reading Guarantee” the legislature passed in 2012 requiring mandatory retention of third graders who can’t score well in reading. 

Churchill said that the percentage of students scoring as limited had dropped under that law in the years before the pandemic — falling from 27% in 2016 to 14% in 2019.

“(It) pushed schools to help struggling readers —now it’s gone,” Churchill said. “The science of reading holds great promise for students, but it needs to be paired with the accountability that a retention mandate brings.”

And at least one weekend per month, she provides all-day care to several children whose parents have to report for duty at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

Jackson is also licensed to provide overnight care, which she does occasionally as needed. 

Through these unconventional arrangements, Jackson provides “nontraditional hour care,” and as her schedule suggests, it can take a lot of different forms. Nontraditional hour care is a poorly understood yet widely sought form of early care and education, generally defined as any care being provided before 7 a.m. and after 6 p.m. on weekdays, and any hours on the weekends. 

It’s estimated that about 40% of children under age 6 with working parents spend at least part of their week in childcare during nontraditional hours, according to a from the Urban Institute, a social policy research nonprofit. The report, which analyzed household survey data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education, found this type of care to be more common among children from low-income families or in single-parent or non-parent households, as well as infants and toddlers. 

Families have a diverse range of circumstances and needs when it comes to care, especially working families with young kids. Sometimes, one parent can cover while the other works, or a relative such as a grandparent can step in to help. But in other cases, families must seek more formal arrangements. That’s where providers like Jackson and Desiree Reid come in.

Reid has been a licensed home-based childcare provider in the Bronx for about a decade. Before that, though, she had a long career as a financial manager — a role that required her to work late into the night and on weekends at times. In other words, Reid needed childcare during nontraditional hours before she became a childcare provider herself. Back then, when her son was still very young, she’d scrap together help from her mother and godmother during the week, and on the weekends, she’d take him to work with her and they’d hole up in her office. 

So when Reid opened her own childcare program and realized a lot of her families were doing shift work and needed flexible hours, she found herself adjusting her schedule. 

“At first it started with maybe one parent saying, ‘Oh, Ms. Desiree, I have to work till 8:30 tonight,’” Reid recalled. “What am I gonna do? Say, ‘leave your job, come get your kid and figure it out?’ No. So I extended my hours.”

The vast majority of nontraditional hour care is provided in homes, through a mix of licensed and unlicensed caregivers. Data varies, but across multiple sources, unlicensed care — and particularly unpaid unlicensed care — is the most used nontraditional hour childcare arrangement, followed by licensed home-based care, and then licensed center-based care. Erikson Institute, a graduate school in Chicago focused on early childhood education, cites data from the 2019 NSECE survey which that about 8% of centers and 34% of listed homes provide some form of nontraditional hour care, while the rest of the care supply is found in unlisted homes, often provided by relatives, but also some nannies, neighbors, friends and babysitters. 

For licensed providers, the shift into nontraditional hour care tends to come organically, as it did for Reid. Because home-based care is typically provided in a smaller and more intimate setting, providers often develop strong personal relationships with the families they serve. So when one family has a schedule change or needs extra help, providers may be inclined to accommodate them — sometimes without any additional pay, said Juliet Bromer, research professor at Erikson and University of Delaware. 

Different types of nontraditional hour care tend to get “lumped together,” Bromer said. But that can conflate the distinct experiences of providers caring for children during early mornings, late nights, overnight and on weekends.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about nontraditional hour care as this monolithic thing, because it isn’t,” said Bromer, who has studied this domain in Illinois. 

Each type of care comes with its own sets of challenges, routines and objectives. During weekend care — the most time for children to be in nontraditional hour care, according to the Urban Institute — many providers tend to offer children more downtime than they would during traditional weekday hours, said Diane Schilder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who led the think tank’s research on nontraditional hour care in 2023. That reflects what parents have said they want during weekend care for their children: a greater focus on play and rest, much like they would have if their parents were able to be with them. 

That’s true for Jackson, the provider in Alabama, who said the biggest difference in how she runs her program on the weekends, compared to a weekday, is that she gives the children more time to relax. 

“The schedule has been so rigid during the week,” Jackson said. “I get it. They need the downtime. 
 They need that time to just rest.”

What that looks like in practice, she said, is extended time outdoors and more free time to do activities like puzzles and drawing. Just because their parents are at work, she said, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get to unwind like other children do during their weekends.  

In New York, Reid’s weekend care is occasional, and a bit less predictable than Jackson’s. She cares for the children of immigration lawyers, taxi drivers and nurses. Often, one parent is available on the weekend to care for their kids when the other is not. But sometimes, their schedules will overlap and they’ll ask Reid to help. 

“As long as they can give me advanced notice and I’m available, sure,” Reid said. 

“I have staff, so if I need to step back, staff can step up,” she added, noting that she has one full-time and four part-time teachers to help with 14 children. “When I didn’t have staff, that was a different story. Oh, my gosh, that was exhausting.”

Reid and Jackson, like most providers who offer care during unconventional hours, also care for children during traditional hours. Cynthia Davis, a home-based provider in Washington, D.C. who operates 23 hours a day, distinguishes between the two by calling one her “traditional shift” and the other her “twilight shift.” 

When she shifted into childcare a couple of decades ago, she decided that she would serve children from low-income families, whatever it took. 

“If I was going to have a program, I wanted to be sure I could serve all parents, regardless of what their shift was,” she said. 

With her program located near a police station, a fire station and multiple hospitals, she has served children at all hours of the day — from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., from 3 p.m. to midnight, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. “That’s the hours some of the parents needed,” she explained. 

It’s a lifestyle that might wear on some people, but Davis enjoys it. “I’m a night owl,” she said. “That’s why I love overnight care. I love being up at night. Everybody is quiet. Nobody is disrupting you. It’s the daytime that wears me out.”

When she cares for children overnight, her adult daughter who works at the program handles morning care so Davis can get some sleep. “It’s why you need staff,” she said. “You have to balance it out. If you don’t have balance, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

The most children Davis has cared for overnight, she said, is six. Eventually she learned that she couldn’t really care for infants overnight, since their sleep isn’t well established and they tend to wake the others. “Over time you learn how the children’s patterns are,” she said, noting that she’d strategically place an early riser farther from a child who sleeps in later. 

When children get dropped off for an overnight shift at Davis’ house, they must be bathed and ready for bed. She finds out from families what their bedtime routine looks like on a typical night — books, music, a bit of TV — “so we can mimic what you’re doing at home.” 

Most children sleep in twin-sized rollaway beds; she also has cribs, elevated cots, floor mats and air mattresses. She will put the beds out in the common area — spread throughout a spacious living room, dining room and back room — before the kids go to sleep. Then Davis posts up in her comfortable recliner chair. She has a refrigerator and table right next to the chair. She does not sleep when the babies sleep. 

In the morning, Davis helps the children brush their teeth, get dressed and eat breakfast. 

Soon, as she begins to think about winding down her working years, she plans to move away from traditional care and only offer the “twilight shift.” She’s a night owl, after all. 

Some center-based programs do offer care during nontraditional hours, but it’s uncommon and the programs that do so primarily serve a specific population, such as the children of shift workers near a large manufacturing plant or . 

“There are very, very few center-based programs that offer late night and overnight care,” said Bromer. “It’s unpredictable. No one needs overnight care every night.”

Many home-based providers will request a week’s notice or a few days’ notice for nontraditional hour care, but when families’ schedules are constantly changing, it’s not always possible. That is incompatible with the staffing setup in most centers, Bromer noted. 

Then there’s the practical reality, which is that — especially late at night, very early in the morning and overnight — want their children to be in a residential home, not a fluorescent-lit commercial building. 

Most centers don’t have space for beds, pointed out Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based childcare. What they have, instead, is thin cots. If given the option, many families would likely opt for rollaway beds like what Davis has in her home over “flimsy cots” in a center for their child’s overnight sleep. 

“In a home-based environment, children are an extension of the family, eating meals in the home, watching Jeopardy,” Renew said. “That’s a little more intuitive.”

For parents who work unconventional hours, it helps a great deal to know their child is sleeping in a bed inside someone’s home, even if it’s not their own, said Jackson. 

“It gives that parent more of a home feeling, versus in a commercial property, where it’s more of a business,” she said. “Families need us. They need the continuity of care. They need to know their babies are being treated with the utmost of respect.”

In many places, it can be hard to come by licensed providers offering care outside of standard business hours. Davis recalled a mom who would take the bus from southeast D.C. to her program in northwest D.C. to drop off her 6-month-old baby before going to her job as a security officer. She had to switch buses along the route, and when traffic was bad, it would take her two hours door to door. 

Access is one of the reasons that care from trusted family, friends and neighbors is by far the most popular option for parents who work nontraditional hours. (It is also the most care arrangement for families during traditional hours.) This could look like two neighbors who both work nonstandard hours taking turns watching each other’s kids in their homes. It could be a family friend helping out for a small fee. Often, though, it’s a grandparent or other family member.

These types of informal arrangements make up the “bulk” of nontraditional hour care, said Bromer of Erikson. Parent surveys have found that they prefer this care type for its flexibility, affordability and nurturing environment. 

“It’s not paid care,” in many cases, Bromer added, “but it is childcare.”

Tonia McMillan is an FFN provider in Southern California caring for her grandchildren during nontraditional hours. McMillan had a nearly 30-year career as a licensed home-based provider, during which time she did occasionally provide care outside of standard hours to families. She retired from that career in 2023, feeling ready to close that chapter. 

But then McMillan’s two adult sons — both single dads — had new babies on the way. At the time, she and her sons decided to “all get under the same roof” to help each other with expenses, and that included childcare. 

Today, McMillan lives in a five-bedroom house with her sons and two of her four grandchildren — now ages 9 and almost 2 — whom she regularly cares for in the evenings. During their dad’s late-night shifts with a trucking company, McMillan feeds them and puts them to bed. Some days, if he gets home especially late, she’ll also get the kids up in the morning, give them breakfast and get the older one to school. It works well, she said. 

“The only difficulty for me is my age,” said McMillan, who is 67. “Having to lift car seats in and out of cars 
 That’s part of the reason I retired. There’s such a physicality to doing childcare that people don’t realize. But here I am again.”

There are days when McMillan has to make sacrifices to be able to care for her grandchildren — she’s very social, she said — and that can be discouraging. But she loves that she is able to help and said she’ll keep doing it for as long as her son needs her. 

Still, she doesn’t view it as charity, and she doesn’t want others to see it that way either. McMillan gets about $1,200 per month in subsidy reimbursements from the state of California to take care of both children. 

“I don’t want to see this role being downplayed or portrayed as ‘you’re the grandmother, it’s your duty,’” she said. “That strips away the importance of this work — how it fills a void, how it takes care of a gap. But it also binds families and makes them stronger and able to do what needs to be done for their children, for their household. It is such an important role that serves such an important purpose.”

McMillan emphasized the importance of being able to provide childcare to her grandchildren in a space that is both theirs and hers. She can put the two children down in their own beds and then retire to her own room. 

“I can walk around in my moomoo,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about if my hair is combed.”

But the value runs deeper than that, too. 

“The comfort of being in a familiar surrounding with a familiar person who loves them unconditionally, it matters,” McMillan said. “My son doesn’t have to worry about calling or checking in, any of that. Just the trust factor alone carries so much weight. It carries so, so much weight.”

By mid-afternoon, Nabila Chehab has worked nearly a full day running one of Colorado’s universal preschool sites out of her home. She’s been awake since 5 a.m. and on her feet for hours. 

By 2 p.m., two 4-year-old girls from the preschool program remain in her care. They will be picked up in the next hour or so. Then the doorbell rings and two more girls — 5-year-old Amira and 2-year-old Nadine — burst through the front door and head straight to the back of the house, joining their peers in Chehab’s classroom. 

Chebab’s first shift of the day is almost over, but her second shift is just starting. 

Around 2:30, she prepares an afternoon snack of watermelon and Goldfish for the four girls. It is the first of several meals she will prepare for Amira and Nadine over the next seven hours while their mother works at a food and beverage stand during a concert at Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, about 30 miles away. (Âé¶čŸ«Æ· is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

As they munch on their snack, three more kids arrive. These are Chehab’s grandchildren — ages 6, 5 and 1 — and the older two sit around the table as she prepares fruit and crackers for them as well. 

The naturally lit, brightly colored back room is alive with the chatter and boundless energy of young children. If Chehab is losing steam, she doesn’t show it. The 61-year-old just smiles and serves. 

By day, Chehab is a licensed home-based childcare provider. Her program, which can accommodate up to six children at a time, has earned the from the state. These days, she is primarily focused on serving 4-year-olds in Colorado’s relatively new , although she enrolls younger children as well.  

Chehab is only a few years into this arrangement. Before opening her program, she cared for her grandchildren as an unlicensed . And prior to that, she worked as a teacher for 15 years and a director for five years at center-based programs, she said. 

Chehab is licensed with the state to provide care from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays, but she continues to help families outside of regular business hours. On Saturdays, she hosts a three-hour Arabic class for young children. (Chehab moved to Colorado from Lebanon in 2009.) On Sundays, she cares for three young children while their parents work. And then, about once a week as needed, Chehab cares for Amira and Nadine in the evenings while their mom works at the concert venue. 

The kind of childcare Chehab provides on weekends and some evenings, often referred to as nontraditional hour care, is used by about under age 6 with working parents. It is most often provided in people’s homes through a mix of licensed and unlicensed care. This type of care can take place in the early mornings, late in the evenings, overnight and on weekends, based on the diverse needs of families. Often, providers like Chehab make themselves available during nonstandard hours only after a family that is already in their care has a change in plans or needs more help. 

That’s what happened with Amira and Nadine. 

Last school year, Amira was enrolled in Chehab’s universal preschool program. Nadine would occasionally join her older sister at Chehab’s house, so both girls became familiar with the provider. 

The girls’ mother, Marissa Kishell, has been working at Red Rocks since 2022, she said, taking shifts about three nights a week during peak season, which spans from spring to fall. Kishell’s mom — Amira and Nadine’s grandmother — would watch the girls at night while Kishell went to work, but when the girls’ grandmother got in a serious car accident in fall of 2025, she was unable to care for them for several months. 

Kishell enlisted Chehab’s help in the evening for the first time back in January, when she had a one-off work event, she recalled. When the Red Rocks concert season kicked off this spring, she began to turn to Chehab more often. 

“No one had ever watched them, especially at night, except for me and my mom,” Kishell said. “With everything that goes on these days, it’s hard to trust your kids with people.”

She worried, initially, about how it would go — but more so about how she would do leaving the girls than how they would do with Chehab. 

“She’s always so welcoming. Her house is cozy and clean,” Kishell said of Chehab. “I was never worried about if they would be OK.”

Now, Kishell will typically get her work schedule about a week in advance, she said. Then she’ll ask her 73-year-old mom — who watches the girls for free — which nights she can take them. Often, Kishell said, her mom will commit to all three nights but then, as the week goes on and she becomes more tired, she might ask to offload a night or two. (Her mom recovered from the car accident, Kishell said, but her energy level is not the same.) That’s when Kishell will ask Chehab, who lives about a 5-minute drive away, to take the girls for a night.

After hours of playing, the girls tell Chehab that they’re hungry. With Amira and Nadine in the kitchen alongside her, helping as much as they can, Chehab prepares a meal of lamb ribs, brown rice, Lebanese yogurt, salad, hummus and bread. The girls sit down to eat around 5:30 p.m. with Chehab, her husband Yassine Ahmed and a family friend. 

This is one of the elements of Chehab’s care that Kishell deeply appreciates. Both of her girls are “very comfortable” at Chehab’s house and “have a lot of fun there,” Kishell said, but it’s more than that.

“It’s nice for me that they get more of a home environment, and they’re having a home-cooked meal, and it’s more of a structure,” she said, “than going to a random babysitter’s house.”

That’s important to Chehab too. It’s central to her philosophy as a provider. 

“I don’t treat my families like clients,” Chehab said. “I treat them like family.”

Kishell pays about $30 per hour for Chehab to watch the girls in the evenings — $15 per hour per child — which she figures is about what she’d have to pay for the average babysitter. With Chehab’s experience and classroom materials and quality rating from the state, she feels it’s a great outcome for her and the girls. 

After dinner, Chehab helps the girls wash their hands then takes them on a walk around the neighborhood, during which they spot airplanes flying overhead. 

Back at Chehab’s house, she takes the girls into the greenhouse in her backyard, where they look for ripe vegetables to pluck and place in nets. Chehab’s garden is varied and sprawling. Inside the greenhouse, she has tomatoes and cucumbers, along with herbs such as parsley, cilantro and mint. Elsewhere in the backyard, she grows green grapes, sumac, apples, pears and peaches, although she said the fruit trees have not borne fruit during this especially hot summer. 

Both Amira and Nadine come out of the greenhouse with a few cherry tomatoes and finger-length cucumbers. 

“This one is so big!” Amira says, admiring her cucumber. “I want to take mine home.”

Chehab helps the girls wash and pack their vegetables to take home later. 

Kishell saw the vegetables from the garden when she got home that night. The girls also brought home a flower craft they’d made. These kinds of keepsakes make Kishell especially grateful. 

“I don’t think they would get quite the same experience with anybody else,” she said. 

Kishell’s appreciation is not lost on Chehab. 

“She values my work with her kids,” Chehab said of Kishell. “She sees how they improve.” 

At about 6:45 p.m., Nadine begins to rub her eyes and show signs of sleepiness — she skipped her nap today, Chehab said. “She’s ready for bed.” Instead, Chehab will try to keep them occupied until pickup, which Kishell prefers.  

Kishell’s husband, Mo Shesao, will pick up the girls at 9 p.m. Shesao has his own car shop, where he works as a mechanic. He usually stays until the work is done, Kishell said, so if someone brings their car in midday and needs it back by the next day, he’ll keep at it until he’s finished. 

Some nights, the girls stay at Chehab’s later — until 10 or 11 p.m. On those nights, Kishell will pack them a bag with toothbrushes, hairbrushes and pajamas so they can get ready for bed before they are picked up. Occasionally, Chehab said, Nadine will fall asleep at her house. Usually, though, they’ll wait until they are in the car or at home. Both children are accustomed to a 10 p.m. bedtime at home anyway, Kishell said. Since she stays home with them during the day, they have nowhere to be in the mornings and will often sleep in.

Chehab reads stories with the girls until about 7 p.m. Nadine picks out, “Big Gorilla: A Book of Opposites,” and Chehab quizzes the girls on opposites. 

“What’s the opposite of short? What’s the opposite of night? What’s the opposite of heavy?”

Next, Chehab sets up a paint station for the sisters. They don aprons and each pick out three colors and a paintbrush. As the girls get going, Chehab says to Amira, “Tell me about your picture.”

Amira has combined her three paints to create a dark blueish-brown hue, which she is trying to use to cover the entirety of her paper. 

“It’s going to be different,” Amira says, answering Chehab. She thinks about it more, then adds: “Spooky.”

As they finish up, Amira tells Chehab and her sister, “Next time, I’m going to take this to the museum 
 so they can hang it up.”

It’s August, so at 7:30 p.m., it’s still light outside. The trio heads outside to sing and dance with scarves. Chehab gives no indication that her stamina is flagging. She continues to play with and engage the girls as if the day is new. 

Around 8 p.m., the sky darkens and the girls go inside to have one final snack. They eat pretzel sticks and drinkable yogurt with straws in the basement while Chehab finds them an age-appropriate show to play on the television for 15 minutes. (She watches the clock closely to make sure they don’t get more screen time than that.) 

Once the girls are settled with their snacks and show, Chehab and her husband roll out their prayer mats and kneel to pray a few feet away. Amira can be heard slurping the last few sips of her yogurt while her caregiver quietly recites her prayers.

Around 8:30, after night has fallen and with only a half-hour left at Chehab’s, both girls become more subdued. They lay together on Chehab’s couch, still giggling and muttering, but more softly now. 

At 8:55 p.m., a car horn can be heard from the driveway. Moments later, the girls race to the front door to greet their dad. Then they give hugs and kisses to Chehab and tell her goodnight. As quickly as they’d entered the house earlier that afternoon, they now exit it, leaving a strange stillness in their wake.  

Chehab’s night is nearly over too. She will prepare her Turkish coffee for the next morning, take a shower, pray once more and then go to bed. She’ll wake up tomorrow, without an alarm, at 4:30 or 5 a.m., she said. Then she’ll head to the gym, where she swims every day, and return home, ready to greet another group of young children. 

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.

At 10:30 p.m. on a Monday in the Bronx, it’s bedtime for many children. But at Juana Grisel Peña’s apartment, 2-year-old Brandon is just arriving. Peña, who goes by Grisel, greets him with a hug as he joins three other children — 7-year-old Sage and brothers Legend, 2, and Legacy, 1 — who are playing with toys in another room as they wind down for the evening. (Âé¶čŸ«Æ· is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

The four children are spending the evening at Al Despertar, a licensed, home-based childcare program Peña runs out of her apartment, which sits three blocks from Yankee stadium. Their parents are working late-night or overnight shifts: one at the MTA, another at a local grocery store, and a third at Amazon. Some of the children will stay at Al Despertar late into the night, while others will sleep over and get picked up in the morning. 

From Monday through Friday, Peña cares for up to six children in her overnight program, which runs from around 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. They arrive and leave at different times, depending on their parents’ work schedules. She has a staff of five childcare providers, three who typically work at the daytime program and two who assist her with night shifts. 

When Peña started her program about 10 years ago, it was initially only open during the day, but she quickly noticed demand among working families with jobs that stretch beyond traditional business hours so she adjusted course to meet their needs. Over the years, she has transformed nearly every corner of her home around the children she cares for. Her living room is filled with learning activities and brimming with toys; bilingual signs about handwashing and nutrition standards hang in the bathroom and kitchen; and a pile of sleeping mats are neatly stacked in a closet of the second bedroom in her apartment, ready to be set up each day for the children.

“I want the parents to go to work and be in peace,” Peña said. “I remember when I had my kids I didn’t feel that peace when they were in someone else’s care and I don’t want anyone to feel that way. I understand it’s not easy.”

Peña’s program meets a significant need for parents. Research by the estimates that 40% of young children under age 6 with working parents spend at least part of their week in childcare during nonstandard hours like early mornings, evenings or weekends. The care can be tough to find though since not all licensed childcare providers operate during those hours. “I went through a lot of trouble trying to find this place,” Sage’s dad said. “There’s not a lot of overnight daycares.”

There are countless small, yet meaningful moments that define the kind of care Peña offers — whispered bedtime stories, shared mealtimes and comforting nighttime and morning routines that help children navigate transitions.

The photographs below, taken at Peña’s apartment during one of her overnight shifts in August, offer a glimpse inside one provider’s experience operating around-the-clock care, revealing a side of childcare that’s rarely seen.

8-11 p.m.

11 p.m.- midnight

5:30-8:30 a.m.

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.

The discussion on NY Inspires, the state’s ambitious plan to overhaul secondary education, centered on the decision to decouple the state’s Regents exams as a graduation requirement, beginning in the 2027-28 school year. Students will still take the exams, administered , to meet federal accountability rules. But graduation will no longer be tied to scores.

While EdTrust-New York supports additional flexibility for graduation requirements, we are deeply concerned the state is moving forward with this change without putting an alternative system in place to measure whether students are ready for success after high school. 

Now is not the time for New York to weaken the state’s only objective measure of high school readiness. Doing so could mask the deep challenges facing our schools and students while making it even harder for parents, employers and colleges to determine whether students have the skills they need to succeed after graduation. 

State, national and international data show that New York students continue to struggle with reading and math. In 2025, the state’s graduation rate reached 85%, yet only 56% of students passed the Algebra 1 Regents Exam. And on the 2024 NAEP, only 31% of 8th graders entering high school were proficient in reading. Just this week, the that U.S. 15-year-olds scored near their lowest levels in reading and math since 2000. 

These numbers reveal a clear disconnect between the assessment data showing a math and literacy crisis, and what the New York State Education Department (NYSED) considers college and career readiness.  

Standardized assessments such as Regents exams are far from perfect. But they are not responsible for New York’s poor reading and math outcomes. Simply changing graduation requirements will not solve the underlying problem: New York is failing to prepare its students — particularly Black and Latinx students, students from low-income households, students with disabilities and multilingual learners — with the foundational skills they need for post-secondary success.  

Even more alarming than the policy itself is the poor roll out of NY Inspires. As the new school year gets underway, schools still face significant confusion and a lack of guidance about how they will measure proficiency in core high school subjects instead of Regents exams for current high school students in less than a year. 

If the state Education Department truly wants to create a new graduation standard and position New York as a national leader preparing students to become 21st Century learners, it should not eliminate Regents exams as a graduation requirement without first establishing a credible alternative. State leaders should provide schools with clear expectations, reliable measures and the resources they need before they weaken an existing statewide standard.  

When state leaders roll out poorly thought-out policies, the students most likely to suffer are those whom our school system already serves least well. New York should also learn from the experiences of states such as Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, which attempted similar competency-based graduation reforms before scaling them back or abandoning them amid concerns about equity, inconsistent definitions of proficiency and an inadequate educator capacity and training. 

The state should pause the implementation of NY Inspires, including the elimination of Regents exams as a graduation requirement. Before moving forward, the department should make a concerted effort to provide schools with the guidance, rubrics, and statewide calibrations they need to implement NY Inspires effectively, equitably and transparently. 

New York can and should rethink how it measures student readiness. But it should not remove the measuring stick before it has built a better one.

Co-founder and CEO of , a Nashville-based nonprofit that works with teachers to provide high-quality resources and instructional support, she got curious about AI after seeing the tool in action. 

It’s designed to help students read texts closely, and it did it in a way that was “very different than any tech I had seen,” Freitag recalled. It made her think that AI “may be a horse of a different color. It may be really, actually a step forward in capabilities.” But she wanted to look past the hype. 

A former assistant commissioner of curriculum and instruction in Tennessee, Freitag got the idea to take a closer look at the full spectrum of AI tools. “I wanted to see it as a mom. I wanted to see it as an educator, and I wanted to see it to be a good partner to our schools.”

So she and a colleague last January began a six-month investigation that would eventually take them to 16 school systems in seven states. They sat with students as they worked through AI-enabled lessons, watched teachers teach with AI, and interviewed more than 100 teachers, school system leaders and ed-tech CEOs.

The results of their first foray are : Instruction Partners on Monday released the initial findings in what it is calling its AI in Action Learning Tour — a year-long effort to observe how actual students and teachers use AI. 

The report looks at 20 student-facing AI products already in classrooms, broken down into three categories: general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini; education-focused platforms such as Brisk Teaching, Google Classroom, MagicSchool and Playlab, and targeted instructional tools built around a specific instructional jobs — they include Amira Learning, Khanmigo and Quill.

“AI is definitely not a single category,” Freitag said. “We saw a huge range of products designed to do a huge range of things.”

They framed their inquiry around two questions: 

1. How does it compare to paper-pencil instruction?
2. How does it compare to the best possible learning experience in that subject?

Freitag and her colleague found a decidedly mixed bag, with a few key surprises.

“I saw tools that held a higher bar for learning than we see in paper pencil instruction and did more to tailor the questions and the feedback for kids to the specific sort of responses they were giving than a teacher could possibly do all at the same time,” she said. “So I really walk away thinking there’s a lot of good here that we need to leverage — and a lot of bad here we need to mitigate.”

They found that general-purpose chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT pose the biggest threat to student thinking, while the platforms — Brisk, MagicSchool and the like — produced different results, depending on how teachers used them.

The targeted tools, such as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo and Quill, a writing app, produced the most consistent and strongest learning experiences, they found.

And teachers told them they’re frustrated by apps kids can easily game — in one case, students found that by simply hitting the “Refresh” button on a computer, they could complete an assignment by answering the same question repeatedly instead of the lesson’s full list of questions. Many students also learned that they could simply Google an answer and paste it into their lessons. 

In another case, an app gave students detailed feedback on their writing — “I thought the feedback was really good and useful and actionable,” Freitag said. But she watched in horror as students simply ignored it and began rewriting without consulting it.

In another instance, she sat with a student as he worked on writing a book based on characters he liked, focused on letter sounds he needed to practice. “He created the book, and he said, ‘Now it’s your turn. Let’s create a book for you.’ And I was like, ‘But are we going to read your book?’ And I realized he was just making books without reading them.” 

The boy, she said, simply liked making the books.

“As someone trying to make sense of where AI has a role to play or not, I think seeing how kids are actually using products matters much more than understanding what they’re designed to do,” Freitag said. “And there are many cases where what I saw in action was quite different than what I expected to see based on the product demo.”

In fact, many of the apps that give students the ability to work together shone in Freitag’s review. By contrast, several apps designed for solo use turned out to be “boring” to many students, who spent perhaps 10 minutes engaged. “By minute 42 of the lesson, they are just tuned out.”

In many cases, she said, the same product produced dramatically different results — and gave kids different experiences — depending on whether teachers built in clear routines and actively monitored dashboards in real time.

In one instance, a teacher taught a lesson with a math app that allowed her to display four students’ solutions to a problem side-by-side on a Smartboard, allowing students to evaluate the solutions. “I was stunned by how much kids learned from looking at each other’s work in that way,” Freitag said. Even with just a little feedback, it was effective. “When it was used socially, it really created a ton of learning opportunity for kids.”

The apps that worked did something that teachers couldn’t do alone, such as offering instant feedback or a quick analysis of an entire group’s work. Those, she said, “were the products where I was like, ‘Wow, this is extending what a teacher could do.’”

But the report emphasizes that AI shouldn’t cut teachers out of the equation. They still have a vital role to play and AI should never be seen as replacing teachers. “My take is that the future is hybrid,” Freitag said. “Teachers have a key and lead role, and there’s tech that gives them an assist.”

In fact, one of the most promising AI innovations is its ability to identify where students are struggling with foundational skills — and where they need more practice. But forcing students to practice those skills in isolation could be counterproductive. “If we help kids practice a bunch of reading skills without actually paying attention to the text or the knowledge that they need to access that text,” Freitag said, “we’re not going to see reading scores improve.”

She also worries about AI’s near-miraculous ability to re-level reading passages with a single click, one of the most popular features of most reading tools. While it can help slower readers understand a text, that releveling can become “a permanent lower setting” rather than a bridge back to grade level.

Arman Jaffer, CEO of Brisk Teaching, one of the apps reviewed, said his philosophy is that releveling “should be used to increase entry points to high-quality instructional material,” but not to limit how far students can go.

“AI is something that’s incredibly powerful that can help you do things like relevel,” he said. “You can make the entire internet accessible to your students, but at the same time, a teacher who might not have the best instructional practices might be using it to hold back students.”

Jaffer said the findings underscore the need for coaching and professional development for teachers as AI emerges in the classroom. “I think every AI company, every technology company, every vendor, truly needs to be a partner to their district or their school or their organization.”

Peter Gault, CEO of Quill, an AI-powered writing app that was also reviewed, said Freitag and her partner watched students using the app in New Jersey and worked hard to unpack how it worked. “I was really impressed with how much due diligence they did. They really went under the hood to understand what works and why it works.”

The duo, he said “did the most thorough deep dive of anyone who has looked at our AI.”

Alex Sarlin, co-host of the podcast, called the new report “amazing work,” noting that Freitag spoke not just with teachers and students but with tech CEOs. “She’s talking to all sides of the equation,” he said. 

The time she and her colleague spent in classrooms is key, Sarlin said. “That gives a much richer picture of how AI is actually being used in the classroom than we usually see, and certainly more than we see in mainstream coverage, which tends to be very surface level and a little panicky.”

This fall, Freitag’s team has grown to three people — they’ll soon look at 30 more products and report on them this winter. And Instruction Partners plans to work with Stanford’s AI in Education Lab to independently vet impact claims by winter 2027. The new report notes that just seven of the 20 products have independent studies examining outcomes across student subgroups.

For her part, Freitag said teachers are hungry for clear guidance around AI. “We work with instructional leaders across the country, and they said, ‘We are getting inundated with sales pitches, and we are getting inundated with calls now to “Ban it all,” and we don’t really understand where there’s value in this.’ So that helped me see that the debate about AI in schools is moving faster than real information.”

From fall 2025 to spring 2026, about 400 students from 27 schools made gains in math and reading on the widely used i-Ready tests, with more than half exceeding expected growth based on national norms in reading and 47% doing so in math.

Some microschools, especially larger ones, were “knocking it out of the park,” with “every student achieving over and above what was expected.” said Daniel Hamlin, dean of education at the University of Texas at Austin, who conducted on behalf of the National Microschooling Center, an advocacy organization.

Nearly half of the students had special learning needs, 28% had mental health needs and 14% had a chronic medical condition. 

“You have a very high percentage of kids who would be classified in a public school as having a disability or some kind of other significant life circumstance, like a severe medical condition,” he said. 

I-Ready creates a projected score for each individual student, based on the data from public and private school students nationwide. In the microschool sample, results were weaker among students in poverty, those in the elementary grades and Black students in math. 

The study has multiple limitations. It’s small and the students who took the tests might not be representative of the microschool population in general, estimated at 1 million to 2 million students nationally. Families who choose microschools may also be different in several ways from those in public schools, and the schools weren’t randomly selected. Still, the research is significant because Hamlin was able to collect data from the same kids in the same microschools over the course of the school year. The . tried something similar last year and ran into multiple obstacles.

“This is a valuable and timely study in a space where we still have far too little empirical evidence,” said Jonathan Schweig, the senior scientist who led Rand’s project. 

In that study, out of a sample of 271 microschools nationwide, he couldn’t find enough programs that had both fall and spring assessment data to reach any meaningful conclusions about how much progress students made in a year. The perception that there’s too much testing in the public schools is often one of the reasons families leave them for microschools.

Schweig added that it’s still difficult at this stage to “make broad claims about microschools given the sector’s diversity.”

Hamlin, who is slated to present the data Thursday at an annual devoted to emerging education models, elaborated on why the sector is difficult to research. As parents piece together different learning experiences for their children, often with state-funded education savings accounts, students sometimes “fall into multiple categories.” They may homeschool part of the week, take an online course and spend a few days at a microschool. 

“It’s really hard to know exactly how many students are in a microschool because there’s just so much overlap between all these different emerging school models,” he said. 

One-on-one learning

The i-Ready results are part of a larger report that includes survey responses from both parents and students. Small classes, individualized attention and a safe school environment were the top three reasons parents gave for choosing a microschool. 

“Finding a school with well-trained teachers who are able to recognize strengths and challenges without passing judgement is really hard,” said Lara Landrum, whose daughter, a sophomore, is in her third year at the , or CALE, in Columbia, Missouri. While it’s possible for students to feel like they belong in a large school, she said, “the intimacy of a microschool allows for this naturally.”

Like many of these non-traditional programs, CALE opened during the pandemic, operating out of a former medical office. Now housed in a church, the school has expanded from the elementary grades to offer a full junior K through 12th grade program. 

Roughly 80% of CALE’s 135 students previously attended public schools. Some, said CEO Jill Brown, struggled with reading disabilities and needed “structured literacy support,” others had gaps across multiple subject areas and some kids were working so far above grade level they needed more advanced assignments. 

“We also have students who experience anxiety in larger school environments and benefit from the smaller, more supportive setting at CALE,” Brown said.

In the survey, those who moved their child out of a public school, about 20% of the sample, said these students are making more progress and have a tighter circle of friends in their current microschool. The school also feels safer and is better at communication, they said. The majority of students reported having one-on-one time with a teacher nearly every day, small group learning and making close friends. 

Given the in these small private schools, Hamlin recommends several areas for additional research. Future studies should have a larger sampleÌęand compare microschool students to those who are demographically similar in district, charter and other private schools.

Because there are different types of microschools, like nature-based programs, models that combine virtual and in-person learning, and those that serve specific populations, he suggested analyzing results to better understand which are more likely to boost student performance. 

Considering many microschool students with disabilities are using ESA funds, researchers could do a “cost-benefit analysis” comparing public schools to microschools. More rigorous studies will also follow microschool students over a longer period of time, Hamlin said.

He acknowledged that working with the National Microschooling Center, a group that’s advancing the movement, to recruit schools for research, “does end up creating some limitations because you get a self-selected sample.”

“But from my vantage point, we have to start somewhere,” he said.

Something wasn’t adding up in . Students were making strong gains in reading in kindergarten and first grade. They were developing foundational skills and, for the most part, reading accurately. But as students moved across second and third grades, growth became stagnant and the end-of-grade reading proficiency began to decline.

After taking a deep dive into the data, district leaders discovered that the challenge wasn’t necessarily whether students could read the words in front of them. In fact, many could. The concern was fluency and automaticity. Students weren’t reading at a pace and with the ease needed to devote their attention to understanding what they were reading.

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For , Davidson County Schools’ director of elementary education and federal programs, the data pointed to a disconnect. The teachers had participated in training to deepen their understanding of how children learn to read, and the district had a core foundational curriculum with aligned support. But Davidson County did not have a comprehensive core reading program that pulled together vocabulary, syntax, knowledge building, fluency, and comprehension.

And the deeper they looked, the more the question shifted from: What are students missing, to what do teachers need to help students get there?

From knowing to doing

Davidson County educators had already invested considerable time in learning about the science of reading. Willard described LETRS as “some of the best professional learning” she had experienced. Instructional coaches studied “” by Nancy Lewis Hennessy. Principals, assistant principals, and coaches examined research together. And most recently, more than 200 teachers were invited to learn from about the role knowledge plays in reading comprehension.

There were plenty of moments when educators could see the connections between what they were learning and what students needed. But seeing those connections was one thing. Translating them into daily instruction was another.

Without a comprehensive curriculum, teachers still had to find and evaluate quality texts, determine how those texts could build knowledge across a topic, plan explicit vocabulary and syntax instruction, incorporate comprehension routines, and connect it all to grade-level standards.

Amber Fitts, an early literacy specialist with the Department of Public Instruction’s , saw that challenge as she worked alongside instructional coaches. They were developing a deeper understanding of what effective comprehension instruction should include. The harder part was envisioning what all of it looked like when a teacher stood in front of students on Monday morning.

“There are wonderful things” in LETRS, Fitts said. “We know what to do, but teachers don’t always know how to make it happen in the classroom.”

It wasn’t that teachers didn’t want to do the work. They needed a way to make all the pieces fit together.

The more Davidson County learned, the clearer the gap became. Educators were building the knowledge. What they needed was a way to turn that knowledge into practice, and the district had to decide how to help them do it.

What if we build it ourselves?

One option was to purchase a comprehensive core reading program. But for Davidson County, Willard estimated that could cost close to $1 million. District leaders also felt they didn’t have time to wait for someone else to solve the problem.

“We couldn’t wait on money to come for an adoption,” Willard said. “We had to do the work ourselves.”

There was urgency behind that decision. Third grade reading proficiency had fallen below the state average, something Willard said was unheard of in a district accustomed to performing at or above the state average in its elementary subjects.

“We knew there was a disconnect,” she said. “And we had to figure out where that disconnect was.”

So, they did.

Willard approached Fitts with an idea: What if Davidson County Schools created their own knowledge-building units?

The goal wasn’t simply to create another collection of lessons. They wanted something that could bring together what teachers had learned through LETRS with vocabulary, syntax, fluency, comprehension, and knowledge building, while also giving teachers the texts and instructional structure to make all of it manageable in the classroom. And if teachers were going to be expected to use the units, Willard believed teachers needed to help build them.

The district invited educators to apply for a design team and began with third grade, where the data suggested the need was greatest. Teachers worked through the summer and continued throughout the school year, creating units designed, as Willard described them, “for teachers by teachers.”

The team also made an intentional decision to connect the units to science and social studies standards, two subjects that can get squeezed out of the elementary school day when time is limited. Yet those subjects offer something essential to literacy development: opportunities for students to build the background knowledge they need to understand increasingly complex texts. Instead of asking teachers to choose between literacy and content, the team began looking for ways to build both at the same time.

Changing more than the curriculum

Creating the units was one thing. Using them required teachers to rethink some familiar approaches to reading instruction.

A teacher might traditionally spend time teaching main idea with one text, pull another text for more practice, and then move on to the next standard. The new units asked teachers and students to stay with texts longer. Students reread. They examined vocabulary and sentence structure. They built knowledge around a topic. And they encountered multiple reading standards within the same text rather than approaching comprehension as a series of isolated skills.

For Willard, that shift was particularly important because fluency had been part of what the district saw in its third grade data. Students didn’t necessarily need an endless supply of new passages. They needed opportunities to go deeper into the text already in front of them.

The texts themselves presented another shift. They were intentionally more challenging to stretch learning growth.

The team considered both quantitative and qualitative measures of text complexity, sometimes selecting texts with Lexile measures one or two grade levels above third grade. The expectation wasn’t that every child should be able to pick up those texts and read them independently. Teachers would provide the scaffolding, particularly early in the year, so students could engage with complex ideas and language while continuing to receive foundational reading instruction based on their individual needs during another part of the school day. Still, teachers noticed.

“This text, it’s too hard,” Willard remembers hearing repeatedly during the first quarter.

For veteran third grade teacher Jill Hunt, the adjustment wasn’t only about the texts. After years in the classroom, she had accumulated favorite books, lessons, and activities. Now she was being asked to use lessons that were much more scripted than what she was accustomed to. There was some hesitation. But there was also a willingness to give it a try and to do it well.

Repeated reading began giving students another way into difficult text. A child who couldn’t initially read a grade-level passage independently could listen to it, discuss it, build knowledge around it, encounter its vocabulary, and then return to it again. After several readings, that same student might begin reading portions with a partner or more independently.

The text hadn’t gotten easier. The students’ access to it had changed.

Teacher perspectives and practices were changing, too. Rather than introducing multiple instructional strategies in quick succession, the units purposefully slowed the process down.

Teachers might concentrate on sentence parsing throughout one quarter before moving to sentence anagrams during the next. That repetition gave teachers time to become comfortable with a practice and students time to internalize the routine.

Instructional coach Tina Hampton saw that shift among teachers who had completed LETRS. Initially, she heard comments like, “I already do this.” But as teachers began using the units, they started to see the difference between incorporating a practice and going deeply enough with it to change what students could do.

Leveling the playing field for teachers, too

As the units moved into classrooms, Davidson County began seeing another effect it hadn’t necessarily set out to create. Teacher experience across the district varied considerably. Some classrooms were led by veteran teachers like Hunt, who had taught third grade for years. Others were led by beginning teachers, teachers new to the grade level, or educators entering classrooms through alternative licensure pathways. That variation mattered.

A veteran teacher might have years of instructional knowledge and materials to draw upon. A teacher hired in October who had never taught a tested grade might be trying to figure out what strong comprehension instruction looked like while simultaneously learning how to run a classroom. The units provided both teachers with a common foundation.

At , Principal could walk from one third grade classroom into another and recognize the same explicit vocabulary routines and instructional structures. The teachers weren’t identical. Their experience wasn’t identical. But students were encountering common language, routines, and expectations. Beasley saw that as a way to create more equitable instruction for students.

Willard began seeing something else in it, too.

“We talk about leveling the playing field for kids,” she said, “but we forget teachers.”

For newer teachers, the detailed lessons could serve as a scaffold. One newly hired third grade teacher used the units almost as a script, Willard recalled, and the instructional results surprised her. Veteran teachers didn’t always need the same level of support. But they, too, had access to the common routines, texts, and instructional expectations.

The district had started by trying to address a student learning problem. Along the way, it was also confronting a systems question: How do you make strong instruction less dependent on the experience level of the individual teacher?

Building the plane while flying it

Davidson County Schools didn’t have a polished curriculum waiting at the end of the process. The district was creating the units while teachers were using them. Willard and Fitts continuously reminded stakeholders that they were “building the plane as they were flying it.”

Each quarter, teachers used the materials and provided feedback. The design team listened, revised, and released the next round.

At the end of the school year, teachers were asked to look back across the entire experience and provide feedback again. The team reconvened during the summer and made more changes.

That feedback loop became important to teacher buy-in. Teachers weren’t simply asked what they thought. They could see their feedback reflected in what came next.

School leaders were part of the process, too. Willard had been clear from the beginning that the third grade units weren’t optional. The data, she believed, showed that the district could not continue doing what it had always done and expect a different result. But a mandate alone wasn’t going to change classroom practice.

Principals spent time examining the data and understanding why the district was making the shift. They carried that understanding back into their schools, into PLCs (professional learning communities), classroom observations, and conversations with teachers.

And then something began happening that the district hadn’t mandated. Fourth grade teachers started asking for the units.

“Why can’t we have something like that?” Willard remembers them asking.

The work began expanding into fourth grade. At Davis-Townsend, fifth grade teachers wanted in, too.

What had started as a required response to a third grade reading problem was beginning to spread because teachers were asking to be part of it.

And within one year, third grade reading proficiency increased 10 percentage points.

“We are proud of the progress our third grade students have made,” Willard said. “This growth reflects the hard work of our students, the dedication of our teachers, and the continued support of our families.”

But she was quick to add that the gains are not the finish line.

“While we are pleased with these gains, we know our work is not done,” Willard said. “We remain committed to strengthening literacy instruction through expanding our ELA Knowledge Building Units into other grade levels, providing targeted support, and ensuring that every student develops the reading skills and knowledge needed for continued success.”

Davidson County School’s story started with declining third grade reading scores. But somewhere along the way, the problem the district was trying to solve became bigger than a test score.

North Carolina has invested heavily in helping teachers understand the science of reading. This district’s experience raises the question of what comes next: What does it take to move that knowledge from professional learning into daily classroom practice consistently, across teachers, classrooms, and schools?

Davidson County School leaders didn’t answer that question with another training or wait for a finished solution. They started with the data and brought teachers into the work. They tried something, listened, changed it, and tried again. The plane is still being built. But now, more teachers are asking to get on.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

More than 139,000 students ages 10 to 13 from all backgrounds and 3,100 educators from 126 cities in 39 countries have connected via e-classrooms over the past decade. 

I am one of them.

Participating in a global digital exchange program helped foster a deep curiosity about the world and made me realize that it is a bigger, more connected place. It inspired me to serve on the University of HawaiÊ»i Board of Regents and to seek out programs and opportunities like the , which centers intergenerational collaboration to move toward a sustainable future. I have kept chasing that same feeling of being genuinely changed by someone else’s reality.

As a student at the University of HawaiÊ»i at Mānoa, I think often about what education is actually for and what it represents. Right now, everywhere I turn, the conversation seems singularly focused on one question: “What do we do about artificial intelligence?” The debates around artificial intelligence in education usually center on whether students are using AI to cheat or as a learning resource. Questions like: Can students use AI on assignments? Will AI replace teachers? How do we design curriculum for a post-ChatGPT world? 

These are real concerns, but in our urgency to respond, we’re neglecting something equally important that AI can’t replicate: human connection. 

Being able to talk with a student across the ocean whose daily life looked nothing like mine, or hearing another student’s perspectives on climate and the future, created a human connection that AI could never replicate. That connection required me to listen, to challenge my beliefs and to update my thinking in real time — not because I’m asking a chatbot, but because a real person is trusting me with their experience. 

I was reminded how valuable this last April when I flew to Madrid to meet Global Scholars alumni from around the world. Seeing everyone in person was a completely different experience from interacting online. Shaking hands, sharing meals and being vulnerable with one another face-to-face strengthened the cross-cultural bonds we started building online. 

AI can expose you to diverse viewpoints. It can summarize them, translate them and even argue them. However, it cannot make you feel empathy for someone else’s world or help you grasp its weight. It cannot hold you accountable to another person across a cultural divide. It cannot recreate a substantive discussion about solutions to urgent global problems.

I remember my first live conference call 12 time zones away, with middle school students in Barcelona. I told them about drought concerns on Kawaihae, where it used to be green. And they told me about water restrictions in Catalonia, a place I’d never heard of. ”Do you really live near volcanoes?” someone asked me. I almost laughed, until I realized how little we actually knew about each other’s worlds. A kid from a small town on HawaiÊ»i Island had just as much to contribute to the conversation as a student in one of Europe’s great cities. 

In Hawaiʻi, human connection is embedded in our culture, in the concept of aloha, in the practice of showing up for your community. We understand that relationships are not just a part of learning; they are the learning itself. Developing cross-cultural empathy comes from building strong relationships and having meaningful conversations that challenge your own beliefs.

I sometimes think about that classmate in Barcelona and whether she remembers the eighth-grader from Hawaiʻi who thought volcanoes were just part of the backyard. I hope more kids get the opportunity to be surprised by each other in ways no algorithm or AI chatbot can replicate. We should be building more of those connections. Not less.

Was this problem unique to that particular college? Or perhaps to California?

In with The Collaborative for Student Success, I set out this summer to understand how these issues were playing out at Rutgers-New Brunswick, the flagship public university in New Jersey. Like UC San Diego, Rutgers is a well-regarded academic institution and a in good standing of the Association of American Universities. While we were not able to gather the same level of information that the San Diego faculty senate had access to, we found similar problems.

Rutgers, like colleges in much of the country, is dealing with a bifurcation of student math skills. Some students are doing just fine, which at Rutgers manifests in a slight increase in the share of incoming freshmen who test into higher math classes like calculus II or III. Those students are well-prepared and likely to succeed.

But the bottom end is more troubling, as Rutgers also has an increasing number of freshmen taking lower-level classes like elementary or intermediate algebra and precalculus. Collectively, about 2,500 students were placed in courses below calculus last year.

Officially, New Jersey requires students to pass algebra, geometry and at least one more math class to earn a high school diploma. Yet even as state officials a record-high 91.8% graduation rate, 40% of this year’s graduates to pass the state’s high school math exam last year. Again, this is not unique to New Jersey; most states have large gaps between graduation and math proficiency rates.

In the report, I show how New Jersey has spent the last decade lowering K-12 standards, and how those decisions are affecting students and faculty at Rutgers. For example, New Jersey has created alternative ways for students to satisfy its graduation requirements, including substitute exams with passing scores below the benchmarks for college readiness on admissions tests. A student can satisfy New Jersey’s math graduation requirement with a 17 on the ACT, for example, even though ACT sets college readiness at a 22.

That can lead to a rude awakening for some students. Rutgers math professor Steve Safran told me that on the first day of his accelerated precalculus course, a majority of students said they had taken precalculus or calculus in high school. Many had earned As and Bs, and were dismayed at being asked to study the same material again. Another Rutgers instructor told me that some students arrive unable to add fractions without a calculator and become lost as soon as a problem introduces a variable.

Those gaps have consequences. Students may have to spend additional semesters working through prerequisites before reaching the courses required for their majors. Some switch majors or drop out. The grittier ones persist, but it takes them more time, and money, to earn their degree.

And the effects don’t stop there. One longtime instructor told me that if she gave today’s freshmen the exam she used in the past, a large number would fail. That puts faculty in the difficult position of helping students catch up while resisting pressure to lower their own standards.

Some of this disconnect could have been addressed much earlier if students had been held to higher standards throughout their time in K-12 schools. Math is a cumulative subject, and students who haven’t mastered their times tables are likely to struggle with fractions. If they are shaky on fractions and decimals, they’re likely to have a hard time with algebra. As I write in the report, early math performance isn’t destiny, but researchers have called it “” that calls for immediate support rather than a wait-and-see approach.

Policymakers could also help by getting test results back to parents and educators quickly, rather than making them endure months-long waits. As one told NJ Spotlight News in response to the state’s testing delays, “It’s like we have an eye patch over one eye flying a plane — we don’t have full 20/20 vision or the full picture.”

New Jersey policymakers can start by giving families an honest accounting of where their children stand. States like Virginia and Ohio to speed up their testing processes. While Ohio now requires districts to share results with parents by June 30 and Virginia says parents must wait no more than 45 days, New Jersey typically makes families wait until October.

But faster test results are useful only if the state is willing to act on what they show. The students arriving at Rutgers did not suddenly become bad at math when they stepped onto a college campus. Many had struggled for years. The failure was that too few adults gave them an honest evaluation of their math skills early enough and clearly enough for them to realize they were behind.

That’s the larger lesson from Rutgers and UC San Diego. By lowering standards, policymakers have boosted graduation rates. But if math gaps aren’t addressed early, catching up is harder and costlier, and students pay the price.

A new five-part documentary, , trains its lens on those fights as a way to understand the broader forces pulling American communities apart.

Co-directed by and , the series zeroes in on the many battles surrounding the Central Bucks School District and its tumultuous board. May and producer began talking in late 2021 about making a film on the nation’s political fracturing, determined to avoid taking sides or “preaching to the choir,” said May. They searched an ordinary-seeming place that illustrated the divide and found it in Bucks County, Pa. “We thought that perhaps the school board wars and the school board campaign itself could be the underbelly motor of how we tell the story,” he said. The film soon grew into a five-part series that was screened this week for locals and premieres nationally on Sept. 20 on .

Filmed over four years, it follows more than a dozen key players who live out political polarization in real life. Foremost among them: two best friends, Vanessa Martino and Evi Casey, who are 14 when filming begins. Their parents hold bitterly opposing political views — actually, Vanessa’s father, , is a Republican activist and businessman who in 2023 bankrolls a slate of GOP school board candidates that includes his wife, Aarthi.

Yet the girls’ friendship seems bulletproof — it’s often the only safe space in the entire series — offering a different perspective that helps explore how community-level political conflict affects families and friendships.

The series frames Bucks County, a prosperous area north of Philly, as a kind of political bellwether — one documentary subject calls it “a purple county in a purple state.” The filmmakers say they want to offer an impartial community portrait that goes beyond politics, even in a deeply divided community.

Located in a key swing state, the district seems a perfect place to explore polarization. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights the district after the ACLU of Pennsylvania complained that it had created a “hostile” learning environment for LGBTQ students. In 2023, a middle school teacher sued the district, alleging he was suspended and involuntarily transferred to a different school in retaliation for advocating on behalf of LGBTQ+ students.Ìę

The same year, members of the board reportedly tried to to a conservative Christian law firm that reviewed a proposed library book review policy. It’s the legal arm of the statewide branch of the national organization , an anti-LGBTQ group. The book ban took effect in early 2023, but was later .

The series centers largely around the 2023 school board race, which becomes a referendum on the public’s ability to endure more confrontation and chaos. But the results don’t necessarily calm the chaos, and community members most often find that the best way to broker compromise is through small-group and one-on-one conversations.

The series producers are hoping Bucks County, USA can help extend those conversations throughout the nation: The public TV station WETA is distributing discussion guides for the series that will allow communities to create their own viewing events and roundtables. It’ll also provide lesson plans for schools. 

“The idea here is take what we’ve done, let this be the beginning, and try to duplicate it in your own community,” said co-director Robert May. “Use the series to turn your thinking in a little bit of a different direction, and less worry about what’s happening on the national front. Let’s first worry about the strengths of our communities and bridge that divide that’s been so deep. And once we have communities stronger, I think we can be stronger across the country, frankly, as a nation.” 

Ahead of the series premier, May sat down with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Greg Toppo for a wide-ranging conversation about political polarization, the perils of social media and how the series could help change the conversation around our deep divisions. 

Their conversation is edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to start with something Lela Casey, Evi’s mom, says early on about her home: “We’re a purple county in a purple state. We’re kind of divided between Republicans and Democrats, so we’re not peaceful. We’re always going to have some challenge.” As I was watching this documentary, I kept thinking of that line from Casablanca: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she walks into mine.” 

Robert May: [Laughs] 

Of all the towns in America in 2022, why Bucks County? Is it that purpleness, that challenge? Something else? What attracted you to this place?

My producing partner, Jason Sosnoff, who also is Barry Levinson’s producing partner — we all were talking about wanting to do a project about the polarization and division in the country. We actually started talking in late 2021, and we wanted to put together something that would be non-biased, where we could talk to each side and just hear their points of view because no one was listening to anyone. Everyone was just spewing, and we wanted this to be different. 

I like to think we don’t take a side. We’re not those sorts of filmmakers where we’re shoving something in, preaching to the choir. We didn’t want to do that. We thought we would go to one place in the country that is viewed as an idyllic place to be, low-key but sort of a microcosm of the political division. Then we heard The New York Times’s about school board wars in Bucks County, and that gave us an idea in two ways: First we thought that when you’re telling a story like ours, about political division, if it’s just about political division, it could be anything. But we wanted to know what the air, the narrative skeleton would be like. What would the motor be for telling that story? And we thought that perhaps the school board wars and the school board campaign itself could be the underbelly motor of how we tell the story, so that everything would surround that. We thought that a lot of the national discussion was coming right into the school board rooms, and that that might be interesting.

Who is this documentary for? What’s the audience, and how are you hoping to change their minds?

We’re all angry right now — whether you’re on the right or you’re the left, we’re angry. And what do we do about it? How do we talk about politics? Well first, if the film can demonstrate that people from opposite sides can come together and talk and still not necessarily agree — there’s no rosy ending, it’s not all wrapped up in a bow by any means — but there’s a level of respect that wasn’t there in the beginning. And I believe that the strength in our communities and our country can be improved by people seeing, “Oh, well, if they can do it, I could do it. I could reach out to a family member that I haven’t talked to in God knows how long. I can reach out to a neighbor that I haven’t spoken with. I can reach out to somebody that I never spoke with, but I thought they were from the other side, so I never wanted to speak to them.” And maybe they can actually find some comfort and joy and pride and be able to say, “I did that. I can talk to someone, I can listen generously, I can share my point of view, and I can replicate what they say, so they know I heard them.” 

Your idea of listening respectfully really comes across very powerfully. I love what retired teacher Kitty Semisch says early on: “Both sides have to stop reading about each other, and engage with each other.” It made me think about how an uncredited character in this documentary is social media 


Oh yes.


 and what a corrosive role it has. There must have been a lot of conversations about that that didn’t actually make it into the film. Can you talk a little bit about how you handled that?

When we first started structuring the film, it was only going to be adults. We were going to talk to adults, and then when we realized, well, they go to the school boards and they’re all arguing over their children, and they all are saying sort of the same thing: They are concerned about the education of their children, the safety of their children, their children getting educated in a way that they will have a prosperous life. They all want that. But they were coming at it from different directions, and they were bringing all the national issues right into the school board meeting.

When they would leave the meeting, they would jump on social media and attack each other. Some people would come to the meetings and attack. Some people would just do it on social media. Some people would do it both ways, and no one could let it go. By the way, the kids are watching all of this, which is why we wanted to start talking with students — which is why there was that student roundtable. It’s how we got to Evi and Vanessa, who were best friends with different political views, and their parents really don’t like each other. Their parents were going after each other right and left. 

In fact, in the broadcast version of this, some of the social media is blurred. We’re doing a pre-release screening in Bucks County [on Sept. 15], and we’re playing it back for the whole community, and that will be the uncensored version. But the blurs will say a lot even in the broadcast version, because you’ll see what’s not there. And it’s astonishing what people were saying about one another. We saw that social media was another character, as you put it, then we had to determine, “Well, how are we going to present that?” because there are many ways to do it. So we did it in two ways. We had the icon of every person, what they say, and then the scatter text is [social media] conversation from the community. The scatter text was the community’s craziness: This is what everybody’s saying and the actual social media attacks then were handled as they were back and forth, back and forth.

I wanted to talk about Vanessa and Evi. To me, one of the most powerful moments was near the end when Vanessa, who really hasn’t said a whole lot of substance until now, is talking about politics. She says, “I kind of hate it. It makes me feel depressed.” I thought that was really moving, considering that her parents are these movers and shakers who bankroll a lot of what happens in the community. I mean, she seems to speak for all of us, honestly.

Yes, she does.

What did you think of that moment?

I feel so lucky — we all do — that we were able to spend four years with those two girls, and really everyone that’s in the series. But the adults were all adults. They’re who they are. They were already grown up. But to spend so much time with Evi and Vanessa and the other students as well was remarkable — because we saw them grow before our eyes. We saw them become more articulate. Vanessa is a self-proclaimed introvert, and Evi is a self-proclaimed extrovert. It shows how two opposites can get along, and so over the course of time, Vanessa became much more open. As a matter of fact, her parents have said she’s just become a blossomed person as a result of participating in the project because she has gained confidence, and because we all had such respect for her. So seeing her grow like that and share what her concerns were and what her thoughts were was remarkable.

To me, what she said about being depressed by politics just felt like a rebuke of everything the adults were at each other’s throats about. And I think it took a lot of bravery for her to say that. 

I completely agree. She’s someone that observes. She’s a good listener too. That’s her reaction to everything she’s seen. There’s this whole piece: The kids are watching, so be careful. What will your story be, adults? Because kids are watching you.

And there was another moment too with Vanna deArmond, the third-grade teacher. I remember listening to her talk very near the beginning, and it was very clear to me that she was just reacting to a lot of trauma in her life. And I thought, “O.K., why are you visiting this on everybody?” Then at the very end, she basically says, “Listen, I gotta admit: I had a lot of trauma, and it affected what I said and what I did.” I thought that was another powerful moment. 

Vanna, in the community, was viewed as this right-winger who had no regard for anybody else. But the thing is, back to your first question, is that when you see someone like Vanna, be careful of the judgment you make because you don’t know what their life was like. When Vanna allows us to go there with what her life was like, we have a better understanding for her as an adult today. 

And the thing is: Look, we all have some level of dysfunction within our families, within us. We’ve all had traumas of some sort, and I feel like when we say we haven’t and we can’t give grace for anyone who has, then we’re lacking something society really needs, especially right now. One of the things that we’re trying to encourage people to do is to watch the entire series before making judgments, because there’s a buildup of all of these little pieces that will come together in the end for thoughtful consideration. And that’s one of them.

Tulsa, Oklahoma

With her long, wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, the young mom sat alone outside courtroom 6 at the Tulsa County Family Center for Juvenile Justic, checking her phone and anxiously waiting for a court official to call her name for an eviction hearing.

“I’ve never been through this,” Courtney said in early May. Her two kids, ages 5 and 6, were staying with her mother out of town while she tried to catch up on rent or find another place to live. It was the best for the children, she said, but “they want to be with me.”

Between losing one job and starting another, she feared she’d still come up short of the  $1,004 she owed.

She didn’t have much time.

In Oklahoma, the eviction process moves faster than the ability of most renters to respond. State law gives tenants five days to pay their debt or move out. A tenant has to appear in court just three days after a summons arrives. 

Tulsa has one of the worst eviction rates in the country — the as of a decade ago. Since then, the rate has grown from 8% to . Last school year, landlords filed evictions affecting more than 600 children in the state’s largest district, the Tulsa Public Schools. 

Her kids’ schools, Courtney said, didn’t ask why she withdrew them with a month left in the school year.

That’s hardly surprising, experts say.

“[Parents are] looking for, ‘How do I find a place where my kids are going to sleep?’ ” said Eric Hallett, a staff attorney at Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. “They’re not thinking ‘What can a lawyer do for me?’ or even ‘What can Tulsa Public Schools do for me?’ ”

But in a state with one of the in the nation, that’s something the district is trying to change. Since 2020, leaders have worked with ImpactTulsa, a nonprofit, to prevent disruption in kids’ education and quickly direct parents under threat of eviction to resources like legal aid and rental assistance. When a student’s address appears in an eviction filing, the parent receives an email from the district offering help.

The alert is a promising example of schools being “first responders” in a housing emergency, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a national advocacy organization focused on students experiencing homelessness. Tulsa’s system has caught the attention of organizations doing similar work from Dallas to Dayton, Ohio. But the resources available to families fall far short of the demand, and the threat of eviction itself can be so traumatic that parents are often too overwhelmed to respond.

“There is a culture of defeat,” said Ana Barros, the director of collaboration and partnerships for ImpactTulsa. If the eviction seems like a “done deal, why would I reach out for help?” 

Roughly nationally are caught up in evictions each year, with households headed by single Black mothers . Housing instability lands the heaviest on families with young from a Stanford University survey shows that nearly 30% of parents with children under 6 were worried about being evicted in the next month and 8% had already received an eviction notice. A federal program provides homeless students with educational and transportation services. But families who are evicted don’t immediately qualify for the same support, and the damage to students’ learning is clear.

“The gaps in children’s education are huge,” said Emily Turner, an attorney who is part of ImpactTulsa’s eviction prevention team. Missing days and weeks of school because of an eviction raises concerns about kids’ safety, she said, and the more they miss, the harder it is to come back. “They feel behind or they feel scared or they feel like this isn’t my space anymore.”

In the Oklahoma City schools, 65% of students whose families received were chronically absent, almost as many as those who were actually evicted, according to , part of Mental Health Association Oklahoma. On state assessments, students with an eviction notice or judgment had 25% lower proficiency rates in math compared to their peers. In reading, the academic impact was more than twice as much — 56% lower. 

“We have slipped to the bottom in education rankings,” said state Rep. Amanda Clinton, a Democrat who this year to give tenants facing eviction access to free mediation before a judge heard their case. The bill passed the House, but died in the Senate. She agrees with Republicans that the state should focus on turning around its dismal performance in . “But we cannot be serious about improving student outcomes unless we get serious about keeping kids in the classroom to start with.”

At Kerr Elementary, on the east side of Tulsa, Principal Jennifer Thomas sees the academic impact of evictions every morning. Students with unstable housing are frequently absent, and when they do come to school, they often arrive at least an hour late and hungry. 

“We have students who have been at four different schools within a month,” she said. As with Courtney’s kids, Thomas said it’s not unusual for grandparents to provide backup, but that adds to the learning disruption. “Grandma doesn’t know where the school is, or Grandma’s not used to having to get the kids up at 7:30.” 

Lawmakers took up the issue last year and worked to pass a bipartisan bill that would have given tenants a few more days to show up in court — a rare development in such a deep red state. But Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, . With a background in , including rental homes in Florida, he argued that the extension would be too “burdensome” for landlords. This year, a died in committee. 

“This is a very, very landlord-friendly state,” said Delia Kimbrel, the director of research and policy at ImpactTulsa. “The scales are really stacked up against the family.”

‘Human realities’

landlords are the most likely to evict, . Those include Vesta Realty, which owned Barcelona Apartments, the Spanish-style complex at a busy intersection in southeast Tulsa that filed the case against Courtney.

Hannah Remick, a former administrative assistant for the company, who herself from one of its 40 complexes, estimates that Vesta filed about 25 evictions a week. Whether tenants have kids doesn’t make landlords any less likely to force them out, she said.

“They would just say ‘units.’ They wouldn’t think about who is living in that unit,” she said. The process, she said, is “very separated from the human realities of what’s going on there.”

When ImpactTulsa identified management companies evicting families with school-aged kids, some of the affected properties had and code violations that had gone for months. In 2024, one mom of a kindergartner told reporters she was to the media about a lack of hot water and cockroaches in her apartment. 

Poor living conditions for renters are not unique to Tulsa. A showed that 13% of renters moved in the past two years because their home needed repairs. Five percent said they were either evicted or trying to avoid eviction.

Remick described as “one of the worst,” with workers instructed to layer coats of Kilz primer over walls with mold. Courtney told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· she had six work orders pending, including one for a leaky water heater, when she was evicted. Because an eviction can prevent a tenant from getting another lease and affect future employment, she asked Âé¶čŸ«Æ· not to use her last name. 

The company’s financial condition was likely one reason for the backlog of repairs. Vesta’s owner, Marc Kulick, is facing . In February, Fannie Mae, the mortgage lender, against the company, and in July, as a result of litigation, a , YSA Investments, took ownership of multiple Vesta properties, including Barcelona. Vesta was also among the Tulsa landlords that fell months behind on .

“We all got letters on our doors saying they were going to charge for water,” Courtney said, even though that cost is supposed to be part of the rent. 

According to a city official, the company caught up with water bills, and Vesta issued a statement saying that because of a pending “ownership dispute,” all questions about conditions, staffing or maintenance at Barcelona should go to the current operator. 

YSA spokesman Parker Detweiler said his company is “doing everything humanly possible within the law to get living conditions where they should be.”

Sherri Daley, executive director of the Tulsa Apartment Association, said while it’s important to address the “underlying causes of housing instability,” landlords have to worry about their bottom line.

“Property owners and managers typically focus on the lease obligations, payment history, and compliance with the rental agreement rather than whether a household includes school-aged children,” she said. One of the arguments against extending the eviction timeline was that it would hurt small, independent landlords. “Even one missed payment can create a ripple effect, leading to deferred maintenance and other financial pressures for the owner.”

Tenants falling behind on rent can sometimes avoid an eviction if they communicate with their landlords, said Amy Coldren, who launched Shelterwell in Oklahoma City in 2023.  As part of its eviction prevention work, the organization provides nonprofits and schools with a free, tenant education program called . It covers topics like how to understand a lease and manage a budget.

Coldren said one of the first women she met after starting Shelterwell was facing eviction because her children, who had previously been in foster care, were considered unauthorized occupants.

“I’m a former foster parent, so I know the work that she did to get her children back,” she said. “A simple solution would have been for her to have a conversation with her landlord and put her kids on the lease.”

‘A sensitive manner’

ImpactTulsa’s work began with a disturbing realization.

Property owners  are also concentrated in the same neighborhoods as schools with the highest . That’s what the organization found when it began scraping the eviction court docket six years ago for addresses that match those of district students.

Between 2020 and 2023, Kimbrel identified eviction filings affecting roughly 4,400 Tulsa students. The disruption wasn’t brief. A year after a district family’s eviction showed up on their radar, nearly three-fourths of those students were still chronically absent. 

“That just slapped everybody in the face,” she said. 

But even the most sophisticated of district data systems can’t stop families from being displaced. The district’s homeless education staff last school year emailed all 621 families identified through the alert system, said BreAnna Shine, director of student engagement. Less than 100 ultimately received support through the district. Most didn’t respond. They might have landed somewhere else, ignored the message or resolved the issue with their landlord.

The other half of the system is a resource hub in one of the district’s most heavily impacted clusters of schools, East Central. The schools on that side of town draw from apartments like Eastgate, which filed eviction notices during that 2020-23 period affecting 47 students at Cooper Elementary and 26 students at East Central High School, Kimbrel’s analysis showed.

The hub at East Central Middle is two offices near the front entrance where Angeles Gonzalez, a family “navigator” with Tulsa Responds, and Turner, an attorney for the YWCA, meet privately with parents to triage their immediate needs — items like rental assistance, a free hotspot or food stamps. But district staff initially wrestled with whether they even wanted to know which families had been evicted. 

“It’s a sensitive matter,” said Stephanie Andrews, executive director of student and family support services. It’s uncomfortable to contact a parent who might not want anyone to know they’ve hit such a low point. “It’s not been without some bumps.” 

The district can guide a family to a nonprofit offering short-term rental assistance or temporary housing, but that often means they end up on a waiting list for services. Restore Hope, a nonprofit, spends about $100,000 a month in rental assistance, but those funds only cover about 30% of the eviction cases, said Josh Geppelt, executive director. Plus, to qualify, applicants have to show they have “means to maintain the rent after we do the assist.”

Living in limbo during that application process, while also bouncing from one living situation to the next, is draining, said Aspen Allen, a mother of three.

“You’re waiting for them to call you, and if nobody answers, they move to the next person,” she said. 

She leaned on the district last fall for clothes and backpacks for her kids in between leaving a rental home with plumbing problems, spending time in a run by a local church and moving into Parkview Terrace on the west side of town, a public housing development known for . It’s the same complex where she’s currently waiting for a subsidized apartment. 

“I haven’t been able to have my own spot for my kids to be happy, go to school, go on vacation and just have a good life,” said Allen, who works as a DoorDasher and was waiting to hear back about a part-time FedEx position. “I’m trying to keep them in school, not missing any days, which is very difficult at times.”

‘They grab what they can’

Inspired by Tulsa’s example, nonprofit leaders in other cities nonetheless face the same obstacles in trying to serve families with scarce resources. 

“There is no system,” said Aqua Porter, executive director of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative in New York. “There are just things that people have to navigate through, and they are not connected.”

Most of those other nonprofits have something Oklahoma does not — a longer timeline between eviction notices and court appearances.  In New York, for example, nonprofits have roughly 30 days from an eviction filing to help families find legal aid, point them toward sources of financial support and encourage them to attend their first court appearance.

Because Oklahoma’s system is designed to get renters with delinquent payments out as soon as possible, it’s often too late to prevent eviction. Those with nowhere to go may stay in the apartment after they’re evicted until they’re forced out by the sheriff’s department, said Melissa Vowell, a homeless education program specialist for the Tulsa Public Schools.

They usually have about an hour to collect belongings. 

“If it’s a sheriff’s eviction, they grab what they can in the time a sheriff will allow,” she said.

Their next stop might be Vowell’s office, which connects to a storeroom packed with school uniforms, socks and underwear, and personal hygiene products.

She also maintains a detailed spreadsheet filled with organizations offering food, transportation and housing. One nonprofit on the list is , tucked into a serene, wooded area west of downtown. Out of a small white cottage, Executive Director Tina Massey runs an eviction diversion program that provides one-time payments of up to $1,000 for those who have fallen behind on rent. Massey estimates that the program reached close to 90 district families last school year.  For those who lose their housing, a shelter on the same property offers fully furnished apartments for up to three months.

Brooklyn Cloud found Family Promise on Facebook last year while living in a Mazda SUV with two daughters, one in preschool and another in second grade. After an eviction from Harmony Glen, a 74-unit complex owned by a , they spent six months sleeping under the lights in Walmart and QuikTrip parking lots. 

“I didn’t even know a 7-year-old could get depressed,” Cloud said. “Her grades started to slip, lack of appetite. She wanted to sleep all the time.”

While staying in one of the apartments, Cloud and her husband paid off the eviction and saved for a new home. Their oldest now “has her own space.” 

“She’s more bubbly and her personality is back,” she said. “She’s not so down-in-the-dumps and snappy.”

‘Legal first aid’

Most parents in a crisis like Cloud’s don’t even show up to court. 

“They can’t get time off work or child care,” said Hallett, the legal aid attorney.

That was clear the day Courtney’s case appeared on the docket. Of the 89 eviction filings before Judge Tammy Bruce, who hears about 13,000 eviction cases a year, less than half of the tenants showed up. 

If they do appear, they’re unlikely to have . In nearly every case, Judge Bruce told them they could either meet with their landlord’s representative or see if they qualified for legal aid. Court documents show Courtney represented herself, while a Vesta employee appeared for the company.

Courtney was evicted two weeks later. Attempts to reach her by phone and text since then were unsuccessful.

Last year, Hallett began asking tenants if they have children in the Tulsa schools. It’s his contribution to the district’s effort to identify more families. 

On the district side, about 40 teachers at East Central MIddle learned how to offer “legal first aid,” like helping parents construct timelines of the events that led up to eviction. Missed or partial payments, maintenance issues reported, and messages to landlords and property managers are important to document because when apartments change ownership, new managers don’t always honor previous attempts to pay. 

Barros, with ImpactTulsa, expected some resistance from staff to the training. She’s a former social studies teacher at East Central Middle.

“Teachers are like ‘Whoa, that’s not my job. You’re adding something else to my plate,’ ” she said. But schools play a unique role in eviction prevention, she said. “Kids are legally required to be here. So let’s take advantage of that.”

Unfortunately, student newspapers are increasingly rare. A national found that fewer than half of high schools had student newspapers in 2021, down from almost two-thirds a decade earlier. The situation is even worse in New York City, the so-called media capital of the world, which must fully implement its “Portrait of a Graduate” framework by the 2029-30 school year. A found only 27% of the city’s 400-plus public high schools had a student newspaper — and that number was even lower among schools serving high-poverty communities and those with the lowest graduation rates. 

For five years, the nonprofit I lead, Press Pass NYC, has been addressing this gap by training teachers to advise student-led news teams, both online and in print. We’ve partnered with more than 40 schools across the city, launching brand-new news teams or revitalizing those that may have closed or had trouble getting off the ground. 

Because newspapers are no longer so visible or easily obtained as they were when New Yorkers used to leave them on buses and subways, many teens have never seen one until joining a news team. I realized this when I visited schools to watch how the teachers and students are working together. I got a few bewildered looks when I asked some students what kind of artwork or photo they thought should go with their articles. But as a former reporter, I was thrilled to see how much they love journalism when they realize what they can do with it.

Middle and high school students spent last year writing about controversial new policies like the city’s school phone ban. At one school in Chinatown, an editorial against the ban revealed that for students to use during class. A student at a Queens high school told me how interviewing people for an article on immigration taught him that writing a news article is different from an opinion piece. “ This is this person’s life, this is their story and you’re listening and you’re resonating,” he explained, with reverence. 

A Bronx River High School student, Lathania Williams, won a for teen journalism for her report on the impact of immigration enforcement on her community. “I didn’t know my voice could reach that far, or that I had power in my writing,” she said. The news team at a school in Brooklyn that a school lockdown had been caused by immigration enforcement agents (it wasn’t). One student who works on the publication said the article, “let people know what actually really happened instead of the lie or the rumor.”

At a time when 84% of U.S. teens have a of journalism, student newsrooms create a source of accurate local news, showing the whole school community the difference between journalism and the unvetted information kids get from social media. In the process, students learn through a collaborative workplace driven by a shared mission with deadlines and standards — the same type of skills “Portrait of a Graduate” standards will be looking for.

St is far more complicated than simply finding a teacher willing to advise one. An effective adviser must understand journalistic ethics, interview skills, audience engagement, newsroom management and the legal and editorial responsibilities that come with student journalism. Those professional skills cannot be acquired through a weekend workshop. And while artificial intelligence can help a student brainstorm questions or polish a headline, it can’t substitute for an adviser who knows when a source needs to be corroborated, when publishing could put a student at risk or when an administrator is improperly trying to influence editorial decisions.

Building those skills requires sustained professional development, practice and support. My colleague Lara Bergen, who founded Press Pass NYC five years ago, learned this the hard way. A former teacher, she had started a student newspaper at her New York City public high school and was thrilled to see how well it engaged her students. But she had zero training in journalism, and that limited what she could accomplish. Her solution was to create a three-year, in-depth Journalism Adviser Fellowship for teachers, a cohort model where teachers learn together from experienced journalism educators. 

This type of training is essential for a school-based newsroom to last. Unlike core subjects, very few states license teachers specifically to teach journalism. In most places, including New York, the subject is folded into the English Language Arts curriculum, which means an ELA teacher can get handed a newspaper or yearbook to advise with no real journalism training. Because requirements differ widely by location, the Journalism Education Association offers a designation for teachers to prove they are highly qualified.

For student journalism to help prepare the next generation of citizens, schools have to stop treating the person running the newsroom as just another teacher with room in his or her schedule. Journalism advising deserves professional preparation and ongoing support, and schools must treat advisers with the same respect as any other educator. That means building journalism into teacher credentialing, funding the sustained training that advising requires and counting the work of a student newsroom as evidence that a graduate can think critically, communicate clearly and engage as a citizen.

Across the country, elementary schools employ an estimated 67,000 speech language pathologists — experts on the front lines of diagnosing early language and reading struggles. 

The problem? To meet , schools of them. 

It’s the same for reading specialists, highly trained educators who have made literacy their professional calling card. There are simply out there with that expertise. 

These shortfalls are part of the reason that students’ reading proficiency is . Today, 40% of fourth graders can’t do things like provide support for ideas related to a story’s plot or characters. That’s up from 33% in 2022. A third of eighth graders can’t pick out the main idea of an informational text. 

Ensuring that every child has foundational literacy skills is going to be a Herculean task. Based on my work with researchers and technologists, I see enormous potential in automatic speech recognition as a tool for helping to make up for the shortage of specialists. After listening to children read aloud, this artificial intelligence-powered technology can help assess their progress by identifying weaknesses, provide them with feedback and give teachers and parents recommendations for interventions. The promise of this technology is substantial – if platform developers and their funders can get it right.

This is particularly true in K-2, when students are learning skills that for lifelong reading and success. By assisting speech pathologists and teachers, automatic speech recognition could make sophisticated early literacy screening more accessible and affordable — and it should only get better as AI advances.

Speech recognition technology has a , and it has been used to support literacy development in young readers since 1990. That’s when Carnegie Mellon University launched , a computer program that displayed stories on a screen and listened to children as they read the text. The program intervened when the student made a mistake, got stuck or asked for help. It also gave teachers feedback and advice on the child’s progress and struggles.

The approach worked. A compared the literacy skills of students in grades 1 to 4 who used the program with those of classmates who engaged in sustained silent reading. Those who used the technology-powered intervention, especially in first grade, outpaced their peers in word identification, comprehension, fluency, spelling and understanding of individual sounds.

Some modern versions of automatic speech recognition serve primarily as a screener, like Amplify’s , which provides teachers with immediate feedback on students’ reading fluency and specific areas where they need extra support. Other innovations use the technology to not only assess, but intervene in real time, like ’s AI reading tutor. An , the tool works in English and Spanish and serves 5 million students in all 50 states. Amira is also collaborating with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania Data Center to develop an for neurodiverse students. 

Automatic speech recognition is particularly strong at helping students decode words, as it improves their ability to match written letters to the spoken sounds they make — a key skill in literacy development.

This spring, Renaissance Philanthropy launched with one moonshot goal: develop AI-powered tools that, over the next five years, will reduce the number of struggling young readers by half. 

Short for Learning Engineering Virtual Institute, LEVI provides five years of funding to researchers and developers who share their knowledge and learnings while tackling big challenges. We recently the teams selected to work toward the literacy moonshot: Reads Labs at Harvard University, OxEd, LitLab.ai and Project Read with the University of Florida Literacy Institute.

Of course, there are challenges to deploying automatic speech recognition in classrooms if it is to reach its full potential. Developers, companies and researchers need to invest in the that are needed to train the AI behind these tools. Importantly, these must include a range of children — English learners, special education students, etc. — so the apps and platforms can assist kids with diverse needs. Finally, developers must ground their tools in cognitive science on how the human brain learns, then validate their platforms through rigorous classroom testing.

Automatic speech recognition can never replace a skilled and caring teacher, but it can serve as a patient, non-judgmental expert companion for every educator trying to better understand who is struggling to read, and why. With thoughtfully designed, research-backed screeners and tutors, the nation can have a powerful new tool to tackle its literacy challenge, and give all students more of the personalized reading help they deserve. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to LEVI Literacy and Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

That decision won’t come until next April when the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce chooses between competing visions of how math should be taught and names textbooks and other learning materials low-scoring schools will be forced to use.

In the meantime, schools will be in a holding pattern of what lessons to use while advocates and state education officials duel behind closed doors over which approaches win out.

With Ohio’s math scores still below pre-pandemic levels, the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine passed a law this summer that mirrors Ohio’s 2023 law mandating the use of the science of reading in classrooms by requiring schools to better track math skills and give students extra help. 

The new law also requires elementary school teachers to show they are proficient in math skills before they can teach math.

But unlike the science of reading law which sets a clear path for how schools should teach, there is no consensus — both nationally and in Ohio — on how students can best learn math, with ongoing debate nationally between a self-proclaimed science of math movement and more holistic approaches favored by many educators.

The differences in math approaches are nuanced — simplified by some as focusing on teaching concepts versus teaching procedures — and have not become a full public debate in Ohio, at least not yet.

But educators are watching cautiously as the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce follows the model of the reading law and creates a list of “high quality” math textbooks and other learning materials by April 2027.

Most schools can still pick their own textbooks, but an estimated 450 schools with low test scores will have to use only books from that list. 

The department won’t clear up concerns by saying which studies or resources will guide its evaluation of materials. Asked by Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, if the science of math was under consideration, the department did not respond, only saying it is still in the planning stages.

“It would be premature to speculate on those details,” the department told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Both the state superintendents association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers union said during debate over the law they oppose letting the state, not each local district, decide what to use.

Ohio’s math teachers also object to the state taking that control.

“I don’t like the state telling me I have to use a certain textbook,” said Mike Lipnos, president of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 

Lipnos wants the state to follow a state math learning plan he helped create last year that prioritizes teaching math concepts and making sure students develop problem-solving and reasoning skills. But he sensed some opposition within the department to the plan and worries the state will instead approve science of math books he believes teach math as a set of procedures to memorize.

His organization has criticized the science of math as trying to “capitalize” off of the science of reading.

“We want to say clearly to all mathematics stakeholders that OCTM rejects the outdated and inappropriate instructional practices that are being repackaged and promoted as some sort of new ‘scientific’ ideology,” the group

The science of math wasn’t an issue in debate over the bill: Backers did not testify and have not made any public comment. University of Texas professor Sarah Powell, leader of the movement, also told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· she is not talking with Ohio officials to promote her approach.

The movement’s While backers favor teacher-led lessons with explicit instruction on how to solve math problems — prioritizing them over lessons on concepts that Powell has said can “ waste students’ time” — they say schools need a balance.

How schools teach reading has become a major issue nationally in the last several years, with the majority of states passing laws mandating use of phonics-heavy science of reading lessons. Low math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress then focused states’ attention on math. 

Ten states have passed policies to change math instruction just this year, said Lindsey Henderson, the senior policy director for math of the ExcelinEd nonprofit education advocacy group.

, such as having math coaches, teaching math at least 60 minutes a day, or making sure students can take advanced math classes. Alabama, an early adopter of some of the policies, leads the way with eight of the 11 approved and Ohio, as one of the ten states setting math policies this year, is also a leader in the effort, Henderson said.

But Henderson and other experts concede that math research is a few years behind where reading was when the science of reading caught on.

“Math doesn’t have a nice short term like the science of reading, and everybody knows what it means and everybody knows where to look for the research,” Henderson said.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education, another nonprofit research and advocacy group, characterized the two sides of the “math wars” as favoring “traditional” teacher-led classes as opposed to “reform-oriented” classes in which student exploration takes priority. 

In a recent survey of states, CRPE found that as of late last year 18 states and Washington, D.C., have passed math policies, “many of which emphasized priorities associated with the science of math.”

But the report notes that both sides claim to be “evidence-based,” which makes it hard to decide what’s best.

“The Science of Math has not achieved the academic and professional consensus that the Science of Reading eventually did, and the gap matters,” the report states. “Whether the field will eventually reach comparable agreement, remains unclear.”

In Ohio, the bill enacted this summer by the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine comes as just 55 percent of students across all grades scored as proficient or better in math in 2025, while more than one in four scored at the lowest level, the state equivalent of F grades on state tests.

“This problem has not developed overnight, but its severity grows ever more prevalent as students who were knocked off track by the impact of the pandemic, or who were already struggling academically, continue to be promoted to the next grade despite showing very clear signs of needing significant intervention,” said State Sen. Andrew Brenner, the law’s author and chair of the Senate Education Committee.

The law passed this summer has drawn praise for several changes, including requiring tutoring of students who struggle, schools where fewer than 51% of third graders score proficient in math to develop a plan to improve and letting high-scoring middle school students combine seventh and eighth grade math into one year and start algebra in eighth grade.

The bill has been praised widely for calling attention to math and for taking steps to help improve math skills.

The law falls far short of Ohio’s 2023 science of reading bill in a few important ways, however. The reading bill budgeted over $160 million to pay for new teaching materials and teacher training, while the math bill provides no new money.

The reading bill also mandated that teachers learn the basics of the science of reading, while the math law only requires the Department of Education and Workforce to develop training by December.

Good training in how to teach math is considered crucial by wide-ranging advocates, including ExcelinEd, Lipnos’ math teachers association and its national organization.

The portion of the law that could lead to debate going forward — the requirement that the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce approve a list of “high quality instructional materials” in math â€” did not spark much discussion during hearings for the law.

In the end, the final law calls for all schools required to set math improvement plans — the 450 schools with fewer than 51% of students testing as proficient in math on state tests — to use only state-approved books and other materials.

And unlike with the reading law, which specifically banned some discredited teaching approaches and mandated phonics-heavy lessons, the law offers no definition of “high-quality.” The new Ohio law only requires that books help students build their math skills toward mastery.

The department declined to answer questions from Âé¶čŸ«Æ· about whether schools are using bad textbooks, whether bad books are leading to bad scores or which methods of math teaching need to be added or cut.

“That’s precisely the gap,” Steve Dackin, the department’s director told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· by email.

“Historically, the Department has not been able to collect data on math materials, and there is currently no approved list to compare materials against in Ohio,” Dackin said. “As a result, we are not in a position to characterize what districts are using.”

Dackin and the department declined to say what it would base its “high quality” judgment on, saying only that books should have “coherent learning progressions, strong alignment with standards, embedded assessments that inform instruction and help teachers identify student needs, and evidence-based strategies that create more opportunities for students to engage deeply with core concepts.”

“It’s not about stopping certain materials,” he said. “It’s about ensuring classrooms use resources that truly support strong instruction.”

The program has served in every state in the nation, ensuring kids not only receive access to early learning opportunities, but have what they need to learn — nutritious food, health supports, developmental screenings, and the like. It also supports their families to become healthy, well, socioeconomically stable, and skilled advocates for their children’s education. 

The impacts have been short-term, long-term, and even intergenerational, reaching the children of Head Start graduates, improving their  , employment, , and . Meanwhile, research indicates that linguistically diverse kids — Head Start calls them dual language learners — have been . 

That’s why the Trump administration’s recent proposal to enact a national English-only mandate in Head Start classrooms is so mistaken. This idea undermines the administration’s own objectives by for parents and giving local Head Start providers less regulatory flexibility while imposing a greater compliance burden. 

Today, about a third of Head Start’s enrollees are dual language learners. These children have long been a focus for the program. In 1975, President Gerald Ford’s administration launched regulations that . For decades since, Republican and Democratic administrations (including the first Trump administration) have sustained that requirement. 

Fifty-one years later, it’s clear that Head Start’s architects were ahead of their time. Bilingual early learning centers and schools are — with both English-dominant families and with families speaking other languages at home. that these programs are highly effective for English learners and English-dominant students alike. 

The Trump administration’s English-only proposal is not only misaligned with science, law, and the administration’s own stated goals, it will also cost taxpayers. Given that roughly speak a non-English language proficiently, implementing English-only instruction would force providers to spend considerably on restaffing and purchasing new learning materials. Specifically, implementation costs would be between $73 million and $124 million. 

That’s a lot to pay, particularly to abandon a half-century of bipartisan consensus that Head Start works best when it’s responsive to the needs of the particular communities it serves. Indeed, this when it exempted tribal communities from the proposal’s English-only mandate so that tribes could build stronger connections between children and their heritage. Why would this be any different for children who speak other, non-tribal languages at home and in their neighborhoods? 

The proposed English-only mandate is also a resoundingly bad idea on the merits. : for the nearly one-third of Head Start attendees that speak a non-English language at home, bilingual learning is the educational gold standard. When these children have opportunities to strengthen their abilities in their first languages — while also being exposed to English — they are more likely to become fully proficient in English and succeed academically. 

Maybe this seems . Why wouldn’t English-only instruction help linguistically diverse kids learn more English? It appears that bilingual early care and education programs help these children become stronger language learners in general. That is, by developing their first languages more deeply, they become more confident language users, more able to understand complex elements of grammar, syntax, and the like. Over time, these stronger language competencies help them to more thoroughly and rapidly acquire English. What’s more, bilingual programs absolutely still provide young, linguistically diverse kids with English-language instruction. 

Bilingual learning models work for early education and K–12 programs alike. Over half a century ago, Texas launched one of the country’s most ambitious commitments to bilingual education. Since that time, the state has grown its investments in these programs to a point where it is now, perhaps, the country’s best school system for English-learning students. On the Nation’s Report Card, better in math and English language arts than their peers in almost every other state. 

Finally, in a more general — and a more urgent — sense, anyone who cares about kids’ well-being should also be concerned whether it’s a good idea to trade in safety and quality for more seats. Even if — after spending around $100 million on a national English-only mandate for local Head Start providers — the administration’s proposal lowered costs enough to expand the number of available seats, those seats wouldn’t be of high enough quality to keep kids healthy, safe, and learning, let alone deliver the results that have made Head Start so effective for so many decades. 

And at some point, once safety, quality, and the high standard of care that has made Head Start the national guidepost are dissolved — we need to ask ourselves what exactly are we expanding access to? 

In February, on orders from the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, Medicaid officials created a first-of-its-kind online portal containing hundreds of millions of billing records that supposedly would allow everyday people to crowdsource investigations into healthcare fraud.

“DOGE is not a department,” Elon Musk . “It’s a state of mind.”

At the time, thousands of heavily armed federal agents were smashing into cars and battering their way into homes throughout Minnesota’s Twin Cities, under the guise of investigating what the Trump administration insisted was unchecked fraud in autism therapy committed by Somali immigrants.

There was a grain of truth: Fraud is indeed widespread in autism therapy, something a series of federal audits begun during the Biden administration found in red states and blue. In the wake of the audits’ release, the Trump administration raided autism centers, blaming lawless immigrants, welfare cheats and “woke ideology” for the scandals unfolding nationwide. 

But a 74 investigation found another problem entirely: a massive influx of private equity players capitalizing on the autism therapy industry to the tune of $7 billion in taxpayer-funded Medicaid payments over the course of six years. And much of this explosive growth has come at the expense of children.

The explosive growth of applied behavior analysis

Âé¶čŸ«Æ· downloaded the 275 million-record DOGE dataset and analyzed Medicaid claims for autism therapy from 2019 to 2024. Our analysis reveals how an unproven, even harmful, behavior modification system called applied behavior analysis, or ABA, is crowding out more effective — and humane — treatments for children with autism.

And it shows how a well-intentioned campaign by parents desperate to find a “cure” for their autistic kids has mushroomed into a poorly implemented but extremely lucrative mechanism for providing ABA — a system of rewards and punishments designed to eliminate certain behaviors — to as many autistic children as possible, regardless of their age or actual needs. 

Pediatricians, psychologists and other professionals who diagnose autism reflexively prescribe ABA to parents, typically unaware that there is mounting disagreement about the therapy’s effectiveness and the associated trauma that can follow an autistic individual into adulthood. Told this is the child’s best chance at a decent life, few caregivers question the guidance until harmful effects start to show.

Experts consulted by Âé¶čŸ«Æ· weren’t surprised by our findings. Health officials turned on the fiscal taps before instituting meaningful legal oversight — creating the exact kind of loosely regulated environment that draws the opaque investment strategy employed by private equity. 

A secretive corner of the financial sector not held to the same standards as exchange-traded stocks, bank loans and other publicly monitored investments, private equity has acquired businesses in numerous industries over the last decade, hoovering up billions of dollars. 

Private equity typically acquires privately held companies that have access to steady streams of revenue, extracting as much cash as possible in the short term and leaving debt when investors move on. To maximize profits, they often deliver the easiest, most lucrative services, rather than the personalized treatments Medicaid and other public funds were supposed to pay for.

From 2019 to 2024, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· found, Medicaid claims for the six most common autism therapy billing codes shot up some 381%, from $400 million a year to nearly $2 billion — with private equity-backed providers leading the billing pack.

Indeed, federal begun in 2022 — two of them in blue states and two in red — reveal a very purple problem. They detail how bad actors in the for-profit business sector, whether greedy or merely inept, push autistic children toward ABA therapy at the expense of other, more effective supports at school that students with disabilities are guaranteed by law. 

Families whose children are referred to ABA by pediatricians and other providers are typically urged by private therapy centers to sign them up for as many hours as possible — up to 40 hours a week — and to keep them there for years. That is a prescription ripe for exploitation, says Ari Ne’Eman, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former director of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network.  

“Private equity was attracted to ABA because the industry as a whole had set up a very tidy financial arrangement for itself,” says Ne’Eman. “It’s not that private equity is corrupting a previously fine field. Private equity entered the field because of the flaws that were already there.” 

For fiscal year 2026, federal spending on special education . If the $2 billion now being spent every year on ABA for children with publicly subsidized health insurance were added to schools’ annual budgets, every district in the country could add one full-time and one half-time occupational therapist — specialists in desperate short supply who have proven success in addressing many issues facing autistic children.

DOGE’s intentions notwithstanding, many in the autism community have hoped the crisis posed by runaway Medicaid spending might present an opportunity to take a hard look at how ABA has grown into an industry with the fiscal might to stave off even basic state and federal oversight. And how it is crowding out more effective, humane alternatives, and even preventing children from going to school.

Instead, now they fear that politics will further overshadow needed autism therapy reforms. The second Trump administration has withheld some $3 billion in Medicaid funding from California and Minnesota, insisting that their governors — whom the president views as foes — are not attending to fraud. As a consequence, people with disabilities have already lost services. 

As the Medicaid cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill go into effect, and as he and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continue to promote disproven and dangerous “cures” for autism — at the cost of research into better treatments — disability advocates fear the future will look a lot like a dark past.   

ABA claims vastly outpace spending on autistic people’s quality of life

In addition to the financial boondoggles, there’s a human cost. 

During the six years of records we analyzed, Medicaid billing for ABA therapy totaled nearly $7 billion. That’s $1 billion more than the United States has spent in 20 years on research and programs under the Autism CARES Act, which pays for services to better autistic people’s lives.   

As disproportionately small as the CARES Act funding is, even after two decades of lobbying by autists and advocates, very little of it is spent on . Of the $2 billion appropriated last year, to be spent over five years, $30 million will go to creating support for caregivers, $13 million to job training and $19 million to safety and well-being.    

Now, even that modest pot of funding is imperiled, as Kennedy is redirecting federal resources toward new research on vaccines and other long-discredited “causes” of autism and dangerous, ineffective treatment strategies. 

Meanwhile, is that the most widely used therapy, ABA, is frequently ineffective and . The therapy was pioneered in the 1960s by Norwegian-born UCLA researcher Ole Ivar Lovaas, who used the same regime of rewards and punishments to develop LGBTQ conversion therapy — now widely acknowledged as abusive.

Independent researchers and autistic adults who went through ABA say its focus on “extinguishing” natural and frequently beneficial autistic traits and in their place demanding compliance with “normal” behaviors is traumatizing. Much as conversion therapy can’t change a person’s identity but can instead instill shame, behavior conditioning will not make autists nondisabled and sends the message their strengths are unimportant.

Lovaas is one of two early autism researchers whose histories are now known to include ties to Nazi Germany. In interviews, Lovaas said that during the five-year German occupation of Norway, he and his family were forced to labor on farms. But a 2025 report in the journal History of the Human Sciences documents his role as a local of Norway’s Nazi youth movement. The Third Reich sought to “euthanize” autistic people, who were seen as a financial and genetic burden to society.  

The other autism researcher who played a role in the Nazis’ eugenics campaigns was Dr. Hans Asperger, who reported of “malformed children” to be targeted for sterilization or death. 

Proponents are quick to assert that today’s ABA is a far cry from the slaps and electric shocks of what was known as the Lovaas Method early on. Yet the goal — to “extinguish” autistic traits in children— typically remains. Kids as young as 2 are routinely subjected to as many as 40 hours a week of repetitive behavior modification drills.   

A past 74 investigation found that for years, the evidence used to legitimize ABA was produced by the industry itself, was rife with undisclosed conflicts of interest and neglected basic guardrails such as documentation of harmful “adverse events.” By contrast, independent research into ABA by the and academic scholars found little to no evidence of effectiveness.

A of 460 autistic adults and caregivers of autistic children found that nearly half of those who went through ABA showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress, while 72% of those who did not participate in the therapy were asymptomatic.   

, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ohio State University and the University of Texas at Austin found that people who had participated in ABA before age 18 were 30% more likely to experience a mental health hospitalization than autistic people who had not. Autistic people who had been treated with ABA and hospitalized were also admitted with 32% greater frequency than those who had not.   

Again, says Ne’Eman, the industry is predicated on a flawed, but very profitable, model. ABA industry recommendations call for every child, regardless of how young they are or what their needs are, to receive the same intensity of treatment.     

“I would argue that ABA is potentially harmful in any situation because we haven’t really addressed the ethical concerns of the potential mental health consequences,” says Ne’Eman. “But even if we were to set that aside, the idea that there is an evidence base for applying ABA in all instances without regard to any consideration for age or the types of challenges that someone has, it’s just ludicrous.”

“Forty hours a week of therapy is a full-time job for a 3-year-old,” says Ne’Eman. “It’s harmful for kids and families first and foremost, but I also think it’s a poor use of public funds.” 

When therapy supplants school

The four federal audits of state Medicaid spending show what advocates have long decried: ABA service providers are allowed to keep children in lucrative standalone treatment centers where they are barred by Medicaid law from receiving academic instruction — often for years after they should begin attending school.

Auditors raised similar concerns in Indiana, flagging the case of a child who was referred to ABA in January 2014 at the age of 2 and was still receiving more than seven hours of therapy a day, five days a week, at age 8 — years after they should have been in school. Medicaid payments for this child increased from $52,000 a year in 2017 to more than $185,000 in 2022, when the child was 11, for a total of $677,448. 

(For perspective, state spending on school-based special education services varies wildly and is poorly reported. One often-used estimate is that an average of $26,000 is spent annually on each student with a disability, versus $9,000 per non-disabled pupil.)     

Special education teachers say that when these students show up in a classroom, it’s after years of lost academic instruction. In practice, often this means they will be denied the chance to learn alongside their typically developing peers — a right enshrined in federal law. 

Advocates say the exact number of children in this position is probably unknowable. As a youngster approaches kindergarten age, families are often warned by their ABA provider that taking their child out of private therapy and enrolling them in school will cause regression. Much as homeschoolers often do, these families can sign official documents saying they are taking responsibility for their child’s education.    

In the case of the Indiana youngster, now 11, auditors noted that the treatment plan did not say whether the child attended school, “but had a standardized statement: ‘The patient’s family [has] taken on responsibility for meeting the educational needs of this patient.’ ” 

After the audit, Indiana lawmakers on how much therapy centers could bill per child, and for how much time. Many children have reached or are near reaching the cap.  

A state task force appointed to address issues likely to follow the changes repeatedly heard from parents and advocates concerned about older children who, no longer eligible for Medicaid-funded ABA, would attend school for the first time. As a result, a new law allows private ABA therapists to accompany children to class for a transition period. 

How did the ABA industry get so big?

For the first 20 years after Lovaas announced he had “recovered” — his term for cured — nine of 19 autistic children on whom he had developed ABA, the supposed miracle cure was inaccessible to almost all families. Insurers were not required to cover the diagnosis or treatment of autism.

Then, in 2005, the mother of a 4-year-old autistic boy sat down at her kitchen table and drafted a bill to require health insurers in South Carolina to cover the “gold standard” therapy being touted as a child’s best shot at a “normal” life. Then she enlisted hundreds of parents of autistic children to lobby state lawmakers to pass it. 

was compelling. To afford ABA, then costing $70,000 a year, she and her husband had downsized their house and spent their home equity — plus her entire salary as a law professor — on therapy for their son, Ryan. 

The grassroots push paid off. In 2007, despite ferocious insurance industry opposition, the South Carolina legislature approved the bill — only to have the governor veto it, with just one day left in the session. 

Unumb put out another call. Accompanied by a CNN camera crew, an army of parents flooded the statehouse, demanding a veto override. 

When the vote was cast, Unumb , the lawmakers on the floor turned toward the families in the gallery and gave them a standing ovation.    

Weeks later, Unumb held a summit to teach other parents, who flew in from around the country, how she had succeeded in getting what’s known as Ryan’s Law passed. She spent the next decade working with Autism Speaks, helping to organize families in other states.

The parents had potent lobbying partners. To convince insurers that ABA was not experimental, a growing community of practitioners created an organization, the Behavior Analyst Certification Board, that set standards, bestowed credentials and promoted research. 

The board did not respond to a request for comment.  

Few questioned whether there was an inherent conflict of interest in an industry creating its own proof points. Most people were more focused on the plight of families — and the promise heralded by a miraculous, if frightfully expensive, cure. By 2019, every state required most private insurers to pay for autism services, though with wildly differing benefit levels. 

The bigger turning point occurred in 2014, when the Obama administration clarified that the Affordable Care Act required publicly subsidized care plans, including Medicaid, to pay for autism treatment. 

At the same time, the rate at which children were identified as autistic began rising dramatically. The ACA for the first time required insurers to pay for autism assessments, and improvements to diagnostic criteria helped to identify autistic children whose traits were previously missed. 

An analysis of special education Child Count data shows that between 2011 and 2022, autism’s prevalence rose from 2.3 to 6.3 per 1,000 children, with the greatest increases among those aged 5 to 8 years.

Today, Unumb is the CEO of the Council of Autism Service Providers. The organization, she wrote in an email to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, “believes ABA providers must continuously earn the public’s trust in caring for children with autism. Genuine fraud, waste and abuse must be called out and punished to uphold accountability and patient safety.”

“Bad actors exist in every healthcare profession, including ABA, but that doesn’t mean they are prevalent,” she added. “Thousands of qualified, ethical ABA providers are at work every day, doing the right thing and making a difference in children’s lives.”

Private equity enters the picture 

Private equity funds are groups of investors who pool their money to buy ownership stakes in privately held companies or real estate. These firms and their deals are subject to far less government oversight than public companies that trade on the stock market. They rarely disclose information about their activity. 

They typically have managers, who make decisions about the businesses they acquire but don’t put much of their own money into the investments. Frequently, the goal is to simultaneously cut costs and increase revenue to create a cash flow for the investors. The businesses are usually resold within three to five years. 

Over the last two decades, private equity has become increasingly common in healthcare, even though the acquisition of doctor’s practices, hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers and nursing homes can . In terms of public oversight, though, all those industries are tightly regulated compared to ABA. 

The mandates for insurance coverage of autism were instituted with very little initial oversight of the quality of services being provided. States that did require providers to be licensed often simply decided to recognize the ABA industry’s internal credentials.

While these standards are often stricter than a provider’s hiring requirements, the practice of adopting industry credentials leaves behavior analysts in charge of overseeing their own members. When, in the wake of a scathing federal audit of its Medicaid billing practices, Colorado recently moved to license therapists, it rejected a suggestion that a newly created oversight board contain outside professionals such as psychologists. Instead, the board will be composed of four therapists and one public member, who can also have industry ties. 

The combination of lax standards and ready cash proved irresistible to private equity firms, which began buying ABA practices and consolidating them into large, multi-state chains. From 2015 to 2024, private equity firms acquired 574 sites run by 147 providers, according to researchers from the Brown University School of Public Health.

Of the 50 largest providers by Medicaid billing in Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s dataset, 23 are (or, in two cases, were) owned by private equity. From 2019 to 2024, their claims totaled $2 billion. 

Private equity firms own 11 of the top 15, with claims totaling more than $1.5 billion between 2019 and 2024. 

The process has dramatically reshaped an industry already in need of reform — in the wrong direction. 

“They have created massive national chains with the primary purpose of extracting high returns in a short period of time,” write the authors of “,” a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Consolidation gives private equity-owned provider organizations a large competitive advantage over other for-profit and nonprofit providers, as well those offering other approaches to [autism] services.”

“It also gives them more bargaining power to negotiate higher rates for themselves vis-à-vis state agencies, regulators and insurance payers. Some PE firms have used this leverage to extract higher reimbursements under threat of closing down sites in states in which they do not get the rates they prefer.”

Many of the large networks also advertise immediate openings for autism assessments, which they tout as a quick path to enrolling in therapy. Otherwise, according to the National Institutes for Health, the median time a family spends on a wait list for an independent evaluation is a year and a half. 

How private equity works

Some private equity funds take a partial ownership stake in a business that needs cash to expand or improve. But most of those investing in autism therapy are typically buyout funds, which acquire and consolidate existing businesses.

These funds’ managers invest very little of their own money, maybe 1% or 2% of the total. Investors, which often include pension funds and other institutions, put in another 30% to 50%. The rest of the cost of the acquisition is borrowed — what’s referred to as a leveraged buyout.

To make these transactions, a fund sets up a series of companies. Responsibility for the debt is transferred to the company being acquired. 

As the purchased company struggles to make the loan payments, a share of the cash coming in is returned to the investors. Sometimes, the fund managers take out loans on the already indebted business and give the cash to their investors as a dividend.   

Meanwhile, the leaders of the investment fund — whose expertise is typically in maximizing profits — are allowed to make decisions about staffing, levels of patient care, who they will serve and where. 

ABA is supposed to be highly individualized, with therapists continually collecting data on children’s responses to repeated efforts to get them to stop behaviors deemed undesirable, such as hand-flapping or rocking, or to perform actions the therapist wants, like making eye contact. 

This information, gathered by the lowest-rung member of the ABA team, a behavior technician, is supposed to be reviewed by a credentialed provider known as a board-certified behavior analyst, who uses it to modify the child’s treatment plan on a regular basis.       

But in state audits, federal investigators found repeated instances where the therapists’ notes submitted as claims documentation had been copied and pasted, often day after day, bearing the names of numerous different children working with different therapists.

Notes were often signed off by therapists before they had finished the session in question, and Medicaid was frequently billed for unallowable activities, such as naps and lunch.   

For their 2023 report on private equity’s influence on ABA, investigators at the Center for Economic and Policy Research interviewed former employees of one of the oldest therapy center networks, the Centers for Autism and Related Disorders, or CARD. Founded by one of Lovaas’ graduate students, the chain was sold to the private equity group Blackstone in 2018 for a reported $700 million.  

The former employees said that under Blackstone’s management, they were told to prioritize younger children. Not only can smaller kids remain enrolled for several years before reaching school age, they are most likely to be referred for additional hours of therapy per week under the guise of early intervention. 

“They would literally terminate patients in our programs who required lower hours and replace them with those requiring at least 30 to 40,” the researchers quoted one former employee as saying.

CARD did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Blackstone said the network of centers was hit by a “perfect storm” of COVID-19-era lockdowns, labor shortages and low insurance reimbursement rates that led to a Chapter 11 restructuring. 

“When it became clear that a restructuring was necessary to put the company on the best long-term path to deliver on its mission, we worked day and night 
 to keep its existing facilities open so the company could continue serving patients,” the statement says.

The statement adds that Blackstone was never involved in specific clinical treatment decisions and had sought to increase pay, reduce caseloads and improve training and operations. 

If an individual center or an entire network is accused of fraud or found to have abused patients, the investment managers who made decisions to maximize profit can’t be held accountable. Just like the debt, liability accrues to the “portfolio company” that owns the actual centers.  

By 2022, CARD had in states with lower Medicaid reimbursement rates and made that put others out of business, shrinking from 250 centers to 100. In June 2023, it filed for bankruptcy and was bought by a group of private investors recruited by its founder.

According to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s dataset, in 2019, CARD billed Medicaid more than $13 million. In 2024, its Medicaid receipts were slightly less than $2 million.

Private equity’s structure shields investors and ABA network owners from liability

With corporate headquarters in Farmington, Michigan, Centria Healthcare was founded in 2009 as a pediatric nursing provider. When one of its early patients needed ABA, the company created an autism-focused division. Today, it owns centers in 11 states. 

Because the company is privately owned, its finances are largely shrouded in secrecy. But, according to the investor intelligence service Pitchbook and data gathered for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Centria was purchased in 2016 by Martis Capital, a private equity firm specializing in acquiring North American healthcare providers. Over the next three years, Centria expanded to nine states. 

As part of a 2018 , the Detroit Free Press reported that Michigan’s attorney general was looking into claims that Centria had engaged in improper billing and service provision. The story was based on interviews with former company executives, documents obtained by reporters and allegations detailed in a defamation lawsuit the company filed against some of the past employees. 

The paper also reported that two Michigan counties had after local mental health officials cited the company for billing and care issues and an employee was abusing a child. 

Martis Capital did not respond to a request for comment.  

In a statement to the newspaper, Centria CEO Scott Barry vigorously denied the claims: “Whatever these allegations are, yes, they’re very outrageous, but they’re not true. And we’re trying to do a good job to help kids and help families and help our community.”

At the time, the company was in line for an $8 million job-creation grant secured with the backing of the state’s lieutenant governor, described by the Free Press as a longtime advocate of autism therapy. Five weeks after then-Lt. Gov. Brian Calley made the recommendation, a key company investor hosted a party kicking off Calley’s gubernatorial bid. Guests donated more than $100,000 to his campaign, the paper reported.      

The grant was put on hold while the state investigation unfolded. In March 2019, the state closed the probe, saying that while it had noted potential billing irregularities, there wasn’t enough evidence to merit criminal complaints. The grant was not reissued. 

Three former executives later sued Centria, resurfacing their allegations. Both lawsuits were eventually dismissed by the parties.

In a statement to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Centria CEO David Harbour said the company focuses on quality and access.

“Our work is grounded in a commitment to ethical care, clinical quality and supporting children with complex needs — including families who may have struggled to find services elsewhere,” Harbour wrote. “We strive to identify the needs of children, families and the broader healthcare system as it continues to evolve — delivering ethical, individualized care that supports the unique needs of each child and family we serve.”

But Centria doesn’t have to report whether the scandals had any impact on its bottom line. 

“[Private equity firms] have nothing to lose if something goes bankrupt,” says Rosemary Batt, one of the authors of the Center for Economic and Policy Research report and a professor emeritus at the Industrial and Labor Relations School at Cornell University. “If a company gets caught in fraud, it’s just the cost of doing business.”

In 2019, Centria was sold to a different private equity fund, Thomas H. Lee Partners, for $415 million. Since then, according to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s analysis, the company has been the country’s largest Medicaid biller, bringing in more than $440 million during our six-year window. That’s more than twice as much as the second-largest ABA company by Medicaid revenue, Lighthouse.

Thomas H. Lee did not respond to a request for comment. 

Ryan Leitner, a researcher at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project and the author of a on the ABA industry, worries that states’ efforts to crack down on Medicaid abuses won’t address the underlying cycle that allows investment funds to pass off a business that they’ve saddled with problems.      

“A great place to start is the concept of joint liability between these [investment] firms and the company that they own and operate,” says Leitner. “You need to have assurances that the care is going to meet some kind of benchmark, that there’s going to be some kind of joint liability if there is a problem.”   

Some states, he adds, are trying to give their attorney general or another regulator the ability to stop the sale of a healthcare facility if they determine the company won’t run it properly or if a private equity firm has problems elsewhere. 

Private equity providers gravitate toward high-reimbursement states 

Writing in the January 2026 issue of the American Medical Association journal JAMA Pediatrics, a group of researchers , one showing the prevalence of children with autism diagnoses and the other assigning states “generosity scores” assessing their insurance rules regarding autism. 

Using a commercial deal tracker, they identified 574 autism service delivery sites acquired by private equity between 2015 and 2024, which they overlaid on the maps. The upshot: The states with the highest rates of diagnosis and the most generous benefits have the largest concentration of private equity-owned ABA centers. 

Home to some of the first acquisitions, Colorado, with 6 million residents, had 38 private equity-owned centers, the third-largest concentration in the country and a likely undercount, the researchers noted. Only California, home to more than 39 million people, and Texas, which has 32 million residents, had more private equity-owned ABA centers — 97 and 81, respectively. 

In February, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General released the fourth of eight state audits, finding that Colorado’s Medicaid spending on ABA mushroomed from $60 million in 2019 to $163.5 million in 2023. 

The auditors examined claims made in 2022 and 2023, finding at least $78 million in improper payments, plus an estimated $207 million in “potentially inappropriate” claims. 

In Wisconsin, they found $18 million in improper payments in 2021 and 2022, plus $94 million more in potentially inappropriate payments. In Maine in 2023, $45 million in claims were improper and $22 million potentially so. In Indiana, a total of $56 million were improper in 2019 and 2020, with another $76 million potentially improper.

In Colorado, the investigators examined monthly billing records for 100 children, finding improper and potentially improper claims in every case. Seven facilities could not supply individual patients’ diagnoses or referrals.

Two providers — including one that auditors said “was purchased by a nationwide ABA company that subsequently closed all of its ABA facilities in Colorado” — did not respond to requests for records from state and local investigators. 

In the 96 months auditors examined, providers didn’t describe the services in some claims; four providers didn’t submit any treatment notes at all. One facility routinely said a child had engaged with peers even though the therapy was delivered at home with no other children present.          

Numerous bills described unallowed “custodial care,” such as bathing, dressing and eating. In 67 months, facilities billed for one-to-one therapy but described group activities. 

ABA companies in Colorado

In May, the Colorado General Assembly took up legislation aimed at . At an , state officials testified that they believed there were between 410 and 500 clinics but could not say with precision because, unlike day cares, summer camps and similar facilities, autism therapy centers are not required to register with the state.  

In 2025 alone, officials received 35 reports of endangerment, including physical abuse by staff, medication mistakes, inappropriate restraint and a registered sex offender working at one center. But because ABA providers and facilities are unregulated, the state lacked jurisdiction to investigate. 

It might be the tip of the iceberg, the state officials warned lawmakers, because many participants can’t tell their families when something is wrong. At least a third of Colorado children in ABA are nonverbal, and more than 18% are age 3 or younger. 

The bill would create a behavior analyst licensing board and require the state Department of Human Services to craft standards for clinics. The board would consist of three credentialed behavior analysts, one assistant — or technician — and one member of the public. It would grant licenses to people who have been given credentials by organizations created by the ABA therapists associations.

To proponents of ABA, many of whom have nursed concerns that private equity is sullying the public profile of their industry, the bill was a huge win. But to many in the disability community, it was one more step in the wrong direction. They feared that new standards would enshrine a treatment they oppose, crowding out public support for alternatives that may be more effective and humane.       

Two parents submitted imploring legislators to oppose or amend the bill. Both cited ABA’s eugenicist roots and research on its harms.  

“Autistic adults often compare ABA to gay conversion therapy, because the goal is often to make autistics appear less autistic, rather than helping them live safely and comfortably as themselves,” wrote Boulder parent Jenny Thamer. “In fact, both practices were developed by the same founder.”

Among other changes, she asked lawmakers to appoint a licensed mental health professional and an autistic adult “who provides lived experience” in place of two of the three analysts on the board; to require discipline for practitioners who engage in harmful punishments, including physical restraint and seclusion — mostly outlawed in Colorado schools — and to remove references in the bill to ABA as “based on scientific research.”

“This bill will have lasting consequences for autistics for decades,” Thamer concluded. “I respectfully urge you not to expand this system without strong protections, independent oversight and meaningful representation from the autistic people most often harmed by these practices.”

On June 2, Gov. Jared Polis signed the bill without her recommended changes. 

Graphic design by Eamonn Fitzmaurice

This investigation was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Jenny Thamer had low hopes for the meeting called by the superintendent of the Boulder Valley School District to hear from families of autistic students.

From her experience, such so-called listening sessions are often pro forma events, staged more to assuage parents than to actually brainstorm change. 

This one had been called hastily, after a handful of caregivers had complained about persistent problems in their children’s classrooms. 

The meeting was scheduled for the day after Memorial Day, after the end of the Colorado district’s 2022-23 school year. Many families would likely have already left town for summer vacation. 

Worried no one would show up, Thamer and a couple other parents put together an anonymous online survey they could present if attendance was low. 

They need not have feared. Some 50 district parents came, cautiously optimistic that Superintendent Rob Anderson would hear their pain. 

“I have to give him credit,” says Thamer. “He listened to every single caregiver story without interrupting, without rushing people. Like, he was there for it.”

The meeting was scheduled to last an hour, but went on for more than four, as families described repeated phone calls from school staffers demanding they pick up their child midday, kids too anxious to go to school, trauma caused by punishments — and, in nearly every case, schools’ lack of interest in parents’ ideas.

As it happened, Anderson’s own child received special education services. “I could understand not just in a way a superintendent could understand,” he recalls, “but as a parent could.” 

While people talked, administrators and the school board president took notes on poster-sized pads stuck to the walls. At the end of the meeting, the parents presented the leaders with the results of their survey, which drew 65 responses.

Anderson listened. And then he promised to create an autism advisory team made up of parents, community members and staff with a goal of using feedback from autistic people — who usually are not consulted about their own conditions — to change the district’s approaches. Thamer, whose child received special education services, was asked to co-chair the team. 

A year later, Boulder Valley implemented what is likely the nation’s first — and only — neurodiversity policy. Adopted by the school board in 2024, it commits district schools to using “strategies to affirm a student’s identity, rather than trying to ‘fix’ or ‘cure’ them.” The policy applies to all kids, not just autists. 

It’s a work in progress — in part because the policy calls for a sea change in how Boulder schools have approached educating autistic students. Intending to provide good services, the district — like a handful of mostly affluent school systems across the country — had invested heavily in hiring practitioners of an intervention called applied behavior analysis. 

Commonly referred to as ABA, the therapy was pioneered in the 1960s by Ole Ivar Lovaas, the UCLA psychologist who created LGBTQ conversion therapy. Both use a system of rewards and punishments to condition a person to act and appear “normal.” Lovaas’ approach was quickly recognized as a human rights violation when applied to LGBTQ people, but not to autistic kids.

Lovaas did not see autistic children as fully human, which he believed justified using electric shocks, slaps and the withholding of food, among other “aversives,” to “extinguish” atypical behaviors. In a trial now regarded as dangerously flawed, he claimed to have “recovered” — cured — nine of 19 children by subjecting them to repeated 1-on-1 drills for up to 40 hours a week.

The Lovaas Method, as ABA was originally known, is now considered the gold-standard autism intervention. Parents are typically urged to enroll their children as quickly as possible after diagnosis, as young as 2, to give them their best shot at a “normal” life.  

Over the last decade, as laws were enacted requiring insurance coverage of autism diagnosis and therapy, the rate at which children have been identified as autistic has tripled. To serve them, a very profitable and largely unregulated treatment industry has mushroomed, pulling in nearly $2 billion a year from Medicaid alone.     

For-profit ABA is particularly strong in Colorado, in large part because of the state’s history of offering relatively generous benefits for people with disabilities. Because of ABA’s dominance — and the accompanying perception that it is the most effective way of treating autistic children — school districts are increasingly turning to practitioners to staff their special education programs, whether or not it is the proper approach for a particular child.      

Modern practitioners defend the intervention, saying ABA no longer subjects children to physical punishment. Yet documentation of its harms is mounting, as researchers — including autistic adults who underwent ABA as youngsters — gather evidence that the therapy has caused widespread PTSD. Autistic children may no longer be subjected to electric shocks or slaps to the face — and the word “aversive” may sound kinder than “punishment” — but they are routinely denied food, toys and comfort items, as well as adult attention, a strategy practitioners industrywide call “.” ABA providers still frequently restrain children or confine them in isolation — practices recognized as so dangerous and traumatic as to be illegal in most circumstances in Colorado schools.

At the listening session, Thamer presented the superintendent with the results of the survey, which echoed what he had heard from parents in person. One-fourth felt the need to shorten their child’s school day because teachers could not provide a full day’s support, and nearly half had unenrolled or considered withdrawing their children. 

One-third of respondents said they had been asked to pick their kids up early from school for behavioral reasons — some frequently. A fourth said their children had been excluded from field trips and other activities. And 13% had out-of-school suspensions and 9% in-school suspensions.

Some 16% were aware their child had been subject to physical restraint or seclusion — likely a wild undercount, given the number of parents at the in-person meeting who said their kids were restrained several times a week. Historically, Colorado did not require schools to report restraint until two years ago, and still doesn’t mandate data collection on seclusion. 

More than 40% said schools focused on fixing behavior rather than uncovering the reasons for it; paid more attention to students’ “lagging neurotypical skills” than to their capabilities; and used inappropriate instruction strategies. 

The families’ experiences were common, but the opportunity to share and be believed was novel, says Thamer. Many of the caregivers at the listening session were meeting one another for the first time. Many had assumed they were alone in rejecting guidance from the district’s supposed experts, or that no one would believe the “gold standard” in treatment was actually making things worse for their children. 

Just sitting in a room with so many other people sharing the same experiences was cathartic. “I had tears hearing other people’s stories,” Thamer says. “Parents carry a lot of trauma from advocating for their kids.”

‘Daddy, help! Daddyyyy!’ 

One of the parents present was Sarah PirilĂ€. In 2019, she had come home from work to hear her 5-year-old screaming in the basement. He was working with two technicians from a local private ABA center who, in an effort to stop a meltdown, had barricaded him in a room and turned their backs on him.  

This was not a new experience for P, who is being referred to by his first initial to protect his privacy. He had been through this rewards-and-aversives cycle at home, in private childcare centers — which were quick to show the family the door — and even public school-based early childhood education. As he got bigger, so did his meltdowns.          

But on this day, PirilĂ€ says, she heard something very different in P’s screams. 

“Daddy, help,” he shrieked. “Daddyyyy!” 

She bolted down the stairs and instantly recognized that her son wasn’t being stubborn. He was terrified.

A series of realizations crystalized in an instant, she recalls. P was being punished, over and over, for not understanding what was expected of him.

In the process, he had learned to fear interactions where he could become overwhelmed and lose control. And his parents, whom he needed to keep him safe, had invited the people meting out the punishment into his life.

In schools, isolating or confining children is known as seclusion and restraint. The psychological and physical harms are . Most states have laws limiting the practices to rare episodes in which students pose an immediate threat to themselves or others.  

Yet P’s therapists were using the tactic on purpose, in the belief that after enough repetitions — delivered under the guise of benign therapy — it would “extinguish” some of the boy’s autistic traits.

On the surface, the goal seems perfectly rational: Grownups were trying to teach P that following instructions brings rewards. But when he didn’t comply, they’d double down, sensing defiance. The stricter the adult, the more dysregulated the child’s response. 

PirilĂ€ knew ABA practitioners often describe the moment she was witnessing as an “extinguishment burst” — a last willful attempt by children to get their way by ratcheting up negative behavior. If she went to P’s aid, in the therapists’ eyes, she would be guilty of setting back their hard work.   

She faced a horrible dilemma: follow the therapists’ advice and let the moment play out, or listen to her gut and defy experts who could document her poor judgment in a file with P’s name on it.  

In the moment, she chose her son, scooping him up and letting him cry.

She had no way of knowing how hard it would be, even after telling the boy’s private therapists she would no longer tolerate ABA’s strategies, to keep P out of the therapy. 

Over the next seven years, the district would move him to five schools, not counting distance learning during COVID and a year when P was so traumatized that PirilÀ homeschooled him. In all but one of the schools, he was subjected to ABA.

But she had an unlikely ally. The behavior technician who had stood nose-to-nose with PirilÀ in her basement is a man named Blake Ross. And that confrontation marked a watershed moment for him, too.

The core epiphany PirilĂ€ had during the episode was that P’s meltdown had been perceived by the adults as a choice, when in fact it was an involuntary stress response — the fight-or-flight instinct that’s a normal part of the human nervous system. Everyone has it, but it’s especially easy to trigger in a child with an acutely sensitive neurotype. 

Ross adored P. He was devastated to realize the boy was scared of him. “There are protocols for stuff like this,” he recalls. “We were following them, and it was making things worse.”

In the ensuing weeks, Ross and PirilĂ€ came to an understanding. The family couldn’t meet the boy’s needs alone, and Ross was committed to finding a better way to help. Together, they started trying to understand how entrenched P’s fight-or-flight responses were, and what would happen if they developed strategies to help his nervous system avoid that traumatic response. 

Things really clicked during third grade when, with help from Ross, PirilĂ€ started homeschooling P mid-year. With their strategies finally working, the following year PirilĂ€ searched for a classroom where the adults would try what she called “neuro-informed accommodations.”   

In the meantime, seeking the flexibility to use their new approach with other kids, Ross and his wife, Jenn Snow, also an ABA provider, had started their own autism therapy practice. They met with PirilĂ€ and the members of P’s prospective school special educators to talk about their work.  

“Luckily, we found a team that would actually try it,” says Snow. “And to magnificent effect.”

A data-minded mom literally charts a new course

Before she quit her job to manage P’s needs, PirilĂ€ was an engineer and data strategist. Both ABA and special education are supposed to be data-driven. The theory behind ABA — the analysis being applied, as it were — is that therapists record a child’s responses to behavioral drills, routines and tasks, and then use the information to refine their tactics.

An individualized education program, the legal document that spells out how special education will meet a child’s needs, is also supposed to contain quantifiable goals and measures of progress, as well as information on behavior, adult time spent delivering services and the amount of time the student spends in a segregated classroom rather than integrated with typically developing peers. 

All special education parents quickly accumulate boxes of IEP-related documents, but PirilĂ€ had more: reports P’s schools sent home when he was physically restrained or isolated, forms announcing he had been suspended and messages asking her to come pick him up early. 

Because P, like many autistic kids, often refused to go to school, PirilĂ€ tracked his attendance. She also recorded how often he met the school’s behavior goals, his reading and writing achievement, how much time he spent in different classrooms and how many special ed services he received. 

In January 2025, after P had been enrolled in a new district school willing to work with her ideas, PirilĂ€ put 340 pages of IEPs and other documents — 4,000 data points collected over eight years — into a database. The results were striking.

When P was being treated with ABA, he achieved the school’s behavioral goals 25% to 50% of the time. When he was in a classroom where the adults were willing to try PirilÀ’s neuro-informed strategies, his success rate was 75% to 100%.

When he was allowed to spend fewer hours and days in the school environment, his attendance actually stabilized — and his reading and writing scores shot up. As P’s fight-or-flight episodes subsided, he grew more willing to work on his least-favored tasks. As adults listened to him when he advocated for himself, he spoke more frequently.  

PirilĂ€ created a presentation for P’s teachers and aides, with two dozen charts showing how his IEP and ABA interventions fluctuated in effectiveness. There was a one-year window — labeled “autistic burnout” — when P was restrained 20 times, sent home another 20 times and suspended three times. 

But there were also slides listing which specific, neuro-informed strategies were in place when things were going really well: “Physical management is to be avoided entirely”; “Proactive is better than reactive”; “P’s words must work or he will stop using them”; “Flexibility from you = flexibility from P.”

At the start of the last school year, the boy’s teachers stopped pushing ABA, PirilĂ€ says. But when she gave them a draft IEP written from a nervous system response lens, the educators in charge of the planning process rejected it.

Everybody on the IEP team agreed with the support plan, she says. But one team member, an ABA practitioner employed by the district, said they needed to rework it to conform with ABA’s structure. 

In Boulder Valley classrooms, what that has historically meant is that when a student exhibits a problematic behavior, educators must create a hypothesis for why it’s occurring. These hypotheses assume the child is choosing to misbehave, e.g., to get attention or to avoid an activity they don’t like. Then the therapists and teachers create goals that outline the steps of an ABA strategy for addressing the student’s actions.

“The [lead therapist] said the way I wrote it from a nervous system response perspective was much more helpful,” says PirilĂ€. “But then [she] also said that she can’t use that structure, that she wasn’t able to structure an alternative path for families like mine that specifically request non-ABA approaches.”  

The format of a support plan may seem like a small thing to someone who has not struggled to get their child an atypical IEP, PirilĂ€ says. But to her, it suggests the adults in the district are not ready to step away from something that’s not working.  

A shaky substitute for real special ed       

In 2022, the Colorado General Assembly took up a bill to allow families to request an ABA therapist of their choosing be allowed to accompany their child to school. Legislators ended up passing a dramatically amended law requiring districts to have a policy addressing the question. 

The debate, however, revealed that much of the time, schools and families were using private ABA therapy to make up for gaps in special education, childcare and disability services writ large — something also highlighted in federal audits of Medicaid spending in Colorado and several other states.   

Many of the therapists and industry representatives testified that their clients didn’t have time for both ABA and school, attended schools that had declared students’ needs too profound to manage or said that because they were understaffed, they could support autistic students for only a few hours a day. 

The parents who urged passage of the bill said they needed ABA to close a caregiving gap. Several said schools and preschools were quick to demand they pick their kids up midday — sometimes threatening to call the police if they didn’t.

“Schools are happy to abbreviate their day and make this someone else’s problem,” said one. “And I just don’t think that’s right.” 

Other parents said their kids were behind academically because they split their time between a therapy center and school. 

A lack of school staff with autism expertise and of out-of-school caregiving options for families are real problems, says Julie Reiskin, co-executive director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition. But behavioral therapy is not intended to address those problems. 

“We need to have childcare and schools that are not calling parents, that can keep their kid through the whole day,” she says. “But if that’s the need, then that’s what we should be funding, not one specific kind of therapy. 

“We could do it for a lot less money than this,” adds Reiskin. “And maybe the kids will also be having more fun.” 

Lindsey Trott told lawmakers there are more effective methods for helping students than ABA, but that schools lack the resources to use them. She’s now an occupational therapist, but as a teenager in the late 1990s, she was hired by a family that was implementing the Lovaas Method in their home with their nonverbal 4-year-old.

For 10 months, three days a week after school, Trott said in an interview with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, she would sit with the boy and perform what are known in ABA as “discrete trials” — repetitive drills of tasks like making eye contact or copying a structure made of blocks. She rewarded his compliance with a fruit snack or a cartoon break.

“After a couple of months of working with me, when I would show up at the door, he would cry and run away,” says Trott. “He made no progress.” 

In hindsight, what she thinks the family really needed was respite care. “At the end, I felt more like I was there supporting the mom,”  she recalls. “I would stay and she would tell me things. She was sad and frustrated.”        

That experience was a catalyst. In search of solutions, Trott went on to earn a master’s degree in special education and then two degrees in occupational therapy. When she was training, she shadowed a veteran OT, as the specialists are typically referred to in schools. 

They drove to several small gyms, where the experienced OT stood alongside kids doing simple gymnastics, talking to them about what they were doing. 

“For the first time, I saw nonverbal kids having fun,” says Trott. “And I felt something about what I was seeing.” 

All people regulate their emotions or nervous systems by what’s known as “stimming” — making repetitive motions or noises. In contrast to things neurotypical people do unconsciously, like twisting a strand of hair, autistic peoples’ stims can be dramatic, such as pacing or rocking. Schools and therapists often attempt to stop stims.  

Occupational therapy’s descriptions of this are much closer to PirilÀ’s ideas about the nervous system than to ABA’s concepts. Proprioceptive input — what OT refers to as “heavy work,” like jumping or other activities that engage muscles —  calms nerves and enables self-regulation. Vestibular input — sensory information the brain receives from the inner ear when a person swings or spins, among other motions — facilitates balance and movement.

If schools taught children about their nervous systems, lots of students’ needs would be met, not just the autistic kids’, Trott believes: “If we had a special ed teacher for every grade level and we had an OT for every campus, schools could look very different.”

A 74 analysis of Medicaid billing claims revealed that spending on ABA just for children with this public, safety net healthcare now totals $2 billion a year. If that money were added to schools’ annual budgets, every district in the country could add one full time and one half-time occupational therapist. 

Neurodiversity training goes only so far

One of the first things Boulder Valley leaders did with the input from its Autism Advisory Team was to put together mandatory neurodiversity training for every staff member in the district. 

In a departure from typical practice, a training video was created using input from community members, says Michelle Brenner, director of special education for the district. Two of the four presenters in the video are autistic. Trainers emphasize that understanding what it means to be neurodiversity-affirming is good for everyone. 

The with a discussion of fight-or-flight and other autistic behaviors, which appear when a student feels physically unsafe or — something that is much harder for a neurotypical person to anticipate — socially unsafe.

“When a student engages in those behaviors, often they are trying to tell us, ‘I feel unsafe all the time,’ ” explains a speech-language pathologist. “That is the autistic experience.” 

Then, an autistic high school teacher, Wren Roberts, describes what it is like to go through life in a state of hyperarousal. Indeed, she confesses that she feels unsafe talking on camera. 

“I have spent my entire life learning to hide it,” she explains. “That’s called masking.” 

Just as existing with a continually activated nervous system causes mental health issues, she notes that autistic people who mask experience high rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia and suicidal ideation.  

Up next in the video, an autistic man who volunteers in a district afterschool program outlines how a neurotypical person can figure out whether a student is feeling unsafe, and why. Finally, a high school teacher reminds the audience that while this cycle is often pronounced for autists, “Other students are likely feeling the same way.” 

As progressive as this seems compared with most other districts’ approaches, the mandatory training was relatively simple, says Shannon Gamble, Boulder Valley’s director of multi-tiered systems of support. Her specialty is differing strategies that are used to help students struggling with literacy or other skills.  

District leaders have created an internal data dashboard tracking how often students are restrained, how many are restrained repeatedly, whether teachers and therapists have looked for the “root causes” of repeated problems and other indications that changes are being implemented and whether they are working. 

The training is a start, Gamble says. “A big part of what needs to shift is mindset and understanding, and the way that we view each other and our students.” 

Some families want their children to continue to receive ABA in school. But to others, who continue to push against it, the pace of change can feel glacial, they say.

“Our families come in and they’re like, ‘All right, why don’t you just go tell people to do this thing?’ ” says Gamble. “There’s things we can do right away. We can change [the language on] a form, right?”  

Altering mindsets is a longer-term proposition, she continues: “It’s going to take more than us just telling people what to do — especially things like neurodiversity, where many of our educators were taught in a way that maybe is not what our neurodiversity philosophy is telling them we believe.”

Because district leaders had invested in what they thought was the best intervention for students, a number of the people leading its special education efforts hold some of ABA’s highest credentials. The persistence of their beliefs is visible in district materials.  

For example, families point to an educator training created more than a year after adoption of the neurodiversity policy that makes numerous rewards-and-consequences recommendations even as it acknowledges trauma’s role in children’s behavior. Forms distributed to classroom aides have grids for charting ABA interventions.    

A outlining the neurodiversity policy and resources also links to that outlines Boulder Valley’s ABA strategies: “The behavior analyst is responsible for the implementation of skill acquisition and behavior support strategies aligned with current best practices from the field of applied behavior analysis (ABA) as well as responsibilities and duties within the school special education collaborative team.”

Restraint and seclusion

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education to avoid restraining and isolating students with disabilities unless a child’s behavior poses “imminent danger of serious physical harm to themselves or others.” Not only are the practices dangerous and abusive, it said, but there is no evidence they help modify disability-related behaviors. 

They are also discriminatory, the agency warned. Students with disabilities are three times more likely to be physically restrained or confined than their non-disabled classmates. Often, they face discipline because they lack proper services. 

In practice, however, it is devilishly difficult to get schools to move away from restraint and seclusion. Over the last couple of years, in several states that of even just preschoolers and early elementary age children, education administrators have lobbied statehouses to repeal the bans.  

Disability advocates push back, saying schools need to do more to support educators who are left without effective alternatives. As a result, when seclusion is prohibited, schools often simply rebrand the spaces where children are confined as time-out rooms. 

How does Boulder Valley stack up? 

Brenner and Gamble say the district’s internal data shows small improvements since the adoption of the neurodiversity policy, including a “slight reduction” in the number of autistic students who are repeatedly restrained and secluded and a dramatic drop in the number subjected to formal threat evaluations under Colorado’s school safety protocol.

But in terms of collecting data on restraint, Colorado’s history is tangled. The state’s first restrictions on when a child could be physically controlled were intended to address solitary confinement and punishment in juvenile detention centers. 

The practices were supposed to be rare in schools, but the state didn’t collect any data that would allow it to measure compliance. In 2022, the Colorado General Assembly passed a law requiring districts to begin reporting by the end of the 2024 school year. 

It did not, however, address seclusion as a specific form of restraint — which all but a handful of districts interpreted as a mandate to report only episodes when a child was physically or mechanically controlled. Legislators rejected a 2025 attempt to clarify the law.

For the 2024-25 academic year, Boulder Valley told the state it physically restrained just 42 students. It did, however, of “detrimental behavior” — conduct that has a negative impact on the welfare or safety of other students or staff —Ìęamong children with disabilities. Students with IEPs make up 15% of the district’s student body, but comprise one-third of those disciplined.Ìę

While ABA practitioners’ stances vary, they often don’t think they are restraining a child but rather — much as took place in PirilÀ’s basement — believe they are engaging in a therapeutic strategy that is to the child’s benefit.   

In 2010, the Association for Behavior Analysis International opposing “inappropriate” restraint and seclusion but supporting the interventions when used by practitioners as part of a formal plan: “When used in the context of a behavior intervention plan, restraint in some cases serves both a protective and a therapeutic function. These procedures can reduce risks of injury and can facilitate learning opportunities that support appropriate behavior.”

In May 2025, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· reported that the Arizona Autism Charter Schools — a network of ABA schools whose founder was chosen by President Donald Trump to oversee special education — restrained and secluded students at unusually high rates even though state law restricted the practice to emergencies.    

Often, when autistic children are sent to “blue zones” or “cool-down corners,” schools fail to see and report it as seclusion. The distinction that’s lost: a space students can retreat to of their own volition when overwhelmed — and leave when calmer — is different from seclusion.

The fact that the district has adopted a neurodiversity policy but also proclaims ABA will remain in place infuriates PirilĂ€. If you ask her, there’s no reason state and local officials can’t do their own version of her analysis of which strategies contributed to P’s dysregulation and which enabled him to stay calm and engaged. They’re just choosing not to.  

‘The most important message’

One of the first things Jenny Thamer did as co-chair of the Autism Advisory Team — a role she played for two years before moving on — was to send out a second survey, consisting of a single, open-ended question: “Please tell us the most important message(s) you or your child want educators to know.”

The replies were consistent: 

“It is our job as adults to figure out why [kids] are not doing well. Children should never be left to figure it out on their own.”

“My child does not need to make eye contact to be listening. He is not avoiding instruction by not making eye contact.”

“My child may look fine on the outside to you, but inside they are almost paralyzed with anxiety.” 

“My child may communicate differently, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to be involved.”

Anderson, the superintendent, says he’s committed to fully implementing the district’s neurodiversity policy. True recognition of the array of ways in which people experience Boulder Valley’s schools will benefit every student and educator, he says, autistic or not.   

“The idea that we understand the challenge and the needs of a neurodiverse community, and that we are locking arms to meet those needs, that’s good for all kids,” he says.    

“This is really hard work. I’m not here to tell you we’ve solved the problems. But these things aren’t hidden anymore. They’re not whispered.”

After publication, the district provided data showing 42 students were physically restrained during the 2024-25 school year.

This investigation was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

The coverage mandates these parents helped secure have driven hundreds- and even thousands-fold increases in Medicaid spending on ABA — an unproven, even harmful, behavior modification system that uses rewards and punishments to try to eliminate certain behaviors.

Over the last decade, the ready flow of cash has attracted private equity, a type of investment that purchases large shares of companies that are not publicly traded. Through cost cutting and other restructuring methods, these short-term investors try to boost revenue before selling the businesses for a profit. With scant state or federal oversight, they have also acquired nursing homes, facilities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, medical equipment providers and other healthcare industries that rely on taxpayer dollars to profit.      

Now, states — which put few regulatory guardrails on the ABA industry, on private equity’s role in healthcare in general or on Medicaid reimbursement — are cracking down. Even before a series of damning federal commissioned by the Biden administration were released in recent months, lawmakers and health officials have proposed capping the amount of ABA an individual child can receive and how much providers can bill, as well as imposing standards on clinics and therapists. 

As states have revisited Medicaid reimbursement rates and other policies that impact providers’ financial bottom lines, two types of ABA-related debates have played out in statehouses. One involves the ABA industry’s entrance into state-level political spending; the other, efforts by providers and caregivers to require public schools to allow the therapist of a family’s choosing to accompany their student to class.  

The start of statehouse spending 

Individual state legislative races are relatively cheap to influence. While parents have long packed hearing rooms to testify against threatened cuts to autism services, in recent years some of the industry’s largest, private equity-owned ABA providers have begun making campaign donations to candidates for state-level office who could sway legislation on ABA oversight, Medicaid reimbursement rates, whether private autism therapists should be allowed in schools and other laws that impact providers’ profits.  

Lobbying and campaign finance reporting requirements vary widely from state to state. Using records compiled by the political spending watchdog group Open Secrets, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· was able to identify instances when ABA lobbyists donated to state-level campaigns around the country at consequential moments, to benefit the companies the lobbyists represented. 

In 2022, Florida lawmakers passed a law allowing behavior technicians from private, for-profit ABA centers to accompany kids to school — opening a new and potentially lucrative market. While reimbursement rates vary by state, private ABA centers typically bill insurers for behavior technicians’ time at $50 to $100 an hour. Special education classroom aides employed by public schools, in comparison, frequently make about $25 an hour.  

Campaign contributions made that year by two of ABA’s largest private equity-owned concerns, Hopebridge Autism Therapy Centers and Acorn Health, would barely cover a lobbyist’s bar tab at a Washington, D.C., watering hole. 

Hopebridge Autism Therapy gave a total of $10,000 to nine incumbent lawmakers and one challenger. Acorn Health gave $7,500 to the state House Republican Campaign Committee and $3,333 to the Florida Republican Party. 

It was a small expense for two of the country’s largest autism therapy companies, which between 2019 and 2024 brought in almost $200 million — nearly $134 million for Hopebridge and more than $63 million for Acorn, according to a 74 analysis of Medicaid ABA billing records. 

The largest company by Medicaid revenue, Centria Healthcare, was paid more than $400 million between 2019 and 2024, according to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s analysis. The company spent almost $200,000 in Oregon and Indiana in three election cycles: 2020, 2022 and 2024. 

In 2024 in Indiana, where a federal audit would soon find up to $133 million in improper Medicaid ABA claims from multiple providers, sparking caps and cuts, Centria gave $25,000 to gubernatorial candidate Michael Braun.

As governor, Braun created a state applied behavior analysis to consider ways to rein in costs while continuing to serve autistic children. The group’s membership is dominated by ABA practitioners.

In Oregon, the company gave former Rep. Dan Rayfield $55,000 during his last two terms as House speaker, followed by $25,000 for his successful 2024 run for attorney general. The state House Democratic Campaign committee received $50,000, while 13 other lawmakers got contributions of $1,000 to $10,000.

On the table: A to expand the state’s private insurance autism therapy mandate until 2030 and a to extend Oregon’s ABA mandate to conditions other than autism, such as intellectual and developmental disabilities — potentially opening significant new markets. The law mandating continued coverage of autism treatment was enacted.

The bill to expand the disability categories for which ABA practitioners can be reimbursed faced significant pushback. Testimony submitted to lawmakers included of research on the therapy’s effectiveness for conditions other than autism, such as Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and epilepsy. It concluded the evidence is thin. The measure is still pending in the state House. 

Facing Medicaid rate cuts, Utah Behavior Services (now known as Bridgeway Integrated Healthcare Services) — with Medicaid revenue of some $196 million, according to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s dataset — spent some $41,000 to influence 21 contests, including state auditor. Action Behavior Centers, which collected $1.7 million in reimbursements between 2021 and 2024, spent $2,500 .  

Must schools allow private ABA in classrooms?

Special education law requires schools to provide “medically necessary” services to children whose ability to attend school and learn depends on them. For the most part, school districts can pass these costs along to Medicaid or another public healthcare plan, or to a family’s private insurer.   

Commonly cited examples are children who need a nurse to manage their airway or feeding tube, or have a condition that requires physical therapy. Historically, ABA has not been recognized as a medically necessary service. Schools typically try to meet students’ behavioral and communications needs in other ways.    

In 2022, two Colorado lawmakers introduced a bill to require school districts to enshrine autism therapy as medically necessary. Administrators from the Colorado Consortium of Directors of Special Education, the Englewood and Cherry Creek school districts and others expressed concern with the bill. 

They would be liable for the in-school conduct of a technician they don’t employ, several of those commenting said. And, most practically problematic, schools would be legally responsible for figuring out how to make up the academic instruction that students would miss while engaging in therapy during the school day.

The General Assembly eventually passed a version of the bill not specifically addressing ABA. Instead, it requires districts to have policies outlining how they will address medically necessary services.  

Louisiana and Pennsylvania recently enacted laws saying schools must accept autism therapy technicians. The requirements are too new to assess results.

This investigation was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.