But 15 months later, the superintendent in Gainesville was after the district defied Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on school mask mandates. DeSantis appointed a board member who tipped the majority 3-2 against her. She was the district’s sixth leader in close to a decade.

“My district will have a hard time explaining the turnover rate of superintendents and convincing the right person to pull up roots and move to our community,” she said. “The governor’s culture war has impacted the work environment so negatively that a school superintendent would be working to push back a very strong current of low morale.”

Far from being an isolated incident, her termination is part of a COVID wave of superintendent firings from the to . The charged atmosphere is a sign of the times, as toxic national and state politics filter down to local school districts.

A recent poll showed a clear decline in parents’ opinions toward their local schools. Those on both sides of the culture war have turned out in force at school board meetings — sometimes calling for superintendents to. But the issues have not been limited to closed schools or classroom controversies. Even run-of-the-mill decisions, like renovating buildings or replacing staff, have toppled careers. With alarming national test scores released Monday and pandemic relief funds running out in two years, the temperature is only likely to increase.

“We’re about to hit a different level of vitriol,” said Julia Rafal-Baer, co-founder of ILO Group, a consulting firm that helps future district chiefs find jobs. “We’re asking our leaders to be a sponge for divisiveness.”

‘Taking a risk’

The job of leading school systems has always been tricky. As they navigate complex bureaucracies and clashing constituencies from parents to teachers unions, superintendents are paid well (average salaries are in the ) but frequently burn out.

What’s changing, according to Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, is that now “we’re seeing a whole range of issues migrate into districts that in the past were somewhat buffered.”

Recent and point to a general increase in superintendent turnover, but none has directly examined the spike in terminations. In conversations with district leaders and their advocates, however, many say the phenomenon is inescapable.

Kevin Brown, executive director of the 3,800-member Texas Association of School Administrators, said in his 31 years in the profession, he’s never seen more superintendents fired than he has in the past two years. And Steve McCammon, executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable, a 100-member network, said it’s becoming common for members to be fired “without cause” — legal language that allows school boards to part ways with their chief executives without offering a reason, a hearing or other elements of due process. Previously, he recalled only one instance in the past 20 years. 

“The stories are out there all over the place,” he said. “Everything has become a political decision.”

To get a sense of the scope of the issue, Âé¶čŸ«Æ· reviewed news clips detailing nearly 40 no-cause firings or forced resignations in 26 states since the beginning of the pandemic. Âé¶čŸ«Æ· also sent an informal survey to leadership networks, including the National Superintendents Roundtable, the Council of Great City Schools, Chiefs for Change, ILO Group and Education Counsel, another consulting organization. Out of 70 superintendents who responded, 15 said they’ve seen several district leaders fired or forced to resign since the pandemic began. Twenty said there have been many more. Nineteen worry they might be next.

“The role of the superintendent has become a punching bag 
 during the pandemic and the attacks are personal,” one wrote. 

Another said: “I have board members running to remove me, and I run a very strong and high-performing school district. It is a dark and sad time for superintendents.”

As in Alachua, debates over polarizing issues preceded firings in dozens of school systems across the country. 

Snapshot

A COVID Wave of Fired Superintendents

When school boards fire their leaders, it is seldom done with transparency. Payouts to superintendents and non-disclosure agreements typically mean the public doesn’t get the full story. The map reflects a sample of school superintendents fired — primarily without cause — since the start of the pandemic.

When conservatives took over the board in Spotsylvania, Virginia, last January, they , who was set to step down just five months later. The district was embroiled in debates over books with LGBTQ themes, with some board members calling for not only banning, but burning, library books they deemed “sexually explicit.” After banning several books, the district after a public outcry. 

In 2021, Kevin Purnell of Oregon’s was among a for simply complying with the law — in this case, a state mandate that students wear masks. The terminations prompted lawmakers to pass this year that protects superintendents from being removed for following laws. 

The perception that schools prolonged closures to protect teachers rather than serve students fueled a huge backlash from parents. Dozens of parents’ rights groups have sprung up since 2020, and Republicans have seized on the issue as a critical plank for upcoming midterm elections.

“School leadership failed students and catered to union agendas during the pandemic,” said Sharon McKeeman, founder of Let Them Breathe, which sued unsuccessfully over California’s mask mandate. McKeeman, who’s also in the Carlsbad Unified district, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that “it’s time for leadership that will put students’ needs first and help them recoup the learning loss and social-emotional damage they incurred during school closures and COVID restrictions.”

Part of the problem in tracking the issue is that such firings are typically shrouded in secrecy. For Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Rafal-Baer of ILO Group analyzed the departures of 210 chiefs who vacated their positions in the nation’s 11 were fired. But based on news coverage, she suspects many more were forced to resign. Superintendents fired without cause often and agreements for everyone involved not to discuss the terms.

“We never hear the real story,” she said. “They legally can’t talk.” 

Issues over district management 

But Cheryl Watson-Harris, fired in April from her post as superintendent of the DeKalb County schools in metro Atlanta, refused to go quietly.

Her termination capped off a two-week media storm following the posting of a that exposed mold, crumbling ceilings and other safety hazards at the district’s oldest school. High school students shot the video after the board voted not to renovate the facility — an action she . 

Even before she walked into the job, Watson-Harris knew the district had a reputation for turmoil. Before they hired her, board members named former New York City schools Chancellor Rudy Crew as the sole finalist for the job, only to vote against hiring him two weeks later. for discrimination based on age and race, and the board later paid out a $750,000 settlement. Rafal-Baer of ILO Group said she even advised another candidate not to pursue the position.

Nonetheless, Watson-Harris, who previously served as second-in-charge under former New York City Chancellor Richard Carranza, hoped her status as an outsider would help her rise above the district’s troubled politics. It didn’t take long for controversy to find her.

She proposed that would require top deputies to reapply for their jobs in an effort to address what she felt was a lack of accountability over school improvement. She the district’s chief operating officer last year, according to local news reports, after an investigation found he bullied other employees and drank too much alcohol at a work conference. He , arguing that he was falsely accused of “a handful of minor violations” and that she retaliated against him for raising questions about accounting irregularities. 

In an interview, Watson-Harris acknowledged “spotty recordkeeping” in the district, one reason she brought in outside evaluators to review finances and was upgrading outdated systems for managing staff and operations.

The former employee died in a car accident in September near Detroit, according to police reports. His attorney declined to comment on the status of his lawsuit.

Board Chair Vickie Turner declined to answer questions about Watson-Harris’s termination. The other three board members who voted to fire her, along with the school district’s attorney, did not respond to requests for comment. 

“When you’re dealing with personnel matters such as this, you have to be very, very careful,” Turner said. “I don’t think it would be wise to speak to that, because we may have some things that are still not closed.” 

Watson-Harris’s firing shocked many in the community, even drawing a from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who said the board chose “politics over students, families and educators.”

With just a month left in the school year, the board spent $25,000 to without her signature. 

“I could have closed out [the school year] and given people some stability,” Watson-Harris said.

Because she was fired without cause, Watson-Harris believes she was denied a chance to respond to the accusations against her. For that reason, she said, she’s refused to accept a $325,000 severance package and is considering legal action. 

After watching the district go through four leaders in three years, state Superintendent Richard Woods finds the volatility troubling.

“You cannot get any continuity of services and support,” he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, adding that consistent leadership is needed to “have some forward growth.”

‘In the spotlight’ 

Such churn is becoming commonplace. In her review of the nation’s 500 largest school districts, Rafal-Baer found more than 20 have had two leadership changes since COVID’s arrival. 

Watson-Harris was both hired and fired during the pandemic. So was Florida’s Simon, who said she faced similar resistance from a board reluctant to challenge the status quo.

Alachua board member Tina Certain, who voted against Simon’s termination, said the former superintendent’s and creation of a teacher advisory committee that included non-union members likely contributed to discontent. 

“Every department I looked at had financial efficiency issues and basic management concerns — lots of ‘this is how we do things around here’ excuses,” Simon said.

That issue came to the fore when she raised questions about the that runs outdoor education programs. She found that scholarships meant for poor students were being awarded to those without financial need, including the child of a former superintendent on a six-figure salary. She — and shared with Âé¶čŸ«Æ· — a text message between the camp’s director and a former staff member about scholarships given as a “thank you for being business partners.” 

An internal investigation of wrongdoing, but the district continues to push for of the camp. The director filed a against Simon, the district and the former camp staffer. He denied the allegations and said he didn’t violate policies because there weren’t any in place. His attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

But for DeSantis, it would appear that Simon’s vocal opposition to his COVID policies was the tipping point. “She went on the national news and put us in the spotlight in a very negative way,” Mildred Russell, the DeSantis appointee who cast the deciding vote to fire Simon, told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Simon now leads that backs board members and superintendents who push for equity and inclusion. She doubts she could find another superintendent job in the state. 

“I think every board in K-12 or higher education would be taking a risk of being in DeSantis’s crosshairs in the event they consider my employment,” she said. “We are asking for people to risk financial and professional stability.” 

The governor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

DeSantis — who is setting the GOP’s agenda on education policy and is widely seen as a potential 2024 presidential contender — expanded his reach into nonpartisan school board elections this year, 30 candidates in 18 districts. The majority won their races or have moved to a November runoff. Several of the governor’s candidates were also backed by the conservative organization Moms for Liberty, a parents’ rights group, and the , which has spent over $2 million on school board races in several states.

The charged atmosphere nationally is producing leadership candidates who aren’t seasoned or politically astute enough to withstand the pressure, said Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

“There’s no time to learn,” he said. “You’re going into battle now.” 

That’s why Alachua is holding off on looking for a new superintendent, said Certain, the board member.

“We’re not going to get anybody who is worth anything at this point because of the turnover,” she said.

Offered the job by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, Carvalho in private, then presided over a televised school board meeting that featured three hours of supporters all but begging him to stay. In the end, Carvalho remained.

greeted the move in Miami, but it didn’t go over so well in New York, home to the nation’s largest school district: Eric Phillips, de Blasio’s press secretary, , “Who would ever hire this guy again?”

Four years later, Phillips has his answer: Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system.

The drama of the hire was underscored by Pedro Noguera, dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education, who likened the move to “LeBron coming to the Lakers.” But Los Angeles offers only the most recent example of an oversize personality with huge ambitions taking over a district’s top job. Right now, all three of the nation’s largest school systems are run by energetic reformers, a rarity even in big-city schools circles.

All of them greet Spring 2022 full of promise — and problems. Over the next few years, they’ll enjoy unprecedented funding as taxpayers throw billions of dollars at schools to scrub away deficits caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But all three districts are rapidly losing students. And unions, emboldened by 2021 victories around remote instruction and, in recent years, high-profile strikes, could be formidable obstacles to their priorities. In Chicago, new schools CEO has already faced down a citywide teacher walkout.

In addition to Carvalho and Martinez, who are both immigrants, New York City Mayor Eric Adams in December named , the founder of a small network of public boys’ schools, as the new school chancellor. Banks’s schools have stood out for, among other reasons, employing many male teachers of color.

All three “definitely seem reform minded, which I think is super exciting and a real breath of fresh air,” said , superintendent of the Catholic independent Partnership Schools network. 

“I think it really speaks to the moment we’re at as we’re coming out of COVID,” she said. The pandemic “provided an uncomfortable reminder” of the need for leaders who will put children’s needs first. 

Billions in new funding 
 until 2024

Martinez, Chicago’s new schools CEO, is of Chiefs for Change, a group that advocates for increased school choice, effective teacher preparation, and standards-aligned curricula. But it also rails against “onerous bureaucracy” in schools. That credo will certainly be challenged by the sheer scale of federal intervention: some in COVID-related relief since 2020.

In New York, state lawmakers in 2021 increased funding to New York City by nearly half a billion dollars. By next year, a lawsuit settled last year to equalize urban school funding could bring that to $1 billion, said president of Bank Street College and New York City’s former senior deputy chancellor. “So there is a significant infusion of new dollars into the school system that can be used to dig into systemic issues. And that’s very rare.”

As in districts large and small elsewhere, the three leaders are “all drinking from a firehose” of funding, said of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. But that also places extra responsibility on them: “No one can blame lack of funding as their excuse for not getting things done,” she said.

But unless Congress acts, all that extra funding will run out in 2024. None of the three new leaders agreed to be interviewed for this piece.

, who leads the AASA, the nation’s school superintendent’s association, said many leaders are using the cash to upgrade facilities. But spending it on generous raises or new instructional positions could actually put them at odds with unions, since those jobs won’t be sustainable.

“The financial cliff is only two years away,” he said.

A ‘friend of charters back at the helm’

A product of New York City’s public schools, Banks cut his teeth founding and the network of five unionized Eagle Academy public schools in New York City and Newark.

While the schools aren’t charters, Banks has said he supports charter schools. He told in December that families “are desperate for quality seats, quality schools 
 And if the traditional public schools were offering that, you wouldn’t see such a mass rush to the charter schools.”

Banks created the Eagle Academy schools to serve academically struggling boys of color in grades six through 12 who often face harsh discipline. As chancellor, he said, his first priorities are to expand early childhood education, improve career pathways for older students, and to combat students’ trauma.

, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city’s union, has known Banks for years. “I’ve been at his schools and I found them to be quite well-run,” he said. All the same, running the largest school district in the nation will force him to tame the city schools’ “mammoth bureaucracy.” 

The last two mayors have restructured the school system six times, Mulgrew said. “And every time, all they did was add another layer.”

In his , Banks on March 2 acknowledged that many families have “decided to vote with their feet, and to say, ‘We’re going to find other alternatives and other choices for our children.’” 

He promised an overhaul of the bureaucracy, including requiring district superintendents to reapply for their jobs. And he took direct aim at the way many schools teach reading, criticizing a method developed by a Columbia University Teachers College professor that “has not worked” with many children. He promised to shift to a method that emphasizes explicit phonics instruction, among other changes.

Banks has also said he’d like to transform city schools from the bottom up by handing to “principals who know what they’re doing,” according to the speech. He also wants to tweak how standardized tests are used, allowing students to show they’ve mastered content in other ways.

His ascendance stands in contrast to previous leaders who have looked suspiciously on the charter sector. New York actually caps the number of charter schools statewide at 460, with just 290 allowed for nearly 1 million students in New York City. While it’d take a state-level change to allow more, choice advocates said Banks can eloquently make the case.

“It feels to me like this is the moment where we can really see that there is a friend of charters back at the helm of New York City schools, which I think is really great to see, and I know is probably sending some shockwaves,” said Porter-Magee.

So far, at least, Banks hasn’t forcefully pushed to lift the cap, in December, “We want to scale excellence. So if that means opening a few more charter schools, that’s what we’re going to do … if we can get the state to approve it.” But he said he’s also encouraging the philanthropic community “to lean in on the traditional public school system, because at the end of the day, most of our children will continue to go to our traditional public schools.”

Enrollment downturns

Carvalho, who led Miami-Dade schools for 14 years, has been able to compete with charters by creating centralized data systems that allowed him to keep track of students’ academic progress better than most big-city leaders during the pandemic, Rees said. 

A Portuguese immigrant, Carvalho grew up in Miami and worked restaurant and construction jobs early on. He came up through the ranks in Miami-Dade, starting out as a high school science teacher and becoming a new breed of area leader: one who sticks around. Before he took the top job in 2008, Miami-Dade “was a revolving door for superintendents coming and going,” Domenech said.

Sticking around paid off. In 2012, the district won the coveted $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, which recognizes school districts that have shown academic improvement while narrowing the achievement gap. More recent findings from the district’s Office of Academics and Transformation paint a : While Black students’ graduation rates rose from 62.4 percent in 2011 to 85.6 percent in 2020, just 40 percent of Black students in 2019 were proficient in reading; 44 percent were proficient in math. 

With parents clamoring to remediate lost instructional time during the pandemic, Domenech said Carvalho brought in “a very creative” program that contracted with camps to provide summer school.

Carvalho’s long tenure — the average big-city leader sticks around — is “a testament to his savvy in terms of the politics, in dealing with the board, in dealing with the community, in dealing with employee groups,” Domenech said.

He’ll need that savvy in Los Angeles, which also has recently featured a revolving door of superintendents, a strong union and an outspoken, ever-shifting school board — it currently has three seats open in the next election. In Los Angeles, Carvalho will work at the pleasure of the school board. Meanwhile, Banks and Martinez will work for the mayors of their respective cities.

During his second week at LAUSD, Carvalho unveiled a that includes expanded preschool, year-round learning and a “Parent Academy” offering coursework to help parents understand their children’s education. He’d also lengthen the school year and offer teachers more professional development. He acknowledged that he’d have to negotiate with the city’s teachers union about those last two ideas.

Carvalho last month told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· the district must expand school choice if it wants to keep from “bleeding out students” from a system that, while much bigger than Miami, has fewer than one-third as many school choice options.

Los Angeles students, he said, basically have two choices at the moment: magnet schools and charter schools. “Whoever decided to restrict choice on the basis of those parameters?” he asked. “Where are the programs in L.A. where we see long waiting lists of parents? Why aren’t we expanding more of those programs to where the demand is?”

He has the district consider an “explosion of offerings” for students, including dual-enrollment programs, International Baccalaureate programs, fine and performing arts magnet schools, and single-gender schools, among others. “I’m less concerned about the dynamic of dialogue that usually separates people into two camps: charter versus non-charter. I’m more interested in programmatic offerings that benefit kids — period.”

Carvalho suggested that the district analyze which programs motivate students to travel long distances from their neighborhoods and offer more of these. “I can fill an entire wall with a repertoire of options for parents. Why aren’t we offering all of that?”

Throughout the pandemic, all three cities have struggled to retain and, in some cases, even find their students. All have seen in .

of the California Charter Schools Association said a crashing birth rate across California is a cause for concern. And net migration has actually dipped “into the negatives” as home due to anti-immigration policies and economic uncertainty.

“This is not about ‘The affluent went to Tahoe during the pandemic to hunker down,’” she said. “This is real and it’s permanent and it’s creating challenges across the state.”

An ‘innovative and data-informed’ school integration experiment

Born in Mexico, Martinez emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was 5. He is in a family of 12 children with deep ties to Chicago’s public school system — three of his sisters and some 28 nieces and nephews attend local public schools. 

Martinez was working in finance for the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2003 when then-Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan hired him as chief financial officer. He remained there until 2009 — Duncan moved on to serve as U.S. Education Secretary under President Obama. Martinez made a name for himself leading the San Antonio Independent School District through a redesign, beginning in 2015, that Âé¶čŸ«Æ· dubbed “one of America’s most innovative and data-informed school integration experiments.”

Using family income data, he mapped poverty levels for each city block. Then he integrated schools not by race but by income and, among other factors, by parents’ education levels. Three years later, San Antonio’s 90 schools and 47,000 students were among the fastest-improving in Texas.

In Chicago, he faces something entirely different: a 330,000-student system that’s as families leave the city. Recent enrollment data show that while 43,500 new students enrolled for the first time this year, 54,000 left between the last school year and this one.

On the job in Chicago for seven months, Martinez has already his first major crisis: the city’s teachers in early January voted to not show up for work until COVID-19 safety demands were met. 

Martinez proposed a host of measures, including building-level testing to determine when to close schools. But the union, with memories of an that ended with millions in extra spending, insisted on more strict measures, including negative PCR tests for all staff, students, and volunteers in order to keep schools open. 

The strike lasted just under a week after the district agreed to increase testing options, allow remote learning on a case-by-case basis, and secure more KN95 masks. Despite the agreement, union Vice President Stacy Davis Gates Mayor Lori Lightfoot as “unfit to lead our city. She’s on a one-woman kamikaze mission to destroy our public schools.”

‘This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest’

, a school consultant and occasional columnist for Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, said the political climate in all three cities reflects a desire by voters more broadly and parents specifically, to pull back from “super-progressive” policies, such as the Defund the Police movement, to more centrist strategies that simply ensure a solid education for all. Parents “just want a school system they can count on, that’s reliable, that is just serving their kids.”

, president of the education advocacy group 50CAN, said Adams, the New York mayor, campaigned on not just a return to moderation but normalcy: “The schools are open, the subways are safe. The restaurants work. People are back in their offices. That’s almost nostalgia now, and people crave that. And I think these candidates got that. And their education choices reflect that too.”

At the same time, unions are on the ascent. With their to in-person instruction amid COVID-19 spikes and a handful of recent in recent years, they’ve seen their and influence grow after years of declining membership. 

“This is the moment that unions should be at their strongest,” said , a resident senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a libertarian Washington, D.C., think tank. “This is a health crisis, and unions are designed to make sure that they’re protecting the health and safety of their members.”

But over the past few years, he said, unions in many places have “overplayed their hands” by demanding that instruction stay remote. The arrival of these new leaders may signal something different altogether: The new leaders are by no means union supporters, even if voters in each of their solidly blue cities are.

Rees, of the charter schools group, noted that Banks hired Dan Weisberg as first deputy chancellor. Since 2015, Weisberg has served as , a national nonprofit (formerly called The New Teacher Project) that has trained thousands of teachers outside of traditional teachers colleges. Since its founding in 1997, it has had a complicated relationship with unions. 

In 2018, after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt unions a blow by making a portion of members’ dues optional, Weisberg wrote that he disagreed with the decision, calling it “a matter of basic fairness that teachers who reap the benefits of collective bargaining should also share in the costs.”

But Weisberg also called the decision “a blessing in disguise” for unions, which he said “are now forced to finally confront an existential threat that’s been brewing for years: They’re losing touch with more and more of their members.”

Rees said Weisberg’s hiring “gives us confidence that there’s a new sheriff in town and that things are going to be a little bit different, or at least that the reform community and the charter school community will have a seat at the table.”

The program’s effects suggest that more exposure to supplemental instruction could yield still greater benefits. But design limitations, particularly those stemming from a pronounced shortage of qualified tutor candidates, also raise the question of whether it can be offered on the scale that some advocates envision. 

The paper was released only days after U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona declared, in a speech laying out his department’s priorities for the coming year, that every student who has lost ground during the pandemic should receive 90 minutes of tutoring each week. A number of states and large districts have already established tutoring initiatives over the last year, typically underwritten by emergency relief funds from Washington.

That push has been backed by a flood of research indicating that high-quality, high-dosage tutoring can help children realize almost unheard-of learning progress. The bulk of that literature — reviewed in a 2020 meta-analysis of nearly 100 randomized controlled trials — focused on instruction that was delivered in-person, though several COVID-era papers from Europe have also shown significant academic gains resulting from online tutoring.

To further investigate the virtual approach, researchers at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and the University of California San Diego helped organize a pilot in Chicago Heights, Illinois, a city roughly 30 miles south of downtown Chicago. Partnering with , a nonprofit mentorship organization founded by college students in 2020, the research team recruited 230 volunteer instructors and paired them with local middle schoolers for regular, one-on-one sessions held over Zoom. Students enrolled in the Chicago Heights school district are overwhelmingly poor and non-white, and only about one-quarter were meeting grade-level standards in math and reading before the pandemic.

Partly owing to the challenge of recruiting volunteers, participating students were organized into three waves that began accessing their tutoring at different times over a 12-week period. On average, students in the first wave received about four hours of total tutoring, while those in the following waves received a little over two hours. In keeping with prior research findings, students in the first wave saw more learning growth (as measured by performance on standardized tests) than those who were tutored less. While the results were not large enough to be classified as statistically significant, said co-author Matthew Kraft, they provide further evidence that the achievement gains from tutoring will accelerate when delivered in higher dosages.

“There’s this explicit interpretation, which I’ve written about in my own work, that higher amounts of tutoring produce better results,” said Kraft, a professor of education at Brown. “What we do see very clearly is this difference across our higher- vs. lower-dosage waves, which were consistent with that pattern.”

Still, he acknowledged, the boost that came from a comparatively brief, low-cost tutoring pilot was “much smaller” than the average effects found in some earlier studies. That can partially be explained by the program’s design: It leveraged the volunteer labor of undergraduates — rather than highly trained teachers or paraprofessionals, who have been shown to be more effective as tutors — and carried out instruction digitally rather than in person. But the cost-efficient nature of the experiment — among its few expenses was a $50 Zoom account — may recommend its model to educational leaders wondering how to pay for tutoring once federal relief funds are depleted.

“It was a very low-cost model,” Kraft said. “That’s something that I think districts are struggling with, despite having pretty substantial amounts of federal aid to work with, at least in the short- to medium-term. They recognize that there’s going to be a financial cliff, so how do you build something you don’t have to just abandon?”

A problem of scale

Both the study’s potential and its constraints are notable at a moment when states and districts are laboring mightily to establish their own tutoring interventions. High-profile efforts in , , and have mobilized millions of dollars in public and philanthropic money in the hopes of reaching thousands of kids who lost ground during months of school closures. A from data tracker Burbio showed that roughly one-third of districts planned to spend relief funds on tutoring.

But the frenzied start-up phase necessitates filling hundreds, or even thousands, of new positions; that kind of hiring blitz would be a daunting prospect in the best of times, but it has become especially thorny under the current economic conditions. While they would undoubtedly prefer to use current or former teachers to staff their programs, a historically tight labor market has already led to shortages in core instructional positions. 

The struggle to recruit qualified tutors is “no different in kind from the staffing challenge they are experiencing for every job within a school system right now,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change. “The same market forces are impacting staffing in tutoring as are impacting staffing in teaching and bus drivers, etc. It does make scaling promising efforts significantly more difficult.”

Tennessee is one of the states that has experimented most energetically with tutoring, launching a $200 million initiative last year that seeks to reach 150,000 struggling students. Schools in Elizabethton, a rural district serving around 2,600 students, are among the 79 districts that have chosen to participate in the , offering small-group tutoring to students scoring below proficient in state reading exams.

Myra Newman, Elizabethton’s assistant superintendent for instruction, said that school teachers and principals “have seen the benefits” of the tutoring, which she hopes will be evident when students sit for their spring exams. But for the moment, the district provides only one tutor (accompanied by several assistants) for each school, and tutoring sessions are offered in a three-to-one format, rather than one-to-one.

“We wouldn’t have personnel — or the funds to hire the personnel — to do one-on-one,” Newman said. “But a three-to-one ratio is pretty good because they still get some individualized attention, and some modeling for their peers.”

Magee argued that, whatever the pitfalls faced by school systems abruptly setting up their tutoring initiatives, the learning emergency presented by COVID necessitated rapid action; while some of the programs in the field may not adhere to the ideal held up in research, they can play a critical role in stemming further learning loss now.

“In a crisis like the one we’re experiencing, which is generational in its negative impact on students, you might well want to move faster and accept some amount of downsides in order to reach as many students as possible,” he said.

But Kraft, who has been a consistent and influential advocate for states devoting increased resources to tutoring, sounded a cautionary note to district leaders.

“There is a tradeoff in navigating the current climate where what is possible might not be scalable. So instead of just saying, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to build a huge tutoring program,’ we might be better off starting off with a small program and building it over time, in a sustainable way — rather than cutting corners or changing the model.”

When her daughter entered Huntington Park High School in Los Angeles this fall, Vega asked if tutoring was available, but was told only students with F’s or a teacher’s referral were eligible.

Vega picked up extra shifts cleaning offices on nights and weekends to pay the $470 a month to get a private tutor. She wonders, however, why that was necessary: The Los Angeles Unified School District is receiving in federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan — 20 percent of which has to be spent to address learning loss, according to the law. 

“The district is really …concentrating on people getting their vaccines,” Vega said in Spanish through an interpreter. “Let’s let doctors and pediatricians do their job and focus on that. The district needs to focus on learning loss and getting to a good academic level.”

Under the law, tutoring is just one way districts can address learning disruption caused by the pandemic. But with research showing that so-called can provide struggling students the academic boost they need, both parents and policymakers expected to see districts use relief funds on such programs.

Thus far, however, the enthusiasm over tutoring has not translated into widespread adoption. A from Burbio, which tracks schools’ responses to the pandemic, shows that out of 1,037 districts nationally, only about a third are spending federal relief funds on tutoring. The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s ongoing review shows that while 62 out of 100 large districts offer tutoring, most don’t provide details on their programs and how many students they serve. 

Some districts have addressed learning loss by lengthening the school day or providing small group instruction. Others that have launched tutoring programs either restrict services to specific students or limit the number of sessions available. A shortage of available tutors has only exacerbated the problem.

“There is good research that high-dosage tutoring has really transformative potential and it’s also true that school systems are struggling mightily to meet the demand,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change.

In October, another Los Angeles Unified parent, Ada Mendoza, was offered tutoring for her two youngest children twice-a-week at Manchester Avenue Elementary School. One hitch: It only lasted a month.

She signed them up, but had doubts that a month would be enough to make up for a year of distance learning. Eight-year-old Juan Jose was beginning to read when schools shifted to remote instruction, but now struggles with words of three or more syllables, reading comprehension and writing complete sentences.

Her children got the flu in October and missed some sessions. She said Juan Jose’s teacher told her he is still reading far below grade-level. “They lost a lot of learning, and they need a lot of help,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter.

According to the district, tutoring is available for children with disabilities, long-term English learners in grades three through eight, and foster, homeless and low-income students “based on performance indicators as identified by school sites.”

Mendoza said she can’t afford a private tutor, but some parents have gone that route. October from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that 3 in 10 families with at least one school-age child had spent their first three monthly child tax credit payments on school-related expenses, including tutoring and afterschool programs.

“Guess we’re not all spending it on getting our nails done and filet mignon,” quipped Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy organization. The group’s recent polling showed that more than a third of parents consider not having enough tutoring or to be a major or moderate problem.

The union has launched — or EPIC — a “watchdog campaign” to follow the $122 billion K-12 schools are receiving through the relief bill. And in Los Angeles, Vega has joined other Los Angeles parents taking part in the nonprofit , which monitors how the district is using relief money to help students get back on grade level.  

Parent Revolution, another Los Angeles advocacy group, wants the district to create an “ for every student. Even if students can get free tutoring, it’s often a “blanket approach” that might not target their needs, said Jay Artis-Wright, executive director of the organization. 

“We work with populations of families who have academic challenges that preceded COVID and now have a wider gap,” she said. “There is a surplus of funds that can support them, but only if we can agree that each child’s academic recovery is unique and should be treated as such.”

‘This giant puzzle’

Districts that have launched tutoring programs say they can’t serve everyone — especially as a tight labor market and quarantine requirements continue to fuel personnel shortages.

The Metro Nashville Public Schools, for example, has been able to sign up 500 tutors — a mix of teachers, paraprofessionals and community volunteers, said Keri Randolph, the district’s chief strategy officer. But that’s half the number they had planned to recruit, which means less than 1,000 students are receiving tutoring instead of the 2,000 the district expected to enroll through its $19 million Accelerating Scholars program.

The Delta variant, Randolph said, affected the size of the volunteer pool and she wasn’t as successful hiring retired teachers as she’d hoped. 

The program — 30-minute sessions, three times a week for 10 weeks — currently targets low-performing first- through third-graders in literacy and eighth- and ninth-graders in math. 

“It’s this giant puzzle,” Randolph said, adding that tutoring is “hot right now, but people have no idea how hard it is.” 

Staff members at the 46 schools now offering tutoring manage the schedule so teachers aren’t “overburdened,” she said. The district tries to schedule the tutoring sessions during the regular school day to avoid the need for extra transportation.

But there are exceptions. Kindall Maupin, who has a daughter in eighth grade at DuPont Hadley Middle School in the district, was only offered a 7:30 a.m. slot for math tutoring — a time that doesn’t work because her daughter has ADHD and can’t focus that early in the morning.

“I feel like if they can have football practice and cheerleading practice at the end of the day, why can’t we do this then,” Maupin said. She added that she’s even considered refinancing her house to afford private tutoring. “I have been there, literally sitting down to crunch the numbers to see how I could do this.”

Maybe next semester

Experts said the current pressures on local districts affect whether they can pull off a new program on a large scale. 

“Many educators are understandably exhausted from these past 18 months of school disruptions,” said Susanna Loeb, director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. “Implementing a new program — no matter how much funding is available for it or how much research supports its effectiveness — takes effort.”

Jonathan Travers, a partner with Education Resource Strategies, a nonprofit that helps districts address budgeting and staffing challenges, said many districts have contracted with vendors to give students 24-hour access to online homework help.

“We are trying to be clear that that is not the same thing” as high-dosage tutoring, he said, but added that with districts focusing on filling vacancies and managing quarantines, some are only now shifting to “actually putting canoes out in the pond around accelerating learning.” 

That doesn’t stop districts from adding tutoring programs next semester, he said. And he added that some who are frustrated with the pace of implementation may push for districts to reimburse parents spending their own money on tutoring.

Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, alluded to Travers’s idea in an this week, suggesting that districts share some of those federal funds with parents who are spending their own time and money helping students catch up. 

“Given all the labor shortages, and the willingness to pay parents for , it is interesting that districts haven’t done more to go the route of paying parents to tutor their kids,” she said in an interview. “We thought we’d see some by now.”

Randolph, in Nashville, said she thinks her district needs to do a better job of communicating the other ways the district is to address learning loss, such as funding $18 million for summer school and $6 million for computer-based literacy and math programs.

“It’s not just tutoring or nothing,” she said.

Still, she said leaders plan to continue tutoring beyond this period of recovery. That’s one reason why the district decided to build the program in-house, instead of contracting with a private provider, which can cost per student for a year. That’s not a sustainable solution, Randolph said. The district is spending $400 per student for the 10-week period.

“We don’t think tutoring is just for a COVID response,” she said. “If it’s the right thing to do now, it’s the right thing to do later.”

Los Angeles students must get their second dose of the shot by Dec. 19 and those involved in sports and other extracurricular activities will need to have their second shot by Oct. 31.

“I think it’s the first big domino to fall,” said San Antonio Independent School District Superintendent Pedro Martinez, chair of Chiefs for Change, a network of state and district superintendents.

As the board deliberated, across the country in Washington, D.C., President Joe Biden used a White House address to unveil aimed at vaccinating and testing school staff and to combat those he called “bullying” Republican governors who have banned districts from mandating masks. Taken together, the actions on both coasts represent some of the more aggressive official actions to quell COVID’s effects in schools since lockdowns were first imposed in March of 2020.

Biden’s plan requires close to 300,000 school staff members working for federal programs, such as Head Start and Department of Defense schools, to be vaccinated, calls on all districts to regularly test students and staff, and provides grants for districts confronting loss of funding for implementing mask mandates and other safety measures.

What the administration is calling the “Path Out of the Pandemic” includes making 280 million rapid and at-home tests available using the Defense Production Act and lowering the cost of over-the-counter tests from Walmart, Kroger and Amazon. Free testing at pharmacies will be expanded to 10,000 sites nationwide.

The actions come amid widespread anxiety over the Delta variant, which is interfering with a smooth return to school. With more students back in class across the country, schools are reverting to remote learning due to COVID-19 outbreaks. According to , 1,400 schools in 35 states were closed as of last Sunday, about twice as many as the week before. Others are sending thousands of students home to quarantine, and among children are the highest in states with the lowest vaccination rates.

“We’re in the tough stretch, and it could last for a while,” Biden said, adding that stricter vaccine requirements are needed. “This is not about freedom or personal choice. It’s about protecting yourself and those around you.”

Martinez criticized the administration, however, for not stepping up efforts to get vaccines approved for younger children and broadly publicizing clinical trial data that can strengthen confidence among parents.

“Here we are in September and I’m not hearing anything about it,” he said. “We need a national bold stance on vaccines. We’re held hostage by this virus.”

Emergency use authorization was initially expected in the fall, but in August, the Food and Drug Administration said it likely won’t be until the .

Biden’s announcement included a new grant program, using school safety funds, to help districts like Martinez’s that are facing funding loss and litigation related to mask mandates and other COVID-19 precautions.

“We should be thanking districts for using proven strategies that will keep schools open and safe, not punishing them,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “We stand with the dedicated educators doing the right thing to protect their school communities, and this program will allow them to continue that critical work of keeping students safe.”

Texas, Florida and Arizona are among the states that have banned local districts from issuing mask mandates. The Biden administration has launched civil rights investigations in several states, arguing that such actions are creating an atmosphere where some parents might think it’s not safe enough to send their children to school.

is also suing the San Antonio district for mandating vaccines for staff, but Martinez doesn’t plan to back down; in fact, he said he would mandate booster shots for staff as well. Martinez said the vaccines and boosters are necessary “to maintain stability.in our classrooms,” but added it’s hard to imagine the backlash he’d receive if he mandated vaccines for students. Reportedly one of to lead the Chicago Public Schools, he declined to comment on whether he would push for a vaccine requirement for students in Chicago if he becomes superintendent there.

‘Fear that this was coming’

According to the , just over half of 12- to 15-year-olds and almost 60 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds are vaccinated. A released last week showed that a third of parents of older teens and over 40 percent of parents of 12- to- 15-year-olds say they still don’t plan to have their children vaccinated.

In August, the Culver City Unified School District, which serves a middle and upper middle class population on the westside of Los Angeles, became the first district in the nation to require vaccines for students.

“At the high school, the parents I know are all very happy the district made this decision,” said Erika Lewis, who has two students in the district. ”I personally don’t know any who opposed it.”

in Los Angeles County considering a mandate include Alhambra, Beverly Hills and El Monte.

But a mandate in Los Angeles Unified, where almost three-quarters of students are Hispanic, might not be as well-received.

Surveys show greater among Blacks and Hispanics, and show that they encounter more barriers to getting the vaccine, such as inability to take time off work. Biden’s directives included requiring employers to allow staff time off to get vaccinated.

Others say it’s too soon, considering the vaccine for children 12 and up hasn’t received full authorization yet from the FDA.

“This vaccine is still experimental and that’s something the district is not explaining to parents,” one mother told the board in Spanish through a translator. “Why are you in such a hurry to vaccinate all children?”

Another asked who they could sue if their child experiences negative side effects.

In interviews with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, other parents celebrated the district’s decision.

“I am thrilled that LAUSD is taking the health of our children and educators so seriously,” said Ariel Harman-Holmes, whose three children —ages 2, 7 and 9 — have disabilities. “I have three children who are too young to be vaccinated, so we rely on the vaccine-eligible members of our community to keep them safe.”

Rebecca Cunningham, a parent of a 5th and 9th grader in Los Angeles schools, who is also in favor of the mandate, said the district has worked hard to eliminate roadblocks that some families might face in getting the vaccine.

“I really feel like we’re getting to the point where maybe six months ago there were legitimate reasons why someone would want to wait,” she said, but not now.

During the board meeting, physicians presented data showing that the risks from the vaccine, including inflammation of the heart, are smaller than the health risks associated with getting the disease.

At the White House, Biden said his patience was “wearing thin” with the 80 million Americans who remain unvaccinated and expressed anger at governors who are “ordering mobile morgues” instead of promoting the vaccine. He called on governors to require all school staff to be vaccinated.

“Talk about bullying in schools,” Biden said of GOP governors in states like Florida and Texas. “If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I will use my power as president to get them out of the way.”

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement that the union stands “in complete support of this plan and of the administration’s effort to protect as many people as possible.” But National Association of Secondary School Principals CEO Ronn Nozoe called for more support from Washington.

“The added pressures and responsibilities of carrying out more robust testing and screening programs will fall on the shoulders of principals, assistant principals and other administrators,” he said. “This is intensified by a growing number of threats being made against school leaders for simply implementing safety measures to protect their communities.”

In March, Biden made $10 billion available to districts for COVID-19 testing. Districts can also use federal relief funds for testing and vaccination efforts. Leading up to the school year, the Biden administration challenged districts to hold vaccine clinics and available on how to operate them, but some districts still ran into .

The Los Angeles district also has an extensive COVID-19 testing program, in which all students and staff, vaccinated or not, are required to test weekly. The district rolled it out last school year, but reliance on the program to catch positive cases has increased this year with most students back in school.

“Our charge remains clear — to provide students the best education possible, which includes the many benefits of in person learning,” said Interim Superintendent Megan Reilly. “Vaccinations are an essential part of the multi-layered protection against COVID-19.”

The department’s Office for Civil Rights on Monday sent letters to five states — , , , and — explaining that their policies prevent districts from protecting students that might be at higher risk of health complications from COVID-19 because of a disability.

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“It’s simply unacceptable that state leaders are putting politics over the health and education of the students they took an oath to serve,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement. “The Department will fight to protect every student’s right to access in-person learning safely and the rights of local educators to put in place policies that allow all students to return to the classroom full-time in-person safely this fall.”

The OCR letters, sent to the superintendents in each state, are the latest development in an ongoing, three-way standoff between the Biden administration, Republican governors and districts trying to respond to rising numbers of students testing positive for COVID-19 because of the Delta variant. Districts, especially in Florida and Texas, have moved ahead with mandates regardless of governors’ threats to withhold funding.

“Local leaders are not being given the freedom that they want and need right now as those closest to the ground,” said Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, adding that universal masking, “buys us time to finish the job on vaccination. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so critical right now.”

The organization includes superintendents such as Chad Gestson of the Phoenix Union High School District in Arizona and Pedro Martinez of the San Antonio Independent School District who have defied state laws banning the mandates.

Oklahoma Superintendent Joy Hofmeister anticipated the OCR’s action, saying in a statement that officials were not surprised by this civil rights investigation spurred by passage of a state law prohibiting mask requirements in Oklahoma public schools.Her department, she said, will “fully cooperate.”

The U.S. Department of Education said OCR did not send letters to Texas, Florida, Arkansas and Arizona. Governors in those states have also banned local mandates, but the courts have intervened, temporarily suspending the bans on universal masking.

In Florida last week, a Leon County county for a group of Florida parents that sued over Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ban on local district mask mandates. And in Texas, has ruled that Gov. Greg Abbott overstepped his authority and that some districts should be allowed to require masks. But the state’s attorney general quickly appealed, leaving districts in further limbo.

On Tuesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court is scheduled to hear filed over the state’s ban, and Superintendent Molly Spearman has urged the legislature to reconsider it. On Aug. 18, she sent districts stating that mandates might be necessary for those teaching or coming in contact with medically fragile or immunocompromised students.

“The [department] is particularly sensitive to the law’s effect on South Carolina’s most vulnerable students and are acutely aware of the difficult decisions many families are facing concerning a return to in-person instruction,” according to a statement.

Cardona has said publicly that he’s concerned some parents might not send their children to school if masks aren’t required, and President Joe Biden on Aug. 18 authorized the secretary to use the “enforcement authority” of OCR.

The fact-finding process will focus on what is known as Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which protects students from discrimination because of their disability and guarantees them the right to a free and appropriate public education. The agency will also look at whether the states are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires public buildings, including schools, to accommodate those with disabilities.

Educators welcome President Joe Biden’s plan to spend $20 billion — on top of the federal government’s current funding for high-poverty districts — to address the needs of schools with the greatest concentrations of disadvantaged students.

But with the new administration already getting a late start on the budget process and Republicans cringing at the size of Biden’s infrastructure and family policy proposals, it’s unclear where the additional funding will come from.

The president’s for fiscal year 2022 would reverse “years of underinvestment in federal education programs,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters last week. But some Republicans are calling it , considering the other relief bills Congress has passed to address the pandemic.

The current federal budget runs through the end of September. If Congress doesn’t agree on a new budget by then, lawmakers would likely pass a continuing resolution to keep funding the government, leaving open the possibility they won’t act on Biden’s new proposals this year. Meanwhile, the administration continues to in an effort to find a compromise over Biden’s infrastructure plan, but it’s possible Democrats would plow ahead and pass much of the president’s agenda on their own.

“Democrats hold control and they want to help the president fulfill his priorities,” said Danny Carlson, associate executive director for policy and advocacy at the National Association of Elementary School Principals. “He obviously campaigned on tripling Title I.”

As they did with the March relief bill, Democrats could use the reconciliation process, which allows them to pass spending bills without a single Republican vote. With the Senate split 50-50, Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, could once again end up casting the deciding vote. If the administration aims for a bipartisan deal, Biden will need the support of at least 10 Republicans.

, released May 28, would keep funding for the existing Title I program at the current level of $16.5 billion but would create a new formula for distributing $20 billion in “equity grants” to states that work to close gaps between rich and poor districts and between those serving primarily white students and those that enroll more students of color.

, an advocacy organization that ceased operating last year, showed that despite decades of school finance lawsuits, there was still a $23 billion gap between white and nonwhite school districts as of 2016.

Under the administration’s plan districts would need to spend the additional funds on priorities Biden promoted during his campaign — increasing teacher compensation, expanding students’ access to advanced courses and providing preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds.

But many questions about the proposal remain, particularly how the federal government would hold states and districts accountable for the money, said Khalilah Harris, managing director of K-12 education policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Some of those answers would come if the plan is approved when the Department of Education creates rules for the program, according to the proposal.

“It will be important not to just have surface-level conversations about equity and access,” Harris said, adding that she expects Republicans to keep a close eye on how districts spend any increase in funding and that education is likely to be a “huge issue” in next year’s midterm elections.

She said the Title I equity proposal complements Biden’s plan to increase funding for community schools to $443 million — almost 15 times the current level — and would help students with the greatest needs, including homeless students, children in foster care and those with disabilities.

The additional dollars, however, wouldn’t change the fact that most funding for schools still comes from the state and local level. Zahava Stadler, a special assistant for state funding and policy at The Education Trust, an advocacy organization, said the new equity grants can serve as a “powerful incentive” for states to address long-standing funding disparities.

‘Think about sustainability’

Another challenge is that the appropriations bill covers not just education, but also the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. Republican members of the House appropriations committee expressed shock that Biden is asking for almost $103 billion for the education department — a 41 percent increase.

“Apparently math was not his strong suit when it came to his education because this budget he has put forward is so far out of whack,” Congressman Ben Cline (R-Va.) said last month during an appropriations hearing. “This level of an increase in spending in the same year that Congress has allocated extensive funds to mitigate the effects of COVID is highly irresponsible.”

If the new program becomes a reality, district leaders say it could allow them to continue the programs they’re launching with relief funds to address students’ learning and social-emotional needs brought on by the pandemic.

“One of the challenges of hiring staff is you have to be able to think about sustainability,” said Robert Tagorda, the executive director of equity, access, and college and career readiness in the Long Beach Unified School District, the fourth largest in California. “That makes it hard for us to think about long-term investments.”

And John Sasaki, spokesman for the Oakland Unified School District, said even though the funds would come with restrictions, “they are intended to help low-income students overcome obstacles that their peers do not face.”

Michael Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, said district leaders have talked about using federal relief funds either for one-time expenses, such as facility improvements, or innovative programs that they “hope attract state and local dollars over time.” With the equity grants, they could do both, he said.

The budget also includes a new $100 million competitive grant program for middle and high school career-and-technical education programs, separate from the Title I proposal. Biden, however, isn’t asking for any funding increases for the national Charter Schools Program — a mistake, Magee said, since charter schools have been reporting enrollment growth in many states since the beginning of the pandemic.

And Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said charter schools should have been included in the president’s equity agenda, considering they predominantly serve children of color. The alliance is pushing for an increase in funding to $500 million in next year’s budget.

In a statement, Rees said, “The administration’s pledge to lift all forms of excellence in education cannot be fully achieved without explicit support for all public schools — both charter and district.”