On Monday night, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs,  of the state’s gubernatorial election by the Associated Press. After nearly a week of tallying, Hobbs led Republican Kari Lake by over 18,000 votes, a margin too large to overcome given the small number of outstanding ballots. In a race that reportedly saw over $40 million of campaign spending, the two nominees were separated by less than 1 percent of all ballots cast.

Lake, one of the most prominent denialists of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet conceded .

Amid debates this summer around parental rights, the teaching of controversial subjects, and LGBT issues in schools, Arizona politicians resolved the state’s longest-running education dispute.

In a move that generated a fraction of the attention dedicated to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and his allies in the state legislature pushed through an expansion of education savings accounts to all of the state’s 1.1 million students. The shift was the latest, and possibly the last, development in a lengthy war over school choice in the state. And as a political event, it may signify more than the hotly contested state elections this fall.

Those campaigns are headlined by the gubernatorial bout, viewed as one of the closest in the country. But even though that race will serve as a bellwether on Election Day, delivering a rare battleground verdict on how well Democrats staved off Republicans’ midterm ambitions, its result likely cannot change the trajectory of school policy in Arizona, which will now feature more direct competition between public and private schools. Such sizable growth in ESAs has the potential to reshape the K-12 environment in one of America’s few remaining competitive states. 

The change was cheered by Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, a charismatic former news anchor who has been dubbed the “” for her right-wing views and growing national profile. It was reviled by Democratic hopeful Katie Hobbs, who has captured her own national headlines over the last few years as the state’s top elections official. The contest between the two women will decide who leads the way for a newly altered school system.

The local debate over private school choice can be traced back to the 1990s, with escalating skirmishes fought over the past decade. Only four years ago, voters delivered an emphatic rebuke by defeating a similar expansion in a statewide ballot initiative. But Republicans, and particularly the term-limited Gov. Ducey, have kept their heads down and kept pushing in an effort to bring a voucher-like system to Arizona. 

This cycle, their persistence was matched by favorable political winds. While the GOP’s once-commanding hold over the state legislature has weakened in recent years, the party has also been buoyed by a growing call during the Biden era for more parental control over school governance and practices. The result has been a kind of inversion of the 2018 “Red for Ed” movement, which saw outraged teachers take to the streets and effectively force Ducey to approve a massive increase in school spending. This year, it is defenders of traditional public schools who are seeking to manage the other side’s advance. 

Paul Bentz, a Republican pollster at HighGround Inc., said that Arizona Republicans’ dissatisfaction with schools had also sped the ascent of Lake, who has warned against the political indoctrination of children by teachers. Even if Hobbs overcomes a recent polling swoon to become the state’s first Democratic governor in over a decade, he added, the momentum of school choice would be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

“For the moment, it feels like they’re taking a victory lap,” Bentz said. “They’ve accomplished what they want to accomplish, and it seems like the fight is over.”

Chris Kotterman, director of governmental relations at the Arizona School Boards Association, went further, arguing that the fundamental premises of education policy had changed over the last half-decade.

“It used to be that we all agreed that public education is a net positive, and what we were really talking about were the terms under which schools operate — whether there should be more choice or more money spent on them,” Kotterman recalled. “Now we see a lot more of, ‘The public schools are corrupt, they can’t be trusted.’” 

‘It’s hard to argue against’

First enacted in 2011, education savings accounts — among them, those assigned to persistently underperforming schools, living in foster care, or with parents serving in the military — up to $2,800 per year to spend on schooling, so long as they were not enrolled in traditional public schools. The initially modest amount earmarked through the accounts by the GOP-controlled legislature to about $6,800 today, and parents were allowed to direct it to either private school tuition or other educational costs, such as tutoring or homeschool curricular materials. Within a few years, the credits had dispensed over $100 million to thousands of families.

The most significant change to the policy came in 2017, when Gov. Ducey signed a bill that allowed any family, no matter their circumstances, to apply for an ESA. Though the legislation still included a cap in the overall number of accounts through the year 2022, it was seen as a giant leap forward in the accessibility of the state’s school choice environment — and a threat to the funding of traditional public schools, which would increasingly have to jostle with private competitors for education dollars. Within months, teacher-led groups like Save Our Schools Arizona began massing in the state capital to demand salary increases and higher overall education spending, since the budgetary crunch following the Great Recession. 

Not only did the Red for Ed protests bring Ducey to the bargaining table, securing a gradual pay bump of 20 percent over several years; they also generated a potent counterweight against further experiments in school choice. In the fall of 2018, after gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures, ESA detractors succeeded in putting the previous year’s expansion on the ballot, where it was .

At the same time, however, Ducey won his bid for a second term, and Republicans maintained control over both chambers of the state legislature in 2018 and 2020. Their majorities intact, conservative lawmakers again voted to extend eligibility for the accounts to any family in Arizona. Paired with an $800 million increase in K-12 funding to bring aboard wavering Republicans, the measure , the final validation of the departing governor’s education agenda.

An effort by teachers’ groups to once again kill the law through the ballot initiative process when they failed to gather sufficient signatures by the legal deadline. Beth Lewis, one of the founders of Save Our Schools Arizona, said the years-long campaign to broaden private school choice was meant to drive families from traditional public schools. 

While Republicans added millions of dollars to the state education budget, Lewis argued, “all of that is going to be drained out by universal vouchers, which they passed the same week. They will never give more than they get when it comes to public education.”

Mike O’Neill, a Tempe-based pollster and longtime observer of local politics, said that Republicans had hit upon a compelling midterm message in emphasizing their support for more educational options for families. While Democrats have become increasingly formidable in state elections since 2018, flipping both U.S. Senate seats and approaching parity in the statehouse, their prospects for rolling back the tide of reform looked slim, he added.

“Of course, even within the public school system right now, parents have a lot of choice. But if you frame the argument that way — giving parents choice — on the face of it, it’s very hard to argue against.”

The shadow of Trump

That hasn’t stopped Democratic nominee Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, from making the case. In , Hobbs vows to “roll back” the ESA expansion, which she argues is responsible for “defunding public schools.” 

First elected to her current position in 2018, Hobbs is a former minority leader of the state Senate who generally takes a progressive, if conventional, stance on most K-12 issues. Her is generally broader than Lake’s, replete with proposals to increase the number of school counselors statewide, offer more affordable child care and preschool options, and push forward on necessary repairs to crumbling school infrastructure. 

A bolstering of the state education budget is also at the heart of Hobbs’s vision. Her campaign particularly targets the so-called , a quirk in the state constitution that caps the total amount that local districts can spend on schools. In a kind of echo of the federal debt limit, hundreds of superintendents have warned that if lawmakers don’t vote to raise the cap by next spring, the provision could force them to shave more than $1 billion off state funding — at exactly the moment when, if anything, greater-than-usual resources will be required to restore academic losses resulting from the pandemic.

Such heady policy discussions haven’t received much play in the general election campaign thus far. To the extent that education has been discussed, it has sometimes focused on symbolic issues. Lake’s campaign has of trying to ban the Pledge of Allegiance and National Anthem from classrooms while serving in the statehouse, but otherwise kept relatively quiet about the more granular aspects of education governance. 

Among the non-education controversies to dominate the campaign has been revisionism over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. As the state’s top authority on elections, Hobbs was charged with certifying President Biden’s ultra-tight win two years ago; she has also gained a measure of national fame while contending with a persistent effort among local Republicans to through a long-running and contentious “audit” of ballots in heavily populated Maricopa County. By contrast, Lake and won Trump’s support in the gubernatorial race.

In a midterm political environment that is thought to favor Republicans — few local analysts believe Democratic legislative candidates can expect to claim majorities in either chamber this cycle, for example — polls have indicated a close campaign that may be nosing in Lake’s direction. 

HighGround’s Bentz, who has spent years working on K-12 campaigns like bond issues and tax overrides, said he once felt he’d “cracked the code” of communicating with Republican constituencies by emphasizing schools’ role in improving quality of life, enhancing property values, and lowering crime. In the aftermath of 2020, however, that messaging had lost some of its effectiveness.

“After Trump lost, some of that dissatisfaction and negativity surrounding the election really found a home in these social issues surrounding schools,” Bentz said. “It’s created a negative vibe for Republicans around public education.”

Choice as a ‘bludgeon’

To add to the Democrats’ worries, they are struggling to halt the emergence of a potential Republican star in Lake.

The former journalist to seize the mantle of conservative populism in the Republican primary, narrowly dispatching Ducey’s more moderate lieutenant governor after of former President Donald Trump. Along the way — and echoing other Republican candidates this cycle — she has made explicit commitments to rein in what she characterizes as left-wing indoctrination in classrooms, including through the adoption of the Trump-approved . She has even pledged to to monitor teachers’ lessons for political content on controversial issues. 

The skeptical outlook on public schools, and the overwhelming focus on social issues, reflects the attitudes of Republican voters, said O’Neill. Since the early months of the pandemic, grave dissatisfaction with local schools has bubbled up from parent activists and reshaped much of the existing education discourse in the state. Not only is private school viewed by conservatives as a valid option among many; it is now seen by some as the only alternative to woke overreach.

“I think what’s really behind this is culture wars: ‘We don’t want critical race theory, and we think the schools are teaching things we don’t agree with,’” O’Neill said. “Choice is being used as a bludgeon for that agenda.

And as in other states, where battles over school board seats have become vastly more heated than in previous cycles, education politics has assumed an even greater prominence in local campaigns. In , parent activists claimed that their personal information had been gathered and shared by the local board president in a kind of “enemies list.” More recently, Charlie Kirk — a nationally known Republican gadfly who leads the Phoenix-based group Turning Point — for right-leaning board candidates in otherwise nonpartisan races, and a Republican state Senator to allow board candidates run with party labels. 

The ASBA’s Kotterman said that the surge in education-related pressure had already had its effects on education governance, driving some longtime board members to retire rather than face grueling, ideologically inflected reelection campaigns. Still, he added, the task of steering Arizona’s education environment further right would be the work of more than one election, even if Lake succeeds.

“It’ll take another two years of sustained energy for this movement to grab majorities on these boards,” Kotterman said. “I don’t want to say it can’t be done because it certainly can, but it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out after this cycle, when we have to get into the business of actually governing school districts.”

In January 2022, Governor Doug Ducey called on state lawmakers to pass the most robust and legislation in the country. As he declared in his state of the state address, “Send me the bills, and I’ll sign them.” In just the few short months since, state lawmakers have delivered a historic victory for school choice and cleared the path for the nation’s most powerful academic transparency law. 

Indeed, this week the governor is set to sign into law a universal expansion of the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, extending eligibility to every single K-12 student in the state.

by the Goldwater Institute over a decade ago, Arizona’s ESA program allows participating families to take a portion of what state taxpayers would have spent educating the child in a public school and instead use those funds (approximately $7,000 per child) for any educational need, whether private school tuition, textbooks, tutoring or curriculum resources for home-based learners, and more. 

Arizona’s ESA program has exploded from serving just over 100 students in 2011 to more than 11,000 by 2022. For years, participating families have shared personal with state leaders of the transformative impact the ESA program has had on their children’s lives. As one mom declared to state board of education members in 2020: “I am a parent of three children on ESA, but I also have a master’s degree in elementary education, and ESA has saved the educational lives of my three children.”

Throughout these years, however, access to the ESA program has been limited to fewer than one in four Arizona public school students, with eligibility restricted to children with special needs or families serving in the military, among others. 

Then came the pandemic. 

As parents found their children ejected en masse from schools during COVID — even as public schools scored an additional in free funding from Washington, D.C. — Arizona lawmakers floated proposals each of the years to expand eligibility for the state’s ESA program and offer a lifeline to families beyond the public school system. Sponsored by state Senator Paul Boyer, proposed legislation would have extended ESA eligibility to students from certain Title I schools with the highest concentrations of child poverty. Despite the massive learning losses recorded among low-income kids as a direct result of public school COVID policies, though, union-backed lawmakers continued to block these attempts at expanding the program. 

This past month, however, the dam finally broke. — sponsored by Representative Ben Toma — secured enough support to clear the full state legislature, bringing ESA eligibility to every K-12 student in the state and vaulting Arizona back into the top spot nationwide for educational freedom. 

Opponents have once again pledged to fight against ESA expansion, and state lawmakers still have to notch the final win for in 2023 after , which would require public schools to disclose online all instructional materials being used in their classrooms, also cleared the state senate and came just a single vote short of final passage in the house. 

But in both cases, one can see a growing consensus among Arizona lawmakers that meaningful reforms are needed by families across the state, and that now is the time for greater educational freedom and academic transparency for students across the nation. 

is director of the Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy and director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute

To mark the 24 months since schools shut down because of COVID-19, �鶹��Ʒ spoke with parents, educators, researchers and students across the U.S. We are running some of these interviews in their entirety to give complete accounts of where we’ve been and where some think we’re going. 

Beth Lehr, an assistant principal at Sahuarita High School, near Tucson, Arizona, was named the state’s Assistant Principal of the Year in 2020. A strong advocate for educators, she is dismayed by the extent to which political divisions over the pandemic and other hot-button education issues have left her teachers feeling overwhelmed, dreading to open their emails.

In a February interview, Lehr candidly revealed that she is not immune to such pressures. After she applied for a principal position in her district, she expressed some ambivalence. “‘Why? Why did I just do that?” she recalled thinking. “I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff I dislike about my job outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis.” A mother of two, who saw her own children struggle with the isolation of virtual learning, Lehr said students have lost a lot more than academics during the pandemic. “If we don’t address those things,” she said, “the academic piece is never going to come back.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

�鶹��Ʒ: Give me a little background on your district.

Beth Lehr: The town of Sahuarita is attached to a retirement community. Green Valley is 55 and over and Sahuarita has families. It’s a very interesting dynamic. Our district covers 606 square miles, so it incorporates a number of very rural areas. We have some [families on] ranches. That means they’re pretty remote and rural, and they don’t have real great internet access. We also have a large farming community with a lot of Hispanic families, some who are undocumented.

How did remote learning impact your students?

The biggest struggle was just that feeling of isolation among our students, especially the students in rural areas. It wasn’t simple for them to get on their bike and ride to their friend’s house or meet in the neighborhood, because they’re 50 miles away. 

What did they do?

Oh my God, the soap dispensers were destroyed over and over and over again. We had to replace sinks. We had to replace toilets — not because they were stolen, but because they were destroyed. The older students were super-annoyed by the freshman because then we ended up having to lock our bathrooms during lunch. 

The problem-solving that they’re [supposed to learn] over seventh and eight grade, they didn’t learn. The relationship skills that you refine when you’re in middle school, they didn’t do. A lot of the stuff that we were seeing at the beginning of the school year is very much what I would see when I was teaching middle school. 

We’ve also had an increase in sexual infractions — not necessarily assaults. It’s consensual, but it’s much more frequent on our campus this year. This is my seventh year as assistant principal, and this year, hands down, we have had more issues with kids getting caught in positions that high schoolers should not be in. Maybe once a year, we’d have kids getting caught having sex on campus. It’s definitely increased this year.

Is that related to the pandemic?

I can’t do causality. I can just say this is what I’ve seen. 

Arizona also has probably one of the worst sex education programs in the country. [The legislature] recently reintroduced where sex education programs cannot talk about homosexuality, other than it being an aberrant behavior. They’re pushing through an anti-trans bill that says trans girls can’t be in sports, which by the way, is not an issue. That’s where the frustration is. Arizona is pushing through all of these hot-button things that the super-conservative think tanks and [political action committees] are doing.

He wanted to target the funds to schools not requiring masks?

It was like Ducey said, “If you follow my direction and do not have any COVID protocols, I’ll give you the money.” The federal government was quick to say, “No, no. That’s not how any of this works.” [Ducey] actually because [they weren’t] letting him spend the money the way he wanted. He came out with an saying essentially that if your child’s school closes ever, for any amount of time, we will give you X amount of money that you can take to a private or charter school — doubling down again on anti-public health measures. As it turns out, when you don’t have a mask mandate, more kids get sick. My district does not have a mask mandate, so we are sending home multiple children.

Have you seen fatigue in your teachers? Are some calling in sick? 

Teachers have been stepping up, but they’re so tired. They’re essentially running three different classrooms in each class period. You have the kids who are sent home because they’re COVID positive and they’re sick so they’re not doing anything. You have the kids who get quarantined. Even though my teachers are keeping up all their Google classrooms and hosting virtual tutoring and sometimes live-streaming their classes, maybe 10 percent of those kids are actually taking advantage of what the teachers are doing. Then they have the kids who are in front of them.

It’s so overwhelming, and they don’t have prep periods because we don’t have any substitutes. We try to protect their prep, but we only have three administrators. If we have six teachers with no coverage, sometimes it has to be the other teachers [covering the classes], and we can’t have all three administrators not available because it’s still a high school and we still have the everyday high school stuff.

Have you lost any teachers mid-year?

Yes. We lost one teacher at our fall break. It was too much for her physical well-being, and her mental well-being. Her position was filled by a long-term sub [until early February].

My site has had very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. I have one teacher. This is her ninth year. She has already resigned for next year. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I dread coming to work every day.” 

I have teachers who are brand new to the district who are frustrated because they caught COVID and they have to use all of their personal sick days to stay home.

Do people feel like the pandemic is ending?

There are kind of two camps. There’s the one camp of “This too shall pass,” and then there’s the other camp of “Yeah, it’s going to pass, but I don’t know if I want to wait for it to.” Anybody who was on the fence about education is weighing if the parts that they love about the job are still outweighing the parts that they don’t love. Actually, the teacher who resigned said, “You know, I love the day-to-day of being in front of our kids. The second I have to open my email or grade their assignments is when I realize why I resigned.” The emails. The constant onslaught of the very vocal unhappy parents. We have some amazing families, but we don’t hear the “Thank yous” as often as we hear the “You sucks.”

It’s so hard to see the end, and it’s so overwhelming. What I’ve heard more than anything this year from my teachers is, “We thought that last year was hard. This year is 10 times harder.” We’ve had very, very low turnover. I do not foresee that being the case next year. 

I was looking at �鶹��Ʒ, and I read the headline about this not being the great resignation for teachers. That’s just because it’s not the end of the year, and teachers have too much integrity to leave their kids in the middle of the year unless it’s a dire scenario. We are going to see it, and it is going to be bad. In December of 2020, Arizona had 2,500 unfilled teaching positions. I guarantee you, we’re going to have pretty darn close to 4,000 for next school year. We don’t have anybody in the pipeline to fill them. Our profession has been vilified and de-professionalized quite successfully.

Did you ever feel like, “I’ve done this long enough and now is the time to go?”

All the time. I’m still feeling that. I’m so torn. I’ve applied for a principal position within the district, but at the same time I’m like, “Why? Why did I just do that? What am I thinking?” I haven’t yet gotten to the point where the stuff that I dislike about my job has outweighed the stuff that I like about it, but it’s hit or miss on a daily basis. 

What keeps you positive ? 

It’s 100 percent the kids.

Is there anyone in particular?

There is a student who is going to graduate — he’s going to graduate a little late, but I don’t care, he’s going to graduate. I know that our school is home for him. He doesn’t have a supportive household. Everyday that I see him and his sister at school, I say, ‘Yeah, you guys made it. Thank God.” This is a family who was dropping off the radar when we were virtual. I said, “Forget that. This is not going to happen. I’m going to bring you the paperwork for you guys to fill out so that I can get you internet. I’m going to bring you computers.” 

You went to their house? 

I took computers. I showed up at random times to figure out why they weren’t in their classes.

One focus this year has been freshman, specifically to prevent them from failing their classes or from failing too many. We have time built into our lunch where teachers have office hours. We made those office hours mandatory if students had lower than a 65 percent, because if you go into your finals with lower than a 65 percent, the chances are very high that you’re going to fail the class. 

Of course, the students who need to go tend to be the students who don’t go. I have not started it yet this semester. A couple of the students are not doing well again, and they said “Ms. Lehr, are you going to start it again? When can we come in?” I said, “You want to come in with me?” That’s from 14-year-old kids who before I had to beg to come. That’s very heartening.

Some of these freshmen I know are making stupid choices. I had a conversation with a kid who at the beginning of the year was just as quick to tell me to “F… off.” But now, here we are where a relationship has been built.

How have you kept yourself sane?

I do not check my email at all on the weekends. My husband and I will go hiking, and I try to spend my weekends solely with my children. I have a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old. 

We kept them in a remote option all last year, but because my husband and I were both at school, that meant that they were home by themselves. They were 8 and 10. On a personal level, my kids had to grow up a lot faster than I would have preferred, but now they have this certain level of independence that’s really cool. It reminds me of when I was a kid in the ‘80s. Your parents are working. Here’s a key. Don’t tell anyone your parents aren’t home.

How did remote learning affect them?

My daughter is very intelligent and very sneaky. She’s a “how-can-I-work-the-system” kid. All year last year, she was trying to find different ways to make us think she was doing her work. She got caught every time, and then the real-world consequences hit her at the beginning of this school year. She was so used to being advanced. She was in fifth grade, so she thought, “When I go into middle school, I’m going to be in pre-algebra, and then I’m going to be able to be in algebra when I’m in seventh grade.” The thing that she didn’t do all fifth grade was math. You can’t skip a year of math and then go into pre-algebra. That was a super hard lesson for her. It’s kind of actually a good thing, but socially she struggled immensely. There was a definite decline in her mental well-being because she is such a social person.

My son is not particularly social. My son is very quick to rise to frustration, and with that comes some acting out. Because it was just him and his sister at home, there were sometimes some physical altercations between them. Nobody was seriously injured or anything, but that was definitely not something we had seen in the past. There were holes in our walls from my son digging his pencils into them that we had to patch. There was a computer screen that we had to replace because it magically cracked somehow.

What do you think schools have learned from all of this?

I’ve had a lot of teachers really rethink their philosophies — some of my most dyed-in-the-wool [teachers]. This has truly opened their eyes when they’ve seen the disparities. Not everybody’s home looks the same. When we first started doing all of the remote teaching, we had a lot of really serious conversations about requiring cameras to be on or not. A lot of our teachers were like, well, “Why wouldn’t the camera be on?” They never took into account that there might be 10 people in a two-bedroom house. There might be somebody being slapped, hit, cut, whatever while they’re there. They might be embarrassed because they’re doing your class from their car in the McDonald’s parking lot.

What do you think the education system learned?

I don’t know. It’s like, “OK, we figured this out.” Well, we didn’t. For example, we have a guest Wi-Fi that a lot of our students use. It was shut down. They didn’t tell any of us until the day they shut it down. Didn’t ask us. We have a whole bunch of students who are using their own personal devices because we’re not a 1-to-1 district. They don’t have data. They can only use it when they’re on Wi-Fi. All of the stuff that we’re telling our teachers to use — Pear Deck, Kahoot, Duolingo — now all the sudden, students can’t access it. 

Our district is woefully behind on the infrastructure. This was highlighted in 2020. We’ve had two years. Why are we still so far behind? I know that it’s not malicious. I know that it’s not ill will. I know that it’s not because they don’t care. But why is it still not done? 

What do you think schools have learned about working with parents? 

The hardest part of my job is never the students. All of these laws that are passing, if you ask our students, they think they’re terrible. We have a number of students who are very upset because their parents won’t let them get vaccinated. How do we meet the needs of the student when the student has different desires and needs than what the parent wants for them? It’s walking that fine line. I think that we’re doing it. We keep open communication with parents, but we still try to honor the student. 

We’ve definitely had to learn how to redirect tone. We’ve had to step in a little bit more when it comes to our front office and the people who definitely don’t get paid enough to deal with it. When parents say, “This person was rude to me,” we’ve been OK with saying, “Were you polite to them?” My health assistant walked away from a parent yesterday, and I said, “That sounds fine. I would have done it, too.”

My school has not necessarily had some of the higher profile things, but the school that I just applied to for the principal position did make . The parents dragged [their daughter] in and said, “She’s coming [to school]. You’re violating her rights by not letting her be here.” 

She was quarantined?

Yes, and she’s saying, “It’s fine, it’s fine.” These parents literally picked that hill to die on, and they were arrested. Now they’re all facing charges, including the poor girl. Our neighboring district is one where the business owner was live streaming as he and two people took zip ties to the school to do a on the principal. That is not a citizen’s arrest. That is kidnapping. 

There is still hope and the kids are just so happy when they get to be there. One of the things we miss is that brief shining moment in March, April and May of 2020 when people really truly started to appreciate what teachers did. I’m really sad that that didn’t stick.

You talked about the students’ immaturity. What about academic growth? Are you seeing improvements now that they’re back in school? 

The learning loss is going to be there. There’s going to be a new norm, but trying to jam more and more and more down their throats is not helping. Continuing to create these high-stakes environments and making kids feel less because of something that was totally out of their control is not helping. Meeting kids where they are is. Teachers need to be able to have the ability to meet the kids where they are without fearing the loss of their job or the loss of pay. We’ve all had too much loss. 

Why do they have to learn all these things, right? They have to learn it to be successful in the future. Great, what does that success look like? How are we redefining success, because honestly, right now, for some of these kids, success is getting out of bed and showing up. If we provide an environment for them that makes them get up and be there — when that’s the last thing they want to do — that is success. They technically had academic learning loss, but they’ve lost so much other stuff. If we don’t address those things, the academic piece is never going to come back.